If natlangs were conlangs

[Arayaz]

Latin: Oh, suuuuuuuuuuure, you're going to make an analytic language with free word order and cases. How lovely. How original. How exotic and challenging.
Not.

I think the reason this is a trope is that all the new conlangers copied Latin. It's like Esperanto.

Inuktitut: Why do you sound like a more fluid version of Klingon. And also *turning away from the language to the speaker*, I thinks it's cheating if you just tack on affixes like that. It's too simple! I mean, since when was a language supposed to be easy for kids to learn, anyways?

No, no, you see, it's so that every English speaker who takes an interest in our language has to DIE A MILLION DEATHS before they remember the order the affixes come in!

Pirahã: WHY

[Visions1]

I think the reason this is a trope is that all the new conlangers copied Latin. It's like Esperanto.

I believe there are some deeper reasons why that is.
Latin is 1) familiar to everyone indirectly, since so many languages borrow/are descended from it; 2) the grammar is actually really easy to work with. Nothing complicated, just tack on some markers and you're good. It's a crazy easy style to implement - you could create the grammar in basically a single day; 3) a lot of people end up learning classical languages anyways (Hebrew and Greek also being examples of this in their own ways), making these systems familiar to many. People tend to conlang through the lense of whatever languages they currently know.

[Visions1]

Wait, you speak Inuktitut?

[Arayaz]

Wait, you speak Inuktitut?

I wish. But no, I haven't found any resources from it, and I'm losing enough hair over Irish at the moment, thanks.

Whoever designed it was inspired by Biblaridion's language where verbs have non-concatenative morphology, and decided, "oh, I wanna make a language where EVERY NOUN HAS SOME RANDOM IRREGULAR GENITIVE FORM!!! YAYYYYYYYY!"

[Salmoneus]

Told you so.

But the genitive singulars aren't that bad - there's only 5 declensions, after all. But the plurals... the 1st declension, for instance, has only one way of forming the genitive singular, but NINE ways of forming a plural. And then the genitive plural is usually the same as the nominative singular, but then sometimes it'll be the same as the nominative plural instead (the nominative plural is in turn usually the same as the genitive singular, except if its' the same as the genitive plural instead).

[Arayaz]

Told you so.

Indeed you did. And thank you for the warning.
Your post also inspired me to learn at least the basics of German.

But the genitive singulars aren't that bad - there's only 5 declensions, after all. But the plurals... the 1st declension, for instance, has only one way of forming the genitive singular, but NINE ways of forming a plural. And then the genitive plural is usually the same as the nominative singular, but then sometimes it'll be the same as the nominative plural instead (the nominative plural is in turn usually the same as the genitive singular, except if its' the same as the genitive plural instead).

And the vocative plural.

I think the quintessential case systems are nom/acc/dat/gen (German), nom/acc/dat/gen/loc/abl/all (Dothraki), and nom/acc/dat/gen/abl/voc (Latin).

Irish is nom/gen/voc, which is a very odd set.

[Visions1]

Kusunda: Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they found another speaker.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found three more speakers.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found another speaker.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found two more speakers.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found two more speakers.
(You really can't let go, huh?)

(This reminds me of an old comedy-piece where they made a fake newspaper in 100 years: "100 years later: Yiddish still dying.")

Southern Yiddish: ...I have not seen horrors like this since the Great English Vowel Shift...
...what... monster... are you...

Tedim: So you're telling me your protolang didn't have a /g/, and you just, made one up using /r/ -> /ɣ/ -> /g/.
That makes no sense! I've never seen a language do that before!
*Meanwhile, in my head*
(Stupid Visions! Why didn't I think of that! Ugh!)

[Informer]

English revisited – orthography:
Then others took over and only tweaked unnecessary details! What even...?

Even then the graphemes they did remove just made it all worse!

[Man in Space]

Stupid Visions!

“Gazed into the visions of the night…”

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

Kusunda: Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they found another speaker.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found three more speakers.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found another speaker.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found two more speakers.
5 years later:
Bad news guys! Kusunda just went extinct!
Oh wait, they just found two more speakers.
(You really can't let go, huh?)

(This reminds me of an old comedy-piece where they made a fake newspaper in 100 years: "100 years later: Yiddish still dying.")

Southern Yiddish: ...I have not seen horrors like this since the Great English Vowel Shift...
...what... monster... are you...

Tedim: So you're telling me your protolang didn't have a /g/, and you just, made one up using /r/ -> /ɣ/ -> /g/.
That makes no sense! I've never seen a language do that before!
*Meanwhile, in my head*
(Stupid Visions! Why didn't I think of that! Ugh!)

Fascinating. I'd never heard of Kusunda until today, and I thought I was up-to-date on my language isolates. I guess it's time to dive deep into this "language that's died 1000 deaths".

[Visions1]

Fascinating. I'd never heard of Kusunda until today, and I thought I was up-to-date on my language isolates. I guess it's time to dive deep into this "language that's died 1000 deaths".

Truthfully, I just think it was that the data was faulty for a while. Nepal isn't exactly easy terrain.

[Visions1]

Wait, you speak Inuktitut?

I wish. But no, I haven't found any resources from it, and I'm losing enough hair over Irish at the moment, thanks.

Whoever designed it was inspired by Biblaridion's language where verbs have non-concatenative morphology, and decided, "oh, I wanna make a language where EVERY NOUN HAS SOME RANDOM IRREGULAR GENITIVE FORM!!! YAYYYYYYYY!"

You know, if you're still interested, I can find you some old grammars online for it.

[YoungConlanger]

Russian IMO is a very interesting conlang - in fact, in one of my roleplays w/ my friends, that's my character's native language. It manages to sound like another conlang from the same creator - German, while not sounding angry or too harsh. I think that's because of a relatively unique idea of having the language distinguish between palatalized & unpalatalized consonants. Also its curse words penetrate right through the soul - that's how swearing is supposed to work!

What I hate about the conlang is that they artificially made /ɨ/ a phoneme. I bet they intended to have /ɨ/ as a phoneme, since Kirillitsa - the Russian script - has a separate glyph for it. I think something went not as planned while they were developing the sound changes from Old Russian to Russian, & then they basically were like "/ɨ/ isn't phonemic because /i/ always comes after soft consonants & /ɨ/ always after hard consonants, but wait /ɨ/ is actually phonemic because aparrently it comes word-initially in some rare loan names, & since both /i/ & /ɨ/ unconditionally appear in the same environment /ɨ/ is a phoneme". The names given sound unnatural even in the conlangs they're "borrowed" from. It's so artificial! I would've been more fine if you just said like "the glyph for the sound [ɨ] remains 'cause historical spelling"!

Thank god it's spelling is just a bit harder than Spanish. Its punctuation rules though - oh god, that's equivalent to English.

[HolyHandGrenade!]

Spanish is fine, but it was obviously created by some newbie trying to play it safe. I would encourage whoever the creator is to study another language, I mean besides just looking up Latin on Wikipedia, and maybe get a little more inventive with their phonology.

[Creyeditor]

The creator of Spanish was the only one if the few conlangers in Europe that looked up the typology of vowel systems before starting their conlang.