User:Armachedes/Linguistics Made Easy

Editor's Note #1 - Help for describing clitics would be appreciated.

For most people, the biggest challenge in building a constructed language is overcoming the complexity of linguistics, which is the study of languages. The goal of this tutorial is to give a complete description of everything you need to know about linguistics to create your own language.

Lesson 1: Parts of Speech
What you're going to realize through these lessons is that linguistics has the tendency of making simple things sound complicated, generally through the usage of bizarre words. This first lesson is no exception.

The parts of speech, also known as word or lexical classes, are categories of words in a sentence. A few parts of speech should sound familiar to you (i.e. noun, adjective, verb), but others may not (i.e. preposition, conjunction, interjection). However, fear not-- once you know what these mean in simpler terms, you'll be recognizing them left and right. The parts of speech in the English language are:


 * Noun - A "thing", like "Look at that cow".
 * Pronoun - A substitute for a noun, like (see example above) "Look at it".
 * Verbs - An action or state of being, like "I walked the dog" or "I am happy".
 * Adjective - Something that describes a noun/pronoun, like "He is a happy person".
 * Adverb - Something that describes a verb, adjective, or another adverb, like "He was devilishly quiet".
 * Preposition - Introduces a prepositional phrase, which describes something relative to something else, like "I walked near the beach". ("near" is the preposition, "the beach" is the prepositional phrase.) In a more general sense, prepositions are known as "adpositions" because they can be at the beginning (preposition) or end (postposition) of a prepositional phrase, or both (circumposition).
 * Conjunction - A connector of sentences or phrases, like "I like dogs but I hate cats".
 * Interjection - An "exclamation" or emotion-expression, like "Hooray!" or "Uh... I don't know".

Note that this list is specifically for English. As you'll soon begin to realize, English is relatively simple in many aspects of linguistics and grammar. Also note that each of these parts of speech have special forms to them (i.e. verbs have "conjugations" such as the infinitive, present progressive, etc.).

A few other parts of speech not generally considered to be a part of the eight listed above are:


 * Determiners - These words describe a noun, but are not adjectives. They often specify if what is described is specific ("a dog" vs. "the dog") or how many there are of it ("two dogs" vs. "three dogs"). Determiners can perform an enormous amount of things; the words like "each", "whichever", "enough", "a lot of", "your", etc.
 * Clitic - These words are generally part of the eight categories already described. They have a grammatical function, but their pronunciations are based on words around them. Clitics are bizarre and do not technically have any strict rules, but often are attatched or associated to a "host" word. A few examples would be "I ' m" ( ' m is a shortened form of am), "a dog", "John ' s".

That's it for the first lesson. In the next section, we discuss inflection: the adapting of verbs and nouns.