Teaching LH/CG Characters, OCs, and Others About Conlanging

Grammar Blueprints

As I, my TTS cohort(s), or both or all *insert number here* of us would explain to the students, the grammar of a language governs the ways in which the meaning of words used together is expressed. And since we've established the phonology, phonotactics, and syntax of the four protolangs, their grammar is now a priority.

There are multiple ways for grammar to manifest, as one can figure out from reconstructions of IRL extinct proto-languages. But for all the grammatical feature that exists, let's go through each of them one by one.

First up, grammatical number, which is the way a language handles plurals. English speakers, though not all of them, are familiar with the language using a singular and plural system. Many other languages are the same, though some languages take it a step further or don't use plurality at all, with that last part being the case for Mandarin and others. Speakers of Mandarin can either infer plurality from context or specify using adjectives or numeral words. There might be other languages without plurality marking that do the same as well. Some languages use a dual number to represent two of something, those languages include Greek, Navajo, and Arabic.

A trial number exists for three of something, a quadral for four. There is a paucal number for a small number of something(languages like Fijian and some Ethiopian ones), a lesser paucal for smaller, a greater paucal for a large number of something(Mele-fila), a collective for an entire group of something(German), etc. High Valyrian's number system uses singular, paucal, plural, and collective. Oqolaawak's system uses singular, dual, paucal(was originally going to be trial), and plural. The plural marker of a language is derived from a word in that language for the following: many, some, all, etc. Another means is via reduplication when part or all of a word is repeated to express grammatical change. This information about grammatical numbers is useful, especially for deciding the grammatical number systems of the four protolangs.

Proto-Language 1 Number: singular, dual(suffix form of "two"), and plural(suffix form of "some")

Proto-Language 2 Number: singular and plural(suffix form of "all")

Proto-Language 3 Number: singular and plural("many")

Proto-Language 4 Number: singular and plural

For the students: What would the teams and/or solo students decide for the plurality factor of their conlang(s)?

Talking about affirmation and negation, that, in a nutshell, is an encoding of positive and negative polarity in languages. English does this with the words "yes" and "no" and with the words "true" and "false". Spanish does the same thing, and a language universal rule is said to require this, so let's stick with that for the four protolangs. But how do languages even handle negation and affirmation? Well, it varies. Some languages put it on the auxiliary verb while others put it on the lexical verb.

On the topic of those types of verbs, there are languages without auxiliary verbs and languages without lexical verbs. I'll play it safe and let the four protolangs include both.

I'm still new to it, though looking it up, languages use a particle meaning "no", "not", etc. to express negation, including Indo-European ones. Some languages put it after the affirmative, while others put it before it. Some languages, like French, put it in both places. Another thing to note is the existence of double negatives. English's double negatives lead to affirmative, aside from some dialects letting it still mean a single negative, and other languages use it to apply greater negation. By my findings, it's expressed via two negators. Using this information, I could think of some ideas.