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The CBB * View topic - CALS vs WALS: A Comparison
The CBB * View topic - CALS vs WALS: A Comparison
Besides from trying to Make a more "logical" and "ideal" language(which probably explains why conlangers tend to make more words, another possible reason is that they simply didn't notice the nature of certain words), many of the biased use of features are probably due to that conk angers tend to use features from languages of Eurasia especially those from European languages, and languages of Eurasia tend to be dependent marking and tend to use cases.
aveneca.com
A comparison between natlangs and conlangs! How does yours add up?




Firen doesn't have enough of a grammar yet for all of these categories to be meaningful yet, and to be honest I don't understand all of them, but it seems to be somewhat more naturalistic than conlang average so far.
Also, the more I think about it, the more I think that pro-dropping will work. So that'll give me another point of naturalism. (I have polypersonal (A/P) agreement already, after all.)
I definitely had to poke around WALS a few times for definitions. Firen has felt very natural in your examples.
I must confess, I just use front rounded vowels (when I use them) because they're familiar and comfortable, not "interesting" or "weird" in the least. Swedish has three of them.
Or, well, two and a half, anyway.
Yeah, I did find the theories on why conlangs tend toward x or y instead of the path more traveled in natlangs to be somewhat... narrow? stereotypical? Sometimes people do what's comfortable, sometimes they do what's more "interesting." More often, they do both.
Interestingly, Akachenti only has voicing contrast in plosives and one fricative, so despite WALS rules plunking it in the last category, I like that it's mostly in the first. I stuck to a simple vowel system, and definitely have a simple tone system, even if I haven't really analyzed it yet. No dental fricative. My inflections go by way of the common conlang, alas! But whole language typology is definitely in the inconsistent/other category! I think case is core system only: agent/object/topic, and reduplication is up in the air.
Not sure yet about Akachenti pronouns, but so far all my languages have had mixed interrogative or generic noun-based pronouns. Consistent ordinals yes. I like remembering them. But distributive numerals also yes. They're more useful. That's a definite yes on possessive affixes and multiple possessive cases. Bare adjectives, no problem! Conjunctions are not varied in Akachenti. Other conlangs more so, but not this one.
So in short, to my extreme surprise, Akachenti is actually more naturalistic than it really looks. Almost every weirdness I've found in it occurs in natlangs and is "underrepresented" in conlangs. Huh.
On a sidenote: I love that Vas'hehr is squarely in the no case system at all. There's a whopping two possessive pronouns in the whole language and that's it.
The heck are associative plurals?
http://wals.info/chapter/36
Very interesting. I want to try them.
Oh! Like -tachi. OK, even I knew that just as an anime viewer. :D I guess since I based my Beldreeni plural suffix on an (admittedly very vague) conception of Japanese plurals, I might as well adopt that feature too!
I guess I never thought that much about it... it seems to be a more elegant way of saying the same as "X and the others" in English or, in colloquial Swedish, "X och de/dem" (spelling but not pronunication dependent on case).
I mean, I didn't know it was called that, obviously...
Yeah, basically. And apparently, there is an English usage in both American and British but it's definitely getting lost in American and is extremely uncommon in conlangs.