The Art of Language Invention, Episode 28: Creating Noun Declensions

[@-arche-7926]

Planned feature for my next conlang: nounmarking the number of socks a noun believes to have insulted.

[@Dedalvs]

Hey everyone! Here's an update on where I'm at. This video has actually been recorded for a while (literally months-which is good, because my hair right now is shockingly awful), and I just wasn't able to get around to adding slides, etc. to it. Then once I had finished it, I had a stupid iMovie error that kept me from uploading it for a couple days. Glad it's finally up. On the one hand, it's quite embarrassing that when I went to upload it, I looked at the date of my last video, and it was _exactly_ one year later: 9/28/17 - 9/28/18. On the other hand, I always did intend for this channel to be useful in the aggregate, rather than to be something that you tune into regularly. My goal has always been that you can find some video that you find useful and start there without having to watch any of the other videos. So I'm still on track there. I would like to do videos more regularly, but it really requires a lifestyle change that I haven't been able to accomplish. If anything, it's all gotten a lot busier since the last time. I'm still working on new TV/film projects (and a new book project), and I'm still not regularly in my office, due to home life. I can see a future where it's easier, but I'm not quite there yet. Got my fingers crossed. Thanks for watching and waiting! It warms my heart that there are folks still tuned in here. :)

[@parthiancapitalist2733]

David Peterson I certainly hope things will get easier in the future, but the quality is still great!

[@GraysonOhnstad]

I'm just glad the videos aren't an abandoned project. Linguistics is such a dense subject for me, and having these videos has helped me on multiple occasions.

[@keegster7167]

+David Peterson I believe you have a couple of mistakes (4:28): *dūx should be short (dŭx), and the ablative form is ducĕ instead of long *dūcē.

[@Dedalvs]

Son of a gun! I wonder where I got the impression that it was long? I don't think I would've just written that... Maybe I actually read a source that had a breve and I mistook it for a macron (the two marks look _very_ similar for someone who isn't wearing their glasses). I'll make a note of it!

[@eritain]

@@Dedalvs Latin stress rule, BTW: 2 moras before the last syllable.

[@itamarbaz9477]

Oh my gosh! It's so good to have you back making this show! Great stuff as always, Mr. Peterson!

[@okuno54]

How did you know I was just getting back into conlanging?

[@oz_jones]

Okuno Zankoku it is known

[@hakonsoreide]

It's less than two weeks since I finished watching the first 27 episodes, but when I saw it had been a year since your last upload, I didn't have high hopes that there would be another one, but here it is, perfectly timed as I finished reading "The Art of Language Invention" in the interim. Very useful and interesting. As always. I also took a break from doing actual work on my conlang to make a script for it. That was great fun.

[@professorracc.9780]

YES! So glad to see more of this series!

[@AshtonSnapp]

WELCOME BACK TO THE TUBES!

[@qwertyTRiG]

I actually let out an audible squee when I saw the notification. That was fascinating. Thank you.

[@uomodibassamorale]

I am pretty baffled by having discovered this channel only now. Apparently this series begun years ago, but for some reason I never stumbled upon it. Even if late to the party, I'm very happy to see a renowned conlanger sharing his thoughts on the internet. I bought the book 'the art of language invention' almost by accident one year ago. A wonderful book, informative and enthusiastically written. Greetings from Italy. Cheers!

[@a_wolf-tj_hyena]

Wooohooo!!!! he's back.:-)

[@sofijeffrey9797]

glad to see a new upload!

[@joy_gantic]

We missed you! :D

[@darkgreninja8349]

Oh my god! A video from David! I definitely wasn't expecting this and I'm so happy :)

[@LegoSnakeproductions]

Great to have you back Mr. Peterson, I've certainly missed your videos. Best wishes for you and your family from Brazil!

[@jasondubose8160]

Glad to see you're back, your videos will certainly help me flesh out feu from a naming language to a fully fledged language :)

[@SachaCubesLatino]

I was literally about to email you to make a video on declensions!!!! Holy cow this is so useful, I've been reading noun declension systems of IE, uralic, japanese and quechua literally all week for hours!!!

