Ah, la grammaire.
Sans doute la partie la plus complexe d'une langue.
Et j'suis sur l'point de l'expliquer !
I know none of you just understood what I said, unless you know French, but if all of you are smart enough to look at the third word, you would know that the next thing we're learning about is grammar!
Before we talk about anything important, we just gotta address the elephant in the room: GRAMMATICAL NUMBER.
Grammatical number shows the plurality of a word. However, SOME languages don't have any. Examples of languages lacking in number marking are Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.
For example, 猫 (neko) can be used as the singular form of cat. However, it can also be the PLURAL form, cats, without any morphological changes! Scandalous, I know!
Let's look at a bunch of plural morphology in random languages:
ENGLISH: CAT -----> CATS
FRENCH: CHAT -----> CHATS / CHATTE -----> CHATTES
KYRGYZ: МЫШЫК (mishik) -----> МЫШЫКТАР (mishiktar)
GERMAN: KATZE -----> KATZEN
All of these words, when pluralised, are affected by a prefix or suffix. However, your language can do something different! I believe in your conlanging ability!
For example, you could change a consonant appearing in the word to show change. It can become voiced like in this scenario:
t'apt'ap - raindrop, the action of falling rain (n.)
t'abt'ab - raindrops (n.)
Or voiceless like in this scenario:
marhmagha - mountain goat (n.)
marhmakha - mountain goats (n.)
Or perhaps vowels could change.
takhī - language, talk (n.)
tökhī - languages (n.)
Or we could just do the typical suffix or prefix.
khibkhib - slipper (n.)
khibkhibūn -slippers (n.)
While, for my language, voicing or devoicing is interesting, it may not last very long. AFTER ALL, this is a proto-language.
Well, for now, I'm going to use the suffix. It's definitely a very sensible option, but I challenge you to use something OTHER than a suffix! I'm sure you'll ace it!
Now let's move on to...
SENTENCE AND ADJECTIVAL WORD ORDER
One important thing that you must know before you wanna become a linguist is NOT ALL LANGUAGES WORK THE SAME. This is especially true when it comes to word ordering.
Word ordering is, funnily enough, the way you order words in a sentence or phrase. First, I'm going to introduce you to SVO (subject-verb-object) order, the ordering system that speakers of English, Arabic, the Bantu languages, French, Russian, Greek, Italian, Mandarin, Toki Pona, Spanish, Hebrew, Hausa, Bosnian and many others will find very familiar!
In this well-known sample sentence below, we have an SVO sentence order.
Sam ate oranges.
SUB VRB OBJ
