1. Overview

A fundamental property of Blaken is the one-to-one correspondence between syllable and morpheme. Each syllable constitutes a complete, meaningful, and irreducible morpheme. There are no sub-syllabic units with independent grammatical or semantic value.

As a result, a single syllable may function as a lexical root and serve as the basis for an entire word family through regular derivational morphology.

All derivational morphemes in Blaken are themselves monosyllabic, preserving the principle of syllable-morpheme identity throughout the language.

Lexical roots in Blaken are semantically underspecified and may be derived into different lexical categories depending on the morphological material attached to them. The following derivations illustrate a typical word family built from the root _blin_ “love”.

1.1. Canonical Dictionary Entry Policy

The canonical lexicon of Blaken is intentionally conservative. As a general policy, dictionary entries should list roots in their nominal or concept-like value, rather than storing every predictable member of a derivational family as a separate lemma.

This means that entries are usually recorded as notions such as:

• solitude
• understanding
• blue
• beauty
• childhood

even when the same root can regularly appear in eventive, adjectival, adverbial, or agentive derivations.

The goal of this policy is to preserve coherence across the lexicon and to avoid unnecessary duplication. If a form can be derived transparently from an existing root, that derived form normally does not need its own independent dictionary entry.

In practice, this means:

• the dictionary favors one root per family whenever the derivation is productive and recoverable;
• the entry gloss should name the conceptual core of the root, not every contextual reading;
• category-specific readings are described in the grammar and in examples, rather than multiplied as separate lemmas;
• compounds, lexicalized kinship forms, proper nouns, and semantically opaque formations may still justify their own entries.

So a root such as blin is best entered once as an abstract nominal concept ("love"), while verbal, adjectival, adverbial, and agentive forms are treated as regular derivations from that root.

2. Grammatical Morphemes

Some morphemes can be used to mark a grammatical role when attached to another. The grammatical functions that these morphemes can cover are the following:

2.1. Derivational Morphemes

They change the category or conceptual framing.

• -ko
• -blom
• ɸøn

2.2. Relational Morphemes

Relational morphemes have a double life. They can be written as separate postpositions after the noun phrase they modify, but they are also ordinary roots and may receive event modifiers such as -ken, -tan, -bu, and -tu. In descriptive glossing, their postpositional use may still be referred to by case-like semantic labels such as locative postposition, dative postposition, ablative postposition, and comitative postposition.

The core relational morphemes are the following:

• to
• os
• tin
• ex

When creating relative modifications, some of the preceding postpositions can be merged:

• exto

• towy

2.3. Event-Shaping Morphemes

• -ken
• -tan
• -bu
• -tu
• -bla

3. Relational Marking

Relations between entities are expressed through a limited set of postpositions and relational morphology, grounded in spatial, experiential, and functional notions. Relational meaning is therefore distributed across several strategies, depending on how the relation is conceptualized. This description is intentionally semantic rather than prescriptive: the labels dative, locative, ablative, and comitative are used as descriptive conveniences for the roles these postpositions commonly express.

Blaken makes use of the following core relational roots in postpositional function:

• os: dative (goal, recipient, beneficiary)

• tin: locative (location, containment, internal relation)

• ex: ablative (source, origin, separation, material, means)

• to: comitative (association, accompaniment, access-based possession)

These postpositions are used both in concrete spatial contexts and in extended metaphorical uses.

3.1. Relational Roots as Events

Because relational morphemes are also roots, they can be eventivized like other roots. In this use, the event does not mean "to use a postposition"; it means that the relation itself becomes a process, stance, or unfolding state.

The postpositional and eventive uses are therefore related but not identical:

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wo to nas _I with you / I in association with you_

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token woblum nas _I accompany you / I enter a with-you relation intentionally_

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wa tin tin _in the interior of the mountain_

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tinken prum wa tin _it becomes internalized in the mountain / it enters the mountain_

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osken woblum pheolhes _I orient myself toward the path / I reach toward the path as a goal_

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exken blwomprum wa to geon ex _warmth emerges from the mountain's root_

The same principle applies to perfective, inferential, reportative, and prospective forms when discourse requires them: totan, ostu, tinbu, exra, and so on. The exact English translation depends on whether the relation is construed as a process, a completed transition, or a goal successfully reached. For this reason, osken may mean either "move/orient toward" or "attain/obtain" when the goal relation is understood as complete.

3.2. Indirect Relations (os)

Besides marking the indirect object of ditransitive verbs, it can also express beneficiary and destination.

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nas os krifbla A letter for you

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kentan woblum nas os I did it for you

3.3. Locative Relations (_tin_)

The locative postposition tin is used to encode relations conceptualized as internal inclusion or structural dependency, including:

• body-part relations

• “hand in me” → _my hand_

• part–whole relations

• “top in table” → _the top of the table_

• stable containment or inherent attachment

This strategy reflects the view that such relations are not ownership relations, but internal configurations.

The tin postposition may also indicate personal possession using the following structure:

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wodom tin mon the object in the me-domain

This is particularly used in relative modifications.

3.4. Ablative Relations (_ex_)

The ablative postposition ex expresses relations involving source or derivation, including:

• material composition

• “ring from gold” → _a gold ring_

• origin

• “apple from tree”

• instrument / means

• “cut from knife” → _cut with a knife_

In Blaken, instruments are treated as sources of action rather than independent grammatical roles.

3.5. Comitative Relations (_to_)

The comitative postposition to marks association and co-presence. Blaken does not employ a genitive case or a general marker equivalent to English _of_. Instead, the comitative postposition to is also a primary strategy for expressing personal possession:

• “apple with me” → _my apple_

This encodes possession as access or proximity, not ownership.

