#let me tell you as a Spaniard I was SO RELIEVED but also so vexed at the no verb tenses thing…

[strangestcase]

last night I dreamt I was in a fantasy world but like modern day and I attended a class on orcish where they summarized orcish sentence structure; and it was like this

[context marker] [adjective] [noun] [verb] [adverb]

The context marker was a unique particle that usually determined 1) how formal the conversation was and 2) how much you respected the interlocutor. It would also mark the sphere of life the sentence was used in: family, friends, servitude, combat, etc. The example the native teacher* gave was honorable v. dishonorable- it would change the whole meaning because you’d basically start every sentence saying wether you respected one, two, or all the people around.

As for verbs, it turned out orcish didn’t have verb tenses. Whether an action was performed in the past, present, or future, and punctually or continuously, had to be deduced through a specific category of adverb called “time adverbs”. There also was no distinction between pronouns: like in toki pona, there was only one first person pronoun for both plural and singular, one second person pronoun, and one third person pronoun. No possessives, either. So instead of saying “I went to the beach yesterday” you had to say “I go to the beach yesterday once”, and “my beach ball is round” would turn into “beach ball *of I* is round”.

After explaining this, the teacher commented that this was the reason orcs with a superficial knowledge of human languages, particularly Germanic languages, struggled speaking English and sounded “broken” even if they had a good grip on the vocabulary.

*I never once saw the teacher (dream logic) but I was 100% sure he was an orc. I also remember he encouraged us to translate sentences on a whiteboard and would kindly correct tilde usage.