The problem with trying to do things differently or more simply is that while 95 percent of the time everything goes smoothly, there are always bumps in the road.
Thus I had a problem with infinitives. One of the first ideas I had about making my own language was to do away with inifinitives. Since my verbs at that time only had one form, I couldn't foresee any problems. 'I want go' is easy understood as 'I want to go.' "Know him is love him' is understandable as well. But more complex sentences did become a problem to my comfort level. I really wasn't sure what was understandable, and that's not acceptable. So I relented and created a conjunction that works both to replace a relative pronoun and functions like 'to' in English as the marker of infinitives. In sentences where the concept is 'in order to' as in 'I went to see him' I use a different conjunction where it's necessary to make the meaning clear. I still avoid using the infinitive as much as I can. But I don't really have hard and fast rules about how it must be used. One thing that I've noticed is that the infinitive can sometimes be replaced by a form that carries at least some more meaning. As it stands now by using forms with tenses I can literally say 'I went to see him' different ways and have it understood that I meant to see him before now, about now, or sometime in the future, independent of when 'I went.'
Friday, December 17, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Verbs 2
So whether or not you are up to aspect as a main feaure, you do need to come up with some kind of comprehensive verbal system. The more you try to leave out now the more problems you'll have down the road.
Some things can be done away with or expanded upon. If you are willing to use nouns and pronouns as often as you would in English, you don't need to conjugate your verbs, even as little as we do in English. If you'd like to be able to avoid stating 'I', 'we' and 'you' in every last sentence with those concepts as subjects, you can conjugate verbs for case and number, You can even conjugate verbs for gender like Russian and other Slavic languages do in the past tense.
Personally I prefer simple verbs. I originally tried to get by with exactly one form of the verb for everything including the inifinite. I had one ending, -u, that marked that the word was a verb, and invariable particles elsewhere gave the tense and mood of the verb phrase. It seemed to work fine, but as time passed I wanted to get more out of the verbs. I did away with the tense particles and conjugated the verb for tense using the -u ending as the base for perfective and went with -i as the base for imperfective. That allowed me to get rid of the rest of the helping verbs masquerading as particles. I was much happier with the result. You might well decide the opposite is what you'd want.
Years later it occured to me that I didn't need to follow any verbal system I knew from natural languages. As an experiment I tried making verbs of state of being like 'is', 'see' and 'hear' as a different class of verb entirely separate from physical action, and mental action verbs like 'make', 'look' and 'listen'. It was very successful. By giving a different set of endings to my new *stative verbs* I was able to reduce the number of word roots I was using. 'Look and see' and several other pairs needed only one root. The power of what I had became clear when I was translating the phrase "the road wound around the mountain." I suddenly realized that by using a stative verb form of 'wind' in this sentence, I didn't need to struggle with the awkward and perhaps comical possibility someone would think of the road actively winding. And on the other hand, if I wanted to go for the metaphor of the road squeezing the mountain, if I used an active verb, it was there as bold as brass. Stative verbs quickly became something I'd definitely put in any new language I'd dream up.
The stative verbs led to yet another kind of verb, which I call 'cumulative.' These are verbs which show a change in state, 'growing', 'shrinking', 'becoming', 'turning blue', and so on. They aren't as common or necessarily as powerful as the stative verbs. But they do add color and individuality to the language.
To all these types of verbs, I've added passive or passive-like forms by changing the characteristic vowels to diphthongs. All the forms of verbs are instantly recognizable. There are few enough forms, and the forms are similar enough that memorizing the endings is a breeze.
Not everything I tried was so successful. More on that next time.
Some things can be done away with or expanded upon. If you are willing to use nouns and pronouns as often as you would in English, you don't need to conjugate your verbs, even as little as we do in English. If you'd like to be able to avoid stating 'I', 'we' and 'you' in every last sentence with those concepts as subjects, you can conjugate verbs for case and number, You can even conjugate verbs for gender like Russian and other Slavic languages do in the past tense.
