What's it called when you break down a sentence morpheme by morpheme?

[sarcasm]

Like this:

"Your father is working at the slaughter-ground."
"tu-taata k̬oldarős ena daara:"
your-father slaughter-ground-GEN at work-IND

(Thanks to Charlie Brickner for the example, taken from his post to the LISTSERV earlier today)

I've been away from conlanging for a long time but I'm back now and would like to start building the grammar for my newest conlang. However, in order to do so, I need to get better at breaking down the sentences. In order to do that, I need to know the name of the phenomenon in order to Google it!

[zyma]

Welcome! This is called (interlinear) glossing. There's a pretty good resource here on the board.

[MoonRightRomantic]

Not sure if this is really on topic, but I found a nonsense phrase that I want to make a conlang from and I was completely not sure how to gloss it.

“cristemopois diaosomia dibesi”

From https://lyricstranslate.com/en/malinda- ... yrics.html

[zyma]

Not sure if this is really on topic, but I found a nonsense phrase that I want to make a conlang from and I was completely not sure how to gloss it.

“cristemopois diaosomia dibesi”

From https://lyricstranslate.com/en/malinda- ... yrics.html

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the question, but if it's a nonsense phrase, and has no meaning, then it can't be glossed. If you make a language based on it, and give it meaning, then it can be glossed, but as long as it's just nonsense, there's nothing to gloss.

[gestaltist]

Yeah, if it's nonsense, you can gloss it however you like and make a conlang out of it.

One of the millions of possible ways to do it:

crist<em>o-pois di-ao-so-mia di-b-esi
bathe<PTCP>-woman away-look-3s-PFV away_from-DEF-man
"The bathing woman looked away from the man."

In doing the gloss like I did, I already made a slew of decisions about that nascent conlang:
- it has infixes
- it has noun incorporation - at least on participles
- it is SVO
- it has prepositions and preverbs
- it has definiteness
- it is agglutinative
- it has a perfective-imperfective distinction, likely conflated with tense
- the verb agrees with its subject
- it has no case marking

I hope this example will help.

EDIT: one note is this: I noticed that the initial "di" is repeated twice and decided to interpret it as the same morpheme both times. I have never really done a conlang from a nonsensical phrase before, but this is one way to start.