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My conlangs on this site:

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[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

1) I have a very difficult time working with any conlang that has a phonology I don't like. I like labial consonants ("Bamba mumbebap pypembaba." is a sentence in my primary conlang, for example) and the vowel /a/. One might think that using a limited phonology would make sentences in my conlangs much longer than their English translations, but this hasnt seemed to be a problem for me.

2) The lagnuage needs to either be strongly fusional or "feel like" it is. e.g. Poswa has tables for its nouns, such that one can say "made from your breast milk" in just one word (bwul). The number of noun inflections is much lower than Finnish, however, where "not even without our dogs?" can be said in one word. (koirattasikaanko or something, see http://i.imgur.com/QFm6SCE.png) However, Poswa is also highly irregular, unlike Finnish.

3) SOV word order please. Occasionally will toss in an SVO sentence or two, but only if the language is otherwise SOV. Adjectives alwayts after nouns.

4) The entire language has to use only suffixes and infixes, never any prefixes.

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And now Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey with our weather report:

1. I also have problems with not liking my phonologies, which generally means that there aren't any voicing distinctions in obstruents without some other manner of articulation distinctions as well (which often means a single stop and fricative series)

2. More generally, I hardly ever have more than 15 consonants.

3. If possible I have fewer than five vowels, though I generally include a length distinction to compensate.

4. I don't often allow clusters, instead strongly preferring CV(C)

5. It's been ages since I last started a language without polypersonal agreement. However, I will often have a few cases as well to denote grammatical relations.

6. I don't like large gender systems, though EDIT: I'm happy with numeral classifiers.

7. I'm a sucker for large numbers of moods and voices, but I avoid past-present-future tense systems like the plague. EDIT: Furthermore, now I understand what it is, I much prefer aspect over tense. EDIT: I also like to mix in evidentials with the moods.

8. I really enjoy having relative clauses use nominalisation, and further to this I don't have a separate category of adjectives, them being covered by either nouns or verbs.

9. I generally just enjoy large amounts of synthesis, so my languages, though they may have a few fused affixes, end up being generally agglutinative out of pure necessity, with no general bias in favour of either prefixes or suffixes.

EDIT: 10. I often drift towards ergativity, but I do like to do funky things with, say, perception verbs, and to make ditransitive verb dechticaetiaive

EDIT: 11. I also strongly avoid SVO.

EDIT: 12. Preference for subsuming prepositions under verbs, or marking locational concepts on verbs.

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First known on here as Karero

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

1. Ejectives. The overwhelming majority of my languages have them. This is generally part of a three-way distinction of voiced/unvoiced/ejective, but I also have plain/aspirated/ejective, plain/ejective, and one case of voiced/aspirated/ejective.
2. Big consonant inventories. Uvulars are pretty typical, pharyngeals/epiglottals are frequent. Palatals other than /j/ are rare.
3. I like fricatives, but I don't tend to have many (or any) voiced fricatives.
4. Quite a few of my languages have /ɬ/.
5. Most of my languages distinguish both laterals and rhotics; if they have only one, it's probably a lateral. Very few have neither. Most of my languages with rhotics have /r/.
6. Vowel inventory tends to be /ɑ e i o u/, usually with length distinction.
7. Nearly all of my languages disallow null onsets. C(C)V(C), CV, and CV(C)(C) are my typical syllable constraints.
8. Probably 60% of my languages are VSO; most of the rest are SOV.
9. At least half of my languages are ergative/absolutive, though my most significant and largest language family is nominative-absolutive (except for one language in the family, which is an outlier in a lot of ways).
10. Quite a few of my languages have obviative pronouns.
11. Most of my languages have verbs that decline only for aspect without tense.
12. I've recently become a big fan of languages with a huge number of directional morphemes like the languages of the Pacific Northwest, and so many of my newer languages have these.
13. Oddly, I'm a big fan of vowel harmony but only three of my languages have it.
14. A little over half of my languages have gender, either masculine/feminine or animate/inanimate. Only one has noun classes. The rest have no grammatical gender.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

1. Two-way aspect contrast between perfective and imperfective.
2. Either no tense marking at all or a past/nonpast system.
3. Morphological causatives.
4. Either >=3 plosive series (pʰ pʼ b in Kannow, pʰ p b in Amqoli, pʰ p b ɓ in Gehui), an incomplete voiced series (/p t k ɓ/ in Insular Kett and [by IK influence] Sestmag, /b t d k/ in Enzielu), or no plosive MOA contrast at all.
5. Tone, pitch accent, or phonemic stress.
6. Noun classes. (Kannow, Gehui, Sestmag, to some extent Amqoli)
7. Either CV phonotactics (Vian, Hathe) or complex consonant clusters (Kannow /tʷʰpʰcʰgʷərkʰtʂʰ/, Sestmag /θstseŋləjɒ/, Amqoli /rbʒa/).
8. Avoidance of SVO word order. (Kannow is VSO, Arve is VOS, most others are SOV)
9. Boring nominative-accusative alignment. (The only exceptions are Haruic, and every Haruic language is an exception.)