Personally I prefer simple verbs. I originally tried to get by with exactly one form of the verb for everything including the inifinite. I had one ending, -u, that marked that the word was a verb, and invariable particles elsewhere gave the tense and mood of the verb phrase. It seemed to work fine, but as time passed I wanted to get more out of the verbs. I did away with the tense particles and conjugated the verb for tense using the -u ending as the base for perfective and went with -i as the base for imperfective. That allowed me to get rid of the rest of the helping verbs masquerading as particles. I was much happier with the result. You might well decide the opposite is what you'd want.
Years later it occured to me that I didn't need to follow any verbal system I knew from natural languages. As an experiment I tried making verbs of state of being like 'is', 'see' and 'hear' as a different class of verb entirely separate from physical action, and mental action verbs like 'make', 'look' and 'listen'. It was very successful. By giving a different set of endings to my new *stative verbs* I was able to reduce the number of word roots I was using. 'Look and see' and several other pairs needed only one root. The power of what I had became clear when I was translating the phrase "the road wound around the mountain." I suddenly realized that by using a stative verb form of 'wind' in this sentence, I didn't need to struggle with the awkward and perhaps comical possibility someone would think of the road actively winding. And on the other hand, if I wanted to go for the metaphor of the road squeezing the mountain, if I used an active verb, it was there as bold as brass. Stative verbs quickly became something I'd definitely put in any new language I'd dream up.
The stative verbs led to yet another kind of verb, which I call 'cumulative.' These are verbs which show a change in state, 'growing', 'shrinking', 'becoming', 'turning blue', and so on. They aren't as common or necessarily as powerful as the stative verbs. But they do add color and individuality to the language.
To all these types of verbs, I've added passive or passive-like forms by changing the characteristic vowels to diphthongs. All the forms of verbs are instantly recognizable. There are few enough forms, and the forms are similar enough that memorizing the endings is a breeze.
Not everything I tried was so successful. More on that next time.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Verbs and aspect
The most daunting task in learning languages like German, Spanish or French has to be learning all the forms of the verb and how they are used. English may have fewer distinct forms, but as in German you have numerous irregular (strong) verbs to contend with. In Norwegian even some regular (weak) verbs have vowel changes in the stem to worry about. I think most English speakers who dream about creating their own language think about simplfying the verbal system. There are serval ways to do that.
I think the most productive way is to make verbal aspect a central feature. Sadly unless you are already familiar with a language that has it , you would have difficultly finding a complete simple explanation of how it works, and it is a simple concept.
For those of you who don't know what verbal aspect as a central feature means I would like to simply to direct you to the Wikipedia article on grammatical aspect. However at this moment (December 2010) that article is mostly taken up with trying to relate verbal aspect to languages in which it isn't terribly important! Worse the discussion about aspect in Slavic languages, in which they are important, is grossly overblown and most likely to confuse, unless you already understand the concept.
In Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, there are two basic verb forms, the perfective and the imperfective. Each has an infinitive plus a past and a non-past conjugation, and that's it. No subjunctives, no progressive tenses, no pluperfect or any of that. The perfective form refers to the finish of an act or a state; the imperfective refers to everything else. In Slavic, the perfective is restricted to single acts or states. Most frequently the perfective form is the same as the imperfective with the addition of a prefix. Using other prefixes with the imperfective verb expands the vocabulary with new perfective verbs with new meanings which can then be made into corresponding new imperfective verbs in fairly consistent ways.
The perfective verb only has only present and future tense, it replaces verb forms like:
I did, I have done, I had done, I will do, I will have done.
The imperfective verb in Russian has only past and present tense, and is used in the future in the infinite with a helping verb. The imperfective verb replaces verb forms like:
I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing, I am doing, I do, I will be doing, I will have been doing.
