Just like how sounds change over time , grammar also changes over time.
Grammatical constructions that were once abundant can be abandoned and fossilized and new constructions can appear to replace them.
We need to think about what kind of changes our language will be subjected to.
To start with, our plural marker, the adjective 'many',
may get used frequently enough to the point where it gloms onto the front of the noun and becomes a prefix.
Now we have a plural that's expressed through morphology rather than a separate word.
And while we're at it, maybe the same thing happens to the numeral 2 to produce a dual number.
And just like that we have ourselves a whole new grammatical number system.
Another thing that frequently appears alongside nouns are articles.
Articles are words that encode that the noun they modify is either definite or indefinite,
that is, whether or not it's expected that the person that you're talking to knows what you're referring to.
Some languages like Latin or Mandarin have no articles at all.
Some, like Turkish, only have an indefinite article.
Some, like Icelandic and Malagasy, only have a definite article. And some, like most European languages, have both.
Indefinite articles almost always come from the numeral 1,
while most definite articles routinely evolve from pronouns like 'they' or demonstratives like 'this'.
Sometimes this is extremely transparent. For example, Spanish has 'uno' for one,
but also uses 'uno' as the indefinite article 'a' or 'an', and
it uses 'el' for 'he' and 'el' for the definite article 'the'.
Again, whether the articles come before or after the noun depends on your word order. In our case, if we evolve an
indefinite article from the numeral one,
And a definite article from the demonstrative 'this',
since both 'one' and 'this' are adjectives and adjectives come before nouns,
then the articles will come before the nouns as well.
A really useful innovation that helps with derivation is the development of augmentative and diminutives.
These are special affixes that can attach to nouns to amplify or diminish their meaning.
The augmentative may, also imply that the noun is scary or dangerous in some way, whereas the diminutive may
imply that the noun is cute or childlike.
Augmentatives routinely evolve from the adjective 'great' or something similar,
While diminutives may come from something meaning 'small' or 'little' or even 'baby'.
These can be great for creating new words. For example, we could take our word for 'animal' and apply the adjective 'great',
which at this point in history would just mean 'large or powerful animal', but over time the adjective could become fused into an augmentative.
The meaning of the word could then change to mean something like 'beast' or 'monster'.
But you can get away with some much less transparent pairs with some metaphorical extension.
For example, remember we've said that this culture conflates emotional states with plants.
Perhaps we can take the word for 'thornbush' and apply a diminutive to create the meaning of 'a nuisance or source of annoyance',
Basically describing something irritating as like being stung by thorns.
You could even go further than this and apply an augmentative on top of the diminutive to emphasize a serious hardship or setback.
Feel free to get creative with these sorts of derivational patterns.
Some languages may have multiple types of augmentative or diminutive, each with their own set of implications.
Not all languages have robust morphological augmentatives and diminutives, but it's always an option.
That about does it for nouns for the time being. What about verbs?
We've already determined how different tenses are encoded,
but let's imagine that over time the speaker's of this language get used to these words
occurring next to each other and they start to fuse onto the verbs they modify?
Pass these fused forms through our sound changes and voila! We have a basic verb paradigm.
It's important to note on your timeline when exactly the auxiliary is fused with the main verbs,
as this will affect how your sound changes manifest.
For simplicity's sake I'm saying that the auxiliary forms got suffixed very early on in history before any of our sound changes took place.
You might be content with keeping your basic tense system intact, but over time, your speakers might get a bit creative.
Even basic tense encodings can change their meanings over time.
It's very common for the perfective aspect to become a basic past tense.
So if that happens in our language, now we have a nice clean past, present, and future tense, which may seem neat and orderly,
but it's highly highly unlikely to last for very long.
Beyond a simple timeframe, there's no other information given about how the verb occurs,
so it's very likely that some aspectual distinctions will evolve.
A common verb that gets used to do this is the copula verb 'to be'.
Not all languages have a verb for 'to be'.
