2: Basic Sentences and Nouns

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“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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— A Note on Glossing —

We will be seeing many, many example sentences and words from here on out, so a brief explanation is warranted on how glosses work, which are used to break sentences into their grammatical pieces and explain them.

A morpheme is a basic unit of a word. For example, the english word “walked” contains two morphemes: “walk”, meaning “to perambulate ones legs for the purpose of motion”, and “-ed”, marking the past tense. Each morpheme is separated by a hyphen, and grammatical meanings are abbreviated. For example, consider this simple English sentence “I walked”:

I walk-ed
1SG walk-PST

(You will always be able to hover over the little grammatical abbreviations to get a longer description of what it means. Try it out!)

Note that the hyphens in the text match up with the hyphens in the gloss. However, sometimes morphemes will carry multiple pieces of information. In glosses, this is done by separating the distinct meanings that the morphemes convey by a dot, as in the example:

Jason walk-s
Jason walk-PRES.3SG

Tsal glosses will also include a rough English translation of the sentence or word in question.

— Basic Sentence Structure —

Most languages have some distinguished word order for their basic sentences (even those that are more flexible in how often this basic pattern is followed). English, for example, is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language. In the sentence “the cat ate the fish”, it is understood that the cat is the one that did the eating, and the fish was the one that was eaten. If you wish to express the other relationship, you must swap the word order as in “the fish ate the cat”, as the subject is before the verb, and the object is after it.

About 35% of the world’s languages are like English in this way, making it the second most common¹ word order. Tsal uses a less common word order, putting it in the same camp as about seven percent of the world’s languages, including Hawaiian and Classical Arabic: Verb-Subject-Object (VSO). So, to say that the cat ate the fish, a Tsalian would say

Ignore all those extra grammatical bits for now, just focus on the word order. “Eat” is first, then “cat”, then “fish”.

However, Tsal is more flexible in its word order. One common tactic employed by Tsal speakers is to move things to the front of the sentence to show emphasis or relevance.

Suppose, perhaps, that you are eating a meal with your friend and their cat is lounging near the table. You decide to put your plate of unfinished fish down next to the cat’s food, since she’s not a big fan of fish and you’re curious whether the cat will eat its usual meal or your fish. To your surprise, the cat does eat the fish. You might say to your friend

This relationship between position in the sentence and relevance extends further than this. In general, phrases can get moved earlier in a sentence to signal that they are relevant or to emphasize them, and phrases can get moved later in the sentence to background them. For instance, a child, sheepishly admitting to their parents that they broke a vase, might employ a OSV or OVS word order, saying something akin to “vase I broke” or “vase broke I”. But in general, the default word order, conveying no special emphasis on anything in particular, is VSO.

— Noun Cases —

This flexible word order raises an issue: If you allow word-order to change freely, the question of who is doing what to whom becomes more ambiguous. How could you tell if “Ate cat fish” is saying that the cat ate the fish, or that the fish ate the (slightly more relevant) cat?

The solution that Tsal (along with languages such as Latin) use to solve this problem is noun case, in which a given noun is explicitly marked with a case which details its role in the sentence. Old English had an extensive case system, but all that remains of it in modern English is the distinction between pronouns, as in “I”/“me” and “we”/“us”.

Different languages have different numbers of cases. Many languages only have two or three, German has four, Latin has six, Finnish has fifteen, Hungarian has eighteen, and the language Tsez has 39 cases. Another constructed language, Ithkuil, has a whopping 96 cases (as it is designed for dense communication), but fortunately we do not go nearly so mad.

Tsal has the following nine grammatical cases:

• Agentive (AGT)
• Patientive (PAT)
• Dative (DAT)
• Genitive (GEN)
• Vocative (VOC)
• Allative (ALL)
• Ablative (ABL)
• Locative (LOC)

and in addition to the case, nouns can also take a plural marking, like English’s -s, if there are more than one of the thing in question.

We will go over each case’s meanings in turn, and at the end provide the big tables with all the affixes in one place. These will be written in the romanization, instead of the native script.

— The Agentive and Patientive Cases —

Every language (that I know of, at least) that bothers to mark nouns for case has a certain pair of core cases, used to mark subjects and objects of verbs. However, they may work differently under the hood. Consider a transitive verb like “love”, that has both something performing the action (the agent, A) and someone to whom the action is being done (the patient, P). Languages will (in general) mark the agent and the patient with two different cases. So far so good. However, we now consider an intransitive verb like “sleep”, which has only one participant, which we will label S, for “sole participant”. Which case are we to use?

Some languages (like Latin) decide to mark S like A. Such languages are called nominative-accusative, with the nominative case for S/A and the accusative case for P.

Other languages (like Basque) decide instead to mark S like P. Such languages are called ergative-absolutive, with the ergative case for A and the absolutive case for S/P.

