The BG Language Creation Guide

#3: Nouns and Nominal Morphology

Material to cover

Nouns
Noun Classes
Number
Possessives
Nominal Negation

Making words

Now that you have a set of segments, it's time to make words. This is easier than you might think. We'll begin with a list of nouns.

To get started, look at the list of assigned English words and just pick one. Then, consulting your list of segments, make up a possible word in your language. Write it down next to the English word ... and you're done making your first word. From there, carry on making words until you begin to see how you might combine morphemes in novel ways that please you. This is one of the places where art, poetry, politics or whimsy slips into your language creation task. Make your language reflect something new, charming, alarming, startling or beautiful.

Think about how yu want the words to sound. are there lots of complicated consonant clusters around single vowels making short words like /skwap/, /ToiNk/, or /Stlorkspiltsk/? Or, does your language have long words in simple syllables like /labilamana/, /kipapi/, or /amasakabu/? Are you going to allow consonants at the ends of your words? Is it going to sound right to you to allow two vowels to come together in a word like /naial/ or /oie.luk/? How many consonants do you think you want to allow at the beginnings of words: english allowsthree in words like 'strike' and 'splat' but hawaiian allows only a single consonant before there has to be a vowel.

As you make your words, keep the following in mind:

Remember what you have learned about the arbitrariness of language. Words in your language should sound nothing like their English translations unless (in some cases) this is done for a particular cultural or esthetic reason that either amuses you or is coherent with the anthropological sketch of your speakers.

You may use only the segments which you have described already in step 2.

Remember that you are transcribing, not spelling your words. Do not use English-based orthographic conventions. If, for example, you write down that your word for "sky" is "shafe", you may intend this to be a one syllable word that rhymes more or less with "safe". However, it will be pronounced by your colleagues in two syllables as /shafe/ rhyming more or less with "cafe". ((click here to hear the pronunciation of /shafe/,.) If you want your word for sky to rhyme with 'safe', you'll have to transcribe it as /Sejf/. (See the help section on transcription).
although your first words might be monomorphemic (containing only one morpheme such as 'joy' 'stone' 'table' or 'bad', yur goal is to combine morphemes in new ways.
Keep careful notes as you work. Write down every morphological idea you decide to implement. The tedious field notes will pay off later when you can look up, rather than refigure out, what you intended in any case.
Think about the culture you wish your language to reflect and the ways in which you want your language to differ from Earth norms. If, for example, your culture believes that children should be seen and not heard, make that part of your language and make the word for 'child' be something like 'no-mouth-person'. (Keep track then of your morphemes for negation, mouth and person so you can employ them again later on). If you think that 'plant-egg' is a good word for 'seed' or if you have a particularly fiendish insult or poetic term of endearment you fancy, make it part of your language. If you think the moon is made of green cheese, string the morphemes 'great-night-cheese' together and say it translates into English as 'moon'. (You could then happily extend the metaphor as far as you like: call the planets 'little-cheese-balls', the stars 'sky-curds', and later claim in a footnote somewhere that English 'milkyway' is a calque from your language into English.)
Make listings for bound as well as free morphemes and explain them.
Note that you may "split" a concept using two or more words in your language to express different aspects of the same English word. You might wish, for example, to have one word for 'ashes' if the fire that created them was a merry bondfire, an entirely different, unrelated morpheme for ashes from a sacred fire, and others for fires started by accident or by nature or as acts of violence. (NOte, for examle, that english has a yriad words for water depending only on its temperature: ice, water, steam. A language could easily have only one word for these related concepts.
You may also merge two concepts, using one form to express what is two separate morphemes in English. If your culture is patriarchal and neither women nor children have any power, you may have one word that refers to both. Less controversially, you may have a single word that refers to both 'egg' and 'seed'.
Important: Be sure that you are awake and paying attention as you do this assignment since it sets the foundation for how the rest of your language will feel. You will be, in a sense, creating a sense of esthetics that will guide you for the rest of the semester. Spend time musing about the culture of the people who speak this language. If you are a poet, do not pass by this opportunity to use this assignment as a kind of experiment or poem that expresses ... whatever you feel like expressing.
The final list of words you develop in this assignment will be nouns, but it is not necessary that all their constituent morphemes be nouns. For example, the English word birdwatcher is a noun, but it is composed of one noun (bird), one verb (watch) and one bound derivational suffix (-er).

Establishing Nominal Morphology

In addition to creating the list of nouns below, you should address these questions and submit them with your work: For each question, provide as many glossed examples as you need to be clear. Do not simply make a list of the information required: write a sentence or two explaining each.

