Valency, 'how many electrons does the verb have?'

One of my older conlangs, "Santaspeak", had reduplication to form commands. "Ho ho ho" was actually a phrase used by Santa to command his elves to obey, with the third "ho" merely being added for extra emphasis.

6:39 "I jump you" means either you're getting jumped over, or you're getting your teeth kicked in.

To me, the phrase "I entangle" works, even without a direct object. It means to me that I generally cause things to be entangled.

The German at 2:41 "Sie wären gekommen" does not mean "I would go", it means "They would have come"

I love making compound words have interesting roots. “Home” means “my tree” for my language and “night” means “no-sky” (as opposed to day meaning “light-sky”)

In the language im working on tenses are made with the words "sunrise" and "sunset" depending on which one comes next. For example, on the morning, if you say "i see animal sunrise" means that you saw an animal. If you say it at night though, it means "i will see the animal." In scribes has to be specified where the sun is, so everyone understands the sentence.

Scientist: Invents a time machine. The Turkish Time Tenses: *"Amateur."*

8:26 That sounds ergative. “I animal rock see cause” makes me more sense.

“You can’t say ‘I jump you’” *laughs in British*

In many dialects of American English especially those clustered on the Northeastern portions frequently make use of "to jump" in a transitive sense such as "They jumped him yesterday" denoting that he was attacked in a surprise fashion by some group of people. Dialects make everything more fun!

That Finnish tense part seems to be wrong. "Minä näin koiran myöhemmin" is nonsensical and would literally mean "I saw a dog later", since "näin" ("[I] saw") is past tense. Correct version would be the present tense "näen" ("[I] see"), or just like in English, "tulen näkemään" which is "[I] will see" where the verb is in passive. Also "tulla" means "come" but serves as "will". (Also the inflection of the verb implies person, so the pronoun ("minä") can be left out to make the phrase seem more natural, so the way I would say this phrase in writing would be like "Näen koiran myöhemmin" or "Tulen näkemään koiran myöhemmin")

Japanese has a really interesting example of aspect and tense. So Japanese has a present/future tense and a past tense. However, there is also a verb conjugation called the te form. What the basic te form means differs depending on the type of verb. To die in te form means has already died, but to eat means eating now.

1:31 Texas *singular- I/me *plural -us/them *paucal-y'all *plural all y'all

Hypothetical tense - now that's interesting. If I build a conlang, I like the idea of using a future tense derived from "I hope" while a hypothetical tense derives from "I dream."

Yknow, the first language i tried to create for my comic (its called zhiwai), i actually came to a lot of these conclusions on my own, which is baffling considering i was in a manic hyperfixation, flailing about with notebooks and sheets of looseleaf and spreadsheets scattered all around me every night and weekend for months. I wanted something simple so i created, essentially, some root words encoded from english and tried to expand out from there while simultaneously creating a writing system based HEAVILY in hangul because i thought hangul was the COOLEST. But there were some issues with how it read. I wanted the language basically to keep some aspects of the story mysterious for a time, so the romanization shouldnt have mattered. But then it became more of a naturalistic storytelling tool. Thats when i fell down the rabbit hole, creating grammar and syntax and trying to find a way to make it look and read more naturalistically. Eventually i burnt out on the project as a whole, but after finding this series, i think ill give it another shot, doing more research and using the general steps youve described.

I mean, English doesn't have a future tense either. Tense is part of conjugation. We don't kinda do the same thing. We do do the same thing. Great vid

My language is extremely in the works right now but it’s called Aldaranti. The name of the language is made up of two words: Aldara(meaning four people) and tighu (meaning to speak) altogether it’s “the language of the four people” and this is so because Aldera, the nation this language is spoken, is made up of four smaller kingdoms that fought in a war, but United at the end. This basically gives me a get out of jail free card for any massive changes in the language. The word “tighu” and the sounds “gh” and “kh” both said in the back of the throat, were slowly changed due to the southwestern kingdoms pronunciation. After years, it became normal to say standard k’s and g’s like that. The eastern nation brought by a lot of words that previously hadn’t existed in the northern region’s language, so some sounds were added to the alphabet, the main one being “oo” (as in book) As for my inspiration, I don’t know. There’s hints of mandarin and Arabic I took but overall I’d say it’s just a mish mash of many languages. As for the culture of the nation I’m focused on, I’m heavily basing it on China and parts of eastern Europe. If I had the mind to focus on one thing and expand on it accordingly, maybe I’d be more sure as to were my inspirations lie, but I’m not that guy. I can’t focus for the life of me. I’ll come to some conclusion, change it, and call it history. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because I’m the one telling the story.

