Dreaming Of Demonstratives

2038-01-19T03:14:07Z

How much am I thinking about Novvocu? I woke up this morning and my first thought - honestly! - was, "If I'm using no to indicate possession, then that means that 'my book' is von no citab, so vona citab wouldn't mean 'my book' but would mean 'this book'." Demonstratives - "this", "that" and "yonder" - can be thought as object pronouns: "this = the thing near me", "that = the thing near you", and "yonder = the thing near them". My subconscious came up with a more elegant treatment of demonstratives than I had come up with for Dublex, which involved appending a demonstrative particle dem to pronouns.

Why am I concentrating on the grammar of Novvocu first? Typically when I develop a language I spend most of my time on the lexicon. With Karklak, my very first language back in the early 1980s (published on the Web for the first time here), that was indeed all I developed - 104 words. What I typically find most enjoyable about langmaking is word making. So I am trying to purposefully postpone that pleasure until I have the grammar finished, in order to make sure that I actually do finish the grammar.

That said, I did make a few words today:

lun [Latin 'luna', extant in Russian, Romance (Spanish, Italian, et al), English ('lunar') and auxiliaries (Esperanto, Novial, et al).] celestial body, heavenly body -- any nonstellar object visible in the sky, especially the moon, the natural satellite of the Earth

nation [From Old French 'nation' (from Latin 'natio'), extant in Russian, Romance (Spanish, Italian, et al), Germanic (English, German, Dutch, et al) and auxiliaries (Esperanto, Novial, et al).] state, nation, country, land, commonwealth, res publica, body politic -- (a politically organized body of people under a single government; "the state has elected a new president");; nation, nationality, land, country, a people -- (the people of a nation or country or a community of persons bound by a common heritage; "a nation of Catholics"; "the whole country worshipped him");; country, state, land, nation -- (the territory occupied by a nation; "he returned to the land of his birth"; "he visited several European countries");; nation -- (a federation of tribes (especially native American tribes); "the Shawnee nation")

sol [From Latin 'sol' (and Spanish and Italian descendents), itself descended from Indo-European *sawel-, extant in Russian, Hindi, Germanic (English, German, Dutch) and auxilaries (Esperanto, Novial). Mnemonic: solar.] celestial body, heavenly body -- (any natural stellar object visible in the sky)

lunnationua [+] American -- (of or relating to the United States of America or its people or language or culture; "American citizens"; "American English"; "the American dream")

Lunnationu [+] United States, United States of America, America, US, U.S., USA, U.S.A. -- (there are 50 states in the United States)

This word formation was for an example on the new Proper Nouns page.

Random thoughts:

I'm thinking of changing conjunctions from VC to VCC and having all articles be VC instead. Depends on how I handle nominal number.
I would prefer to replace sol and lun with one word for "celestial body", because as separate roots I don't think they will be used a lot, but then "sunlight", "moonlight" and "starlight" would require at least three morphemes each to distinguish between.
I've been wondering which is used more frequently in English writing: the or a/an? Maybe I could omit the most frequent article (i.e., if the article isn't indicated, it has definiteness or indefiniteness as the default).
I'm tormenting myself about how to indicate plural; at the moment I have three ideas: the particle ge (which I had thought of but left out of my first particle summary), the suffix -men (from Chinese plural pronouns) and the definite/indefinite articles.
I expanded the Part Of Speech page and added subpages beneath it in the site hierarchy.
While trying to learn more about Chinese pronouns, I did this specific search on Google which ironically turned up my page on Dublex pronouns as the best source of information.

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Dreaming Of Demonstratives