Creating a Grammar for your Language

Copyright 1991, 1998 by Leigh Kimmel

For permission to quote or reprint, contact Leigh Kimmel

This article originally appeared in Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter # 159, December 1994.

Although there has been plenty of attention given to phonology, and in particular to phonological shifts over time, very little attention has been given to the role of grammar in language. And if we are to be going about world-building in an honest way, we cannot ignore the role of grammar in language, or simply assume that all languages will have the same grammar as English. A quick look at the other languages of the world will tell us that almost no two languages have the same grammar, although most languages share certain grammatical features.

By grammar I am referring primarily to what linguists call morphology and syntax. Morphology referrs to the way in which words are constructed from basic units called morphemes, while syntax refers to the way in which words are united to form sentences.

Morphologically, languages are referred to as being either analytical or synthetic. Analytical languages have few prefixes and suffixes, and functions such as number, gender, tense and person are indicated by separate words. Chinese is an example of a highly analytical language. The English language, while less analytical than Chinese, is certainly more so than languages such as Russian and Latin. Such languages, which use a large number of affixes, are referred to as being synthetic. Synthetic languages can be further divided into three classes: fusional, agglutinative and polysynthetic. Russian and Latin, as well as most of the other Indo-European languages, are fusional in nature. In these languages the affixes are not clearly separable from the bases to which they are attatched, and frequently indicate more than one grammatical relationship. For instance a single Russian verb ending often contains information about tense, number and person. Contrastingly, the affixes of an agglutinating language such as Turkish are clearly separable from their bases and usually contain only one kind of information. Thus a number of affixes, each providing a single bit of grammatical information, are strung together to create forms that can be quite long, although the unmarked word may be very short. The third kind of synthetic language is polysynthetic, in which noun-elements may be combined into the verb, making lengthy word-sentences. Inuit is an example of a polysynthetic language.

Syntactically, languages may have either fixed or flexible word order. Languages with flexible word order indicate syntactic relationships morphologically, while languages that use few or no morphological markers almost always have fixed word order. But even in languages with flexible word order, there is usually a word order that is regarded as being the most neutral form. There seem to be three basic neutral orders. The first is subject-verb-object, or SVO. English and Latin fall into this class. The second is subject-object-verb, or SOV. Turkish falls into this class. The third is verb-subject-object, or VSO. Hebrew provides an example of this word order.

In constructing a language, one must remember that naturally developing languages will usually contain a mixture of characteristics. English is largely analytical, but does retain some grammatical prefixes and suffixes, and although it is a SVO language it does have some characteristics, such as adjectives preceding the nouns they modify, that are more characteristic of SOV languages.

Copyright 1991, 1998 by Leigh Kimmel

For permission to quote or reprint, contact Leigh Kimmel


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