I use genius word combinations so that I dont have to make new words. For example, “dum” means not, “do” means no, “dumdo” means yes or “not no”

English does have a small number of preserved causative verb forms: lay (from lie), raise (from rise), fell (from fall). There's one other commonly cited one that I'm not thinking of, at the moment. Note that they all involve a shift in the internal vowel, because that's how 'strong' verbs got inflected, back in the day (no endings).

I guess you've never jumped a queue.

Love the thoroughness of your explanations - I wish there were more examples between explanations. Also - just nitpicking - to jump can take an object if you use it as to assault or attack suddenly he jumped them

There's supposed to be links in the description for more information. I feel betrayed.

Tense is not aspect or mood. Most language teachers conflate the three terms to avoid using too much linguistics jargon and make themselves easier to understand, but this should never be done when teaching conlangers who need to know the differences between these.

i have a conlang which has a "prophetic" tense. it's a language spoke by a species with the ability to recieve prophecies, but they're not always from the future, they could see into the past as well. unfortunately the prophecies never go into specific detail about when things will happen, and it's impossible for the prophet to actually remember the prophecy until it's spoken, so eventually a new tense came about that didn't assume a time period (although it is sometimes possible to figure out a time frame from context after the fact. the prophecies are like dreams, in that some people have very clear and straight-forward prophecies, and some people wake up rambling about vague symbolism and such). it only has third person, because the person is removed entirely from the prophecy, so relative concepts like "me" and "you" don't exist, there's only "they". since future prophecies are considered more useful, the prophetic tense is usually translated as the future "shall", even if it happened in the past, but it depends on the translator.

That's why Google Translate can't translate very well Update: This is a very old comment. I typed this 2 years ago, before Google Translator could translate as well as it can today.

I laughed at the concept of 'jumping you' XD

Speaking of "doubling a word", in Chinese it kinda act as adding a "very" to the word, while in Japanese it can be to refer the "collection" of something, say, ki=tree, kigi=woods; hi=day, hibi=daily, but it can also mean "very" as well.

In my conlang, Xaski, the future tense preffix came from the word for time. The past prefix came from two words - the word for opposite, followed by the word for time. Thanks for making me understand grammar isn't REALLY BORING!

I got distracted because I wanted to check how my favorite conlang Ithkuil handles plurality and tense, and big surprise it's kind of complicated: Plurality is handled jointly by Configuration, Affiliation, and Perspective (mostly Configuration), and tense is handled by Perspective (it does double duty) and Extension. There are nine configurations and six extensions. Edit because I forgot to mention: Great video! You've earned a subscribe from me.

Man this series is amazing and has such a high rewatchability factor, everytime i watch it again i learn new things. Damn, conlanging is hard! haha

To mark tense on a verb in Españato 2.0: T is past, P is present, F is future, X is conditional. To mark imperfective aspect, you add an R after the time consonant. For the 3 persons, you use the vowels A, E and I. Indicative has stress on the last syllable (acute), subjunctive has stress on the penultimate (plain). If it finishes with N it's a singular, if it finishes with S it's a plural.

In colloquial Finnish we also often say "Minä tulen olemaan" ("I come to be") to express the future tense.

This is honestly a great tutorial series keep going! I am following the language you are making except editing a few details :D

Avīeš. Eideha ynykka ilhniyya Alex! This is my own language, Ulfian, and this is the Ulfian sentence in English. Hi. My name is Alex!

2:10 A native Finnish speaker here. You got it right when you wrote "Future = Present tense + time expression" but wrote "näin" instead of "näen" like it was supposed to be. Good job tho! Your videos have been a ton of help to me while I'm making my own conlang!

0:50 unfortunately plurals aren’t that simple in German lol

How did you naturally develop a noun class system in your conlang Oqolaawak?

