How to create a language

by Pablo David Flores

(partly based on Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit)

[All the pages of How to create a language can be downloaded for offline browsing in
a .zip file. That doesn't include multimedia content. A big consolidated page with all the
topics is also available for reading, and is a bit more suitable for printing.]

These pages are intended for people interested in creating languages for fictional
purposes (or just for fun) and in linguistics in general. They're not meant to be an online
linguistics course, but you sure can learn quite a few things about linguistics by reading
them, the same way I, not being a linguist, learned from others. They're also not
supposed to be a guide to the creation of auxilliary or international languages such as
Esperanto.

The pages are divided into two main fields: phonology and grammar. These in turn
cover topics going from phoneme theory and phonotactics to typology, morphology and
syntax, with interspersed comments on orthographical representation, diachronical
change of both grammar and phonology, and methods of word generation. The full table
of contents is available elsewhere. Technical terms are often used -- correctly and
clearly, I hope -- but no piece of jargon is left unexplained.

Before starting, I'd like to give the credit deserved to Mark Rosenfelder, who gave me
the first tool to engage myself in serious language development. The structure and main
points on these pages are based on his work, although I have tried not to copy
everything (which would be quite silly of me), but instead give some advice and go
deeper into some details he didn't mention in the Language Construction Kit. Some
material has also been drawn from the Model Languages newsletter, run by Jeffrey
Henning. Fellow conlangers and helpful readers suggested a lot of corrections and
useful additions to the original version of this document. Some explanations have been
adapted from posts to the Conlang list. Thank you all!

I've used examples from, or mentioned, a good couple dozens of languages, both natural
and fictional, the latter by me or by others. I have tried to be as accurate as I can; it all
depends on my sources, which are sometimes books from a library that I took back
months or years ago, so I have to cite from memory. This also explains the mentions of
"an African language" whose name I can't remember, and the somewhat dubitative
nature of some statements. Nevertheless, I have a good memory and I believe every
piece of information is correct as far as I know; I haven't included conjectures or guesses
which aren't noted as such.

If someone finds anything that seems to be a mistake, or wishes to make a suggestion, or

wants a particular topic to be discussed here, please write to me.
These pages do not require any plug-in or fancy gadget in order to be viewed correctly
(not Flash, not Shockwave, not even Java). However, it is recommended that you use a
browser with the ability to interpret Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS specification). Though
not required, these pages are compatible with Opera, which provides support for
certain innovations in the standard allowing for easier navigation.

Also, a couple of topics are accompanied by sound samples in MP3 format, which was
chosen since it produces compact files that can be listened to, recorded and/or modified
with software tools anyone can access for free. These samples are not indispensable for
the comprehension of the rest of the content.

Sounds
Sounds are the way a language first becomes real in the physical world, so we'll start
talking about them. Some people believe that a letter in their alphabet is the same as a
sound, or that all sounds in all languages are the same (as the sounds in their own
language), only with different 'accents'. Why this is false can be easily explained and
understood by most people. I won't mix sound with representation or transliteration,
here, and I'll give examples of sounds in languages that may be familiar to you just in
order to simplify things. Other languages need not use the same sounds as one's own, or
pronounce them the same way.

However, we'll have to stop at a fairly abstract topic first, in order to move on
confidently then. We'll talk about phones (real sounds) and phonemes (the sounds in
a language as seen by a linguist).

Phones and phonemes

The immense (actually infinitely dense) range of possible sounds that a human being
can produce are called phones. Each particular position of the lips, tongue, and other
features in our organs of speech can be thought of a point in a multidimensional
continuum. Given two positions of the tongue with respect to the interior of the mouth,
there is always a position in the middle, and so on. Remember the real numbers from
school?

However, we group sounds into prototypical examples of themselves, to study them

better and more easily, and we call each of these a phone, a single sound that can be
described by certain features (for example: the tongue touches the teeth, vocal chords
are vibrating, etc.).

In a particular language, we'll find a lot of phones, but those are not the object of our
study. We need to distinguish the sounds that are distinguishable by the speakers of the
language, i. e. that they conceptualize as different sounds. These are called phonemes.
A phoneme can be thought of as a family of related sounds which are regarded as the
same phonetic unit by the speakers. The different sounds that are considered part of the
same phoneme are called allophones or allophonic variants. Each allophone is said to
be a realization of the given phoneme.

In phonetic symbols, phonemic transcriptions are surrounded by slashes ( /X/), while

phonetic transcriptions (those who distinguish the different phones that are allophones
of the phoneme) are surrounded by square brackets ([X]). The standard phonetic
symbols that are used by most people nowadays belong to a set, the IPA (International
Phonetic Alphabet). They are a lot, and you'd need a special font to see them if I used
them here, so I (as most people that have to handle IPA symbols in the Web or e-mail)
use a transliteration that allows IPA to be represented by 7-bit ASCII characters. There
are several kinds of ASCII-IPA renderings. In this site I tend towards a version of the X-
SAMPA scheme, as employed customarily in the CONLANG e-mail list (see a chart). If
you want to listen to the sounds in the IPA, try IPAHelp.

Back on topic... The allophones of a phoneme need not be similar sounds (from one's
own point of view, that is). For example, the Spanish phoneme /b/ has two allophones,
[b] (like the English b) and [β] (a bilabial fricative, similar to English v but with air
blown between the two lips). These are similar, related sounds. On the other hand,
Japanese /h/ has three allophones, [h], [ç] (more or less like the sound in 'huge', or the
German Ich-Laut), and [φ] (like /f/, but blown between the two lips). These are quite
different sounds. What makes them allophones is that Japanese speakers treat them as
the same sound (phoneme). Note that in German, for example, [ç] and [h] are
allophones of different phonemes, so they can distinguish words.

Allophones of a given phoneme are in complementary distribution. This means that

which allophone appears in a particular position depends on the position, and position
determines one and only one allophone to be present, and not any of the others. Coming
back to our examples, Spanish /b/ is [β] in all positions except after /m/ and when
clearly starting a word (for example, at the beginning of a sentence); it's [b] otherwise.
You can't have [mβ] or [ab], because only [mb] and [aβ] are possible.

This all boils down to a fact that defines what phonemes are: they are sounds that can
make words different. If two sounds are allophones, you can't produce two words
exchanging them, because they are in fact the same; if you pronounce one where the
other should be, it'll sound bad to native speakers, but they won't hear a different word.

You'll see more of this afterwards, in other sections, since I'll keep repeating myself. If
you don't understand the concept of phoneme, you'd better keep trying.

Vowels vs. consonants

The sounds used in any language can be divided (generally) into consonants and vowels.
This division is not necessarily universal; in many languages some "consonants" like r,
m, n, l, are actually vowels (this is, they are treated as syllable nuclei, can be stressed, or
lengthened, etc.). For example, Sanskrit has syllabic l and r (as in Rgveda); and
Japanese syllable-final n is syllabic (actually "moraic", but that's a distinction I won't
explain here). The division between vowels and consonants is a matter of closure: the
more closed the air passages are, the more consonantic a sound is. We will examine the
different kinds of sounds using this scale.

Consonants

Sounds vary along dimensions. These represent ranges of possible features, or yes-no
features. Each language has a phonology with one or more dimensions within which
sounds are placed and recognized. One important dimension is the degree of closure.
According to this, consonants can be classified into:

 Stops: the airflow is completely stopped for a moment, and then released, to
produce the sound. The sounds p, k, b, d in English pin, king, ban, dad are stops.
 Fricatives: the airflow is not completely stopped, but it causes an audible
friction. For example: English s, sh, v, German ch as in Achtung, Ich, München.
 Approximants: the airflow is barely modified at all. For example: English w, l,
r, y.

Also an affricate is a stop plus a fricative occurring in the same place of articulation,
like English ch (which can be analyzed as t + sh) or German z (pronounced /ts/).

A click is a sound produced by placing the tongue in position for a stop while there's a
second closure somewhere else, accumulating pressure and then releasing the closure
(see below).

Then there's the place of articulation, this is, where the obstruction or modulation of
the airflow occurs. According to this, consonants can be:

 Labial: formed by the lips (w, p), or by the lips and the tongue (f, also called
labio-dental)
 Dental: between the teeth and the tongue (th, French or Spanish t)
 Alveolar: in the alveola, the place right behind the teeth (s, English t, Spanish r)
 Alveolo-palatal: further back from the teeth (sh, ch), with the body of the
tongue retracted towards the palate.
 Palatal: at the top of the palate (Russian ch, Spanish ñ as in niño)
 Retroflex: with the tip of tongue curled backwards, its underside touching the
border of the hard palate (American r, in many dialects; in Sanskrit there's a
complete series of retroflex consonants (which are called cerebral), which
parallels the alveolar series t, d, n, s).
 Velar: at the back of the mouth (k, ng as in sing)
 Uvular: way back in the mouth, at the uvula (Arabic q, French r) [also called
post-velar]
 Glottal: back in the throat (h, glottal stop as in uh-oh).

Some other dimensions are:

  Voicing: whether the vocal chords are vibrating (voiced) or not (voiceless or
unvoiced). Sounds like p, t, f are voiceless, while b, d, v are voiced.
 Nasalization: whether the air goes through the nose (nasal) or not. The sounds
m, n, ŋ (ng) are nasals.
 Aspiration: (this applies mostly to stops) whether there's a puff of air when
releasing the airflow. Initial English p, t, k as in paw, toe, kite are aspirated
(while the same sounds in spawn, star, sky are unaspirated).
 Palatalization: whether the middle part of the tongue is raised towards the
palate (the top of the mouth) when pronouncing the consonants. English doesn't
have palatalized consonants (see below), but Russian has a whole series.
 Glottalization: whether there's a glottal closure together with the main sound.
English doesn't have glottalized consonants (see below), but Georgian has a
whole series.

Let's examine these contrasts. I call them contrasts because that's what they are: things
that may be distinguished. Linguistics is based on contrasts, on differences. If a
language doesn't distinguish one sound from another, then it's the same sound for all
practical purposes, and in that way it should be studied.

Voicing is a very usual contrast in Western Indoeuropean languages, not so in many

other language families, where this distinction is not made (so in fact p and b, or t and d,
are regarded as exactly the same sound). In English you might say that /p/ is a
phoneme, with two phonetic realizations or allophones, [pʰ] (aspirated, at the
beginning of words) and [p] (non-aspirated). In Hindi, where aspirated and non-
aspirated stops are regarded as different families, /p/ and /pʰ/ are two phonemes.

Nasalization is quite a common contrast in many languages. The most common nasals
are voiced stops, but some languages do have voiceless nasals, and a few have nasalized
fricatives. If you can't imagine how to pronounce a voiceless nasal, take into account
that an m is actually a nasalized b, so a voiceless m is a nasalized p: pronounce a p while
you let air through your nose, and you're done. Many people in fact nasalize consonants
(and vowels) after a nasal, although they don't notice it: the distinction is usually not
phonemic (it can't be used to distinguish a word from another one).

We have already talked about aspiration. A language can have aspirated stops, non-
aspirated ones, or both; and it can make the distinction phonemic (like Hindi) or just
phonetic (like English).

Palatalization is a common device in languages. A consonant is palatalized by raising

the middle part of the tongue towards the top of the mouth. Normally the palatalized
consonant should be alveolar in the first place. The result is something that sounds like
the original consonant plus a /j/ sound (as in yet, new, pure). Russian has a distinct
series of palatalized consonants, transliterated with an apostrophe (t', l', d'). Spanish has
two palatalized consonants, ll (only pronounced this way in Spain, not in Latin America)
and ñ /J/ (as in año), also found in French, written gn (as in baigner).
Glottalization is performed by closing the glotis, and opening it at the same time you
pronounce the sound. The glotis is at the back of the throat. Glottalized sounds are
usually stops. You can produce a glottalization by producing a glottal stop in the
middle of the pronunciation of the original consonant, and then releasing the air in the
two closures at the same time. But what's a glottal stop? In English, a glottal stop is
usually pronounced as a pause before a word that begins with a vowel, especially when
the previous one ends in a vowel too, as in uh-oh. German always places a glottal stop
before an initial vowel. The glottal stop is not phonemic in English or German, but it's
quite a common phoneme in other languages, like Hawai'an (the apostrophe ' represents
/?/, the glottal stop). Glottalized consonants are also called glottalic egressive or
ejective. Georgian and Quechua have a complete series of glottalized/ejective voiceless
stops.

There are also glottalic ingressive consonants, also known as implossives. Those
are produced by making a sound, but just before opening the mouth also rapidly
lowering the glottis to produce a hollow sounding effect. Some African languages,
among others, have implossive consonants, which are also voiced stops.

There are also some contrasts I didn't mention before:

A lateral consonant is one in which the airflow doesn't go between the tongue and
another spot, but instead leaves that space closed and lets air pass through the sides
(lateral release). Some languages, like Welsh, have a voiceless lateral. The most
common lateral we know is l (which is usually alveolar and voiced). However, English
/l/ has two variants, one alveolar and one velar [L\], the latter occurring in syllable-
final position, especially in clusters, as in milk. This 'dark L' is an independent phoneme
in other languages.

If you use only the two main dimensions (degree of closure and place of articulation),
and simplify a bit, you can show the distribution of consonants in English with a grid
like this (in a common variation of SAMPA):

labial lab-dnt dental alv alv-pal velar glottal

stop p b t d k g
fricative f v θ ð s z S Z h
affricate tS dZ
approximant w r l j
nasal m n ŋ

(where /w/ is actually labiovelar, not just labial; /j/ is palatal, not alveolo-palatal; and
/r/ may be alveolar or retroflex according to dialect).

New consonants

How do you invent new consonants for your language? The first step should be deciding
which contrasts you will use. English three places of articulation (POAs) for stops, which
are usually the reference frame, and distinguishes voicing for most consonants and
nasalization for stops.

