Building Sentences

In the previous lessons, you designed the individual components of your conlang: sounds, syllables, word-building rules, nouns, pronouns, verbs, and basic grammar. Now it is time to combine these elements into complete, expressive sentences. This lesson focuses on building complex sentences that go beyond simple subject-verb-object statements. You will learn how to form questions, create negations, build subordinate clauses, and use conjunctions to connect ideas. This is where your language truly comes alive, because the ability to express complex thoughts is what separates a language from a vocabulary list.

Languages use several strategies for forming questions. In yes/no questions, some languages change the word order (English: 'You are going' becomes 'Are you going?'), some add a question particle (Japanese adds 'ka' at the end of a sentence), and some use only intonation (in spoken French, 'Tu viens?' rises in pitch at the end). For content questions (who, what, where, when, why, how), languages differ in whether the question word moves to the front of the sentence (English: 'What did you see?') or stays in its normal position (Japanese: 'Anata wa nani wo mimashita ka?', literally 'You what saw?', where 'nani' stays in the object position). You should decide on at least one strategy for yes/no questions and create a set of question words for content questions.

Negation is how a language says 'not' or 'no.' Languages negate sentences in various ways: with a negative particle (English 'not', French 'ne...pas'), a negative affix on the verb (Turkish '-me/-ma'), a negative auxiliary verb (Finnish 'ei'), or even a completely separate negative verb form. Some languages have multiple negation strategies for different contexts: standard negation for declarative sentences, prohibitive negation for commands ('Don't go!'), and existential negation ('There is no water'). You should decide how standard negation works in your conlang and whether there are any special forms for negative commands or negative existence.

Subordinate clauses are clauses that cannot stand alone as complete sentences but add information to a main clause. Relative clauses describe a noun ('the person who speaks'), adverbial clauses provide context ('when the sun sets'), and complement clauses serve as arguments of a verb ('I think that she is right'). Languages vary in how they form these structures. Some use relative pronouns (English 'who', 'which', 'that'), some use a general subordinating particle, and some use verb forms (participles or nominalized verbs). Conjunctions connect clauses and ideas: coordinating conjunctions link equal elements ('and', 'or', 'but') and subordinating conjunctions introduce dependent clauses ('because', 'when', 'if', 'although'). Design at least a basic set of conjunctions and decide how relative clauses work in your conlang.