Gnash (gNassh) - what even is this?
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A brief overview of why Gnash looks the way it does
This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 24 Oct 2021, 02:19.
[comments] gnasintroduction
?FYI...
This article is a work in progress! Check back later in case any changes have occurred.
This article is a work in progress! Check back later in case any changes have occurred.
So, I was utterly bored and created a fantasy artlang.
Meet Gnash (or, when spelled properly, gNassh) - it's a language that's supposed to be spoken by noble dragons who can shapeshift into humans (autoethnonym - gNai). How have a solitary species even developed sentience and language? It's fantasy. We're allowed to be weird.
My aim wasn't to create a language that would be easy to speak - rather, I was aiming for a language that had a vague vibe of having been spoken for centuries. Thus, a lot of things in it are broken.
But let's start with the basics (I won't write anything you can already see on the summary page).
Technically, Gnash only has two main parts of speech - pronoun and verb. Both are essential to forming any sentence. Every other thing that would be a main part of speech in, say, English, is a qualifier or a quantifier; I list them as affixes (with the exception of numerals) and link them to their noun-like meanings.
Pronouns come in 3 persons and decline by number:
| Singular | Dual | Plural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | io | io'o | iogn |
| 2nd | hho | hho'o | hhogn |
| 3rd | iu | iu'u | iugn |
Everything that in an English sentence would be the noun part of the sentence is then attached to it, with qualifiers separated by hyphens.
Verbs are always recognisable as such, since they end in the verbalising suffix "-ol". Certain verbs have unverbalised qualifier analogues, certain don't. Logically, every non-numeral qualifier that has a lexical meaning1 can be turned into a verb. Here's an example:
ayo'ene'o (akro'ene'o, "a tree") → ayo'ene'o'ol (akro'ene'o'ol, "to tree")
What does "to tree" mean? I'll be damned if I know, but if you want to tree someday, it's right up your alley.
Certain verbs formed this way have figurative meanings, though (for example, wbne-fo'erol (mhaene-tho'erol) literally means "to moon-time" or "to night", but its figurative meaning is "to hook up; to have a one-night stand")
And then everything that would be in the verb part is attached to it.
1 Listed in the dictionary as Lexical modifiers
You could call Gnash an SOV language, but, in the absence of things to serve as objects, let's call it an SV one. A typical affirmative/negative sentence would then look something like this:
(qualifiers-)Subject (qualifiers-)verb.1
Questions are formed by inverting the word order. For content questions, a construction that signifies the asker's ignorance is added (e.g., instead of saying "Where is X?", one would say "al-wof-ren-ne'ol X"
(al-mhoth-ren-ne'ol X-iu, not-knowledge-place-be.PRESPresent tense (tense)
current x-3SThird person singular (person)
neither speaker nor addressee) and receive "X-ju Yren-re-ne'ol" (X-iu Y-ren-ne'ol, x-3SThird person singular (person)
neither speaker nor addressee y-place-at-be.PRESPresent tense (tense)
current) or "X is at Y" in response). A question in Gnash isn't marked by a question mark, and it's not uncommon for a speaker to say it with the same intonation as an affirmative sentence and rely solely on the word order to carry their intent2.
1 Qualifiers aren't always necessary, obviously. "I am", for example, simply translates to jo ne'ol (io ne'ol).
2 As a matter of fact, a sentence said in a monotone would be perceived as acceptable, as Old Gnash (which I probably will develop at some point. Probably) used tonal shifts to indicate negation.
Modern Gnash uses an alphabet that consists of 23 letters, plus "-" and ".", and digits 0-9
You can see the alphabet itself on the summary page, and the digits go like this: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.
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