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Trafalgar's [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/language/common/ Common Social Resource blog] is mirrored in real time at the link given here, but frustratingly, they don't include the year in their dates and the dates are updated when they edit their articles and increment the revision. Trafalgar's materials are invaluable, however, because they allow us to understand potentially useful materials from Earth 0077 with much greater ease than would otherwise be possible, and their exposition about the New World Order, while necessarily limited and biased, has nevertheless been hugely helpful in understanding the context of other materials recovered from that dimension. They appear to be exceptionally knowledgeable about the New World Order and at least make an attempt at academic objectivity, as a number of their assertions that researchers initially questioned turned out to be corroborated and confirmed by other sources. | Trafalgar's [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/language/common/ Common Social Resource blog] is mirrored in real time at the link given here, but frustratingly, they don't include the year in their dates and the dates are updated when they edit their articles and increment the revision. Trafalgar's materials are invaluable, however, because they allow us to understand potentially useful materials from Earth 0077 with much greater ease than would otherwise be possible, and their exposition about the New World Order, while necessarily limited and biased, has nevertheless been hugely helpful in understanding the context of other materials recovered from that dimension. They appear to be exceptionally knowledgeable about the New World Order and at least make an attempt at academic objectivity, as a number of their assertions that researchers initially questioned turned out to be corroborated and confirmed by other sources. | ||
We have relied heavily on Trafalgar's work to create this article, some of which is copied word-for-word from the Common Social Resource blog. | |||
==Introduction== | ==Introduction== | ||
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The impact of this change over time is that early to early modern Common borrowed vocabulary contained the letters b, d, g, q and v quite often, because they were convenient to type, but in modern times, there is a much stronger tendency to 'Commonize' borrowed words, even people's names, not only because of official efforts to encourage this, but also because these letters are now inconvenient to type. | The impact of this change over time is that early to early modern Common borrowed vocabulary contained the letters b, d, g, q and v quite often, because they were convenient to type, but in modern times, there is a much stronger tendency to 'Commonize' borrowed words, even people's names, not only because of official efforts to encourage this, but also because these letters are now inconvenient to type. | ||
==Parts of Speech== | |||
Common thinks of itself as having the following parts of speech: | |||
'''Terms (naz Jerekka)''': Concrete objects, concepts, actions and experiences. Corresponds to nouns and verbs. The Common word for 'term' is 'jerekka', 'that which ends'). | |||
'''Modifiers (naz Keulca)''': Descriptions of objects, concepts or manners of action, and well as describing how arguments relate, in space or in motion. Modfiers are adjectives, adverbs, numbers, propositions and more. They have a property called 'binding' which determines how they are interpreted. The binding types are tight and loose binding, with loose being unmarked. The Common word for modifiers is 'keulca', 'that which makes a change'. | |||
'''Determiners (nar Samorka)''': Determiners are phrase heads, and carry all of the grammatical information about how the phrase relates to other parts of a sentence, and a host of other grammatical distinctions. Determiners are articles and auxiliary verbs. Article determiners are also pronouns. Relative pronouns that allow a dependent clause to describe a noun or that allow a dependent clause to function as an argument to a verb also fall into this category, although they are arguably also modifiers. The Common word for determiners of all kinds is 'samorka', 'that which starts'. | |||
'''Conjunctions (naz Heratca)''': Words that connect articles and phrases, either logically or in terms of how one flows into the next. Conjunctions tend to have forms that are different inside and outside of phrases (internal and edge conjunctions, in Common terminology).The Common word for conjunctions is 'heratca', 'that which connects'. | |||
'''Interjections (naz Smokka)''': Words that serve some kind of purpose outside the framework of an explicit or implied sentence. Often these words have uses in the other categories.The Common word for interjections is 'smokka', 'that which is thrown'. | |||
It is not at all that Common lacks a distinction between nouns and verbs, or between adjectives and adverbs, of course. Grammarians talk about Common verbs and nouns all the time. But what having these 'terms' and 'modifiers' whose function is determined by context does is make Common very friendly to zero derivation between parts of speech. There are plenty of examples of zero derivation in English. For example, you have the verb 'to stop' and the noun 'a stop' that are zero derived from each other (that is, the word changes part of speech and hence something important about its meaning without any explicit conversion like adding a suffix). Students of constructed languages who are familiar with Esperanto will note the contrast with that language's very explicit and mandatory marking of parts of speech, Common goes to an extreme the other way, at least within its self-recognized part-of-speech categories, and usually gives you no visible way to determine the part of speech of a word other than to just learn it. | |||
English purists have often complained about this process, especially nouns being zero derived from verbs. However, there are literally hundreds of examples in English. Common is like this too, within its broad grammatical categories. So if you noun a verb, in Common that amounts to just taking a term which usually has more of a verbal character and using it with a noun determiner, and that's actually completely halal. There are usually conventional ideas about what the derived word means, but ambiguity is often tolerated and context is required to understand the meaning. | |||
==Syntax== | |||
===Noun and Verb Phrase Structure=== | |||
Common leans heavily on its very particular syntax, particularly on the structure of phrases. The concept behind Common is that it has relatively free phrase (na weteras lawt) order, but word order within phrases has highly specific syntax. A basic noun (na poen) or verb (na hultan) is always actually a noun or verb phrase. The Common grammatical terms 'poen' and 'hultan' usually refer to the whole phrase when speaking about the Common language. A term without a determiner could be either a noun or a verb, and its meaning is only clear in the context of the other words it appears with. A Common noun phrase always has the following structure: | |||
