The Language Vorlin
Copyright 1999-2002 by Richard K. Harrison. All rights reserved.
2: The Shapes and Sources of Words
6: Adjectives, Adverbs and Demonstratives
7: Numerals and Other Quantifiers
Vorlin is a constructed human language (which might also be called an artificial language or a planned language, depending on your taste in terminology). The central idea of the project is vor, our word for “a compromise between technical and aesthetic criteria,” in other words, the avoidance of extremism in the design of things; an attempt to blend art with appropriate technology.
Vorlin is the language of an undiscovered culture of people who exercise their artistic tendencies with good taste and self-restraint; who demand absolute freedom for themselves and yet avoid doing things that would prevent others from enjoying the same degree of freedom; who resort to formalism and algorithms when necessary, but acknowledge the “fuzzy” nature of reality; who accept beneficial technology while unapologetically rejecting technology that endangers any sentient creature’s well-being, privacy, or freedom. Perhaps the only laws in the country of Vor are “don’t be excessively annoying” and “don’t be too easily annoyed.” The language is my humble gift to this undiscovered country.
Rough drafts of the project began in 1989. The first published version was released on the Spring Equinox of 1991.
Vorlin underwent many drastic changes in its early years. A great deal of experimentation helped us to invent techniques of grammar and vocabulary creation that give the project a consistent “texture” and make it feel like a real language.
The most recent months of activity have been devoted to making the design more stable. In some cases, this has meant putting difficult questions about minutiae “on the back burner” while we focus on documenting the elements that are ready to be declared permanent. This document does not address important issues such as the handling of quotations and parenthetical phrases, the types of conjunctions and exactly how they operate, etc., because those elements of the design are not yet completed.
With the publication of this document on June 21, 1999, the basic structure of Vorlin described here is declared permanent. Any typographical errors found in this document will be corrected, but the fundamental structure of Vorlin will no longer be subject to massive and unpredictable changes. Future developments in Vorlin should mainly consist of additions to the vocabulary, and (on rare occasions) additions to the rule-set. These additions should be compatible and harmonious with the existing language.
Vorlin’s development was organized as a weak dictatorship. I did listen to suggestions, but it was not possible to implement all of them. I called it a “weak dictatorship” because I really had no way to enforce any rules I create.
The language itself is not patented or copyrighted. Anyone may use Vorlin without seeking approval from any central authority.
Persons interested in Vorlin can contact one another directly through Internet media such as the Vorlin Forum, the newsgroup alt.language.artificial, or possibly the Conlang mailing list.
Update, 1 June 2002: I am busy with other activities and do not expect to put any more energy into Vorlin. Persons who want to see Vorlin developed further should carry on without me by individually or collectively developing Vorlin-like languages.
I have attempted to implement the idea of vor by keeping the following design elements in mind:
Vorlin generally has self-segregating morphemes. This means that if you hear a sentence spoken rapidly without pauses between words, you can in most cases use the rules of Vorlin to determine where each morpheme begins and ends, and to reconstruct the locations of the word boundaries. Sentences containing foreign names or loan-words will not always have this quality.
The set of sounds used in Vorlin is similar to the “modal” or “most typical” phonemic inventory of a human language (as described in Patterns of Sounds by Ian Maddieson; Cambridge University Press, 1984). The ratio of consonants to vowels in a sentence generally cannot exceed 2 to 1, and often falls as low as 1 to 1. The potential length of consonant clusters is controlled, and the use of “schwa buffering” is permitted. These features make it relatively easy for most people to learn to pronounce Vorlin, regardless of their native language.
The most frequently used morphemes are generally briefer than uncommon morphemes.
The semantic centers of morphemes will be well-defined, but we acknowledge that we cannot prevent people from metaphorically extending their use to cover related concepts. To draw an atomic analogy, the official definition of each morpheme will be its nucleus, and the actual uses will be the electron cloud.
The syntax is generally unambiguous. Given a strict application of the published rules of syntax, there will usually be only one possible way to analyze the boundaries of phrases, the items to which modifiers are attached, and so forth. However, this goal will not be taken to extremes. Some ambiguities may be permitted in order to preserve the naturalistic “feel” of the language or to keep the number of syntactic rules within reason.
This document is meant to describe the basic structure of the language, and to provide a stable foundation for future development.
I would like to thank the following people for helpful comments, useful information, insightful criticisms and words of encouragement during the first 10 years of the project: Chris Bogart, John Cowan, Edmund Grimley-Evans, Marina Guerrero, Jeffrey Henning, Bertil Jannson, Shawn C. Knight, Crash Knorr, Liu Haitao, Jordi Mas Trullenque, Rick Morneau, Leo J. Moser, Matt Pearson, Steve Rice, John B. Ross, And Rosta, John Schilke, Mark Shoulson, Evgueni Sklyanin, Mark Tierisch, Hiep Truong, Wang Shuxin. Special thanks to Michael Helsem and Felix Wan.
2: The Shapes and Sources of Words
Most Vorlin words are not immediately recognizable “at first sight” to the speakers of any particular natural language or group of languages. This is part of the cultural neutrality designed into the lexicon. It is also a way of reducing the influence of “false friends” (pseudo-cognates) and helping to prevent incoming words from bringing along too much of their idiomatic baggage. Vorlin tries to find a middle ground between the fairness but difficulty of memorization that a completely random or a priori vocabulary would have, and the unfair ease of memorization for a minority of people that exists in most a posteriori planned languages.
Although you will not recognize Vorlin words at first sight, you will probably find that their a posteriori heritage makes them easier to remember than randomly-generated words would be. This is especially true if you already have some familiarity with the world’s major languages and if you take the time to read the etymologies of Vorlin words as you encounter them. Nobody could be expected to guess that bom means “tree,” but knowing that this word is inspired by German Baum and Dutch boom can aid in memorizing the word.
