Brooding

Introduction

Brooding is a language spoken in the land of Harken. You can't get there from here!

Sounds

Consonants

b	/b/	as in 'bee'
p	/p/	as in 'pea'
d	/d/	as in 'deed'
t	/t/	as in 'tea'
g	/g/	as in 'get'
k	/k/	as in 'key'
f	/f/	as in 'fee'
th	/θ/	as in 'thin'
s	/s/	as in 'see'
z	/z/	as in 'zed'
sh	/ʃ/	as in 'she'
kh	/x/	as ch in German 'Bach'
h	/h/	as in 'he'
ch	/t͡ʃ/	as in 'cheek'
m	/m/	as in 'me'
n	/n/	as in 'need'
ng	/ŋ/	as in 'ring'
l	/l/	as in 'leaf'
r	/ɹ/	as in 'reed'
w	/w/	as in 'we'
y	/j/	as in 'yea'

• All but kh are pretty much pronounced as in standard English
• th is always pronounced as the 'th' in thin (/θ/), never as the 'th' in thee or they (/ð/)
• l always pronounced like the 'l' in leaf (/l/), never like the 'll' in all or ball (/ɫ/)
• g is always pronounces like the 'g' in get (/ɡ/), never like the 'g' in 'gee' (d͡ʒ)

Consonant Blends and Clusters

Several of the sounds have a 'blended' version. A consonant blend is two consonants in a row pronounced one after the other. Most of these blends only appear at the beginning of syllables. While these blends are represented by a single letter in Brooding orthography, they are two consonant sounds (and this subject to Brooding word structure rules that apply to two consonants in a row).

br	/bɹ/	as in 'bread'
pl	/pl/	as in 'plea'
dr	/dɹ/	as in 'drum'
tl	/tl/	not an English sound. t followed immediately by l
gr	/gɹ/	as in 'grow'
kl	/kl/	as cl in 'clean'
fl	/fl/	as in 'flee'
thl	/θl/	not an English sound. It sounds a lot like sl as said with a lisp.
sl	/sl/	as in 'sleep'
zr	/zɹ/	not an English sound. z followed immediately by r
shl	/ʃl/	as schl in 'schlep'
khl	/xl/	not an English sound. x followed immediately by l
hl	/hl/	not an English sound. h followed immediately by l
sk	/sk/	as in 'skill'
sp	/sp/	as in 'spill'
st	/st/	as in 'still'

• As noted above a few of the blends do not occur in English. They take a little practice to say, but aren't hard. Avoid putting a sound between the sounds - English speakers might have a tendency to insert a vowel in there (like some people pronounce sphere as 'suh-fear')

Vowels

a	/ɑ/	as a in 'father'
aa	/æ/	as a in 'bat'
ae	/e/	as ay in 'bay'
ai	/aɪ̯/	as ie in 'bit'
au	/aʊ̯/	as ow in 'cow'
aw	/ɔ/	as ou in 'bought'
e	/ɛ/	as e in 'bet'
ee	/i/	as ee in 'bee'
i	/ɪ/	as i in 'bit'
o	/o/	as oa in 'boat'
oo	/u/	as oo in 'boot'
uh	/ə/	as u in 'but'

Contrasting Vowels

Brooding has a concept of contrasting vowels. These are pairs of vowels that are used in various grammatical operations. Some processes require you to take a vowel from a word and change it to its contrasting vowel. For example, if the vowel is 'oo', it changes to 'o'. If it is 'o', it changes to 'oo'.

Here are the pairs of contrasting vowels:

oo	/	o
ee	/	i
ae	/	e
aa	/	a
aw	/	uh
ai	/	au

General Structure

Languages can be classified (at the extremes) as either synthetic or isolating. Synthetic languages are those languages where much of the sentence and grammar is built into larger words. The extreme are Amerind languages where a single word translates as "I went down to the stream to catch a fish and cook it for dinner". The other end is languages where grammar is based on word order with lots of little words - Chinese is much like this. Most languages are in between (English is more isolating than Spanish, Latin is more synthetic than Spanish, etc). Brooding falls in the middle with some of the core grammar built into words, but in other places, word order is important.

