How did you personally go about choosing your language's syntax and other related attributes?

[Bob]

There's also no possible way to say that Thomas Jefferson was born in Port Huron, unless there is a spatio-temporal portal between Port Huron and Shadwell VA.

Well, I meant Thomas Edison, the famous inventor.

[Eti]

Here's a late appendix.

Using the advice given as well as some thinking, I've done something a bit experimental, probably over-complicated, but it's bound to happen on my first conlang (I've made the effort to moderate it, so it's not me being lazy and saying "Oh, it's my first one, better trash the place while I'm here"). I wanted something that prevented it from being too similar to English.

So here's some of the neat quirks of the language! Since the writing medium is relatively slow (often dipping fingers in ink or using a crude brush) these behaviors are generally beneficial because writers can trim out a lot of stuff.

Nouns can use dedicated suffixes that denote their state of existence at the current point in time.

• Past-Existence State: A subject or object existed in the past and no longer exists / is long-lost & assumed to be irrecoverable. This might be used if something is destroyed, such as a building, a tool that broke, and can even be used on the names of people to denote their death.

• Anticipated-Existence State: An object is anticipated to come into existence, be delivered or found, or otherwise be acquired in any way. It has similar use cases, but in this case can reference anything that you don't have but will soon have. Similarly to past existence, this can also be used on peoples' names, for instance, on an unborn child.

This has a number of interesting implications. In English this is mostly implicit, but in this language it is leveraged to create a general time frame for a context without needing to actually describe it. For instance, if I am talking about a temple that was destroyed and then rebuilt, I wouldn't have to even describe that there was an old one where the new one is. In English, I'd have to say "Oh, so this temple was destroyed, but we rebuilt it. In the old one..." -- the usage of these dedicated suffixes allows that all to be implicit and is also natural. It cuts a lot of stuff out of the sentence without stripping away too much. It's much faster to write the word for "old temple" instead of having to describe there's an old one and a new one. That, and the use case is intended to be this way. In English people may extrapolate on that, but it may confuse some people depending on who you talk to.

Verbs leverage this noun behavior, and leverage an inherited tense mechanic.
Since "inherited tense" is bound to grab more attention (especially due to its inherent problems) I'll describe that first.

In English, I would have to say "He ate the apple then ran." -- "ate" and "ran" are both in their past tense. In this language, the tense can be inherited from the previous context. "He ate the apple then run" would crudely represent the way to say it. This is generally only used for short or unimportant writing. Of course, this is avoided in important writing (such as a mural, a gravestone, something that will be somewhere for a while) with the anticipation that some of the text may eventually be lost over time, and someone at some point in the future is going to uncover it as history.

In these cases, there's either what are loosely referred to as "refreshing verbs", which are verbs that employ the explicit tense anyway mid to late sentence, even though it's technically unnecessary. Alternatively, and more frequently, if the text is important they just flat out don't use the inherited tense as a means of what would be considered more formal writing (they always use the explicit tense). Finally, the inherited state is reset for every sentence, so every sentence has to define the tense at least once. Should the tense change, a verb with the new tense is used and the inherited state swaps to the new tense. The current state is defined by the latest verb that is read, so defining a tense mid-sentence will only affect the words after it, not before it.

Additionally, the tense of verbs can be avoided if the context of a noun with an existence modifier could potentially define it. Should the noun or subject they reference be in its past or future existence state, the verbs would implicitly be in the same state. Unlike implicit tense, a specific single-letter ending is added to the verb to denote that it should be the same tense as its associated noun, otherwise any inherited tense defined earlier will take precedence. This special behavior changes the inherited state as well.

Ten? Never heard of it.
Since the creatures speaking this language only have six fingers, their counting system is a base six number system. That is, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, ... - Have fun learning. Their number system is otherwise identical to what is used for the Arabic counting system and how places exist, so that it's at least sort of recognizable, especially when using their native number symbols.


So if anything is a bad idea or particularly interesting, lemme know. And again -- thanks for the help, everyone.

[bradrn]

That looks great! A few comments:

Nouns can use dedicated suffixes that denote their state of existence at the current point in time.

• Past-Existence State: A subject or object existed in the past and no longer exists / is long-lost & assumed to be irrecoverable. This might be used if something is destroyed, such as a building, a tool that broke, and can even be used on the names of people to denote their death.

• Anticipated-Existence State: An object is anticipated to come into existence, be delivered or found, or otherwise be acquired in any way. It has similar use cases, but in this case can reference anything that you don't have but will soon have. Similarly to past existence, this can also be used on peoples' names, for instance, on an unborn child.

This has a number of interesting implications. In English this is mostly implicit, but in this language it is leveraged to create a general time frame for a context without needing to actually describe it. For instance, if I am talking about a temple that was destroyed and then rebuilt, I wouldn't have to even describe that there was an old one where the new one is. In English, I'd have to say "Oh, so this temple was destroyed, but we rebuilt it. In the old one..." -- the usage of these dedicated suffixes allows that all to be implicit and is also natural. It cuts a lot of stuff out of the sentence without stripping away too much. It's much faster to write the word for "old temple" instead of having to describe there's an old one and a new one. That, and the use case is intended to be this way. In English people may extrapolate on that, but it may confuse some people depending on who you talk to.

