Conlanging Features you Avoid

[bororo]

Are you people proud about your ignorance or something?

Interesting post, but what's the point of this?

[Systemzwang]

Are you people proud about your ignorance or something?

Interesting post, but what's the point of this?

To shame whoever things they know enough when it's clear they don't.

[Ollock]

I don't know why gender is suddenly so divisive. Some people like it, and others don't. I agree that gender certainly has a function, but I understand why a lot of people don't see that purpose. That's OK. Not every conlang has to have it, so it's fine that some conlangers don't like it.

BTW, if you want a really good rundown on what gender is useful for and ways you can implement it in a conlang, we did an episode on it a long time back: http://conlangery.com/2012/01/23/conlan ... n-classes/

[Xnenai]

Though I speak italian, I don't really like using gender in conlangs.

I avoid anything past palatal trill except for velar plosive because I'm not that good at making those sounds.

I avoid making verb conjugations more complex than they have to be. For example in French, I don't understand the point of different spellings for verb conjugations that sound the same. In addition to that, you must use the subject in French.

[bororo]

For example in French, I don't understand the point of different spellings for verb conjugations that sound the same. In addition to that, you must use the subject in French.

Well, I suppose you could say that in French you have to use the subject pronouns because so many verb conjugations sound the same. As for the orthography, I don't know. Maybe the etymological quirks survive as a way to signal that one has received a proper education or something.

I have a new project in which I use gender (or rather noun classes) as a way to distinguish between degrees of sentience: nouns describing animals have two syllables, while humans have three.
This is matched by the corresponding verb classes : verbs of sensation are composed of two suprasegmental morphemes, verbs of thought are made of three.

[kiwikami]

I'm not a fan of velar consonants - I honestly prefer uvular ones, and tend to use them more often. I don't usually use gender, but I don't have anything against it, and really HyPry's noun-state system could be seen as one big, overly-complex mess of genders. In fact, I think male/female (and, for that matter, animate/inanimate) are some of the only things it doesn't distinguish between.

I'm fond of ejectives, but not implosives. I don't generally use agreement systems between verbs and their subjects or objects or what-have-you, and if I do, I try to make the language pro-drop. I work to avoid redundancy, because in my experience, no matter what one does, some degree of redundancy is going to occur regardless - that's just how language seems to work. As Systemzwang said, we live in noise, and it would be rather hard to understand a language with no redundancy at all.

I don't usually use tones. I simply don't like the way they end up sounding most of the time, though they can be beautiful if the person using them knows what they're doing. I don't. (And sandhi tends to completely escape me.) A partial tone system managed to weasel its way into HyPry somehow, but it mostly focuses on stress (they're extremely important in verb tense and voice, and try as I might to rid the language of them, I swear it has a mind of its own). I'm not very fond of irregular stress either - as much color and pizazz as it may add to a language, it can be a real pain to memorize.

And... there are my opinions. Yes. Right.

[Keenir]

I'm working that bit out now. Generally they were initially used for count words, but conceptually the differentiation between count and mass nouns is absent, and Tletlwan hasn't had plural/singular distinction ever, so in lieu of number Tletlwan developed a system of classifier words which can identify things like "handfuls", "a set of", "a mess of", "countless" and some merely indicate featural elements of the juxtaposed noun "longish rigid object", "adjoining lengths", "ungainly object", "slablike object". Furthermore the noun can be dropped after it has been introduced but the measure word/classifier must be retained (along with the verbal inflection indicating person and animacy plus a stripped down classificatory agreement system)

so...you could say something like this?
"a mess of" "slablike object" "pebble" = "(a bunch of) pebbles"

(and "there were (a bunch of) pebbles lying on the ground...I slipped on the (a bunch of) that afternoon" as well)


cool.

[Thrice Xandvii]

To shame whoever thinks they know enough when it's clear they don't.

...

To the point of cussing and yelling? How do you imagine that comes across to the folks you are attempting to ellucidate?

Well... back on topic: I tend to avoid the usage of articles of any kind, I find "the" to be a fairly useless word that doesn't carry a ton of meaning in most respects. Likewise, I tend to avoid gender, but that isn't a universal rule. I may well work it into one of the projects I am working on now... but it is very unlikely to be a system based on the male/female duality.

Unfortunately, I also avoid a lot of the IPA simply because I don't know how to say some of the sounds and don't feel at all comfortable using things I can't pronounce. I hope to increase my knowledge in that regard.

[H.Á.]

- Phonemic Nasalization. Fair to play to French, it sounds beautiful and all, but I just can't prõnõũncẽ ĩt prõpẽrly.
- Uvulars
- Arbitrary Stress. Nope, not worth it IMO.

[Ollock]

- Phonemic Nasalization. Fair to play to French, it sounds beautiful and all, but I just can't prõnõũncẽ ĩt prõpẽrly.

Is French nasalization actually phonemic? Two phonology professors have covered phonological rules governing nasalization resulting from deletion of a coda nasal in French (once as an in-class example and once as an analysis problem). That doesn't mean that there aren't places where it's phonemic, but I don't know French well enough to go looking for a case where the rules don't predict it.

[Ossicone]

In response to Systemzwang's severe overreaction, I think it's important to remember a few things.

1. No one is born with innate knowledge of the science of linguistics. Everyone is ignorant at one point in their lives. This includes ignorance of how ignorant they are. But it's not until after you start learning that you realize how little you knew in the first place.

2. Just because you speak a language natively doesn't really give you any real insight into how it works. (Just the ability to know when something sounds off. ) Native speaker insight is notoriously unreliable.

