What did you accomplish today? [2011–2019]

[HoskhMatriarch]

- I made more words (although not many)
- made a collective (there's probably going to be more than one form of collective even if one's not productive, since that somehow seems normal)
- started working on how the lang is going to be named (which is a bit more complicated than how langs are named in English, mostly because you say "the language of X" as a formal name for a lang rather than use an adjective like "the X-ish/ian/ese language", which tends to turn into really long compound words, and to shorten that you end up saying something like "the (one) of X" which can be ambiguous and context-dependent, plus, a lot of the stuff is not very Anglicization-friendly, although it's not quite as cross-linguistically bonkers as some other langs I've tried to make)
- added a few cases (since it seemed a bit weird to me that this was a very agglutinative lang with 3 cases and a bunch of postpositional clitics, none of which turned into cases. Hopefully the cases I have now are enough, because I really don't think this kind of language would have 26 or 60 cases. Also there's no dative, yay)
- accidentally came up with something that's more or less a triple-object construction (well, you have a regular object, incorporate that, add a secondary object in a dative role, and then add an applicative. The verb always agrees with the applied object since that goes last, and the number/gender verb agreement usually disambiguates it since there are 6 classes. I don't care if no natlang does that, it seems reasonable enough to me)
- started working on how the classes will actually work instead of just saying "I want classes, and it should be formal, but it shouldn't look like German/French/Russian/whatever, because that system pretty much only arose once in the history of the whole world and I doubt it would happen again, and I don't think masculine/feminine or animate/inanimate would really keep things distinct enough of the time" (also, genders seem to be extremely language-family-dependent somehow. Almost all the langs with 3 genders are Indo-European, especially the ones with 3 formal genders, and the ones with two are about 50/50 Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. I also think the map on WALS would be quite different if they had more data, as I thought there were a lot more animate/inanimate gender languages in the Americas than that and pretty much every language related to Mohawk has a masculine/feminine/"indefinite" system that I think is formal but doesn't quite work like your masc/fem/neut in German and such. Australia I thought had tons and tons of noun class systems like Dyirbal in that region but there aren't that many languages listed for Australia compared to other places in general. Australia is probably the region with the most variation in gender systems though, since IIRC a bunch of individual Australian languages have basically acquired gender systems from classifiers independently after they split off from the proto-languages rather than inheriting some gender system from a 5,000-year-old language and having it get modified in various ways since then)
- tried to make a past tense, but that went like this:
Me: Hmm, should I use a prefix or suffix? I kind of want a prefix, but really it should be a suffix. Let's just have a prefix and a suffix. If there's going to be a suffix, it's pretty much guaranteed to have umlaut, and having umlaut for one of the central verb categories probably should happen anyways. Also, it should probably be lowering/a-umlaut, because I don't really want to make a bunch of front rounded vowels in the past tense for some reason.
Me: So there's a circumfix and a-umlaut? That doesn't sound vaguely like anything else at all...*
Me: Well, when you think about it, that is pretty cool, and I can't think of much cooler except maybe tone changes...
Me: No.
Me: *sulks back off to think of something else*

(OK, that's not really how that happened)
- messed with the grammar quite a bit

*Yes, the circumfix happens with Indo-European ablaut in Germanic past participles and the a-umlaut is for the past tense finite verbs. It's still close enough to be annoying. Also, tense is such a prominently-marked category it would probably be annoying to have it marked as a circumfix all the time.

[Keenir]

- I made more words (although not many)

excellent!
(can we see?)

- started working on how the lang is going to be named (which is a bit more complicated than how langs are named in English, mostly because you say "the language of X" as a formal name for a lang rather than use an adjective like "the X-ish/ian/ese language",

actually, that's pretty much the same thing.
(Scottish = language of the Scots; English = language of the Angles; Vietnamese = language of Vietnam; etc)

- added a few cases (since it seemed a bit weird to me that this was a very agglutinative lang with 3 cases and a bunch of postpositional clitics, none of which turned into cases.

