(This is the second in a series of posts on the Beta language for the RTS game Grey Goo. See the first post to learn how to pronounce the language.)

Before I can talk about the nouns of the Language, I need to discuss noun classes a bit. Most of the people reading these posts will probably be familiar with some other European language, such as Spanish, German, or Russian, and will be familiar with the concept of grammatical gender. In a language with grammatical gender, every single noun in the language is put into a gender bin which determines how other words interact with it. For example, in French, the definite article, “the,” must match the gender of the noun it goes with, “la semaine” (the week) is feminine, and “le café” (the cafe) is masculine. This phenomenon of making the article match the noun’s gender is called “agreement” and is likely to show up in quite a few places - with adjectives, with verbs, and with pronouns.

While the major European languages have gender systems that refer to biological sex (in French, a week is “she” and a café is “he,” or at least seems that way to native speaker of English), there are languages with gender systems that categorize nouns along quite different lines. For example, in Blackfoot, every noun is either animate or inanimate. In such a system, while plenty of nouns match their “natural” gender, there are still nouns whose gender simply has to be memorized, such as isstoán “knife,” which is animate.

Going the other direction, some languages have quite a few genders, up to 17 in Mufian. For some reason, when a language has more than three genders, we stop calling them genders are start calling them noun classes.

The Beta Language has noun classes — four of them. The are mostly semantic, that is, you can predict which class a noun is in from its meaning a lot of the time. However, the are plenty of exceptions.

The first noun class is for people — sentient, language using beings, such as arán “commander,” hádun “soldier”, áudis “woman.” There are no non-sentient nouns which appear in this class.

The second noun class is for motile animals and certain words related to vitality and intelligence, as in cháhaje “demon, monster,” but also kátta “blood” and kórya “duty, obligation.” The sun, máuka, is also in class two.

The third class has a lot going on, and represents the collapse of two classes in pre-spaceflight Usandu. It includes: plants, sessile animals, occasionally body parts, as well as forces of nature, many celestial objects, and bodies of water. Finally, many nouns of location end up in this class, including some buildings. Examples: faldúnan “prison”, cháwo “sky, heavens,” éwuyo “road, path, way.”

The fourth class is for inanimate objects and abstractions, and is the residue class for anything else that doesn’t obviously fit into classes I-III. Examples: mírra “star,” óhuna “intelligence,” náuku “memory,” “word; language.”

In some languages you can tell what class a noun is in by some affix on the noun. For example, in Tamazight, feminine nouns will have a t- or m- prefix and a -t suffix. There are some patterns in the Beta Language, but with so much vocabulary coming from non-Usandu sources, things can get a bit hairy, so I won’t go into the details here.

Similarly, knowing the correct plural of a Beta noun can be a bit tricky, for much the same reason. And even within Usandu the collection of possible plural forms is not small (at least, compared to English or a Romance language). For example, a significant number of class III nouns referring to location end in -s, and the plural for these is -rut, as in tárhas “grave”, tarhárut “graves.” However, the class III noun kíta “corpse” has the plural kúkta. Class II nouns in -a take plurals in -as (máuka “sun”, máukas), but class IV nouns in -a take plurals in -i (nínta “rope, cord”, pl. nínti). And so on.

Finally, let’s look at a table layout I’ll be presenting more than once in the coming posts. The Beta Language has a definite article (“the”), which changes form for both class and number.

These come before the noun, fa máta “the story,” di naukádi “the memories.”

As always with the definite article, the usage doesn’t quite match that of English. The most notable unexpected feature is that it is required with pronoun possession (“my, your, her”), with the possessive coming between the article and noun, as in fa ku máta “my story,” di tan naukádi “our memories,” da u dówa “their ship.”

And that’s all I have to say about the nouns for now. In the next post I’ll be talking about adjectives, which also require you to keep track of noun classes - in not one, but two, entirely different systems!