It's really almost just that simple. But if you haven't had to use it actively in a natural language, you are probably not going to feel comfortable with it or use it correctly.
It should be no surprise when I say, the more natural languages you know before you start to create your own, the more choices you will have in verbs and everything else.
I think the most productive way is to make verbal aspect a central feature. Sadly unless you are already familiar with a language that has it , you would have difficultly finding a complete simple explanation of how it works, and it is a simple concept.
For those of you who don't know what verbal aspect as a central feature means I would like to simply to direct you to the Wikipedia article on grammatical aspect. However at this moment (December 2010) that article is mostly taken up with trying to relate verbal aspect to languages in which it isn't terribly important! Worse the discussion about aspect in Slavic languages, in which they are important, is grossly overblown and most likely to confuse, unless you already understand the concept.
In Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, there are two basic verb forms, the perfective and the imperfective. Each has an infinitive plus a past and a non-past conjugation, and that's it. No subjunctives, no progressive tenses, no pluperfect or any of that. The perfective form refers to the finish of an act or a state; the imperfective refers to everything else. In Slavic, the perfective is restricted to single acts or states. Most frequently the perfective form is the same as the imperfective with the addition of a prefix. Using other prefixes with the imperfective verb expands the vocabulary with new perfective verbs with new meanings which can then be made into corresponding new imperfective verbs in fairly consistent ways.
The perfective verb only has only present and future tense, it replaces verb forms like:
I did, I have done, I had done, I will do, I will have done.
The imperfective verb in Russian has only past and present tense, and is used in the future in the infinite with a helping verb. The imperfective verb replaces verb forms like:
I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing, I am doing, I do, I will be doing, I will have been doing.
It's really almost just that simple. But if you haven't had to use it actively in a natural language, you are probably not going to feel comfortable with it or use it correctly.
It should be no surprise when I say, the more natural languages you know before you start to create your own, the more choices you will have in verbs and everything else.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Adjectives and Adverbs
Unless you are using case with nouns there is very little to say about adjectives. The big decision is whether to put your adjectives mostly in front of the noun as in English and Finnish or mostly behind the noun as in French and Spanish.
Adverbs are perhaps even less exciting. English has fairly free adverb placement. You could make your adverb placement more restrictive if you wish.
All of the adjectives and adverbs in my language end in -o. Orginally I intended adjectives and adverbs to be indistinguishable as they often are in German. But as time went on there were some times when having some difference helped in my situation. So now adjectives are stressed on the initial syllable and adverbs are stressed on the -o suffix which is reflected by a spelling convention.
Adverbs are perhaps even less exciting. English has fairly free adverb placement. You could make your adverb placement more restrictive if you wish.
All of the adjectives and adverbs in my language end in -o. Orginally I intended adjectives and adverbs to be indistinguishable as they often are in German. But as time went on there were some times when having some difference helped in my situation. So now adjectives are stressed on the initial syllable and adverbs are stressed on the -o suffix which is reflected by a spelling convention.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Nouns
Nouns play a large part in the discussion of any natural language's grammar. But I have to believe that anyone interested in making up their own language will have given considerable thought to nouns before they start. Other than reminding about some options I won't say much.
Besides whether to use case, you have the option of how to show number or whether to show number at all as a part of your nouns. Mandarin nouns do not show number, for instance. If you want your nouns to show number you can be creative and include the idea of 'some', 'many' or 'none of' in your noun as well as singular and plural. Though it's a complicating factor Russian uses a singular noun with any number ending in 1, and different noun forms with numbers ending in 2,3 or 4 from the forms with and those numbers ending in any other number.
There is nothing exciting about the simple nouns in my own language. All of them end in stressed -a in the singular and all of them can take one of two related endings for the plural. One ending keeps the stress on the end of the word and the other moves it back one syllable. It's purely for euphony.
I will discuss noun suffixes at a later time, because they are a very critical part of my own language, but as a demonstration of how you can get creative with your noun structure I show you one trick I've added.
