This is gonna be my go-to spot for posting whatever I'm working on for Msérsca at the moment.
EDIT: Removed an idea for verbal negation that no longer holds water for Msérsca. Shortly I will discuss some of the quirks of Msérsca-as-currently-understood's morphology.
Msérsca scratchpad
Re: Msérsca scratchpad
Perhaps the chief highlight of Msérsca grammar is that adjectival phrases and relative clauses are both formed by turning a verb into a declinable noun which agrees with the noun it modifies in case and number. Attributive verbs are known in, say, Japanese, but partly because Msérsca has lost the nominative/accusative distinction in most nouns, its verbs have developed multiple attributive forms that allow us to distinguish subject and object (and quite a few other things besides, but one thing at a time). We can think of these as participles, much like the active and passive participles of many European languages.
Let's start with a simple subject-predicate sentence with a transitive verb. Since nominative and accusative have mostly merged to form what I call the common case, I'll leave them unmarked. Basic word order is SOV.
Cem prus nama.
man apple eat.PRES
The man eats an apple.
To refer to the man who eats the apple, we need to apply the agentive participle of namar to eat. The least ambiguous way to do this is with the agentive suffix -x, giving us namax eater, one who eats. But if the modified noun is in the common case, it's permissible to simply use the finite/predicative form (with no suffix), and it will be assumed that the modified noun is the subject.
prus namax cem or prus nama cem
apple eat.AGT man
"apple eater man" or "apple eat man"
The only difference between these two might be that the former is a bit more definite. We would probably translate it as the man who... whereas the unmarked form might be more likely to mean a man who...
Now suppose we want to talk about the apple eaten by the man. For that we'll need the passive participle, which for namar is namat, thus:
cem namat prus
man eat.PASS apple
"man eaten apple"
Note that we can't say *cem nama prus, because this would imply that the apple is eating the man!
Again, these participles agree with the modified noun in case and number, and there are two "full" cases in Msérsca, which I'll call the genitive and the dative. Here are a couple examples with what we established above:
prus namaira cemi demnes
apple eat.AGT.GEN man.GEN house
the man who eats the apple's house
Ranucca prus namactis cemnis mitto.
napkin apple eat.AGT.DAT man.DAT give.1SG.PRES*
I give a napkin to the man who eats the apple.
*A few dozen common verbs have first-person singular conjugations in the present tense. Otherwise, Msérsca conjugates finite verbs for number, but not person. More on that another time.
Msérsca adjectives are a special case of attributive verbs. They're stative, so they don't form relative clauses with subjects or objects, and they don't have agentive or passive participles unless we're trying to be a little goofy. So even more cleanly than with other verbs, we can think of adjectives as words which behave as verbs predicatively and as nouns attributively.
Diachronically speaking, the majority of these stative verbs were originally nominals that merged with an adjectival copula. But synchronically, as we'll soon see, the "original" form of the word is often obscured. In these cases, two attributive forms can be back-derived (and happily employed) from the predicative form. Due to this "primacy" of the predicative form, the dictionary form of adjectives is the infinitive/gerund, which for most of them ends in -or.
For example, take the stative verbs círor to be red and doëllor to be good, welcome. These have the predicative forms círa and doëlla, as in Prus círa The apple is red and Cem doëlla The man is good. But what should we do if we want to say the red apple or the good man?
In the former case, cír (equivalent to pulling -or off completely) has quite a life of its own as a noun meaning (the color) red. In the latter case, the original nominal form for good is actually doëlla (identical to the predicative form). Now cír ends in a consonant, so it takes the first declension, and doëlla ends in a short vowel so it takes the second, and thus we can say
cír prus / cíe pruri / cirris prussis
red apple / red apple's / to the red apple
doëlla cem / doëllan cemi / doëllas cemnis
good man / good man's / to the good man
And this is all perfectly grammatical. But there is little stopping a Msérsca speaker from analyzing these two adjectives in reverse of the above, deriving círa for red and doël for good. This gives us
círa prus / círan pruri / círas prussis
red apple / red apple's / to the red apple
doël cem / doëli cemi / doëllis cemnis
good man / good man's / to the good man
In practice, a mix of both sets of forms is often used. Many speakers, especially for the genitive and dative, choose the form that matches the declension of the modified noun, giving us e.g. cirris prussis to the red apple but círas nápas to the red fruit.
