Fantasy Constructed Languages Part 3: Parts of speech - adjectives

Other fantasy language posts
Creating a fantasy languageElfin and Orcish amount of words so far
Fantasy Constructed Languages Part 1: Sounds
Fantasy Constructed Languages Part 2: Parts of speech - nouns
Fantasy Constructed Languages Part 3: Parts of speech - adjectives
Fantasy Constructed Languages Part 4: Parts of speech - articles, quantifiers, prepositions, questions
Fantasy Constructed Languages Part 5: Parts of speech - why, pronouns, conjunctions,

Before going to far into adjectives, ahead of time you want to figure out

1. how your will differentiate adjectives from nouns
2. how will you show comparison and superlatives
3. how you will position your adjectives compared to your nouns.

Differentiate the noun
English uses two main ways to differentiate adjectives. First, English uses words to proceed adjectives to show comparison 'more' and superlative 'most'. Second, it also uses several suffixes such as -ful, -al, -some, -ar, -ish, -ary, -ic, -less, -like, -ly, -y, and -ous. It uses -er for comparative and -est for superlatives. In Fairy I'll use prefixes.

Normal, comparative, and superlatives
For Fairy I will use na- for normal use,  nga- for comparison, and ma- for superlative as prefixes to the adjective words.

Adjectives v Noun position
In English, normally adjective go before the nouns that they describe, like the 'white house'. I think in Fairy I will keep that convention of adjective + noun. Some of my other languages have adjectives after nouns which is more like Spanish.

30 Fairy adjectives
I use 30 Swadesh adjectives to create my first adjectives. I try to keep the words at one syllable since I will be adding a prefix to the root word, sometimes looking at the nouns that I did last time to become possible root words for those nouns.

Normal form will be na + root word, comparative nga + root word, and superlative ma + root word
For these adjective words for this fairy language,
1. big            lang
2. long          tof
3. wide         zan
4. thick         dan
5. heavy       dot
6. small         iha
7. short         viz
8. narrow      da
9. thin           ile
10. warm      yan
11. cold        win
12. full          jof
13. new        yen
14. old         hom
15. good      shin
16. bad        tsom
17. rotten     tash
18. dirty       ez
19. straight   fol
20. round     ji
21. sharp     di
22. dull         los
23. smooth   dah
24. wet         sar
25. dry         sho
26. correct   jana
27. near       tsay
28. far         don
29. right       joly
30. left         vily

Now we can do small phrases using normal, comparative, and superlatives forms with the 53 nouns and these 30 adjectives.

big dog        nalang vava
bigger dog   ngalang vava
biggest dog  malang vava

new tree      nayen lanyi
newer tree   ngayen lanyi
newest tree  mayen lanyi

Now we have 53 nouns and 30 adjectives in the constructed Fairy Language equaling 83 total words.

Next Post

I want to create some prepositions or articles the next post.