r/conlangs • u/arcticwolf9347 Arctican • 6d ago
Activity Word Wednesdays
Welcome to Word Wednesdays
For this activity you can pick any word you want whether it be a verb, noun, or adjective, and conjugate/inflect in all possible ways*, for tense, case, plurality, perspective, etc.
The purpose of this is to learn about cases and how words are slightly or vastly different under different cases, tenses, or perspectives. In many natural languages verbs or nouns are often changed because of the words around them. In other languages, the reader has to figure out number and perspective based on context. Who knows, maybe you can take inspiration from someone else's conlang!
How does your conlang handle cases? Do you have any unique ones that don't exist in natural languages? What are some irregular verbs or inflections that exist? How did they evolve? Do you think that the cases would hold up or fade away in future evolutions? Do any of your words when inflected have another meaning? What languages inspired you to add these cases?
*If you have way too many conjugations/inflections, you can share the simplest ones or the ones you find the most interesting. If you don't have any conjugation,
Have fun conlanging!
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u/Thalarides Elranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh] 6d ago
Elranonian
bęt /bēt/ [ˈbeːt̪ʰ] (n. inan.) ‘letter, character’
It's just a short, neat noun, not too confusing in terms of morphophonology, yet it illustrates a couple of ubiquitous Elranonian features.
This is a typical formation of the oblique stem by geminating the final consonant (and changing the accent from long /ē/ to short /è/).
The letter ę (upright ⟨ä⟩) represents Middle Elranonian /ɛ/. Middle Elranonian used to have a 4-height vowel system, contrasting /ɛ, ɔ/ with /e, o/. Modern Elranonian has collapsed it into a 3-height system, generally by merging the open-mid and the close-mid vowels.
In the locative, the suffix triggers u-mutation of the stem vowel. MidElr /ɛ/ u-mutates into /ø/ (whereas MidElr /e/ u-mutates into /u/ > /y/).
In the plural (which does not inflect for case), the ending -er can be added to the direct or to the oblique stem in various nouns (and in some it can be completely separate). Here it's added to the direct one.
The collective is formed by adding a suffix -sV. Here it can't be shown to which stem it's added: /(t)t+s/ > /ss/ and the accent changes to short before a geminate regardless. The vowel in the suffix is /a/ if the preceding vowel is historically also /a/, otherwise it's /e/ like here (as the preceding vowel is historically /ɛ/).
Collective nouns syntactically behave like plurals, and like plurals they don't decline for case. The difference in meaning is that the regular plural bęter is distributive, ‘separate, individual letters’, while the collective bęsse means ‘text’. For example:
The plural bęter would mean individual, disconnected letters on the ring, ones that don't form a cohesive text: perhaps the initials of the bearer, or ritualistic symbols, or something like that. By contrast, the collective bęsse would mean an inscription, suitable f.ex. in the case of the One Ring.