Brefic

Overview

As of now, Brefic is a sketch of a language, primarily an experiment in grammar design. I wanted to see if it was possible to design a language in which nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and even prepositions are merged into a single part of speech, without requiring any sort of part-of-speech markers (as in Esperanto) or otherwise seeming too artificial. Perhaps one day it will grow into a full language, possibly an international auxiliary language.

At present, Brefic has a skeleton vocabulary stolen from European languages, mostly used in examples to illustrate the grammar. Its grammar, however, is entirely constructed, resembling a bizarre hybrid between Chinese and Japanese grammars if anything at all.

The fundamental design principles are:


 * Make things possible, but not obligatory. Tense-marking and case-marking, for example, are possible in Brefic, but not obligatory.  It's also possible, but not obligatory to make sentences completely unambiguous - the same goes for making sentences short and leaving things up to context.
 * Keep the rules general and few in number. For example, the rules of word order in a sentence without particles are simply applications of the general principle that "modifiers come before the words they modify."  This rule can only be overriden by particles.
 * Maximize the usefulness of unaltered root words. For example, a single root word can be used as a noun, verb, modifier, suffix, prefix, or postposition without making any change to it at all - not even sticking a different vowel at the end.
 * Keep things open. That is, the "closed classes" (categories of words or suffixes that can't be expanded without the expansion itself being a major revision of the language) should be kept small and few in number.  In this way, Brefic's inventory of cases, tenses, aspects, "suffixes," etc. can be expanded merely by adding words to the dictionary.

=Basic Grammar= Brefic grammar has three well-defined parts of speech:

Content Words - All words which carry any sort of semantic content whatsoever. This includes nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and even post-positions. Brefic content words can move between these functions without any sort of modification, though the meaning of using, say, a "nounish" word as a "verb" or vice-versa is well-defined. It is possible to express entire sentences using nothing but content words (and not just tiny sentences, either.)

Particles - Words which do not carry any semantic meaning at all, but mark the relationships between the content words to help reduce ambiguity in parsing the sentence. The aforementioned all-content-word sentences can become very ambiguous, especially as they grow longer. Therefore Brefic contains a small word-class of particles to make them more precise when needed. Brefic's set of particles is small and bounded.

Interjections - These are words like "Hey" that are used to express an emotion (as opposed to naming an emotion, such as the noun "anger.") I won't define specific interjections or rules for using them - my focus is on content words and particles.

Content Words
To understand Brefic content words, it helps to think of them all as nouns. This isn't the only way to describe them - they can also be described as all verbs - but I'll stick with the noun-based explanation for now. "Verbs" are nouns referring to actions - the English verb "sleep," for example, can be used without modification as a noun meaning "the act of sleeping," as in "I'll get some sleep." In Brefic, every verb is like the English verb "sleep" in this regard. I will refer to this as the "gerund rule."

Brefic "adjectives" are nouns referring to states, qualities, or properties. To illustrate with an English example, English color words such as "red" or "blue" can be used both as adjectives and as nouns referring to the concepts of the colors (though one can also say "redness," "blueness," etc.) Brefic has no need for suffixes like English -ness - all adjectives have it "built in." Alternatively, think of all adjectives as verbs meaning "to be " (and they can be used as such) and turn those verbs into nouns via the gerund rule.

Brefic has no prepositions, but postpositions (technically it has a preposition dy, but that's considered a particle.) It's hard to think of pre/postpositions as nouns directly - therefore, I'll describe it as a series of part-of-speech conversions that eventually leads to nouns. First, imagine a preposition as a verb meaning "to be " ex: replace "I am in the house" with "I in the house." Then imagine this verb as a gerund, e.g. "being-in." Now we have arrived in the land of nouns.

That's all well and good, but how do we go the other way? How do we use these nouns as verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or postpositions?

First, it's important to understand the entire Brefic sentence as a noun phrase. Jo un arbor wid, "I see a tree," would mean roughly "the seeing of a tree by me" or "my seeing a tree" or "my sight of a tree," etc. Saying this noun phrase as a sentence means that you are asserting the existence/happening of the noun phrase you're referring to. This means that all nouns, even the most "nounish" of nouns, are impersonal verbs meaning roughly "There is/are " (The trouble with this English translation is that "is" and "are" implies tense, whereas what I'm trying to express here is a tenseless concept.  The "tense" of the sentence would be expressed as a modifier within the "noun phrase" itself, such as "X which happens in the future" or something like that.)

