Goal: Create number markers or more words
Note: Create proto-forms and their grammaticalized forms if you are marking number.
Tip: Basic words like “many” and “one” can indicate number where necessary.
Work focus: Create/Make/List
If you decided not to have any number inflections in your language, then you can spend the day creating more nouns. You can also jump ahead a tiny bit and create words like “many” or “one” that you could use as modifiers to indicate quantity where necessary (i.e. where context does not make it clear).
If you are incorporating number inflections in your language, then take time today to create the forms you need. Go back to your list of lexical sources you selected as origins for those inflections, and create any new words you need (e.g. if you selected “three” as the source for the plural, you may need to actually create a form for “three” before moving forward).
Once you have your lexical sources created, you can work on reducing the forms to mimic the process of grammaticalization, where a full word may be reduced to a single sound or small syllable.
As with yesterday’s prompt, you need to consider the interaction these number forms might have with the noun base if they are attaching to the noun in any way. Furthermore, if you decided to create a more fusional language, then consider whether these number inflections would fuse with class markers (if you have them). If so, work on creating the ways each number inflection will appear with each class marker.
Finally, show examples of how these number inflections occur with nouns—for each inflection, combine it with a variety of nouns to demonstrate how they are used and how they may shift when occurring with different nouns.