However, in languages that do have a copula verb,
it regularly evolves from verbs of posture like 'sit', 'stand', and 'lie'.
And, once a language has a copula, it's very likely to get used as some form of auxiliary,
sometimes multiple kinds of auxiliaries.
Just think about how in English you can use the verb to be to make an imperfective,
but you can also use it to make a passive and even a kind of future.
Exactly how the copula affects the verbs meaning can vary from language to language,
but let's say that in this language the copula
was derived in the proto language from the verb that means 'to stand', and using the copula as an auxiliary verb
indicated that the action happened over a long duration or continuously.
Now we have a perfective versus imperfective distinction for all of our tenses,
but again this is highly unlikely to stick around for very long.
Think about how your speakers might gradually expand and reinterpret these basic meanings over time.
Recall we derived our copula from the verb 'to stand'.
So, in the present tense the imperfective literally means something like 'I stand to do something'.
Perhaps over time this basic meaning changes to 'I am doing something indefinitely'
and therefore gets reanalyzed as a habitual tense marker meaning 'to do something regularly or as a general truth'.
In the past tense, it would start out with a literal meaning of 'I stand finishing doing something' which may be
Interpreted as 'I have finished doing something',
indicating that the action has been completed -
a variation on the perfective aspect sometimes called the Completive or simply the Perfect.
What about the future tense?
Well, the standard future was derived from the verb to go,
So it meant something like 'I go to do something' which was interpreted as the future,
but now, with the copula it would mean something like 'I stand to go to do'.
Maybe our speakers find this form a bit too unwieldy to use very often.
after all, it's not quite as important to make a distinction between perfective and
Imperfective in the future, and so the old form of the future persists as the standard future and the copula never becomes
associated with the future in the same way that it does with the other tenses.
Now, we've got a whole bunch of shiny new tenses created by the verb 'to be' as a separate auxiliary verb to modify the main verb's meaning
Note that most of the time, the auxiliary verb will receive the grammatical marking while a lexical verb will be left
unmarked, or will be placed into a less marked verb form of some kind.
It doesn't have to happen this way, but it's by far the most likely possibility.
But what if over time the two verbs were used together with such
frequency that the auxiliary glommed onto the end of the main verb and essentially became a new suffix?
This is exactly what happened in Latin, where the pluperfect and future perfect tenses are
transparently related to the verb for 'to be'.
Now our tenses have become fully morphological, but there's other possibilities for what we can do with the verb.
Remember in our proto-language we had those passive and causative constructions? Well the same thing could happen to them.
Over time they become attached to the main verb and form into suffixes, giving us a morphological passive and causative.
And there's no need to stop there; There are many other verbs that can take on auxiliary meanings before getting sucked into the main verb.
The verb 'to be able to' or 'can' might become suffix to form what we call an abilitative mood,
signaling the ability to perform the verb.
It's pretty rare for a language to have a separate ability to form,
but if you're aiming for a high level of complexity, it's certainly a possibility.
In fact, you could go even further; A verb like 'to need' could become grammaticalized into an obligative form,
With the meaning of 'to have to do something'.
Some languages have optative forms, permissive forms, dubitative forms, the sky is the limit.
Again, for all of this you'll need to keep in mind
when these auxiliaries get suffixed relative to your sound changes.
If they've only recently occurred in history, and sound changes haven't blurred the boundaries between words yet, then the individual components of grammatical
meaning will likely still be fairly transparent and come in a linear order of discrete units.
This is what we call an agglutinative language,
where affixes with singular meanings are stacked together to form words.
On the other hand, if there have been lots of sound changes since the auxiliaries got suffixed,
then the various suffixes might merge together and you may
end up with what's called a fusional language, where words take only one or a small number of suffixes each containing
multiple grammatical meanings.
For example, in the Latin word Puellās, the stem Puella, 'girl', is suffixed with us ās,
a single suffix that conveys that the stem is feminine, that it's plural, and
that it's the object of the sentence, all from one very simple suffix.