The basic order of a Brooding sentence is Subject-Verb-Object. This means that the subject comes before the verb, and if there is an object it follows the verb. This is like English. This order is somewhat variable due to things like adding words, artistic license, etc. The one thing that is invariable is that the verb is always the second constituent in the sentence. If you were to add something to the beginning of the sentence (an adverbial phrase, starting off with saying something like "So..." or "Meanwhile", etc.), that phrase would take the first place in the sentence. The next phrase has to be the verb phrase, and the subject moves to after the verb. Any object will be after the subject. Languages with this structure are known as V2 languages.

(Note, a 'constituent' can be a single word or a phrase. 'I' in "I love you" is one constituent. In the sentence 'The man down the road loves you', the whole phrase 'The man down the road' is one constituent.)

Nouns

Brooding nouns, in their basic form, always end with the sequence consonant-vowel-consonant (i.e. they cannot end in a blended consonant, see above).

Number

Nouns can be marked as singular, plural or 'mass' (collective). Mass nouns are nouns that where there are multiple entities in the group, but the group is considered as a coherent whole. For example, a bee would be singular, bees would be plural and a swarm of bees would be a mass noun.

Let's look at the word for 'tree': geeth

• The basic noun is singular: geeth
• To make it plural, you take the last vowel in the word and add it to the end of the word: geethee
• To make it a mass noun, you remove the last consonant: gee

Examples:

• raap - a war
• raapaa - wars
• raa - a series of wars, warfare in general

• chendim - a shoulder (part of the body)
• chendimi - shoulders
• chendi - a group of shoulders (probably used to refer to both shoulders at once as in 'you have a good head on your shoulders')

Case

Case indicates the function of the noun in the sentence. Brooding marks either the subject of the sentence (the one doing the action) and the object (the one being done to, if any).

The subject of the sentence works just like above. If the tree is doing something, it is said as geeth. If it is more than one tree, it is geethee and if it is a group of trees, it is gee.

However, if the noun is the object of the sentence, it is modified. You start off with the form marked for number, as above. Then you take the contrasting vowel of the last vowel and put it at the beginning of the word.

For example, if something is being done to a tree, take the word as above geeth. Next, you take the last vowel and find its contrasting vowel: i. Then add it to the front: igeeth. It works the same for plural igeethee and mass igee.

Modifying Nouns

Modifying nouns is done in a number of different ways. Almost all of the modifiers for a noun come directly after the nouns they modify.

Word Order

The order of modifiers for a noun are as follows:

demonstrative noun adjectives possessor prepositional-phrases relative-clauses

Note that only the noun itself is required. Any of the other elements in the noun phrase can be left out or included as needed. The relative order between them is invariant, however.

Adjectives

Adjectives follow the nouns they modify. For more details on adjectives, see the Adjectives section.

Possessives

Sometimes you want to say something belongs to something else. You turn a noun into a possessive noun to do so. If we have someone named Klaid (Clyde in English), we make it a possessive by inserting an l after the last vowel. klaid becomes klaild. So 'Cylde's tree' is translated as geeth klaild.

Prepositional Phrases

Propositional phrases (i.e. "On the water", "with a duck", etc.) can be appended to modify a noun. See the Prepositional Phrases section.

Relative Clauses

A relative clause is a short clause that describes the noun. In "The tree that burns", the relative clause is "that burns". A relative clause is like a mini-sentence embedded after the noun. In our example, you could visualize it as "The tree (it burns)". In English, we add "that" on the beginning and remove the pronoun that refers to the noun. The noun is called the 'head' and "that" is called the relativizer. The head noun might be the subject or the object of the clause. If I say "The tree that burns", the tree is the thing burning - it's the subject of the burning. However, I can say "The tree that I burn". In that case, the tree is the object, the thing being burned.

In Brooding, a relative clause starts with the relativizer, followed by the verb, the subject then the object (if any). This seems different than the usual sentence order (SVO) but it adheres to the V2 nature of the language - the verb is always the second constituent (the first in a relative clause is the relativizer).