Use to rather than tin when the relation is one of accompaniment, access, symbolic association, social bond, or practical possession, and when both entities remain conceptually separable. Use tin when the relation is internal, bodily, structural, contained, or constitutive.

This contrast is especially important in body-like metaphors:

• wa tin kom: the mountain's head as an internal body-part region
• wa to phaoc: the mountain's influence field, associated with it but not contained inside it
• wa tin dem: a literal hand of the mountain, if construed as part of its body
• wa to dem: the mountain's hands as associated beings or agents, separable from the mountain itself

3.6. Postposition Combinations

3.6.1. Without (towy)

3.6.2. Reason (exto)

3.7. Layers of Possession

There are three layers of possession, from the strongest to the loosest:

1. Inherent/Bodily (tin): wo tin kles ("hand in me"). The hand is part of the physical aggregate. 2. Domain/Psychological (dom tin): wodom tin mon ("object in my domain"). This isn't "part" of your body, but it is currently within your sphere of influence or responsibility (like the air you are breathing or the house you live in). 3. Associative/Access (to): wo to glwɑmdom ("house with me"). The house exists, you are with it, but there is a clear separation.

4. Nominal Morphology

There is no special marking for nouns. When nouns function as direct objects, the noun and the morpheme are identical. However, new concepts are often built by merging morphemes into compounds.

Because the lexicon stores roots in their canonical nominal/conceptual value, nominal morphology is also the descriptive baseline for dictionary citation. Other category readings are treated as derivational expansions of that nominal core unless the language has lexicalized a separate item.

In general, the rightmost element of a nominal compound determines the basic nature of the nominal as a whole, while preceding elements specify the nature of the last morpheme.

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The Fourfold Principle for Word Length Excessively long words make reading harder and burden understanding. In practice, morpheme clustering usually does not go beyond three syllables, including grammatical morphemes. Four-syllable clusters may occur occasionally. Further clustering may remain grammatically interpretable, but speakers often avoid it by rephrasing or by creating new single-syllable morphemes.

The following noun phrase meaning "blue" has four morphemes, and agglutination would usually not go any further:

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Omken andomprum an-dom-wor-vom Sky appears in an above-place [sky] color manner

4.1. Event Nominal Compounds

Instead of a verb-object relationship, Blaken often uses noun-noun incorporation. The patient (e.g. water in I want water) is fused to the state (want) to create a single event nominal. For more on these constructions, see Syntax: Existential Sentences.

4.1.1. Internal Ordering of Event Nominals

Blaken does not impose a rigid syntactic order on the elements of these nominals. Event nominals represent single complex events, rather than hierarchically embedded predicates. Consequently, the relative order of roots inside a compound does not by itself encode subject, object, or complement structure.

As a result, the following compounds may both be acceptable when the intended relation is recoverable:

• pølgjof: _help–find_

• gjofpøl: _find–help_

This works in a way closer to many Chinese compounds than to strongly head-marked agglutinative morphology: speakers may tolerate multiple orders, and discourse or lexical convention resolves much of the interpretation. The order chosen does not create a different clause structure; rather, it changes which part of the event is more salient or more lexicalized.

Still, speakers often treat the final element as the semantic profile or center of the compound: an event ending in ɲa is usually interpreted as a desire-centered event, while one ending in pøl is usually interpreted as a helping-centered event. Earlier elements specify what that centered event concerns. In this sense, order reflects semantic profiling, not grammatical dependency.

For example:

• a compound ending in ɲa (_want_) is understood as a desire-type event

• a compound ending in pøl (_help_) is understood as a helping-type event

4.1.2. Desire-Nominal Complex

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gljum-ɲap water-desire _a water-desire_

This compound is used to express will, intention, or need in phrases such as domken gljumɲaprum wo tin (lit. the water-desire exists in me).

4.2. Proper Nouns and Transliterations

Concepts imported from other languages, like proper nouns, can be translated into a polysyllabic morpheme. In casual register, the tendency is to use only the first syllable and the -ɸøn suffix, which is neuter (the native construction for given names); the polysyllabic version may be kept in formal speech.

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Javier $\rightarrow$ ɸafɸøn / ɸa-bjer Lilian $\rightarrow$ liɸøn / li-ljan Andrés $\rightarrow$ anɸøn / an-dres Martin $\rightarrow$ marɸøn /mar-tin Romain $\rightarrow$ roɸøn / ro-man

Since the resulting name can bear a meaning in Blaken (e.g. mar-tin meaning in the evil; marɸøn meaning evil being), an alternative form can be coined based on the etymology of the name.

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Martin $\rightarrow$ tʁiχɸøn (fighter) Ángel $\rightarrow$ anɸøn (celestial being) Flor $\rightarrow$ ɸlømɸøn (flower being)

5. Verbs

Refer to verbs.

6. Adjectives

Refer to adjectives.

7. Adverbs

Comparison and similarity are expressed through the adverb-forming morpheme -vom, which attaches to compound nouns.

This strategy encodes similarity as manner or mode, rather than as a binary comparison:

• “you-ish manner” → _like you_

• _nas-vom_ → “in a you-like way”

This avoids comparative constructions based on abstract equivalence. Adverbs can modify events and adjectives. They are often derived from any morpheme by reduplication:

gurgur: repetitively blinblin: in a lovely manner blomblom: completely

Not every doubled form is adverbial. The current corpus also shows a small kinship pattern in which reduplication is lexical and nominal rather than manner-marking. A form such as tata “grandmother” should therefore be treated as a kinship noun, not as an adverb derived by repetition.

At the current stage, this pattern is best analyzed as a restricted kinship subset rather than as a fully productive general rule for nouns.

The root vom can also be attached to a compound concept to form an adverb.

prjørmivom: blindly