Vorlin adopts most of its words from Germanic, Slavonic, Latinate and Sinitic languages. I would have preferred to include a little material from even more language families, but most other language families either contain relatively few words of the correct consonant-vowel-consonant shape, or they have phoneme inventories that are not compatible with Vorlin’s.
A few of Vorlin’s words are newly invented a priori constructions, and a few are taken from other artificial languages and extinct natural languages.
Vorlin is a noun-based language. Most verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are derived from nouns by adding affixes. This adds a degree of predictability to the vocabulary, although on close inspection you will see that there are still some unpredictable features that simply have to be memorized, as with any language.
A somewhat noun-based vocabulary seems worthwhile because nouns are generally easier to translate from one tongue to another than other parts of speech. Additionally, one of the most irregular features of most natural languages is their verb argument structure. For example, there are some verbs that cannot have a direct object, some that require two direct objects (e.g. “she called Einstein a genius”), some that require one direct object, and so forth. In Guide to Patterns and Usage in English, A. S. Hornby identified 25 different verb argument structures. Reducing the number of verbs reduces these irregularities, and in theory Vorlin has taken to this idea to the limit, having only two verbs: the intransitive i and the transitive o.
The following constraints on morpheme design make it easy to determine the boundaries between morphemes within a compound or derivative word, and also reduce the frequency of hard-to-pronounce consonant clusters. (A “morpheme” is a building-block from which words are made; for example, the English word undoubtedly consists of four morphemes: the prefix un-, the verb doubt, the suffix -ed and the suffix -ly.)
All nouns have the form IVF, IVMVF, IVMVMVF, IVMVMVMVF, etc.
I (initial) = b, c, d, f, g, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z
M (medial) = b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, z
F (final) = b, c, d, f, g, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, z, µ
As a general rule, 3-letter nouns refer to broad, generic concepts and high-frequency ideas; longer nouns refer to less frequent items and very specific concepts such as particular substances and phenomena.
Polysyllabic nouns cannot end with VC (vowel-consonant) combinations that are reserved for use as derivational suffixes.
The constraints listed above do not apply to “proper nouns” such as the names of cultures and individual humans. The names of the letters j, w, x, y also deviate from the rules.
Morphemes that are not nouns can have different phonetic shapes. Suffixes may have forms such as V, VC, VCC, and SVC (where S = semivowel w or y). Function-words such as conjunctions and special particles may have forms like CV, CSV, CVV, or CVhV.
Vorlin’s character set (alphabet, numerals and punctuation marks) is similar to those of English and other West European languages. Each line of text is written horizontally from left to right.
Each written symbol represents one sound, or rather a narrow range of very similar sounds that will all be interpreted by a listener as the same element of speech.
a: as in “father” (open, central, not rounded)
b: as in “bubble” (voiced bilabial plosive)
c: like the “sh” in “ship” (voiceless postalveolar fricative)
d: as in “deed” (voiced dental or alveolar plosive)
e: When e is followed by a consonant within a word, it is like the “e” in “ten men” (open-mid, front, not rounded). When e occurs at the end of a word, it is longer and more like the “ey” in “they” but hopefully without the diphthongal off-glide which occurs in English (close-mid, front, not rounded)
f: as in “fluff” (voiceless labiodental or bilabial fricative)
g: as in “gargle”, not as in “ginger” (voiced velar plosive)
h: as in “hot” (voiceless glottal fricative)
i: as in “machine” and “ski” (close, front, not rounded)
j: as in French “bonjour.” This sound is also heard in the English words “vision, pleasure, azure.” (voiced postalveolar or retroflex fricative)
k: as in “key-stroke” (voiceless velar plosive)
l: as in “lull” (alveolar lateral approximant)
m: as in “memory” (voiced bilabial nasal)
n: as in “noon” (voiced alveolar nasal)
o: as in “note,” Spanish “ocho” (close-mid, back, rounded or semi-rounded)
p: as in “pop” (voiceless bilabial plosive)
r: preferably a trill (voiced uvular or alveolar trill); those who have difficulty producing a trill may use the retroflex approximant “r” of central US English
s: as in “sissy”, not as in “rose” (voiceless alveolar fricative)
t: as in “tight” (voiceless dental or alveolar plosive)
u: as in “truth,” German “du” (close, back, rounded)
v: as in “valve” (voiced labiodental fricative)
w: as in “water” (semi-vowel; essentially a brief u with exaggerated puckering of the lips)
x: represents the schwa phoneme and is mainly used in the transcription of non-Vorlin names; see chapter 10
y: as in “yes” and “yo-yo” (semi-vowel)
z: as in “zigzag” (voiced alveolar fricative)
µ: the sound of “ng” in “sing” (velar nasal)
The final letter in Vorlin’s alphabet does not exist in the English alphabet. In properly printed Vorlin publications, this letter takes the form of either “eng” or “n with crossed tail.” (See illustration below.)
![[ image ]](/web/20041015210101im_/http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/v99nasals.gif)
Some fans of Vorlin prefer “eng” because it is readily available in Unicode and International Phonetic Alphabet fonts, and is found in printers’ typefaces made for some natural languages including Sami (Lapp) and Mandinka.
I advocate the use of the “n with crossed tail” character because it is more distinctive from n, leading to fewer errors in reading and writing. Having a unique character in the Vorlin alphabet adds to the distinctiveness and recognizability of the language, in much the same way as the profusion of umlauts marks Volapük and the circumflexed consonants identify Esperanto.
Is “n with crossed tail” merely a glyph variant of “eng” or a totally distinct character? This question is unresolved at the present time. If the vast majority of Vorlin users adopt “n with crossed tail,” we could reasonably call it a distinct character. A computer file containing (for example) both Vorlin text and an IPA transcription of the pronunciation would require a font that contained both the IPA “eng” glyph and Vorlin’s “n with crossed tail” glyph, with separate codepoints for storing the two glyphs. On the other hand, if most Vorlinists use “eng,” it would be logical to say that “n with crossed tail” is merely a stylistic variant of the “eng” character, not worthy of its own codepoint in a data transmission protocol.