The important thing is that the phonology of a language is a system. Consonants which
are out of the system (because they use exceptional contrasts, for example) tend to be
left out and disappear or are merged with similar consonants. For example, English
couldn't possibly have a glottalized consonant, because it would use a contrast not found
elsewhere in the language and wouldn't survive long. Exceptions are possible, of course,
but try not to abuse them. If you have an exotic sound, you should have others of the
same kind. On the other hand, you probably shouldn't invent many strange sounds; you
must know how to pronounce each of them, and be able to read your language fluently.
(This also involves a careful planning of the transliteration scheme.)

Once you have decided the contrasts you'll be using, set up the grid and fill in the gaps.
You'll probably have to invent new symbols or digraphs for some letters (see Writing). If
you decide there are too many consonants, delete a series, or just some members. You
don't have to occupy all the places in the grid (English, as you may notice, leaves lots of
empty spaces). For example, you might have voiced and voiceless stops, but only
voiceless fricatives and voiced nasals.

English only has two affricate consonants, voiced j and voiceless ch, and on the same
position. Your language could have affricates in all positions where there's a stop and a
fricative; for example pf (found in German, as in Pferd), ts (also in German, written z as
in zehn, and in Japanese, as in tsukuru, though it's just an allophonic variant of /t/), tth
/tθ/ (not in any language that I know, but possible), tsh (ch), kkh, etc.

You can complete a series of consonants, for example the English fricatives: there are no
bilabial or velar fricatives (there's no reason why there should be any; but there's no
reason why there couldn't, either). An unvoiced bilabial fricative /φ/ sounds like an f
pronounced by letting air out between the lips; and an unvoiced velar fricative /x/ is just
the sound represented in Spanish by j (as in Juan, viejo), or the sound of Hebrew hhet,
sometimes transliterated kh. Some languages have both unvoiced /x/ and voiced /γ/.
Spanish voiced stops between vowels become fricatives, though the distinction is not
phonemic, so b, d, g in cabo, cada, soga are actually a bilabial fricative, a dental fricative
(/ð/, English soft th), and a velar fricative (/γ/).

If you want to go right into it, you can add a contrast not used in English, and create a
series of palatalized consonants. Or use aspiration as a phonemic distinction. Or even
lateralizing or retroflexing consonants. As Mark Rosenfelder says, the key to a
naturalistic language is to add (or substract) dimensions. Being into the study of
Quechua, he mentions that it has not one, but three series of stops: aspirated, non-
aspirated, and glottalized; but it doesn't distinguish between voiced and voiceless
consonants. So, for a Quechua speaker, the p in pat and the b in bat would be the same
sound (phoneme), but the p in pat and the one in spat would be clearly different.

Some sounds are more common than others. Most languages have the simple stops /p t
k/. From what I've been able to gather, the average language has twice as much
consonants as vowels. The simplest systems belong to Hawaiian, with only eight
consonants and five vowels, and Rotokas, with six consonants and five vowels. Quechua
has a lot of consonants but it's only got three vowels (/a i u/, which are the most
common). The most complex systems are those found in the Khoisan linguistic family;
the !Xũ language (also written !Kung) has 141 phonemes, with 92 consonants, 47 of
which are clicks. (!Xũ is pronounced as a glottalized dental click followed by a nasalized
/u/).

Vowels

Vowels are produced exactly the same way as consonants; they're not different in
essential ways from consonants. The main thing is that the airflow is almost not
disturbed while passing through the mouth; it's only modulated by the position of the
tongue and other parts of the vocal organs. Also, vowels are usually voiced (some
languages have voiceless vowels, especially at the end of words; they sound exactly as if
you pronounce /h/ with the tongue and lips in position for the vowel).

Vowels can vary along these dimensions:

 Height: how open the mouth is. Vowels are usually classified into high (i, u),
middle (e, o) and low (a). This scale is of course continuous, not discrete; in some
cases you cannot describe a vowel as middle or low, for example, but you have to
say it's higher than a but not so high as e.
 Frontness: how close the tongue is to the front of the mouth. Can go from front
(i, e) to central (a), or back (o, u). Front vowels are sometimes called palatal,
and back vowels are also called velar. There are also pharyngealized vowels
(produced with the pharynx), but I can't imagine how they actually sound.
 Roundedness: whether the lips are rounded (o, u, German ö, French u) or not
(i, e, a). (In most languages this covers it all, but Swedish has three degrees of
roundedness in a front vowel, from unrouded to semi-rounded to fully-rounded,
not just a yes-no choice).
 Length: how much you keep pronouncing the vowel, of course. English doesn't
distinguish vowels by length, but Latin, Greek, Old English and many other
languages do. Estonian has three degrees of length.
 Nasalization: like consonants, vowels can be nasalized. In English, a vowel next
to a nasal may get nasalized, but this is not distinctive. In French, on the other
hand, there are four vowels that can be nasalized or not.
 Voicing: vowels are usually voiced, but some languages have voiceless vowels
(sounding exactly as /h/ pronounced with the lips and tongue in position for the
vowel). In Japanese, /u/ and /i/ are usually voiceless if they aren't high-pitch
and stand between voiceless consonants (but they get voiced if for some reason
there's need to emphasize them.)
 Tenseness: difficult to explain except for examples. In English, the vowels in
pit, put are said to be lax, and the ones in peat, poot are called tense. I'm sure
you understand the difference!
  Retroflexion: the same as retroflex consonants. A vowel can be retroflexed by
curling the tongue towards the back of the mouth before pronouncing it. An
African language (I don't remember the name right now) has three series of three
vowels each; the first is of non-retroflex vowels, the second is semi-retroflex, and
the third is fully-retroflex! (I assume the neighbouring sounds tend to get
retroflexed too.)
 Constriction: a constricted vowel sounds as if you were choking. In some
languages, this and other ways of pronouncing sounds are phonemic, not just an
accident.
 Others: there are probably more contrasts for vowels, but I don't know anything
about them. Other modifications can be made by stress and tone (in tonal
languages like Chinese or Vietnamese; see below).

English has this vowel system:

--lax-- --tense--

front------back front------back

high pit put peat poot

mid pet putt pate boat

low pat pot father bought

If you read a book on linguistics or phonetics, you'll probably find a recurrent diagram
for vowels. It uses the two main contrasts (height and frontness) and places vowels in a
triangle, like this (corresponding to Spanish or Latin):

HIGH

i u
FRONT e o BACK
a

LOW

Along the i-u line are the high vowels, going down to the low vowel a, and the front of
the mouth is equated to the left side of the triangle. You can place vowels anywhere in
the triangle formed by i-a-u. The English schwa /@/ (as in alive, rodent) is in the middle,
right over the a; it's mid-central. There's a high central vowel ы in Russian which would
be located in the middle of the line i-u. This sound, /i\/, is also found in many North
American languages and in Guarani (the final y in Paraguay and Uruguay is the
Spanish adaptation of this sound, which is a one-phoneme word in Guarani, meaning
'water').

New vowels
As with consonants, you can invent as many vowels as you like. You should take into
account that vowels form a system, and one which can't be disbalanced. If you have a
tense and a lax version of i, then you're using tenseness as a contrast, and it should be
present in some other pair of vowels.

Roundedness is not disbalanced in English, or in Spanish. It seems that roundedness is

more frequent in back vowels than it is on front vowels. Nevertheless, many languages
have rounded front vowels, which English doesn't have (German and French have
rounded i and e, represented ü, ö in German). On the other hand, you can have
unrounded back vowels (like Japanese u or Turkish ı).

You can have as many vowels as you want to. The simplest systems have three vowels,
generally i, a, u (the vertices of the triangle, and not by chance). This means they
distinguish three vowel sounds, not that its speakers do not know how to pronounce an
e or an o. A Quechua speaker might say something that sounds e to an English speaker,
but it's actually an i, of which English e is just a phonetic, not phonemic, variant.
Spanish and Japanese have five vowels, i e a o u. Swedish has nine vowels, British RP
English has twelve, German has fourteen, and !Xũ (the absolute record) twenty-four.
But perhaps you shouldn't go that far.

There are at least three languages with only two vowels: Ubykh, Abkhazian and Abaza,
spoken in the Northwest Caucasus (in fact, Ubykh is extinct now, as of 1993). Each of
them distinguishes between an open vowel /a/ and a close vowel /@/ (a schwa).
Phonemically, that is; it's quite probable that phonetically each of these two is realized
in multiple ways according to their position and proximity with different consonants.

Stress and pitch

Stress is of course the strength placed on certain syllable of each word (or of the
important words in a complete sentence). Languages can have a regular stress rule, in
which case you only have to mention it, or it can be irregularly stressed, in which case
you should indicate it. English has an unpredictable stress and it's not marked
anywhere; even identical words in writing can have different stress patterns. Spanish
has an unpredictable stress too, but it can be read correctly without trouble. In Spanish,
an unaccented word receives stress on the penultimate syllable if it ends in a vowel or in
n or in s; if it ends in any other consonant it receives stress in the last syllable; and if it is
accented (a vowel is marked with an accute accent as in álamo, adiós), stress falls in the
accented vowel. French words always receive stress in their last syllable. Quechua
receives stress in the second to last syllable. Latin stresses the second-to-last syllable if
both final syllables are short (short vowels and single consonants, as in seculus
['sekulus]); else stress falls on the first-to-last syllable (as in secundus [se'kundus]).

Pitch is the height of the syllable. Japanese, for example, doesn't use stress, but pitch,
to "accent" words. Some syllables are low pitched, and some others are high pitched.
The pitch of each syllable is determined by the position of the main pitch drop or accent.
(Jump here for more details.)
In most languages, some words are not stressed when in a complete sentence. In
English, for example, "I'm here for the ad" gets no stress over I'm, for, the. (Also,
unstressed vowels are reduced to centralized forms, namely a schwa or a weak /I/.)

Tone
Tone is the intonation contour of a syllable. Tone exists in all languages, but it's not
phonemic sometimes. In English, you pronounce "What did you do?" (normal) and
"What did YOU do?" (emphatic reply) differently, and key words have different tones.

In some languages, tone is phonemic. These languages include Chinese (Mandarin and
Cantonese), Vietnamese, and a lot of African languages. Each syllable receives a
particular tone, which is as characteristic as the height of the vowels in it, and can
distinguish words. Mandarin Chinese, for example, has four tones, called high, rising,
low falling, and high falling (you can imagine what they mean). For example: ma
"mother", má "hemp", mâ "horse", mà "curse". Vietnamese has six tones, two of which
include creaky voice -- lowering the pitch so much that the individual vibrations of the
vocal chords can be heard.

You can try using tones in your language, but I don't recommend it unless your native
language is tonal too. It's an interesting device, but it takes quite a lot of self-reeducation
of the vocal organs. Tone can be a phonemic feature or (rarely in natural languages) a
grammatical feature.

There's an interesting short discussion in a work by Marjorie K.M. Chan: "Tone and
Melody in Cantonese", positing and answering an interesting question: how do you sing
a song in a tonal language?

Phonological constraints
Each language has combinations of sounds that are considered difficult, forbidden, or
impossible. These are called phonological constraints, and are the moulds into which
any word has to be made to fit for the sake of coherence and "familiarity". The rules of
syllable- and word-formation are part of what is called phonotactics (i. e. which
sounds can come in contact with other given sounds).

English is quite free of phonological constraints. Hence the enormous quantity of

foreign words it has been able to absorb, like garage, sombrero, mosquito, ersatz,
schmuck... Some languages do not resist such invasions.

For example, Japanese (one of the most restricted languages) basically allows syllables
formed by a (perhaps double) consonant, a vowel (perhaps double), and /n/: (C)V(V)
(n). The English word club was adapted into Japanese as kurabu, to give an extreme
example. If you're an anime fan, you know how Japanese anime shows typically employ
English (in Sailor Moon, the main character shouted the invocation muun kurisutaru
pawaa akushon -- that's "moon crystal power action").
Fidjian is almost as much restricted as Japanese: a consonant plus a vowel form a
syllable, with an optional consonant at the end of the word.

Finnish didn't tolerate consonants clusters like pr or fl in not-so-old times. The Elvish
language Quenya doesn't tolerate initial or final consonant clusters at all. Greek words
can only end in -s, -n, or a vowel. Some languages only use certain sounds together with
others and never alone.

It's difficult to design a pattern in abstracto --but you should have some ideas about it.
The main thing is defining whether your language will be vocalic or consonantic, to put
it in non-technical and inexact terms. English (and most North European languages) are
quite consonantic. Spanish, Japanese and Greek are quite vocalic. Hawai'ian is very
vocalic (a word like Kilauea is not possible in many languages). The global tendency,
according to some theories, is towards the basic consonant-vowel syllabic structure. This
is confirmed by the tendency, found in many languages, to simplify the codas -- i. e. to
reduce or drop consonants that end a syllable.

A synthetic language with lots of inflections usually prefers a simple structure.

(Nevertheless, consider Georgian, a very agglutinating language, where you may find up
to six consonants in a row, as in vprtskvni "I am peeling it" [ts is an affricate, so it
counts as one consonant]). An isolating language can have very intrincate words,
because you won't be adding anything else to them. The best thing is try and try until
words begin to look and sound right to your particular taste and mood (just don't
change it in midway!).

Sounds tend to influence one another and change. Sound change can ultimately produce
a new language, or a distinct dialect.

Sound change
Nobody knows why, but sounds change in all languages. The only languages that don't
change are the dead ones.

Sounds change into other sounds, sometimes influenced by others. Sound changes can
be classified into conditional and inconditional. An inconditional sound change
transformed the Old English sceadu /'skæadu/ into shadow /'SædOw/, as well as every
word beginning with /sk/ into a new one beginning with /S/ (sh) . Most modern English
words in /sk/ are Scandinavian borrowings, in case you were wondering. A conditional
sound change transformed French marbre into English marble, the second /r/ being
dissimulated by the presence of the first one.