Presumably, at one point in time, these three pieces of grammatical information would have come from
three different words that got stacked together and eroded down over time through sound changes into a single suffix.
To illustrate this in our sample language, I'm going to say that the copula fused onto the verb just after our basic tenses did,
before any sound changes took place, so our tense system is very old, while the passive and
causative got suffixed just after the production of diphthongs.
That means our final tenses end up looking something like *this*.
Those are some basic ways
that grammatical inflections can evolve, but another aspect of grammar that's very likely to evolve is a secondary form of role marking.
Up until now, we've been relying entirely on word order to distinguish between who's the subject and who's the object.
Some languages, like Chinese,
And to a lesser extent English, are perfectly content to do this, and as a result have very strict word orders.
But in complex sentences and lengthy discourse,
It's quite common, if not likely that some other system will evolve to clarify who's doing what to whom.
One pretty common strategy for clarifying roles is the evolution of a noun case.
Noun case is essentially marking a noun with an affix that tags it for its role in the sentence, whether it's the subject,
Direct object, indirect object, possessor, or adpositional phrase.
If that seems strange, English actually has noun case, although by this point in history it only occurs with pronouns.
Some languages have only one or two cases, some have as many as 50, while most generally settle on 5 to 7.
These noun cases routinely evolved from adpositions that fuse with the nouns that they modify.
So if we want to include noun case in our language, let's have a look at our postpositions.
The unmarked form of the noun is almost always
interpreted as the nominative or subject form of the noun. If we apply the post position 'to,'
to the object of the verb, then we can make an accusative or object form of the noun, and 'at' could become a locative,
encoding the subject is at, in, or on the noun,
whereas 'away from' could create an ablative case,
conveying movement away from the noun.
If we wanted to, we could keep on suffixing postpositions to make as many cases as we want,
but we'll stick with just this small collection.
It's also very likely that cases may evolve to take on multiple meanings. For example,
maybe the locative becomes co-opted to mark indirect objects.
Another strategy for marking roles is verb agreement,
where pronouns get sucked into the verb to indicate the subject and sometimes the object of a verb.
In the Romance languages for example,
Verbs have to agree with their subject in person and number,
but in many languages the direct object gets indicated too, and some even include the indirect object and other roles.
This helps make it abundantly clear who's the subject and who's the object by marking them on the verb.
Marking the verb for roles beyond just the subject in this way is called Polypersonal agreement.
It's pretty rare for a language to have both noun case and Polypersonal agreement since that would effectively mark the various roles in the
sentence *twice*, and therefore add a degree of redundancy to the language, but it does happen occasionally.
Typically, a language will go for either one strategy or the other. If the language uses case then it frequently gets called
Dependent-marking, since its marking the nouns the dependence of the verb for their role,
whereas languages with Polypersonal agreement are called Head-marking, since they mark the head, the verb for all the
information about the dependents.
Most languages will be one or the other, but for the purposes of illustrating how these systems work, we'll include both in our sample language.
So we'll say that over time, our pronouns got sucked into the verb complex and became prefixes and,
because our language is word order is
Subject-object-verb, that means our verbs will have two prefix slots, the first for the subject and the second for the object.
In terms of possessive phrases, dependent-marking languages will frequently have a special case for handling possession,
One that marks the noun as the possessor of the noun that it occurs with.
Alternatively, in a head-marking language, the possessive pronoun might fuse onto the possessed noun so we get a possessed noun that
agrees with its possessor in person and number.
Once again, having both of these in the same language is pretty rare,
but it can happen, and for the purposes of illustration, I'll include both.
So we'll create a genitive case by Suffixing
the old postposition that means 'of' or 'related to', but we'll also have the possessive pronoun
become a prefix that agrees with the possessor.
So both the possessor and the possessee are marked.
A cool thing you can do with these role marking systems is that, since you've already clarified
who's doing what to whom, you can
abandon your default word order as a means of role-marking and vary the word order in any way you want.
