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The introductory grammar that follows is based on the standard work La Langue Bleue which runs to several hundred pages. Obviously this treatment cannot be as comprehensive as the original, but Bollack was a bit pedantic in the way he expressed things, so there is less left out than one might be led to fear. This is a revised guide based on the work of Ed. Robertson from 1998.

Mea per boned srare geч fasteч an prif trased ama.

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Bolak uses a 19 letters, and has no synonyms. The Ч is taken from the Cyrillic alphabet and is the same sound as the English, or Spanish, ch. The letters C, H, J, Q, W, X, Y, and Z are not used in Bolak:

A, B, Ч(ch), D, E, F, G, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V.

It is based around the idea of Daisy Rule, Margueritation, the vowels a, e, i, o can be prefixed to any noun to express degrees of that concept, it allows to express nuances without learning separate words. If we take the Bolak root lov(love), the 5 vowel affixes can be used to form other words as follows:

The Daisy Rule is so called because of the custom in French of pulling the leaves off a daisy to determine the degree to which one is loved by one's partner, similar to the '(s)he loves me, (s)he loves me not' custom in English.

3 heures d'étude de la Grammaire

In Bolak, every grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.) has a distinctive shape, so you can recognize a word's function instantly by looking at it. The shape of a word tells you its grammatical role:

TypeShapeExample
Small Wordsmax 3 lettersnu (not), ku (that), si (yes), no (no)
Nouns3+ letters, ends in consonant (not ч or d)lov (love), pan (bread), kval (horse)
Verbsnoun root + tense vowellovi/lovo/love/lova
Adjectivesnoun root + vowel + dlovid (loving)
Adverbsend in -чloviч (lovingly), moч (very)

The small words are composed of a maximum of 3 letters. If composed of 3 letters, they must not end in a consonant. They perform 4 functions in the language: interjections, framework words, connectors and designators.

1. Interjections are composed of one vowel, or the same vowel doubled. The doubled forms express the opposite of their single equivalents:

2. Framework words are made of two different vowels, or one/two consonants followed by a -u. Let us take the sentence give me bread, and its Bolak translation et givo pan, in the context of a speaker of French conversing with a speaker of English, using Bolak. Suppose the French speaker forgets that the Bolak for bread is pan. In this unlikely example, he or she could say:

The other two words in this group are:

This leaves 12 other possible combinations of two different vowels. Four are used as general purpose substitution words, a bit like 'je' in Esperanto.

The other 8 are used as optional markers of verbal aspect or mood.

There are 45 permitted combinations of the other form of framework words (Cu or CCu). Of these the most useful are:

The others are indispensible words which can be used free-standing or as prefixes in word-formation.

me du snu oa ru lovo?

do I not begin to love myself again?

3. Connectors are for things such as prepositions and conjunctions, the form of this group of words comprises two or three letters including one consonant and one or both of the vowels I and O.

The basic prepositions include ib above, oч below, og behind, ik in front of, ot outside of, in in, il around, ol beside. These can be modified to express motion towards or from by the addition of -i or -o respectively: ogo from behind, ini into etc.

govo Paris

to go to Paris

Some important conjunctions are ki with, spi towards, pi for, it and and or or. Two other words which have the same phonotactic shape as this group are si yes and no no.

4. Designators are small words of two or three letters which have a form like that of the Connectors, but are composed of a consonant and one or both of A or E, instead of I or O. There are six kinds: relative, interrogative/exclamatory, personal, possessive and personal. Their meanings are listed as Singular/Plural:

The personal designators, however, do not change according to whether singular or plural, and there are different consonants at the beginning for all of the personal pronouns:

Some of these cases are also used with relative and interrogative designators. The possessive designators are derived from the personal pronouns, with the ending -ea neing used for the singular and -ae for the plural, e.g. mea/mae my (sing./plur.). Personal designators have a number of cases in Bolak:

The indefinite designators are formed from A followed by a consonant with the plural formed by adding -E, as in the demonstratives above:

The majority are formed from two consonants ending in -A in the singular and -E in the plural. Some of these a singular and no plural, and others a plural and no singular:

Et nu maki sfa, ska te nu vili ku sta maki ad ete

Do not do to another what you would not want someone to do to you

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The granmots of Bolak convey the bulk of the semantic content. The form of these words is 3 letters or greater. If composed of only 3 letters, the last of these must be a consonant. There are 4 types of granmots: nouns & numbers, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Normally, for all of these, the root word is the noun. Noun roots can be transformed into other parts of speech by the addition of various endings. Endings can then be added on to each of these cardinal numbers:

1. Nouns in Bolak must in their root forms begin and end with one or two consonants and end with one or two consonants. They cannot end inч or d. Normally these roots are one syllable in length. There are also a number of nouns which have more than one syllable, but these must not contain any affixes which are used in word formation. Bollack regarded the number of affixes used in agglutinative conlangs as confusing. For this reason the two syllable word sigar (cigar) is allowed because there is no suffix -ar in Bolak.