The main types of sound changes are:

 Assimilation: a sound "gets nearer" to a neighbouring sound, i. e. takes on

some of its phonetic features, especially when this eases the pronunciation. For
example assimilate from Latin ad- + simul-; /d/ became /s/ because of the
 neighbouring /s/. Also cupboard, pronounced no more as cup-board but as
cubbord. Assimilation can transform two sounds at the same time: got you
becoming gotcha. Italian got a lot of double consonants from old clusters of two
different consonants (e. g. otto 'eight' from Latin octo).
 Dissimulation: the reverse of assimilation, two (identical o similar) sounds
move away from each other. For example: the changes from (French?) marbre to
English marble, and Latin arbor giving Spanish árbol, show /r/→/l/
dissimulation. Nasal dissimulation also changed /mn/ to /mr/ in the process that
gave Spanish hombre from homre ← homne ← Latin hominem.
 Metathesis: two sounds exchange places. This generally produces a new
combination which is easier to pronounce (although the term "easier" is quite
subjective). For example: Old English thridda became English third. The name of
the Turkish city of Iskenderun shows metathesis too (the original form was
Alexandretta -- aleksand(e)r- → (al)iskend(e)r-).
 Elision, syncope, apocope: all these are names for the same phenomenon.
They refer to the loss of sounds; elision especifically means loss of unstressed
vowels or syllables, while syncope applies to the loss of medial sounds, and
apocope is the loss of final sounds. Examples: elementary being pronounced
/El@'mEntri/ (elision), in French au revoir /or'vwa/; boatswain /bOws@n/
(syncope); the loss of final -e in English is an apocope, as well as the alternative
forms of certain words in Spanish (grande 'big', gran casa 'big house').
 Haplology: the loss of a sequence of sounds because of similarity of
neighbouring sounds. In Latin stipendium should have been *stipipendium;
haplology would have been reduced to *haplogy if it were a common, non-
technical word.
 Liaison: introduction of a sound between two other sounds, especially between
words. Pronounced /li.e'zõ/. French, where the word comes from (meaning
'binding'), is the best example: the final consonants of many words are
pronounced only when the next word begins in a vowel. For example C'est moi
/sE'mwa/ vs. C'est Anne /sEt'an/.
 Prothesis: an extra initial sound is added to the beginning of certain words, as
in Spanish: e- before initial cluster sp-, Latin spectrum > Spanish espectro
(Spanish speakers also add /e/ at the beginning of many English loanwords, such
as escáner, estándar for scanner, standard).
 Epenthesis: an extra medial sound is inserted between others. In Welsh, an
epenthetic vowel appears between certain pairs of consonants in final
position; for example llyfr pronounced as if it were llyfyr. In French, nombre
'number' got an epenthetic /b/ (into Latin numerus) to bridge the gap between
/m/ and /r/.

Conditional and inconditional sound changes are not always easy to take apart. If we
take the definition as a strict rule, almost all changes are conditional; very few are
absolutely inconditional. For example, the change of Latin /k/ (written c) in Romance
languages is regarded as inconditional, but it was actually produced by the influence of
vowels: Latin /k/ changed into /s/ in Spanish and French (although continued to be
written c) when the next sound was a front vowel (/e/ or /i/).
Sound change most often produces irregularities. In Spanish, the different forms in
which the Latin /k/ changed produced the following forms of the verb decir 'to say':
digo 'I say', dice 'He says', dijo 'He said', he dicho 'I've said'. But one specific type of
change can be actually regularizing. It's called analogy, and it will treated in its own
section.

Rules of sound change

Sound changes can be of a lot of different types, as we have seen above. But all kinds of
sound change obey some rules:

 Sound change is grammatically irrestricted. If a certain phoneme changes

into another one, it does not matter the word class. A rule of change that
transforms one phoneme or set of phonemes into another can have only phonetic
restrictions, for example: 'A changes to B whenever it follows C, except in
stressed syllables', or 'intervocalic X changes to YZ'. A rule of change cannot be
restricted to certain word classes or grammatical constructions, like 'final A and
B are dropped, except on adjectives' or 'X changes to Y on inflected nouns'.
 Sound change has no memory. This may sound stupid, but it's not. A rule of
change that transforms X into Y cannot discriminate between a certain X that the
language has had from the beginning and another X that comes from a previous
change W → X. Cycles of sound change are cumulative and each one erases the
previous one's tracks, so to speak; imagine waves coming to a sand beach one
time after another...
 Sound change is unstoppable. Some people used to argue that a written
language helps to keep the spoken language from changing. This is obviously
untrue. What a written language does is to keep the written words looking as they
were before the change. If we learned language from books, the argument would
probably be true; but we first learn to speak by listening to other people
speaking! If a language doesn't change, it's probably dead. This of course doesn't
apply to artificial auxiliary languages such as Esperanto, or to artificially
resurrected-and-kept-alive languages like Latin. As for Esperanto, I don't know if
Esperantists speak the language at home for their children to hear so that they
learn it as a (second) native tongue. If they do, the kids will probably be
producing changes very slowly over the years (if they do the same with their own
children, and so on). This perhaps would horrify doctor Zamenhof and his
followers, but it would be a sure sign that the language is indeed used for
communication and is alive, a natural(ized) language among peers. As for Latin,
everybody pronounces it more or less as they prefer...

These rules have exceptions, but they must be adequately explained. If you write down
the history of your language, you may explain them or use 'for some unknown reason...',
but don't let this become an excuse for violating linguistic rules.

Exceptions to the rules are mostly caused by analogy or related processes tending to
regularize the language. For example, if a sound change makes X become Y and this
makes two pronouns sound the same, one of these things will probably happen: 1)
nothing, 2) the pronouns will be merged into one, grammatically as they were
phonetically, 3) the pronoun to be changed will 'refuse' to change, 4) people will stop
using one of the pronouns, replacing it by another construction.

Also, sound change might be slowed down or sped up. Some people have tried to come
up with a set of factors that may cause a language to enter a rapid change phase (such as
economic and social chaos, wars, a new religious movement, etc.) These theories have
proven useless. There are surely social factors that regulate the speed and quality of
sound change, but they depend on so many 'social variables' that they are impossible to
calculate. Some you can imagine: if an enclosed country (in an island, for example)
suddenly gets in contact with a massive and constant amount of foreign visitors, its
language will probably begin to change faster, borrowing new words and structures,
creating or copying new idioms, and inventing new words for concepts they had no
previous knowledge of.

Another cause for exceptions is the fact that some words are less common than others.
Words may change if they are said and repeated over and over, thus being "worn out";
strange, rarely used words, are likely to stay unchanged. These rarely used words usually
include educated terms, or very formal or specific words. Sometimes they are not exactly
preserved, but reborrowed from the ancient language (or another one), like English
foreign, which comes from Proto-Indoeuropean *dhwor-, hence also door; or
semaphore, where -phore "carry" has the same origin *bhero- as the verb to bear. Other
examples include pairs of related words like night-nocturnal, viril-werewolf, blanch-
blank, etc.

Harmony
Harmony is a set of sound changes that some languages produce in parts of speech on
certain occasions. Although simple, it can be considered a different type of sound
change, related to the assimilation process.

One type is called vowel harmony. It produces changes on vowels, according to other
vowels in the same word. Vowel harmony is present in Turkish, the Finno-Ugric
languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) and some Native American languages.
These have in common the fact that they are agglutinating, so the root of the word may
be followed by a lot of suffixes or come after a string of prefixes, which are concatenated
(agglutinated). The stressed vowel in the root (which is usually the first or the last one,
depending on whether you use suffixes or prefixes) is cathegorized according to a certain
contrast, usually the place of articulation. So you may have, for example, vowels divided
into front (i, e, German ä, ö, ü) and back (a, o, u). Then you change all the vowels in the
agglutinated affixes to match the quality of the root vowel. In this way, each affix has to
have two forms, a front form and a back form. (Some languages may have three or four
steps in the scale instead of just two.) For example, take a look a some Finnish words
with case marks:
autossa 'in the car'
laatikossa 'in the box'
järvessä 'in the lake'

Do you see how the final vowel alternates between -a (back) and -ä (front)? Some more
examples, with the perfect tense of verbs:

on lyönyt 'has beaten'

on ajanut 'has driven'

The perfect tense mark is -nut for roots with back vowels, -nyt for roots with front
vowels (y = /y/, like German ü).

I have a language with vowel harmony of my own: Knarwaz. Compare the following
words: back vowel gnolpusut 'in the mountain' vs. front vowel lempüsüt 'in the tree'.
The first syllables (gnol-, lem-) are the roots, while the endings show locative case and
masculine gender. The form -pusut uses the back vowel /u/ because the root vowel /o/
is a back vowel. The form -püsüt uses ü = /y/ (rounded i or front u) because the root
vowel /e/ is a front vowel.

Vowel harmony can also be extended to other contrasts besides place of articulation; it
could include length, nasalization or roundedness, too. Vowel height harmony is also
possible, but it isn't found in any known natural language.

Another form of harmony is called nasal harmony. It's found on Guarani (the
language of a South American native group which inhabited in Northeastern Argentina
and Paraguay, where it's still spoken by many people and has formed a pidgin). I don't
know of any other language featuring nasal harmony, but again I didn't go researching.
Nasal harmony 'turns on' nasalization in certain consonants of the agglutinated affixes
(yes, Guarani is also agglutinating) when the root of the word contains nasal
consonants. So many affixes have two forms, a nasal one and a non-nasal one. For
example, from hecha 'see' we can form jajoechapeve 'until we see (each other)'. This is
non-nasal. But from hendu 'hear', we must say ñañoendumeve 'until we hear (from each
other)', where ñ is the palatalized n also found in Spanish (almost like /nj/). See the
change? Non-nasal palatal j changes to nasal palatal ñ, and also non-nasal labial p (in
-peve) changes to nasal labial m (-meve).

You can have other types of harmony in your language. For example, a kind of 'inverse
harmony' where two consecutive syllables cannot have the same vowel, or cannot
begin by a certain consonant cluster. This is closely related to the phenomenon of
dissimulation, only that it's systematic, not accidental. Greek provides an example of
this: when deriving words from their roots, there can't be two fricative sounds beginning
consecutive syllables; it there are, the first one becomes a stop. For example, the root
thrikh- 'hair' gives trikhós (instead of the expected **thrikhós). (Greek also produces a
lot of assimilation.)

Sandhi or mutation
Sandhi is the name given by the ancient Sanskrit scholars to a regular set of sound
changes which are produced on words on certain conditions. It can be also called
mutation. These changes can be of several forms. I will mention one, the one I'm most
familiarized with: lenition.

Lenition or softening is a change produced on the initial sounds of words whenever

they are used in certain positions, or for certain purposes. These changes affect the
beginning of words by removing, adding or changing initial sounds. In that way, words
can have two or more forms.

Of the Western languages I know something of, Welsh and Irish have lenition patterns.
Welsh, in fact, inspired the phonology of the famous Sindarin language invented by J. R.
R. Tolkien for the Grey Elves of Middle-Earth. I don't know much Welsh, but I happen
to have some material on Sindarin, which has lenition patterns taken from Welsh. So I'll
use Sindarin for the examples.

Sindarin lenition affects the initial consonants of words in certain contexts. A lenited
consonant changes this way: the voiceless stops p, t, k become voiced b, d, g. The voiced
stops become fricatives, except for g: b, d, g change to v, dh (/ð/), and nothing.
Voiceless lh and rh become voiced l, r; s gives h, and m gives v.

In Sindarin, a word is lenited when it is (a) the object of a verb and is next to it, (b)
anything after conjunctions and articles, (c) an adjective following the noun it describes,
and (d) the second element of a compound. For example: from certh 'rune' we have i
gerth 'the rune'; from peth 'word' the magic spell Lasto beth lammen 'listen to the word
of my tongue'; from calen 'green' the name Tol Galen 'Green Island'; from mellyn
'friends' the name Elvellyn 'Elf-Friends'.

Welsh mutation patterns are quite more complicated than that; there are three types of
mutation, called soft (lenition), nasal, and spirant mutation. Welsh also features a
related phenomenon involving verb conjugation (at least for the verb bod 'to be') where
interrogative and negative forms, besides changing intonation and/or using particles,
produce a change in the initial sounds.

You can use other types of lenition and consonant mutation, and specify when they
should be used. In the African language Ful, a personal-class noun is lenited when it's
pluralized; singular jim 'mate', plural yim'be 'mates', with lenition j → y. Curiously,
thing-class nouns are lenited exactly the opposite way.

Writing your language

Once you have determined which sounds your language will have, you'll need a way to
write them down in the Roman alphabet (transliterate them), and perhaps an
alphabet of its own. We'll talk about alphabets in a minute.
Transliteration can be a nightmare. The ideal thing would be having one symbol for
each sound, but the Roman alphabet doesn't have symbols to represent some very
common sounds. Here you have your first choice: will you invent or use one symbol for
each sound, or use some other devices? If you want one symbol for each sound, then
you'll probably have to use either non-letter symbols (such as ' @ ?) or resort to
diacritic marks, i. e. modify letter symbols by using little signs on top of (or below)
them. The accents and diaeresis over vowels are diacritic marks: á è î ÿ. English doesn't
use any diacritic marks. Spanish shows some stressed vowels with an accute accent: acá
éramos ínfimos órganos súbitos, and writes the palatalized nasal sound as ñ (as in año).
French uses accents to show that a written e should be pronounced and for the sake of
tradition in many words: été âme à mère; and it has a letter ç for /s/ before a, o, u.
Portuguese shows nasalized vowels with a tilde (~) over them (as in são). German shows
front versions of back vowels with a diaeresis over them (ö ü). Danish writes a kind of
rounded a with å, and a fronted o with ø. Many languages have nonstandard letters for
certain sounds, and unless you speak those languages and your keyboard is configured
for them, you won't be able to easily access to them when writing your language in your
computer.

