First part of translating for me goes like this:
Subject Object Verb Link
The Creator stood upon the mountain and overlooked a frozen land. This is how it was in the beginning.
English is an SVO language which means that, typically, the subject comes before the verb which comes before the object. I don't know how to explain what each of these is as it's not as simple as agent-patient (the one doing the verb and the one being acted upon). We understand subject, object, and verb even if we can't entirely formulate the words to entirely explain them. "The dog bit me" and "I was bit by the dog" mean the same thing, the agent and patient are the same in both, but the subject and object switch.
SVO isn't the only word order either. We'll use the words "She hit me" in all word orders:
SOV: she me hit (Japanese)
SVO: she hit me (English)
VSO: hit she me (Irish)
VOS: hit me she (Fijian)
OVS: me hit she (Urarina)
OSV: me she hit (Warao)
I ordered these from most common to least common word order as well - and before going to Wikipedia for example languages! (Had SOV and SVO switched on the list initially though)
SOV accounts for almost half of the world's languages. But there's actually one other word order: free word order. This was the word order of Latin that would eventual be replaced in the Romance languages with groups preferring to use words in certain orders, most of them being SVO. The way that Latin did this is by markings that indicate what is what through a nominative-accusative system, one of the morphosyntactic alignment systems.
These systems are dependent on the syntactic relationship between various components of a sentence rather than placement of words within the sentence. The simplest system is the Dixon argument system:
(S)ole - the subject of a transitive verb
(A)gent - the subject of an intransitive verb
(P)atient - most times called the Object, but I like giving it more separation from word order, the object of a transitive verb
And the various alignments:
Nominative-Accusative - S=A ; P
Ergative-Absolutive - S=P ; A
Active-Stative - S¹=A ; S²=P
Austronesian Alignment - both S=A ; P and S=P ; A are true, people can choose to use either, although there are common triggers for each, working similar to voice in English
Direct Alignment - there is no distinction between S, A, or P, it's based on context clues
Tripartite Alignment - S, A, and P have their own separate cases
Transitive Alignment - A=P ; S
The most basic breakdown of the section chosen without any alteration to words to mark for anything is this:
Creator stand mountain overlook land-(frozen). This be beginning.
Marking them again for word position:
Creator stand mountain and overlook land-(frozen). This be beginning.
And now marking for argument:
Creator-A stand mountain-P and [Creator-S] overlook land-(frozen)-P. This-A be beginning-P.
Creator here is both the Sole and Agent in the same sentence since there's 2 verbs linked by an "and" which, in English, implies the subject being used again if no new subject is presented. Stand and Be are intransitive verbs where Overlook is transitive. Transitive verbs require an object for the subject to act upon where an intransitive verb can be acted upon by a subject without an object. You can say "I'm standing" and that's a complete sentence but you can't say "I'm overlooking" and have it be a compete sentence. "I'm standing" can take on an object with a preposition such as "on", but "I'm overlooking" always requires an object that is being overlooked and takes the object without the need for a preposition.
There's a few ways we can deal with the double argument:
Implied argument change - the subject is implied in the second part and so is the argument
Prepositional argument change - the preposition takes on the argument for the subject, so "and-S" would be its own separate thing from "and-A"
Repetition argument change - having to use the subject both times, changing only the argument
There's also other noun classes that can be used. For the nouns we have, we can go for a number of different possible cases (and this isn't an extensive list, just what would work here):
Creator : direct, ergative, nominative (not the intransitive case even though there's an intransitive verb because the preposition makes it grammatically act like a transitive verb and we could even make stand-on its own verb)
Mountain : absolutive, accusative, direct, locative, prepositional, superessive
Land : accusative
This : ergative, identical, nominative
Beginning : ablative, accusative
Could've missed some, but here we are. Thinking of cases, there's a hierarchy that languages typically follow, although breaking from these typicalities is typical of language as well. It's a general rule rather than a hard-set law.
nominative > accusative or ergative > genitive > dative > locative or prepositional > ablative and/or instrumental > others
Generally, if they're missing one of these, they are missing all after it. Such as, if there's no dative case, there likely isn't a locative, prepositional, ablative, instrumental, or others.
Verbs also have their own "classes" leading to what's called conjugation. Anything that changes a noun can even affect the verb form, such as having verb-a for a nominative and then verb-b for an accusative. The main ones to focus on first are gender, person, tense, and aspect.
