Skip to main content

Let's Make a Language: Day 8, Demonstratives and Personal Pronouns

 Demonstrative Pronouns

Welcome back. Today we're going to work on demonstratives. The lexical sources for demonstratives usually come from words like "here" and "there", but since Munya currently does have those words, I've decided that it will use phrases utilizing words I already have that will eventually be whittled down and grammaticalized as demonstratives. I want Munya to have a three way distinction in its demonstratives, proximal, medial, and distal.

The first phrase I chose was [tʲo tʲi5] meaning "by (the) foot" for the proximal demonstrative. This is equivalent to English's "this".

Tyotyi byu.
[ˈtʲo.tʲi5 ˈpʲʰu]
This dog.

The second phrase  I came up with was [sʲoː15.lə] meaning "at (the) hand" for the medial demonstrative. This would be equivalent to English "that".

Syo'le byu.
[sʲoː15.lə pʲʰu]
That dog.

The final phrase I chose was [pʰal.xi]  meaning "on the path" for the distal demonstrative. This is also the word for "across" in Munya. This would be equivalent to English "that over there" or "that (far)".

Balhi byu.
[pʰal.xi pʲʰu]
That dog over there.

These phrases are pluralized as if they were nouns by adding  [nai5] for the dual and [lʲi] for the plural.

The demonstrative modifiers would be identical to these forms.

Personal Pronouns

So far, Munya only has 2 (two) personal pronouns, [ni(la)] the first person nominative and [kau(la)] the third person nominative. I want to keep Munya's personal pronoun inventory quite small, so we really only need one more pronoun for the second person, but, I want to create a formal distinction for each which I'll do by suffixing [la].

And tada! We have a full set of personal pronouns with a formal distinction. Pronouns in Munya will be treated the same way nouns are for pluralization, so we don't need to create plural forms for these.

As for possessive pronouns, we already created those on day 6, so no need to worry about those.

Now lets bring them all together.

Ni tyi balhi byu so.
[ni tʲi5 pʰal.xi pʲʰu so]
1SG see that dog ACC
I see that dog over there.

Beautiful, I'm loving the aesthetic so far.

 The last thing I want to do today is throw together a set of interrogative pronouns, like the "wh" words in English. Munya has a system of roots already which includes an interrogative particle "xa" which doesn't mean much on its own, so I'll give it the meaning of "what" and create the others from that word.


And there we go.

Join me next time when I'll be tackling indefinite pronouns and modifiers.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Make a Language: Day 1, Setting Goals

 Hot off the heels of my previous conlanging endeavor, Synkatokopa (Kopa), I want to create something brand new. For this project I will be (loosely) following along with Quothalinguist 's "conlang year" series. In that vein, day 1 will be all about intentions and goals. This is the most important part when starting a new project, any project not just a conlang, in my opinion. Setting a good foundation will not only springboard your progress on your journey faster and farther, but it will let you know when it's time to wrap up. So, no matter how excited I am, or you are, to start your own conlang, right now is the moment to ask a few important questions. Question #1 and the most important one, in my opinion, is "why do I want to create this language?". My answer? I want to create another language for a worldbuilding and ttrpg project I've been working on since 2018, one that will slot in next to Kopa. More specifically, I want to create a strictly CV str...
Post a Comment
Read more

Let's Make a Language: Day 12, How I Make Conscripts/Writing Systems Part I

When creating a conscript I always begin with researching real life scripts. I scan through a large selection of them, figure out how they work, their major visual motifs, and especially how they conform to the language they describe. A good question to ask yourself at this stage is "did the speakers of this language create this script, or did they borrow it?". If they created the script, its graphemes will usually match up really well, or even one to one with its phonemes. This is especially so in more recent scripts. For examples of this, take a look at Hangul or the many new Sub-Saharan writing systems. East Africa in particular is a treasure trove of these kinds of scripts. As a general rule the newer the script, the closer it will adhere to the language it was made for. If they did not create the script, its orthography will probably be more complex than that of the former, and the system will have more difficulty succinctly mapping graphemes to phonemes. English is the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Let's Make a Language: Day 14, Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Happy Valentines day! Today is a super quick one, we're working on numbers some more. Nouns in Munya appear in their singular form when co-occuring with number, so instead of English's "one apple, two apples, three apples..." a Munya speaker would say "one apple, two apple, three apple..." Pa ba, nai ba, tsa ba... Now, what if a Munya speaker wanted to say "the first apple, the second apple, the third apple..."? They would use the superlative suffix -dyi to create a series of ordinal numbers. Padyi ba, naidyi ba, tsadyi ba...  I also want a way to make adverbial numbers like English's "once, twice, thrice...". I decided that a Munya speaker would simply have to put the number into the genitive case to create this distinction. Pa fa, nai fa, tsa fa... Right now a Munya speaker has no way to count above ten, so let's create some compound numbers. All numbers from 11 to 19 will follow the same pattern of "10 by x", for exam...
Post a Comment
Read more