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

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Formerly a vegetable

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Grammar:

1. No grammatical gender. Zompist said something about it in one of his intros to Verdurian - conlangers dislike it, but it's a common feature in several unrelated language families. In my languages, there's never a gender distinction in pronouns, either.

2. No Latin- or Greek-style fusional morphology. Traditionally I'd go for either an analytic or an agglutinative groundplan, but right now I'm working on a language with Semitic-style nonconcatenative morphology. (P.S. real-world Hebrew and Arabic are better about separating tense from subject marking than the Romance languages.)

3. Grammatical inflections that are either regular or unpredictable, with nothing in-between, like the regular-with-many-exceptions verbal paradigms of Romance languages. One of my languages has a closed class of verbal roots, with aspect marking that's irregular with some patterns, like modern-day strong verbs in English. The rest are more regular than that. This is in some ways a consequence of #2 - agglutinative languages tend to be more regular, and so do Hebrew and Arabic verb conjugations.

4. SVO word order.

5. No T-V distinction; politeness is expressed in other means.

6. Grammaticalized aspect distinctions, usually perfective vs. imperfective. This includes the far-future descendant of English, which turned the progressive construction into an imperfective, swallowing the habitual, which in today's English uses simple tenses.

Phonology:

1. A phoneme inventory that looks like Standard Average European, at least as far as fricatives go, with voicing distinctions in both plosives and fricatives. (Just don't ask about the voiceless nasal series in one of my languages...)

2. If there are affricates, such as /dʒ/ then their fricative versions also exist, in this case /ʒ/. There are no gaps in voicing, such as the lack of a /p/ in Arabic.

3. In the a priori languages, onset semivowels /j w/ are either consistently treated as vowels for phonotactics purposes (so, can follow any consonant, even /r l/) or as consonants (so, can precede any vowel, even matching /i u/). Coda semivowels are always treated as vowels, as in the Romance and Germanic languages, rather than as consonants, as in Arabic, Hebrew, or Russian. Even in the far-future descendant of English, /j w/ are for the most part vowels in that they can follow any consonant except /r l/, but they still do not count toward syllable weight for stress purposes.

4. Vowels vaguely look like a five-vowel system. There may be length distinctions, or a schwa in unstressed syllables, or diphthongs, and the far-future English also has /æ/. But there are no front rounded vowels, or triangular vowel systems, or vertical vowel systems, or back unrounded vowels. A lot of this is an artifact of my needing to transcribe these languages in Latin script for RPG players and such. One of my languages, in early versions, had a six-vowel system, with /æ e i ɒ o u/ plus long vowels and diphthongs /aɪ eɪ i: aʊ oʊ u:/, but eventually I merged /æ ɒ/; I decided this was an in-universe merger. Another language began as /a e i o u ə/ but right now I'm stripping it for parts to be used in a five-vowel language.

5. In most cases, stress is predictable from phonology. The one possible exception is due to diachronic artifacts in the far-future English: I initially created this language for a story set in 3411, but then decided to write something else in the same universe in 2869, when the distinctive stress system has not yet been replaced by distinctive length through spelling pronunciations. It's still difficult for me to remember to pronounce character names the 29th-century way and not the 35th-century way.

6. No tones, no ejectives, no retroflex consonants, no phonemic palatalization or velarization or labialization (phonetic features arising from a /j w/ phoneme do exist).

7. Onsets and codas are usually about equally complex. One language I'm working on is probably going to be CV or CVn. The rest are more complex, but are never like Greek with its horrific onsets and simple codas, or Arabic with CVCC, or Hebrew with CCVC. The far-future descendant of English has the same onsets as modern English, except with /j w/ allowed nearly everywhere, and codas like modern English with the -ed suffix removed.

EDIT: I forgot 8. /r/ = [ɹ] whenever consonant clusters are allowed.

This thread was good, I will necro it.

1. >=4 Plosive POAs, including at least one non-plain velar dorsal.
2. No or an incomplete palatal series.
3. A large (7 or more qualities) vowel system, often including length or nasality also.
4. Realis/Irrealis mood distinction.
5. No or few dedicated nonfinite forms, and none specialized as adjectives (participles).
6. Phrase-level clitics.
7. Verb-verb compounding.
8. Initial, but not final, clusters.
9. Nonconcatenative morphology.
10. Semantically broad adverbalizing/subordination strategies.
11. Direct object and agent are marked the same way.

