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 very artificial, resembling a bizarre hybrid between Chinese and Japanese grammars if anything at all.

=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.

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. "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.

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."

Brefic has no prepositions, but postpositions (technically it has a preposition dy, but that's considered a particle.) The postpositions are nouns referring to the concept they mark - in,  for example, means "interior," and super means "the region over something." It helps to think of postpositions as "verbs" meaning roughly the equivalent of English "to be " and turn those "verbs" into nouns via the rule described above.

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

=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

Consonants: B = [b] C = [k] D = [d] F = [f, v] G = [g] H = [h] J = [j] like y in yes L = [l] M = [m] N = [n] P = [p] R = [r] S = [s, z] T = [t] W = [w] X = [ʃ, ʒ] like sh in show or z in azure

=Dictionary= ...

=Example text= ...