Additionally, Systemzwang is getting an official board warning. How many times can I say "being right does not mean you have the right to berate people"? Throwing insults only serves to undermine any point made.

[Thrice Xandvii]

1. No one is born with innate knowledge of the science of linguistics. Everyone is ignorant at one point in their lives. This includes ignorance of how ignorant they are. But it's not until after you start learning that you realize how little you knew in the first place.

Man, ain't that the truth!

Before I came here, I felt like I knew quite a bit about language... and now? Holy crap do I have so much to learn!

[Systemzwang]

I would fucking like to know what exactly can be construed as a direct insult in what I said.

[Thrice Xandvii]

I would fucking like to know what exactly can be construed as a direct insult in what I said.

Dude... first... chill out. Second, direct insult or no, it is heavily implied that you are belittling people's intelligence over this issue. And that seems to be a bridge too far. Beyond that, what is the point of getting so bent out of shape over this issue? If they don't like/understand an aspect of languages, what does it matter? Either offer to politely educate or move on.

I probably should just leave this to the mods and butt out, but this seems... like really odd behaviour/reaction and felt I needed to put my 2 cents in as an outside observer.

[Trailsend]

I would fucking like to know what exactly can be construed as a direct insult in what I said.

Very little, actually, with the possible exception (depending on what "direct" means) of "Are you people proud about your ignorance or something?". But that doesn't actually matter, because:

2. Somewhat related to the above, don't bite the newbies. Just because someone knows less about languages or linguistics (or anything, really) than you do does not give you an excuse to be rude to them. We do not have any minimum standard of linguistic knowledge required for membership on this board, so don't make it look like we did.

Of course, it's okay to point it out when people make mistakes; that's how they learn (hopefully). But try to do it politely.

Direct insults or no, your presentation was clearly not in accordance with the House Rules.

Apart from presentation, though, Systemzwang is spot on, as usual. You can learn a lot by listening to what he says while ignoring how he says it.

If they don't like/understand an aspect of languages, what does it matter?

It matters because this is a forum about (con)languages, and it is intended to be educational (among other things). It is our hope that if you notice that another member doesn't understand something, you will help them to understand it. But you have to play by the rules as you do so.

[Thrice Xandvii]

It matters because this is a forum about (con)languages, and it is intended to be educational (among other things). It is our hope that if you notice that another member doesn't understand something, you will help them to understand it. But you have to play by the rules as you do so.

Very true... but I guess the point I was making was just that there is no need to get that upset over it, because, in reality, you can only teach so much and if someone doesn't get it beyond a certain point, there isn't much you can really do anymore.

I really am glad to see though that this forum's moderation team takes respect of the "newbs" seriously, as well as attempting to educate as much as is possible.

[Larryrl]

Wondering if anybody is phobic towards any conlanging features.

I tend to avoid prefixes as often as I can, for some reason. I don't like them. I don't like them because they're at the beginning of words. I don't want a lot of my words beginning with the same sounds. That also means by default I tend to avoid VSO. Thus, I'm a prefixophobic or something.

I'm just the opposite. I have 50 prefixes for my Yerk language. That includes part of speech markers. It wasat first prefixes and suffixes but it was too hard to try to detedrmine which wend on the end and which on the front, so now they all go on the front

[druneragarsh]

Grammar: articles, gender, fusional languages. Clicks are something I'd like to do someday, but none of my current projects have clicks.

Phonology: [ə] (my least favorite vowel), [ɤ] (I can pronounce [ɯ] but not this), [dʒ] (it's ugly), [ɹ] (it's ugly), and allophony.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Grammar: articles, gender, fusional languages. Clicks are something I'd like to do someday, but none of my current projects have clicks.

Phonology: [ə] (my least favorite vowel), [ɤ] (I can pronounce [ɯ] but not this), [dʒ] (it's ugly), [ɹ] (it's ugly), and allophony.

In other words, you hate German :P

All natural languages have allophony...

I dislike the [ɹ] too, and implosives. I also dislike the common [w] sound. I have a long list of things I dislike and I probably should just not list them, but many of the things I dislike are things languages don't have, like languages not having at least somewhat flexible word orders or any productive compounding.

I also happen to like articles in languages, since you can use them to convert things into nouns without affixes, like "I saw the the enemy destroyed the city" = "I saw the enemy's destruction of the city" or "the speak" = "speech" (like "the run" or "the hunt" in English).

[druneragarsh]

Grammar: articles, gender, fusional languages. Clicks are something I'd like to do someday, but none of my current projects have clicks.

Phonology: [ə] (my least favorite vowel), [ɤ] (I can pronounce [ɯ] but not this), [dʒ] (it's ugly), [ɹ] (it's ugly), and allophony.

In other words, you hate German :P

All natural languages have allophony...

I dislike the [ɹ] too, and implosives. I also dislike the common [w] sound. I have a long list of things I dislike and I probably should just not list them, but many of the things I dislike are things languages don't have, like languages not having at least somewhat flexible word orders or any productive compounding.

I also happen to like articles in languages, since you can use them to convert things into nouns without affixes, like "I saw the the enemy destroyed the city" = "I saw the enemy's destruction of the city" or "the speak" = "speech" (like "the run" or "the hunt" in English).

Well... yeah :P (Though I like their accent in English, so, compensation?)

Ah, let me rephrase that. I hate excessive allophony, as found in some languages with small inventories. I like roughly 1:1 correspondencies between the glyph and the possible sounds. /f/ becoming [ɸ] in a cluster with bilabials is fine, any soud altering in both POA and MOA is not.