The BG Language Creation Guide

• Remember what you have learned about the arbitrariness of language. Words in your language should sound nothing like their English translations unless (in some cases) this is done for a particular cultural or esthetic reason that either amuses you or is coherent with the anthropological sketch of your speakers.
• You may use only the segments which you have described already in step 2.
• Remember that you are transcribing, not spelling your words. Do not use English-based orthographic conventions. If, for example, you write down that your word for "sky" is "shafe", you may intend this to be a one syllable word that rhymes more or less with "safe". However, it will be pronounced by your colleagues in two syllables as /shafe/ rhyming more or less with "cafe". ((click here to hear the pronunciation of /shafe/,.) If you want your word for sky to rhyme with 'safe', you'll have to transcribe it as /Sejf/. (See the help section on transcription).
• although your first words might be monomorphemic (containing only one morpheme such as 'joy' 'stone' 'table' or 'bad', yur goal is to combine morphemes in new ways.
• Keep careful notes as you work. Write down every morphological idea you decide to implement. The tedious field notes will pay off later when you can look up, rather than refigure out, what you intended in any case.
• Think about the culture you wish your language to reflect and the ways in which you want your language to differ from Earth norms. If, for example, your culture believes that children should be seen and not heard, make that part of your language and make the word for 'child' be something like 'no-mouth-person'. (Keep track then of your morphemes for negation, mouth and person so you can employ them again later on). If you think that 'plant-egg' is a good word for 'seed' or if you have a particularly fiendish insult or poetic term of endearment you fancy, make it part of your language. If you think the moon is made of green cheese, string the morphemes 'great-night-cheese' together and say it translates into English as 'moon'. (You could then happily extend the metaphor as far as you like: call the planets 'little-cheese-balls', the stars 'sky-curds', and later claim in a footnote somewhere that English 'milkyway' is a calque from your language into English.)
• Make listings for bound as well as free morphemes and explain them.
• Note that you may "split" a concept using two or more words in your language to express different aspects of the same English word. You might wish, for example, to have one word for 'ashes' if the fire that created them was a merry bondfire, an entirely different, unrelated morpheme for ashes from a sacred fire, and others for fires started by accident or by nature or as acts of violence. (NOte, for examle, that english has a yriad words for water depending only on its temperature: ice, water, steam. A language could easily have only one word for these related concepts.
• You may also merge two concepts, using one form to express what is two separate morphemes in English. If your culture is patriarchal and neither women nor children have any power, you may have one word that refers to both. Less controversially, you may have a single word that refers to both 'egg' and 'seed'.
• Important: Be sure that you are awake and paying attention as you do this assignment since it sets the foundation for how the rest of your language will feel. You will be, in a sense, creating a sense of esthetics that will guide you for the rest of the semester. Spend time musing about the culture of the people who speak this language. If you are a poet, do not pass by this opportunity to use this assignment as a kind of experiment or poem that expresses ... whatever you feel like expressing.
• The final list of words you develop in this assignment will be nouns, but it is not necessary that all their constituent morphemes be nouns. For example, the English word birdwatcher is a noun, but it is composed of one noun (bird), one verb (watch) and one bound derivational suffix (-er).

In addition to creating the list of nouns below, you should address these questions and submit them with your work: For each question, provide as many glossed examples as you need to be clear. You will use the Leipzig Glossing Rules to gloss your words.

• Do you have noun classes? This is like gender in Spanish or French (2 classes each) or German (3 classes). Kiswahili has 8 noun classes (depending on how exactly you count them). If you have noun classes in your language, how many? Are there semantic rules about what goes into what class? How do you mark them? Give examples of nouns from each class. Remember to use hyphens to separate the root from the inflectional affix that indicates its class.
• How do you form plurals? Do you have a zero marked singular? Do you have a dual? A paucal? Other variations? Translate the following remembering to use hyphens to separate morphemes:
  • birds,
  • people,
  • moon,
  • Any other forms you need to demonstrate all of your noun classes or other interesting phenomena.
• How do you form possessives? Do you have any inalianable possessives? Anything else unusual here? Do not create possessive pronouns at this point. Deal with only nouns as in: ' man's stone, or 'the tree's leaves,. Be sure to mention what order the two nouns (possessor and possessed) come in.

  Here are some suggested phrases containing possession. translate and gloss these as examples of how possession works in your language. Pay attention to what's singular and what's plural as you translate: NB: You will notice that the example for step 3 uses a different set of translations here because the linguist recording the language required different examples to fully elaborate the system of ossession which contains several unusual features.

  • person's bird
  • bird's person
  • children's bird
  • birds' eggs
  • Any other forms you need to be complete
• How are the noun class markers, plurals and possessives marked when they are all on the same word? That is, form a template for your nouns. If possession and number are prefixes and noun class is a suffix, demonstrate that like this:
  poss-plural-root-nounclass
  and give examples.
• Along with the nouns, please create a bound negation affix and demonstrate its use.
• Once again, you may not create a totally isolating language. It should look much more like Turkish than like Mandarin.

About the Humble Hyphen

• Hyphens separate each morpheme within a word: fire-place-s, un-open-ed, un-re-cycle-d, think-s
• When written in isolation, free morphemes do not use hyphens: rock, soda, think
• When written in isolation, bound inflectional and derivational morphemes are written with hyphens to show how they attach to roots: pre-, -s, dis- -ize
• When written in isolation, bound roots use hyphens to show how the obligatory affix connects: -ceive (re-ceive), feas- (feas-ible)
• When written in isolation, infixes are surrounded by hyphens: -freakin'- (abso-freakin'-lutely)

40 Nouns *

the name of your language
ashes
bird
branch
child
cloud
day
earth
egg
fire
fish
forest
friend
heart
house
idea thought
leaf
man
moon
mountain
night
person
rain
river
root
sand
seed
shaman, sage
sky
smoke
star
stone
story
sun
tree
water
woman
--- animal of your choice
--- animal or object of your choice
--- vegetable, fruit or other plant of your choice
--- plant or object of your choice