What about modifiers? In general, the entire Brefic grammar operates on the principle that modifiers come before the words they modify. "Modifier" in this sense refers not just to adjectives and adverbs, but even to subjects, objects, genitives, relative clauses, and postpositional phrases. In English, we can use nouns as modifiers by sticking them in front of other nouns, as in "truck tires" or "sound amplifier." There is some vague-yet-obvious-from-context meaning connecting the two nouns, but it's always clear that "sound amplifier" is a kind of "amplifier," not a kind of "sound," and "truck tires" are a kind of "tire," not a kind of "truck." Brefic modifiers operate on these exact same principles. For example, to express the concept of "angry person," one would say engo hom, which translates more literally to "anger-person." When this expands into long strings of nouns, it becomes ambiguous as to which content words modify which - but even in a ridiculously long uninterrupted stream of content words, we can know that the word at the very end is the "kind of" thing that the whole noun phrase refers to.

From this principle, we derive the "fundamental" word orders in the Brefic language:


 * Subject-Object-Verb - ex: Jo das wid = "I that see" = "I see that"
 * Adjective-Noun - ex: ruz haus = "red house"
 * Genitive-Noun - ex: jo haus = "I house" = "my house"
 * Noun-Postposition - ex: haus-in = "in the house"
 * Number-Noun - ex: tri haus = "three houses"
 * Adverb-Verb - ex: rapid cur = "fast run" = "run fast" (This is actually quite flexible, since there's no distinction between adjectives and verbs - the adverb can be used as an auxiliary verb, and thus appear after the main verb without any sort of particle.)
 * Verb-Modal Verb - ex: ed deb = "eat must" = "must eat"
 * Relative Clause-Noun - ex: apyl ed hom = "apple-eating person" = "person who eats apples"

These word orders are "fundamental" in the sense that they are the word orders of sentences that contain no particles. Particles (and only particles) can reverse these word orders.

Naturally, a stream of nothing but content words will be ambiguous beyond mere two-word statements. Consider, for example, a string of four content words:

A B C D

According to the rules above, we know that D is the head of the phrase. We also know that C modifies D. But B can modify C or D, and A can modify B, C, or D (however, it can't modify C if B modifies D.)  Sometimes it is easy to tell which meaning is intended through context, but that becomes less and less likely as phrases and sentences grow longer. Therefore Brefic contains a class of particles to reduce ambiguity and potentially eliminate it.

Compounds
Compounds in Brefic mean exactly what they would mean if they had spaces separating their roots - compounds and strings of roots are interchangeable. Thus, the same left-branching rules apply to compounds - the root at the end is the "kind" of thing the compound refers to. It's possible to turn postpositions into case suffixes, and auxiliary verbs into tense suffixes, merely by compounding them. It's theoretically possible to express an entire sentence as a single, giant compound, but that wouldn't be too easy on the eyes.

Particles
Particles in Brefic are designed to help resolve ambiguities and free up the word order. I intend to keep the number of Brefic particles, especially grammatical particles, to a minimum. I believe that the three particles below are sufficient to make large, complex sentences completely unambiguous, but I could be wrong.

dy - roughly "of" (though it can also mean "which is," "who," or "that") this is the only "preposition" in Brefic. It is used to indicate that the word before it is modified by a word or phrase appearing after it. For example, hom dy engo is equivalent to engo hom, angry person, and Jo wid dy un arbor is equivalent to Jo un arbor wid. This particle fills the dual role of freeing up the word order and splitting sentences up into smaller phrases to reduce ambiguity.

yc - a kind of "close-parenthesis" for a phrase beginning with dy. For example, Un hom dy engo un arbor wid would mean "There is a person who angrily sees a tree." However, Un hom dy engo yc un arbor wid would mean "a person, who is angry, sees a tree." The yc blocks the dy from "capturing" the words after it.

jy - a quasi-prefix which marks a particular word as taking precedence in grabbing modifiers. This is somewhat difficult to explain, so I'll use an example. Consider the string of content words mentioned above:

A B C D

Now, consider A B C jy D. This means that A, B, and C all modify D.

Now, consider A B jy C D. This means that A and B modify C, which modifies D.

Now, consider A jy B C jy D. This means that A modifies B, and D is modified by both C and the phrase A-B.

I'll make an attempt to summarize the rule - the jy particle marks a word, then "walks" leftward, grabbing each content word as a modifier for the word it marks, until it arrives at another word marked with jy. It will grab that word as a modifier, but it won't grab its modifiers. But jy is constrained by the particles dy and yc - it cannot "walk" past a dy, and it will skip over a phrase enclosed between dy and yc.

jy-dy - This compound particle is a jy that "walks" rightward, grabbing dy-phrases until it encounters another jy-dy. Keep in mind that this grabs whole dy-phrases, whereas the regular my grabs individual content words. Example:

A B jy-dy C D E dy F G dy H dy I J K L jy-dy M N

B is the head of this entire phrase, directly modified by A, E, G, H, and L. (E, G, and L each have their own sets of modifiers too.)  But N does not directly modify B - it directly modifies L.

by - "by X," where X is a single root, is a shorthand way of saying "dy X dy." This can be used to turn postpositions into prepositions.