*shrugs* it happens.

ps: double-spacing helps readers.

- I don't care if no natlang does that, it seems reasonable enough to me)

bingo. precisely this, yes.

*Yes, the circumfix happens with Indo-European ablaut in Germanic past participles and the a-umlaut is for the past tense finite verbs. It's still close enough to be annoying.

if its annoying you, set it to one side, and work on another feature.

Also, tense is such a prominently-marked category it would probably be annoying to have it marked as a circumfix all the time.

why would it be annoying? presumably it tells the listener something...it might be annoying to someone who doesn't want to listen. :)

[felipesnark]

- I made more words (although not many)
- made a collective (there's probably going to be more than one form of collective even if one's not productive, since that somehow seems normal)

Cool! Can we see some of this?

---

I worked on some minor noun declensions in Shonkasika (I love working on them!). Inspired by n-stems from some Indo-European languages, I came up with three minor declensions, mi-plurals, t-stems and z-stems.

mi-plurals are certain neuter nouns whose stems end in -ie or -i and would have indefinite plurals that would be identical to some indefinite singular forms or confused with singular forms. These nouns take -mi in the indefinite plural but not the definite plural.

t-stems are neuter nouns that end in a stressed vowel and take the suffix -te (sg.)/-ti (pl.) before all case forms besides the indefinite nominative singular.

z-stems are animate nouns (masculine, feminine, or common gender) that are stressed on the last syllable and take the suffix -ze in all case forms besides the indefinite nominative singular.

See examples here.

[Lao Kou]

I don't care if no natlang does that, it seems reasonable enough to me

Hosannah!

Also, tense is such a prominently-marked category it would probably be annoying to have it marked as a circumfix all the time.

French has negation as a "circumfix", and while not all the time in certain registers, I doubt "annoyance" is the motivation behind that. Personally, I think circumfixed tense sounds rather kewl.

(can we see?)

Cool! Can we see some of this?

Yet two more requests to actually see what you're doing. People are paying attention -- you needn't be coy or parsimonious with the examples.

[HoskhMatriarch]

- I made more words (although not many)

excellent!
(can we see?)

Well, I put a lot of the words in the CWS dictionary, and that's public.

- started working on how the lang is going to be named (which is a bit more complicated than how langs are named in English, mostly because you say "the language of X" as a formal name for a lang rather than use an adjective like "the X-ish/ian/ese language",

actually, that's pretty much the same thing.
(Scottish = language of the Scots; English = language of the Angles; Vietnamese = language of Vietnam; etc)

For a second I thought you were going to say it's similar to something Scots does. And semantically, it's basically exactly the same thing, since English says things like "coastal waters" for "waters of the coast", it's just different morphologically and syntactically (and pragmatically insofar as that makes sense when referring to a noun).

- added a few cases (since it seemed a bit weird to me that this was a very agglutinative lang with 3 cases and a bunch of postpositional clitics, none of which turned into cases.

*shrugs* it happens.

ps: double-spacing helps readers.

Well, pretty much the only difference between a postpositional clitic and a case was agreement, so basically I just added more agreement. All the cases aside from accusative are extremely straightforward.

- I don't care if no natlang does that, it seems reasonable enough to me)

bingo. precisely this, yes.

Yeah, I read some papers about linguistic universals and it was pretty much "there are no universals". I think that's a bit of an exaggeration (for example, I'm pretty sure all spoken languages have phonemes and archiphonemes rather than like, semaphonemes) but there are a lot less limits on what languages can do than a lot of linguists want to think there are.

*Yes, the circumfix happens with Indo-European ablaut in Germanic past participles and the a-umlaut is for the past tense finite verbs. It's still close enough to be annoying.

if its annoying you, set it to one side, and work on another feature.