Noun suffixes in my language are not added directly to the stem. Instead there is a link vowel. In my language the link vowel can carry it's own meaning.
The word for 'magic' is woba
11-year-old Harry Potter is a wobuka, a general term for wizard.
Dumbledore is also a wobuka, but also a wobaka, a wizard famous for his magic skill.
11-year-old Neville Longbottom is a kiro wobika a poor wizard who isn't much good at magic.
Lord Voldemort is a påyo wobika an evil wizard, though those who fear him would certainly call him a wobaka instead.
Besides whether to use case, you have the option of how to show number or whether to show number at all as a part of your nouns. Mandarin nouns do not show number, for instance. If you want your nouns to show number you can be creative and include the idea of 'some', 'many' or 'none of' in your noun as well as singular and plural. Though it's a complicating factor Russian uses a singular noun with any number ending in 1, and different noun forms with numbers ending in 2,3 or 4 from the forms with and those numbers ending in any other number.
There is nothing exciting about the simple nouns in my own language. All of them end in stressed -a in the singular and all of them can take one of two related endings for the plural. One ending keeps the stress on the end of the word and the other moves it back one syllable. It's purely for euphony.
I will discuss noun suffixes at a later time, because they are a very critical part of my own language, but as a demonstration of how you can get creative with your noun structure I show you one trick I've added.
Noun suffixes in my language are not added directly to the stem. Instead there is a link vowel. In my language the link vowel can carry it's own meaning.
The word for 'magic' is woba
11-year-old Harry Potter is a wobuka, a general term for wizard.
Dumbledore is also a wobuka, but also a wobaka, a wizard famous for his magic skill.
11-year-old Neville Longbottom is a kiro wobika a poor wizard who isn't much good at magic.
Lord Voldemort is a påyo wobika an evil wizard, though those who fear him would certainly call him a wobaka instead.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Prepostions and Case
Since the discussion of prepostions in English grammar is often an afterthought, it may seem strange to talk about them now before I get to nouns. The fact is that after years of thinking they'd pretty much take care of themselves, I decided to take a more systematic approach to prepositions and discovered that as words that are used very frequently they should be given serious thought.
Case comes into play here because, nominal cases can eliminate the need for some prepositions and help decide how the rest connect to sentences.
For speakers of languages like English, French and Spanish, nominal cases might seem like an unnecessary complication. Indeed, I would suggest that if you don't very well know any natural languages with an extensive case system you do not attempt to introduce case into your constructed language. If you wish to introduce object case versions of the pronouns (which each of the languages I mentioned in this paragraph have) you won't have any trouble and now is the time to do it. But a full blown case system is a very different matter.
My first graduate school roommate studied Classical Literature. I very well remember him struggling to understand his Latin translation assignments, and saying what a breeze his Ancient Greek readings were by comparison. I had a similar experience with different languages. It was easy enough to use the cases of German, but since the cases of German have very much fallen together and are sometimes barely distinguishable, reading the complex formal German of the late 19th and early 20th century was often a headache. By comparison the more extensive case system of Russian, which I learned a little later, was a breeze; easy to use, easy and even fun to read.
The use of case can free up word order and make for interesting stylistics. But those stylistic twists can either be a headache for the learner like in Latin or a joy as in many of the Slavic languages. The difference is in how easy it is to recognize the case of words at a glance. If you are going to use case, limit the number of noun classes you use(and if you don't know what that means you are probably not ready to be using your own case system). Then make each of the case endings distinct. Don't fall into the temptation of using the same endings for different cases as you may find in the natural languages you know. The natural languages have had thousands of years to develop and even then, some of the results aren't as happy as we'd like. Most of all remember that the first and perhaps only person who will learn your language is you. If you write something down one month and then can't make sense of it the next, there will be no one else to help you out.