I particularly love this idea! I don’t know if you’ve considered this yet (it sounds like you may not have), but you could even incorporate this into your language’s noun paradigm rather than just giving a couple of affixes — so something like having nouns obligatorily be marked for, say, definiteness, number and existence. If you go down this road, it may be worth finding a few more existence states to mark. Here’s a couple I can think of:

• Present-Existence State: An object which currently exists — the default existence state.
• Remote-Existence State: An object which existed a very long time ago, beyond living experience; includes mythological artefacts.
• Reversible-Existence State: An object which can be reversibly deconstructed and reconstructed as needed.
• Inaccessible-Existence State: An object which is known to exist, but is inaccessible.

And actually, now that I think about this, this seems remarkably similar to a ‘nominal tense’ system. Your ‘past state’ is similar to a past tense, while your ‘anticipated state’ is similar to a future tense. I’m sure I’ve seen a suggestion for such a ‘nominal tense’ system before, but too long ago for me to remember clearly.

Verbs leverage this noun behavior, and leverage an inherited tense mechanic.
Since "inherited tense" is bound to grab more attention (especially due to its inherent problems) I'll describe that first.

In English, I would have to say "He ate the apple then ran." -- "ate" and "ran" are both in their past tense. In this language, the tense can be inherited from the previous context. "He ate the apple then run" would crudely represent the way to say it. This is generally only used for short or unimportant writing. Of course, this is avoided in important writing (such as a mural, a gravestone, something that will be somewhere for a while) with the anticipation that some of the text may eventually be lost over time, and someone at some point in the future is going to uncover it as history.

In these cases, there's either what are loosely referred to as "refreshing verbs", which are verbs that employ the explicit tense anyway mid to late sentence, even though it's technically unnecessary. Alternatively, and more frequently, if the text is important they just flat out don't use the inherited tense as a means of what would be considered more formal writing (they always use the explicit tense). Finally, the inherited state is reset for every sentence, so every sentence has to define the tense at least once. Should the tense change, a verb with the new tense is used and the inherited state swaps to the new tense. The current state is defined by the latest verb that is read, so defining a tense mid-sentence will only affect the words after it, not before it.

Additionally, the tense of verbs can be avoided if the context of a noun with an existence modifier could potentially define it. Should the noun or subject they reference be in its past or future existence state, the verbs would implicitly be in the same state. Unlike implicit tense, a specific single-letter ending is added to the verb to denote that it should be the same tense as its associated noun, otherwise any inherited tense defined earlier will take precedence. This special behavior changes the inherited state as well.

This sounds interesting, but I think you should probably work out the details of this system pretty carefully. For instance: Under exactly which circumstances may tense be inherited? (In conjunctions? In disjunctions? In relative clauses? In subordinate clauses?) How will you distinguish the inherited tense from the present tense, if both are unmarked? And, if a sentence has two tense markers, is the second relative to the current time or the inherited time? (e.g. in a sentence like ‘I eat-PST and I run-FUT’, is FUT relative to the present or the past?)

Ten? Never heard of it.
Since the creatures speaking this language only have six fingers, their counting system is a base six number system. That is, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, ... - Have fun learning. Their number system is otherwise identical to what is used for the Arabic counting system and how places exist, so that it's at least sort of recognizable, especially when using their native number symbols.

This sounds absolutely fine, especially if your speakers have six fingers. (If you want an Earthly precedent, a few Papuan languages have a senary system — e.g. Ndom, and some Yam languages such as Komnzo.)

[Eti]

I particularly love this idea! I don’t know if you’ve considered this yet (it sounds like you may not have), but you could even incorporate this into your language’s noun paradigm rather than just giving a couple of affixes — so something like having nouns obligatorily be marked for, say, definiteness, number and existence. If you go down this road, it may be worth finding a few more existence states to mark. Here’s a couple I can think of:

• Present-Existence State: An object which currently exists — the default existence state.

• Remote-Existence State: An object which existed a very long time ago, beyond living experience; includes mythological artefacts.

• Reversible-Existence State: An object which can be reversibly deconstructed and reconstructed as needed.

• Inaccessible-Existence State: An object which is known to exist, but is inaccessible.

And actually, now that I think about this, this seems remarkably similar to a ‘nominal tense’ system. Your ‘past state’ is similar to a past tense, while your ‘anticipated state’ is similar to a future tense. I’m sure I’ve seen a suggestion for such a ‘nominal tense’ system before, but too long ago for me to remember clearly.

I'll have to consider those propositions. This is definitely something with potential that needs to be used in the best possible manner. As for bringing up the tense, that was partly the intent: I wanted to answer the question of "Is it possible to move tense to nouns and potentially remove it from verbs in certain cases"? Additionally, the appeal of being able to construct more complex thoughts in less space was a super neat idea to me.

This sounds interesting, but I think you should probably work out the details of this system pretty carefully. For instance: Under exactly which circumstances may tense be inherited? (In conjunctions? In disjunctions? In relative clauses? In subordinate clauses?) How will you distinguish the inherited tense from the present tense, if both are unmarked? And, if a sentence has two tense markers, is the second relative to the current time or the inherited time? (e.g. in a sentence like ‘I eat-PST and I run-FUT’, is FUT relative to the present or the past?)

That is a good point. I actually cut out a really confusing system just prior to posting this (some obscure garbage so complicated I'm not gonna bother with it) so I have some reason to suspect that I really didn't think this one through too deeply either. I'll definitely refine this and streamline it because right now it feels really unstable. I want something absolutely solid to build on, so I'll definitely look at some of these points and see what I can't pull off.

Thanks for the response!