If you don't want to use so many strange symbols, you'll probably have to use two or
more symbols to represent some sounds, like English uses sh and th for single sounds.
These are called digraphs (trigraphs are possible but to be avoided for the sake of
length). The letter h is very good for digraphs. But you have to take something into
account: two symbols should never be used to form a digraph if they can appear on their
own to represent two different sounds. English can use th because the cluster /t/+/h/
does not appear in English, but couldn't use sn to represent a nasal fricative, because
some words have sn with the value of /sn/.

Transliteration has no rules on which symbols you use to represent which sound, but
you should try to make the language readable: it's OK to use zh to represent /f/, but
most people will surely read something completely different from /f/ when they find it,
and besides, you already have a more familiar f to fill that place, right?

Transliteration should be as phonemic as possible. English is a bad example; words are

written the way they were pronounced centuries ago, so the written and spoken forms of
a word are usually inconsistent. French is even worse (in a word like oiseau, pronounced
/wa'zo/, there's not one sound corresponding to its 'proper' letter). Written Spanish and
Italian are quite phonemic, and almost as much important, the sounds can be guessed
from the written form, although inaccurate. Some languages are remarkably consistent
in their written forms.

Alphabets and other scripts

An alphabet is a collection of symbols representing sounds. You can invent an alphabet

for your language if you want to. If you do, and your romanized spelling is phonemic,
then your alphabet should be too: one symbol for one sound. You can use digraphs and
add diacritics to your own alphabet. If your language derives from another language for
which you already had an alphabet, then probably the newest language will use the old
alphabet, but some letters will have changed sound. For example, Spanish uses the Latin
alphabet, but the letter c now represents /s/ before e, i. This is not phonemic spelling,
but the change is completely regular.

When inventing letters, play around with them and write them quickly one after
another. People write carelessly in most cases, and elaborate letters are likely to be
simplified. Also try to make each letter different from all others, so that they are not
confused. When two symbols look very similar, people find ways to distinguish them.
The dot over the i appeared when the little stick of the lowercase i began to be confused
with the vertical lines of m's and n's in Gothic handwriting. Computer fonts and
programmers distinguish 0 (zero) and O (the letter o) by writing a slash over the zero.

You have to decide how you will read and write. Will it be from left to right, like the
Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are usually written? Hebrew and Arabic are written from
right to left, and vowels are not written except in children's books and (Arabic) in the
Koran. Japanese is usually written from top to bottom and from right to left, but it's
written from left to right in certain books, like mathematics ones.

Alphabets are not the only kind of writing. Chinese uses ideograms, or characters
which used to represent a picture of an object. Each character represents a concept and
is read as a syllable; but words that sound the same and are not related are written as
different characters. Chinese characters have two parts, the radical and the phonetic.
The radical gives an idea of the meaning, while the phonetic gives an idea of the sound; a
radical can sometimes act as a phonetic and viceversa.

Japanese uses a mixed system of kanji (ideograms) and kana (phonetic syllabic
characters). In general, the main content of what you're trying to say is written in kanji,
while particles, conjunctions and inflectional endings are written in kana. There are
about 90 kana divided into two sets (hiragana and katakana). Hiragana are most
often used for original Japanese words; katakana are preferred for borrowed words,
and also to add emphasis, just like italics in the Roman alphabet. Also, when an unusual
kanji is used, it can be clarified by spelling it phonetically in hiragana, which are called
furigana ('handicap kana'). You can change the quality of the consonant in a kana by
using some diacritic marks. There are 1945 'standard' kanji, of which 1006 are taught in
elementary school, and each kanji can be read according to its Japanese pronunciation
(kun-yomi) or its original Chinese pronunciation (on-yomi). As if it weren't confusing
already, each kanji can have several readings of each of the two forms. [See a description
of Japanese and Chinese writing here. Includes a hiragana-katakana chart!]

Korean uses an alphabet called Hangul (or Hangeul), which is a featural code, a
system in which similar sounds are represented by similar symbols. I don't know when
this was originated, but it requires a remarkable phonetic analysis. In Hangul, symbols
are grouped in syllables, making the writing look as if it was composed of many
ideograms or syllabic characters, which is not the case.

Arabic uses a cursive alphabet, which is unusual because most peoples in history have
started out with block letters, due to the nature of the material support for writing.
Arabic was written with fine brushes on some kind of smooth surface from the
beginning, I guess; cursive letters are completely inadequate for (quick) stone carving or
clay.

Thai, while a syllabic language, uses a phonetic alphabet of single letters, which often
have little curls and twists at the ends. Some other scripts of peoples in that area of the
globe use that kind of characters which seem a bit too much elaborate. The reason is
that they were first written using materials which required lines to be 'closed' in some
way.

This all boils down to a principle: to invent an alphabet, you must know where it's going
to be written and by what means.

Inventing an alphabet is simple, but a syllabary (or ideograms) can be a headache, so

you should think of it carefully before. Ideograms are probably the worst kind of writing,
and you should probably refrain from using them unless you have a photographic
memory. Syllabaries are fine, but they work best on very restricted languages; English
has an enormous number of possible syllables, and inventing a sign for each one would
be impossible.

Take a look at some natural language scripts in Ancient Scripts, a page with examples
from all around the world.

Ordering your script

We're used to have our letters in order. This is very useful for dictionaries and phone
books, and for indexes in general. How are you going to order your symbols?

Western alphabets derived from the Roman alphabet usually follow a predictable order.
English uses a relatively small set of symbols, and digraphs aren't considered
independent symbols, but this is not so in other languages. For example:

 The Spanish alphabet consists of all the letters in the English alphabet, plus the
following: ch (which goes after c), ll (after l), and ñ (after n). So you won't find a
word like chico under the C chapter. Does your language use a Latin-derived
script? What extra symbols do you have, and which of them are given their own
place in the ordered alphabet.
 Finnish alphabetizes the umlauted vowels ä and ö after the letter y.
 In Dutch, the digraph ij is sometimes still considered one symbol. (Older
typewriters have a key for it!)
 In Swedish, v and w are considered two versions of the same letter, so they fall
into the V chapter of alphabetic lists. This causes great trouble given the many
many English and German words with w that have been borrowed into Swedish
(which only uses v for native words).
Some other languages, using non-Latin scripts, order their characters in different
fashion. Some of them use the phonetic features of sounds to order the letters; for
example, first the labials (p, b, m, f), then the alveolars (t, d, n, s) and so on.

As for syllabaries, there's usually also a fixed order. In Japanese, both types of kana are
arranged like this: first the vowels, a i u e o, then the syllables beginning with k (ka, ki,
ku, ke, ko), then t-, n-, h-, m-, y-, r-, w-, and finally the symbol for syllabic n. Another
order, more traditional, was used in former times (and is still used in indexes and tables,
as opposed to the modern order, which is used in dictionaries). This order follows a
poem by Buddhist monk Kuukai, which uses each character of hiragana exactly once:

Iro ha nihohe to
chirinuru wo
waka yo tare so.
Tsune naramu
uwi no okuyama
kefu koete
asaki yume
mishi wehi mo sesu.

(Note: this is probably not good modern Japanese, nor is this the correct pronunciation.
The kana for ha is pronounced wa, and the kana for wi and we are obsolete. The kana
for wo is pronounced o.)

As for ideograms, Japanese kanji (and Chinese hanzi) are ordered by the radical
number and, within the same radical, by the number of strokes needed to write the
character (there's a method to count them properly).

It would be a nice idea to have letters with names that mean something, or that can be
recited in order. Latin letters have meaningless names in all languages that use them,
and their names are often too similar to one another, hence the need for codes like
'Alpha, Bravo, Charlie'... Other languages and scripts don't have such problems.

Grammar
This section will take some grammar issues and develop them, showing with examples,
when possible, how natural languages manage them, and what can you do about them.
You can't have a language without a grammar; if you don't think about it, you'll probably
copy the structures of your own language, and the whole thing will be an exercise of
translation of single words.

Morphological typology

The classic cathegorization is that languages can be inflecting, agglutinating, or

isolating. This cathegorization has proven to be too limited, but I'll explain it, because
it's a good starting point to understand the differences.
Inflection

An inflecting language uses inflections, which may be affixes used, for example, to
conjugate verbs, decline nouns and other tasks. Some languages use suffixes for this
purposes, while others use prefixes; most use both, though there's usually a preference.
A few languages employ infixes or circumfixes. Examples of inflection in English are the
-s used for pluralizing names and the -ed used to form the past of regular verbs.

Another type of inflection (and "purer", if you like) is the change of the root forms of
words. Examples are the inflection of strong verbs of English, like sing/sang/sung,
which are inflected forms of a root concept "sing". Inflection by vowel change (called
ablaut) is quite usual in certain languages. Consonant change does exist, but it's rarer.
Curious examples in English are the pairs breath/breathe (changes voiceless to voiced
th, besides vowel change), house (noun) vs. to house (verb) (same change).

Inflection includes some other devices like changing suprasegmental features like tone,
stress or pitch; lengthening a vowel or geminating a consonant; and repeating a part of
the root (reduplication). The main thing about inflections, however, is that an inflection
can carry more than one meaning at the same time. For example, in Spanish viví "I
lived", the inflection -í shows that the verb is in the past tense, first person singular,
indicative mood. Examples of inflecting languages are English, Spanish, German, Latin,
Greek, and in general all Indoeuropean languages.

Agglutination

An agglutinating language uses suffixes or prefixes whose meaning is unique, and which
are concatenated one after another without overlap. Some known agglutinating
languages are Quechua and many other American languages, Turkish, Finnish, and
Hungarian. For example, in the Quechua word wasikunapi "in the houses", the plural
suffix -kuna is separate from the locative case suffix -pi. In Finnish, huoneissansakaan
means "(not) even in their rooms", and it consists of five agglutinated morphemes,
"room-s-in-their-even".

Isolation

An isolating language doesn't use affixes or root modifications at all. Each word is
invariable, and meanings have to be modified by inserting additional words, or
understood by context. The best known example of isolating language is Chinese. In
Chinese, a noun by itself is not singular, nor plural; and a verb has no tense or person;
these distinctions are made by adding quantifiers, adverbs, or pronouns. In effect you
say "books" by saying "several book".

Analysis and synthesis

The modern classification of language grammars is a continuous scale which goes from
analytic to synthetic. The more analytic a language, the more meaningless the words
by themselves, so as to say, and the more important is context and word order (analysis
is thus roughly equivalent to isolation). The more synthetic a language, the more self-
contained the words (synthesis involves inflection or agglutination).

The scale is meant to be taken as a reference; there are no extreme points, but you can
compare two languages and say that one is more synthetic than the other. Chinese is
very analytic; a Chinese word by itself can mean a lot of different things, because no
distinctions are made in it: you don't know if it's a verb, a noun, an adjective, or if it's
past tense or future, or plural, or singular, or anything, you only have the root concept.
Some Native American languages like Nootka or Chinook are the other end, so synthetic
that indeed they were called polysynthetic, inflecting words in such ways that a single
word can mean "the many little fires been lit in the house in the past" (I'm not making
this up; the word is inikwihl'minih'isit, and by the way, it's not properly a verb or a
noun; it needs verbal or noun prefixes...). In the middle, we have Japanese (quite
analytic except for verbs), English (quite analytic too, as it barely distinguishes noun
case or verbal person), Spanish, French and Italian (of the ones I know a bit of), German
(already with many inflections) and all the agglutinating languages, which are in fact a
subset of inflecting languages, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit...

So you'll have to pick up a point in the scale and stay there. This is probably the most
important decision in the process. Each kind of grammar has its own pros and cons.

 An isolating language avoids a lot of work on difficult fields like deciding how to
pluralize nouns and conjugating verbs. But it requires that you plan a rigid word
order for sentences, and respect it at whatever cost, after assuring that it can't
lead to ambiguities (serious ones at least). And a totally isolating language is
difficult to devise, because you have to eliminate all traces of inflection, even ones
that you'd never suspect about.
 An agglutinating language means a careful planning of affixes (dozens of them)
which must have unique meanings. Also, you must decide in which order they
will appear after or before a word. Finally, agglutinating languages may tend to
produce very long words, or ones that are very difficult to pronounce (consider
Georgian, where many affixes are formed by just one or two consonants;
sometimes they have to be joined to other affixes of the same kind, so you might
end up with six consonants in a row).
 An inflecting language produces shorter words and compact sentences (the
more inflecting the language, the more compact the sentences), but it requires
that you plan all inflections and combinations of inflections, because sometimes
you won't be able to place two or more of them in a row (agglutinated). You can
take inflection to its simplest expression (as in English) or produce a
polisynthetic language which inflects words for almost every conceivable
purpose. The more inflected a language, the more you'll have to care about
concordance (the agreement of adjectives and nouns, and nouns and verbs).

Sapir's classification
There's another classification of languages, which is far more complex, and was created
by Edward Sapir in the 1920s. This divides concepts into four classes:

Group I. Basic (concrete) concepts (objects, actions, qualities): normally expressed by

independent words or radical elements; they don't include any kind of relationship with
other words. For example, English nouns and adjectives like dog, party, ugly, strange.

Group II. Derivative concepts (generally less concrete than those in group I): normally
expressed by affixation of non-radical elements to radicals, o by internal modification
inside these. They denote ideas that don't have to do with the proposition (sentence)
itself, but give the radical element a certain particular twist of meaning and are therefore
intimately related to it in a concrete fashion. For example, English prefixes pre-, for-,
un- and suffixes -less, -ly.