[@Chubbchubbzza007]

HE LIVES! HE LIVES!!!

[@parthiancapitalist2733]

Chubbchubbzza 007 so does google translate lol

[@NappingWanderer]

Ahhh, needed this for my newest project. Great advice from the master, and great to see you back!!!

[@tonio103683]

Cool to have you back for this vid, i hope you're doing well :) this channel is a nice small visual encyclopedia, so while i'd be happy to have more vids of yours, i understand why you'd not have a regular uploading. This video is very useful for indo-european/latin-like noun declension. I think i came up with a similar technique on my own but i do like your spin on it, will probably use it to make mine less contrived, héhé ^^

[@raysan_rosado366]

It's great to see you're back! So basically, what you mean is that the evolution of the vowels influence the ending. For example, you have "Óga" (Heart), "Mido" (Animal), and "On" (Book), and they all take on the accusative ending "o." Over time, after evolution, they may become sometime like "Ógo," "Midō," and "Ono"?

[@Dedalvs]

That's the idea! Pretty much that plus any number of sound changes that can apply to a sequence of sounds.

[@senesterium]

Took you months to release it. Took me minutes to enjoy it. World is unfair ! Anyways, thanks for it, and the previous ones, and the next ones, and basically everything you're doing !

[@יואביאייל]

You're back! Yay!🎉

[@SachaCubesLatino]

Please do ablaut/apophony and how it arises!!!!

[@Nosirrbro]

Happy to see the channel isn’t dead! Would love to see as much more as you can reasonably do, but of course I understand having quite a lot else going on, so I’m happy to watch however much you can make on the channel, even if it’s exactly another year from now.

[@lXBlackWolfXl]

German has a strange form of 'lumping' going on. German nouns don't decline for case (besides the possessive, and you still see the dative in a few dialects and archaic expressions). Case is instead primarily marked on the article. German has four genders and four cases, so that would, in theory, give you 16 forms of each article. But this isn't the case. The definite article, for instance, only has five forms. Of the articles, only the masculine ones distinguish all four cases. The neuter has one for both the nom and acc, and shares its dative and genitive with the masculine articles. The feminine only has two forms: one for nom/acc, and the other for dat/gen. Its nom/acc form is identical to the plural, and interestingly enough, its dat/gen form is the masculine nom article! The plural dat and gen is even weirder. The plural dative is the same as the masculine accusative, and the genitive is also the masculine nominative! Yeah, its a rather convoluted system, and really requires you to remember exactly which gender each noun belongs to. I have no idea how this evolved. It looks like German is losing its case system, but in reality the current system has been stable for centuries (though the exact forms of the articles HAVE changed, which are the same and which are not hasn't). It makes sense that there would be no distinction in the nom and acc for neuter nouns (they're often inanimate objects), but why the feminine and plural? Germans seem to get along fine with only masculine nouns and about half of their personal pronouns actually making a distinction between the nominative and accusative. It would be interesting if you had talked about how such odd systems developed, because it obviously works fine in practice even though the whole system doesn't really make a lot of sense if you think about it.

[@rayleyfarnam2218]

Thank you so much for this series!!! I'm just getting into conlanging and I have a lot to learn. I'll be looking into your book and making sure to watch this series from the beginning :) when I saw that the first video was from 2015 I figured the series had probably been abandoned by now, so I'm so happy to see that it's still going even if only periodically :)

[@MisterSketch4]

How do u go about forming vocabulary naturalistically? For instance, third person pronouns are usually formed from demonstrative like this or that. What other rules like that are there for common vocabulary terms found in the Swadesh List?

[@Dedalvs]

This might make a good video if I can come up with a suitably large list. Maybe someone can keep track of it on a Google Doc...? But yeah, there are lot of things like that, and it would be useful to have them all collected in one video. Good suggestion!

[@MisterSketch4]

Even if the list is small, could u please email me, if time permits?

