An image with multiple ways of saying "hello" and "welcome" in a variety of conlangs

Day 233: August 20, 2024


Decorative image of a chalkboard with the daily prompt written on it, in front of mousey students
Conlang Year, Day 233 prompt

Goal: Create examples with “if/whether”

Note: Focus on situations where “if/whether” would begin a noun clause.

Tip: An example is “We don’t know if they are here.”

Work focus: Create/Make/List


Some languages have a different strategy for indicating a noun clause contains unknown or questioned information. For instance, the English “We don’t know if they are here” negates the matrix verb and includes “if” as the subordinating conjunction. “If” could be replaced by “whether,” as in “We don’t know whether they are here.”

Decide if you want to have a different strategy for these kinds of instances in your language, and, if you do, what forms they will take. Create examples showcasing your decisions.

If you don’t want to mark these instances any differently from what you’ve already created (e.g. perhaps you created conditional inflections that indicate this information, and no other markers are necessary), then use today to create more vocabulary or more example sentences. In general, the more you work with your language and create full sentence structures with a variety of clause structures, the more vocabulary you will create in the process.