Linguistically, gender has nothing to do with biology or psychology, although it's often tied to human biological genders (male and female). Could even look to a "spiritual gender" such as the concept of two-spirit in Amerindian cultures where one person has both a male and female soul and are, as a result, closer to the spiritual. That's why the culture building is an important part of language building. I imagine Mochian culture as having a belief in 3 souls: the genderless immortal soul that reincarnates, the soul that is inseparable from the body (and thus is what the body is) that rests when they die, and the soul that is created by memories that dies once they are forgotten. The memory-soul's "gender" is what they are remembered as and has nothing to do with one's biology.
Person depends on perspective. We all know first, second, and third person. First person is from the perspective of the subject "I ran home". Second person is from the perspective of the other "you ran home". Third person is from the perspective of an outside observer "they ran home". But there are other persons to go with. Could simply split the third person to have one case for denoting the topical person and the other case for the obviate person. Could even have a 4th person or a 0 person for an indefinite general referrence.
Tense is another commonly understood one. English has three - past, present, and future - right? Actually, no. That may be true in an abstract temporal sense but not in a linguistic sense. English only has two tenses: past and non-past. "I wanted", "I want", and "I will want" are all talking about want at various temporal moments, the past being "I wanted". But "I want" and "I will want" are using the same grammatical tense, the non-past tense. The word "will" is adding context about the non-past verb "want" to denote this as a future thing that is to come. But there are languages that do have a dedicated future tense so "I will want" would have "will want" as a singular verb with a future tense, so it's more like "I want-F". There are a lot more tense systems - and even tenseless systems which rely on context clues and "helper" words. Past-Nonpast is as described, Present-Nonpresent and Future-Nonfuture work similarly. Tenses work in two ways: relative or absolute. An absolute tense is relative to the "now", a relative tense is relative to another point in time. A relative tense can also be divided between a strict relative and an absolute-relative tense. Strict relative is relative to just some point in time, absolute-relative is relative to a point in time that is relative to the "now". "I ran", "I sweat when I run", "I will be running tomorrow" are examples of absolute, strict relative, and absolute-relative, in that order.
Aspect is another side to temporal marking. Rather than telling the point in time, aspect tells the finality, or lack thereof, of the verb. These do more than just say whether or not the verb is ongoing (continuous "I'm running") or complete (perfect "I ran"), it can also tell that it happened in a single moment (momentane "I sighed"), that it's done regularly (habitual "I run everyday"), that it almost happened (defective "I almost fell"), and that it is beginning (inceptive "I'm about to run").
So breaking down the verbs:
Stood : Past tense, perfect aspect of Stand
Overlooked : Past tense, perfect aspect of Overlook
Is how it was : Past tense, perfect progressive aspect of Be
All of these verbs had an ending, all of them happened before the present, one of them is the end of some that was continuous. Last thing I want to get to is adpositions and modifiers, which are divided between prepositions (preceding their complement) and postpositions (following their complement). The main thing about adpositions to look at is Hawkins' Universals:
Preposition ⊃ ( (N-Demonstrative v N-Numeral v N-Possessive ⊃ N-Adjective) & (N-Adjective ⊃ N-Genitive) & (N-Genitive ⊃ N-Relative) )
Postpositions ⊃ ( (Adjective-N v Relative-N ⊃ Demonstrative-N & Numeral-N & Possessive-N) & (Demonstrative-N v Numeral-N v Possessive-N ⊃ Genitive-N) )
Lemme explain what you're looking at...
If the language is Prepositional, then is the Demonstrative, Numeral, or Possessive comes after the Noun then the Adjective will come after the noun, if not then it can go either way. If the Adjective is after the Noun, then the Genitive will come after the Noun, if not then it can go either way. If the Genitive comes after the Noun, then the Relative will come after the Noun, if not it can go either way.
If the language is Postpositional, then if the Adjective or Relative come before the Noun, then the Demonstrative, Numeral, and Possessive will come before the Noun, if not then they can go either way. If the Demonstrative, Numeral, and Possessive come before the Noun, then the Genitive will come before the Noun, if not then it can go either way.
I just threw a lot of words at you so I should define things that you probably don't know (we all know what an Adjective and Noun are, right? I don't need to define those, right?).
Demonstrative : "this" and "that" words, indicating what's being referred to
Numeral : "one" and "once" words, indicating the quantity of what's being talked about
Possessive : 's, indicating the owner of a thing
Genitive : an expression of the relationship between two nouns
Relative : a clause that modifies a noun
And finally, languages have hierarchies in the order of a modifier. The modifier hierarchy for English so as so:
Quantity > Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun
You don't say "the grey round old stone", you say "the old round grey stone". In an agglutinative language, you could pile all of these into one word, mashing word pieces together to build a bigger word. "The old grey stone" could be theoldgreystone if English were agglutinative.
Now it's time to finally build this language... in the next post! I did a lot for this one, I'll get back to it later.
