Conlanging Features you Avoid

[Luan]

My phobiae are mostly phonological in nature: rounded front vowels and bilabial fricatives.

[Lao Kou]

My phobiae are mostly phonological in nature: rounded front vowels and bilabial fricatives.

Well, if Lao Kou is asked again to ride shotgun for Santa, I know who's getting a lump of coal in their conlanging stocking this year.

[k1234567890y]

My phobiae are mostly phonological in nature: rounded front vowels and bilabial fricatives.

maybe for you they can make a conlang too "European" in pronunciation?

[Egerius]

My phobiae are mostly phonological in nature: rounded front vowels and bilabial fricatives.

You'll hate Old Wílandisċ, then. Particularly the Wíneċeaster dialect.

[Squall]

In my a priori languages, I avoid many things I do not need, such as arbitrary genders, irregularities, declensions and conjugations.
I also avoid things I do not understand, such as the lack of articles and the lack of plurals.

I avoid phonemes that I cannot pronounce (/ʈ ʁ ʋ ħ/ and others) or I cannot understand (clicks, ejectives...).

[Artaxes]

I avoid irregularities, analytic grammar, triconsonantal construction of roots (I don't understand it well), /ʌ/ (it's the same for me as /ɑ/), clicks, radical stops and epiglottal fricatives, grammatical volitionality vs involitionality, indirective ditransitive alignment (because I like secundative), perfect aspect, laterals others than approximantal, mobile stress, and some others.

[Sights]

Well I only have one conlang, so not much of a sample, but here goes my list of things I'm not particularly fond of:

-Having the complete series of /p t k b d g/. I don't dislike conlangs or natlangs that have it, obviously, but I prefer a gap or two in there.
-Grammatical case.
-Complex consonant clusters (and especially onsets).
-I avoid tone, but only because I wouldn't know if I'm doing it right.
-Fastidious aspectual morphology.
-I think I make a distinct effort to avoid Tolkienesque phonoaesthetics, by which I mean having many words end in /ɾ/ or /n/. Honestly, this is easier said than done, for me at least.

[Adarain]

Oh yea, triconsonantal roots I've been avoiding so far. They're such a Semitic thing, imo any language that has them should be an a posteriori one (unless someone can point me to an unrelated language [both according to tree and wave model] that also has something similar, in which case I'll take it all back)

[Ahzoh]

Oh yea, triconsonantal roots I've been avoiding so far. They're such a Semitic thing, imo any language that has them should be an a posteriori one (unless someone can point me to an unrelated language [both according to tree and wave model] that also has something similar, in which case I'll take it all back)

I have an a priori triconsonantal root language, Vrkhazhian. Mine does not have any relation to Semitic languages.

[Adarain]

Yea, I meant natural languages

[Xing]

Oh yea, triconsonantal roots I've been avoiding so far. They're such a Semitic thing, imo any language that has them should be an a posteriori one (unless someone can point me to an unrelated language [both according to tree and wave model] that also has something similar, in which case I'll take it all back)

I have an a priori triconsonantal root language, Vrkhazhian. Mine does not have any relation to Semitic languages.

Indeed, a "triconsonantal" language does not need to be a Semitic clone.

It partly depends on what would count as a "triconsonantal" language. An old conlang of mine - Wered – was (is?) triconsonantal in the sense that vowels carried a relatively little semantic load, and it was meant to be written with an abjad. In other ways, it was rather different from "Semitic-style" triconsonantal languages – it was head-final, left-branching, ergative, and had more agglutinating features than Semitic languages. (In some later versions, I think I more or less abandoned umlaut/vowel changes as a grammatical device.)

[Keenir]

Oh yea, triconsonantal roots I've been avoiding so far. They're such a Semitic thing, imo any language that has them should be an a posteriori one (unless someone can point me to an unrelated language [both according to tree and wave model] that also has something similar, in which case I'll take it all back)

if I may ask, what are tree and wave?

times like this, I wonder if triconsonantal roots are an artifact of analysis and-or the script.

[HoskhMatriarch]

I avoid irregularities, analytic grammar, triconsonantal construction of roots (I don't understand it well), /ʌ/ (it's the same for me as /ɑ/), clicks, radical stops and epiglottal fricatives, grammatical volitionality vs involitionality, indirective ditransitive alignment (because I like secundative), perfect aspect, laterals others than approximantal, mobile stress, and some others.

Completely avoiding irregularities is dumb if you want to make a naturalistic language. Even Turkish has some irregularities, even if they're far less than English...

[Adarain]

Oh yea, triconsonantal roots I've been avoiding so far. They're such a Semitic thing, imo any language that has them should be an a posteriori one (unless someone can point me to an unrelated language [both according to tree and wave model] that also has something similar, in which case I'll take it all back)

if I may ask, what are tree and wave?

times like this, I wonder if triconsonantal roots are an artifact of analysis and-or the script.

Basically, the tree model explains how German and English share many similar things because they are on the same branch of the language tree. The wave model explains why Romanian has many shared features with other Balkan languages, because they're near each other they may affect each other.

