Sketch of a simple analytical language

[TehranHamburger]

Since everyone is making polysynthetic languages, sketch of a simple relatively analytical language on the analytical level of your average romance language

Nominals

Nouns have no grammatical gender and do not inflict for singular and plural. There are two grammatical cases, direct and oblique. Direct is used for the subject or object of a sentence, oblique is used for the indirect object, the object of adpositionals, absolutive constructs and some disjunctive constructs.

There are 6 pronouns for three persons and singular and plural, they do not distinguish gender and the first and second person pronouns have a specific accuasative case as well. Pronouns are generally only used for animate referents, to refer in the third person to objects generally demonstratives are used, demonstratives can also be used to refer to animate referents.

There is no genitive case or possessive pronouns, there are however possessive suffixes for each pronoun as well as a seventh one correspending to the determiner. Pronominal third person possessive suffixes are always reflexive and refer back to the subject of the sentence. Possessive suffices always imply definiteness of the possessed, a postpossive construct of [I-OBL of car] can be used for indefinite possession.

To indicate possession with general nouns typically a his-genitive is used as in [car-OBL door-POS_SUF] ('the car its door'). It is also possible to simply use a postposition [car-OBL of door].

There is no indefinite article but there is an definite article, if a phrase is definite on its own due to being a proper noun or having a possessive suffix it does not require an article.

Verbs

Verbs agree with the subject to some extend but the language is not pro drop. There is a different third person agreement depending on when the subject is a pronoun or not.

Tenses and aspects are mostly formed using auxillary verbs.

Syntax and word order

The word order of the sentence is German-Dutch, as in, while it has a strong SOV tendency, it is also a V2 language. The finite verb tends to come after the subject but the rest of the predicate comes at the end of the sentence. Giving rise to a [subj fin ind_obj Obj adv pred] word order in general. Alternative word orders such as [obj subj fin ind_obj adv pred] are also allowed.

Adjectives generally come before the noun but can also come after a noun in which case they imply definiteness and the article is dropped. The same rule of definiteness applies to adpositional phrases. Determiners come before the noun.

Morphology

Stems have a strong and weak grade which deals with softening the final consonant, a remnant of an older system of richer inflexion, the soft and weak grade applies to verbs and nouns alike. In the majority of nouns the strong and weak grade are identical however.

Nouns are organized into different classes depending on how they form their oblique form. The majority of nouns is actually indeclinable. The most common way to form the oblique case is by simply using the soft grade, a small group of nouns forms the oblique case with an actual suffix, some nouns are completely irregular in how they form their oblique form, in some cases having two different stems altogether.

The definite article and a large portion of adjectives still declines to indicate case however.

Random examples

he reafud feann kint huńńa reafd tann mak
[the-DIR great-DIR man-DIR gives the_other-DIR great-DIR man-OBL book-DIR]
"The great man gives a book to the other great man."

he lampu hreaf huńńa lammi ky
[the-DIR child-DIR plays the_other-OBL child-OBL with]
"The child plays with the other child."

heka lampu seof reafud feant
[the_other-DIR child-dir sees great-DIR man-DIR]
"The other child sees a great man"

a seota du
[I-NOM see-1SG you-ACC]
"I see you"

dea seotte ma
[you-NOM see-2SG me]
"You see me"

kean seot seonnim hun sel mi
[he see-3SG self-3SG_POS the-OBL mirror-OBL in]
"He sees himself in the mirror."

[TehranHamburger]

Nominal declensions:

Bare declension
- direct case: S+Ø
- oblique case: W+Ø

examples:
daant, daann (moon)
eot, eof (earth)
hreank, hreańń (boat)

u-declension
- direct case: S+u
- oblique case: W+i

examples:
lampu, lammi (child)
misu, misi (cat)
peommu, peommi (small girl)

e-declension
- direct case: S+e
- oblique case: W+Ø

examples:
huotte, huot (playful girl)
hruakke, hruak (food)

n-declension
- direct case S+Ø
- indirect case S+n

examples:
four, fourn (wind)
kaol, kaoln (rock)
mear, mearn (sea)

Indeclinable

[Ser]

Since everyone is making polysynthetic languages,

No, they aren't.

sketch of a simple relatively analytical language on the analytical level of your average romance language

Nominals

Nouns have no grammatical gender and do not inflict for singular and plural. There are two grammatical cases, direct and oblique. Direct is used for the subject or object of a sentence, oblique is used for the indirect object, the object of adpositionals, absolutive constructs and some disjunctive constructs.