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First known on here as Karero

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My most recent quiz:

1. True palatals (sometimes as allophones, usually phonemic)
2. /ð/ but no /θ/ (usually from older /z/, this is not hugely common in my conlangs, but much more so than in natlangs)
3. No consideration of sonorant hierarchy in phonotactics.
4. Either very simple syllables, or lots of initial clusters.
5. If there are ejectives, invariably /p'/ is not present.
6. Evidentiality
7. Strongly head-initial, VSO word order common.
8. Very little in terms of tense and number

I posted above, under my other name, but didnt really give much information. a few more things I like are:

PHONOLOGY:
Bilabial consonants are found in every language and are core speech sounds. /p/ is likely to be the commonest consonant. There is often a set of labialized consonants, but other co-articulations are not found.

The language is likely to be "consonant-strong", meaning that consonants influence the pronunciation of surrounding vowels, but vowels have no influence on the pronunciation of consonants. Any allophones of consonants are predictable either from other consonants or the position in a word. Exceptions to this pattern tend to appear in languages with very small, mostly or entirely CV, setups where one could argue that a syllable rather than a sound is the smallest meaningful bit of information.

If there is any grammatical gender, it is marked by consonants rather than vowels.

There are between 3 and 6 vowels at the phonemic level. Commonest setups are /a i u/, /a i u ə/, /a e i o u/, and /a e i o u ə/. As above, however, the pronunciation of vowels often varies considerably due to sandhi. /a/ is always the commonest vowel, and long sentences can be written without using any of the other vowels.

In languages with a schwa, it is always the rarest vowel in the language. In languages without a phonemic schwa, it usually does not appear even as an allophone of one of the other vowels.

Dense consonant clusters generally do not appear. When two consonants meet at a morpheme boundary, sandhi often reduces the cluster. There is a consonant hierarchy one can use to predict the result of the sandhi, which leans heavily in favor of voiceless stops, bilabials, and labialized consonants. However, syllabic consonants are found in some languages.

There are no minimal pairs between a diphthong and a sequence of the same two vowels. Thus diphthongs can be analyzed as allophones of vowel sequences.

Voiceless obstruents occur more frequently than voiced ones. In some languages, /b/ is the only voiced stop.

There are often marginal consonant phonemes. These mostly arise from previously existing consonant clusters that were worn down. However, some marginal phonemes arise from sound changes affecting consonants that previously were more common, which survived in only a few phonemic environments. For example, in Khulls voiced stops survived a lenition shift only after a nasal. Later, the nasal sometimes disappeared, meaning that the voiced stops could no longer be analyzed as allophones of voiced fricatives. But they remained rare.

It is common to have restrictions forbidding certain consonants to appear in certain parts of a word; for example, in Khulls /r/ cannot begin a word. Most languages allow only a small subset of their consonants to appear at the end of a word. Traces of the Tapilula language's purely (C)V syllable structure are visible even in its descendants 9000 years later.

GENDER:

If there is any grammatical gender, it favors the feminine in ways not found in Earth languages. Feminine words in most semantic fields outnumber masculine ones. Some languages, such as Moonshine and Bābākiam, have two feminine genders but no masculine gender, instead grouping human males with vegetables and some words for young children of both sexes. This tendency often corresponds to cultural traits; in Moonshine, women are taller than men and adult men are only allowed to speak when the nearest woman gives them permission.

Grammatical gender, if present, classifies people based on age and sex rather than just sex. The age categories are not firmly defined and can be used metaphorically. There are often several age categories for children, but all adults share just a single age category.

Mixed gender categories are often present; a man and a woman, referred to as a unit, will take an epicene gender rather than having one gender overrule the other. If there is no epicene, a group containing both males and females will be described with words in one of the feminine genders.

Gender and animacy, if present, can be inherited by nouns describing syntactically inanimate objects, by borrowing from a parent object. That is, a man's arm will be animate (and masculine), and so will his books or any other possessions.

PARTS OF SPEECH:
There are no adjectives or adverbs. Verbs are used instead of these. In some languages, even the nouns can be analyzed as a subset of the verbs.

Pronouns play only a minor role in the language, and some languages lack pronouns altogether, instead using nouns and verbs with person markers.

Verbs are generally the longest words in a sentence. Verbs are heavily inflected in most languages.