Group III. Concrete relationship concepts (yet more abstract): normally expressed by
affixation or internal modification, but commonly in a less intimate fashion than group-
II elements. They indicate relationships that go beyond the word itself. For example,
English -s for plural nouns.

Group IV. Pure relationship concepts (totally abstract): expressed by affixation or

internal modification of radical elements, or by independent words, or by word order
within the sentence. They connect the concrete elements of the proposition, giving them
a definite syntactic form. For example, the modifications of English him, her from he,
she indicating accusative case; the prepositions to, for; the position of the dog in I see
the dog indicating that it's the object of the verb, etc.

The classification of languages according to these classes is as follows:

Type A. Languages which only express concepts of groups I and IV, so that they have
no means of modifying the meaning of the radical element by means of affixes or
internal changes. For example, Chinese.

Type B. Languages which express concepts of groups I, II and IV, preserving pure
syntactic relationships and being able to modify the meaning of radical elements by
affixation or internal change.

Type C. Languages which express concepts of groups I and III, where syntactic
relationships are expressed in necessary connection to barely concrete concepts, but
they can't change the radical elements by affixation or internal change.

Type D. Languages which express concepts of groups I, II and III, i. e. where syntactic
relationships are expressed in mixed ways, like in Type C, and can also modify the
meaning of radical elements by affixation or internal change. In this group belong most
of the "flexive" (inflectional) languages with which we are familiar, as well as many
"agglutinating" languages.
Each one of the types A, B, C, D can be subdivided into agglutinating, fusional and
symbolic. Agglutination means the things added to the radical element are just
juxtaposed (put together); fusional means they are sometimes merged; symbolism
roughly means internal change. Type A also has an isolating subtype.

The method (agglutinating, fusional, or symbolic) for a certain group of concepts

needn't be identical to the method for a different group. The classification uses a
compound term, the first part referring to the method for group II concepts, and the
second part to concepts in groups III and IV. These methods are sometimes not alone;
English uses them all. For example, goodness from good is agglutination; books from
book is regular fusion, depth from deep is irregular fusion, and geese from goose is
symbolic fusion or symbolism.

All this rant is just about one thing: you don't have to expect everything must be in its
"proper" place in your language (the proper place being that of English). English
number (singular vs. plural) is a Group III concept, quite abstract and forming part of
the very core of words; we can't conceive an English noun without number. In Tibetan,
number is an optional feature and it's not grammaticalized as in English; it's not an
abstract thing that belongs into the word, but a concrete thing: the idea of plurality,
"several" or "many", is expressed by a radical element which is a separate full-fledged
word, a Group I concept. It's not syntactic and can therefore be omitted when not
needed.

Think hard about this! After you place your language on the scale, you have to decide
which word classes you'll use, and how they'll link to one another.

Nouns
Number

Number is not restricted to singular vs. plural; many languages have forms for pairs of
things (dual) and some for groups of three things (trial). Others have a paucal number
(from the same root as paucity, meaning 'few'), that is used for items up to a certain
approximate quantity (such as three or four), resorting to the plural for higher
quantities.

You can have a singular number which refers to a unique object, or two plurals
distinguishing the things at view ('these men') and all the things of the stated kind
('men')... Your imagination is the only limit.

You can however simply leave number out of your system. This is what Mandarin
Chinese and Japanese do. You can have a particle or an adjective with the meaning of
'several' or 'many' to express the idea of plurality when needed, if context is not enough
to make it clear.
If you use an inflection for plural number, be aware that it doesn't have to be a short
suffix; it can be quite long (like the two-syllable Quechua -kuna) or be a prefix, or an
infix, or it can appear as vowel change (e. g. umlaut or ablaut). Many languages show
plurals of some kinds of items by reduplication, which means repeating the whole word,
or the first syllable, or the last syllable, etc. In Bahasa Indonesia you have baterei-
baterei 'batteries' (this is from the multilingual manual of a calculator!); in Japanese you
have hitobito 'people' from a slightly modified reduplication of hito 'person'.

English irregular plurals of the kind man/men, goose/geese, mouse/mice are examples
of vowel gradation, which resulted from umlaut, in turn produced by a suffixed
inflection that was lost. Other languages are much more regular, like Spanish (which
always marks plural with -s, -es).

Gender

Gender is the common term for the more general concept of class. Gender need not be
feminine vs. masculine. German, Greek and Latin have the genders
feminine/masculine/neuter. Swahili has noun classes ('genders') for animals, for human
beings, for abstract nouns, etc. Many languages make a distinction based on animacy,
between animate and inanimate objects (people and animals vs. plants and non-living
objects, or the like). You can invent new distinctions.

Noun classes can be more or less arbitrary. In Indoeuropean languages there is usually
no relationship between the gender and the actual object. While the Spanish noun mesa
'tabla' belongs to the feminine gender, not only is it unrelated to femininity, but also has
nothing in common with most other feminine nouns, like comadreja 'weasel' or crisis
'crisis'... The animate/inanimate distinction tends to be less arbitrary, but there are
always borderline cases and particular cultural influences (for example, some languages
may take 'fire' to be an animate noun). When there are many classes with semantic
content (as in Bantu languages) it may happen that some nouns change meanings but
stay in the same class (suppose you have a class for round objects and another for
square things, and the word for 'ring' comes to mean 'boxing playfield', as in English...).

Case

In a broader sense, grammatical case is the role of the noun in the sentence (for
example, subject, object, complement of place, etc.). In the restricted sense which we'll
refer to from now on, a case is some morphological mark of that role, usually shown by
inflection or agglutination.

There is no fixed set of cases; each language distinguishes one or more morphologically-
marked cases and uses them for given purposes. However, some common cases found in
many languages are always given the same names.

Latin has the following inflected cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, ablative, dative,
and vocative. A noun is in the nominative case when it's the subject of a sentence;
accusative when it's a direct object; dative when it's an indirect object; genitive when it's
a possessive; ablative when it's part of a verbal complement; and vocative when it shows
a call (plus many, many special cases). English actually has a genitive case, marked by
the possessive ending -'s, and distinguishes nominative and accusative forms of
pronouns (we-us, I-me, they-them, etc.).

Certain cases are used after certain prepositions (the preposition is said to govern the
case). My language Terbian has a core case (used for subjects and objects, which are
further distinguished by other marks) and an oblique case (used as a genitive or
compounding case, and with all postpositions). Romance languages have mostly lost the
Latin case system altogether, and resort to prepositions and word order to show
syntactic roles. Your language can have many cases; Estonian has 14 cases, and Finnish
even more (18, according to some analyses). There are many syntactic roles that can be
codified by a case, but these tend to overlap, and the majority are local cases (used to
convey relationships of position and movement -- on, over, under, around, inside,
outside, at a side, from, towards, into, out of, etc.).

Adjectives
With adjectives, we enter the land of possibilities. You can choose to have adjectives (as
a separate word class), or not. Adjectives can be an entirely different word class, as in
English; or they can be a subset of nouns (considering morphology and behaviour), as in
Spanish or Latin; or they can behave like verbs (as some do in Japanese). Let's examine
these alternatives.

If adjectives are a completely different word class, then they don't have to behave like
anything else; they can have their own rules of inflection, or not inflect at all. English
adjectives are an example of this: they are invariable words (except for the comparative
and superlative forms).

If adjectives are like nouns, or a subset of nouns, then they behave like nouns. In
Spanish, where nouns have gender and number, adjectives have them too, and they
must agree with their head noun. Sometimes they can become nouns without any
change; rojas means both 'red' (feminine and plural) and 'red ones' (when preceded by
an article). Curiously, nouns can become adjectives, in colloquial sentences like ¡Es tan
payaso! 'He's so (much of a) clown!'. In Latin, adjectives agree with their head noun
even in case. But the distinction between nouns and adjectives is usually well-defined in
these languages; some other languages may choose not to make it.

In Japanese, adjectives of a particular class (na-adjectives) behave like nouns; they are
placed before the noun they modify, followed by na, which is the relative form of the
copula 'to be'. For example: kirei na kimono 'beautiful kimono' -- the nominal adjective
(or qualitative noun, as some people call it) kirei means 'beauty' or 'beautiful', and the
phrase could be translated as 'kimono which is beautiful / which has beauty'. You can
add tense to the adjective by marking tense on the copula: kirei datta kimono 'kimono
which was beautiful'.
If adjectives are like verbs, then they conjugate like verbs. Another class of Japanese
adjectives (i-adjectives, because they end in -i) work this way; adjectives are usually a
kind of participial form of verbs, or a single-word relative clause (relative clauses in
Japanese come before the noun phrase they modify, the same as adjectives and
demonstratives do). You can think of Japanese adjectives as a combination of an English
adjective + the copula 'to be', though Japanese adjectives can and do take the copula
sometimes. But the tense is still on the adjective, not on the copula. For example:
Kakkoii desu 'He is cute' (polite form); Kakkoikatta desu 'He was cute'. Here kakkoi- is
the root, while -i is the suffix for adjectives in present tense, -katta is for past tense, and
desu is the polite present tense form of the copula. As you see, the tense in this class
goes directly on the adjective, not on the copula, which can be omitted sometimes.

In my own language Draseléq, adjectives do not exist as such. There are verbs that mean
'to be big', 'to be yellow', and even 'to be four'. You say 'a tall tree' by saying
'talling/talled tree', using a short participle. You say 'the tree is tall' by using the third
person singular present tense of the verb 'to be tall' with 'the tree' as the subject: 'the
tree *talls'. The best thing about this is that you merge two word classes into one, and
you can use whatever devices you invented for one on the other. In Draseléq, you can
express the equivalent of 'make/cause to be four' in one word.

Many adjectives may not exist at all in any form (although every language has some
words that act like adjectives). The ideas of qualifying can be expressed in other ways.
Tibetan uses abstract nouns instead of adjectives; you don't have the adjective 'large',
but the noun 'magnitude, largeness', and you can express 'a large room' by saying 'a
room of magnitude'. This is not ridiculous in English. 'A room of magnitude' is rare but
possible, and 'a disaster of biblical proportions' (which follows the same structure) is
common.

In some languages, the adjectives form a closed word class (like prepositions in
English); there are a certain number of them (pairs like 'big'/'small' and the colours) and
others can't be formed.

If you have a morphologically separate word class for adjectives, you should also invent
some affixes to colour their meaning, to negate them, and to transform them into other
word classes. Also think of comparatives and superlatives. It's not an obligation to have
them, but a language should be able to express such ideas as something being taller, or
redder, or uglier, than something else.

As an extra, you can read a compilation of a thread in the Conlang list, started by a
question by Fredrik Ekman: are there languages without adjectives?

Verbs
Person and number
In many languages, the verb agrees with one of its arguments (one of the noun phrases
in the sentence); in languages that mark subject vs. object, generally the subject.
However, some languages have double agreement (Hungarian verbs agree with both the
subject and the object), which is a form of polypersonal agreement (Basque verbs agree
with subject, direct object and indirect object when applicable!). The verb usually agress
with the noun phrase in one particular case (nominative in nominative/accusative
languages, absolutive in ergative/absolutive ones).

In quite a few languages, there's no agreement at all: English barely distinguishes the
third person singular from the rest in the present tense; Mandarin Chinese and
Japanese don't mark person in the verb in any way.

Tense

The tense system can be anything from a distinction between present and non-present
actions to a complex structure. The only universal tense is present. Many languages
don't have a real future tense and employ a past/non-past distinction that conflates
present and future. English actually doesn't have a morphological future tense, since
futurity is modelled by an auxiliary, will, not by inflecting the verb. For the sake of
generality we'll call this a tense (a periphrastic one).

You can have several types of present or past or future. Spanish has two different pasts;
one shows actions that took place over a period of time in the past (imperfect), and the
other shows that things just happened. That's more or less the difference between
English I lived and I used to live.

Some languages do not distinguish tense, using adverbs of time or suggesting a temporal
frame by other means (like aspect marks) when necessary.

Aspect

From Richard Harrison's Invisible Lighthouse: Aspect refers to the internal temporal
constituency of an event, or the manner in which a verb's action is distributed through
the time-space continuum. Tense, on the other hand, points out the location of an event
in the continuum of events. In many traditional grammar descriptions, tense and aspect
(as well as mood) are conflated together; for example, English has what is called 'present
perfect tense', which is in fact a present tense with a perfective aspect.

Verbs can inflect to show that the focus is on the ongoing process (progressive), or a
single action (punctual), or a habitual action, or a repeated action (iterative), or the
beginning of an action (inchoative, inceptive), or the ending of an action (cessative), etc.
Some languages have literally dozens of these aspects. An interesting pair is the
distinction between static and dynamic. A static form describes a particular state,
while a dynamic form reports a change in state. In Arabic, rukubun means 'ride' in its
static forms, and 'mount' in its dynamic forms.
Japanese has a conditional aspect: it can inflect verbs to show conditional clauses, so for
taberu 'eat' there's tabetara 'if/once I eat' and tabereba 'if I eat'.

Perfectiveness

Perfectiveness is an aspectual distinction. In grammar descriptions, perfect means

'completed' (referring to the verbal action). I have come is perfect (or has a perfective
aspect) while I'm coming is imperfect. The Spanish example above is an aspect
opposition.

Mood

Mood refers to whether the action is real and certain (indicative), or is doubtful or
desired (subjunctive), or isn't happening at all (negative), etc. etc. The indicative
mood (it just happens) is the most common.

English doesn't distinguish indicative and subjunctive (it uses past forms of indicative
mood to show the subjunctive), and it uses an auxiliary to negate a verb. In Spanish and
other Romance languages, the subjunctive mood is used (among other things) for
hypothetical actions and for wishing formulae: si pudieras 'if you could'; ojalá pudieras
'wish you could'.