When using a computer that is limited to 8-bit fonts (up to 256 characters), Vorlin text is usually stored and transmitted using the “Latin 1” (ISO 8859-1) character set with one modification: Vorlin’s “eng” or “n with crossed tail” character replaces the “micro sign” glyph (position $B5). When this protocol is used, viewing a Vorlin document only requires the reader to switch from a standard Latin 1 font to a font containing the unusual glyph. And even when such a font is not available, the text is still quite legible using a Latin 1 font.
The letter q may be used as a substitute for the proper glyph when Vorlin text is composed on an English-language typewriter and in computer systems that cannot use “eng” or the “micro sign” protocol. (Earlier versions of Vorlin used the letter q to represent the velar nasal consonant because the shape of q vaguely resembles the shape of “eng.”)
Voiced consonants should not be aspirated. It does not matter whether voiceless consonants are aspirated or not.
Occasionally a hard-to-pronounce consonant pair, such as sz or pd, will occur in a compound word. (A consonant pair that is easy for an English speaker to pronounce might be difficult for a native speaker of Russian or Chinese, and vice versa.) In that case, it is permissible in spoken Vorlin to insert a schwa between the two consonants. (“Schwa” is the brief, blurry-sounding vowel heard at the beginning of the English words about, ago, around. It is represented by an upside-down e in the International Phonetic Alphabet.)
Depending on the language being discussed, to “stress” a syllable means to pronounce it with greater loudness and/or slightly higher pitch and/or slightly longer duration than the other syllable(s) in the word.
Mastering another language’s system of stress is often very difficult. For example, English has three or four different levels of stress, and the written language provides no information about stress; the noun “record” is stressed on the first syllable and the verb “record” is stressed on the final syllable, yet their written forms are identical.
Patterns of stress that affect the loudness and duration of certain syllables exist in English and other Germanic languages, as well as the Latinate languages such as Spanish. However, this phenomenon is (nearly) absent from Japanese and many Sino-Tibetan languages. In those languages, the loudness and duration of syllables tend to be more uniform, with increases being used only occasionally to signal special emphasis of a concept.
Either style of stressing syllables is acceptable in Vorlin. You may either use a metronomic, quasi-Japanese style of pronounciation that gives nearly equal loudness and duration to every syllable; or you may use the other system which we will call Option Two, for lack of a better name.
Option Two contains some complexities that come from Vorlin’s design goals and from its association with the languages that provide vocabulary. Here are the rules of Option Two:
A stressed syllable has greater loudness and slightly higher pitch than the surrounding syllables. Duration of a syllable in Option Two Vorlin is generally a function of the number of phonemes; bom occupies more time than the suffix -a.
Generally speaking, the final syllable of a polysyllabic stand-alone noun will receive the stress (e.g. tomat, banan)
The pseudo-suffixes -as, -er, -is, -os, -um, -us are used to mark words from certain Indo-European sources. Nouns ending with these VC couplets are stressed on the next-to-last syllable. This applies to completely Vorlinized words (e.g. zomer, liter) and to immigrant words that have not yet obtained full citizenship (e.g. hemerokalis).
Most bound suffixes (-a, -o, -ist) cannot receive primary stress. However, bound suffixes that have a VC shape do receive primary stress (salo, saloz). This rule prevents potential blurring of word boundaries and maximizes the difference between pairs such as salis and saliz.
Prefixes like kan and non may receive primary stress due to their semantic importance.
Multi-noun compounds have a falling pitch contour, e.g. in fulgan both syllables have equal loudness but the first has a higher pitch. If one or more of the roots in a multi-noun compound is polysyllabic, all of its syllables share the same pitch, but the original loudness difference of the syllables lingers: in mikanbom, the syllable kan is loudest; mi and kan are at the same pitch, which is higher than bom.
A declarative sentence may have a level or gradually falling tone contour. An interrogative sentence may have a level or rising tone contour. The intonation of individual phrases within a larger sentence will vary from one person to another, reflecting each speaker’s native language and personal style. Make a distinct pause at the end of each sentence.
An interrogative sentence should end with a question mark (?). Other types of sentence may end with a period (.), exclamation point (!) or colon (:). The exclamation point indicates a high level of emotional intensity. The colon indicates that the sentence in question introduces or invokes the next sentence. These four marks can only be used to indicate the ends of sentences, with this exception: the colon can be used to express times (as in 23:59:59) and mathematical ratios (as in 2:1). The period cannot be used to indicate abbreviations or initials as it is in English.
Most European languages use a comma to represent the decimal point, while English uses a period; and so we may find “pi” approximated as “3,14159” or “3.14159” depending on the language of the author. In Vorlin, the “middle dot” character (Unicode 00B7, HTML entity name ·) represents the decimal point: 3·14159
Other punctuation marks such as commas and parentheses are not currently included in the design of Vorlin. They can be added later if needed.
Most Vorlin words are written entirely in lower-case letters. Vorlin does not automatically “capitalize” the first letter of a sentence. Only proper nouns and their derivatives begin with upper-case letters. For example, the proper noun Yovis (Jupiter) and the derived adjectives Yovisa (Jovian) and nonYovisa (non-Jovian) all contain an upper-case letter at the beginning of the proper noun.
In the alphabetical sorting of Vorlin wordlists, the velar nasal consonant (“eng” or “n with crossed tail”) appears after z. If the material being sorted contains vowels with accent marks and other extended Latin characters (used to transcribe non-Vorlin names), the velar nasal consonant (“eng” or “n with crossed tail”) appears after z and before “A with acute accent.”