Even though most finnish linguists don't consider it "good language" and prefer to use the present tense with context to signify future, finnish actually does have a future particle in the same way as "will": the "tulla" verb, meaning "to come", is commonly used especially in spoken language as a future tense of sort. For example, "syön" is "I eat". Normally to say "I will eat" you would have to explain the future tense with context or additional time markers eg. "syön huomenna" or "I will eat tomorrow", but many people use the "tulla" verb as in "tulen syömään" (literally "I come to eat" but understood as "I will eat")

My first conlang, which I am currently making, Kuki, already has some grammar. Surrounded by parentheses means optional (C)(C)V(C) syllable structure. C is for consonant, V for vowel. Words should have 1 to 4 syllables Monosyllabic words require a consonant. Subject-verb-object word order. Vowels: a, e, i, o Consonants: b, d, ɸ, h, ʒ, k, l, m, n, p, s, t, θ Vowel letters: A, E, I, O Consonant letters: B, D, F, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, S, T ( and all their lowercase counterparts ) *Possessors* Order is possessor-possessee, similar to English. Kuki uses ' to show that something owns something else. Example: "Thike efaton' doboth." - "This person's heart." *Plurals* If a world ends with a vowel, then the plural should be suffixed with "-s", if the word ends with a consonant it should be "-is." Example: "Eleses' dobothis." - "Eels' hearts." "Eleses' desobes." - "Eels' beds." *Verb conjugation* Verb conjugation should be handled by affixes. If the affix starts with a vowel, and the original verb ends with a vowel, the affix's first vowel will replace the verb's last. "Be" as an adverb indicates that an action is currently happening, or was happening. Verbs in the present are also their infinitive. Tense: past(-ed), present, future(-ad) Example: "Mi bed dole, eth nomi mi be lod." - "I was small, but now I am big." "Joe deso." - "Joe sleeps." "Joe be deso." - "Joe is sleeping." "Joe be desed." - "Joe was sleeping." There are other rules, but I won't put them in this comment

Ayo thanks Biblariadon! I created a language called Himnu and I didn't know what to do for grammar. But, this video helps a ton and I was able to create solid grammar rules.

I found another tense from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy which describes time travelling to the future, coming back and then talking about the future in said new tense.

"to die" is actually not active, it's passive, therefore "to kill" is active and the causative would be "to make someone kill someone" (you can't turn "to die" into a passive, it's already passive)

Watching these videos is kicking my ass.

I literally just put a certain word at the beginning of a sentence for future or unpredictable future, then one at the end for recent or distant past. Four different words for four tenses. Present is unchanged and usually taken literally, so my verb conjugations shouldn't be too effected by it.

I made my tenses using the word for time. Which is read as "zeuzia." You start with a root verb eg. Makh-kshla (to reed) and then, based in the tense, you add a part of zeuzia. Past = +sia Present = +nothing Future = + zeu

I would like to mention that chinese doesn’t have direct tenses, but does have tense markers that aren’t related entirely to time words. 我跑步(I run) 我在跑步(I’m running) 我跑步了(I ran)

I don't use seperate characters for capitals in my language. I just use circles around the character.

Love your vids man, just noticed that the german translations are sometimes a bit off, but you can still grasp the concept

In Germany there are some well quiet a few special cases like the word “Zug” (train) its plural is “Züge” (trains) which adds the dots on the u and the e German is complicated

2:03 Isn't mingtian tomorrow?

I'm not surprised, but am extremely disappointed. The one thing I struggled with when learning German was the distinction between perfect and imperfect past tense. My teacher couldn't tell me, she wasnt a good teacher anyway, but that was the one thing that made learning impossible for me. And yet I find it simply and easily explained to my when I look into what makes a language because I'm board.

I decided on a rule: what is modified/acted upon comes first and verbs splits subjects from objects. I have a feeling I'm making an ergative language but it'll be interesting.

I love this series, well done. :D As a Turkish speaker I do not have enough English knowledge to explain the correctness/falsity of the examples given, but the correct spelling of Turkish sentences should be in the following form: Ben köpeği görüyorum Ben köpeği gördüm Ben köpeği görüyormuşum Ben köpeği göreceğim Ben köpeği göreceksem Ben köpeği görseymişim Ben köpeği görmüşmüşüm Ben köpeği görecektim Ben köpeği görmüştüm Ben köpeği görmeliyim Thanks for this nice video, peace.

Where have you been this 6 years!!👌👌👌

This is awesome and informative. Nitpicking a bit but in Mandarin, 只 pronounced ‘zhǐ’ usually means ‘only’ whereas the measure word 只 is usually pronounced ‘zhī’

Just making a note for myself: Plurals, tense-aspect-mood (auxiliary verbs), valency (i.e. if a verb can take what is considered to be the "object" in languages with a Nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment), causative

I was wondering for my conlang Absku Lokus if auxillary verbs are necessary because from what I can tell, I don't really have them. For example, in my conlang, "to sit" uses the verb "sup". But what I want to do to conjugate it into past/future tense is to add a vowel to the end, like how the past tense of "sup" will be "supo" and the future tense will be "supu". So does that mean the auxiliary is connected to the beginning of the verb or the end? Or is it neither?

chinese does have a future and past tense kind of thing but its hard to say if its a tense or not. they put 会 or 了 before or after the verb to indicate if an action will be completed, is complete or happened already. for example: wo zuo wo de zuoye - i am doing my homework; wo hui zuo wo de zuoye - i will/can do my homeowork; wo zuo le wo de zuoye - i did/finished my homework.

