#noun classes

(This is easier than trying to take 5 different screenshots lmfao)

Class 1 - ma(n): The most commonly used class, more or less committed to ‘people’ and things directly related to them. Beasts of burden or household pets which have been highly modified all fall into this class due to how they’ve changed alongside more obvious things such as jobs, kinship titles, relationships and the like.

Duja mapiya The small nomad

Class 2 - ba(n): Colloquially referred to as ‘the untamed’ class, just about every base form of creature and plant falls into this category (ex. Wolves, trees, flowers, berries, thorns) alongside other outside elements such as the weather and celestial bodies. Given its association of being ‘things beyond mortal command,’ gods and goddesses typically trigger this class.

Nayirigizan bayaa The large skewer-bird

Class 3 - azi(n):  Something of a mirror-class to the Untamed, the third class takes in all things that can be consumed by a sophonant and specifies that it is safe to do so. Consists primarily of food but also of things like medicines, water and is particularly important to pay attention to when talking about alien foods. Always ensure whatever you're eating was referred to in this class!

Nezidumi azimazilo! Delicious mudfish!

Class 4 - so(n): Specifically tools used for domestic purposes such as sewing, carving, pottery and the like. It primarily holds the words for furniture and is the class that new technologies tend to be automatically assigned to unless shown that they deserve to be elsewhere.

Sonigu soguvik A sharp needle

Class 5 - sha(n): Specifically tools and creations meant for the act of drawing blood in some fashion. Sometimes it’s still referred to as the hunter’s class due to its continued reality of it being founded on hunter’s tools (knives, spears, bows, arrows, traps) and the like. Often, the only difference between Class 5 and Class 4 words is the prefix.

Sogaaga shanyak An old dagger

Class 6- sa(n) or va(n): Primarily a migratory class that all words can be dropped in to create a place associated with the word, though all resulting words will trigger this class. Interestingly, this class appears to consist of two different variants merged under one banner.

Sakuba savivyak* A filthy nest Vakuba vagagajuk An abandoned den

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I still have to decide if I want articles. I think I only want an indefinite article (a/an) and dropping it would more mean the X.

When I studied Latin and Ancient Greek, I was taught that they each had three genders. So I was fascinated to read this article about how the Romans and the Greeks didn’t necessarily think of their own languages that way, featuring many quotes from original texts. Excerpt:  

As a Latin teacher, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I present grammatical gender to my students. Latin obsessively genders its speakers. From pronouns to choice of name and use of adjectives, it’s one thing if you identify as masculine or feminine, but Latin presents real questions for non-binary speakers. In addition, there is a chauvinism inherent in Latin grammar, like in the way that mixed-gender groups are referred to as masculine. There is a similar chauvinism in the Latin pedagogical tradition: the very ordering of adjectival forms as masculine/feminine/neuter (-us/-a/-um) presents a hierarchy of being masquerading as a lexicographical convenience.

On top of that, I worry that our modern pedagogical practices implicitly present students a highly essentialized vision of gender: every noun has one gender exclusively, rigid and unchanging.

Yet grammatical gender is actually complex and shifting, a fact that Greek and Roman grammarians were highly conscious of. They debated whether grammatical gender was inherent in the things themselves or a product of human convention. They devised a technical vocabulary to articulate the difference between grammatical gender identity and grammatical gender expression. They argued about whether their language had three genders — as we teach — or perhaps only two, or maybe five, or even as many as seven, if you count “fluid” and “uncertain” and as distinct categories (and they did!).

Grammatical gender, at its most basic, is a system of noun classes whose forms agree with other inflected words, like adjectives. French nouns have two genders, German three, Chechen six, and Ganda ten. Wikipedia has a handy list of languages by type of grammatical gender.

The fact that we think of these classes as “genders” at all is a product of historical circumstance rather than linguistic necessity. There is nothing inherently feminine about aqua (“water”) or masculine about rivus (“stream”). From a purely morphological perspective, we could dump the very concept of grammatical gender and call these groups “noun classes,” which is apparently the usual term for them in Bantu languages.

[Image description: Excerpt from a text that reads "or as many as around 20 genders". End image description]

Image here is the kind of flower I always envisaged as the national symbol of Orikrindia.

Last time I showed you some Ori verbs and how they are conjugated. I mentioned that there are essentially three ways to conjugate verbs (1st, 2nd, 3rd conjugations), and showed you some verbs from the 1st class of those verbs. I kind of lied, as it is not quite as simple as that sounds. Despite all verbs ending in -i and in all alveolars being grouped as one class, there is a little variation inside the conjugation, depending what the individual sound in the verb stem ends in. I go into a little more detail for the 1st conjugation below. Note some of the differences marked in bold where there are some variations in the stems and endings.

