I'm assuming an absolute layman's reading from here on out, so that people who know exactly Zero things about linguistics can pick up what I'm putting down and understand how this conlang works (conlang being short for "constructed language", usually used in fiction). If you already know this stuff, skip as much as you'd like! No idea what I'm talking about? Read on :P
I'm going to use English as my main reference point, since it's the only language I'm fully fluent in and thus the language I know best. You, the reader, may or may not have heard of pronouns before. What are they? What indeed! There's actually a really good Schoolhouse Rock song (Youtube link) about them, but just as a refresher: a pronoun is any word used in a sentence in place of a noun. Simple, right? You may think of pronouns as being something put in their twitter bio, but in reality I've used five different pronouns in just this sentence (I, you, their, this, something).
Here's a handy little chart I use when learning languages:
| First | Second | Third | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plural | we | you (y'all) | they |
| Singular | I | you (thou) | he/she/it |
While there are many other pronouns in English, these tend to be what people think of when they say "pronouns", especially in relation to language learning. They are also what I'll be refering to when talking about pronouns in Infernal.
One of the things I wanted when I set out to make a language was that I wanted to see if it was possible to have a language with Zero pronouns, of any kind. I ended up having to rework this idea, but for people? No one in Infernal uses generic pronouns, unless they hate your guts. Instead, each person has a sort of second name, called a "turuk", that acts as a personal pronoun in most cases.
Here's an example conversation, with the pronouns replaced by their respective turuk:
Person 1 (ax): Hello axlet friend! How is kai today?
Person 2 (kai): Hello kailet friend! Kai is good today, what about ax?
Person 1 (ax): Ax is doing well!
What I hope is made clear here is that each person uses their specific turuk to refer to themselves, regardless of their position in the conversation. In English, "I" refers to the speaker, whoever that may be. In Infernal, "ax" refers Specifically to That Guy Over There (aka my dnd character Champion). There is no one word to refer to the person speaking— one must know who someone is in order to talk about them.
In practice, this is not super practical! There will be LOTS of cases where you never got introduced to someone, or you need to talk about That Thing Over There and not a person, or you're talking about a Hypothetical Person instead of someone specific. What do you do then? This is when my good friend "ur" comes in.
There will be times that one has to talk about something Unknown, and in those moments, one may choose to use... well, "one". In English, using one as a pronoun has an antiquated air to it, giving the impression of Fanciness (or snobbery), but in Infernal it is the main way to talk about objects, unknown or hypothetical people, or just people you Fucking Hate.
There's to be a whole page about counting, numbers, and numerical systems on here, but suffice to say that the word "ur" in Infernal can, in different contexts, mean "it", "one" (number), "one" (pronoun), or even "a" (article; one of many). For reference, "vol" would be the article "the".
That's great, but what about... "what"? Or "thing"? Or any of the dozens of other pronouns in Enlgish that don't 100% match up to the classic he/she/it/they model? Currently that's a little outside the scope of this specific page, but rest assured that those words do exist, and will be present in the dictionary tab when that gets finished. But for now, this is what I've got! I hope this all made sense, and that you have fun messing around with Infernal and all the linguistic quirks it has :P
Infernal pronoun generator: coming soon!