However a two syllable root ending in a suffix that was used, e.g. -or or -ort would not be permitted. The ending -or is used to indicate the agent associated with the root, e.g.:

The ending -ort is used to indicate the place associated with the root:

The suffix -u is used to form the plural of nouns while the prefix u- is used to form the feminine. Nouns in Bolak are not assumed to be masculine, and there also a masculine prefix stu-. Thus:

Nouns referring to familial or social relationships have separate words for the male and female equivalents:

In the event of the learner not remembering the Bolak word for the the feminine of the pair, the possibility of using the feminine prefix together with the male word is explicitly permitted. What the learner is supposed to do in the event of forgetting the male word is not stated.

The suffix -in can be used to refer to a female who acquires a title by virtue of marriage, e.g.:

As opposed to: kvin queen (in her own right), there is no masculine equivalent for this. Nouns can be combined with various framework words mentioned earlier, e.g.:

The operation of the Daisy Rule prefixing nouns with a-, e-, i-, or o- has already been mentioned. The augmentative and diminutive suffixes are -as and -et respectively. The affix -an can be used to indicate the inhabitant of a place.

Compound nouns can be formed by joining two noun roots with a -u- between them. The headword comes last as in English, Chinese, Hungarian, German etc., e.g.:

Proper nouns can be used to qualify a headword as a separate word and not joined by a preposition: Bolak ditort Bolak publishing house

The subject noun always goes before the verb. A vocative noun always goes at the beginning of a sentence, as a separate clause, then followed by a vocative pronoun. Object nouns follow the verb. Any indirect object complement follows the direct object, and if there is more than one indirect object, these follow in decreasing order of interest.

2. Verbs are formed from the noun in Bolak by adding the appropriate tense affixes. There are four simple tenses:

Verbs can of course be formed from roots where the Daisy Rule has operated, e.g. ilovi, to worship. Verbs are preceded by their subject noun or pronoun and are invariable for person and number.

The simple tenses can be modified by prefixing u- before the verb to provide their perfect or anterior equivalents: me lova I shall love, me ulova I shall have loved. The grammar does not state whether this u- is to be added before or after the operation of the Daisy Rule.

The passive voice is created by inserting a -u- between the root and the tense ending: me lovua I shall be loved, me ulovua I shall have been loved.

What Bollack calls the reflexive voice is formed by inserting the reflexive particle: me su lovi I love myself.

What is called the subordinate mood is simply formed by using ku or knu for positive and negative subordination respectively.

Чe nanko knu me spiko.

It is necessary that I should not speak.

The imperative is formed by putting the pronoun into the vocative:

Because verbs can be freely formed from nouns the question may sometimes arise of what the meaning is of the verb thus formed. The following three possibilities of meaning can be tried in the following order of precedence:

Examples of each of these are:

3. Adjectives are formed from noun roots by adding a vowel and -d. This vowel varies according to ideas of tense, so the word may also be regarded as the verb plus a participial ending, e.g.:

Attributes used predicatively can be translated by verbal expressions: me lalgo I am ill. There is no need to say: me sero lalgod.

Attributives follow the noun they qualify. Degrees of comparison are provided by the Daisy Rule:

4. Adverbs always end in -ч, and are the adverbial equivalent of the attributives: loviч lovingly (in general) etc. There are also a number of basic modifiers, e.g. moч (very), paч (not very) and many more.

If modifiers are used with a verb, they are placed after the verb, but if they are modifying an attributive or another modifier, they are placed before the word they modify.

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Vocabulary Summary

BolakMeaningBolakMeaning
lovloveporfear
panbreadsopsoup
kafcoffeekvalhorse
dosdogspilgame
belbeautybarkembarkation
bintstringdormsleep
rekskingkvinqueen
perfathermermother
manmanfemwoman
lonkuncletantaunt
noksnightknisshirt
gonanglemilvmill
serito bererubrother
givoto givegovoto go
komoto comespikoto speak
makito do/makevilito want
nankoit is necessarylalgoto be ill
savito knowkarcar

Numbers are a special kind of noun, they are placed before the noun they relate to.

Terson nifis venmel farson lokis dov

391,482

Months of the year

Colors

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