Chuma wrote:
- My main langs are not naturalistic. Among other things, they have no phonetic or syntactic ambiguity.
- I like having pretty big phoneme inventories, but with sounds I can pronounce, so they tend to include some of the oddities of English and Swedish.
- Always base 16. It's the best base.
I wanted to do base 16 back when I was making logical languages, but I never really got around to it, and since 2004 I've exclusively worked on conlangs that are related to each other and are supposed to resemble natural languages.
Other traits of my own languages that I've thought of in the meantime:
No politeness distinction of any kind. I tried male/female speech registers once, where males were required to use suppletive forms of certain verbs, but it didnt really fit well with the other features of the language and I had no real explanation for how that feature appeared since it wasnt true of the protolanguage. It would make sense in a hyper-feministic culture like Moonshine, but with Moonshine I'm mostly interested in efficiency and I think even the Moonshines would not burden half their population with the chore of using unnecessarily long words just because theyre male. I still have a small wordlist of words that belong to
Womb Magic, however, which is a type of magic that only women can use. Womb Magic's purpose is to ensure that a baby will be born healthy and strong, rather than to perform visually impressive magic spells such as casting lightning bolts. Womb Magic can also be used for evil. Right now this exists in only one language, Poswa, but it would make sense for me to derive it backwards to the proto-language and then forwards into at least some of the other languages (probably not Khulls since its people believed in a different religion).
Very little semantic change over time. This is largely a result of my being unwilling to do the extra work that would be required to derive semantic changes for thousands of words in each language. Thus words for basic and ordinarily highly changeable things like "hello" are often cognates even in languages that diverged 7000 years ago. I make exceptions when words come into phonological collision, which happens a lot in some languages (Pabappa, Andanese) but rarely in others (Poswa, Khulls).
Likewise, there are very few loanwords in any of my languages. If there are loans, they are almost all from a single language rather than being taken from all of the surrounding cultures.
I like infixes. Most of my conlangs are descended from a language that used prefixes, infixes, and suffixes in roughly equal proportions, and the daughter languages of this language abandoned prefixes entirely but still used suffixes and infixes a lot. The Poswa term for infixation,
laššum pammom, translates as "verbal pregnancy", and infixes are divided into "head-first" (the most common) and "feet first" types, the distinction being whether their basic structure is -VC- or -CV-. Head-first infixes are more common because it is easier to slip a -VC- morpheme into a word that is likely to be mostly CV without violating the phonotactics. However, many infixes consist of just a single vowel and can be analyzed as being either type.
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Its silly to keep making multiple posts so I will just edit this post from now on to add new info.
1) No nasal vowels. I just dont like them.
2) Ive already mentioned I dont like voiced stops other than /b/, but /g/ is one phoneme I avoid so much that Ive come to spell it as
ġ since any "g" in any conlang of mine is far more likely to be /ŋ/ or /ɣ/ than /g/.