Also, tense is such a prominently-marked category it would probably be annoying to have it marked as a circumfix all the time.

why would it be annoying? presumably it tells the listener something...it might be annoying to someone who doesn't want to listen. :)

Well, yeah, it's probably not as bad as I thought it was since in some languages with obligatory tense you have like 3-4 syllables basically just devoted to tense, but it's still too West Germanic-looking to do exactly what I said.

[Keenir]

- I made more words (although not many)

excellent!
(can we see?)

Well, I put a lot of the words in the CWS dictionary, and that's public.

?

- started working on how the lang is going to be named (which is a bit more complicated than how langs are named in English, mostly because you say "the language of X" as a formal name for a lang rather than use an adjective like "the X-ish/ian/ese language",

actually, that's pretty much the same thing.
(Scottish = language of the Scots; English = language of the Angles; Vietnamese = language of Vietnam; etc)

For a second I thought you were going to say it's similar to something Scots does. And semantically, it's basically exactly the same thing, since English says things like "coastal waters" for "waters of the coast", it's just different morphologically and syntactically (and pragmatically insofar as that makes sense when referring to a noun).

ah, and that is where, as a language creator, you get to play even more: you get to decide if they all express something the same, or each one is distinct, or neither.

[kiwikami]

Settled at last on six moods for Alál (marked on nouns, to take some of the load off the rather bogged-down verbs), including one that indicates the speaker is terrified of the information they are imparting (Aḳùzxıǎu zuùk - you're going to kill me). The desiderative merges with the potential when the noun ends in an affricate, which is fun; I'd like to come up with a few more things like that to add a bit of natural ambiguity. Also, "if" statements are now distinguished from "because" statements only by a single mood marker. I'll be puzzling out indirect quotations later tonight.

The root lexicon hit its 150-word milestone with ḍal /!äɬ/ "egg yolk (n), to be related to OBJ (v.t)" which'll help with kinship terms later on. Also last night and this morning I hand-drew a map of the distribution of Wayfarer subspecies over the course of a couple thousand years; I'll share it eventually when I get around to uploading it.

Well, I put a lot of the words in the CWS dictionary, and that's public.

?

HoskhMatriarch has a page for the language on the ConWorkShop, which has a dictionary! Could you give us a link to that, Hoskh?

[felipesnark]

Settled at last on six moods for Alál (marked on nouns, to take some of the load off the rather bogged-down verbs), including one that indicates the speaker is terrified of the information they are imparting (Aḳùzxıǎu zuùk - you're going to kill me). The desiderative merges with the potential when the noun ends in an affricate, which is fun; I'd like to come up with a few more things like that to add a bit of natural ambiguity. Also, "if" statements are now distinguished from "because" statements only by a single mood marker. I'll be puzzling out indirect quotations later tonight.

Neat! How do you decide which noun in a clause gets the mood marking?

Well, I put a lot of the words in the CWS dictionary, and that's public.

Link?

[Chagen]

I find myself incessantly captivated by Proto-Indo-European's athematic nominal declension. The way shifting stress accent results in markers changing grades is just fascinating. One of the things that bugs me the most when conlanging is when words look very "samey" throughout their inflection. The PIE accent system helps alleviate that. Such a system was seen, a little, on Pazmat, but I want to make a little "minilang" about that kind of feature expanded to all nouns.

The basis is that damn-near every noun consists of three parts: the root, suffix, and ending. Plurality was originally going to be a fourth category, but that might make words too long so I'll probably give each suffix it's own unique plural variant (of course, I could change that). Anyway, viewed through a PIE lens, every single noun is Hysterokinetic--the accent bounces between the suffix and the ending (if I go for a system where the plural is a separate suffix, then the accent will pattern between the last two suffixes, probably). Unlike PIE, the case endings themselves undergo gradation.

