Tag Info

There is the term relexification meaning that the words of a given language are replaced by new words without changing the structure of the starting language. Relexification does not only occur in conlangs but also in natural languages.

One general term would be function words; these are words that do not carry any lexical meaning, but are used to link content words together and clarify their relationships (eg in the case of prepositions or conjunctions). It is indeed difficult to see exactly what you have in mind without any examples; other possibilities would be particle, which is eg ...

I am not aware of a generic term covering all instances of function words without meaning, but only some specific cases. The pronoun it in phrases like It's raining or It seems that ... is called a dummy pronoun, pleonastic pronoun, or expletive pronoun. Extending from this example one may call the particle ta in the question a dummy verb.

Here are some ideas haven't been listed yet Allow nouns denoting weather phenomena to form clauses by themselves Use an existential construction Make the subject a location Use an all-purpose weather verb Weather noun clauses If a normal transitive clause looks something like the following, then a weather clause can just be a noun by itself. student-NOM ...

There are also language with impersonal verb conjugation, and of course, nothing prevents a verb from being used only in the impersonal. Nahuatl has an impersonal voice, but because it's only used with verbs that normally have animate subjects, its weather verbs function much like Spanish's, ironically enough. In my own conlang Mfalen, weather verbs ...

One clear-cut example of a language that treats many things like predicates, numerals included, is Khoekhoe. Khoekhoe marks many kinds of predicates the same way, including numerals. The paper argues that all three of the open word classes (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in Khoekhoe can be analyzed as primarily predicates and non-predicative usage requires ...

The most prominent positions in a sentence are the beginning and end, and so those positions are frequently used to indicate the information structure of a sentence. A word carrying grammatical markers is not very prominent, but there is actually a common position for unprominent words: second position, or Wackernagel's position, named after the linguist who ...

I don't think there are any attested languages that limit the role that relative clause heads can have in the matrix clause. The accessibility hierarchy is a theory explaining the capabilities of various languages to produce relative clauses where the head has specific roles in the relative clause. If we take your example and exchange the matrix and ...

So, here are some of the implications of choosing secundative alignment. They aren't really strict implications so much as Stuff You Might Consider Thinking About™. I think the effects of choosing secundative alignment are pretty local overall and won't have cascading effects on your grammar. In my opinion, the thorniest issue here is dealing with valence-...

A common term for such a word would be auxiliary. An example from the Australian language Walmajarri is ma-rna-n-ta-lu, where ma is the auxiliary to which the suffixes are attached. However as your word is used for carrying the TAM (Tense/Aspect/Mood) suffixes another term is copula. Copulas are often verbs (such as the English be) but not in all languages. ...

Since it’s your conlang, you can put it wherever you think is best—but my inclination would be immediately adjacent to the verb it applies to. Your sentence structure seems to be VSO, so my initial inclination is to place it immediately after the verb. For your sample sentence, Sepyew sonsato eu bítõe de è roum de aqua. For the translation of a ...

I have heard the term "Proverb" used to describe the word "do" as it is sometimes used in English, and that seems to be something you're trying to achieve here. Example: Q. "Did he go to the store?" A. "He did." In this case, "did" is used to refer to "go" in the previous sentence, analogously to ...

This word is acting as a copula. It is entirely reasonable for the copula to be omitted in some contexts and not others. For example, Hungarian requires zero copula for third-person constructions in the present tense (the second item here is ungrammatical): Róbert öreg ∅. Robert old COP "Robert is old" * Róbert öreg van. Robert old COP "Robert ...

I do not know of any tools that are specifically designed for producing syntactically valid text, but my own word generator Logopoeist could be made to work for that purpose, and it wouldn't be terribly difficult to update it to produce a program actually intended for that purpose. The reason for this is that Logopoeist already treats morphophonology as an ...

It is difficult for a machine to passively understand a language (it takes tons of time with machine learning, and that's for Google). Actively, that's even more difficult, as many machine responses are pre-programmed and rarely actually generated (and in that case, mostly nonsensical, but the question isn't for sensical utterances). It will be extremely ...

In your example: Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation. ...sight is a verb. In order to have a verbless phrase, you'd want something like "the man within the woman's sight", making it clear you're ...

Hungarian avoids expletive subject when talking about weather by using an appropriate non-expletive subject. To say that it's sunny in Hungarian, you say Süt a nap. bake.3S the sun "The sun is baking." To say that it's raining, you say: Es-ik az es-ő. fall-3S the fall-N "The rain is falling" In this sentence, eső is used as the word for rain, ...

Such languages are uncommon but not unattested. However, they are more common than prepositional SOV languages and are present in a number of unrelated families around the world. This WALS map shows us that in general, the order of object and verb and adposition and noun phrase is very highly correlated. In the map, postpositional VO languages are the group ...

What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses? Interesting question! For a start, some languages have ‘verbal classifiers’ (Aikhenvald 2000). These are a set of incorporated nouns or dedicated affixes which agree with a verbal argument, most commonly the S/O argument. Such a system will ...

Just have two different words, like "twelve" (T) and "dozen". Than the number 1T is one-dozen-and-twelve.

In russian: The sun is shining — Солнц-е свет-ит. (Sun lights) It is raining — Ид-ет дождь-ø. ("Goes rain"≈"The rain is going"

It is reasonable, but I'm having trouble finding unambiguous precedent for it in natural languages. This handout shows the frequency of different orders of demonstratives, adjectives, nouns, and numerals in a sample of 528 languages. Demonstratives and determiners are not identical, but there is considerable overlap. The order Num-Dem-N-Adj is not attested....

Reasonable: sure! We do this in English, fronting the number for emphasis or for poetry. There's no reason why you couldn't do this as a matter of ordinary in your language. Five the orange balls that Johnny saw flew through air and bounced to jackadaw.

Are you aware of the World Atlas of Linugistic Structures (WALS)? Combining three chapters of WALS into this combined view I found 21 languages in the sample with the combination NA/SVO/Postpositions. Among the languages are Guarani and Ewe. On the other hand, NA/SVO/Prepositions has 229 languages in the sample, showing a strong typological tendency for ...

The past tense marker you constructed, sonasato, is a rather long element. Applying the rule "short before long" this would indicate that you put it even after the objects, like Sepyew eu bítõe dèroum de aqua sonasato In this example it becomes the last element in the sentence.

For a lower-level kind of isomorphism: I have read a story in which an alien speaks a synthetic language, suited to its own vocal tract, into a machine that converts its speech phoneme-for-phoneme into a human language. It could be a scene in Poul Anderson's A Circus of Hells, or not.