Logical particles:
Logical particles are considered a separate class from the above grammatical particles. They include conjunctions such as "and" and "or," and the negation particle "not."

ei - means "and"

or - means "or"

ar - means roughly "both or neither"

na - means "not." Na appears immediately after the word it negates. Ex: arbor-na = not a tree / not trees

nei - "nand," i.e. "not both"

nor - "neither...nor"

nar - exclusive or

lei - "all" or "every" - appears before nouns as a quantifier. ex: lei hom = "all people"

lor - "some" or "at least one" - appears before nouns as a quantifier

lar - "all or none" - appears before nouns as a quantifier

=Sounds=

Where more than one sound is indicated, the pronunciation of the letter is the free choice of the speaker.

Vowels:

 * A = [a] as in father
 * E = [e, ɛ] as in great or set
 * I = [i, ɪ] as in machine or sit
 * O = [o, ɔ] as in so or sore
 * U = [u, ʊ] as in rude or push
 * Y = [ə] like a in about

Diphthongs: ai, au, ei, eu, oi, ou, ui, iu

Consonants:

 * B = [b]
 * C = [k]
 * D = [d]
 * F = [f, v]
 * G = [g]
 * H = [h, x] ([x] is not in English)
 * J = [j] like y in yes
 * L = [l]
 * M = [m]
 * N = [n]
 * P = [p]
 * R = [r]
 * S = [s, z]
 * T = [t]
 * W = [w]
 * Z = [ʃ, ʒ] like sh in show or z in azure

Consonant clusters are not allowed at the ends of syllables, except for -ng which is really the single consonant [ŋ].

=Dictionary=

Main article: Brefic Dictionary

Pronouns

 * Jo = I, me, my
 * Tu = you (singular)
 * Ta = he, she, it, they(singular)
 * Nu = one
 * Se = oneself (which can mean "myself" "yourself" "themselves" etc.)
 * Jos = we (excluding you)
 * Tus = you (plural)
 * Tas = they, them
 * Nus = we (including you)
 * Ses = each other
 * Dis = this
 * Das = that
 * Dise = these
 * Dase = those
 * Cwe = what, which

=Numbers=

Digit words:

 * 0 = nul,
 * 1 = un,
 * 2 = du,
 * 3 = tri,
 * 4 = cwar,
 * 5 = cwin,
 * 6 = siz,
 * 7 = set,
 * 8 = oit,
 * 9 = nof

des = "more than one," a plural quantifier which can be used as a digit in its own right. Ex:

des haus = houses

desmil = thousands

Powers of Ten:

 * dec = 10
 * cen = 100
 * mil = 1000
 * wan = 10000

Suffixes:

 * -jon = ^2  ex: miljon = 1000000
 * -jar = ^3
 * -li = ^-1
 * -yp+number = ^(number), where number is a single digit or power of ten.

Ex: milypsiz = 1000^6, wanypwan = 10,000^10,000

When powers of ten, or words constructed from them using the above suffixes, are placed next to each other, the result is the multiplication of the two. Ex: decwan = 100,000, cenwanypwan = 100*(10,000^10,000)

Multi-digit numbers are constructed as follows:

First digit (unless it's 1) + Power of Ten + The rest of the digits listed sequentially (unless they're all zeroes.) If the first digit is 1, then saying "un" is not necessary - the power of ten will suffice.

Ex: 947 = nofcen-cwar-set

12 = decdu

20 = dudec

68,295 = sizwan-oit-du-nof-cwin

767,598 = setdecwan-siz-set-cwin-nof-oit

If there is a long string of zeros in a number, the number can be constructed using multiple powers of ten:

649,000 = sizcen-cwar-nof-mil

649,000,070 = sizcen-cwar-nof-miljon ei setdec

Base Twelve
Brefic contains words for expressing numbers in base twelve. In base twelve, dec becomes a digit word, represented by X or A (I prefer X, but A seems to be the convention in modern computers.) A new digit word lef is introduced to represent "eleven," represented by L or B (again, I prefer L.)

Base twelve, like base ten, contains four "power of twelve" roots, from which larger or smaller powers of twelve can be constructed. They are:


 * twel = 12 (10)
 * gros = 144 (100)
 * greit = 1728 (1000)
 * juz = 20,736 (10,000)

From there, one can use the same suffixes used on powers of ten to build other powers of twelve, such as greitjon and whatnot.

=Example text= ...