Grammar

How sentences are structured in the Slabbic.

Word Order

Slabbic has free word order. The sentence's main verb, object, and subject can go anywhere, and additional words are placed relative to these words.

Thus, the main verbs, subjects, and objects of a sentence are called "Core words", and are essentially the roots of a sentence.

Example

Both and are valid translations of "Unity creates Acacia Trees". The order of the core words is entirely up to the author.

Multiple Core Words

In Slabbic, a sentence can have as many of each kind of core word as you wish. You can list multiple subjects, objects and verbs anywhere in a sentence.

Example

Using multiple of each kind of core word with free word order allows one to write sentences like

Noun Declensions

Because of Slabbic's free word order, the role of a noun in a sentence is determined by declension. Nouns come in three types, those that end in (M-nouns), those that end in (J-nouns), and those that end in (H-nouns). Nouns decline differnetly based on these endings.

There are three declensions a given noun can take on. An "Object" / "Dictionary" form, a "Subject" form, and a "Verb" form.

The below table indicates how the different kinds of noun decline when used in different parts of a sentence.

	Object (dict. form)	Subject Form	Verb Form
M-nouns
J-nouns
H-nouns

"Object form", also called "Dictionary form", is used as a base form of the word to be listed in dictionaries. This Object form is also used to indicate the sentence's core object(s).

"Subject form" is used to make a noun the subject of the sentence.

"Verb form" is a declension that turns the noun into a verb, like how we often verb nouns in English to turn them into action words. Nouns often have specific meanings when used in Verb form (these are listed with the word's definition in the dictionary). However, in other cases, verbing a word has a context-dependent meaning that is completely up to the author, or a noun is verbed that has yet to have an established verb meaning.

Plural Nouns

By default, it is implied through context whether or not a noun is plural or singular. "Noun Affixes" are used to concretely specify a noun's count.

Verb Types

In Slabbic, verbs conjugate based on whether or not they have objects. This allows speakers to omit nouns from a sentence while still indicating that an object exists. Some verbs do not conjugate however, and play a stricter role. "Strictly Intransitive" verbs can never have an object, while "Strictly Transitive" verbs always have an object. Because of these words' 'strict' roles, they do not need to conjugate. All of the other verbs, called "Flexible Verbs", conjugate to specify whether or not they have an object.

	Transitive (dict.)	Intransitive form
Flexible Verbs

Noun-ed verbs are an exception to this rule, instead working context-dependently. A noun in "Verb form" does not have any suffixes telling the reader what role it is playing.

Making Verbs into Nouns

To make a verb into a noun, the noun prefix "" is added to the beginning of the verb. If the word is in dictionary/object form, no suffix is added to the word. If you need to indicated that the noun-ed verb is in subject form, the "" suffix is added to the word.

Converting a Verb with Subjects and Objects into a Noun

In order to convert a verb with subject(s) and/or object(s) into a noun, the normal noun conversion affixes are applied to verb, and then grammatical words are used to attach subjects and objects to that verb. The subject clause, initiated with the word "", makes any following nouns the subjects of your verb. The object clause, initiated with the word "", makes any following nouns the objects of your verb. Any nouns listed in these clauses must be in dictionary/object form, and can only be placed immediately after their grammatical words. Preventing the nouns in these clauses from declining helps remove confusion as to what role they play in the sentence at large. Either the subject clause or the object clause can be listed first, but they must immediately follow the noun-ed verb in question.

It is worth noting that if multiple nouns are listed in an object clause, it can be ambiguous whether or not any of them beyond the first noun are a part of the object clause or are simply core words of the sentence at large. This is can be fixed by listing the object clause before the subject clause, as clause-ed noun words must be written in sequence, but this method only works to disambiguate phrases that use both an object clause and a subject clause.

Verb Tense

By default, verb tense is implied through context. To specify a tense, a "Verb Affix" can be used.

Affix Descriptive Words

Descriptive words in Slabbic are affixes, meaning they are attached to a word. They can come immediately after (suffixes) or immediately before (prefixes) the words that they describe or alter. They come in four classes: descriptive words for nouns called "Noun Affixes", descriptive words for verbs called "Verb Affixes", words that can describe nouns and verbs called "Multi Affixes", and special "Affix Affixes" which describe or alter other affixes.

Examples of "Noun Affixes" include the prefix "-", which means that the noun is large in size, literally or metaphorically; and the suffix "-", which means planks made from the used noun (likely some kind of wood).

Examples of "Verb Affixes" include the suffix "-", which means that the verb happened in the past; and the prefix "-", which turns a verb into a noun meaning the action of doing that verb.

An example of a "Multi Affix" (i.e., can apply to either nouns or verbs) is the prefix "-", which changes a verb or noun to mean the opposite of that word. This could be context dependent, especially if a word has multiple meanings, like changing "fire" into "ice" in one context, and changing "fire" into "hire" in another context.

Turning Affixes into Nouns

Affixes can be turned into nouns with a special "Affix Affix" (that is, an affix that alters another affix) prefix "-" which turns an affix into a noun meaning "the property of having that affix". For example, "" means "the property of having happened in the past".

Specific Affix Uses

Some Noun + Affix combinations have established, perhaps arbitrary meanings in Slabbic. For example, "" (using the affix "-" meaning 'material made from ~') usually refers to "Oak wood logs", even though it technically could refer to Oak leaves, or even sticks or apples as well.

Slabbic Romanization

There are 30 letters in the slabbic language (excluding spaces). These letters are romanized by mapping each one to a latin letter with the numerals "1" through "4" used to cover the last slabbic characters. See the alphabet page for the exact mapping. For example, the Slabbic "" (meaning Acacia Woord) romanizes as "oh".

To take romanized text and convert it the other way into a slabbic form, you simply do the same thing in reverse. Each latin letter already corresponds to a slabbic character. For example, the name "Luke Knotts" is written as in Slabbic. If anyone's curious, on the developer side of this website, I have a special component that converts romanizations into their Slabbic form.

Suffix Appending for Foreign Nouns

Say you wanted to convert something into a noun and that was not a normal Slabbic word, such as a loan word. It coule be ambiguous what role that word plays in a sentence if it doesn't end in a typical noun declension (if it did, it is typical to then decline the word as if it were a Slabbic word, even using a declined form as the 'dictionary form' of the word in Slabbic). In these unconforming cases, the base form of the word is considered the "Object" or dictionary form, and the suffixes "-" and "-" change the word into the "Subject" and "Verb" forms, respectively. This creates the "B-noun" class, as shown in the below table.

Object (dict. form)	Subject Form	Verb Form
[base form]	-	-

Thus if you wanted to convert the foreign name " (Luke)" into a Slabbic noun, "" would represent the dictionary form, "" would represent the subject form, and "" would represent the verb form.

Cases where adding a suffix to make a B-noun also can arise when using other affixes to convert words into nouns.