Alphabetic languages have names for the letters they use; e.g. in English we refer to Z as “zee” (in the US) or “zed” (in the UK). The table below gives the Vorlin words that refer to each glyph. The names of most voiced consonants contain the vowel e and most unvoiced consonants have u; this makes them very distinct from one another, moreso than English pairs such as “bee” and “pee.”
| a | lac | j | jej | t | tut | ||
| b | beb | k | kuk | u | luc | ||
| c | cuc | l | lel | v | vev | ||
| d | ded | m | mom | w | wu | ||
| e | hec | n | nar | x | hxc | ||
| f | fuf | o | hoc | y | yi | ||
| g | geg | p | pup | z | zez | ||
| h | huz | r | rer | µ | raµ | ||
| i | lic | s | sus |
Unlike English, Vorlin does not mark nouns for the quality known as definiteness. (English does this with the definite article “the” and the indefinite article “a, an.”) The rules that govern the usage of articles vary from language to language, and are sometimes a great difficulty for people whose native languages do not have articles. (Many languages, including Russian and Chinese, do not have articles).
Vorlin also does not mark nouns for singular/plural status. (Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, and many other natural languages also do not mark this distinction.)
Thus, the Vorlin word ful might be translated into English as “bird” or “the bird” or “a bird” or “birds” or “the birds” or “some birds,” depending on context. Of course, Vorlin allows more precision when it is needed: you can say yun ful = one bird, men ful = more than one bird, tan men ful = these birds, and so forth.
Possession is indicated by placing the particle es after the possessor and before the possessed. Erik es hus = Erik’s house. The type of possession indictaed by es is vague, usually indicating ownership by law or custom (e.g. “Erik’s car”), or usage or consumption (e.g. “Erik’s apartment” or “Erik’s beer”).
A common noun can be converted to a proper noun by placing the particle nas before it and capitalizing the first letter: bab = a gate, the gate; nas Bab = someone or something named “Gate.”
The personal pronouns are:
ya : I/me
ti : you
ku : he/him/she/her
Add -s to form possessives: yas (my), tis (your), kus (his/her). Think of this -s suffix as a contraction of the particle es. The possessive forms of the personal pronouns are used quite frequently, so it seems desirable that they be monosyllabic.
Unlike nouns, these three pronouns are assumed to be singular unless marked as plural. Add men (which means “more than one”) to create the plurals menti (you plural) and menku (they/them). It is possible to say menya (we/us), or you might prefer the less ambiguous option of saying the equivalent of “you and I” or “they and I” or “you and they and I.” (Note that men has become attached to the subsequent pronoun, e.g. there is no space between the two morphemes in menti.)
Vorlin, like many other languages, does not have a single word corresponding to all uses of the English pronoun “it.” This is because “it” has many different functions: sometimes it signals the presence of an impersonal verb (e.g. “it is raining”), sometimes it refers to something that has already been mentioned, sometimes it refers to something that is about to be mentioned (e.g. “it seems strange that you are laughing”), and sometimes it is shorthand for “the most important thing” as in the political proverb “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Vorlin does not have impersonal verbs; we say the equivalent of “rain is falling” instead of “it’s raining.” In referring to something which has already been mentioned, you can repeat the noun which names that thing (which is not a great burden, since the most common nouns in Vorlin are only one syllable in length). Vorlin also has a special pronoun that means “the idea of the previous sentence” and demonstratives corresponding to “the previously-mentioned,” “the about-to-be-mentioned,” and so forth.
Vorlin creates its verbs by attaching the suffixes -i and -o to nouns. The suffix -i is intransitive and means “to engage in the specified process or activity” or “to be in the specified state or condition.” The suffix -o is transitive and means “to do process X to Y” or “have relationship X toward Y.”
The suffix -i is most often used to indicate intransitive activities such as sedi “sit,” lopi “run,” sofi “sleep,” and so forth.
When attached to a noun that names a condition or abstract quality, -i forms a stative verb: guti = is good, rodi = is red.
In general, -i is not attached to nouns which refer to substances, objects, and other tangible things.
From the point of view of an English-speaking person, the meaning of o varies somewhat depending on the noun (or other root-word) to which it is attached.
When used with a noun that refers to an activity or process, o means “do the process or activity to something.” bev (drinking) + o = bevo (to drink something); mim (imitation) + o = mimo (to imitate).
As an extension of the previous item, when the noun refers to an emotion, o means “feel that emotion toward...” Vorlin is more consistent about this than English and other unplanned languages, so be careful when translating terms of emotion into Vorlin. (Rather than saying “that interests me” or “she makes me angry,” a speaker of Vorlin says the equivalent of “I do fascination to that” or “I do anger to her.”) fob (fear) + o = fobo (to be afraid of, to fear)
When used with a noun that refers to a relationship, o means “have the relationship toward something.” sen (lack, absence) + o = seno (to lack, be without)
o can mean “apply the named substance to something else.” sal (salt) + o = salo (to salt something). Note: fumo (to smoke something) means “apply smoke to something,” as in “to smoke turkey meat.” fumo cannot mean “extract smoke from something” as in the English expression “to smoke a cigarette.”
Every Vorlin noun which describes an activity is considered to be either inherently transitive or inherently intransitive. This is very different from English, in which many verbs can switch from intransitive to transitive without any change in form, e.g. one can say “a pile of leaves is burning” or “he is burning a pile of leaves.” The two uses of "burn" in those sentences really have two different meanings, so we should not be surprised to find that Vorlin (and other languages) would use two different words to express them.
Some will say that having to memorize the transitivity of an action-word is an unnecessary burden on the memory, like having to memorize the arbitrary gender of a German noun. However, Vorlin’s approach to this is necessary in order to have predictable derivation of related words from a single root. Furthermore, the memorization process is easier if you learn the actual meaning of a Vorlin noun or verb rather than thinking of it as an encoding of some English word. If you think of bad as meaning “the act of immersing something in water or another liquid in order to cleanse or otherwise improve it,” you will make fewer mistakes than if you assume that bad equals English "bathing."