Somewhat like PIE, the the suffix and endings have base vowels with different grades. This language's base vowels are /e/ and /o/. When accented, /e/ becomes /i/ and /o/ becomes /u/ (this is "high-grade"). When not accented, two grades are possible: either zero-grade, where /e/ drops completely and /o/ becomes /a/, or base-grade, where they remain /e/ and /o/ when preceding an accented syllable ("Base Grade"). Also, much like PIE, a zero-grade morpheme with a resonant will turn that resonant syllabic, if the morpheme is e-base.

(I am also debating cribbing even further from PIE, and having /e o/ lengthen instead of rise in high-grade)

Now, here's where things get probably little non-naturalistic. Imagine that zero grades have a value of 0, base grades have a value of 1, and high grades have a value of 2. A word's last three morphemes must add up to 4 (disyllabic words must add to 3). For instance, you could have High-High-Zero, but not High-High-Base. This has some pretty big implications, because most nouns in this language are tri-morphemic, like PIE. Since the grade of a noun's root is fixed, the grades of the suffix and endings must be wrangled to fit. I should probably provide some examples:

Let's take nugh, formed from the high grade of some root nogh (the meaning is irrelevant here). We suffix this with -nor, giving us nughnor (jeez this already doesn't look anything like PIE). The Nominative does not have to follow the accenting rules. Now let's take some random cases:

Strong (does not change grade):
ACC: -as
DAT: -ut
GEN: -ev

Weak (will change grade if forced to; all weak cases are base-grade):
LOC: -et
ESS: -ews
ALL: -obha

(For disyllabic case endings like -ete and -ebha, the graded vowel is always the first; the second vowel does not change grade)

So, using accent marks to denote high grade:

ACC: núgh-nor-as; High-Base-Zero. This adds to 3; unacceptable. In this case, the first possible morpheme, going from the right, which can change its grade will do so. Since roots and the Accusative are both strong, nor must change grade, rising to become nur, and giving us núghnúras
DAT: núgh-nor-út. High-Base-High. 5; unacceptable. Once more, nor must change its grade, lowering to nar, giving us núghnarút
GEN: núgh-nor-ev. High-Base-Base. 4; no change needed: núghnorev

(I am already tired of typing ctrl-u-' just to type <ú>. Fuck.)

LOC: núgh-nor-et. High-Base-Base. This adds to four--in fact, all of the three weak cases I showed will add to 4 and be acceptable. núghnoret
ESS: núgh-nor-ews > núghnorews
ALL: núgh-nor-obha > núghnorobha

To provide examples of how minor changes can affect the whole paradigm, here's what would happen if -nor were instead its zero-grade form -nar (no suffix is high-grade):

NOM: núghnar
ACC: núghnoras
DAT: núghnarut
GEN: núghnorev
LOC: núghnarít
ESS: núghnarús
ALL: núghnarúbha

Huh...that's not as different as I expected.

Well, for yet more examples: let's take the root id, zero-grade of yed, and suffix -er to it:

NOM: ider
...and stop right there, because it's fundamentally impossible for the Accusative to have correct grades: ideras can only become idíras, which adds to 3 and still isn't acceptable. Shit. I need to re-think this system, or ban zero-grade roots. Regardless, taking an irregular ACC idíras, let's continue:
DAT: idírút
GEN: ...Also impossible. At best, idírev adds to 3. Dammit. I'm going to make a quick hack that zero-grade roots count as 1 for strong cases only, but this is still unsatisfactory.
LOC: idírít
ESS: idírús
ALL:idírúhba

I can already see some patterns forming: If a noun's root is Zero-Grade, and has a Base Grade suffix, then its cases will have these forms:

ACC: Z-H-Z
DAT: Z-H-H
GEN: Z-H-Z
All weak cases: Z-H-H

Likewise, any noun with root high-grade and suffix base-grade:

ACC: H-H-Z
DAT: H-B-H
GEN: H-B-B
All weak cases: H-B-B

And do the mathematical flair of this, I can compute that a root base-grade and suffix base-grade would be:

ACC: Impossible. At best there's B-H-Z which is 3. Ugh.
DAT: B-B-H
GEN: B-B-H
All weak cases: B-B-H

Still...I don't like how this currently is. I mean, I like the way the language looks, as some demented cousin to PIE yet still very much its own thing, but...this isn't working. There's very little wiggle room for me to do fun stuff. I could do the PIE method where every grade was mostly arbitrary, but I wanted a logical, programming-like system, though that computational framework now limits me a lot. Right now, there's never a case where a weak case suffix will be zero grade.