How many cases you should use is up to you. Personally I think, a four case system, as in German or modern Greek, is something of a waste. You introduce much of the complexity without getting all the benefits of having a case system. On the other hand having 16 cases like Finnish is said to have, is most probably excessive. I would say that if you are familar with Latin or one of the Slavic languages with lots of cases, you should feel free to adjust the number of cases up or down to fit your imagination and needs.
Getting back to prepostions, if you are using cases, you will need to decide which cases go with which prepostions. Simply copying this from some language you already know will certainly work, but it does beg the question of whether you are making up a language or simply encoding the one you knew. Not everything you do in your language has to be new and different. But to make it worth all the effort, some things ought to be changed or improved just to make yourself happier with your end product.
The grammatical function which prepostions fill, does not necessarily have to be performed by words in front of noun phrases. In English we can readily understand the sentence Who are you going with?. Teachers of English who've been taught to think rigidly in terms of Latin grammar (whether they've been taught so much as a word of Latin or not) violently object to this kind of construction, saying it's ungrammatical. The truth is they don't understand grammar the same way a linguist does. It's not ungrammatical, it's just a construction totally alien to Latin! There is no reason the things we call prepostions could not be placed after the noun phrases and be called, say, 'postpositions!'
The plane sailed the sky through.
The woman signed the letter her pen with.
We can puzzle these sentences out. Though for sanity's sake having the words 'sky' and 'pen' above in a case relating the noun to the 'postposition' instead of the verb would be a giant help as sentences became more complex!
Personally, I didn't do anything so daring with my own language. I have a complete set of case endings (eight, including the Russian cases plus vocative and ablative) which I can use with my langauge. However I do not currently use them and don't intend to use them ever. In fact I do not even use object forms of prepositions. I do use a genitive case for nouns to avoid the chains of 'of phrases' I kept running into when I was learning Spanish. ...de la casa del hermano de Maria... I have a preposition for 'of' to use for stylistic variety, and indeed it is tempting to use it just as in English.
I made things a little more interesting by coming up with the concept of parallel prepostions. Those who know Russian know the verbal prefixes and prepostions that go together to make a set for talking about coming and going. I chose to make up prepositions in sets for 'location, direction, and destination.' I have eight sets corresponding to - in, out, to, from, up, down, into and out of. (The rest of my prepostions do not fit in this scheme). While it has made things interesting, the simple concept has turned out to be complex in use. I won't get rid of it, but I would not recommend it for others to use.
Case comes into play here because, nominal cases can eliminate the need for some prepositions and help decide how the rest connect to sentences.
For speakers of languages like English, French and Spanish, nominal cases might seem like an unnecessary complication. Indeed, I would suggest that if you don't very well know any natural languages with an extensive case system you do not attempt to introduce case into your constructed language. If you wish to introduce object case versions of the pronouns (which each of the languages I mentioned in this paragraph have) you won't have any trouble and now is the time to do it. But a full blown case system is a very different matter.
My first graduate school roommate studied Classical Literature. I very well remember him struggling to understand his Latin translation assignments, and saying what a breeze his Ancient Greek readings were by comparison. I had a similar experience with different languages. It was easy enough to use the cases of German, but since the cases of German have very much fallen together and are sometimes barely distinguishable, reading the complex formal German of the late 19th and early 20th century was often a headache. By comparison the more extensive case system of Russian, which I learned a little later, was a breeze; easy to use, easy and even fun to read.
The use of case can free up word order and make for interesting stylistics. But those stylistic twists can either be a headache for the learner like in Latin or a joy as in many of the Slavic languages. The difference is in how easy it is to recognize the case of words at a glance. If you are going to use case, limit the number of noun classes you use(and if you don't know what that means you are probably not ready to be using your own case system). Then make each of the case endings distinct. Don't fall into the temptation of using the same endings for different cases as you may find in the natural languages you know. The natural languages have had thousands of years to develop and even then, some of the results aren't as happy as we'd like. Most of all remember that the first and perhaps only person who will learn your language is you. If you write something down one month and then can't make sense of it the next, there will be no one else to help you out.