The fixed transitivity of Vorlin action-nouns has these noteworthy side-effects:
The -o suffix must sometimes be used in sentences that do not have an explicity stated direct object: ya fajo = I am eating (something).
Many verbs that can either be intransitive or transitive in English are expressed as intransitive or causative in Vorlin. For example, men buk buli = some books are engaged in combustion; ku bulikso men buk = he/she is causing some books to engage in combustion.
Some concepts that are considered intransitive in English are expressed in Vorlin by means of a transitive verb and the reflexive pronoun sig. The English sentence “I took a bath” is translated into Vorlin as ya pe bado sig.
A causative is a verb form indicating that someone causes another entity to do something. Although English does not use affixes to convert existing verbs to causative forms, other natural languages including Turkish, Georgian and Tongan do have this useful feature. Regular formation of causatives has two benefits: it shortens potentially cumbersome phrases, and reduces the number of morphemes that a student must memorize. Show essentially means “cause to see” and feed usually means “cause to eat,” so if we can form the causatives in a predictable manner from their semantic roots, the mnemonic burden is reduced.
The suffix -kso converts an intransitive verb to a causative:
ku lopi. He/she ran.
ya lopikso ku. I made him/her run.
lin mer guti. The language is better.
ti mergutikso lin. You improved the language.
The affix -aks- converts a transitive verb to a causative. A phrase containing -aks- has a more complex argument structure than a non-causative transitive verb phrase. The “causer” takes the subject’s position in the sentence, and the “causee” (the entity that has been caused to do something) is tagged by the preposition re.
ti vido buk. You see the book.
ya vidakso buk re ti. I show you the book.
kat fajo ful. A cat eats a bird.
ku fajakso ful re kat. He caused a cat to eat a bird. = He fed a cat a bird.
Vorlin’s verbs are not conjugated or inflected to indicate tense. When the time of an occurrence is relevant but not obvious from context, it is indicated by adverbs and adverbial phrases equivalent to yesterday, recently, soon, five years ago, etc.
Vorlin does not have a single verb corresponding to the English copula “be, is, am, are.” English “be” expresses several different ideas: existence, location, equivalence, membership in a category, etc. Each of these ideas is represented by its own noun-converted-to-verb in Vorlin: haji means “exist,” loko means “be located at...,” etc.
The feeling which English expresses with the passive voice of verbs can be expressed in Vorlin by replacing the subject with man as in man pelo ya, “I got pushed, I was pushed, somebody pushed me.” You might recognize man as the “null pronoun” from the German phrase man spricht Deutsch which means “German is spoken (here).”
Verbs can be chained together in the following manner: ya vilo hobo libo ku = I want (to) cease (to) love him/her, I want to stop loving him/her. The final verb is either transitive or intransitive, according to its meaning; the initial verb(s) will normally be transitive: ti vilo sedi ma? = do you want to sit down?
Due to the prohibition of parataxis mentioned in chapter 11, Vorlin does not allow us to insert nouns or pronouns into the serial verb phrases; “I want you to sit” should be expressed as ya vilo ke ti sedi instead of *ya vilo ti sedi.
Adding the suffix -a to a noun creates an adjective meaning either “characterized by” or “pertaining to.” Examples: ful = bird, fula = avian; gut = goodness, guta = good; son = sound, sona = sonic.
The suffix -a by itself is brief but ambiguous; if you need more precision, you have other options. The suffix -oz means “having a larger than usual amount or heavier than normal concentration of”; -uc means “having an ordinary amount or typical concentration of”; and -iz means “having a smaller than ordinary amount or thinner than average concentration of.” (These words ending with -oz, -uc, -iz are adjectives.)
Additionally, you can use -tefa to indicate that X pertains to Y, -hava to indicate that X “has” or “is furnished with” Y, or -sena to indicate that X lacks or “is without” Y.
Examples:
lin : language
lintefa : pertaining to language(s)
sal : salt
salsena : saltless, devoid of salt, “salt-free”
bom : tree
boma / bomtefa : arboreal, pertaining to trees
bomhava : tree-ed, having tree(s)
bomsena : tree-less, devoid of trees
bomoz : having a large quantity of trees, a dense tree population
bomuc : having an ordinary concentration of trees
bomiz : having a sparse tree population, having few trees
When used with color words, -iz means “very much diluted in white,” for example, roda = red, rodiz = pink.
Adding -e to a root-word forms an adverb. The -e suffix has a meaning similar to “in the manner of” or “using a method involving...” It is somewhat similar to the English suffix -ly. Examples: gut = goodness, gute = well; mal = badness, male = poorly, badly.
The special adverbs les “less,” mer “more,” and gam “to the same degree” form the comparatives. They often occur with the preposition pinu “than, compared to.”
tan hus gam guti pinu tun hus. This house is as good as yonder house.
yas fac les rodi pinu tis fac. My face is less red than yours.
mer luka ful mer gute gani. A happier bird sings better.
By the way, les, gam and mer can be used as prefixes in the creation of compound words: ne mermalikso zak = don’t worsen matters; fem leslukikso han = the female caused the male to be less happy.
Demonstratives (words like “this” and “those”) are a special class of words. They behave like adjectives, but if there are several adjectives in a phrase, the demonstrative will “float” to the beginning of the phrase.
Like Japanese, Georgian, Old English and many other languages, Vorlin’s demonstratives have a three-way distinction: tan “this, these” refers to something near the speaker, tin “that, those” refers to something near the addressee (the person to whom the speaker is talking), and tun “yonder” refers to something which is relatively distant from both the speaker and the addressee. Note that the sequence of vowels in tan, tin, tun is the same as in ya, ti, ku.
