There are eight types of morphemes in Gladilatian, nouns, adjectives, relatives, conjunctions, prepositions, attributes, states, and suffixes. Of these, all but suffixes are considered parts of speech. A suffix is considered a converter which changes an occurrence of a part of speech into a related occurrence of a possibly different part of speech.
A noun, adjective, or relative can stand alone as a word. A conjuction consists of two or more words. Prepositions, attributes, and states are prefixes.
Note that there are no verbs, although there is an implicit "to be" in every sentence. Thoughts expressed as verbs in English are treated a number of ways in Gladilatian. For "I build that," Gladilatian says, "I [am] the builder of that." For "It is changing," "It [is] a changing one." For "I see you," "I [am] the user of sight directed at you."
Nouns correspond to English nouns and pronouns. Every Gladilatian sentence has at least two nouns (at least one in informal speech), and a Gladilatian sentence may consist of only nouns.
An important noun to know is u, which is used as a general placeholder when the grammar calls for a noun but one is not really needed. If it is translated at all it is usually translated as something like "something".
Adjectives modify nouns or other adjectives. When modifying nouns they correspond to English adjectives, and when modifying other adjectives they correspond to English adverbs.
Relatives correspond to English relative pronouns.
The general relative is ep,
but it is rarely used.
The two most common are:
mep "who/which is intrinsically"
zep "who/which is temporarily"
A conjunction consists of two or more words which tie together two or more
grammatical units of the same type. The conjunction as a whole fills the
same place in a sentence as the type of grammatical unit it holds together.
Conjunctions may be nested, theoretically to any level.
An example of a conjuntion is: (curly brackets denote words which can occur
any number of times, including zero)
za unit1 {za unit2}
we unit3 "unit1 {and unit2} and unit3"
All conjunctions are of the same form in that they have one word preceeding the last unit being conjoined and another word preceeding each of the other units.
Prepositions correspond to English prepositions. A preposition is prefixed to the noun it governs.
Attributes are prefixes which modify nouns, adjectives, and relatives. There is some overlap between adjectives and attributes, but attributes are generally used for more fundamental properties, and are how Gladilatian expresses ideas which in English are expressed by gender, number, and tense.
States are prefixes which modify any parts of speech. When a state modifies a conjunction it is prefixed to the first word of the conjunction only.
Every state ends with a whistle. A state will become part of the first syllable of the morpheme it's modifying unless that would violate the morphological rules or the state is being emphasized.
Some important states are mr, "not", sl, "very", and ny which means that the speaker is questioning the modified morpheme. There are also several states which are used to express mood.
Suffixes are used to convert nouns, adjectives, attributes, and states into related nouns and adjectives. For example ot is the abstractor, converting the noun esnfe "human" into the noun esnfeot "humanity" and the adjective wla "dark" into wlaot "darkness".
This section gives definitions of the different grammatical units used in Gladilatian along with semantic interpretations of them.
The following notation is used in this section:
These are the definitions. Some of them may seem circular, but any circularity involves the inclusion of optional units and should be considered a recursive definition.
Gladilatian grammar has four rules, the first of which is relaxed in informal registers.
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