If you’re not a trained linguist, you’ll be glad to know that Ancestral’s grammar is remarkably easy to learn.
If you believe, as I do, that a grammar is, in essence, nothing more than a set of patterns, and that the complexity we see in the grammar of every more recent language is due to these patterns being overwritten time and time again, like the ripples that result from throwing stone after stone after stone into a pond, then the comparative simplicity of Ancestral’s grammar makes perfect sense.
According to the speakers of Ancestral themselves, their grammar was a gift of the gods. Although its original patterns soon began to fade and be overlaid, as is the case with every other human language, there wasn’t enough time or contact with other languages for these patterns to be fully obscured.
No, the challenges I’ve faced in understanding Ancestral do not include learning its grammar, but lie instead in deciphering its writing system and understanding its world view, both of which turned out to be very different than our own.
That being said, here’s what you need to know: