As members of the nominal class, nouns and adjectives have exactly the same infections for the customary colour, case and number. Some members of the nominal class, such as pronouns, have completely different inflections, and these will be dealt with separately. Classical Gluonic has a single declension - nouns and adjectives decline in a completely predictable way by attaching an ending to the root and then letting the colour "shine through" the stressed syllable of the root.

Black Radical

The dictionary entry for any noun or adjective is the "black radical" or root. "Radical" just means root, and it is "black" because no light is shining through it (and it would be written in a black font in native writing). Phonologically it can be any valid CG root, regardless of the "natural colour" of the vowels.

Why nouns and adjectives have black forms where some others like pronouns don't is because nouns and adjective are capable of undergoing derivations into opaque parts of speech, such as verbs, where the black pronunciation will be realised. Of course, in the native orthography, the black form is always written and readers have to infer the right pronunciation from the colour of the font or ink.

Inflectional Endings

The following endings are appended to the black radical of the noun or adjective in the first step of inflecting it into a usable, coloured nominal.

In the native orthography, this is handled with six separate glyphs, written in small form, with colour encoded in the font colour (i.e., if you are colour blind, there is no secondary information that would tell you the colour). Bourque does not capture this quality, having 24 separate symbols to represent these glyphs.

If a noun or adjective has infixes, the infixes go between the radical and the inflection. If it has suffixes, they go after the inflection.

Shine

The last step to declining an inflected and usable form of a noun or adjective is to add the "shine." The process is as follows. Having the Phonology article handy is a good idea until you get used to shine.

1. Identify the stressed syllable in the radical.
2. Determine the colour of the vowel, based on frontness or backness. Front vowels (i, ii, e, ee) are red, mid vowels (y, yy, a, aa) are green, back vowels (u, uu, o, oo) are blue.
   1. If the colour of the stressed syllable vowel matches the colour of the inflectional ending, no further action  is needed.
   2. If the colour does not match, change the vowel to the closest matching vowel in height and length  of the correct colour.
3. If the vowel is a diphthong, apply the following rules:
   1. <aw> matches blue and green and does not need to change for either of these colours. For red, change the vowel to <aj>.
   2. <aj> matches red and green and does not need to change for either of these colours. For blue, change the vowel to <aw>.
4. For heavy inflections (absolutive plural and ablative partitive and plural), if the root has no heavy syllable to attract stress, the vowel of the first syllable in the root will lengthen in order to attract stress, and then the above shine process will be applied.

The rule about diphthong makes green different than the other colours, because it is compatible with both diphthongs. There is a theory put forward by Daniel Fong and supported by some Gluonicists that <aj> and <aw> may have been invariant in the original design of the language in order to preserve symmetry, and the susceptibility of these vowels to shine might have been an early innovation. There is little concrete evidence to support this, however, other than the fact that some Gluonic scholars themselves agree.

Example: White House

The Classical Gluonic radical for "house" is TU*-LA. The root for "white" is I-VA*N. In Sanderson, they would be "tuula-" and "ivaan-." To decline them in Bourque way is easy, just take the radical and add the symbol for the ending. So the red singular absolutive form of TU*-LA would just be TU*-LA-r. The shine is not written.

In native orthography this would be similar, the word would be written as the character for TU*, the character for LA, and then the small form of the character for singular absolutive. The whole thing would be written in red font or ink. Ther would be no equivalent of the Bourque hyphens, the characters would be written next to each other with a space on either end of the word to separate ot from other words.

Sanderson, on the other hand, represent the shine, and it is Sanderson that we will use for the majority of composed work on this blog. Here is the full declension of TU*-LA I-VA*N, "white house," in Sanderson:

Notice that tuula- becomes tiila- in red and tyyla- in green, the height and length qualities of the stressed sylable vowel being preserved. the unstressed "la" syllable is untouched by shine. Notice as well that the n -> q allophony (/n/ -> /ŋ/) is reflected in writing in Sanderson for the ablative forms of "ivaan-," "white." TU*-LA and I-VA*N undergo no shine changes in the blue and green, respectively, because their stressed vowels are already the right colour.