Ever since the age of fourteen, when I read an article about Esperanto, I have had the eccentric hobby of inventing languages. I never seriously expected to get anyone else to speak them. I just liked the idea of making up languages. When I began creating the imaginary civilization of Fifth Earth, I invented the language concurrently with the geography, history, religions, and so on. All this happened before I settled on which period in Fifth Earth history I’d write about, let alone a cast of characters and a plot.

As you know from elsewhere on this site, both the language and the religion of Danallo were invented by bored space travelers on the “generation starship” during their long journey from earth. This is why the vocabulary of Danallian doesn’t bear any resemblance that I’m aware of with any existing Earth language, except that some of the religious terms are borrowed from Hebrew. Its grammar is also quite bizarre, unless you’ve got some familiarity with comparative linguistics.

What follows is NOT a scientific description of Danallian, NOR is it a complete set of lessons in how to speak, read, or write Danallian. It’s merely a set of examples of phrase and sentence structure to give some feel for the language.

There are only two types of roots in Danallian from which independent words can be made up: (1) Nominal roots, and (2) adjective-verbal roots. Pronouns (personal, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite and relative pronouns all being available) are considered nominal roots. Adjective-verbal roots are used as verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.

To illustrate, consider the two nominal roots ni and gaakaa and the adjective-verbal root bo. Ni means “I,” “me,” or “my” depending on its case endings. Be warned right now! I love languages with lots of noun cases. I was exposed to Latin at an impressionable age. Gaakaa means “daughter.” Bo as an adjective means “going, mobile, moving.” As a verb it means “to go.” Now we put the three together in a phrase: Gaakaa bo ni. What does this mean? A literal translation would be “my mobile daughter” or “my moving daughter.” Both of these sound a little weird and un-idiomatic. A better translation would probably be “my daughter, who is going somewhere.” At this point, it becomes clear that Danallian uses relative pronouns (the “who” in the preceding line) somewhat less commonly than English does.

Adjective-verbal roots, as we can see from this example, are adjectives in their simplest form. This could also be considered the present participle of an intransitive verb. We can also see that inflected forms of nouns or pronouns come after the adjective, which in turn follows the noun.

We will now turn our “my moving daughter” into a simple sentence: Gaakaak ni bubo. It means “my daughter is going.” Reduplicating the first consonant of the root turns it into a verb in the present indicative. Verbs, by the way, do not have personal endings. If the verb is intransitive, the subject may either precede or follow it. Our sentence could just as easily have been Bubo gaakaak ni. You will notice we have put a final k on the end of the noun. This is the nominative-accusative case ending. It indicates the subject of an intransitive verb. In Danallian, pronouns take exactly the same case endings as nouns, added to the same verbal root. This is in contrast to English, where we have “I” and “me,” using entirely different roots. So if you wanted merely to say, “I am going,” you could say: Bubo nik or Nik bubo.

If the verb were transitive, the final k ending would mean something else. So let’s try that. Let’s change bubo to a transitive verb. The prefix li does this. Libo means “approaching, arriving at, going up to.” Notice that we you’re translating English into Danallian, you can sometimes omit a preposition, turn the intransitive English verb into a transitive Danallian one, and recast the object of the preposition as a direct object. Transitive verbs are conjugated in the same way as intransitive ones, by reduplicating the beginning of the word. Lilibo means “is going up to.” So now we have Lilibo gaakaak ni or Gaakaak ni lilibo. It means “is going up to my daughter.” Without changing its form, the nominative-accusative noun is now the direct object of the transitive verb lilibo.

But who is going up to my daughter? You can omit the subject of the sentence if it’s clear from the context. But suppose we want a subject? Let’s say “I am going up to my daughter.” That goes like this: Gaakaak ni lilibo ni. Time for some more explanation. The subject of a transitive verb must come directly after the verb. However, you can move the direct object around. You can say, Lilibo ni gaakaak ni.

