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.
_________________ Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:
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