There are 6 pronouns for three persons and singular and plural, they do not distinguish gender and the first and second person pronouns have a specific accuasative case as well.

But that's not like your average Romance language at all.

[TehranHamburger]

Since everyone is making polysynthetic languages,

No, they aren't.

sketch of a simple relatively analytical language on the analytical level of your average romance language

Nominals

Nouns have no grammatical gender and do not inflict for singular and plural. There are two grammatical cases, direct and oblique. Direct is used for the subject or object of a sentence, oblique is used for the indirect object, the object of adpositionals, absolutive constructs and some disjunctive constructs.

There are 6 pronouns for three persons and singular and plural, they do not distinguish gender and the first and second person pronouns have a specific accuasative case as well.

But that's not like your average Romance language at all.

I never said it was like your average romance language, I said it had the analytical level of it.

[Hallow XIII]

But, uh, that is not analytic at all.

[TehranHamburger]

But, uh, that is not analytic at all.

Analytical vs synthetic is a matter of degree. Like I said, it's on the analytical level of your average romance language. It's not one of those heavily polysynthetic languages which are quite common which derive super long words wit 22 grammatical cases, which I do so often make.

Like romance languages, it's obviously a fusional language that descended from a language which was more richly inflicted.

[Hallow XIII]

It is a matter of degree to be sure, but I call into question your use of the word as a label for this language. Not only because it appears to mostly be based on the idea that superagglutination is extremely widespread, to the degree that you can use it as a new standard for defining typological terms (and I'm not even going to go into redefinition of terms on the basis of conlangs).

(It isn't.)

[TehranHamburger]

Well, I don't know how you can get more analytical than romance language / English unless you're diving into Creole or Chinese languages. As far as world languages go romance languages are extremely analytical as a matter of degree.

My own experience with most conlangs is that they are highly synthetic, maybe it's my own bias since most of the conlangs I've seen were made by mathematicians, stands to reason that those kinds of people like to make very regular ultra synthetic languages.

[Hallow XIII]

I think the problem is that you have quite the warped perception of how analytic romance languages really are. They really aren't very, you know. Latin was just synthetic as all hell.

[TehranHamburger]

Well, with the exception of Romanian and the verbal system of Spanish and Italian, they're pretty extremely analytical. Of course, French tries to act like it's less analytical than it is by spelling it the same as it was when it was more synthetic. But I don't know, most romance languages do not have cases. French in a lot of cases does not inflict for plural except with the article. A large portion of the verbal inflexions are formed with compound tenses.

Latin isn't extremely synthetic on a world scale either.

[TehranHamburger]

By the way, I feel for this discussion we need a proper definition of 'synthetic', I feel we're missing each other. I'd say a language is more synthetic if more closed morphemes can be attached to a single open morpheme within a word boundary. The vagueness of the term 'word boundary' of course makes this troublesome but in general speakers of a language have such a mental perception where a new word begins.

For instance in Latin for your average nominal you can't get much further than say 'Ad Domumne venit?. Here in 'Domumne' we' have 'um' which indicates singular number and accusative case as a fused morpheme and 'ne' indicating a question asked.

Contrasting this with Finnish, the most synthetic language I know which still isn't by far polysynthetic or even highly synthetic, we can form words like 'mielistännekinköhän' composed of miel- as the stem meaning 'mind' with -i- added as plural and -s- as the suffix to mark an internal state and -ta to mark a movement away from something, then the possessive suffix -nne which denotes possession of both plural and second person, then -kin which sort of translates to 'also', then -kö indicating a question and then 'hän' some-what mitigating the impact of that question. Literally coming down to about 'Hmm.. also out of your minds?' But better traslated as 'Hmm.. in your opinions too?'.

Latin isn't that synthetic I feel, yes it has a lot of declension classes and alternate forms of expressing the same morphemes based on categories like grammatical gender. But ultimately it isn't capable of compressing a lot of morphemes within a single word bountary, not drastically more than English at the very least.

[Sevly]

Since everyone is making polysynthetic languages,

No, they aren't.

In fact, this is starting to feel like the claim that the board is predominantly gay: widely exaggerated. Between my own conlang, Culla's Kŋau, and others, there are plenty of analytic languages on the board.

[DePaw]

What do S and W mean?

[TehranHamburger]

Strong grade of the stem and the weak grade.

Like, a victive stem tuonk in the strong grade would be tuońń in the weak grade. ń is basically a velar nasal like ng.

[Pole, the]

Since everyone is making polysynthetic languages,

No, they aren't.

In fact, this is starting to feel like the claim that the board is predominantly gay: widely exaggerated.

Right, there are also a few bi's.