Micamo's Guide to Glosses!

[Micamo]

Hi, Micamo here, and I wanna tell you all about interlinear glosses, for only 12 easy payments of only $19.95!

Interlinear glosses are ridiculously useful tools, and you won't get very far in conlanging (or in linguistics in general) unless you know how to read and produce them. They're useful because they allow you to literally "translate" a language example into a metalanguage (in most cases, english) while keeping the grammatical structure of the language intact, like this.

Kathkat mul mane los.
ka-shka-t mul man-e los
FUT.PRF-walk-1sf.S green mile-DEF never
I will never have walked the green mile.

What does this gloss tell us about the structure of this conlang? Quite a lot, actually.

- The prefix "ka" when applied to verbs indicates the future perfect tense.

- The suffix "t" when applied to verbs indicates the subject is 1st person and female.

- Definiteness is indicated by a suffix on the noun, "e"

- The basic word orders are verb-object, adjective-noun, and verb-adverb.

Doing all of this with plain old words would take several sentences just for this simple sentence: Dissecting and explaining a much more complicated sentence could take several pages. Yet, with the magic of glosses, it can be done in just 4 lines, no matter the length of the sentence being dissected.

The Basics

The basic idea behind glosses is segments a segment is just a block of meaning that can be translated one way or another.

When you make a gloss, your first step is to divide the sample up into segments.

A space represents a word boundary.

A hyphen (-) represents an affix boundary. Whether it's a prefix or a suffix doesn't matter: That can be determined by the affix's position relative to the root. Use a hyphen either way.

An equals sign (=) represents a clitic boundary. A clitic is an element that can move around like it's a free word, but is phonologically blended to another word when it appears as if it were an affix. English examples of clitics include 's, the, a/an, and 've.

A tidle (~) represents reduplication. Reduplication is the process where a word or part of a word is repeated to indicate some grammatical process.

Angular brackets (<>) mark infix boundaries. An infix is a grammatical element that's placed inside the word somehow.

A backslash (\) marks non-concatenative morphology. This is a big fancy term that just means the word is modified in some way other than affixing, like consonant mutation, vowel ablaut, or tone shift.

Finally, a period (.) represents a one-to-many correspondence. This is where a single segment in the sample represents multiple words or elements in the metalanguage.

Examples of all of these can be found here, along with some optional rules for special cases and abbreviations for grammatical elements.

I can, however, give one tip that the linked page doesn't give: If you don't know the abbreviation for something, write it out in all capital letters within the gloss. DO NOT COME UP WITH YOUR OWN ABBREVIATION AND EXPECT EVERYONE TO FIGURE IT OUT AUTOMAGICALLY. This is easily the #1 problem that new conlangers encounter when they work with glosses, and it can pretty easily be avoided.

[CrazyEttin]

Awesome guide is awesome.

[Ossicone]

Can you add a note saying the glosses, unlike transcriptions, are not placed between //'s or [ ]'s?

Also, it might be a good idea to give usage examples for -, =, ~, <>, \, etc. (Oh wait I see you've given a link. I still think a guide should provide its own examples.)

[Micamo]

Also, it might be a good idea to give usage examples for -, =, ~, <>, \, etc. (Oh wait I see you've given a link. I still think a guide should provide its own examples.)

I would, but I honestly think there's nothing wrong with the guide in the link itself. Honestly I only made this because it was requested.

[mbrsart]

*applauds* More people need this guide! I almost never see glosses on the deviantART group. I often don't even see translations. :(

[Taernsietr]

This is also useful :3.