Welcome to my new and hopefully improved Nova grammar pages. I hope you will find it more usable and informative. On this page you will find a brief history of my efforts, an Index of the Nova Grammar Pages and a brief introduction to the language. If you want to bookmark Nova, please do so at this URL, the others may occasionally change.

One of the first things I did when I became interested in languages as a child, was to attempt to invent my own. This is not the place to run through the whole list of failed (and a few successful) efforts but it was during this time that I came across two writers who would greatly influence my work just as they have so many language makers both before and since.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, a Fire Insurance Inspector cum linguist wrote a number of articles dealing with Hopi, an American Indian language of the Southwestern U.S. Although later scholars would severely criticize his work, his interpretation of the language's structure fascinated me. Earlier he had worked with Nahuatl, culminating in a failed attempt to prove that the language was 'oligosynthetic' with its vocabulary built from a small number of building blocks.

Robert Heinlein might seem an unlikely source for linguistic inspiration but he wrote a short story called "Gulf", describing a constructed language, Speedtalk, for a race of geniuses. This language was based on the principle of one morpheme=one phoneme so that what would on the surface appear to be short words, were in fact sentences.

Together, these ideas provided the inspiration for Nova. Nova would be oligosynthetic, originally the goal was 400 morphemes, now there are still less than 1000, from which all other words are created or modified. Each morpheme would be exactly one syllable long. The language would be heavily inflected but not for any of the commonly recognized categories. It would literally be an attempt to reinvent language and what a speaker had to analyze to convey information. It is still too early to say that I have succeeded in that effort but work goes on.

The first sketch was written up in early 1977 and work was actually quite slow due to many restarts and changes in the phonology. Shortly after I began the language, I decided to create a culture to go with it. As Tolkien noted, one needs a culture in which to anchor a constructed language. That has undergone far more changes the language but it has gradually become the most important part of my work. Those pages are indexed elsewhere.

Those of you familiar with Whorf's work will note that I have quite unabashedly used a great deal of his terminology. This was quite intentional and is meant as a sincere tribute.

• Broad Overview and History
• Phonology and Script
• Basic Morphological Processes
• Inflectional Morphology of Eventives
• Inflectional Morphology of Integers
• Integers (Uninflected)
• Syntax (still under construction)
• Text Index
• Classified Morpheme List Updated 3/9/99, this is the only up-to-date and accurate morpheme list.
• Nova-English Morpheme List, Please be Patient.
• English Index to the Morpheme List
• Recent Changes to the Morphicon
• Nova-English Dictionary , Please be Patient.
• English-Nova Dictionary , Please be Patient.
• Index to Nowapan Reference Handbook

Nova is very different from any Natural Language even though almost everything in it is found in at least one Natural Language. Much of what will be said here will be reiterated at greater length in individual pages but this is intended as a quick overview.

Nova is an oligosynthetic language, which interprets and describes the world as a series of events which are subject to various degrees of control by those involved in them. Oligosynthesis is an idea first proposed by Benjamin L. Whorf, a fire insurance inspector who dabbled in Linguistics. He proposed that Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, was based upon a very small number (35 to be exact) of elements from which all other words were formed. Nova is an attempt to model a language which also uses a small number of word forming elements (morphemes) which may combine to form new words. Nova has considerably more basic elements than Whorf proposed for Nahuatl, but the total is still less than 1000 and over 300 of those are inflections or a class of morphemes called integers which basically stand alone.

As stated, for Nova, most words are going to be events but Nova takes a very broad view of what an event is. It may be as quick as a flash of lightning or as long lasting as a planet. Nova divides them into classes based upon their duration.

Control is the analysis of who or what initiates or controls the event in progress. This analysis is largely based upon size and intelligence. After duration, understanding control is the key to understanding Nova syntax.

Nova is heavily inflected but many of the inflectional categories are not those people have come to expect from a Natural Language. Others are common enough categories but not used where they might be expected, for example, much of what Natural Languages call voice and associate with verbs, occurs in Nova as nominal cases.

The morpheme list used by Nova will strike some as oddly primitive. There are morphemes for 'obsidian', 'loincloth', 'shamam', and so forth but there are no morphemes for 'airplane', 'electricity', or 'computer'. The Nowans have a long history established and the morpheme list as it is today, was that of a relatively primitive, herding and hunter/gather people. Nova does not as a general rule borrow either words or morphemes so new words are still drawn from the original morphicon.

This Scattered Tongues site belongs to Brad Coon
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Revised August 29, 2001

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