Unlike most of the languages we are familiar with. Danallian does not have “genders.” Noun classes are what Danallian has instead. There are two, animate and inanimate. The animate you’ve already seen. It has a k suffix. The inanimate has a t suffix. For instance, if we wanted to say “I am going up to the house,” then we would have Lilibo ni finglat or Finglat ni lilibo. The noun classes are highly predictable. Human beings, animals, plants and their body parts are animate. Exotic living things, such as protozoa, bacteria, fungi, and viruses are animate. Things incapable of life are inanimate. There are some exceptions to this:

(1) The same body part is animate if still attached to a living creature but inanimate if it has been amputated or if it’s part of a corpse. Plants harvested as food are inanimate. For instance, kunaat (animate) is a tomato on the vine, but once removed from the vine it becomes inanimate. Slogo, blood, is animate when still in the body, but blood coming out of a wound is inanimate.

(2) Some natural phenomena such as the incoming and outgoing tides, wind and storms, thunder, lightening, the sun, Fifth Earth’s two moons, and the stars are animate. By analogy, Danallian physicists use the animate class for electricity, magnetism, elementary particles, radio waves, and so on. Engines, motor vehicles, computers, and communication devices such as radio and television are animate. By analogy also, components of these things are also animate. However, vehicles drawn by a beast of burden are inanimate. Elemental things, of which inanimate things are composed, such as water, wood, metals, the air, and so on, are inanimate.

(3) Nations, territories, and so on are animate, especially one’s own country. To classify the name of a foreign nation as inanimate is an insult.

(4) Grammarians are still debating the classification of some nouns. Is blood stored in a blood bank animate or inanimate? Which class do boats and ships belong to, and if to both, where should one draw the line? Some say they are all inanimate, because they are at the mercy of wind and tides to some degree, even if they contain an engine. Others would confine only row boats and sailing ships to the inanimate. Spacecraft are animate, but what about satellites, which are at the mercy of gravity and centrifugal force? Are lighter-than-air craft inanimate, because of the effect winds can have on them? Or are they animate, by analogy with other vehicles? Are all chemical elements inanimate, like water and wood? It has also been proposed that the inert gases are inanimate, and all other chemical elements animate because they can bond. The lay speaker is typically impatient with such pedantic issues, and nearly always prefers the animate when in doubt.

Note that there is no equivalent for “the.” There is, however, an equivalent for “a, an.” Danallian substitutes an indefinite adjective for this. They vary from place to place and period to period, but in the main “a house” is considered equivalent to “some house” (fingul shono) or “any house” (fingul idi).

Now for a brief rundown of the Danallian case system. There are 21 cases used in the Dryk Kudaish, the sacred scriptures of the Kadmonian religion. Of these, only 18 are in regular use. There is the one I call “nominative-accusative,” which indicates the subject of an intransitive verb, the predicate nominative of an intransitive verb, and the direct object of a transitive verb. This one has the k ending in the animate class and the t ending in the inanimate class.

The case that I call “basic” has no ending, not even for noun class. It is used for three different purposes: (1) the subject of transitive verbs, (2) partitive expressions such as arno ni (my arm), and (3) a certain type of possession called matrilineal possession. So when you say gaakaak ni, you are designating yourself as the mother of the daughter in question. Sorry, guys! :-) I admit it's rather strange that the these three functions should be thrown together like this. The main reason the subject of a transitive verb must immediately follow the verb is to keep it from being confused with a partitive or matrilineal possessive use.

All cases except the basic contain the t/k noun class marker as part of the suffix. A very important one is the patrilineal genitive case. This one is used to indicate paternity in kinship and also possession of inanimate things of all types. To sum up the idea of possession, you are the "mother" of your body parts and of your children if you gave birth to them, indicated by the basic case. You are the "father" of the things you buy and use, and of your children if you begat them, indicated by the patrilineal genitive.

There is also an objective genitive case. Consider the phrase talizilghi finglaatun. The first word means "to build or construct," or "construction." A Danallian verb has no true infinitive. It instead uses a verbal noun. Finglaatun is "house" in the objective genitive case. Talizilghi finglaatun therefore means "to build the house" or "the building of the house." It is semantically equivalent to the predicate "build the house."