Do you have noun classes? This is like gender in Spanish or French (2 classes each) or German (3 classes). Kiswahili has 8 noun classes (depending on how exactly you count them). If you have noun classes in your language, how many? Are there semantic rules about what goes into what class? How do you mark them? Give examples of nouns from each class. Remember to use hyphens to separate the root from the inflectional affix that indicates its class.
How do you form plurals? Do you have a zero marked singular? Do you have a dual? A paucal? Other variations? Translate the following remembering to use hyphens to separate morphemes:
- birds
- people
- moons
- Any other forms you need to demonstrate all of your noun classes or other interesting phenomena.
How do you form possessives? Do you have any inalianable possessives? Anything else unusual here? Do not create possessive pronouns at this point. Deal with only nouns as in: ' man's stone, or 'the tree's leaves,. Be sure to mention what order the two nouns (possessor and possessed) come in.
Here are some suggested phrases containing possession. translate and gloss these as examples of how possession works in your language. Pay attention to what's singular and what's plural as you translate: NB: You will notice that the example for step 3 uses a different set of translations here because the linguist recording the language required different examples to fully elaborate the system of ossession which contains several unusual features.
- person's bird
- bird's person
- children's bird
- birds' eggs
- Any other forms you need to be complete
How are the noun class markers, plurals and possessives marked when they are all on the same word? That is, form a template for your nouns. If possession and number are prefixes and noun class is a suffix, demonstrate that like this:
POSS-PL-root-NC
and give examples.
Along with the nouns, please create a bound negation affix and demonstrate its use.
Once again, you may not create a totally isolating language. It should look much more like Turkish than like Mandarin.

For Example

You will use the Leipzig Glossing Rules to gloss your words. Here are the abbreviations for the affixes you will need for this assignment:

Noun Class: you may use NC1 NC2 etc. to mark different noun classes You may use F for feminine and M for masculine if you have these.
In the language of hawks, all edible things are one noun class marked by an -ne suffix. All other things are in the nonedible class and marked with -bu. thus, we have:
- rabbit: du-ne rabbit-NC1
- rock: kik-bu rock-NC2
Number:
- Singular (if you have a morpheme that means singular): SG
- Dual = DU
- Paucal: If you have a morpheme that means 'a few', you might use: PAUC
- Plural = PL
If [du-ne] means 'rabbit' and the plural is formed by a -li suffix, your word for 'rabbits' will look like this:
rabbits: du-ne-li - rabbit-NC1-PL
Negation = NEG
If your word for 'dog' is 'not rabbit' and your negation affix is a 'ga-' prefix, you word for 'dog' will be written like this:
dog: ga-du-ne NEG-rabbit-NC1
Possessive = POSS
Perhaps you put the possessive morpheme on the owner of the object and place the owner before the thing owned. Your possessive morpheme might be -a: Thus:
rabbit's tail
du-ne-a ak-bu rabbit-NC1-POSS tail-NC2 (Assuming tails are not edible and thus in class 2.)

About the Humble Hyphen

The presence and placement of hyphens indicates a great deal about the status of morphemes in your language. Follow these guidelines:

Hyphens separate each morpheme within a word: fire-place-s, un-open-ed, un-re-cycle-d, think-s
When written in isolation, free morphemes do not use hyphens: rock, soda, think
When written in isolation, bound inflectional and derivational morphemes are written with hyphens to show how they attach to roots: pre-, -s, dis- -ize
When written in isolation, bound roots use hyphens to show how the obligatory affix connects: -ceive (re-ceive), feas- (feas-ible)
When written in isolation, infixes are surrounded by hyphens: -freakin'- (abso-freakin'-lutely)

The 40 Nouns to create *

Please create the following words. Make sure you use hyphens to separate all the morphemes. Include which noun class a word belongs to (if any) and anything irregular about it (as in anirregular plural form.) Turn in your set of words alphabetized by English translation as shown here. Include any extra words you create along the way.

1. the name of your language
2. ashes
3. bird
4. branch
5. child
6. cloud
7. day
8. earth
9. egg
10. fire
11. fish
12. forest
13. friend
14. hand
15. heart
16. house
17. idea thought
18. leaf
19. man
20. moon
21. mountain
22. night
23. person
24. rain
25. river
26. root
27. sand
28. seed
29. sky
30. smoke
31. star
32. stone
33. story
34. sun
35. tree
36. water
37. woman
38. --- animal of your choice
39. --- animal or object of your choice
40. --- vegetable, fruit or other plant of your choice

* If you're wondering how I chose these words, the list itself is a version of the Swadesh word list. This list was originally proposed by American linguist Morris Swadesh in the 1950s. The idea is that there are certain words, basic to all cultures, that are unlikely candidates for borrowing. Thus, a field linguist who started with these words would get a better sense of the basic phonemic and morphological situation in a language by avoiding long or borrowed forms. His list was relatively short (under 200 words) and versions of it are used by field linguists to this day. Here's where you can see an example Swadesh Lists on Rosetta Site

Where would you like to go?? Top of this Page?
BGSU Language Creation Homepage?

Someplace Else Interesting such as: It's true that language is inherently arbitrary, but tradition plays a necessary and important role. This is especially true with proper names. Look up the meanings associated with given names at Behind the Name.com

Updated 2/16/2011