Japanese inflects verbs to negate them (keru 'I kick', keranai 'I don't kick'), while
Finnish uses inflected forms of an auxiliary (ei) before a form of the main verb (much
like English auxiliaries don't, doesn't).

There's also the imperative mood, which is used to give orders or make requests.
These moods, of course, are not the only ones. Nenets, a Siberian (Uralic/Samoyedic)
language, has a lot of moods (some of which I would've taken as aspects!): indicative,
imperative, hortative ('Let me'), optative ('Let him'), conjunctive ('He will' [request]),
necessitative ('He must'), interrogative ('Did he?'), probabilitative ('He may'), obligative
('He should'), approximative ('He seems to'), superprobabilitative ('He probably'),
hyperprobabilitive ('He must have'), reputative ('He is supposed to'), Habitive ('He is
used to').

Evidentiality

Refers to the kind of evidence that the speaker has about what he or she's saying (does
he know about the action from personal experience, or just by hearsay, or just believes it
likely?). Quechua, Aymara and many other Native American languages distinguish these
aspects with different levels of subtlety. You may have heard of it as 'levels of
experience', or 'trivalent logic' (i. e. not only consisting of 'true' and 'false' statements but
also of 'maybe' statements).

Argument structure
The arguments of a verb are the parts of the sentence (generally noun phrases) that it
joins and that it has a close grammatical relationship with. In general this means the
subject and (if present) a direct object and maybe also an indirect object.

The number of arguments of a verb is called its valency of the verb (by analogy with the
valency of chemical elements, which is the quantity of atoms of other elements that can
be joined to one atom of the element).

Valency Verb type Example

0 impersonal none in English
1 intransitive "he runs"
2 transitive "she ate lettuce"
3 ditransitive "we gave presents to them"

So-called impersonal verbs (with valency=0) have no arguments, not even a subject. In
English all verbs must have at least a dummy 'it' to fill the subject slot (as in 'it rains'),
but e. g. in Spanish the equivalent form llueve is impersonal (it appears in the third
person singular form, but does not and cannot have a explicit subject).

Most languages do not morphologically distinguish transitive and intransitive verbs, but
e. g. Hungarian does (transitive verbs have different person/number inflectional
endings than intransitive ones, i. e. different paradigms).

Some intransitive verbs are semantically reflexive, i. e. there's an implied object that is
identical to the subject. Some languages mark reflexivity in the verb (English does it, but
not productively, in verbs like 'self-destruct'), while others use reflexive pronouns
('itself', 'themselves', etc.) in the object position.

In some languages, pronouns acting as objects (and/or subjects) are incorporated in the
verb (Spanish tacks clitic object pronouns on the verb, either before or after).

Some languages are more rigid than others with respect to the argument structure of
verbs. For example, transitive verbs may always need a explicit object. Compare this to
English, where the objects of many transitive verbs can be left out, and many verbs are
interchangeably transitive or intransitive (e. g. burn, write, see, etc.).

Voice

Voice can be understood from two points of view: the syntactic and the semantic. The
semantic point of view refers to what voice represents for the meaning of the verb and
the sentence. In English you can show whether the topic or theme of the proposition is
the subject (active voice) or the object (passive voice). The dog bit me is active (the topic
is the dog), while I was bit by the dog is passive (the topic is I). Since English, like many
other languages, tends to equal topic with subject, this is how you topicalize a part of the
sentence (in Japanese this is unnecessary, since topic can be explicitly marked in a
different way, apart from the subject/object distinction).
From the syntactic point of view, the idea is that voice changes the way in which the
arguments are arranged. Voice change is a grammatical operation that shifts arguments
from their original places and may increase or decrease the valency of the verb. In
English passive voice constructions, the original object becomes the subject (it gets
promoted), while the original subject becomes an optional complement (it gets
demoted).

English and other languages use a periphrastic construction with the verb to be and a
participle for passive voice. Latin verbs, on the other hand, can be inflected by voice:
curare 'heal', curantur 'they are healed'.

Active and passive are not the only voice distinctions. Greek had a middle voice, which
suggested an action performed by the subject for his/her own sake. From the point of
view of meaning, Spanish has a middle (or mediopassive, or pseudo-reflexive) voice
shown by the pronoun se: Se vende bien 'It sells [itself] well', apartarse 'set oneself
aside'.

In addition to these, there are voices that are more difficult to define from the semantic
point of view, but can be understood as syntactic devices. For example, many
ergative/absolutive languages have an antipassive voice, that transforms a transitive
verb into an intransitive one ('I eat meat' becomes 'I eat'). In these languages, this also
means that the subject is demoted from ergative to absolutive, though this doesn't show
up in the translation. Changing the case of the subject may be done to allow
coordination with other propositions.

One of my languages, Terbian, has an applicative voice, which promotes an optional

(oblique) complement to the object position, with a special marking on the verb that
shows the general function of the original complement (did it refer to a position or
place, to a destiny, to a source?). For example (to take one that is easily translatable), 'he
swims under the boat' becomes 'he underswims the boat'. In Terbian there is a kind of
antipassive voice that also acts on intransitive verbs with complements by promoting
one complement to the subject position and demoting the original subject: 'the cat
sleeps on the mat' becomes 'the mat *sleeps the cat'.

Deference

Verbs may show the degree of deference (or the need of politeness) between the speaker
and the hearer. In certain languages, there are different forms of verbs (and pronouns)
to address a subordinate, a master and an equal. Japanese verbs can be inflected to
increase politeness: hanasu 'speak', polite form hanashimasu. Japanese also has hyper-
polite verb forms, and several other registers of speech that may be used in different
occasions, by and to different people.

Weirdness and trivia

Some very common verbs in English aren't found in other languages, like 'to have'.
Many languages rephrase 'I have a book' by 'A book is to me', or 'with me' or something
to that effect, either using prepositions or case marking.

The copula 'to be' is in many languages not a verb, but a special word in its own class. In
Japanese the copula has a special paradigm that differs from common verbs.

Many languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew and Russian) simply omit the copula in the
present tense (this is called zero copula), so two noun phrases, or a noun and an
adjective, put together, form a valid sentence (A B = A is B).

Some verbs can be used as grammatical words beyond their original status. For
example, in Khmer you use the verb 'to give' as the preposition 'to', to mark the indirect
object of verbs. I'm guessing that this might correspond to a serial construction: English
'I give the book to her' could be translated as 'I take the book and give her'. This could be
common for languages that avoid ditransitive verbs.

In Ainu, the conjugated forms of the verb 'to have' are used as possessive marks. For
example:

kukor kunupe kunukar rusuy

1s.have 1s.brother 1s.see want
'I want to see my brother'

Note the 1st person singular prefix 1s is placed before verbs and nouns. Given this, it's
not impossible to think of a language where possessive pronouns don't exist, nor are
they formed from personal pronouns, but are instead subordinate clauses, consisting of
conjugated forms of 'to have': 'my brother' becomes 'the brother that I have'.

In Japanese, verbs are sometimes used in place of adjectives, taking advantage of the
fact that subordinate clauses come before the modified noun. For example: sabitsuita
kokoro 'rusted heart' (sabitsuita 'it rusted'), takanaru mirai 'soaring future' (takanaru
'it soars').

Conjunctions
Conjunctions are words which put together different parts of a sentence. English
common conjunctions are and, or, if, but, etc. Conjunctions can be present or not. It's
possible to include some distinctions in conjunctions which aren't made in English; for
example, the difference between exclusive and inclusive or. In Latin, you can say vel X
vel Y (X or Y, or both) or aut X aut Y (X or Y, but not both). Conjunctions can be
sometimes transformed into other things; in Latin, while you have et 'and', you can also
use a postposed particle -que to join two nouns: Senatus Populusque Romae 'the Senate
and the People of Rome'. Some languages do not have conjunctions at all; they simply
put things together. 'X Y' (perhaps with a pause between them) means 'X and Y' (or even
'X or Y', depending on intonation and context). You can also use a case ending to join
things, saying 'X together-with-Y' for 'X and Y'. Or you can replace conjunctions by
adverbs: 'I tried but I couldn't' gives 'I tried, however, I couldn't'.

Articles
Do you have articles? English has two, a and the. Spanish has four, two indefinite and
two definite ones; two are feminine and two are masculine. If your language has
grammatical gender, then perhaps the articles should agree with their nouns. In Greek,
articles agree not only in gender, but also in number and case, with their head noun.
Scandinavian languages place the articles at the end of words, attached to them as
inflections (for example, in Swedish en bok 'a book', boken 'the book', böcker 'books',
böckerna 'the books'). Many languages do not have articles. In most cases, you can
paraphrase articles by using adjectives, quantifiers (like some, all), or demonstratives
(that, this). Articles are often unstressed and joined to the following words, perhaps
with elision of vowels and other simplifications. In French, you say la voiture 'the car'
but l'avion 'the plane'. In Italian and Portuguese, the articles are joined to whatever
particle is in their way.

Adpositions and particles

The word 'particle' refers to little words, generally invariable, that modify the meaning
of other words, or the sentence. Among them we find adpositions (prepositions and
postpositions), which are used by most languages to modify the meaning of noun
phrases and create complements (of place, time, manner, etc.).

There are also particles that have a wider range of functions, like the many particles of
Japanese, some of which function as postpositional case marks, others as part of
adverbial phrases, and others to add different twists of meaning to the whole sentence.
For example, anata no 'your' uses the genitive particle no; the particle wa signals a new
topic (a change of subject of the sentence and the following utterances), which will be
omitted and understood in the next sentences. There's even an 'exclamation particle',
yo, used to add force to statements; and an 'interrogative particle', ka, which signals a
question (taberu ka 'shall we eat?'). In addition, ka produces indefinite deictics (itsu
'when', itsuka 'sometime').

A language can have prepositions or postpositions, or neither (I know of no language

that has no adpositions at all, though). Whether a language is pre- or postpositional
depends mainly on the position of the parts of speech (especially the verb arguments) in
a sentence. As a general rule, SOV languages are postpositional, and VSO languages are
prepositional; SVO languages can go either way. When you're designing a language, you
can go against these general rules, but you'll soon run into certain practical problems
that will make it clear why this is so.

The most common adpositions can be adequately replaced by case, and perhaps
adverbs. Japanese shows many relationships with postposed particles which don't have
a real meaning, but only general functions. In some cases, when it needs to use the
equivalent to an adpositional statement, it uses two nouns joined by the genitive
particle: heya no naka 'room (genitive) in-side', 'the room's inside, inside the room'. So
in fact some of our prepositions are rendered by nouns. This is not unheard of in English
('in front of', 'on top of'), and Spanish is full of noun phrases that replace single-word
prepositions (bajo 'under' vs. abajo de, encima de lit. 'on-top of').

Syntax
In simplified terms, syntax is the order and structure of words and phrases in a
grammatical proposition.

The various components of a sentence often appear in a fixed order. The more analytic
the language, generally the more fixed the word order is. In Chinese and English, for
example, sentences are ordered in such a way that the misplacement of any word can
alter the meaning completely. The more synthetic the language, probably the freer the
word order, because synthetic, very inflected words, can stand on their own, and they
don't depend so much on context. For example, in Latin Petrus amat Paulum 'Peter
loves Paul', the subject and the object are perfectly determined by case endings, and
their place can be changed with no change of the meaning of the phrase: you can say
Paulum Petrus amat or amat Petrus Paulum and it's OK. But in English, 'Peter loves
Paul' and 'Paul loves Peter' mean different things, because word order serves the
function of distinguishing subject and object; and 'loves Peter Paul' or 'Paul Peter loves'
are impossible or ridiculous.

A synthetic language may have a free word order not only by resorting to case endings,
since other grammatical devices such as agreement (between verbs and nouns, nouns
and adjectives, etc.) may serve this purpose by reducing ambiguity.

Subject, verb, object

The main structure of a complete sentence includes subject, object, and verb. These can
of course be ordered in only six different ways: SVO, SOV, VSO, OVS, OSV, VOS.
English affirmative sentences usually employ SVO, although sometimes English lets out
an OSV (in sentences like 'this I don't know' or 'to thee I will sing'). Spanish is a bit more
loose: usually SVO, VSO as an alternative for most verbs, SOV or OVS when the object is
a pronoun, etc. Perhaps certain verbs of your language can use one form, and others use
a different one; or perhaps you could use one form for short sentences and another one
for longer complex sentences.

There is always an unmarked word order, that is, a particular order that doesn't
convey any extra information (such as emphasis), and is therefore 'neutral' for the
hearer. For example, English unmarked word order is SVO. The examples of OVS order
I gave are marked; they make you focus on the object.

Some orders are more common than others. According to surveys, SVO and SOV
languages each comprise about 40% of the world's languages. VSO languages are
relatively frequent too, 15%. The other word orders (where the object is before the
subject) comprise about 5%. So if your language is intended to be average, use SVO or
SOV; if you want it to be exotic and weird, try OVS, OSV or VOS.

Heads and modifiers

Each part of a sentence can be divided into a head and zero or more modifiers. The
head and its modifiers make up the phrase.

A phrase that functions as a noun (and whose head is a noun) is called a noun phrase. In
a noun phrase like 'the little red cottage', the head is 'cottage' and the modifiers are the
article and the two adjectives. A phrase whose head is a verb is called a verb phrase, and
it may be modified by adverbs, negative auxiliaries, etc.

All languages have an unmarked order for heads and modifiers in each case, which is
sometimes fixed. A language like English, that places modifiers before heads ('red dog',
'terribly hot summer'), is called head-last. A language like Spanish, where modifiers
come after their heads, is called head-first. There are more technical designations for
these tendencies, 'left-branching' and 'right-branching'.

