If natlangs were conlangs

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Sequor
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Sequor »

Old Church Slavonic has many cases marked and distinguished by a single vowel: gradŭ grade grada gradě gradu gradi grady.

And there's a bit of syncretism of different case and number combinations, to make matters worse: gradŭ 'the city, of the cities', grade 'oh city!', grada 'of the city, the two cities', gradě 'in the city', gradu 'to the city, of/in the two cities', gradi 'the cities (nom.)', grady 'the cities (acc.), with the cities'.

Terrible conlang.
Shemtov wrote: 23 Nov 2018 14:49To whoever did the Ethiopic subfamily of Semitic: Where did the emphatic biblabial come from? And why did you take a VSO family and make it SOV?
Many Arabic dialects have emphatic m and b (and r!) as well, even though they're not indicated in writing. Maybe there's something reconstructible here.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Pabappa »

I think the /ṗ/ is mostly found in loans, including loans from Greek where it takes the place of the unaspirated /p/, since the standard Ethiopic stops are fundamentally aspirated.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by LinguoFranco »

I really hate whoever created Nuxalk. It gets ridiculous with some of the words having absolutely no vowels. And I thought Georgian was bad with consonant clusters. I guess having only aspirated and ejecting stops is pretty weird but nothing too unnatural. Still weird, though.

Just... why?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Shemtov »

To the creator of Zulu: Clicks, one implosive, and a lateral fricative? You really have a thing for uncommon phonemes. At least you restrained yourself from putting in ejectives. (To be fair, I use /ɬ/ a lot, too. I even have a language with /k͡ʟ̞/. But if there's any other weird phonemes, they're ejectives, which are attested as being in languages with /ɬ/, and I'm usually basing the conlang off of such a language.)
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Creyeditor »

Why do people always say bad things about natlangs in this thread? I just want to say that I would really enjoy the crazyness of the languages of Vanuatu if they were conlangs. They are so nicely crafted.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

Creyeditor wrote: 31 Jan 2019 21:20 Why do people always say bad things about natlangs in this thread?
Because it's more fun.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by eldin raigmore »

@Creyeditor:
As Frislander is saying, this thread is (or appears to be) a fun way of expressing our opinions about how weird natlangs can be; a feeling often otherwise expressed as ANADEW.

Years ago on this board I expressed my perplexion re Swedish’s vowel-inventory by pretending the poster who described it was posting about their conlang, which they were proposing to call “Swedish”. My helpful, constructive criticism, was that their vowel-inventory was unnaturalistic and unrealistic for a conlang intended to be spoken by unmodified humans pretty much like RL humans.

I just looked for that post and can’t find it here anymore. But this thread contains several good posts in the same vein! Quite original, too, IMNSHO!
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

Creyeditor wrote: 31 Jan 2019 21:20 Why do people always say bad things about natlangs in this thread? I just want to say that I would really enjoy the crazyness of the languages of Vanuatu if they were conlangs. They are so nicely crafted.
I take it as a way to poke fun at people criticizing the conlangs for being "unrealistic" by applying the same criticisms to languages that actually exist.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Iyionaku »

Creyeditor wrote: 31 Jan 2019 21:20 Why do people always say bad things about natlangs in this thread? I just want to say that I would really enjoy the crazyness of the languages of Vanuatu if they were conlangs. They are so nicely crafted.
In a way, I think it doesn't really make sense to praise things about natlangs because that feels like a tautology - if natlangs were conlangs, they'd all be perfect, way better than any "real" conlang ever created. Look at the perfect grammar that allows to express every possible situation! The nicely crafted lexicon of at the very least 20,000 entries (most of the time, a lot more) which new entries almost every day! They even made dialects! And don't even get me started on their perfect diachronics that feel so real!