It's like I've taken PIE's athematic nominal framework and managed to create a boring and soulless copy. In its place is a needlessly-"logical" morphology that probably isn't even naturalistic.

....I also have no clue what the fuck I actually want to do with this language outside of this nominal morphology. I really just made this to crib off of PIE's athematic noun declension. Like...I'm making a nominal morphology completely divorced from an actual language just so I can decline nouns which don't mean anything for fun. God I'm a fucking weirdo.

Back to the drawing board, I guess.

[kiwikami]

Settled at last on six moods for Alál (marked on nouns, to take some of the load off the rather bogged-down verbs), including one that indicates the speaker is terrified of the information they are imparting (Aḳùzxıǎu zuùk - you're going to kill me). The desiderative optative, now, merges with the potential when the noun ends in an affricate, which is fun; I'd like to come up with a few more things like that to add a bit of natural ambiguity. Also, "if" statements are now distinguished from "because" statements only by a single mood marker. I'll be puzzling out indirect quotations later tonight.

Neat! How do you decide which noun in a clause gets the mood marking?

Thanks!
It depends. It can be the subject (the patientive-marked noun below):

Suas Rahı aktǐtıẓlatás zıukk.
inside be_alone<1>-DUR dark_house<OBL.AUG> 1<PAT.AUG-OPT>
I hope I'm alone in this dark house.

But it doesn't have to be. The case of the optative is actually kind of interesting, I think: non-animate things, things that shouldn't really be "hoping" anything - particularly if they are containers, locations, possessors, or otherwise salient things that nonetheless have zero volition - can take the marker to get a sort of general, "it is hoped/wanted" meaning out of it without directly stating that the subject hopes the event will occur.

Suas Atùltasaı ẓlatáts.
inside stand<2-NEG>-DUR-VOL.ACT house<OBL.AUG-OPT>
You should not be in this house.
It is wanted (not by you) that you not be in this house.
Lit: The house wants you to not be in it.

Here, the oblique-marked object of the preposition "behind" carries the marker, 'cause it's the one doing the hoping:

Aız Atrìsıá ızákk ḍııladẓ sṣulıuhìtukḷ.
behind stand<4.4>-DUR-VOL.ACT 1<OBL.AUG-OPT> sibling<AGT.AUG>=FOC monster<AGT>-NEG=CONT.FOC
I hope that's one of my siblings standing behind me, and not a monster.

You can get these markers on multiple different nouns at once, within the same clause:

Hua aız Atrìsıá ızáûkıt sṣulıuth Raḳrısḷẓaılǎ tıxrırúẓ.
because behind stand<4.4>-DUR-VOL.ACT 1<OBL.AUG-COG>-NEG monster<AGT-OPT> eat<1.4PL-many_obj>-recently-CONC-VOL.ACT bean<PAT>.
I don't think a monster would want to be standing behind me, because I recently ate many beans.

And some things can stick to any noun in the clause just as long as they do show up, like the conditional when it is being used to separate "if" from "because":

Hua Raḳẓxıàṭıdẓ sṣulùhh zııùk das Ṣrıṣıl ḍııl.
because eat<1.4>-FUT-CONC-NVOL2.PASS=FOC monster<PAT-COND> 1<AGT.AUG-FEAR> following<OBL> FOC*<3.4>-PST sibling<AGT.AUG>
I'm afraid that if my sibling was eaten by a monster, I will be too...
*Focus clitics double as proforms but I'm still not sure how to gloss this clearly...