Person markers on nouns, denoting their possessor, are common. Languages that lose this system often redevelop it from grammatically unrelated words later on. (For example, Poswa uses -o -e -a for 1st 2nd 3rd; Pabappa lost this due to sound changes but later developed -iba -idi -i from its pronoun system.)

Most languages are highly fusional, with Poswa being the champion by far. Compounds in Poswa usually differ from what one would expect from looking at their parts. For example, the word for playground is made of tae "children" + mušos "playing with each other" + -m "place of", but instead of something such as *taemušosum, the resulting word is taempom.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

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First known on here as Karero

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Phonology

1. No gaps in phonemic inventories (in most conlangs).
2. Rather I am not using ejectives and implosives.
3. Retroflexion is common in newer languages.
4. Sometimes also I am using uvulars.
5. I am loving aspirated plosives and nasals.
6. System with five vowels (/i u e o a/ or /i ɨ u ə a/; the last is common in newest sketches).
7. Simple tone (low and high tone) or phonemic length on vowels.
8. /θ ð/ are sometimes in use (in few sketches instead /s z/).
9. Pharyngeals are common only in few cases, ie. in Proto-Samaran.
10. I like palatalized consonants (alveolar and velars).
11. Many fricatives (when a language don't have aspirated plosives in project)
12. /ɣ/

Grammar

1. Nominative-genitive alignment
2. Secundative ditransitive alignment
3. Voice infixed between root's phonemes
4. Many cases (5-10).
5. Ditransitive theme = Instrumental case
6. No commitative case (Commitative = Instrumental. Sometimes I have Vialis.
7. Balance between prefixation and suffixation
8. TAM suffixed
9. Evidentiality (rather preffixed)
10. Dependent-marking or double-marking
11. Three tenses (Past-Present-Future or Past-Non-Past with proximal distinctions in the Past tense)
12. Three aspects (Imperfective, Iterative ~ Habitual, Perfective)
13. I dislike Perfect aspect
14. Gender (sex-based or animacy-based)
15. Number: singular and plural (sometimes also dual)
16. Morphological causative
17. Passive, Medial or Reflexive voice
18. Passive-Causative voice
19. Person suffixed to verb
20. Prepositions
21. SOV word order
22. Right-headed

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I've been trying to make my current conlang different from those I made before, but I still seem to gravitate towards some typical features for my conlangs (though I avoided them mostly in my current conlang):

Phonology:
- SAE-sized consonant system with with at least a simple voicing contrast
- usually some thrown-in ejectives for good measure
- palatal coarticulation is love
- a weird love for /ʙ/ ... can't ... resist ...
- large vowel systems with rounded front vowels
- vowel harmony, based on either front-back or ATR contrast
- vowels have contrastive length
- front vowels /i e y/ and semivowel /j/ palatalize coronals
- nasal vowels, even though I hate them ...
- no tone, fixed stress
- complex onsets with plosive clusters like /tk pt/
- complex syllable structure

Grammar:
- large number of cases (never less than six)
- (badly executed) ergative alignment
- agglutinative, suffixing verbs and simple nouns
- gender system based on semantics, usually animate-inanimate
- dependent marking
- lots TAM affixes
- some kind of reflexive morphology
- number: more than singular and plural. I also seem to have a weakness for singulativ nouns.
- subject person marking
- SOV word order

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

Phonology
1. strong preference for voiceless consonants, where there are voiced stops there are rarely voiced fricatives
2. strong preference for large fricative inventories
3. typically well balanced (no gaps in the) inventories...where there is a stop, there's a fricative and there's a nasal.
4. relatively few phontactical rules, but those that are there usually devoice consonants word finally or through sandhi
5. almost always 5-vowel system with length contrast
6. fixed stress built left to right
7. usually simple syllable structures, but when I do allow for consonant clusters I pretty much go wild and allow for crazy clusters. Maximally I will allow (s)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(s)
8. when rhotics are present, I prefer the uvular trill to the alveolar trill or apprximate

Grammar and Morphology
1. Nom-Acc alignment...I know boring but I have always been less into syntax than phonology
2. no grammatical gender, except occasionally in pronouns
3. no articles
4. either fusional or agglutinative languages
5. use of relative particles rather than pronouns
6. Adjectives follow nouns and are under-inflected compared to the nouns they describe
7. Verb second
8. simple past-present-future tense system layered with imperfective-perfectibility aspects
9. distinction only between realis and irrealis moods

Vocabulary
1. Words for food or eating usually rooted in /nam/
2. Words for reading or book have ktb/ktp consonant roots
3. Separate words for physical emotional feeling
4. Name of the language always ultimately derived from the word to the, though it's never simply "tongue"
5. Other more haphazard nods to existing languages are very common in developing vocabulary.

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