Cool features you scrapped

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Alessio
sinic
sinic
Posts: 390
Joined: 03 Sep 2012 21:27
Location: Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Cool features you scrapped

Post by Alessio »

I just had to scrap a feature from my latest conlang (which... doesn't have a name yet, because I'm bad at naming stuff), because although it felt super cool in principle, in practice it didn't quite work. Now I'm sad, so I'm here to look for other people who shared my pain.

So here's my question: what are the coolest conlang features you designed, but you had to scrap, and why?

As for me:
Spoiler:
The idea was to have a grammatical distinction between stative and eventive verbs, not only a lexical one. Basically, there would be two sets of endings applied to the same root, which would, accordingly, be used for two meanings:
  • one, called the stative, would denote a passive action, i.e. one that doesn't require actively doing something, for example a state (sitting on a chair, as in, currently being seated) or some kind of perception (seeing or hearing something);
  • the other, called the eventive, would denote an active action, for example a transition towards a state (sitting on a chair, as in, going to sit down) or some kind of attempt to perceive (watching or listening to something).
This distinction felt cool because you could apply it to so much more. For example, the verb to go still had a stative version, that meant to be carried (e.g. by public transport, or by someone else driving).

So... why did I scrap this? Because it's a pain. My conlang already has three aspects, five moods and three tenses (and thank God it doesn't mark person or number on the verbs). That's too many endings already, multiplying them by 2 would be a pain. So I had the ingenious idea to just add an eventive marker (-i) at the end. Well guess what? Try to neutralize the verb and see how terribly that works. For example, since the verbal roots for to know and to learn where the same, the nouns knowledge and learning were also the same. When I realized I would need to duplicate the neutralizing endings to accommodate for this, I gave up and dropped the feature.

This is exactly the problem. Stative vs eventive is a lexical distinction, not a grammatical one. Neutralizing works in languages with aspectual distinctions because aspect is not lexical - the action is the same, the aspect just tells you how it's done or viewed. But stative vs eventive is much more than that.
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HolyHandGrenade!
greek
greek
Posts: 574
Joined: 29 Aug 2024 17:27

Re: Cool features you scrapped

Post by HolyHandGrenade! »

I’d like to challenge this notion that aspect is inherently grammatical, while eventivity is not. For example, what about telicity? That’s a kind of aspect which is often lexical but can be encoded grammatically, and interacts with grammatical aspects in complicated ways because it essentially is aspect, if you define aspect as the way events are framed in time. I think your idea could work, maybe with a different language and some thought into how it interacted with other systems like aspect.
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TBPO
greek
greek
Posts: 722
Joined: 25 Apr 2024 18:19

Re: Cool features you scrapped

Post by TBPO »

My cool but scrapped feature was that Arkasian had three high front vowels: long /i:/, palatalized /j/ (syllabic) and centralized /i’/ (I try to make umlaut in ascii). I maked centralized vowels central and turned /j/ into /i/, removing cool distinction but making my conlang more naturalistic.
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