There are two relativizers: ai and au. Which you use depends on how the head fits into the relative clause. If the head noun is the subject of the relative clause, ai is used. If it is the object, then au is used.

So let's take the above example. If I say "The tree that burns down", the head is "tree", and the relative clause is "that burns down", that you can look at as "The tree (it burns down)". In that clause, the tree is the subject (it is what is burning). So it's the subject of the relative clause. When you write the clause, you use the relativizer ai:

geeth ai aekhlaat tree REL/SUBJ burns "tree that burns"

(Note: there is no object listed after the verb because there is nothing the tree is doing the burning to)

If I say "The tree that I burn", the head is the same (tree), but the tree is now the object, the thing being burned. In this case, the relativizer is au instead of ai:

geeth au ootawnaekhlaat leed tree object-relativizer cause-burn I "tree that I burn"

(Note: There is a subject in the relative clause - leed ("I") - since "I" am doing the burning. It appears after the verb because the verb is always second. Also, the verb is slightly different. aekhlaat means something is burning. I am making it burn, so the verb is literally "to cause-to-burn." For more on that construction, see the section on Verbs).

One thing to remember is that the relativizer is based off of where the head noun fits into the relative clause, NOT where it fits into the overall sentence. Look at the following sentence:

leed agen igeeth ai aekhlaat I see tree-OBJ REL/SUBJ burn "I see a tree that burns"

The tree is an object of the sentence, but is the subject of the clause (it is what I see, but it is what is burning). So ai is the appropriate relativizer, not au.

Demonstratives

Brooding uses four demonstratives:

ti	this	(right here, in my hand)
de	this, the	(here)
ga	that, the	(there)
klau	that	(distant)

Note that Brooding has no distinct words that are articles (i.e. "the", "a/an"). Rather when "the" would be used in English, a Brooding speaker would use a demonstrative instead. There is no equivalent to "a/an".

Noun clauses

A noun clause is a clause that, instead of modifying a noun, replaces a noun in a sentence. English has a few versions of a noun clause. For example, in "He saw that I hit him", "that I hit him" is a noun clause. It is the action "I hit him" that is being seen. In this case, it is the object of the sentence. English sometimes drops the "that" (e.g. "He saw I hit him"), but it still remains as a replacement for a noun.

The other English variation is to use an infinitive verb in places of a noun: "I want to hit him." This is equivalent to "I want that I hit him". Once again, "I hit him" is the object of the noun.

In Brooding, there is only one form for this sort of construction. The action of the dependent clause is converted into a noun (as per the rules for nominalization) and then it modified by prepositional phrases and relative clauses. In Brooding, "I want to hit him" would be:

leed okhair indpeg leeld oofruh fosh I want hit-action I-POSS of he/she literally "I want my hitting of him"

Denominalization

Denominalization is converting nouns into other parts of speech.

To Verbs

Initiation: prefix aw

To say that the subject is becoming the noun, you add the prefix above to change the noun into a verb. This creates an intransitive verb. awfoos - to become a cow

Causation: compound with ootawn

To say that the subject is causing the object become the noun, compound the noun with the verb ootawn.

ootawnfoos - to turn into a cow, to cow-ify

Verbing: compound with osen

To ‘verb’ a noun, that is to make a verb that means to use the noun or engage with the noun in a typical way (i.e. ‘google’ as a verb), compound the noun with the verb osen.

osenraap – to war, to make war (literally ‘do-war’).

To Adjectives

Similarity: suffix ee

To have an adjective that means having the quality of the noun, suffix ee to the end.

foosee - cow-like, cowish, cowy

Association: suffix ingee

To have an adjective that means pertaining to the noun, suffix ingee to the end. This is actually creating a new noun by suffixing ing, then suffixing ee to make it an adjective.

raapingee - martial

Lacking: suffix yuh

For an adjective that means lacking the noun, suffix yuh.

daroonyuh - nameless

Pronouns

Pronouns in Brooding are listed below. There are a few differences from English pronouns, however.

There are different pronouns for you-singular and you-plural.

