zompist bboard

Arabic
Like:
The richness of 1400 years of written language to draw upon! The redundant marking of prepositions in dependent clauses (e.g. I want to ride the car that you rode in it). /ʕ/ , /q/ , and /ɣ/ are such beautiful sounds.

Dislike:
The richness of 1400 years of written history and the freedom of authors to draw upon any period of that according to their fancy. The divergency between the "dialects" (I'm best in Moroccan Arabic, which leaks out whenever I speak Egyptian Arabic to non-Maghrebi Arabs).

Like:
Verb two word order in independent clauses and verb last word order in subordinate clauses in Germanic languages.

Dislike:
Memorising gender assignment in languages and how some languages (looking sternly at you German) reuse so many endings. I sometimes wonder if it would be easier to keep them straight if they had more.

Since my Welsh classes have started back up I've remembered something else I dislike about it:

I really don't like the northern-dialect's vowel /ɨ̞/, which is just an absolutely f-ing ugly sound. I much prefer the southern /i/.

dyolf wrote:I really don't like the northern-dialect's vowel /ɨ̞/, which is just an absolutely f-ing ugly sound. I much prefer the southern /i/.

I don't necessarily like the sound of /ɨ/, but I think it's cool that Welsh has it. (My own speech lacks it, since I learned to speak Hwntw)

linguoboy wrote:

dyolf wrote:I really don't like the northern-dialect's vowel /ɨ̞/, which is just an absolutely f-ing ugly sound. I much prefer the southern /i/.

I don't necessarily like the sound of /ɨ/, but I think it's cool that Welsh has it. (My own speech lacks it, since I learned to speak Hwntw)

I'm a hwntw learning gog since that's where I live now, but it's not a problem. I can't really do the ɨ̞ so I just stick with my southern i, no one cares if I pronounce du as /di/ or /dɨ̞/, and equally I can understand both seeing as they're not drastically different.

the best IE language is scottish gaelic, because it has /ɯ ɤ/

in related opinions, the correct aesthetic is the austroasiatic one:

• ridiculous clusters
• back unrounded vowels
• in general too many vowels
• phonation/tone

this is why all of my conlangs are ugly

I can easily tell you my least favorite parts of natural languages.

Having multiple declension and conjugation classes. I mean, why have -ar, -er, and -ir endings when you could just have -ar? At the very least just merge the -er and -ir endings since the only difference is the nosotros ending.

Gaelic is indeed awesome. One feature I like is the dependent forms for questions and negative forms.

linguoboy wrote:

Zaarin wrote:Phoenician has them as well (to a lesser degree than Celtic). I love them, too.

As well as Hebrew and Arabic and other varieties of Semitic.

I like that some varieties of Arabic (e.g. Lebanese) use a range of prepositional constructions to distinguish ownership from possession and the like. (Irish does this, too, but not Welsh.)

Alienable vs inalienable possession is sexy. (Looking at you, Polynesian!)

Malagasy has inflected prepositions too: 'amy' can take objective/possessive suffixes like -ko. It seems there's a correlation between inflected prepositions and verb-initial languages.

Other features I like Malagasy include fronting of prepositonal phrases with circumstantial voice (though I think other western Austronesian languages do this too) and the fact that they don't just have a single word for 'how-much-th' like the German 'wievielte' but even such words as 'how-many-times'.

I'm not sure what my favorite or least favorite features from natural languages are, but I think I have a love-hate relationship with Malagasy orthography. I find it hard to figure out how I'm supposed to pronounce anything because it feels to me as if every single word can be collapsed into one syllable (however wrong I may be about that), but that's exactly what makes it so much fun to read song lyrics in Malagasy and sing along.

It's like that in the standard, in Merina, like what we get taught. But it depends on the region; other parts of Madagascar as well as the Malagasy-speaking villages of Mayotte pronounce every syllable (or else they take out different syllables).