This, is what's known as non-configuational syntax, or free word order.
Non configurational languages tend to use word order to convey some other meaning, most often emphasis and focus.
For example, in Basque, the noun placed immediately before the verb is the focus of the sentence,
whereas the first word in the sentence is the topic or the thing being discussed in the wider conversation.
As always, pay attention to your sound changes and decide when these grammatical inflections were realized.
You'll notice the patterns of inflection your words take may start to diverge slightly.
For example, any verb that ends in a stop will lose the stop and have its previous vowel lengthened
when conjugated in the habitual or perfect tenses.
Since these tenses originally came from the copula verb that began with a voiceless stop
which led to vowel loss between the suffixed copula and the preceding voiceless stop and then loss of the first voiceless stop and lengthening of
the vowel in accordance with our sound changes.
This means that these verbs have become irregular.
All natural languages contain at least some degree of irregularity.
Some languages, like Turkish, only have a couple of curious quirks.
While others, like Navajo, are so irregular that practically no two verbs are conjugated the same way.
All of these irregularities ultimately stem from seemingly mundane sound changes.
Keep track of these irregularities when they arise. In fact, you may even be able to take these further.
What if we decided to implement a further sound change that meant the language lost all word final stops?
That would mean that these verbs would undergo seemingly spontaneous vowel lengthening in the habitual and perfect tenses and
develop a *voiced* stop in the past and future tenses.
For someone trying to learn the language there would be no way to predict when this occurred it would just have to be memorized.
Little touches like this will make your language more complicated, but at the same time a lot more naturalistic.
So, we've now pretty heavily modified the grammar from the proto-language,
but we also need to think about how the meanings of words change over time.
See, when a word becomes attached to another word and becomes a grammatical marker, its core sense tends to get depleted over time
A process called semantic bleaching. So for the words that you choose to become grammaticalized,
You'll have to choose new words to take over they're old meanings to fill in the gaps.
For example, in our language, we've taken the word for place and grammaticalized it into a derivational suffix.
Since 'place' has lost its status as an independent word, we'll need a new word to replace it.
Once again remember that our culture uses the conceptual metaphor that plants are states.
Maybe an expression emerges in which the word for 'Grove' or 'Glade' becomes used to mean 'an area' either physical or metaphorical.
Perhaps this association could strengthen until the old word for 'grove' becomes the new word for 'place'.
When this first occurs, the speakers will just think of it as a metaphor, but if it's used
frequently enough, your speakers may forget about its history entirely.
For example, in English the word 'horn' could mean 'the horn of an animal', or 'a device that you use to make a loud noise'.
We don't really think of these as anything other than homophones, but they actually come from the same word. Why?
Because in ancient times, animal horns were used to make war horns, and so the word for them was the same.
And this was done so consistently that we still use it today
with things that have absolutelyno relation to animal horns at all
Again this is an area where you really get to incorporate elements of the culture into the language
and give some distinctly non-English flavor.
And now, after all that, we can finally give our language a name.
What a culture calls their language almost always comes from one of two places:
1. the word for 'language', or 2. the word for what's the culture calls themselves,
which in turn almost always comes from the word for 'people'.
So for our language, let's create a word for language by applying an augmentative to the word which means 'tongue',
which is a very common pathway,
and adding a possessive prefix to produce the meaning 'Our Language'
And there we have it, our language is now officially called
'Simātsan'.
Once you've done all of that, you've got the basics of a full-fledged language on your hands.
From here it's pretty much up to you
Where you take it and what you do with it.
You can keep coining and deriving words at nauseam, you can apply further sound changes or create new verb forms,
or you can even make a branch in the languages evolution and create a sister language, or perhaps even an entire language family.
It's now entirely in your hands to create it and use it how you see fit.
But before we finish up, there's just one more thing we need to talk about...
It's entirely optional and perhaps not even necessary, but it's an opportunity for a whole new avenue for you to explore.
Join me next time in the final episode, when we'll talk about
writing systems.