You can mix realis and irrealis moods with some fun results that get tangled up with focus and causation and I-haven't-figured-out-what-else (the indicative is null-marked):

Raàẓàa ıkhùzd.
eat<1.3>-CONC-VOL.ACT meat<PAT-COND>
I would eat the meat (but it's gone bad - the meat is the preventative force).

Raàẓàa ıkhùd zıılk.
eat<1.3>-CONC-VOL.ACT meat<PAT-IND> 1<AGT.AUG-COND>
I would eat the meat (but I'm a vegetarian - I am the preventative force).

Raàẓàa ıkhùzd zıılk.
eat<1.3>-CONC-VOL.ACT meat<PAT-COND> 1<AGT.AUG-COND>
I would eat the meat (but my dog got to it first - there is an external preventative force).

It's... possibly turned into something other than "mood" at this point, but it does the job, so *shrug*.

[Chagen]

I've decided to just scrap the PIE-rip-off and return to work on my old PIE a posteriori conlang. I haven't worked on this thing for a year at least, and I had to do some digging to find my notes on it. I'm still on phonology, but I'm making some changes. Besides, phonology has to be done before I work on grammar since sound change will no doubt wreak havoc on inflections.

[DesEsseintes]

I'm making a nominal morphology completely divorced from an actual language just so I can decline nouns which don't mean anything for fun. God I'm a fucking weirdo.

That's what you're here for. That's what we're here for.

[alynnidalar]

....I also have no clue what the fuck I actually want to do with this language outside of this nominal morphology. I really just made this to crib off of PIE's athematic noun declension. Like...I'm making a nominal morphology completely divorced from an actual language just so I can decline nouns which don't mean anything for fun. God I'm a fucking weirdo.

FWIW, while I have no clue how to solve the dilemmas you ran into and I can't comment on the naturalism anyway, I very much enjoyed reading this and found it an interesting system. Maybe someday you'll return to it with fresh eyes and find a solution you didn't see this time around.

[LinguoFranco]

Well, I finally got around for creating tenses in my conlang and came up with ways of marking them.

[kiwikami]

....I also have no clue what the fuck I actually want to do with this language outside of this nominal morphology. I really just made this to crib off of PIE's athematic noun declension. Like...I'm making a nominal morphology completely divorced from an actual language just so I can decline nouns which don't mean anything for fun. God I'm a fucking weirdo.

FWIW, while I have no clue how to solve the dilemmas you ran into and I can't comment on the naturalism anyway, I very much enjoyed reading this and found it an interesting system. Maybe someday you'll return to it with fresh eyes and find a solution you didn't see this time around.

It'd be neat to see what you can make of it if you do come back to it after taking a break for a while; as it is, it seems very interesting!

Well, I finally got around for creating tenses in my conlang and came up with ways of marking them.

Awesome! Would you be willing to share some examples?

[LinguoFranco]

....I also have no clue what the fuck I actually want to do with this language outside of this nominal morphology. I really just made this to crib off of PIE's athematic noun declension. Like...I'm making a nominal morphology completely divorced from an actual language just so I can decline nouns which don't mean anything for fun. God I'm a fucking weirdo.

FWIW, while I have no clue how to solve the dilemmas you ran into and I can't comment on the naturalism anyway, I very much enjoyed reading this and found it an interesting system. Maybe someday you'll return to it with fresh eyes and find a solution you didn't see this time around.

It'd be neat to see what you can make of it if you do come back to it after taking a break for a while; as it is, it seems very interesting!

Well, I finally got around for creating tenses in my conlang and came up with ways of marking them.

Awesome! Would you be willing to share some examples?

Sure!

Namasan has two tenses: Past and non-past. The past tense can be divided into recent past and distant past. To mark past tense, simply add the infix -na- to a verb. If you want to indicate that something happened in the remote past, add -na- along with another infix -mu-.