Verbs in –i

meri-m ‘I dance’

meri-t ‘you dance’

meri-r ‘he/she/it dances’ (animate, inanimate)

meri-l ‘he/she/it dances’ (celestial, abstract)

meri-bra ‘we dance’

meri-dra ‘you all dance’

meri-nda ‘they (an, inan) dance’

meri-lta ‘they (cel, abs) dance’

–

Verbs in -n

Note difference in some endings/stems.

boltin-im ‘I keep’

boltin-it ‘you keep’

boltin-ir ‘he/she/it keeps’ (an, inan)

boltinil ‘he/she/it keeps’ (celestial, abstract)

boltim-bra ‘we keep’

boltin-dra ‘you all keep’

boltin-da ‘they keep’  (an, inan)

bolti-lta ‘they keep’ (cel, abs)

Verbs in -l

Note changed suffix:

potil-im ‘I think’

potil-it ‘you think’

potil-ir ‘he/she/it thinks’ (an, inan)

potil-il ‘he/she/it thinks’ (cel, abs)

potil-bra ‘we think’

potil-dra ‘you all think’

potil-nda ‘they think’ (an, inan)

potil-ta ‘they think’ (cel, abs)

Verbs in -s

Note devoicing on plural endings with verbs ending with unvoiced consonants

cetis-im ‘I cut’

cetis-it ‘you cut’

cetis-ir ‘he/she/it cuts’ (an, inan)

cetis-il ‘he/she/it cuts’ (cel, abs)

cetis-pra ‘we cut’

cetis-tra ‘you all cut’

cetis-ta ‘they cut’ (an, inan)

cetis-ta ‘they cut’ (cel, abs)

Verbs in -d

Note some stem changes.

trellid-im ‘I walk’

trellid-it ‘you walk’

trellid-ir ‘he/she/it walks’ (an, inan)

trellid-il ‘he/she/it walks’ (cel, abs)

trellim-bra ‘we walk’

trellid-ra ‘you all walk’

trelli-nda ‘they walk’ (an, inan)

trelli-lta ‘they walk’ (cel, abs)

Verbs in -t

Note differences in stems and endings.

grasit-im ‘I scrape’

grasit-it ‘you scrape’

grasit-ir ‘he/she/it scrapes’ (an, inan)

grasit-il ‘he/she/it scrapes’ (cel, abs)

grasi-pra ‘we scrape’

grasi-tra ‘you all scrape’

grasi-nda ‘they scrape’ (an, inan)

grasi-lta ‘they scrape’ (cel, abs)

Verbs in -r

Note difference in some stem forms.

lar-im ‘I laugh’

lar-it ‘you laugh’

lar-ir ‘he/she/it laughs’ (an, inan)

lar-il ‘he/she/it laughs’ (cel, abs)

lar-bra ‘we laugh’

lar-dra ‘you all laugh’

lar-nda ‘they laugh’ (an, inan)

la-lta ‘they laugh’ (cel, abs)

~

Alright, that’s it for the regular 1st conjugation verbs. Many of the variations in these verbs are mirrored elsewhere and are probably results of semi-regular morphophonotactic rules…but I’ll need to figure out exactly what those appear to be later on.

Another Ori topic I wanted to talk about are definite articles. Ori has them. It doesn’t have any other articles (like indefinite artcles, e.g. English ‘a/an’, French ‘un(e), des’). These definite articles are roughly equivalent to English ‘the’, but the usage varies in Ori and may not always align with English usage (i.e. you might see an Ori article where you wouldn’t in English (or whatever other language), and vice versa). In Ori, the definite articles are proclitics. They are written with a hypen before the noun, and like other things in Ori, they have to agree with the noun class of the noun. See some examples below.

tu-syalanyas ‘the queen’ (animate, singular)

tun-hilunyan ‘the merchats’ (animate, plural)

ti-yutar ‘the cloud’ (celestial, singular)

tin-celunyas ‘the priests’ (celestial, plural)

lye-buni ‘[of] the house’ (inanimate, singular)

lyen-kapyan ‘the desks’ (inanimate, plural)

co-sestas ‘the life’ (abstract, singular)

con-gerumin ‘the deaths’ (abstract, plural)

As you can see, the plural forms of these articles are made by adding -n to the end. You can get a little preview of some of the case system for nouns too in the above examples….soon we’ll see the rest!

The base 2 noun class: lets say "un" means "opposite of." We got good and ungood. Any even number of uns is positive and any odd number of uns is negative.

The base 3 noun class: lets say "uhun" means "opposite of." We got good and uhungood. Applying only one syllable of the prefix, between good and uhungood, we have ungood, meaning neutral but deteriorating. Adding the half-prefix to uhungood, we have unuhungood, meaning neutral but improving. To give a "true neutral" meaning, switch the order of the syllables: unuhgood.

Does your conlang have genders or other noun classes? What are they like?

A language with no word-initial consonants

I was having a look at some of the squibs in Linguistic Inquiry today, which are often fairly interesting (and have the redeeming quality that, when they’re not interesting, they’re at least short), and there was an especially interesting one in the April 1970 (second ever) issue by R. M. W. Dixon (Dixon 1970) which I’d like to write about for the benefit of those who can’t access it. In Olgolo,…

The other one was for my biology class, and I could choose to write about anything I liked as long as it had something to do with biology, so I wrote about the domestication of the dog, here. That one was also just for bragging rights, really---it didn’t count towards my marks or anything. So neither of these essays were marked rigorously. I showed the domestic dog essay to my biology teacher, and I showed the noun classes essay to one of the French teachers who had done some linguistics at university; both of them seemed to like what they saw.