SAT Conlang

The Scholastic Aptitude Test is an examination given to high-school age youngsters in the United States which is designed to measure how well a student will perform in a college or university setting. Reading comprehension and math problems have long been at the core of the exam, but early on, a constructed language was devised for the exam, presumably to test a prospective applicant's ability to work with foreign languages.

There is very little to go on, as far as this conlang is concerned. The image at right represents the sum total that has survived since it appeared in the 1926 exam. The grammatical apparatus consists of a very few lexical roots and affixes, six rules of grammar and a handful of examples.

What is clear is that the language contains roots that can be used as verbs, adverbs, nouns or adjectives depending on the affix applied. Affixes are agglutinative in that several can be applied to further modify the root meaning of a word. The word order is SVO. What is not immediately clear is whether or not verbal and substantive affixes can be mixed together in one word, nor if so, what would the resultant meaning be. (Note that the conlanger(s) in question has specifically disallowed the use of the plural affix on anything but nouns and pronouns -- but has not so disallowed future or past affixes on nouns or adverbs!)

Ola belbomo thantid ren erpbomo horpid thos.

Thantac puo horpac; bomac thos puo thantac horpid thos.

Ol thanto Oteb ren horpo oleba.