Standard Average You

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snappdragon
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by snappdragon »

I have a strong attraction to nasals, bilabial trills, fricatives, prefixes, and the average Spanish vowel set.
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Imralu
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by Imralu »

Orthography:
- No use of diacritics - easy to write quickly with whatever keyboard
- Little use of digraphs, and no use of digraphs that could lead to ambiguity (these two things have an effect on my phonology, although I tend to like small systems anyway)

Phonology:
- Standard five-vowel system, with /i/ and /u/ having semivowel/non-syllabic allophones
- Tendency towards smaller consonant inventories
- Lots of [ʒ] because it is sex
- Initial /ŋ/ always allowed
- No rhotics although alveolar flaps appear as an allophone of /d/
- Increasingly few consonant clusters, tending towards more open syllables. I used to like a slightly consonanty, Eastern Europe sound, but I'm liking vowelier languages now.
- Tending towards more voiced consonants, prenasalised stops, semivowels and a kind of stereotypical "ugabuga bu" sound, but also with ʒ.
- I want to be able to pronounce my langs fairly easily, so I tend not to have anything too exotic and non-SAE. I do have a fondness for ejectives though, but only put them in positions where I have no trouble pronouncing them.
- At the same time, I detest anything that makes it sound too Englishy (or Elf-Dragon-Orc fantasy-y), so no approximant rhotics and no dental fricatives. (Although I have always thought about making a conlang with the exact phonology of English so it just sounds like gibberish. Washy top the snarker jumple? Ping! Washing topped in the snarker a jarkins. Oh, tessalation.)

Grammar:
- Heads before modifiers and pretty strict about it, although what counts as a head would sometimes surprise.
- Analytic because of my dislike of prefixes and because suffixes break the branching order unless they actually belong to the following word (like marking the following word with a suffix on the preceding word).
- No lexical noun-verb distinction (generally with content words behaving more nouny, but one lang was more verby)
- Usually weird things with genders, associated with strict gender roles in society (differing pronunciation, gendered action words, derogatory marking of inappropriate behaviour for a gender)
- Frequent use of gerundives, since before I even knew that was a thing. Gerundives frequently infixed although not in the latest lang.
- Simple kinship system (Families! Fuck em!)
- Base ten number system. I'd like to be more exotic, but I hate maths, so, no.
- Clusivity distinctions in pronouns, plural pronouns often formed additively, like "you+I" or "s/he+I" etc.

Vocabulary:
Except for the occasional more novel conlang that I usually give up on quite quickly, most of my conlangs are a nearer approximation of the conlang I really want. They're more or less big overhauls of the same thing. They don't exist in the same world as each other and once I've moved on, the last one is dropped and no longer exists, so I am free to take a lot of vocab that I've grown attached to and simply put it in the new one without worrying about explaining why it's the same as in another language. For about the last ten years, I've had these words or words very like them.

na = 1s
wa = 2s
ba = extreme one
i copula, introduces predicate
da = big one

So basically, "you are very big" has basically been wa i ba da (with small mostly orthographic variations) in every main language of mine, except one where it was ba tta wa (with <tt> representing an ejective, although, even then, with topic fronting, it could be wa iba tta.
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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sanskacharu
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by sanskacharu »

This will certainly be a challenge to write. I do feel like I definitely have certain preferences, though...

Phonology
  • Minimalist phoneme inventories. I'm a minimalist myself, and I always end up trimming rather than adding.
  • Lack of voicing contrast in plosives and fricatives. Usually the default becomes voiceless.
  • Love my [ŋ], and it's allowed to be initial.
  • No [r], because I can't say it, and I like being able to pronounce my own conlangs.
  • Fondness for [β], usually written <v>.
  • My default inventory of vowels seems to be [i e ɛ ɑ ə ɔ o u].
  • Vowel length pretty much universally present and contrastive.
  • I always specify my low vowel as [ɑ] for some reason.
  • Simpler phonotactics. CVC at most -- if CCVC is allowed, the second C of the onset is highly limited to something like liquids or glides only.
  • Vowel sequences allowed with hiatus. Diphthongs less common for some reason.
  • often get press-ganged into being [j w], or into becoming [Cʲ] or [Cʷ] in combination with another consonant, in the phonological rules.
  • I'm fond of coalescence as a way to get weird sounds.
  • Whenever I make the orthography, I viciously avoid digraphs. Really only use them for long vowels occasionally.