How many cases you should use is up to you. Personally I think, a four case system, as in German or modern Greek, is something of a waste. You introduce much of the complexity without getting all the benefits of having a case system. On the other hand having 16 cases like Finnish is said to have, is most probably excessive. I would say that if you are familar with Latin or one of the Slavic languages with lots of cases, you should feel free to adjust the number of cases up or down to fit your imagination and needs.
Getting back to prepostions, if you are using cases, you will need to decide which cases go with which prepostions. Simply copying this from some language you already know will certainly work, but it does beg the question of whether you are making up a language or simply encoding the one you knew. Not everything you do in your language has to be new and different. But to make it worth all the effort, some things ought to be changed or improved just to make yourself happier with your end product.
The grammatical function which prepostions fill, does not necessarily have to be performed by words in front of noun phrases. In English we can readily understand the sentence Who are you going with?. Teachers of English who've been taught to think rigidly in terms of Latin grammar (whether they've been taught so much as a word of Latin or not) violently object to this kind of construction, saying it's ungrammatical. The truth is they don't understand grammar the same way a linguist does. It's not ungrammatical, it's just a construction totally alien to Latin! There is no reason the things we call prepostions could not be placed after the noun phrases and be called, say, 'postpositions!'
The plane sailed the sky through.
The woman signed the letter her pen with.
We can puzzle these sentences out. Though for sanity's sake having the words 'sky' and 'pen' above in a case relating the noun to the 'postposition' instead of the verb would be a giant help as sentences became more complex!
Personally, I didn't do anything so daring with my own language. I have a complete set of case endings (eight, including the Russian cases plus vocative and ablative) which I can use with my langauge. However I do not currently use them and don't intend to use them ever. In fact I do not even use object forms of prepositions. I do use a genitive case for nouns to avoid the chains of 'of phrases' I kept running into when I was learning Spanish. ...de la casa del hermano de Maria... I have a preposition for 'of' to use for stylistic variety, and indeed it is tempting to use it just as in English.
I made things a little more interesting by coming up with the concept of parallel prepostions. Those who know Russian know the verbal prefixes and prepostions that go together to make a set for talking about coming and going. I chose to make up prepositions in sets for 'location, direction, and destination.' I have eight sets corresponding to - in, out, to, from, up, down, into and out of. (The rest of my prepostions do not fit in this scheme). While it has made things interesting, the simple concept has turned out to be complex in use. I won't get rid of it, but I would not recommend it for others to use.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Pronouns
At this point, if you've decided to go deeper into constucting a workable language, not just a few stray phrases, you need to start making some serious choices that will affect how the language will work in terms of grammar and equally in terms of how efficient your vocabulary will be.
No matter how many vowels and consonants you have chosen, and how many consonant clusters you've decided to accept, there is a mathematical limit to the number of individual word-roots possible of a given length. Just starting out, it will seem that you can make everything as simple, regular and unambiguous as you please and never have to worry about running out of new words you can create to expand your vocabulary. Such is the case as long as you don't attempt to create literature (short stories, poetry, essays or longer works) or attempt to translate existing works of literature into your own language.
There is a reason that on any page of an English dictionary you find words with multiple meanings. These mulitple meanings help keep words short in our language and help provide space for new terms within the phonology. It also helps make the language difficult to learn. The same is true of having grammatical gender. Theoretically you can nearly triple the number of word roots, by having nouns with three genders (masculine, feminine and neutrar) instead of none. Where the genders of the nouns are fairly obvious from the form of the word as in Spanish or Russian, learning to handle gender isn't difficult. In a language like German where the gender of many, many nouns is unpredictable from their forms, handling gender can be an endless battle.
