rainbowcult wrote: ↑13 Sep 2020 19:30
I have been exploring the translation section of the site, and users will often put the word order under the text, however said word order often has things I don't understand. Usually it looks something like this: text.GIBBERISH. I assumed these were conjugations. How do I display them in my language? Specifically, how would I display verb agreement?
As Jackk and Dormouse have said, the convention is to employ, more or less, Leipzig Glossing Rules. If you can't open Dormouse's pdf file, by the way, then a webpage version [urlhttps://
www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php]can be found here.[/url]
A really basic intro is: the meanings of word roots are in lowercase text, word-for-word (if you need more than one word, you can put an underscore: if you have a single word that means "eat cabbage", you can gloss it "eat_cabbage"). The capital letters indicate grammatical information that's being conveyed. This keeps the two clear and separate.
The two things you're likely to see are:
waga-ya
text-GIBBERISH
...which means that 'waga' in the conlang means 'text' in English, and -ya is an affix that conveys the grammatical information 'GIBBERISH' (if you'e using hyphens like this, there should be the same number in both the conlang text and the English gloss;
and:
wuga
text.GIBBERISH
...which means that 'wuga' can't be divided into two parts with distinct meanings, and the word simultaneously conveys both the meaning 'text' and the grammatical information 'GIBBERISH'.
So in English, we can have:
eat-s
eat-3SG
(this says that 'eat' means 'eat' (obviously!), and '-s' means 'this has third-person singular agreement'
Or:
ate
eat.PST
(this says that 'ate' means 'eat' but in the past tense, but there isn't a specific bit of 'ate' that indicates 'past tense' by itself)
[there's a bunch of detailed rules and optional rules - like you can write that last one as "PST\ate" if you prefer - but you don't need to worry about them]
However, the bigger picture here is:
- don't worry
- most of it's very intuitive once you get the hang of it
- the point isn't to test whether you can follow an arbitary set of rules; the point is to communicate the info clearly and concisely
- you can always vary the conventions if it suits you better, if you explain what you're doing (or if it's obvious enough)
- in particular, although there are conventional abbreviations for things, you can use your own abbreviations if you explain them. Like, officially you should mark distributives as "DISTR"... but if they're really common in a language and you don't want to have to keep repeating a four-letter abbreviation, you could just say, for example, DS (assuming there's nothing else in your language that could stand for).
So, how would you indicate verb agreement? Well, it depends what qualities your verbs agree with. But if it's a European-style language and they agree in person and number, then:
- if there's not a specific affix for the agreement, but something like ablaut (eat-ate) or suppletion (go-went), then you can use a "."
- if there's a specific affix, then separate this out with a '-' in both the conlang and the translation
- use '1', '2' or '3' to indicate person
- use 'SG' or 'PL to indicate singular or plural
- if there's one affix for number and one for person, then again, you should separate them with a hyphen, in the correct order: 1-PL or SG-2 or whatever
- if there's only a single affix that conveys both person and number (like in most European languages), then you technically should divide them in the gloss with a dot, with person first: 1.PL, 2.SG, etc
- however, these affixes are so common that people generally ignore the dot and write '1PL', '2SG', etc, or even just '1p', '2s', etc.