There is no gender split in the 3rd person pronouns (no he/she). However, there is a split between people and non-people. (he/she vs. it). There is a separate third person plural for groups that are all non-people.

Several of the pronouns have an alternate 'clique' version. These are for referring to people who are part of your clan, group or 'side' to things.

	Clique	Outsider
I	leed	--
you (sg.)	sloon	druhnshoon
he/she	fosh	bashen
it	tluht	--
we	lee	radla
you (pl.)	sloo	druhnshoo
they (an.)	fo	bashe
they (inan.)	tluh	--

Possessives and accusative cases are marked as all nouns.

Prepositions

Prepositional phrases are used to modify nouns or modify verbs. In either case, they present more details about the noun or the action the verb describes.

They begin with a preposition followed by a noun phrase (see Nouns, Word Order for what can be in a noun phrase). Note that a prepositional phrase can have a noun phrase in it that itself has a prepositional phrase. The noun in the noun phrase has the subject case, though it can be any of the three numbers a noun can be.

Basic prepositions themselves are one to two syllables, ending in a vowel. However, some prepositions are compound words made from a basic preposition and another word.

Locational ("Essive") Prepositions

The basic location prepositions are:

ma	at
aw	in
thai	on

From there we get more complex prepositions:

awzra	outside of
awchee	between
koma	above
yeema	below
cheema	near
staima	behind
yuhneema	in front of
khauma	beyond
tima	touching
dema	beside

Motion ("Lative") Prepositions

The basic motion preposition is:

aa

to

Complex prepositions for motion are:

ma	at
aw	in
thai	on

From there we get more complex prepositions:

awyaa	into
aastai	toward
aayuhnee	away from
aazraw	out of
aati	by way of
aatima	along
aataw	through

Relational Prepositions

Relational prepositions describe a relation between items.

Basic prepositions of this type are:

e	of, associated with, characterized by
chee	with
se	of, from
skau	for, for the benefit of
pa	for (recipient), indirect object
bae	about, regarding

Complex relational prepositions are:

zrachee	without, lacking
tichee	using, by means of
ese	made of, comprised of

Guidance on using prepositions

What exact prepositions are used for what situation varies wildly between languages, and Brooding is no exception. The following sections provide guidance for how a Brooding speaker would translate situations where usage varies from English usage.

Translating ‘of’

Where an English speaker would use ‘of’ to describe an association or something being characterized by something else, a Brooding speaker would use the preposition e. This would include phrases like “weapon of choice”, “friend of mine”, and “man of wealth and taste”.

When an English speaker would use ‘of’ indicate something that is comprised of something, like “book of words” or “band of thieves”, the Brooding speaker would use ese.

In indicating origin as in “Robin of Lockley”, a Brooding speaker would use se.

Translating ‘from’

“From” is used in English to indicate origin, both in general (“I’m from the city”) and in specific “I came from inside”. Brooding uses different terms for these two usages.

To indicate origin of an action or motion, aazraw is used.

To indicate origin in general, the preposition se would be used instead.

For the more archaic use of “from” involving making something out of something else (as in “something from nothing”), using tichee (so literally “something using nothing”) is better.

Translating ‘to’

The word “to” gets used a lot in English, but the uses are split up in Brooding.

In situations involving motion, and the subject going somewhere, such as “going to the store”, Brooding uses the motion preposition of aa.

However, in those cases in English in which “to” would indicate a recipient of some sort for, Brooding uses pa. For example “I hit the ball to her”, pa is used to translate “to”. In English this is often referred to as the indirect object.

Translating ‘for’

In determining which preposition to use in place of “for”, the key difference is whether the meaning noun in the phrase is a benefactor or just a recipient. For example, in “I made a cake for you”, “you” benefits from it, so skau would be used.

In the case of a phrase like “I have a letter for you”, “you” is the recipient, and pa would be used.

In something like “for example”, you’d use an adverbial phrase (see Adverbs) with otlai to something like “in the manner of an example”.

Translating ‘by’

“By” can be used to describe both location and means in English.

In Brooding, location would use cheema to mean “near” instead. To describe means, as in “by hook or by crook”, Brooding uses tichee.