The basic cardinal numerals are:
nom (0)
yun (1), dus (2), san (3)
kad (4), lim (5), tor (6)
zib (7), hog (8), nev (9)
dek (10)
bak (100)
taz (1000)
milon (1,000,000)
bilar (1,000,000,000)
For the sake of discussion, we will call the numerals dek, bak, taz, milon, bilar “powers-of-ten words.” Prefixing a numeral-word ranging from 2 to 9 onto a powers-of-ten word indicates multiplication. Therefore, dusdek means “twenty,” tordek means “sixty,” etc. Note that dek by itself means “ten;” it is not necessary to say *yundek.
In naming integers larger than ten, we create a compound word, starting with the multiple of the largest powers-of-ten word and working our way down to the hundreds, tens, and units. These words are written with spaces after each powers-of-ten word. Examples: 11 = dek yun, 21 = dusdek yun, 365 = sanbak tordek lim.
Ordinal numerals are created by adding -um: yunum = the first, dusum = the second, etc.
hem represents “half.” Other fractions are formed by adding per-: perkad = one quarter, one fourth; dus perlim = two fifths, 2/5.
Serial numbers, such as telephone numbers and the names of years, are normally recited digit by digit: the year 1972 is called yun nev zib dus.
These quantifiers are also worth mentioning:
yuwem = one and a half
piz = pi (3.14159...)
kec = more than zero
men = more than one
Many relationships that are expressed with prepositions in English are expressed by transitive verbs in Vorlin. This may seem surprising to someone only familiar with English and its relatives, but many languages around the world handle these concepts in a similar manner.
Even in English, prepositions resemble transitive verbs in several ways: 1.) Either a preposition or a transitive verb must be accompanied by two arguments, a “subject” and an “object.” 2.) One preposition can take another as its object in a manner similar to serial verbs, e.g. “she ran from behind the bushes.” 3.) Prepositions can be modified by adverbs, e.g. “from his position slightly above the others...” 4.) In many cases an English preposition can be replaced by a relative clause containing a transitive verb, or by a transitive verb’s active participle: “a person without money” = “a person who lacks money” = “a person lacking money.”
Since prepositions are merely verbs in disguise, it seems logical for Vorlin to derive prepositions from nouns in the same way that it derives verbs from nouns. Vorlin converts nouns that refer to abstract relationships into transitive verbs by adding the suffix -o: ya deso Erik es hus = I left Erik’s house, I departed from Erik’s house; roda ful loko mikanbom = the red bird is located at the tangerine-tree. These verbs can be converted to prepositions by changing the o to u: son desu Erik es hus mali = the sound (coming) from Erik’s house is unpleasant; ful loku mikanbom vido tis kat = the bird at the tangerine-tree sees your cat.
Prepositions have a relatively high degree of polysemy and idiomatic usage in most natural languages. For example, the English preposition “with” means possessing in “person with money,” accompanying in “went to the cinema with her,” using in “stabbed him with a fountain pen,” in proportion to in “the pressure varies with depth,” supporting or agreeing in “are you with us or against us,” opposing in “had a fight with his wife” or “at war with Mars”... and those are only a few of the meanings listed in a good dictionary! Deriving prepositions from well-defined nouns is expected to protect Vorlin’s prepositions from acquiring multiple disparate meanings.
There are a few prepositions that are not formed by adding -u to a noun. Some of these perform special syntactic functions, such as ze. Others such as par have remained in the vocabulary from Old Vorlin, and have been allowed to retain their CVC shape for two reasons: (1) They perform special functions such as tagging verb arguments, therefore it seems reasonable to allow them to retain a phonological shape different from ordinary relational prepositions; (2) They are used in compound words more often than other prepositions, and their CVC shape makes it less likely that they will create morphological ambiguity.
Technically, any word consisting of more than one morpheme can be called a compound; for example, guti consists of a noun and a verb-suffix and might reasonably be classified as a compound. However, the text that follows deals with multi-noun compounds.
In the formation of compound words, the most significant root-word comes last, and is preceded by its modifiers. For example, ful (meaning “bird”) and hus (“house”) combine to form fulhus (“birdhouse,” which would normally be interpreted to mean a man-made dwelling-structure for birds); ful plus gan (which means “song”) produces fulgan (“birdsong,” the song of birds) or ganful (“songbird,” a bird associated with singing). Generally speaking, the final noun indicates the broad concept, and the preceding noun(s) modify or restrict its meaning; together they create a single lexical unit that can eventually (through ongoing usage) come to acquire a very specific denotation.
The exact relationship between the items in a compound is somewhat variable (e.g. fulgan means “the singing which is done by birds,” and ganful means “a bird whose most note-worthy characteristic is singing.”). I know there are some ambiguphobes (people having an unusually strong dislike of ambiguity) who object to this variability. However, this is how compounds work in the human languages to which Vorlin is most closely related. Furthermore the number of variations is not as large as some ambiguphobes claim. For example, if a two-noun compound ends with a noun that describes a transitive action, it’s a safe bet that the first noun is the object (or “patient” if you like) of the action; other patterns of predictability are evident.
polar opposites
The opposite meaning of a word (if a binary opposite would make any sense) can be formed by adding the prefix kan-. Thus guta means “good” and kanguta means “bad,” fula means “avian” (pertaining to birds) so kanfula would be a nonsense word and would not be used in normal communication. Do not equate kan- with English “un-.” There is nothing equal to kan- in English, although it is somewhat similar to contra- in the medical term “contra-indicated,” and anti- in “anti-matter.”
Some commonly-used root-words have been given separate opposites. For example, mala has the same meaning as kanguta. These opposites prevent monotonous over-use of kan- and increase the brevity of common words.
The intensive, moderative, and attenuative particles can be added to bi-polar items in order to express finer gradations of meaning; the resulting words usually do not have exact equivalents in English: gutoz has a meaning similar to English “excellent,” gutuc = “moderately good,” and gutiz = “slightly good, not bad but not wonderful.”
unary opposites
To indicate unary opposites and/or simple negation, use non as a prefix: nonfula tir = non-avian animal(s); nonguta = not good (but not necessarily bad).
