As you can see, Sam is the subject. Subjects often appear first in a simple sentence like this. The verb is 'ate', a version of the verb 'to eat'. Finally, the object is the oranges. Objects often appear last in a simple sentence like this.
Many people reading this now would say "Well, Tortanx! Why don't we just use SVO order since most of the world is already familiar with it!"
And to that I reply, LET'S LOOK AT SOME MORE INTERESTING ONES FIRST BEFORE I MAKE MY DECISION AND BEFORE YOU GUYS AT HOME MAKE YOURS!
Now, we move on to SOV order, one of my favourites. It is used by languages such as Hindi, Japanese, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Kurdish, Mongolian, Manchu, Quechua, Sanskrit, Turkish, Urdu and more.
Let's use that previous sentence and make it SOV.
Sam oranges ate.
SUB OBJ VRB
Sam, the previously-established subject, is first, like last time. Oranges, the object, is next and the verb, ate, is final.
OSV is next. It's used by languages as more of a way to emphasize sentences like Hungarian, Nahuatl, Hebrew, Portuguese and Turkish.
Oranges are what Sam ate.
OBJ SUB VRB
OSV could perhaps be used in a poetic sense. We should keep this fact in mind.
Anyway, those are the main 3 but there are a few others like VOS, OVS, OSV, which I think you already understand. I think I'm going to use OVS normally and OSV when we are writing native scriptures.
Now, let's get to adjectival order. It's a lot less complicated than sentence ordering thankfully.
There are only two orders: AN (adjective-noun, used in English, Russian and Japanese, for example) and NA (noun-adjective, used in Latin, most Romance languages, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew among others).
I think I'm going to use NA for my language, just because I like how it looks. You do you, reader, you do you!
PRONOUNS
Pronouns are an important part of any language. While, some languages have many pronouns like Japanese, languages like Indonesian have only 11 common personal pronouns!
There are three kinds of pronoun: 1st-person (I, me, my, we, us, our), 2nd-person (you, your, yours) and 3rd-person (he/him/his, she/her/her, they/them/their). You've probably heard these phrases in literature or video game discussion!
A pronoun system that I believe hasn't been done much before is one which reflects one's social or significant status as well as gender. However, like I mentioned, pronoun systems can be very simple.
There are three common morphological cases in English personal pronouns, those being: the nominative case (subjective pronouns like I, he, she, we), the accusative case (object pronouns like me, him, her, us) and the genitive case (possessive pronouns like my/mine, his, her/hers, our/ours).
One that is less used and requires a sentence to explain is the dative case. In the sentence "He gave me the book", 'he' is the nominative pronoun while 'me' is the dative. The dative is used to indicate the beneficiary or recipient of an action.
I think it'd be quite important to add all of these. They are all very important for speakers to use.
POLYSYNTHESIS
Now this is where it gets pretty confusing. If you're already kinda confused, I'm sorry but this is gonna be a bit hard to explain, but, nonetheless I'll do my best!
A polysynthetic language are languages that are really synthetic, AKA languages in which words have a large number of morphemes (tiny parts of a word with their own meaning).
Here's an example of a polysynthetic sentence:
Tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.
"He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer."
Wow, guys! Doesn't that look cool?
This choice is incredibly optional, so no need to do it, but since I wanna try something new, this will be my FIRST polysynthetic language!
VERB CONJUGATION
Verb conjugation is pretty standard, everyone knows what it is.
I had.
You had.
He/she/it had. Et cetera. There isn't much to talk about with verb conjugation.
Some languages, like Chinese, don't even differentiate time with verbs! They do it with CONTEXT.
I think veb conjugation is pretty necessary but you could pull a China and just not bother!
Well, yeah. I'm done with THAT. For now. Anyway, that's the end of the Grammar section. It definitely has some cherry-picked areas of discussion but that's all I'm willing to sift through for today.
See you next time, where I'll be talking about...
VOCABULARY!
Grammar - Conlang Crash Course 101
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