Making fun of weird features fits it better, imo. But you do you! I'd also love if you could share some resources about the Vanuatunian languages, all I know about them is that they are unbelievably many.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

(Another English post cuz I'm unoriginal)

What's with the random nominal declension?! You have basically two cases: a half-assed genitive and everything else, and the markings are all the same in 3 of the four cases! You only needed 4 endings and all you came up with was
-Ø -s
-s -s
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

^The creator of English spent way too much time on a non-intuitive and inconsistent orthography, but when it came to morphology, they really half-a***d it. [xD]
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 21 Feb 2019 18:15What's with the random nominal declension?! You have basically two cases: a half-assed genitive and everything else, and the markings are all the same in 3 of the four cases! You only needed 4 endings and all you came up with was
-Ø -s
-s -s
And then they went and added random apostrophes for seemingly no reason just to make all four forms look different :roll:
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Shemtov »

The creator of Hausa must be a PhD in Linguistics, whose thesis was about theoretical morphosyntax, who created a test lang, and fell in with some fringe followers of Elijah Muhammad, thus placing it in an altversion of Africa. And probably barely passed Phonetics, because what is up with that emphatic series? The only people who could learn it as an L2 are altpeople who need it, or PhDs in Linguistics whose thesis was about theoretical morphosyntax.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Creyeditor »

I see the morphosyntax part, but as for the phonetics part, he simply would not have been very well versed in Semitic linguistics. He just had a very general typological introduction à la bilabial implosives are least marked, velar ejectives are least marked, etc. He even did a very standard tone system.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Shemtov »

The palatal emphatic is a glottalized /j/. Does that look natural?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Creyeditor »

We might talk about different varities of Hausa and from very different perspectives. I learned a variety were /j/ plus glottal stop gives a glottalized /j/.
From a semicist perspective having a glottalized palatal as your palatal emphatic indeed looks crazy. From a general perspective if you want some glottalized palatal, you might end up with a glottalized /j/. Both palatal implosives and palatal ejectives are rare. On the other hand, it breaks the nice pattern, because one would expect an ejective palatal judging from the velar ejective and the alveolar ejective affricate.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Shemtov »

Props to whoever did Quechua. It looks at first like they took Hungarian, removed the VH, made it more "Native American" and placed it in Tagalog-like relationship with Spanish. But no, a closer look shows a fine attention to detail: The vowel allophony before /x/ is great, and then there are some morphemes that are fusional, in an otherwise perfectly agglutanitive language, making it look like without the conquistadors, the language would be very fusional. Very nicely done.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by eldin raigmore »

The last several posts exemplify the reason I keep lurking here!
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Shemtov »

Shemtov wrote: 22 Dec 2016 22:47 So the the other board has this thread, so why not start one here (I don't go there anymore, because that's were the fun of conlanging goes to die.)

So anyhow:
Who created Gaelic really has a fetish for historical spellings, moreso then the guy who did English. I mean, in his or her "Irish" version /vʲəurə/ is written <Mheabhraigh>, what the Hell? I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a logic to his or her orthography, but why write /u/ with <bh>? Who does that?
Oh, and whoever did the Cois Fharraige dialect, what are you doing>? <oíche> is /i:/instead of /ˈiːçə/ or /ˈiːhə/ in the other dialects. I ask again: What are you doing?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by ɶʙ ɞʛ »

Also, Danish's crazy vowel system (16 phonemic qualities in long and short form!). This is more complex than any conlang, including from Birdlang.

/i i: y y: u u:/
/ɪ ɪ: ʏ ʏ: ʊ ʊ:/
/e e: ø ø: o o:/
/ɛ ɛ: œ œ: ɔ ɔ:/
/æ æ: ɶ ɶ: ɒ ɒ:/
/a a:/

No explicit diphthongs of course, but then you have things like Vejle /ʋailə/, etc, with <j v g r> in the coda showing implicit diphthongs /Vi Vu Vi~Vu Vɐ/. What will happen to this in the future? The vowel orthography is almost as confusing as English, with <ig> representing /i:/, /ɪ:/, /ei/, /ɛi/, /ai/, and several others.
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