You may notice that the title of this section has none of those four words, because of course it is much more complicated than this. Some languages simply give S its own case. Some languages decide based on what type of clause the noun in question is in, or based on semantics of the verb. Tsal is one of these mix-and-match languages. Particularly, Tsal is what is called an active-stative language.

Tsal’s two core cases are the Agentive and Patientive. As one might expect, with a transitive verb, the agent gets the Agentive and the patient gets the Patientive. This is how our example sentence from the previous section worked, and how we always knew it was the cat doing the eating.

However, with an intransitive verb’s sole S, the case depends on context. Consider a verb like nihLix, meaning “to sleep”. If your friend isn’t feeling well and decides to go to bed to get some rest and try to feel better, and later someone asks you where she is, you might use the agentive case and say

On the other hand, suppose your friend got home from a long day of work and was so exhausted, that she sat down on her bed for a moment and just fell asleep because her body couldn’t stay awake. In this case, you would instead use the patientive and say

The difference here is one of volition. If the subject of an intransitive verb is doing the action of their own free will, a Tsal speaker might reason that this makes them more like an agent than a patient, and so would mark them as such. However, if the subject did not have agency, they would be considered more patient-like and thus get the patientive case.

Another factor that may influence which case is used is empathy on the part of the speaker. Using the patientive case highlights a level of sympathy, and thus might be used if the topic of discussion is of a heavy or sensitive nature to the listener. It is for this reason that using the agentive case with the intransitive verb bwehox (“to die”) is considered extremely offensive. Don’t do that in polite company.

It is important to note further that the choice of case is not constant for every verb, and that it is the choice of the speaker to decide based on the particular context of the conversation (though, naturally some verbs may more commonly use one or the other). In fact, some pairs of verbs in English differ primarily on volition, and so may be translated as the same verb in Tsal. One such example is Kwitox, which, depending on the case of the noun, can be translated as either “to slip” or “to slide”.

The agentive case is unmarked in the singular and is marked with -to in the plural.

The patientive case is marked with -(e)ř in the singular and -řo in the plural. (That is, if just suffixing -ř would break syllable rules, suffix -eř)

— The Dative Case —

The dative case is primarily used for the marking of indirect objects of verbs like “to give” that involve three things. For example:

Ignore the extra marking on the verb. That has to do with “to give” being irregular in Tsal.

The dative also has a few other uses:

• To mark the purpose of an action or for whose benefit/detriment the action takes place:

• To mark the agent of a passive verb³:

• To mark a measurement or difference:

• To indicate perspective for verbs of subjective experience or perception like “to seem”:

The dative case is marked with -pā in the singular, and -pao in the plural.

— The Genitive Case —

The genitive case is used to mark that the noun posesses something. Nouns in the genitive go before the nouns they modify:

It can also be used similarly to the English word “of”:

Though in poetic or highly formal speech, the genitive when used in this second manner may appear after its corresponding noun, it usually goes before, as in the first use.

The genitive case is marked with -xa in the singular, and -xano in the plural.

— The Instrumental/Comitative Case —

The instrumental/comitative case, shortened to the instrumental case, is used in two ways:

• To mark the means by which an action occurs or the tool with which it is done:

• To mark that the verb is done alongside something or in association with something:

In some languages (like Finnish), these two uses are two seperate instrumental and comitative cases. In others (like English) they are conevyed by the same constructions (the preposition “with”). Tsal is of the latter group, having one case for both uses.

The instrumental/comitative case is marked with -šub in the singular and -šob in the plural.

— The Vocative Case —

The vocative case is used for direct addressing of the noun:

It is not limited to proper nouns:

and can be inserted into a sentence effectively anywhere so long as it doesn’t split modifiers from their nouns.

The vocative is marked with -de in the singular and -jō in the plural.

— The Allative and Ablative Cases —

The allative and ablative cases are the cases of motion (be it spatial or any other type).

The allative case marks motion towards a noun:

The ablative case marks motion away from a noun:

The allative is marked with -(e)ł in the singular and -ił in the plural.

The ablative is marked with -(e)ž in the singular and -iž in the plural.

— The Locative Case —

The locative case marks a location.

Tsal relies heavily on context to tease out specifically what locational relationship is being conveyed. Depending on the context, one might use the locative case analogously to any of “by”, “at”, “on”, “in”, “about”, and several others. Tsal has some means of being more precise if it is needed, which we will discuss in the section on prepositions.

The locative is marked with -tū in the singular and -two in the plural.

— Summary of Cases —

Here is the full declension table for nouns:

Case	Singular	Plural
Agentive	-∅	-to
Patientive	-(e)ř	-řo
Dative	-pā	-pao
Genitive	-xa	-xano
Inst./Comit.	-šub	-šob
Vocative	-de	-jō
Allative	-(e)ł	-łi
Ablative	-(e)ž	-ži
Locative	-tū	-two

As will become usual, there are some minor irregularities that are basically just some alterations, which will go into the Irregularity Box:

Irregularity Box

V denotes an arbitrary short vowel.

