Grammar index
A living reference shaped by attested forms and corpus evidence.
Blaken Grammar
This is the language of the Blakenian people. This language is young but it is eager to grow and bloom into a beautiful network of human thought.
Grammar Survival Guide
This guide is a compact map of Blaken grammar for readers who need to understand a text written in Blaken without reading the whole reference grammar. It does not replace the fu...
Orthography
Besides the IPA symbols used throughout this grammar, Blaken can be written in several orthographic systems. The current text corpus primarily uses IPA-heavy or MonoBlaken-like...
Phonology
The vowel inventory cosists of the following eight phonemes: While front vowels are open, back and central vowels tend to be rounded. However, for the following vowels, the foll...
Morphology
A fundamental property of Blaken is the one-to-one correspondence between syllable and morpheme. Each syllable constitutes a complete, meaningful, and irreducible morpheme. Ther...
Event Nominals
Event nominals are how Blaken expresses what other languages do with subordinate clauses. Turn verbs into events, not actions controlled by agents.
Verbs
Verbs in Blaken do not encode time directly. Instead, they encode whether a concept (morpheme) manifests as an event, and how that event unfolds (aspect). Temporal interpretatio...
Adjectives
In Blaken, “adjectives” are not a primitive lexical class. They are derived states or relations built by attaching an adjectivizer to any root. The adjectivizer determines wheth...
Alignment
Blaken uses a fluid-S active-stative alignment system in which subjects and agents are identified through noun-phrase-level markers that encode internal states of control. The m...
Syntax
We inherit from our actions, and we are bound to our actions. For that reason, the verb is typically placed first. Blaken therefore tends toward VSO order. Verb stacking is avoi...
Pragmatics
The present chapter documents pragmatic tendencies that are actually visible in the current text corpus. Because that corpus is still relatively small, the observations below sh...