If an artificial language is going to be useful for real communication, it must be able to cope with human names and deal with specialized terminology. These are difficult issues in language design, and there is no technique that will satisfy everyone.
A proper noun (sometimes called a “proper name”) is the name of a particular person, city, ethnic group, mountain or other geographical feature, corporation or other business entity, or other highly individuated entity. (Actually, pedants can argue for hours about the definition of this term, and there is considerable variation among natural languages in the handling of proper nouns. Vorlin will develop its own definition as usage increases.) Proper nouns begin with upper-case letters.
Human names are written in the following style:
fra Hernández we Marina (= Ms. Marina Hernández)
her Cmiht we Yóhan (= Mr. Johann Schmidt)
The following rules are the norm for expressing full names in Vorlin:
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This system is a hybrid of the Occidental and East Asian naming protocols, with we added to reduce ambiguity. The system works well for names written in the Roman alphabet consisting of a family name (or something similar) and individual given name(s). However, some cultures have very different ways of formulating names. If members of those cultures begin to use Vorlin, we will try to adopt any suggestions they offer for elegant ways of dealing with their names.
digraphs and special symbols
Vorlin gives you the option of using some special symbols and digraphs to re-spell names of non-Vorlin origin; we can make an effort to preserve the pronunciation of cultures’ and individuals’ names rather than their printed appearance. This intention should not be taken to extremes, however, as Vorlin cannot absorb dozens and dozens of additional phonemes (plus distinctions of vowel length, aspiration, tone contour, etc.) solely for such a specialized purpose. From a pragmatic point of view, it seems to reasonable to start by providing symbols to create reasonably good transcriptions of the names used in the language groups that have the largest populations (i.e. Chinese/Sinitic, English/Germanic and Spanish/Latinate).
Below is the initial set of digraphs and extended Latin characters for transcribing proper nouns.
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The use of digraphs introduces some ambiguities. A short dash should be used between characters whenever this is needed to prevent ambiguity. For example, the dash makes it possible to distinguish Li-hu from Lih-u.
If it is typographically possible, acute accent marks should be used to indicate the most heavily stressed syllables of multisyllabic non-Vorlin proper nouns, e.g. Fernández.
Very narrowly-defined culture-specific items, such as the names of prepared food dishes (e.g. pizza, vichyssoise), articles of clothing (e.g. fez, sombrero), etc. will retain their “original” or “international” names in Vorlin. It would not be practical, and even if it were practical it might not be desirable, to invent Vorlin nouns or compounds to represent such highly specialized terms. So, Vorlin will have a native term meaning “pasta / noodles,” but it will use the most international available terms for specific types such as spaghetti, ziti, macaroni, and so forth. (There are dozens of types of pasta.)
The following rules govern the handling of such “foreign” terms:
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Example: ya vilo fajo le pitsa = I want to eat pizza.
The question of plant and animal names is especially difficult for planned languages. There are thousands of species, and when a person wants to mention that he saw a particular kind of bird or that she’s growing a particular kind of vegetable in her garden, the language must provide a way to communicate the idea clearly.
Some language designers have suggested using the scientific (neo-Latin) species names, such as Helianthus annuus for “sunflower.” From the viewpoint of Vorlin’s design, using these neo-Latin binomials without modification would not be practical for several reasons:
In many cases, there are two neo-Latin terms in widespread use for the same specie. Scientists sometimes agree that a specie should be moved from one genus to another, thus the citrus rootstock plant formerly called Citrus trifoliata is now tagged Poncirus trifoliata. Due to these competing terms and changes over the course of time, the binomials are not really stable enough to serve as a foundation for a human vocabulary.
In some cases, the binomial of a species is not specific enough for everyday conversational purposes. The vegetables kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts are all members of the species Brassica oleracea according to some botanists, while others call broccoli and cauliflower varieties of the species Brassica botrytis or Brassica cauliflora, and some refer to cabbage as Brassica capitata or Brassica oleracea var. capitata. Ordinary people are able to unambiguously name these vegetables; the scientific taxonomy is a maze of competing, subjective classification schemes.
The neo-Latin words contain a lot of non-Vorlin digraphs such as ae, ch, oe, ph, th, ii, qu ...
I would recommend a mixed approach for Vorlin. In some cases, suitable CVC(VC) nouns can easily be found for frequently-discussed species, such as tomat (from Dutch tomaat, Russian tomát, with cognates in many other languages) for “tomato.” In other cases, a compound that is sufficiently widespread and reasonably descriptive might be emulated in Vorlin. For example, the disk of a sunflower resembles an icon of the sun, and sunflowers rotate to follow the sun during the day, so naturally many human languages refer to the sunflower with a compound of their words for “sun” and “flower.”
For the less frequently discussed types of plants and animals, a modified (Vorlinized) version of the scientific genus or species name would be appropriate. Hemerocallis (the day-lily genus) can be changed to hemerokalis, for example. In other cases, the people who work with these plant or animal species on a daily basis might choose to invent compounds of Vorlin nouns to describe them, something like “heart(shape)-leaf morning flower vine” for the plant that English-speakers call “morning glory.”
The sentence structure of Vorlin is designed to be a compromise that blends a degree of naturalness with a degree of freedom from syntactic ambiguity. Vorlin’s rules of syntax are an amalgam of patterns from many languages. Vorlin is not meant to be a word-by-word encoding of English (or any other language).
In simple sentences, the word order is SVO (subject, verb, object). A simple intransitive sentence can have SV or VS syntax. Adjectives and adverbs appear before the words which they modify; prepositional phrases generally appear after the items which they modify.
Some people fear that a relatively fixed word order will somehow interfere with the development of poetry and other forms of literature. A quick look at English and Chinese, which have been producing fine literature with relatively fixed word order for several centuries, should be sufficient to dispel that misconception. (In English, the use of unusual syntax to move rhyming words to the ends of phrases is the hallmark of embarrassingly bad poetry.)