Here are some examples

tlakune- I am
tlakunane- I was
tlajeka- I live
tlajenaka- I lived
tlaneko- I have
tlanenako- I had

nukune- You are
nukunane- You were
nujeka- You live
nujenaka- You lived
nuneko- You have
nunenako- You had

sikune- He/she/it is
sikunane- he/she/it was
sijeka- he/she/it lives
sijenaka- he/she/it lived
sineko- he/she/it has
sinenako- he/she/it had

If I want to indicate that "I was" is in the distant past, then it would be tlakunamune.

[Chagen]

More work has been done on my PIE apost language. I can actually conjugate a verb now! Kind of. For an example I'll conjugate h₂eǵ- "sit" as a root-accented thematic verb with my language's reflexes:

h₂éǵoh₂mi > hájāmi"I drive"
h₂éǵowom > hájawų "we two drive"
h₂éǵomon > hájamų "we drive"

h₂éǵesi > hájasi "you drive"
h₂éǵowos > hájawas "you two drive"
h₂éǵeton > hájatų "you all drive"

h₂éǵeti > hájati "he drives"
h₂éǵowot > hájawat "those two drive"
h₂éǵonti > hájųti "they drive"

And in the middle:

h₂éǵh₂er > hájjar"I drive"
h₂éǵowedhṛ > hájawadar "we two drive"
h₂éǵomedhṛ > hájamadar "we drive"

h₂éǵeth₂er > hájattar "you drive"
h₂éǵowesṛ > hájawasar "you two drive"
h₂éǵedhwen > hájaddų "you all drive"

h₂éǵetor > hájatar "he drives"
h₂éǵowotṛ > hájawatar "those two drive"
h₂éǵēro > hájāra "they drive"

To help get another feel for the language, here's the numerals 1-10 along with their PIE ancestors:

*h₁óinos dwṓu tréyes kʷetwóres pénkʷe swéḱs septḿ̥ h₁oḱtṓw néwn̥ déḱm̥t
háinas dwṓ tráyas kattáras pįka swaś sáppų háśtō náwą ðáśųt

[kiwikami]

Sure!

Namasan has two tenses: Past and non-past. The past tense can be divided into recent past and distant past. To mark past tense, simply add the infix -na- to a verb. If you want to indicate that something happened in the remote past, add -na- along with another infix -mu-.

Here are some examples

tlakune- I am
tlakunane- I was
tlajeka- I live
tlajenaka- I lived
tlaneko- I have
tlanenako- I had

nukune- You are
nukunane- You were
nujeka- You live
nujenaka- You lived
nuneko- You have
nunenako- You had

sikune- He/she/it is
sikunane- he/she/it was
sijeka- he/she/it lives
sijenaka- he/she/it lived
sineko- he/she/it has
sinenako- he/she/it had

If I want to indicate that "I was" is in the distant past, then it would be tlakunamune.

Huzzah for infixes! I assume from the above that they go before the final syllable of the verb (or perhaps after the first syllable of the verb's root, given that the first syllable appears to be a subject marker), at least as a general rule? Are all verb roots bisyllabic?

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

I accomplished 100 posts on this forum without ever posting a conlang :(

The good news is I finally split my conlang into two conlangs, one of which is now simpler (I guess it could be seen as a more modern variant of it) and more likely to be posted here some time :)

[k1234567890y]

I accomplished 100 posts on this forum without ever posting a conlang :(

The good news is I finally split my conlang into two conlangs, one of which is now simpler (I guess it could be seen as a more modern variant of it) and more likely to be posted here some time :)

(hug)

btw, I have created a list of starter vocabulary for conlangers, which is made from the Swadesh list and the Leipzig-Jakarta list and contains 199 content words, however, I added some spatial words which exist on neither lists.

Besides conlanging, this list can also be used to research natural languages, I think.

Function words(pronouns, adpositions, conjunctions, etc.) and numerals are not listed in the list though.