I have been looking forward to set up some lessons for my own conlang, Gadyl, and I finally managed to develop two completely developed lessons, and I thought I could share.
Note: I highly recommend reading this lesson in pdf. The quality of the original document is much better than the plain text of the forum. However, for those who will read on their phones, I will copy the full text in the post.
Gadyl lessons
First level (Low beginner), Lesson 1.01
NOTE: In this guide, I am assuming that every reader already knows how to read and write the Hebrew alphabet, including a basic knowledge on how matres lectionis work.
If you don’t, you can still go further; in this lesson, I will be providing some introduction about the pronunciation of the letters, but I would sincerely recommend practicing Hebrew somewhere else, in a more detailed tutorial.
Gadyl (hagdillir, הגדיליר) is an inflectional language spoken by Keyali people, an ethnic group of approximately two millions and a half people in the Gaian plain.
It is written by native speakers using the Anollim script (hagdillir anol, הגדיליר אנל), but among scholars, the Hebrew alphabet (rarely the Greek) is mostly used to write and describe it.
Reading and writing
(Phonology, orthography and Romanization)
Gadyl has 17 consonantal sounds and 7 vowels. Since the Anollim script is not encoded in any Unicode charset, in this course we will be using a version of the Hebrew alphabet (due to their similarities, this will be proven to be useful).
A couple of rules:
- Some consonants show a different form if they appear at the end of the word, for example <ן> instead of <נ>, <ך> instead of <כ> and <ם> instead of <מ>.
- Each consonant is romanized according to the value in the table.
- The vowels are <a> /a/, <e> /e/, <i> /i/, <o> /o/, <u> /u/, <ey> /eɪ/ and <ay> /ɛɨ/.
- Some consonants, such as <b>, <p> and <t> show a weak/strong duality which will be represented in the Latin text.
- The consonant <sh> often mutates to <z>. Since this change is quite sporadic and irregular, we will be specifying each time it occurs.
- Semi-consonants, in some patterns, mutate from their consonant form to their respective vowel (<y> -> <i>; <w> -> <o/u>; <h> -> <a/e>).
- As a cluster, <הל> is pronounced /fl/ and <הר> is pronounced /χʀ/.
Pattern schemata notation – Sometimes Gadyl shows such a morphological variety in the conjugation of verbs that I have to make a table with all the possible patterns.
To generalize this tables, I developed a notation that helps me to describe how vowels are applied to the key of the root to make it a meaningful word.
Each consonant of a triconsonantal root is called a key.
- Each “X” stands for a general consonant of the abjad (a key); similarly, a “Y” stands for its weak counterpart (<v> for <b>, <f> for <p> and <th> for <t>).
- The consonants of a root are numbered. The number is added to the “X” in subscript.
- Any lowercase text is plain romanized content and it indicates the pronunciation.
- Stress normally falls on the last vowel; Otherwise, the stress vowel will be signalled by a macron.
This is an example of patterns applied to the – fictional – root B-N-Sh:
Getting started with grammar
(Nouns, prepositions, verb to be and genitive construction)
Nouns – The easiest part of Gadyl are native nouns (sometimes called “pure nouns”, as they are not derived from any verbal root).
Native nouns in Gadyl have no gender, and they mostly do not need to be suffixed for number, even if some reminiscence of the old plural is still present in the language.
Pure nouns generally consist of two, rarely three, consonants. Let’s learn some:
You should always keep in mind that words in Gadyl have a really broad meaning, and one should be careful when putting them in a context.
For example, “sam” means “friend”, but it has a really general meaning: it indicates someone that you walk your path of life with, whether it is an actual friend, a lover, a family member, your teacher or pretty much anyone that you can clearly recognize as a human.
You wouldn’t ever tell anyone that they are not a sam, because that would be extremely offensive and dehumanizing; that’s the kind of phrase that can be told to a rapist, a mass murderer of kids or an unwanted dictator.
Pronouns – Pronouns in Gadyl behave mostly like in English: they do inflect for case even if regular nouns don’t in the language; However, the case system is different.
Gadyl has three (direct, dative and locative), and it doesn’t have possessives (the verb “to have” doesn’t exist at all, for various reason that I will be covering further).
Unlike English, pronouns don’t have number.
The first person is “מה, me” (I/me/we/us), “מי, mey” (to me, us) and “מת, mat” (in me, us).
The second person pronoun can be translated as “דה, de” (you), “דס, das” (to you) or “דבי, divi” (in you). The dative case, sometimes, may be translated as “דע, de’” for archaic reasons.
The third person pronoun, which is somehow irregular, is “זי, zi” (She, her, he, him, it, they, them), “סן, sen” (To her, him, it, them), “כרי, kiri” (In her, him, it, them).
“kiri” and “divi” are pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.
The interrogative pronoun is “תי, ti”. For any case but the direct it requires prepositions, so we will have for example “נתי, neti” instead of a separate locative form.
The relative pronoun is “ל, ley”. Similarly to the interrogative, it requires prepositions but this time it requires one even for the direct form, in which case it becomes “של, sheley”.
Now, there’s a couple of rules to remember about third person pronouns.
In Gadyl, unlike some language, there are no honorific pronouns and we can therefore use these forms without any exception, speaking to anyone.
However, one should always remember not to use third person pronouns when speaking about someone who’s not witnessing the conversation.
For example, if you want to introduce Hana to your friends, you could say “zi sam” (She’s a friend), but if she’s not there, you have to say “Hana sam” (Hana is a friend).
Prepositions – In Gadyl, we have a short number of prepositions to express the logical role of the word in the sentence, and postposition to better define it.
For example, the preposition “ne” (נ) means “in”, “on” or “at”, and it is used invariably to specify location, time, category or role. However, if we want to translate a more specific concept, for example, the English preposition “beneath”, we will need the postposition “arat” (ארת).
After a preposition, pure nouns undergo an internal vowel change. ‘e’ becomes ‘a’, ‘ey’ becomes ‘ay’ and vice versa; “dar”, for example, becomes “der” and “ben” becomes “ban”.
Later in the lessons, we will see more in depth where postpositions are applied, including the proper usage of negative nouns and verbs.
To be – Now that we have learnt our first preposition and some nouns to play with, we can start making meaningful sentences.
Gadyl has no verb “to be” for the present tense, so we can already say:
A couple of notes about pronunciation and orthography.
1 – As we can see, the preposition “ne” becomes “ney” in the sentences we provided.
One should always remember that vowels change very often (and sometimes irregularly) in Gadyl: meaning is always conveyed by the consonant.
In this case, this was a simple way to link the preposition with an object starting with another vowel, to make the sound pleasant.
“In the sun”, for example, would just be translated as “ne layum”.
2 – The subject and the object of the verb “to be” should be pronounced as a single word, with the first consonant of the second word doubled.
Generally, everything that is not separated by a verb or a genitive behaves like a single word.
For instance, “Hana sam” sounds like “Hanassam”, and “ney anol arat” should be pronounced like “neyanollarat”, both with the stress on the last ‘a’.
3 – Prepositions are orthographically connected to the object, postpositions are not.
Genitive construction – Possessions and logical correlations, in Gadyl, are expressed by juxtaposing the possessed object after the possessor.
Just like prepositional objects, genitives often change their first vowel; this does not apply to nouns beginning with ‘א’ or ‘ה’ (“Anol”, for example, does not change).