“A person unacquainted with language forms might conclude that a language with a simple structure would lead to a dreary style. This is far from true. Every structure, in the hands of an artist, lends itself to beautiful effects.” - Kenneth L. Pike
There are three main types of valid sentence in Vorlin: the vocative phrase, the fragment, and the full sentence.
A vocative phrase gives the name or description of the person who is being spoken to, or attracts the attention of the person being spoken to. English examples: a phrase like “dear Mister Jones” at the beginning of a letter, or “hello, Elizabeth” at the beginning of a conversation. In Vorlin, a vocative phrase must begin with a vocative particle; this may optionally be followed by one or more noun phrases, such as name(s). A vocative phrase may optionally end with a sentence-final particle. Examples:
yo! = Hey! You there! Yo, dude!
yo Migel ma? = Miguel? (Is that you?)
laho Migel. = Hello, Miguel.
yo her Cmiht we Yóhan: = Mister Johann Schmidt:
A fragment consists of a few words or a short phrase, and does not contain a verb or a vocative particle. Fragments are rare in formal writing and are common in casual conversation.
guta! = Good!
san ma? = Three?
ne! = Don’t do it!
A full sentence must contain a verb phrase, and any sentence containing a verb phrase is classified as a full sentence. A full sentence may optionally begin with one or more modal particles. A full sentence may optionally include adverb phrases or prepositional phrases at the beginning that modify the whole sentence. The next optional item is the noun phrase which is the subject of the verb. Next comes the mandatory verb phrase. If the verb is transitive, it may be followed by the direct object, and this may be followed by the beneficiary. Toward the end of the full sentence we may optionally include one or more adverb phrase(s) and/or prepositional phrase(s) that modify the verb phrase. At the very end of the sentence we may optionally include a sentence-final particle.
A declarative sentence can be turned into a question simply by inserting the word ma at the end. ti vido ya ma? = Do you see me? The answer consists of the main verb from the question, with or without the negative particle non. vido. = Yes, I see you. non vido. = No, I don’t see you.
The presence of an interrogative word (such as the equivalent to “where?” or “what?”) does not cause a change in word order.
The term “apposition” refers to a phrase in which two nouns are adjacent, refer to the same entity, and do not have a conjunction or preposition between them. English examples are “the playwright Shakespeare” and “John the baptist.” Apposition is not permitted in Vorlin. The special preposition ze, meaning “which I further specify as ...”, is used to deal with these situations: bur ze Cikágo = the city (of) Chicago, Tomas ze kurnik = Thomas the health-care professional. These phrases have a “topic-comment” syntax, i.e. the thing being discussed is mentioned first, followed by ze and the comment (further specification).
The term “parataxis” refers to two phrases or sub-sentences appearing side by side without an intervening conjunction to indicate how they are related. English examples are “I know she loves me” and “if you visit my house, I’ll show you my garden.” In Vorlin (as in many other languages), parataxis is not permitted, and one must say the equivalent of “I know that she loves me” or “if you visit my house, then I’ll show you my garden.”
A relative clause is a certain type of phrase that modifies a noun. An English example is “that modifies a noun” in the previous sentence. In English, a relative clause must always occur after the noun which it modifies; approximately half of the world’s languages put relative clauses before the modified noun. An example, from Mandarin Chinese:
Ni gei wo de zhè zhibi feicháng hao.
you give me de this pen extraordinary good
(This pen that you gave me is very nice.)
In the example, the particle de essentially converts the phrase “you gave me” into a modifier that appears before the noun, almost as if the phrase had become an ordinary adjective.
Vorlin also places relative clauses before the nouns to which they are attached. The relative clause must begin with wel and end with da. Here are a few examples, followed by literal, semi-literal, and free translations into English.
ne libo wel non kuno libo ti da diµ.
Don’t love wel not can love you da thing.
Don’t love an unable-to-love-you-ish thing.
Don’t love a thing that cannot love you.
wel havo roda bar da linhakist loko mikanbom.
wel have red beard da language-creator be-located-at tangerine-tree.
Have-red-beard-ish language-creator is-at tangerine tree.
The redbearded conlanger is over by the tangerine tree.
A certain amount of syntactic chaos in English is caused by the fact that a noun can be followed by relative clauses and/or prepositional phrases, which in turn can contain more relative clauses and/or prepositional phrases. By placing the relative clause in front of its noun and explicitly marking the beginning and end of the phrase, Vorlin avoids a lot of these entanglements.
A relative clause in Vorlin must contain a verb. If the subject of this verb is not specified, we assume that the noun which the clause modifies is the subject of the verb. For example, in the specimens given above, diµ is the subject of the verb phrase non kuno libo, and linhakist is the subject of the verb havo.
However, it is possible for some other noun or pronoun to serve as the subject of the verb within the relative clause. For example:
wel tis kat fajo da ful pe gute gani.
wel your cat eat da bird (past) well sing.
Your-cat-eat-ish bird did well sing.
The bird that your cat ate used to sing nicely.
Just as wel ... da converts a phrase into the equivalent of an adjective, ke ... das turns a phrase into a noun-equivalent. das is normally omitted if it would appear at the end of a sentence.
ke tis kat non fajo ful das guti.
ke your cat not eats bird das be good.
That your cat does not eat birds is good.
ku vilo ke ya fajo tan le pitsa.
He desire ke I eat this pizza.
He wants me to eat this pizza.
Two or three full sentences can be chained together using appropriate conjunctions. In theory it might be possible to link an unlimited number of sentences in this way, but people often get confused or require a lot of extra “processing time” if more than three sentences are involved.
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: the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative which is spelled x in the Pinyin system of romanizing Chinese (spelled hs in Wade-Giles)
: the voiced consonant in Heather
: the voiceless consonant in Thor and Keith
: the consonant at the end of German Bach