You can see vocabulary problems more easily in languages with limited numbers of possible syllables like Mandarin or Hawaiian. In Mandarin there are many spoken words with several meanings dispite the fact that pitch stress allows Mandarin to quadruple the number of possible word roots. In Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages. the words are mostly short but the phrases and sentences to express many things can be quite long, because the number of short word-roots is very limited.
Basically I'm saying that for most purposes you will not have to worry about the number of word roots you are using, but the more extensive your language's vocabulary becomes the more you may find it necessary to introduce complications which will make your language less concise, less regular and less easy to learn than you hoped.
I recommend starting your vocabulary with pronouns. The function of pronouns need not always be separate words. In Navajo and the artificial language Klingon the pronouns are very often incorporated into the verbs as suffixes, instead of I saw him and He heard me you have something like Isawhim and Heheardme, where the forms of 'I', 'he', 'me' and 'him' might possibily change to make different classes of verbs (increasing the number of possible word-roots). Spanish has this in a more limited sense with words like verlo and verla where only the object is part of the word. If you are comfortable with this kind of suffixes then by all means try it.
One thing that immediately comes up when discussing pronouns is the Latin concepts of person and number. Just about any language taught to English speaking student will have pronouns and often verbs forms explained in terms of first person singular, third person plural and so on. Latin concepts of grammar are not the only way of looking at things and sometimes they lead us far astray. But for what we think of as person pronouns, Latin grammar does give a useful frame work, which we need not copy too rigidly.
We don't need to fill in every slot in the Latin frame work with a separate distinct word. In English we use the personal pronouns I, we, you, he, she, it, they. If we are being complete we might include thou but for 95% of all English speakers that's a relic of the past. Most of us use the word you for both second person singular and plural, and don't feel a teensy bit guilty about it. The point is that falling together of forms is a normal part of the history of real languages though it horrifies purists. There is no reason you need to be a purist for your own language, nor any reason you need avoid being one. It's your choice.
Surprisingly many natural languages have dual forms of nouns and the personal pronouns, besides singular and plural. You can use the dual or not as you wish.
Not every language has words to directly translate each of our personal pronouns and your language may have more personal pronouns than English or fewer. Very many languages (Finnish, Turkish, Navajo, etc.) with no history of grammatical gender do not have pronouns to distinguish between he and she. Many of those also don't distinguish between he/she and it. Mandarin distinguishes between all three of them in modern writing, but not in speech! Finnish distinguishes it from he/she and even has a separate they for things. From what I've read Samoan avoids using a pronoun for it altogehter.
For my own language I kept he, she, and it, though I have no grammatic gender. It just seemed a good way to make sentences clear without extra verbiage. However I did introduce two personal pronouns, which I don't know exist in any natural language. The first is a different we.
Have you ever a misunderstanding like this?
We are going to the movies tonight.
Oh, no *we* are not. I'm busy.
Uhm, I meant my family and I.
I have in my language an 'exclusive' we which excludes the intended listener as well as an 'inclusive' we which includes the intended listener. This is very helpful at times especially in writing. I'm not a native user of the concept so I do have to think which 'we' to use and sometimes make mistakes.
Much easier to remember to use is my form of a second it. I use one it only for concrete touchable objects, the other for abstract concepts. Obviously, it's not a necessary distinction. But I have found that the it for concepts can often be left out of some constructions entirely or used for emphasis. It's another feature I'm glad I have.
No matter how many vowels and consonants you have chosen, and how many consonant clusters you've decided to accept, there is a mathematical limit to the number of individual word-roots possible of a given length. Just starting out, it will seem that you can make everything as simple, regular and unambiguous as you please and never have to worry about running out of new words you can create to expand your vocabulary. Such is the case as long as you don't attempt to create literature (short stories, poetry, essays or longer works) or attempt to translate existing works of literature into your own language.
