ReConLangMo 5: Sentence Structure

Published on 05/18/2020, 592 words, 3 minutes to read

The last post in this series was more of a grammar dump with few concrete examples or much details about things (mostly because of a lack of vocabulary to make examples with). I'll fix this in the future, but for now let's continue on with sentence structure goodness. This is a response to this prompt.

Independent Clause Structure

Most of the time L'ewa sentences have only one clause. This can be anything from a single verb to a subject, verb and object. However, sometimes more information is needed. Consider this sentence:

The dog which is blue is large.

This kind of a relative clause would be denoted using hoi, which would make the sentence roughly the following in L'ewa:

le wufra hoi blanu xi brado.

The particle xi is needed here in order to make it explicit that the subject noun-phrase has ended.

Similarly, an incidental relative clause is done with with joi:

le  wufra  joi              blanu    ke brado
the dog,   which by the way is blue,    is big.

Questions

There are a few ways to ask questions in L'ewa. They correlate to the different kinds of things that the speaker could want to know.

ma

ma is the particle used to fill in a missing/unknown noun phrase. Consider these sentences:

ma   blanu?
what is blue?

ro  qa madsa   ma?
you are eating what?

no

no is the particle used to fill in a missing/unknown verb. Consider these sentences:

ro no?
How are you doing?

le wufra xi no?
The dog did what?

so

so is the particle used to ask questions about numbers, similar to the "how many" construct in English.

ro madsa so spalo?
You ate how many apples?

le so zasko xi qa'te glowa
How many plants grow quickly?

Color Words

L'ewa uses a RGB color system like computers. The basic colors are red, green and blue, with some other basic ones for convenience:

Colors will be mixed by creating compound words between base colors. Compound words still need to be fleshed out, but generally all CVCCV words will have wordparts made out of the first, second and fifth letter, unless the vowel pair is illegal and all CCVCV words are the first, second and fifth letter unless this otherwise violates the morphology rules. Like I said though, this really needs to be fleshed out and this is only a preview for now.

For example a light green would be puoqa'o (pu'lo qalno, white-green).

I hit a snag while hacking at the tooling for making word creation and the like easier. I am still working on it, but most of my word creation is manual and requires me to keep a phonology information document up on my monitor while I sound things out. As part of writing this article I had to add the letters f and r to L'ewa for the word wufra.

I am documenting my work for this language here. This repo will build the grammar book PDF, website and eBook. This will also be the home of the word generation, similarity calculation, dictionary and (eventually) automatic translation tools. I am also documenting each of the words in the language in their own files that will feed into the grammar book generation. More on this when I have more of a coherent product!

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: conlang, lewa