Creating pronouns and grammatical words/affixes
Posted: 10 Feb 2020 23:55
Hello!
Whilst conlanging, I've got some processes figured out for creating words and that works pretty well, but it only really works for "content" words ("house", "person", "aubergine", etc.). I can use onomatopoeia or sound symbolism to figure out some root and then put that through derivational morphology to get my words. What I find I struggle a lot with is deciding what to make each of the little grammatical words and affixes and things that I can't really apply my process to i.e. anything where a root needed doesn't represent any thing or concept but instead something completely abstracted at the grammar level like pronouns, articles, tense markers, and the rest - I guess also the affixes and things that make up the derivational morphology.
For context, I'm talking entirely within the realms of a priori languages, so there's no existing content that I could derive these things from.
In the past, I've created them near-randomly where needed, and elsewhere tried to combine already-made ones to try and make it coherent. It's these tiny little bits of word where there's no point to start from that I just cannot wrap my head around. Having some method or thought process with which to build up these things then means they're justified in being what they are, which makes my brain happy.
Any pointers or suggestions? Thanks for any help.
Whilst conlanging, I've got some processes figured out for creating words and that works pretty well, but it only really works for "content" words ("house", "person", "aubergine", etc.). I can use onomatopoeia or sound symbolism to figure out some root and then put that through derivational morphology to get my words. What I find I struggle a lot with is deciding what to make each of the little grammatical words and affixes and things that I can't really apply my process to i.e. anything where a root needed doesn't represent any thing or concept but instead something completely abstracted at the grammar level like pronouns, articles, tense markers, and the rest - I guess also the affixes and things that make up the derivational morphology.
For context, I'm talking entirely within the realms of a priori languages, so there's no existing content that I could derive these things from.
In the past, I've created them near-randomly where needed, and elsewhere tried to combine already-made ones to try and make it coherent. It's these tiny little bits of word where there's no point to start from that I just cannot wrap my head around. Having some method or thought process with which to build up these things then means they're justified in being what they are, which makes my brain happy.
Any pointers or suggestions? Thanks for any help.