Grammar

How sentences are structured in the Slabbic.

Word Order

A sentence has three core words. At minimum it must have a verb, and it may also have subject and object nouns. These words can go anywhere in the sentence, but clauses, adjectives, and other attached words are ordered relative to the core words.

Example

This means that both and are valid translations of "Unity creates Acacia wood". The order of the words is entirely up to the author.

Noun Declensions

There are three declension classes of nouns. Nouns that end in (M-nouns), (J-nouns), or (H-nouns).

Nouns decline based on what role they play in a sentence. The declensions are as follows:

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

"Object form" or "Dictionary form" nouns are both the form that is typically listed in the dictionary, as well as the declension used to make that noun the object of the sentence's verb. "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 jokingly verb nouns to turn them into action words. Because nouns decline, you can easily list multiple subjects, objects and verbs anywhere in the sentence.

Verb Types

In Slabbic, verbs conjugate to tell you whether or not they have objects. This way, you can leave out the nouns of a sentence and still get a meaning across. 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, so no conjugation is necessary. All of the other verbs, called "Flexible Verbs", conjugate to specify whether or not they have an object.

	Transitive (dict.)	Intransitive form
Flexible Verbs

Making Verbs into Nouns

To make a verb into a noun, you add the noun prefix "" to the beginning of the verb and give it a suffix to indicate what role it plays in the sentence. Add the "" suffix to make the word in dictionary/object form, and use the "" suffix to make the word in subject form.

In order to make a larger sentence into a noun, you must add the affixes to your verb as explained above, and then you can use grammatical words to attach subjects and objects to your verb. The subject clause, initiated with "", makes any following nouns the subjects of your verb. The object clause, initiated with "", 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.

Verb Tense

By default, verb tense is implied through context. To specify a tense, an affix can be used, as described in the next section.

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 word that they are describing or altering. 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 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 wooden planks made from the used noun.

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, changing "fire" into "ice" in one context, and changing "fire" into "water" in another.

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 "the property of having that affix". For example, "" means "the property of having happened in the past", or similarly, "completedness" or "finishedness".

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.