Be aware that I speak of tendencies here. While English adjectives tend always to come
before nouns, in poetry they are sometimes placed after them. In Spanish the opposite
happens: most adjectives follow nouns, but in some cases they come before, especially
for emphasis and in poetic speech. There is also variation according to the kind of
modifiers used: English places adverbs before verbs, but longer adverbial phrases (such
as 'in the park') after the verb. Japanese places everything before the corresponding
heads, even subordinate clauses; the subordinate clause acts as an adjective:

Kanojo ga dakishimeta otoko wa goshujin deshita.

she NOM embrace-PAST man TOPIC her_husband be-POLITE-PAST
"The man (that) she embraced was her husband."

There are general tendencies correlating sentence-level word order (the order of subject,
verb and object) and the place of heads and modifiers within phrases.

Sentence order Phrase order Adpositions

SOV head-last postpositional
VSO head-first prepositional
SVO either way either way

These are only tendencies and have many exceptions. While SOV languages are almost
always head-last and use postpositions (the prototypical example is Japanese), Latin is
SOV, yet uses prepositions and moves heads and modifiers around rather freely. SVO
languages can go either way (English and Chinese are both prepositional, but Chinese is
markedly more head-last than English; and Spanish, French and Italian, also SVO, are
head-first). SOV languages usually mark the subject somehow, since it could get
confused with the object that follows; SVO languages don't need that marking (though
many of them use it), because the verb itself separates subject and object.

Verb-second languages

Some languages (featuring different word orders) are known to have a peculiarity
regarding the position of the verb within the sentence. They are called verb-second
languages (or shorter V2 languages, though that may have bad historical
connotations). All the Germanic languages (except English) are V2 languages. The verb
(or more correctly, the finite verb or auxilliary) has to be the second constituent of the
sentence. This is not the same as SVO or OVS order; English is SVO, but in a sentence
like 'Yesterday I went to a party', the verb is actually the third constituent (the first is the
adverb, 'yesterday', and the second is the subject pronoun, 'I'). For our purposes,
constituents are noun phrases (i. e. article or demonstrative + adjectives + noun), verb
phrases (i. e. conjugated verbs and auxiliaries), adverbs and adverbial complements.

In V2 languages there is room for one and only one constituent before the verb. If
something has to be emphasized, it usually comes to the front of the sentence (this is
called focus fronting and happens in many languages). If the language is V2, however,
this means that something else will have to move to the other side of the verb. For
example, in German you can say (the verb, or actually the auxiliary, since the complete
verb phrase is hat geschenkt, is in UPPERCASE):

Zum Geburtstag hat sie ihm ein Buch geschenkt.

for (his) birthday has she him a book given
"For his birthday she has given him a book."

Ein Buch hat sie ihm zum Geburtstag geschenkt.

a book has she him for (his) birthday given
"She has given him a book for his birthday."

Geschenkt hat sie ihm zum Geburtstag ein Buch.

given has she him for (his) birthday a book
She has given him a book for his birthday.

Of course, German has case, so the subject and objects don't get so confused as in the
English literal gloss.

English is a Germanic language too, and though it has lost V2 compulsory order, it has
kept some traces. You can see it in the way questions are asked (*'Who you saw?' is 'Who
did you see?' because the auxiliary occupies the second position), in the use of
auxiliaries in general, in phrases like 'There is', 'Here is', etc., and notably in seemingly
'inverted' sentences like 'Never had I seen such a thing'.

Trigger systems

This topic is a bit outside the scope of this section, but I felt it was worth including. The
word order classification of which I've been talking presume that there will be a subject,
a verb and an object, and that they'll be differentiable by the word order itself and/or by
case marks.

There's a different system, which is used in Malagasy and most Filipino languages, like
Tagalog, in which subject, object and other modifiers may appear in different orders,
and they're not marked in traditional ways. It's called a trigger system.

The trigger is the part of the sentence over which emphasis is placed (I'd call it the
topic, but I'm not so sure about this). The trigger can be the 'subject' of the sentence
according to our view, but also the object, or a location, or the verb (predicate) itself.
The trigger is marked as such (by a particle or inflection, or by word order), but you only
state 'this is the trigger', not its function. Other parts of the sentence are marked
differently. Then the verb is marked to show the relationship of the action to the trigger.
The 'case' of the trigger is not marked on the trigger but on the verb.

In order to illustrate this, I'll just transcribe part of a post to the Conlang list, by Kristian
Jensen, who was kind enough to repost it when I asked for an explanation about the
subject. Here it is:

In Tagalog, there are only three markings for case: the Trigger, the Genitive, and the
Oblique. This is exactly like most (if not all) the Philippine languages. Furthermore,
much like many Western Austronesian languages, there are a large inventory of affixes
used to create different nuances in the verbs, noteably the verbal trigger. When the
trigger plays the role of the agent, an agent-trigger affix is used with the verb. When the
trigger plays the role of the patient, a patient-trigger affix is used with the verb. When
the trigger plays the role of location, then a location-trigger affix is used with the verb.
Etc. etc., etc...

A particularly noteworthy feature of this system is that non-triggered (unfocused) core

arguments are marked as the genitive. As a result, "I am buying" and "the buying (of
something) of mine" (or "my buying (of something)") have identical structures. Verbal
constructions appear to be identical with nominal constructions by the use genitives.
One theory has it that the verbal affixes are actually nominalizing affixes. Examples
always help. Take the sentence "The man cut some wood in the forest". With three
different arguments, three trigger forms are possible. Below are parsing examples of the
way a Filipino language would translate the sentence. I have refrained from using real
language examples at this point hoping that it would be easier to understand how the
_grammatical system_ (_not_ the morphological system) works.:

AGENT Trigger:
AT-cut GEN-wood OBL-forest TRG-man
"[cutting-agent] [of wood] [at forest] = [man]"
lit.: "The wood's cutter in the forest is the man"
transl.: "The man, he cut some wood in the forest"

PATIENT Trigger:
PT-cut GEN-man OBL-forest TRG-wood
"[cutting-patient] [of man] [at forest] = [wood]"
lit.: "The man's cutting-patient in the forest is the wood"
transl.: "The wood, the man cut it in the forest"

LOCATION Trigger:
LT-cut GEN-man GEN-wood TRG-forest
"[cutting-location] [of man] [of wood] = [forest]"
lit.:"The man's cutting-location of wood is the forest"
transl.: "The forest, the man cut some wood in it"

Note how I have nominalized the verbs in the transcription. Thus, the verb for cutting
has been nominalized as an agent, a patient, or a location depending on what role the
trigger plays. There are other verbal trigger forms too including benefactor and
instrument. My own theory is that trigger languages only have one core argument. Such
being the case, trigger languages resort to nominalizing verbs. This might also explain
why passive constructions do not exist in trigger languages since the valency of the verb
is not changed (cannot change) with different triggers.

In a language using a trigger system, it's not useful to talk about subject, object, etc., and
word order may greatly vary. In Tagalog, the predicate (the nominalized verb) is the first
word in the sentence, and the trigger is last. Other languages might be different. It's
equally useless to talk of transitive or intransitive verbs, or of voice (active, passive,
middle).

This is just to show you how things can be really different, and still understandable. See
if you can imagine something else!

Morphosyntactic typology
When one talks about verb arguments (or syntactic elements in relation to the verb), one
usually distinguishes two basic ones, which we will call subject and object. According to
the manner in which a language marks those, we have several types thereof:

1. An accusative language is one where

 the subject of all verbs (transitive and intransitive) is marked with one
grammatical case, conventionally known as 'nominative';
 the object of a transitive verb is marked with another case, which is
conventionally named 'accusative'.

2. An ergative language is one where

 the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are both
marked with one grammatical case, called 'absolutive';
 the subject of a transitive verb is marked with another case, conventionally
known as 'ergative'.

3. An active language is one where

  the subject of a transitive verb is marked with a grammatical case, usually named
'agentive' (A);
 the object of a transitive verb is marked with another case, usually known as
'patientive' (P);
 the subject of an intransitive verb is marked with either one of the two cases
mentioned above (A or P) according to semantic considerations.

A different, more formal way of looking at it, is using three syntactical categories,
usually labelled S, A, and P, where S is the only argument of an intransitive verb, and A
and P are the two arguments of a transitive verb. There is (it seems) no language on
Earth that marks these three roles using three different cases; they're usually divided,
one marked with one case and the other two with a different case. Thus, a language that
groups (treats alike) S and A is an accusative language (P gets the accusative case); a
language that groups S and P is an ergative language (A gets the ergative case); and a
language that groups S and A or S and P according to the verb is an active language.

There's apparently no language that groups all three roles; something (some
morphology or word order) distinguishes between them on most occasions (and context
disambiguates if not). Also, almost no language groups A and P and sets S apart (A and
P need to be distinguished since they're both arguments of one verb, but S doesn't need
marking since an intransitive verb has no other argument).

Accusative languages

Let us recall the definition given above: accusative languages mark the subject of all
verbs with one case (nominative, NOM), and the object of transitive verbs with another
case (accusative, ACC). That's why they are also called nominative/accusative.

The typical example of an accusative language is Latin.

domin -us veni-t

master-NOM come-3sPRS
"The master comes."

domin -us serv -um audi-t

master-NOM slave-ACC hear-3sPRS
"The master hears the slave."

Most Romance languages have not preserved the morphological case marks of Latin, but
the order of the words within the sentence, as well as concord (grammatical agreement)
and context, allow us to differentiate the nominative and the accusative roles. Therefore
these languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc.) show a syntactic accusative quality,
rather than a morphological one.

English, while not a Romance language, also derives from a case-inflected language and
has also lost most morphological cases, but its syntactic accusativity can be confirmed
by observing sentences where an argument is deleted. In the sentence "the pupil saw
the teacher and left" there are two coordinated propositions with a common argument.
The fact that the missing argument is assumed to be "the pupil" points to the fact that
English is an accusative language, because the nominative role takes precedence to
occupy the vacant space, since the verb in the second proposition ("left") requires a
nominative subject. In an ergative language (see below) the missing slot would have
been occupied by the absolutive case argument (which is the object of the first
proposition).

The great majority of Indoeuropean languages are accusative. However, some present a
partial ergative behaviour.

Ergative languages

An ergative language, as we saw, is one that marks the subjects of transitive verbs with
one case (ergative, ERG), and the subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive
ones with another case (absolutivo, ABS).

The ergative language most known in Europe is Euskara (Basque), which is in fact the
only European ergative language, and cannot be grouped within any linguistic family,
being probably the last remnant of ergativity left behind after the Indoeuropean
occupation.

Georgian (spoken in the nation of Georgia, an ex-Soviet republic and birthplace of

Stalin) shows ergative patterns in one of its verb series (the verb system in Georgian is
extremely complicated), but is accusative in the rest. In one grammar sketch of Georgian
that I have, it is described as having formal ergativity with features more in line with
those of active languages of the Split-S type (see below).

The Australian language Dyirbal is also partially ergative (it uses an ergative structure
for third-person sentences, but becomes accusative for the first and second persons),
with an underlying syntactic structure that is ergative. Hindi is ergative in the perfect
tenses, and accusative in the imperfect ones. (These weird cases have been explained in
several ways, all of them rather dense...)

An example of ergativity (from Euskara):

umea erori da
ume -a -0 eror-i da
child-the-ABS fall-PRF AUX:PRS+3sS
the child (ABS) fallen is
"The child fell."

emakumeak gizona ikusi du

emakume-a -k gizon -a -0 ikus-i du
woman -the-ERG man -the-ABS see -PRF AUX:PRS+3sS+3sO
the woman (ERG) the man (ABS) seen has
"The woman has seen the man."
In an ergative language, the argument in the absolutive case is the one that is assumed
when it is missing. Thus, while in English "the pupil saw the teacher and left" is
interpreted as "the pupil saw the teacher" + "the pupil left", the equivalent in Euskara or
another ergative language (with syntactic ergativity) would be interpreted by assuming
the absolutive object of the first proposition as the subject of the second verb (which is
intransitive):

"the pupil (ERG) saw the teacher (ABS) and left"

is interpreted as
"the pupil (ERG) saw the teacher (ABS)" + "[the teacher (ABS)] left"

A test of this kind with the native speakers of a language (where they are forced to fill in
the vacant slots and complete their interpretation) is a way to decide if a language is
ergative/absolutive.

Interestingly, ergative languages usually do not have a passive voice, but they do have an
antipassive voice, which deletes the direct object and demotes the subject from ergative
to absolutive (i. e. it makes the verb intransitive).

See also this article about split ergativity.

Active languages

As explained above, an active language is one where the S-role (the subject of an
intransitive verb) can be marked in one of two ways (either as A = agentive or as P =
patientive), according to semantic considerations with respect to the verb or its
argument.

Active languages are in turn divided into two types:

 a. Languages with a split S-role (Split-S), in which the decission to mark the
Subject of a given verb as A or P has been made beforehand, so to speak, in a
conventional way, and fixed as part of the syntactic structure;
 b. Lenguages with a fluid S-role (Fluid-S), in which the decission to mark the
subject as A or P depends on real-time semantic considerations and must be
taken by the speaker according to his/her intention and the context, since the
meaning of the expression can be changed.

The semantic considerations mentioned above may have to do with the kind of concept
described by the verb (is it an event or action, or is it a state?), as well as the degree of
control or will of the subject over the action or state expressed by the verb (is it a
voluntary act or an involuntary one?, does the actor perform it directly or through an
instrument?). In Fluid-S languages these considerations have to be pondered by the
speaker to twist the meaning to one side or the other. In Split-S languages each verb has
these connotations (and the way of marking the intransitive subject) already assigned as
part of its definition, and all the speaker may do is learning this and employing it in the
usual way, modifying it through other means when s/he deems necessary to change the
meaning.

