"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!
MoonRightRomantic wrote: ↑09 Jan 2019 22:52
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.
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.
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.