[@stationshelter]

it's been 3,000 years...

[@mollytaylor2122]

…so like -ar, -er, -ir verbs in Spanish? I mean, those are verbs not nouns, but the same phonology sets thing is going on, right?

[@Dedalvs]

Yep! Obviously the specifics are going to be different, but same idea.

[@clivegoodman16]

I studied Latin in school and the different declensions are numbered. Thus we have 1st declension eg. "poeta, poetae" 2nd declension eg. "dominus, domini" 3rd declension eg, "dux, ducis" 4th declension eg. "portus, portus" 5th declension eg. "res, rei" In all these cases I quoted the Nominative and Genitive singular. Most nouns in the first declension are feminine, "poeta, poetae" is one of the few 1st declension masculine nouns.Masculine and feminine 1st declension are declined in the same way but have different adjectives, thus we have "poeta bonus" and "puella bona". Most nouns of the 2nd declension are masculine or neuter, thus we have "dominus bonus" and "bellum bonum". Nouns in the 3rd declension can be of any gender. "Dux" is masculine thus "dux bonus". Most nouns of the 4th declension are masculine thus we have "portus bonus" but "manus" is a 4th declension which is feminine thus "manus bona" Most 5th declension nouns are feminine and I believe "res" is feminine as in "res bona".

[@christopherthr]

Yayyyyy! Welcome back! 🎉

[@drduden8984]

Where are the differences between conjugations and declensions, except these are for nouns and those are for verbs?

[@davidknighten469]

Hey! Absolutely love and appreciate your videos! Always super informative and helpful! Wanted to ask if you would do an episode on the evolution of modality. I am finding it difficult to get many answers surrounding this topic in my searching. Specifically, I'm working on a language in which I'm struggling to find a naturalistic way to evolve a morphological subjunctive mood. But any tips you have on modality in general as it relates to grammatical evolution would be awesome!

[@Typhlosion969]

Hello I was wondering if you could help me create vocab for my language or if you know somebody who could help me. Thanks!

[@Riurelia]

Do you ever plan on making a video regarding verb conjugation? I'm trying to implement person specific conjugation like Latin or Greek and I've been wondering where those endings (-o, -as, -at, -amus, -atis, -ant, in Latin) come from. Verbs aren't really my favourite thing to work on.

[@novvain495]

Those endings come from PIE,but we don't know where PIE got them from.

[@alison4051]

Just a note: In the Latin segment it's _dux, ducis_, not _*dūx, *dūcis_, and the ablative singular isn't _*ducē_, it's _duce_. Otherwise great and informative video.

[@Kaza0kun]

How did I not know you had this!?

[@xwtek3505]

Is it just me or is Valyrian should be [ɨ]

[@ungefiezergreeter6034]

Yes, just you, it’s actually [y]

[@jamessenecal8065]

Can noun cases and noun classes be used simultaneously and if so how could one go about doing so?

[@papaoompsie6981]

Yay new vid

[@lXBlackWolfXl]

I have a good question that I can't seem to find an answer to: how does noun-adjective agreement evolve? You explain how declensions in nouns can evolve (which I personally already knew), but how do adjectives end up agreeing with nouns? If they evolved the same way noun declensions do, that would mean that people would have to start adding particles between their adjectives and nouns that indicate case, gender, and number! I really can't figure out how it could happen, especially since adjective declensions don't always line up with noun declensions. What, do people just suddenly decide that a noun's adjectives need to rhyme with it? That would be rather weird...

[@lXBlackWolfXl]

Trying to do my own research, I found that PIE didn't have seperate declensions for nouns, adjectives, and pronouns; they all drew from the same 'chart' (for lack of a better term). In fact, apparently PIE didn't really have a distinction between these three categories (the wikipedia article just calls them 'nominals'). I guess that would explain where agreement came from.