It's checkers where "jump" is undeniably transitive and still carries the same basic meaning as the intransitive form of the word. "jump the shark" is really a shortened version of "jump OVER the shark," so "jump" is intransitive here. "We jumped him and took his money" uses "jump" as a transitive verb, but there's not necessarily any literal leaping off the ground or over an object. The sentence uses an alternate meaning of "jump." In checkers, the word "jump" is used to literally mean one object passing over another and therefore requires an object. "I jumped your king." This transitive form of "jump" still retains the same basic meaning as the intransitive form.

I am a little confused at to where to put my my causitive/passive operators in the word order. I assume as it because it is acting on the verb it goes in in the verb position, but do you put it before or after the verb you are modifying? What would be used to decide that? (My word order is VOS)

Can you signal a tence change using a particular symbol/ word at the beginning? Are there any languages out there that do this?

1:15 Sanskrit also use the dual number known as Dwivachan (Dwi:- two; Vachan:- quantity).

Hey, is there someone who can help me on the valency parte? I'm really confused about the passive... How could "I animal see take" mean I'm seen by the animal? For me it sounds like "I take the vision of the animal". And finally, could you give me more examples of how to evolve a passive?

I am Ukrainian speaker, and for the first time since I learned English construct "to be going to" in high school, I perceived it literally. So we use the construct "to prepare to"/”збираюсь" (which has roots to "gather my stuff (to go)"/"збираю себе

This is the episode of the series that makes you go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The conlang I'm making does plurality by attaching a number onto the word. (ie. cat-4 or house-20). What is that called?

Is it possible to leave valency to be interpreted based on context? For example having a verb be passive if there is no object and causative if there is one. Not sure if that would add confusion or not.

I jump you

Are there any languages that differentiate between a 'contemporary' present tense and an 'instantaneous' present tense?

Did I miss that, or was there no mention of analytic vs synthetic, fusional vs agglutinative morphology (with case declension as a possibility), of morphosyntactic alignment (with ergative, active, tripartitite, Austronesian alignment), of dependent vs head marking? These seem like fairly basic and important choices to have in mind when designing the grammar.

How would One Evolve Moods? Like Optative, Subjunctive, Imperative, and Hypothetical.

for the tense bit i have a generic past auxiliary and an perfective past auxiliary

One question; if my language has continious tenses, I have to mark perfectives and/or imperfectives?

Stupid question, but I ran into this thing in my attempt at conlanging. Let's say I'm doing the future tense the way it's in the example (using "to go" as an axulliary verb). Would a sentence "A person will go" (using the sample langage from the vid) be "Alu ua ua"? I know English works this way (A person is going to go), but this sounds waaay less awkward due to first "go" being in continous form. My brain just can't accept seeing two identical words repeated one after another. Is that a legit language thing, or does it sound too artificial to be plausible?

Is jump really the best example of an intransitive verb, considering it can also mean mug/beat up/etc?

My past tense will completely depend on if there is a word like yesterday. Unlike how I added 'in' to make something plural, nothing will be added to the verb to show its past, present or future tense. But then I thought, ' how will anyone know if you did/ are doing something in the past of today, or in the future of today. So I said " well, I'll just scrap that and put will, or have and if it doesn't have that, it's present. I'm not very good at this, but I don't care.

For my language, you add extra symbols to the words to make it grammatically correct. Example: Oodloh yohnoh kiavie (keep in mind my language has different letters altogether so this is just the sound the letters make) and then you would add a dot like this ^ to represent the sentence was in past tense. This only counts for writing things down, but when you're speaking it the ^ is pronounced 'hid'

2:16 First time I hear Biblaridion say "Hell". XD

I'm struggling a little with grasping Head-Final syntax. If I wanted to put the following sentence into Head-Final positioning, how would it look? "The tall person on the rock is going to see the floppy ears of the big animal on the beach." I'm making it complex to be sure I fully understand it. Are there multiple heads in this sentence? I feel like it would be something like "The tall thing the person the rock on the big thing the animal the floppy thing the ears the beach on see go". Is that right? So the Heads in this would kind of be the rock and the beach? The rock has "on" it a person which is tall. The beach has "on" it ears which are floppy and possessed by an animal which is big. Do you need context to differentiate "The skinny, tall, grey thing on the rock" and "The skinny tall thing on the grey rock" or would those need something like adjective endings to separate them? Thanks for any and all help!