There is a reason that on any page of an English dictionary you find words with multiple meanings. These mulitple meanings help keep words short in our language and help provide space for new terms within the phonology. It also helps make the language difficult to learn. The same is true of having grammatical gender. Theoretically you can nearly triple the number of word roots, by having nouns with three genders (masculine, feminine and neutrar) instead of none. Where the genders of the nouns are fairly obvious from the form of the word as in Spanish or Russian, learning to handle gender isn't difficult. In a language like German where the gender of many, many nouns is unpredictable from their forms, handling gender can be an endless battle.
You can see vocabulary problems more easily in languages with limited numbers of possible syllables like Mandarin or Hawaiian. In Mandarin there are many spoken words with several meanings dispite the fact that pitch stress allows Mandarin to quadruple the number of possible word roots. In Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages. the words are mostly short but the phrases and sentences to express many things can be quite long, because the number of short word-roots is very limited.
Basically I'm saying that for most purposes you will not have to worry about the number of word roots you are using, but the more extensive your language's vocabulary becomes the more you may find it necessary to introduce complications which will make your language less concise, less regular and less easy to learn than you hoped.
I recommend starting your vocabulary with pronouns. The function of pronouns need not always be separate words. In Navajo and the artificial language Klingon the pronouns are very often incorporated into the verbs as suffixes, instead of I saw him and He heard me you have something like Isawhim and Heheardme, where the forms of 'I', 'he', 'me' and 'him' might possibily change to make different classes of verbs (increasing the number of possible word-roots). Spanish has this in a more limited sense with words like verlo and verla where only the object is part of the word. If you are comfortable with this kind of suffixes then by all means try it.
One thing that immediately comes up when discussing pronouns is the Latin concepts of person and number. Just about any language taught to English speaking student will have pronouns and often verbs forms explained in terms of first person singular, third person plural and so on. Latin concepts of grammar are not the only way of looking at things and sometimes they lead us far astray. But for what we think of as person pronouns, Latin grammar does give a useful frame work, which we need not copy too rigidly.
We don't need to fill in every slot in the Latin frame work with a separate distinct word. In English we use the personal pronouns I, we, you, he, she, it, they. If we are being complete we might include thou but for 95% of all English speakers that's a relic of the past. Most of us use the word you for both second person singular and plural, and don't feel a teensy bit guilty about it. The point is that falling together of forms is a normal part of the history of real languages though it horrifies purists. There is no reason you need to be a purist for your own language, nor any reason you need avoid being one. It's your choice.
Surprisingly many natural languages have dual forms of nouns and the personal pronouns, besides singular and plural. You can use the dual or not as you wish.
Not every language has words to directly translate each of our personal pronouns and your language may have more personal pronouns than English or fewer. Very many languages (Finnish, Turkish, Navajo, etc.) with no history of grammatical gender do not have pronouns to distinguish between he and she. Many of those also don't distinguish between he/she and it. Mandarin distinguishes between all three of them in modern writing, but not in speech! Finnish distinguishes it from he/she and even has a separate they for things. From what I've read Samoan avoids using a pronoun for it altogehter.
For my own language I kept he, she, and it, though I have no grammatic gender. It just seemed a good way to make sentences clear without extra verbiage. However I did introduce two personal pronouns, which I don't know exist in any natural language. The first is a different we.
Have you ever a misunderstanding like this?
We are going to the movies tonight.
Oh, no *we* are not. I'm busy.
Uhm, I meant my family and I.
I have in my language an 'exclusive' we which excludes the intended listener as well as an 'inclusive' we which includes the intended listener. This is very helpful at times especially in writing. I'm not a native user of the concept so I do have to think which 'we' to use and sometimes make mistakes.
Much easier to remember to use is my form of a second it. I use one it only for concrete touchable objects, the other for abstract concepts. Obviously, it's not a necessary distinction. But I have found that the it for concepts can often be left out of some constructions entirely or used for emphasis. It's another feature I'm glad I have.
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