DET [MOD] [MOD, etc] [TERM] [TERM, etc.] (HEAD) | |||
The square brackets mean optional elements. Round brackets have a special meaning that we will get to. The abbreviations mean: | |||
DET = Determiner, in this case an article. | |||
MOD = Modifier. Modifiers for nouns have subclasses and a relatively strict order of these classes, which is a topic for later. | |||
TERM = Term, these terms are optional and are modifying the head term in some way - they may or may not be explicitly compounded with it, which will have phonological implications. | |||
HEAD - The head term (na jenys jerekka). It's just a term, but as the head it is the most salient part of the meaning of the overall phrase. | |||
The reason why the HEAD is in brackets is because it may be omitted (creating 'ny ikwéteras lawt', an imperfect utterance) - but only if there are no modifiers or terms in the rest of the phrase. In other words, the phrase can consist of a naked determiner (which in this case functions as a pronoun), or else it must have a head term. In the event it is desired to omit the head term but still use modifiers, a dummy term ('na epális jerekka'), 'yn', must be employed to fill this grammatical slot. | |||
Another feature of this phrase structure is that some modifiers, typically prepositions, but also relative pronouns, can take an object, which can be an entire phrase structure or dependent clause. If a modifier takes an object, it is forbidden to remain in the bracket between the determiner and the head term, and it must come out. For noun phrases, such modifier phrases must come in a row immediately after the head term. | |||
Verbs look the same way. Common teachers don't teach the verb's object(s) as part of the verb phrase, but academic grammarians would use a more conventional analysis. To understand Common on its own terms, we will focus on they way Common is taught and explained. The basic phrase structure is: | |||
DET [MOD] [MOD, etc] [TERM] [TERM, etc.] (HEAD) | |||
DET refers to an auxiliary verb in this case. The structure is conceptually the exact same as for noun phrases, but the difference is that there is much more freedom with modifiers for verbs, which are of course adverbs. They may come out of the bracket at will, and may move to certain places in the sentence, either at the beginning of the sentence or immediately following the verb, as an element of stylistic freedom that can be used for emphasis. As with nouns, if a verbal modifier takes an object, it must come out of the bracket into one of the allowed positions. Also as with nouns, the determiner may be used by itself as a stand-in for the verb, but if there are modifiers present, even modifiers that have been moved out of the bracket, and the head term is to be omitted, the same dummy head term as for nouns, 'yn', is required. | |||
With verbs, it is far more likely that a 'paradigm verb' will be used to substitute for the head term if it is desired to be omitted, rather than using yn, but yn is still common. The other thing that differs is that there are less recognized classes of modifiers and less restrictive order for what order they must appear if present. | |||
As noted, it is not just perfectly good Common but actually a central strategy of the language to freely zero-derive between nouns and verbs in the "terms" category and between adjectives, adverbs and prepositions in the "modifiers" category. What Common grammarians don't like is zero derivation between Common's defined parts of speech. For example, it is considered bad grammar to zero derive a modifier from a term or vice versa - the English word 'green' to describe a part of a golf course, zero derived from the adjective green, is not considered acceptable in Common. Derivational morphology exists in order to convert back and forth between term and modifiers. | |||
The reason given for this is that listeners can identify the end of a phrase when the head term is reached, which will be the last term in the phrase. Supposedly, zero derivation between modifiers and terms muddies these waters. This is a matter for debate, but regardless, it is important to understand that derivational morphology exists to go back and forth between these classes, and native speakers are generally quite disciplined about using it. | |||
Note that in terms of head structure, Common is a head-initial language for the most part, owing to the fact that phrase heads are always initial, but that it has head-final qualities as well, in particular in how compound words and phrases are constructed with a head term last. | |||
===Word Order=== | |||
In terms of its default word order, Common is an SVO language in main clauses. It is also an ergative language. SVO word order is unusual for an SVO language. As Trafalgar points out, though, Common is only morphologically ergative, through its article cases.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/113/] Syntactically, Common is actually accusative, as they point out with the following example: | |||
Ja pikki(A) tene slek a skitrem(P) | |||
3.SG.DEF.ERG cat TRN.NPST.PRF.REAL eat 3.SG.DEF.ABS mouse | |||
The cat has eaten the mouse. | |||
Compare this to: | |||
A pikki(S) se hitaj. | |||
3.SG.DEF.ABS cat NTRN.NPST.NPRF.REAL sleep | |||
The cat is sleeping. | |||
Morphologically, Common treats S the same as P - they are both in the absolutive case. But syntactically it treats S the same as A - although Common has free word order, it does have a preferred word order, which is SVO, and in that word order, both A and S appear before the verb. S is treated like A syntactically. | |||
===Dependent Clauses=== | |||
Common prefers SOV work order in dependent clauses - in theory, it is completely mandatory for the verb to come last, but in practice there is some leeway around this rule if the dependent clause occurs at the end of a sentence. | |||
Conceptually, Common dependent clauses work like noun or verb phrases with a Determiner - Head bracketing structure. In this case, the Determiner is a relativizing particle and the head is the verb that is required to go to the end of the clause. While there is sometimes a little leeway in practice around verb placement (as much as this upsets grammarians), native speakers never, ever omit the relativizer. | |||
There are two relativizers, "su" and "si". Both of these particles can fully decline into Common's four cases. "Su" introduces a dependent clause that modifies a noun. The case of "su" is governed the role of that noun in the dependent clause. "Si" introduces a relative clause that acts as a core argument of the verb. The case of "si" is the role of the clause as a whole on the verb. | |||
==Morphology== | ==Morphology== | ||
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