There are adjectives that don't exhibit this behavior (at least not to nearly the same extent), but we'll discuss them another time. We'll also discuss active intransitive verbs.
Relative Clauses
Let's start with a simple subject-predicate sentence with a transitive verb. Since nominative and accusative have mostly merged to form what I call the common case, I'll leave them unmarked. Basic word order is SOV.
Cem prus nama.
man apple eat.PRES
The man eats an apple.
To refer to the man who eats the apple, we need to apply the agentive participle of namar to eat. The least ambiguous way to do this is with the agentive suffix -x, giving us namax eater, one who eats. But if the modified noun is in the common case, it's permissible to simply use the finite/predicative form (with no suffix), and it will be assumed that the modified noun is the subject.
prus namax cem or prus nama cem
apple eat.AGT man
"apple eater man" or "apple eat man"
The only difference between these two might be that the former is a bit more definite. We would probably translate it as the man who... whereas the unmarked form might be more likely to mean a man who...
Now suppose we want to talk about the apple eaten by the man. For that we'll need the passive participle, which for namar is namat, thus:
cem namat prus
man eat.PASS apple
"man eaten apple"
Note that we can't say *cem nama prus, because this would imply that the apple is eating the man!
Again, these participles agree with the modified noun in case and number, and there are two "full" cases in Msérsca, which I'll call the genitive and the dative. Here are a couple examples with what we established above:
prus namaira cemi demnes
apple eat.AGT.GEN man.GEN house
the man who eats the apple's house
Ranucca prus namactis cemnis mitto.
napkin apple eat.AGT.DAT man.DAT give.1SG.PRES*
I give a napkin to the man who eats the apple.
*A few dozen common verbs have first-person singular conjugations in the present tense. Otherwise, Msérsca conjugates finite verbs for number, but not person. More on that another time.
Adjectives
Msérsca adjectives are a special case of attributive verbs. They're stative, so they don't form relative clauses with subjects or objects, and they don't have agentive or passive participles unless we're trying to be a little goofy. So even more cleanly than with other verbs, we can think of adjectives as words which behave as verbs predicatively and as nouns attributively.
Diachronically speaking, the majority of these stative verbs were originally nominals that merged with an adjectival copula. But synchronically, as we'll soon see, the "original" form of the word is often obscured. In these cases, two attributive forms can be back-derived (and happily employed) from the predicative form. Due to this "primacy" of the predicative form, the dictionary form of adjectives is the infinitive/gerund, which for most of them ends in -or.
For example, take the stative verbs círor to be red and doëllor to be good, welcome. These have the predicative forms círa and doëlla, as in Prus círa The apple is red and Cem doëlla The man is good. But what should we do if we want to say the red apple or the good man?
In the former case, cír (equivalent to pulling -or off completely) has quite a life of its own as a noun meaning (the color) red. In the latter case, the original nominal form for good is actually doëlla (identical to the predicative form). Now cír ends in a consonant, so it takes the first declension, and doëlla ends in a short vowel so it takes the second, and thus we can say
cír prus / cíe pruri / cirris prussis
red apple / red apple's / to the red apple
doëlla cem / doëllan cemi / doëllas cemnis
good man / good man's / to the good man
And this is all perfectly grammatical. But there is little stopping a Msérsca speaker from analyzing these two adjectives in reverse of the above, deriving círa for red and doël for good. This gives us
círa prus / círan pruri / círas prussis
red apple / red apple's / to the red apple
doël cem / doëli cemi / doëllis cemnis
good man / good man's / to the good man
In practice, a mix of both sets of forms is often used. Many speakers, especially for the genitive and dative, choose the form that matches the declension of the modified noun, giving us e.g. cirris prussis to the red apple but círas nápas to the red fruit.
There are adjectives that don't exhibit this behavior (at least not to nearly the same extent), but we'll discuss them another time. We'll also discuss active intransitive verbs.