Colorless ǀ A Language Generator Archived by Soaring

This is a Javascript random language generator that creates language parameters based on statistics from WALS and UPSID. To generate a new grammar refresh page. You may use this in conjunction with the Colorless Relexer here.


Consonant inventory / t tʰ d q s ʃ tʃ f m ŋ ɲ ᵑg j w l /
Vowel inventory: / a u /
Syllable structure: (C)V(C)
Word stress: No fixed stress. Stress is on one of the last 3 syllables.

Sentence order: Sentence order is Subject-Oblique-Object-Verb. An English sentences such as Mary opened the door with a key would translate to Mary with a key the door opened.
Morphology: Where two or more affixes occur in the same place, morphology is agglutinative.

Case alignment: Ergative-Absolutive. Case is encoded with prefixes.
Additional cases: Genitive, dative, locative, ablative and instrumental.
Gender in nouns: Nouns have no gender.
Plurality: Plurality is expressed by suffixes on the noun. Plural marking on nouns is optional in OV languages, and is avoided in particular when nouns are accompanied by numerals.

Demonstratives: Demonstratives are a separate word before and after the noun, i.e. this house this. Demonstratives have a 3 way distal contrast, i.e. the language makes a contrast between "this" (close to me), "that" (close to you) and "yonder" (far from both of us). Pronominal and adnominal demonstratives (i.e. Give me that vs. Give me that book) are different. Demonstratives do not agree with any inflectional properties of the noun.
Articles: Articles are prefixes on the noun. Articles do not agree with any inflectional properties of the noun.
Possessive determiners: Possessive determiners (i.e. "my", "your", "his", "her") occur to the left of the noun (PosN). Possessives agree with number (plurality) and gender (if applicable) of nouns.
Numbers: Numbers occur to the left of the noun (NumN). Numbers are based on the decimal system. Ordinal numerals are derived morphologically from the cardinal numbers, however the word for "first" is suppletive (i.e. does not resemble the word for "one").
Adjectives: Adjectives (and modifying nouns) occur to the left of the noun (AdjN). Predicative adjectives are non-verb like (same as English: He is tall). Adjectives agree with number (plurality) of nouns.
Relative clauses: Relative clauses occur to the left of the noun (RelN). Relative clauses are expressed with a gap strategyundefined after which they are expressed with a noun reduplication strategy. What the hell does this mean?*
Adpositions: Uses postpositions. The preferential order of postpositional phrases is Time-Manner-Place: I'm travelling on Monday [time] by car [manner] to Munich [place].
Adverbial Subordinators: Adverbial subordinators such as "because/since/if/although" appear at the beginning of the subordinate clause: If I like you, I will reward you.

Case alignment of personal pronouns: Nominative-Accusative.
Gender in personal pronouns: Gender distinction between male and female 1st person, 2nd person and 3rd person.
Proniminal subject position: Pronominal subjects appear in regular subject position but can be left out (optional pro-drop). Because of pro-drop, verbs show agreement with all pronouns, using separate patterns for "I", "we", "you", "he/she" and "they".
The pronoun we: The word for "we" does not differentiate between "we, you included" and "we, but not you".

Past tense: Past tense inflected on the verb as suffix.
Future tense: Future tense is marked by a separate word (or through context).
Perfective/Imperfective aspect: Perfective/Imperfective distinction marked (optionally) as a separate word.
Perfect aspect: Pefect aspect is expressed by a separate auxiliary word.
Possibility: Situational possibility is expressed with affixes on the verb. Epistemic possibility is expressed with affixes on the verb.
Evidentiality: Encodes indirect evidentials (used when the speaker was not a witness to the event but learned of it after the fact) with an affix.
Nominal and locational predication: The language encodes the copula verb in "That man is a student" (nominal) and "That man is by the ocean" (locational) differently, with nominal predicates using a zero copula, i.e. "That man is a student" = That man a student.
Passive voice: There is no passive construction. "Mistakes were made" must be rendered as "Someone made mistakes".
Imperative mood: Has no morphologically dedicated second-person imperatives (like English).

Negation: Double negation: negative word at beginning of sentence and negative word before verb.
Polar questions: Yes-No questions are formed with a question particle at the end of the sentence.
Interrogative questions: Interrogatives (e.g. who, what, when, where) occur in their corresponding declarative position (as opposed to at the beginning of the sentence like in English), e.g "You saw WHO?", "WHO saw him?", "You went WHERE?"
Diminutives and augmentatives: Has no diminutive or augmentative derivational morphology.



*Relative clause strategies explained

English uses a relative pronoun strategy to express relative clauses, for instance, in The man [who I know] died, "who" is a relative pronoun that stands in for "the man". In other words, "who I know" can be rearranged into "I know the man". English can also use what's known as a gap strategy where by the relative pronoun is a deleted: The man [I know] died.

Strategies in other languages include the noun reduplication strategy whereby the head noun is reduplicated inside the relative clause, as in: The man [I know the man] died, or a pronoun strategy, as in: The man [I know him] died.

In the first two strategies the structure of the relative clauses is different to the structure of a regular clause; they have been "relativized". In the last two strategies the structure is the same. It has been observed that a language's ability relativize certain types of constituents within the relative clause is constrained along a strict hierarchy of Subject > Direct object > Indirect object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparison. So, if you can relativize one of these you can also relativize everything to left of it nothing to right (at which point you have to employ a different strategy). English can relativize all of them: To unpack this, if you rearrange the relative clauses inside the square brackets to regular clauses you will notice that "who" always stands in for the "the man", however in each case "the man" is filling a different constituent role - subject, direct object, etc.