For example, 'sleep' shows an involuntary state. In a Split-S langauge, the speaker will
mark the subject of 'sleep' as P always. If s/he wishes to make it explicit that an effort
was made to sleep, or something like that, s/he will have to resort to auxilliaries ('try to
sleep') or other means to convey this meaning. On the other hand, in a Fluid-S language,
while the typical use of 'sleep' will have the subject marked as P, the speaker might
actually be allowed to suggest 'go to sleep, make an effort to sleep' by using the same
verb 'sleep' with a Subject marked as A. In this way one could also give different
meanings to verbs like 'cough' (generally involuntary, but sometimes willfully performed
by the actor) or 'turn around' (active and usually voluntary, but sometimes an
unconscious reflex act).

Daniel Andreasson, from the CONLANG list, researched the subject and sent the list a
brief explanation. He states that active languages distinguish between A and P Subjects
according to several criteria (each language uses primarily one of these):

 a) event vs. state

 b) control
 c) performance, effect and instigation

"Event vs. state" means that if the verb is an event (like 'run', 'dance', 'chat', 'kill'), then
the argument is marked like A. If it's a state ('be hungry', 'be tired'), then it's marked like
P.

"Control" means that if the argument of the verb is in control of the event (or state),
then it's marked as A. If it is not in control, then it is marked as P. 'Go' and 'be careful'
are controlled predicates. 'Die' and 'fall' are not.

Then there's "performance, effect and instigation". Some predicates are in some way
performed or instigated by the actor. However, they need not be controlled. These are
verbs like 'sneeze' and 'vomit'. In languages like Lakhota and Georgian, it's enough if the
actor in some way performs the action (or state), s/he doesn't need to be in control.
Thus the argument of predicates like 'sneeze' and 'hiccup' are marked as A. In languages
of group (b) ("control") these would be marked as P.

Analogy
Analogy is the blanket term for various kinds of processes that change the phonetics and
the grammar of a word or expression, produced by very special causes. When I speak of
analogy I will usually be referring to phonetic change.

Analogy is the creation of a new form of a word by influence of similar, analogical

forms. Analogy is quite a fruitful device, and it's probably one of the major word-
creators in languages. Let's see an example.
Latin derives from Proto-Indoeuropean (a language or set of dialects of a language that
has been reconstructed based on its daughter languages). In PIE, nouns had case, so
they changed form according to case. The word for honour was reconstructed as having
the forms *honos, *honosem. As PIE evolved and gave origin to Latin (and also Greek,
Germanic, Sanskrit, etc.) some sound change took place. In particular, the /s/ sound
between vowels gradually became voiced (/z/) and finally gave an alveolar trill, /r/ (this
change is called rhotacism). This only happened when the /s/ was intervocalic, and
not in any other position.

(Before) (After)

*honos -> honos

*honosem -> honorem

This, as you see, produced an irregularity; the root form of the word split in two forms,
honos- and honor-. All languages have some irregular forms, but this one (and many
others of the same kind) probably wasn't accepted by speakers. Now put your hand over
the "Before" column and hide it, ignore it. Speakers couldn't know anything about the
sound change, which is a subtle and unconscious process (and not studied in those
times). What could you do with the irregular pair honos/honorem?

The solution came by analogy with the many words which hadn't changed form (I don't
know enough Latin to give an example), and with the same root. They had honorem and
also honoris, perhaps even honorificum and so on, so they began saying honor instead
of honos. That's analogy.

Of course, no language ever takes analogy so far as to regularize its whole grammar.

A related form of analogy appears when people create words out of elements they had,
based on other similar words. English is quite prolific in this respect. Having words like
pulverize or finalize, English speakers have created analogical forms like idealize,
nationalize, hospitalize and hundreds more. If you're creating a language, probably
analogy will be the best tool to increase your lexicon.

Grammatical devices
This section is a general one which will mention and summarize the main grammatical
devices found on languages, i. e. how a grammar is managed at the practical level (on
actual words).

We already seen most of these devices in a way or another. Here's a brief list of them:

 Affixion: this includes adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes to words in order to

change their meaning or their relationship with other words. These affixes
include what we call inflections and also agglutinated affixes.
 Word order: it's free in some languages and fixed in some others (see Syntax).
In general, the more synthetic the language, the freer the word order. An analytic
 language such as Chinese relies on word order to clarify the meaning of words,
because they are never inflected and therefore don't show their functions on their
structure. (Actually Chinese does have some inflections... in fact, according to
certain authors, English is more analytic than Chinese.) A synthetic language like
Latin can construct a sentence with scattered words (this is called hyperbathon
[I think] and is used as a poetic device).
 Stress and pitch: we've already talked about them. In some languages they are
only formal; in many others, two words can have different meanings according to
their stress patterns. Compare English a record /'rek@rd/ and to record
/ri'kord/ (and many other pairs).
 Tone: the same as for stress and pitch. Sometimes a change in tone distinguishes
two completely different words, and sometimes it produces a different form of
the same word. In Shilluk, yít (high tone) means "ear", and yìt (low tone) means
"ears"; tone is not a phonetic feature but a grammatical feature.
 Alternation: we've seen it with examples. It's the (regular) change of sounds on
words. The most common is vowel alternation, which is indeed found in English:
compare sing, sang, sung, and man, men, etc. In some languages this is not
irregular but the norm. Consonant alternation is less common but does exist
(compare a house, to house, voiceless vs. voiced). Consonants can alternate in
different ways, not only by voice; they can change stop to fricative, or fricative to
affricate, or simple to double, or even in strangest ways. There's an African
language where /t/ alternates with /l/ and /p/ alternates with /w/ (this is voice
alternation but also involves other contrasts).
 Reduplication: (a part of) the root of a word is doubled, repeated before or
after it. A reduplicated verb can increase its force, like Hotentot go "look" vs. go-
go "examine with attention" (used by Philip J. Farmer in Riders of the Purple
Wage, in the Go-go School of Criticism). A reduplicated noun can be taken as
plural, like gyat "person" vs. gyigyat "people" (again an African language), which
also shows vowel alternation. Sometimes the reduplication is just put there as
part of an inflection. In Greek, the perfect forms of verbs use reduplication and
vowel alternation: līpō "I leave", hélipon "I left", léloipa "I have left".

Creating words
Well, now you have everything set up, so you have to begin creating words. Probably you
already have some particles, case endings, affixes, etc., but that's only the skeleton.

How many words do you need? If you're creating a full language (which I assume you
are, because you wouldn't have come this far if you weren't), then you'll need about
2000 (two thousand) words to communicate with a certain comfort. You can do quite a
lot with about 1000 words, if that scares you; but you'll probably be creating new words
now and then.

Mark Rosenfelder mentions (and I'm not going to repeat it here) the thesis of Ogden and
Richards. These guys showed that the most part of any English text contains a very
reduced lexicon. A group of common words cover 80% or 90% of any text. Then they
said, "Well then, let's isolate those words and use them and only them, combining them
to form complicate concepts instead of using not-so-common words". For example,
forget the word "success" and use "make good". All in all, you could do with only 850
common words and perhaps a hundred more for specific fields.

The argument is right, but it has a failure. The most common words which cover so
much of the text are also the ones that carry the least information: articles, prepositions,
pronouns, etc. In newspaper headlines, those are usually deleted, because they are not
so important and the rest can be understood. The not-so-common words cannot be
deleted, because they are the ones which convey all the meaning, all the information. In
fact, the theoretical basis of modern informatics says that the most unusual signs are the
ones that possess the most information. If you understand the 90% of the words in a
text, but the 10% remaining is composed of the most critical information, then you're
actually getting nothing except a lot of particles connecting inintelligible concepts.

So don't spare your words. You can never have too many.

How do you start? There's no method, but I'll tell some ways I have used:

 You can translate simple texts. When you need a word, you create it; if there's an
available related root, you derive it from there, or else create and note a root first.
You can't have words coming out of nowhere. Translation is tedious, and it
bothers you to stop at each word and invent it, but it's wonderful to create words.
What to translate is your decision. I don't recommend James Joyce or
Kierkegaard or Borges, of course. The Babel text is quite good. You can go on
with the Bible (or the Talmud or the Rigveda or whatever sacred scriptures your
religion has, if it does and you have a religion). If that seems too dense, use comic
books, or The Hobbit. If you dare, try translating from a conlang (a glossed text)
into your own.
 Perhaps you can find a list of basic vocabulary. I have an English-English
dictionary intended for non-English speakers, with a list of 2000 common words
that are used to explain the definitions, and I've taken some words from there
and translated them into my own (invented) language. Don't translate dictionary
entries. It's boring, it's time-consuming, and it's pointless: you'll be having lots of
unusual words, all of whose English glosses will begin with a, and nothing else.
 Find a topic or field and invent words on it. For example, verbs of motion (walk,
go, jump, come, rise, raise, drag, spin), or body parts (head, arms, legs, toes,
fingers, face, eyes, hair), or colours (you know the colours), or numbers (you'll
have to create a numeric system or use the decimal one), or tools, or animals, or
domestic appliances.
 This one I haven't used yet, but it just seems interesting: create rhyming words.
Take any collection of English concepts you like, and translate the first one with a
certain word in your language, and all the others with words that rhyme with it.
Or the other way round (English has lots of rhyming words, especially
monosyllables). Or you could build alternating series, words which vary only in
their first consonant, or in their vowels (of course they should be totally
 unrelated concepts, unless sound alternation is a valid inflecting mechanism).
You can then use these words to make puns if you like :-).

There's a very interesting list of words (the Universal Language Dictionary) which
comprises 1600 words divided into topics, and used in some way by the most common
languages of the world. You can find it at the Model Languages site: it comes with the
Langmaker language generator. Very good, at least to check for words (it's not very fun
to sit and generate them one after another). For a simpler but still useful way to generate
random words, try Wordgen. It lets you specify beginning, medial and final consonants,
clusters, vowels and diphthongs, and the number of syllables you want.

Final words
If you want to become a great language creator, read! Read everything that falls into
your hands or passes by. The Web is full of material, though a bit scattered. I have
already mentioned some of my sources. Here's a full list of sites you should visit:

Model Languages is a newsletter devoted to language creation, which used to be

published bi-monthly. The newsletter is not published any more, but the old issues are
still online. You can find lots of online material there; it's quite a lot of reading material
and it also features a wonderful list of more than 200 links to pages about invented
languages. There's also a word generator that can handle different syllable structures
and produce words, and derive them according to simple phonetic changes.

Mark Rosenfelder has made a terrific work in his site, Metaverse, including the
Language Construction Kit, a review on Quechua, a list of numbers from 1 to 10 in 3500
languages, and lots of material about one of his languages, Verdurian.

Then there's the Human Languages Page, which is a bit scrambled, but helps you find
linguistic resources on lots of natural languages.

The folks at SIL have collected an immense amount of definitions having to do with
linguistics and the study of language (including rhetorics). Check out the Glossary of
Linguistic Terms.

If you're a J. R. R. Tolkien fan, you can find descriptions of the languages he invented in
Ardalambion, the Tongues of Arda.

For a look at some real world scripts, you can visit Ancient Scripts, a very well-made set
of pages with examples of writing systems from around the world, including
Mesoamerica, Europe, and Middle East.

You shouldn't leave without visiting the pages in the Scattered Tongues webring. Follow
the arrows!
If you want to get into the conlanging community, join the Conlang list by sending an
e-mail to listserv@listserv.brown.edu with subscribe conlang your_name as the body of
your message. Conlang is dedicated to the discussion of constructed languages for
fictional purposes. If you belong to Conlang already, or you're simply curious, visit the
Conlang FAQ for a lot a topics covered in past threads, or consult the Conlang Archives.

Joshua Shinavier, a fellow member of Conlang, has a quite comprehensive list of

constructed languages of which you can find some material in Internet: The Conlang
Yellow Pages. No better way to learn about language construction than seeing how
others have managed it.

And then of course there are libraries, those quiet buildings full of books. I've learned a
lot from linguistics books. Most often than not, they are dense and sometimes
inintelligible (they weren't intended for ordinary people trying to create languages), but
they often provide explanations on curious stuff along with examples. The best way to
learn how to invent a language is studying natural languages.

Well, so long! If you're creating a language and would like to expose them to the praise
and critique of the world, or just need to get some advice or to give some advice, mail me
and I'll do my best to correspond to your expectations. Don't go away without checking
out Language Creation.

Acknowledgements
I want to give thanks to the following:

 Mark Rosenfelder, for his excellent work in the Language Construction Kit,
which taught me a lot and inspired me to write this, and for not complaining
when I took big chunks of it.
 Jeffrey Henning, for his (also terrific) work as the editor of the famous Model
Languages newsletter.
 Nik Taylor, a fellow member of CONLANG, who was if I recall correctly the first
person to write to me re: How to create a language, correcting some gross
mistakes and contributing data about the record 92 consonants of !Xu~ and the
average proportion of obstruents to sonorants.
 Kristian Jensen, who taught me and the rest of the CONLANG list about
trigger systems.
 Markus Miekk-oja, a.k.a. Miekko, who shared a lot of curious things about
languages real and fictional, including the mysteries of the many Finnish cases
and the names and uses of verb moods in Nenets.
 Jarkko Hietaniemi, for one nice example of agglutination in Finnish.
 Donald Patrick Michael Goodman III, for teaching me how to say "He's
cute" in Japanese and then make it past tense.
 Reena D., for correcting a typo in Donald's example.
 Mathias Lasailly, a fellow CONLANG member, who supplied the example of
possession shown by a subordinate clause with the verb "have" in Ainu.
 Cseri Benedek, who corrected my mistake of stating that no languages
consistently mark transitivity on verbs by showing me how this is done in
Hungarian.
 All the members of the CONLANG list that I haven't named above.
 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, and so many others that have
made me think about words, their meanings, their beauty and the magic wrought
by them, which makes tangible the matter of dreams and thoughts.