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A photo taken of a sudreɪl sentence broken down so you can see individual morphemes impact, in IPA being:
- /ecjawa ioʊθa asulewa lafetwa laɪitari ru?/
In creating sadreil's grammar, I found myself pondering an interesting question; does simplicity make a language more effective, or does an overly simplified grammar limit what meaning can be expressed? Over time, I determined that simplicity in the form of consistency was necessary for ease of use and learning, though a simple system could lead to a lack of expression in the language when trying to communicate complex ideas and emotions.
A prime example of this is the conlang Toki Pona. Toki Pona's extremely simple grammar makes it fantastically easy to learn, though it is much harder to express ideas even as simple as "___________________________"
In this realization, I created the main aspects of sadreil's grammar, and was struck by both logical ease of understanding and its seemingly paradoxical difficulty to learn. I felt very confident making sentences with my notes in front of me due to the grammars consistent nature, though coming up with sentences off the top of the my head proved harder than anticipated. sadreil's grammar feels almost alien to a native English speaker, and being one even I, the creator of the language, found myself stumbling into the habits forged by my native tongue. I then decided to make the grammar a little more familiar for ease of learning by re-introducing the SVO word order as the default, but allowing Free Word Order (FWO) in order to express the focus of a sentence.
This combo system, much like the dual writing system, proved over time to be my favorite way of communicating, allowing the strengths of both SVO and FWO systems while having none of the weaknesses, because their strengths cover each other very well. It also allows beginners to jump into the language with SVO, learning FWO only once they become more serious about mastering the language. This allows for levels of expertise, so everyone from the most casual visitor to those who are seeking fluency can find something in this language and not be put off by it.
Before I even tacked word order however, I focused my energy on the particle and core system sadreil uses in regards to bound and unbound morphemes. I was inspired largely by my casual at best study of mandarin Chinese in school (except ewwwww tones why), which has what I would consider a wildly easier to use and learn grammar than English, though the simplicity of the grammar does not seem to get in the way of effective communication. The proof of this lies in quite simply how widespread the language is. The determination therefore can be made that Mandarin has managed to cross the boundary between simplicity and communication, meaning that it is complicated enough to allow for any necessary thought or feeling to be expressed though keeps relative simplicity. This interesting balancing act lead to me basing much of sadreil's grammar off of my very limited expose to the middle kingdoms speech, such as how /mai/ and 不/没 (/bu/ and /mei/) negate the meanings of words. I also fell in love with how mandarin attaches meaning to core words, leading directly to my creation of the particle and core system. An example of this would be how you would say "your" in mandarin and sadreil. They are one to one translatable due to the shared systems.
我们的 /su le wa/
我们的 /su le wa/
These both in English would literally translate to "you + plural + possessive", roughly meaning "your". It would realistically mean the very awkward "your guys's", due to the fact that in English the world your does not communicate any kind of plurality to the word.
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