Verbum

General information
This is a simplified language meant to be easy to learn and easy to speak. In all it has less than 5,000 words. All other words beside root words are expressed through Derivational Morphemes that reflect the intent, emotion, degree and intensity of the speaker. So there is no real direct translation from Verbum to other languages but the Listener or Reader is allowed to insert a word that means what the morphemes are expressing. For example, look at the word for HAPPY (fek).

jū fek	“I [am] happy.”

jū ta gafek	“I am very happy.” [joyful, cheerful, elated]

jū ta sagafek	“I am euphoric.”

jū ta fekna	“I am sad.” (the opposite of happy)

jū ta feksana	“I am very sad, upset or discouraged”

jū ta feksanasa	When necessary to express an extreme condition, you double the primary inflection. “I am despondent or suicidal”

jū sēta feksana	Gives the impression of a certain word because of locality. Basically means an extreme sadness inside yourself. “I [have in me] [extreme sadness] depressed/depression.”

jū mōta fekna?	“Are you upset?” mō get added to the verb

By using Derivational Morphemes in this fashion hundreds of thousands of words can be expressed with only having to know a couple thousand. In addition, all root words are single syllable so they are easy to say or remember.

Dipthongs
eɪ, əʊ, aɪ

Phonotactics
All syllables are spoken, they are not run together. For example, sagavēdōda is pronounced sa ga vē dō da. The verb root is stressed. So it is really sa ga vē DŌ da. If multiple derivational morphemes are used, which causes two vowels to be together, they are spoken separately just like all other words. So if the or morpheme is used like in sagavēdōdaor the end of the sentence is not run together to create a sound similar to dower. Each syllable is spoken: sa ga vē dō da or.

In verbum, each sound has a letter representation so it is not necessary to remember when a certain vowel or consonant sound should be used in a word.

Phonological Constraints

(C)(C)V(C)(C)

In most cases, all root words are 5 characters or less and are single syllable. Roots can end in a vowel such as tō (to have) and can be followed by a morpheme that begins with a vowel. As stated above, both syllables are spoken, but the speaker has the right to use a glottal stop between vowels to help make the words more understandable.

Derivational Morphemes
Derivational Morphemes play an important part of the language. All meaning and intent of the speaker or writer is expressed through the morphemes. Morphemes can be either prefixes or suffices shown but the "-" at the front or end of the morpheme.

There are additional Morphemes that have multiple choices depending ontheirr purpose. Theyaree listed below.

Tense
Tense is also used when Conjugating Verbs.

Intensity
Examples of How Derivational Morphemes Work

We will use the work for MAN, ma

It should be noted that Verbum has very few words and even though it is possible to translate an English word into Verbum, in reality, Verbum does not translate to specific words. Verbum imparts an intent, feeling, emotion and intensity. The listener or reader is left to judge what word from their language best represent the intent of the Verbum conjugation. We can demonstrate this with the verb “to See”, dō.

Notice -sū being injected into word that are Nouns because the verb to See is being converted to a noun. So many English words can be represented by the morphemes. It should also be noted that each verbum morpheme conjugation can represent many words. For example, the English word EXAMINE. The Thesaurus lists consider, explore. Inspect, investigate, ponder, probe, review, scan, scrutinize, study, survey, along with many more as examples of EXAMINE. How the word is used in context provides the reader or listener with the means to choose what word best fits the situation.

Important Point to Realize

In the two charts above the ONLY words that were actually in the Verbum Dictionary were ma and dō

Numerals
Number are fairly straight forward using a base 10 system but in reality there are only 6 numbers. The other numbers are compounds of the 6 "primes".

Examples of Numbers

Note that numbers are assembled using a ":"

Time
Time is based on the day and words all evolve from there. Again, it should be noted that in many examples here, the only work actually in the dictionary is DAY, dē.

Telling Time
Based on 24 hour clock. Time is an hour and a minute with the conjunction ‘il’. Note that the ‘il’ is stressed hard. You only use the words to time ( ie., seconds) when you are referring to a portion of time.

Colors
Colors are named after the 3 base colors Red (rō), Blue (bū) and Yellow (yē). Combining base colors makes secondary color names. Combining secondary colors with base colors created tertiary colors. Note however, that combining base and secondary colors will create a name with two of one color ( i.e, rō rō). Tertiary names always places the single name in between the double name.

Along with the base colors are White (bī) and Black (dū). They combine to make Gray (bī:dū) and the base colors combine to make the special color, Brown (rō:yē:bū).

Base Colors

Secondary Colors

Tertiary Colors

After the standard colors above, the tint and shade modifiers essentially define all the main colors. Tint is the color plus White and shade is the color plus Black. There are 6 levels of tint and shade so the modifier is combined with a number from 1 – 6 to represent which tint or shade of that color you are talking about. So the third tint of Purple is bīkō’bū:rō:bū while the fourth shade of Orange is rō:yē’dūkēnō.

Nouns
Nouns are always a minimum of 3 characters long and follow the model CVC. They can be up to 5 characters long using the full model CCVCC. Nouns always end with a consonant unless the noun is a verb being used as a noun. For example, the verb to FILM. Verbum has a Derivational Morpheme suffix that turns a verb into a noun. This morpheme is -sū. In this case, the nouns would end in a vowel and could possibly be larger then the 5 character limit.

Verbs
Verbs follow the model (C)(C)V(C)(C). They are a minimum of 2 characters, can end in a vowel or consent and can be up to 5 characters in length.

Conjugation of verbs uses Derivational Morphemes to express the intent. Listed below are the conjugation morphemes in addition to Tense from above.

Examples of Verb Conjugation

We will use the verb [to] DO which is ba

Syntax
Very similar to English using SVO