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 ahgehn 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) |
Unlike other modifiers to the noun, demonstratives appear before the noun. 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".