[@Dedalvs]

That's basically the answer I was going to give. Adjectives come in two varieties: nominal adjectives or verbal adjectives. Adjectives tend to act more like one or the other, and tend to come from either nominal or verbal sources. The ones with heavy case/gender agreement come from nominal sources. Their declensions tend to simplify over time because it's the noun that does the heavy lifting in terms of grammatical who does what to whom, with adjectives just being pure agreement, so it's easy for them to get simplified without losing any meaning.

[@uhcantbesayingmyname5609]

What is ablative?

[@davidguerin6142]

Great video! But I have a question : how do you evolve an accusative ? I understand how you can go from pre- and postpositions to case endings, but most often there is no adposition leading to this case

[@Dedalvs]

The theory is if you go back far enough there is. But, of course, one could also just form a nominative, and the accusative is the bare form by default. Or maybe the nominative form picks up a copy vowel for phonological reasons and due to its positioning the accusative doesn't. There's always options like that.

[@verdakorako4599]

Oh diety what a pleasing surprise.

[@Tesana]

Oh, so Daenerys is pronounced incorrectly in the show Game of Thrones?

[@lesdio_leos-d2988]

How can conjugation show up at the end of verbs in a SOV language since there isn't supposed to be anytjing after them? Or more generally how do you get an affix where there wouldn't be any word that is susceptible to become an affix? Great videö by the way!

[@Dedalvs]

There's always the chance that it didn't start out as SOV, or it's a deemphatic strategy (in English our closest is "Went to the store I did", but in other languages [thinking of ASL] you just throw the pronoun at the end). My hunch is deemphasis is the culprit behind a lot of subject agreement on verbs.

[@lesdio_leos-d2988]

Thank you

[@elderscrollsswimmer4833]

@@Dedalvs Only having a subject as a separate word when it's emphasized would do that.

[@moonwalk3rr]

My life would have been significantly less interesting without DJP.

[@SolWolf1]

2 to 3!? My conlang has over 50!

[@Patrick-oc1vq]

Why do you have three knuckles on your thumbs?

[@levonclark9604]

Finally you're back! :)

[@zerbgames1478]

Hey new vid :3

[@Chubbchubbzza007]

Where do agent nouns come from?

[@Dedalvs]

Same place all nouns come from? Sometimes they're derived, sometimes they're not.

[@Chubbchubbzza007]

David Peterson But where does that derivation come from? Like in teacher, where does the -er come from?

[@varana]

The problem with real-world languages is that this historical approach hits a wall once we get to a stage where we have no written records any more. We can assume that suffixes came from words or particles (or other things) glued to a noun because we can see the process in action throughout history. But for many (in fact, the overwhelming majority of) individual endings, we can't safely reconstruct the origin any more. So while the historical approach may be better for conlangs to get naturalistic results, you usually won't be able to trace these things back to their origins in natural languages.

[@Chubbchubbzza007]

varana312 I wasn’t talking specifically about the -er suffix in English, but about that sort of thing in general.

[@verdakorako4599]

Bolth

[@parthiancapitalist2733]

MAĤIAC ikr

[@rickardspaghetti]

Does this also apply to pronouns?

[@Dedalvs]

It can. Pronouns tend to be a little older and are _definitely_ higher frequency, so they'll have a lot more variety in terms of their exponence. Of course, like with all irregularity, higher frequency = higher chance of irregularity, so if you have 10 noun cases, it's more likely that the ones on the end (the elative, translative, or what have you) won't be irregular. But, in effect, yes: If you have a pronoun whose base form is *ma and another whose base form is *et, I don't think it should be surprising that they have different results. Furthermore, a third person pronoun (which, absent gender/animacy, is as likely to refer to a human as a non-human) will have different patterns of use when compared to a first person pronoun (rarely used to refer to anything other than a human). This is why the High Valyrian first and second person pronouns (singular and plural) have the same instrumental/comitative form-the M form-whereas third person pronouns have distinct instrumental and comitative forms.