Question: You said that its okay to leave some tense distinctions unmarked as its more naturalistic. Is it okay to leave the valency distinctions also unmarked?

Sometimes plural form of a word is completely different from a singular one. Like person and people Same in Russian Человек/люди As well as there are some words in a language that does not follow the usual way for making it plural Child/children And for sure even the common way sometimes affect the word, changing a sound/stressing ( sometimes in order to avoid too much similarity with some other word that already exists) Or adapts itself to be easier to pronounce and just sound nice I think it’ll sound more realistic if adding some exceptions for a few words, not just a strict same pattern

Do you have any sources on what certain tenses and aspects evolve from?

I have a new system! I haven’t done any research, so I may be wrong in thinking that this is a first, but I’m excited anyway! My conlang, Tarivinian, has noun gender suffixes stuck on the ends of verbs, which are different depending on the tense. For example, the sentence ‘Osa saw the dog’ would be: ‘Osa fūeya ostno’. Broken down, that’s: Osa (Nominative) fūe (dog) ya (Accusative suffix) ost (to see) no (female perfect suffix). It’s complicated, but very good for breaking the language down to simple MORPHEME-MORPHEME-MORPHEME etc. word structure. What do you think?

Not sure if this will be seen, but how do you develop a sentence like “I see a still rock”. Would “still” work as an adjective or a noun as it still is the action of the rock.

What do I do if I want my verb infinitives to mostly end in a similar way? Like in Latin, how most Present Active Infinitives (besides Irregular Verbs) although belonging to different conjugations, end in -re.

This is what I did for my tenses: Past not recent: If word ends in vowel then suffix p But if word ends in consonant then suffix i Past recent: If word ends in vowel then suffix l But if word ends in consonant then suffix a Present: Word stays same Future: If word starts with vowel then prefix b But if word starts consonant then prefix e’ But also if you are formally talking about a human then if word starts with vowel prefix t, and for consonant it would prefix u

is it good if past tense is represented by "am", future is by "pan" before the verb, and if its continous i just add "sa" before "am" and "pan"? will there be any troubles in the future?

At "5:20" when talking about "imperfective", what if I wanted to mark it with something? How would I go about doing that? I'm not sure if I fully grasp that. And also with "present".

Im making my own proto-language and I figured that I don't need to have auxiliary verbs to change the tense or valancy. Instead of using that, I just use a short syllable that changes the meaning of the verb but that syllable does not necessarily mean anything. For example, the word "to sit" is Wahi. If you wanted to say "I will sit" you can say "A wahire", with "re" just being the marking that changes the verb "wahi" to a future (perfect) tense. Does this system make sense? I feel like I can add auxiliary verbs when I evolve the language.

Question, I feel I may have gotten lost, but why is it "I rock animal see cause" and not "I animal rock see cause"? Like what exactly dictates that the direct (?) object comes before the indirect (?) one? Or was it arbitrary

How do you say something like "I want to jump"? Would you have to create a new auxiliary word for it?

The biggest problem I'm facing with grammer is the indirect object. For reference; I'm totally new to conlang in general I've got the sentence "I gave him a house" that I want to translate, but "him" is an indirect object, and I don't know where to put it in SOV sentence structure. Help?

Im making a conlang, “the person will see the animal” is spoken as: "hweroudu shea maüheadu"

Do verbs need valency and or valency operations? I’m just wondering cause I am making my first conlang but I don’t understand what valency even means at this point and so it would just be easier if I left out, or maybe not

How would a language without the perfect tense like, " I have done it", use the auxiliaries would, could or should. Will it say something like, "I should did it"?

In chinese you actually have a caracter to mark plural (at least thats what my teacher said) : it's 们 and you can use it after a noun to indicate plurality (but its not an obligation)

For my grammar, I use the same word to mean different things. (I haven’t gotten a font together, so I will use the English versions of words) For example, saying “You book” would mean “Your book”, and “You sad” would mean “You’re sad”

2:03 A few corrections: Mingtian is tomorrow, not yesterday, and 'I have seen a dog' is 'Wo kan guo gou', not 'Wo kan gou guo'. The 'guo' is usually affixed to the verb.

Tbh i think there's a confusion between the perfective and imperfective aspect and the global and secant aspect. It's probaly because of the definition of Saussure who nammed "perfective/imperfective'' what's now called "global/secant" ;p