conlangery

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A word for position

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A word for wood

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You said something about Ndakaga and Sylvan verbs before that I don’t understand. Something like “how the tense, aspect, and mood systems interact” is there some material you can suggest that will help me understand? I understand what those things are separately but not how to think about them combined. Thanks for your help

I'm not sure what specifically you're referring to.

Tense, aspect, and mood (abbreviated TAM) are often studied together because of a few different factors:

They all tend to be marked on verbs or in constructions involving verbs.

They tend to be combined, for instance with one morpheme having both tense and aspect parts to its meaning, or a construction combining tense, aspect, and mood markers in unique ways

One think I personally like to do in my conlanging is to work out the TAM markers and then think about how they combine. For instance, by default the modals eng (potential, "can") and ik (obligative, "must, should", and also "will") will combine with irrealis marking on the verb, indicating an action that hasn't been realized -- something that's in the future or in an imagined world. But if you instead use perfective marking on the verb, it generally indicates that the event did actually happen:

Gadi if ñubeube ăchĭtăbăjĭ eng dragon-ERG the humanoid-ACC 3-eat-3-IRR can "The dragon can/could eat a humanoid."

Gadi if ñubeube ăchĭtăbăcha eng dragon-ERG the humanoid-ACC 3-eat-3-PFV can "The dragon was able to eat a humanoid." I really love building in that kind of interaction in languages. It adds depth. Of course, if you're going for naturalism, you should avoid being too systematic. Notice that I can't combine the irrealis (a mood) with perfective (an aspect) because the irrealis suffix takes the aspect slot on the verb. Also, the modals eng and ik can occur with irrealis or perfective, but they generally don't occur with imperfective or gnomic forms of the verb.

As for resources, I've kind of absorbed these ideas from lots of sources and experience, so I'm not sure if I have a single source that'll tell you all about TAM interactions. I'll throw it out to the community to see what people recommend.

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A word for mind

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A word for guarding

(This one is one of my favorites.)

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A word for decay

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Be ready! Tongues and Runes is up in about 30 minutes! We will be continuing to work on verbs and TAM constructions in Middle Fae.

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Would you ever consider using a conlanger’s thesaurus while streaming, to go through and explain/teach new conlangers about it? (Or other such grammar reference material) I enjoy watching you work on conlangs but I struggle getting started myself as I just don’t know enough about grammar and linguistics

I do have plans on making videos on some of the tools I use based on a presentation I have to a conlanging class at UW-Madison. Unfortunately, life has made it quite difficult to actually get that recorded and put out.

I don't really use A Conlanger's Thesaurus much myself, but it's definitely a good resource (link here for others). My go-to for the kind of data is CLiCs, which I believe I have demonstrated on stream at some point during the Draconic series.

I'll see when I can get that tools video out. I have a few extra things on my plate ATM.

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A word for your feelings

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A word for tentacle

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A word for seeing

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A word for the angels

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A word for names

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A name for the fae

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A word for fiends

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We are LIVE with Tongues and Runes working on our TAM constructions in the verbs.

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Another word for the undead