[@RanmaruRei]

In my native language, Russian, it's pretty much like this. We have one pattern, that is used for personal pronouns of 1st and 2nd persons and for reflective pronouns. It works kinda on logic of nouns. And we have 2nd pattern for the rest of pronouns inclunding personal pronouns of 3rd person. And 2nd pattern requires agreement on gender unlike 1st one. It works on logic of adjectives. Personal pronouns for 3rd person in Slavic languges are derived from demonstrative pronouns. It makes them extremely different.

[@rickardspaghetti]

I think that's how most Indo-European languages work, yeah.

[@rickardspaghetti]

Actually, Rei's comment made me think of something. Looking at your typical Indo-European pronouns, specifically 1st person singular, there is one irregularity that can't be explained by merely "declension". In many languages, the nominative form is clearly distinct from the other case forms. For example: I vs me, ego vs me, ich vs mich, я vs меня. This goes all the way back to PIE, h₁eǵ vs h₁me. The Wikipedia page on PIE even states as much that they are different stems entirely, caused by suppletion at some point in time. I think suppletion would be a great topic for another video. Think of all the examples you can find in English alone. "Bad" becomes "worse" and "worst", "good" becomes "better" and "best", the past tense of "go" is "went". Have you any examples of suppletion in any of your conlangs?

[@XeDolceQuestaMusica]

Yessss! New video!b

[@DarkrarLetsPlay]

You're still living? :D

[@booloffs.3912]

your back! whoooooo

[@deathwiddle3826]

Heill ok sæll!!!

[@josephcampbell7172]

*WOAH, YOU'RE STILL ALIVE*

[@juanpablolopez2270]

Finally

[@eheshzoumi7224]

HI!!! Missed you

[@parthiancapitalist2733]

My language has singular, dual, and plural forms, and there are 5 cases, however no gender

[@eufalesio1146]

same, but no dual, only singular and plural, and 10 cases

[@Marjiance26]

Same but no dual, 7 cases, and 4 genders. So, not actually the same

[@keegster7167]

Hi again! My language, Cornic, has 15 declensions and 8 cases (6 "real"/syntactic cases).

[@parthiancapitalist2733]

King Keegster what cases do you have? I have ergative, absolutive, genitive, dative, and locative :/ kinda boring I guess but I'll evolve to to be more fun. It's also split-s

[@parthiancapitalist2733]

King Keegster also I'm not a leftist anymore

[@dvrocha]

I can't breath :ooooooooooooooooo

[@eloisenewman3814]

Nightmares of my years studying Latin resurfacing... haha

[@keegster7167]

Aw. Why was it so bad for you? I study Latin a lot myself, so that's why I'm asking :p

[@eloisenewman3814]

Because of the work load. We were given only one semester to learn all the noun declensions, plus 30 new words every week, plus all the verb conjugations for the active voice and the passive voice. That's a lot of endings and paradigms to learn in less than 6 months! Especially for someone who had never studied Latin before. Perhaps it would've been doable if that was the only subject I had, but my major is German and alongside that I have a few English literary classes too. Even still, all of that in less than 6 months would be a hard thing to do even if it were the only subject you had, and the crazy thing is that the course is considered an 'introduction' course!

[@keegster7167]

+Eloise Newman Ah, I see. Yea, that's way too quick for an introduction. It's usually best to just memorise the less common verb endings as you come across them while reading. That way you get them in context.

[@eloisenewman3814]

It was definitely quick. I scraped through with a pass but heaps of people failed. Semester 1 we had around 20 people, Semester 2 had about 5. Ended up failing semester 2 because it was just too intense.

[@betlamed]

It was poet-a-e? Not poet-ä? Man, how they lied to us in high school!

[@varana]

Latin has been spoken for 2000 years over large areas in Europe and the Mediterranean (and sometimes elsewhere). There is not _one_ correct pronunciation. The ancient Romans until the 1st century CE (approximately) would've said poet-a-i. After that, the diphthong slowly morphed into an open e (i.e. a German ä) which was the predominant pronunciation from the Middle Ages onward.

[@keegster7167]

+varana312 I'd say there is a correct pronunciation... but it depends on each person, so it's correct only for particular individuals, because people have different goals for learning Latin.