Morphosyntax
  • What the hell is fusion. Languages tend to be a mixture of agglutinative and isolating.
  • However, I am also fond of infixes. Inordinately.
  • Case alignment tends to be very transparently agent-patient based. Therefore, I have a lot of ergative-absolutive, and a lot of fluid-ergativity.
  • Objects (patients) precede their subjects (agents) almost always. I actually have no idea why. I just know that if you give me the sentence "Dog cat bite" in English, or "Bite dog cat", my first instinct is that the cat is the biter and the dog is the bitee. "Dog bite cat" reads the other way round, probably because English is my native language.
  • Essentially, this results in a lot of VOS and OSV.
  • Generally, nouns are verbed and verbs are nouned with spectacular ease. Adjectives are easily adverbed.
  • No genders, or rarely genders. If gender, definitely not masculine-feminine based.
  • I have a weird fondness for base 6 numeral systems.
  • Plurals strikingly absent or optional.
  • Lots of particles for things like questions and negatives, and even mood. Not inflected, though.
  • No T-V distinction in second-person pronouns. Only one gender-neutral third-person pronoun.
  • Lack of articles.
  • Basically there's not a lot of inflection, but I tend to try and reduce word density anyway. This doesn't always work.
  • If a category does have inflection, there's generally not a lot of options for it, and one of them is usually zero-marked. So for instance, perfective-imperfective aspect being marked, imperfective being zero-marked. All other aspects are syntactically expressed.


Lexicon
Not much to say here except that I have never made a conlang that has two different words for 'man' and 'woman'. Just 'person'. Personal thing.
My conlang family:
  • Ukumusi & Mupuasa -- Two peas in a pod. Tired of your nonsense.
  • Ku Ṣili -- Lonely Misfit. Can't make up its mind.
  • Ayakadiya -- Standoffish, self-important. Needs More Lexicon.

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Chuma
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by Chuma »

I think I agree with almost everything Imralu said (we've previously noted that our conlangs are uncannily similar). I don't have a lot of different conlangs, but I do occasionally overhaul the whole thing and make a new version. The current one is version 20, hopefully the last major version.

A few things, though:

- 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.

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WeepingElf
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by WeepingElf »

I don't have many "standard average me" features in my conlangs; I cherish diversity and avoid doing the same thing twice. What there is is that most of my conlangs are naturalistic and constructed diachronically. Features I like are front rounded vowels, rich inflectional morphologies and active-stative or other split-ergative morphosyntactic alignments - but not all of my conlangs have all of these. My main conlang, Old Albic, pretty much embodies what I consider a "beautiful" language.
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StrangerCoug
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by StrangerCoug »

Chuma wrote:- Always base 16. It's the best base.
Makes me think your conworld's inhabitants are going to have an easier time with computer science than Earthlings xD
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Soap
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by Soap »

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.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————
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/.
Last edited by Soap on Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Chuma
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by Chuma »

StrangerCoug wrote:
Chuma wrote:- Always base 16. It's the best base.
Makes me think your conworld's inhabitants are going to have an easier time with computer science than Earthlings xD
And they can count to 255 on their fingers. :D
Soap wrote:"verbal pregnancy"
Awesome idea.

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Imralu
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Re: Standard Average You

Post by Imralu »

Soap wrote:"verbal pregnancy"
Hmm, but if the infixes are bound morphemes and can never occur as independent words, they can never be born and they're also a different species from the mother ... so it's more like verbal parasitism. Your verbs have got worms. :mrgreen:
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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