Suppose we want to say “I want to build the house.” Let’s see, now. “I want” is lilimosh ni. We already had the rest of it. So the sentence is Lilimosh ni talizilghit finglaatun. We had to add the nominative-accusative suffix to talizilghi. Not the house, but the building of the house, is the direct object now. We could also change the word order to Talizilghit finglaatun Lilimosh ni, and meant the same, although there is now more emphasis on the construction rather than my wanting it.

Suppose we wanted to specify who’s going to build the house. We could say Lilimosh ni talizilghit finglaatun de-hu’okib. This means “I want you (plural) to build the house.” Hu’okib is the instrumental case (in the plural) of the pronoun “you.” The de- element, literally meaning “and,” is required by the grammar in order to indicate that both hu’okib and finglaatun modify talizilghit.

The de- element, literally meaning “and,” is required by the grammar in order to indicate that both hu’okib and finglaatun modify talizilghit. Why is it required? This leads to a discussion of the three classes of adjectives.

We have seen that adjectives can be conjugated as verbs. They can also modify a noun or pronoun (which is what we call “adjectives” in English grammer). Or they can modify other adjectives. In either case, an adjective must come after the thing it modifies. If you see two or three adjectives in a row, which one modifies the noun and which ones modify the other adjectives? For this we use the conjunction de-, which means “and” but is not a separate word in Danallian.

nad suhokhmah de-brang. Nad means “man,” suhokhmah means “wise,” and brang means “strong” when modifying a noun and “strongly” or “very” or “extremely” when modifying another adjective. The prefix de- makes suhokhmah and brang parallel to each other, so they both modify nad. Therefore, nad suhokhmah de-brang can only mean “wise, strong man.” (You obviously don’t have to translate the “and.”)

Now consider nad suhokhmah brang. Here, brang can only modify suhokhmah, and the result is “very wise man.”

Do you have to put “and” between any two adjectives that modify the same preceding noun? Fortunately, not always. The division of adjectives into three classes makes the use of conjunctions less necessary. There are three classes of adjectives: INNER, MIDDLE and OUTER.

The Inner ones mostly indicate direction or nearness / separation; for instance, inward, outward, forward, backward, up, down. They are semantically closely connected with the verbs they often modify. For instance, "id" by inself means "in, inside," but combined with the verbal root "tep" as "tep id," it means "work one's way into" or "burrow into" or "dig one's way into. "Puin" by itself means "together," but "tep puin" originally meant "put together," and later came to mean "cook together in a stew or broth." "Tep" by itself originally meant "do, make, work," but is now almost never found without modification by an Inner adjectivial root. They can modify nouns as well. For instance, consider the adjective/verbal roots drid (to run or running) and thro (to go forward or forward). Drid can form a verbal adjective tadrid. So we can have tadrid thro, which means “forward running,” composed of tadrid and thro. We can also have oodrid thro means “ran forward,” consisting of oodrid (ran) and thro.

The Middle ones are numerals, or adjectives with plural meaning (such as nidi (many or numerous), or they are indefinites with plural connotations (shono - some, idi - any). The most general Middle Class adjective is noo, which means "more than one." Danallian nouns do not distinguish the plural number. Instead, it is indicated by Middle adjectives.

All the rest are Outer, including the two we met a few paragraphs ago: suhokhmah and brang. Now consider our next example: moonad puin nidi skalseeb. It means "many Caucasian women together." Composed of moonad ("woman") puin ("together"), nidi ("many") and skalseeb ("Caucasian").

Puin, nidi, and skalseeb all belong to different classes of adjective. Therefore, when they are found together, it is clear that nidi and skalseeb modify the preceding noun (moonad). This shows how it possible for a speaker to string together several adjectives without having to tie them together by conjunctions. (Parenthetically, it must be admitted that at some periods of its history, Danallians have been extremely racist and xenophobic. This explains the refernce to white women. My novel Discarded Faces describes part of the process by which Danallians overcame this.)

You can substitute a noun with case-endings for an Outer adjective.

NOT FINISHED