• If a word ends with řV, the patientive singular is marked by removing the vowel, and the patientive plural is marked by replacing the vowel with o (if the vowel was already o, replace it with ō).

— Pronouns —

Tsal has four sets of pronouns: 1st person, 2nd person, two sets of 3rd person pronouns.

The distinction between the 3rd person pronouns is not gender-based. Tsal has no grammatical gender whatsoever, and either 3rd person pronoun can be used with any gender. The pronouns are distinguished based on whether they are proximant or obviate.

The proximate 3rd person pronoun is used for whatever is the most relevant to the current topic of conversation. In that conversation from earlier about an exhausted friend, you would refer to her with the proximate 3rd person, and everything else would be referred to with the obviate 3rd person. Essentially, whatever is most important, salient, topical, or relevant has exclusive rights to the proximate. Of course, if the topic changes throughout the discourse, the referent of the proximate pronoun may change with it, so one must rely on context to discern what is “salient” at any given time.

It is also important to note that being the proximate referent has no correlation with being the subject. For example, if someone is talking about a population of fish that is at risk of extinction, they might say (in English), “One risk to this species is that sharks prey upon them.” The “them” in that sentence is the fish, currently the object, despite being the core topic of discussion and thus getting the proximate.

Here is the full pronoun table. Forms in red are irregular.

Case	1st Person		2nd Person		3rd Person, Proximate		3rd Person, Obviate
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Agentive	ki	koC	cu	cuto	Lo	Dah	naR	zoh
Patientive	Ce	Ceo	do	cuRo	Lon	Lono	naz	ozo
Dative	pwi	pwoh	gat	cupao	loge	Dogo	nage	zago
Genitive	atal	ital	tas	cuxano	Lag	Lig	zag	zig
Instr./Comit.	atale	italob	tase	cuSob	Lage	Ligob	zage	zigob
Vocative	kide	kijoh	cude	cujoh	Lode	Lojoh	naRde	naRjoh
Allative	lak	lako	let	cuLi	lel	lelo	len	leno
Ablative	zek	zeko	zet	cuZi	zel	zelo	Zel	Zelo
Locative	kice	kiCwo	cut	cutwo	teLo	teDah	nacaz	nacwo

One might notice that a lot of the pronouns are irregular. Pronouns are some of the most irregular parts of many languages, and this one is no exception.

In addition, there are, in informal speech, several contractions for commonly used pairs of pronouns involving the first person. These are:

Pair	First Pronoun	Second Pronoun	Contracted Pronoun
1st Agentive + 2nd Patientive	ki	do	kyo
1st Agentive + 3rd Prox. Patientive	ki	Lon	kyon
1st Agentive + 3rd Obv. Patientive	ki	naz	kyaz
2nd Agentive + 1st Patientive	cu	Ce	cwe
3rd Prox. Agentive + 1st Patientive	Lo	Ce	Lwe
3rd Obv. Agentive + 1st Patientive	naR	Ce	nwe

— Adjectives and Noun Phrases —

Adjectives in Tsal are very transparently noun-like. So much so that nouns and adjectives are mostly interchangable. For example, the word “oxlo” is an adjective meaning “red”. It can, naturally, be used alongside a noun:

But can also be used in place of a noun, as a noun:

Similarly, nouns can serve as adjuncts to other nouns:

Adjectives (or nouns acting like adjectives) must always agree in case and number with the noun they modify:

However, sometimes you may find compounds that have fused together into a single word, such as

in this case, the compound is treated exactly as any other word, and so the fused part does not need its own case marking. You may also encounter compounds that are hyphenated, such as

The choice of relatively strange words in this example is intentional. Hyphenated compounds like this are a kind of middle ground between fullly fused compounds and multiple-word noun phrases, and are a very common pathway by which new words are coined. They act like full fusions in that they only take the one normal case ending, and yet a Tsal speaker would say that such a compound is still two different words.

The use of a hyphen in this manner acts as a clue that the connection between the two words is more intrinsic or inherent than if the words were separated. For example, a “mirror worm” might simply be a worm that lives near mirrors (as opposed to some other fixture), whereas a “mirror-worm” might be supernaturally good at mimicry or have a literal silver finish (in a world of magic, this is not too far-fetched!). Then, perhaps, if the biologists study and popularize this creature, its name may be used frequently enough that it does start to be considered a word in its own right, and the hyphen is dropped, marking the birth of a new word. (Such a process sometimes occurs in English! The word “today” used to be hyphenated “to-day”, and before that was two completely seperate words “to day”.)

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Footnotes

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