So basically, can someone show me a natural language which is neither closely related to the semitic languages, nor has been in heavy contact with one, that features consonantal roots.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Oh yea, triconsonantal roots I've been avoiding so far. They're such a Semitic thing, imo any language that has them should be an a posteriori one (unless someone can point me to an unrelated language [both according to tree and wave model] that also has something similar, in which case I'll take it all back)

if I may ask, what are tree and wave?

times like this, I wonder if triconsonantal roots are an artifact of analysis and-or the script.

Basically, the tree model explains how German and English share many similar things because they are on the same branch of the language tree. The wave model explains why Romanian has many shared features with other Balkan languages, because they're near each other they may affect each other.

So basically, can someone show me a natural language which is neither closely related to the semitic languages, nor has been in heavy contact with one, that features consonantal roots.

They're also called Semitic roots, so I don't think there are any. Conlangers love them though, so I don't think people will stop using them just because they're only in Semitic languages.

[Ahzoh]

Times like this, I wonder if triconsonantal roots are an artifact of analysis and-or the script.

It is entirely based upon the analysis of the speakers.

A system where speakers view roots as an abstract series of consonants only occurs (as far as natlangs are concerned) due to a mix of syncope (unstressed vowel deletion) and vowel mutations (which can blur, or completely change, the root vowel) that cause the original vowels of a root to become unidentifiable and when this happens en masse, the speakers start analogizing with other similar words until it is not possible to identify the original vowels between the root. Then, due to all this, the only thing that has been constant the entire time have been the consonants, which results in them identifying them as the root. It is, in many ways, a form of thorough and out-of-control ablaut.

Triconsonantal roots are the most common because bisyllables were probably the most common. You could also have a biliteral root sytem or a quadriliteral root system or a mix of them. It doesn't matter as long as they arrive from the same processes.

I could, theoretically, take an earlier stage of a language like Japanese and turn it into a triconsonantal root language. It will not be Japanese, and it might not even look like it, but it won't look like Semitic.

---

On a tangent, but does anyone have a summary of features that defines the Semitic languages (aside from being triconsonantal)?
E.g. They usually have a singular-dual-plural distinction, they usually have emphatic consonants (as in, contrasting from voiceless and voiced consonants) with a few exceptions (like Hebrew), they usually have pharyngeal consonants, etc. but also morphological and syntactic features.

That way I do not accidentally create a Semitic clone.

[Keenir]

I could, theoretically, take an earlier stage of a language like Japanese and turn it into a triconsonantal root language. It will not be Japanese, and it might not even look like it, but it won't look like Semitic.

if I were any capable of diachronics, i'd accept that challenge.

given the size of the Semitic language family, that's a tough claim to make - I can buy that a triconsonantal Japanese wouldn't look like Arabic or Hebrew, but there were other members of the family, and it might look more like one of them.

That way I do not accidentally create a Semitic clone.

that's a strange thing to say. (or has your original/earlier aim changed). I remember when you were trying as hard as possible - and harder still - to make your conlang as close to Hebrew and Arabic as possible, even down to the regularities and irregularities.

i'm just disorientated, is all; sorry.

[Ahzoh]

That way I do not accidentally create a Semitic clone.

that's a strange thing to say. (or has your original/earlier aim changed). I remember when you were trying as hard as possible - and harder still - to make your conlang as close to Hebrew and Arabic as possible, even down to the regularities and irregularities.

i'm just disorientated, is all; sorry.

That was some time ago, now I'm more confident in the diachronics and how the 3con system works that I do not feel the need to mimic a Semitic feature just to "keep the triconsonantal-iness".

I like the way Semitic does some things, like the construct state, but I do not want Vrkhazhian to have too many of them that it looks like a clone. I already cringed when I decided to use gemination to indicate the causative but I didn't want to use periphrasis or affixes that would increase syllable count.

I have tried to add things to make it different than Semitic languages or are common across majority of languages. But, I do not really know as a whole all of the features that makes the Semitic family distinct from other families.

[Keenir]

That way I do not accidentally create a Semitic clone.

that's a strange thing to say. (or has your original/earlier aim changed). I remember when you were trying as hard as possible - and harder still - to make your conlang as close to Hebrew and Arabic as possible, even down to the regularities and irregularities.

i'm just disorientated, is all; sorry.

That was some time ago, now I'm more confident in the diachronics and how the 3con system works

congratulations. self-confidence is a good thing - a positive feature.

I retract my earlier confusion.

I have tried to add things to make it different than Semitic languages or are common across majority of languages. But, I do not really know as a whole all of the features that makes the Semitic family distinct from other families.

maybe take a look at members of the Semitic family other than that "little" side branch (or the not-so-close relatives), to see what else the A-Mutation we discussed can get involved in.

if nothing else, it might spark ideas.

[k1234567890y]

Oh yea, triconsonantal roots I've been avoiding so far. They're such a Semitic thing, imo any language that has them should be an a posteriori one (unless someone can point me to an unrelated language [both according to tree and wave model] that also has something similar, in which case I'll take it all back)

I have an a priori triconsonantal root language, Vrkhazhian. Mine does not have any relation to Semitic languages.

I also have a priori triconsonantal root languages, and I have more than one...