Guide to forming words in Jain

I shan't explain pronunciation for now.

lun body (as in 'body of water') -> lu-u-un
selksa water -> se-elk-esa
tarak reich -> ta-rak-ak
jain jain -> ja-i-in
tet small -> te-e-et
pákur currency -> pá-aku-ur
tralksrut ground -> tra-alksru-ut
tralokorut cake -> tra-lokoru-ut

Jain is a heavily agglutinative language (meaning many morphemes in a word). Using this as a base, I took inspiration from the agglutination of Finnish and German, flipped it on its head and added more.

In German, if you want to say, for example, 'the German Empire', you would take the word for 'the', 'German' and 'Empire'. That's 'Das', 'Deutsch' and 'Reich'. According to German adjective rules, 'Deutsch' should be 'Deutsches'. There we have it. 'Das deutsches Reich'.

In Jain, two things are evident: there are no articles 'The' and 'A', and there are no adjectives. "Wait," I hear you say. "How can there be no adjectives?" That's a fine question, my friend. All adjectives as we know them in English are nouns in Jain. We can see up there that there is 'Tet', meaning 'Small'. This is a noun. It works in the same way as a noun. You can easily say 'I like small' just as you can say 'I like cake'. Easy.

But where does this all fit into forming words in Jain, as shown by the title? This is where agglutination comes in. In German, something like 'Computer games' is 'Computerspiele'. See how the two words are joined? That's how it works in Jain. But with a catch. Everything is in reverse. So what would be 'Computerspiele' in German is 'Spielecomputer' in Jain. Also, don't forget that adjectives are nouns in Jain. This means we can fuse adjectives with nouns. So, if we wanted to say 'Small computer games' in German, we'd say 'Kleine Computerspiele'. In Jain, we say 'Spielecomputerklein' (obviously with Jain vocabulary).

Let's go over this with a simple example. As we can see up there, 'Lun' means 'Body (of something)', 'Selksa' means 'Water' and 'Tet' means 'small'. So, how would we say 'Small body of water'?


'Lunselksatet'? Precisely. This is, in fact, one of the easier words to form, due to the absense of sound change and metathesis and what-not, but we won't go into that.

Now, you may have noticed the things next to the words, such as 'lu-u-un' being next to 'Lun'. This is how we form the small form of words. These are words used in an informal context. If we were writing a letter to a boss or somebody, we would use the long form in nearly all words (the long form is stuff like 'Lunselksatet'). The short form, however, is, well, short.

To form it using two words, say, 'Lun' and 'Selksa' to make 'Body of water', we would take the initial form of 'Lun' (from 'lu-u-un'), which is 'Lu-'. Then, we would take the final form of 'Selksa', which is '-sa'. Join them together, what do you get?


'Lusa'! Hurrah!

Now, you ask me, what do we do about a third word'. Well, let's go back to our previous example of 'Lunselksatet'. Remember what that was made up of? 'Lun', 'Selksa' and 'Tet'. In this case, we need to take the middle form from 'selksa', which is '-elk-', and the final form from 'tet', which is '-et'. Join them together with 'Lu-', and what do you get?


'Luelket'! Hurra- wait. That isn't right. The combination 'ue' isn't allowed! In this case, we have to erase one of the vowels. Most likely, that'll be the one from the middle, as that's typically the biggest morpheme (compare 'elk' with 'lu'. Which has more letters?)

So, we take the 'e' away from '-elk', and we're left with 'Lulket', meaning 'Small body of water' again! Now we've got it. This is what you'd use in an informal situation, such as talking to a friend.


I hope you enjoyed reading my not-so-brief-and-possibly-confusing explanation on that area of Jain. I can't be bothered to write any more.