Favorite/least favorite features from natlangs

[cunningham]

What are your favorite features from natlangs and why? It doesn't have to be unique.

For German, I like how the nouns are capitalized. It's easy to tell what is a noun and what isn't, which in turn gives a better use for capital letters - and it makes things much more neat and orderly - just like the Germans!

Wenn nicht diesen schönen Apfel, dann kauf mindestens diesen wunderbaren Kamm!

But I don't like the confusing case system for the articles. Cases are cool but why do some cases have to look like other ones? It's easily the hardest part of learning the language (in my opinion).
der den dem des
die die der der
das das dem des
die die den der

It just drives me mad.

I would love to know what your favorite or least favorite features are from natlangs.

[Soap]

Japanese (not a language I speak, by the way)

Hate:
*The writing system, which besides being inefficient, perversely spells out the least important parts of words in hiragana while scrunching up the most meaningful part as hard-to-read kanji that themselves may have several different readings, which generally have nothing to do with the shape of the kanji.
*The phonology. I think modern Japanese sounds ugly. Specifically because my favorite sounds are either missing or extremely rare: /p b l w/. Old Japanese seems like it would have suited my ears a lot better.

Love:
The only real positive thing about Japanese for me is that it's interesting. It seems like a language geek's language, in that one can spend thousands of years learning all of the quirks of the history of the language. e.g. is /hirame/ "sole" 鮃 or 平耳? Why is one of them two separate kanji while the other looks like two kanji squished together?

[Zaarin]

I love Syriac script; I think it's the prettiest writing system in the world, even prettier than it's cousin Arabic.

I'm really fond of polysynthesis, especially languages that go crazy with it like Tlingit (which IIRC has somewhere around 60 locative prefixes, for example, many of which are quite specific and local). I also really like ejectives, which is +1 point for Tlingit.

[Viktor77]

Love:
Subject verb inversion in Germanic and Romance languages because I find it sophisticated sounding for some reason.
Past participle agreement in French in cases where the direct object precedes the subject because I mean that's just so bizarre how could you not?
The pronouns "y" and "en" in French because they are incredibly efficient compared to say Spanish.
Glottal stop in Danish because it's just plain cute.
Complex morphology like in Lithuanian is also something sexy.
I'm also a big fan of phrasal verbs/separable verbs.
And I love the Romance imperfect tense and subjunctive mood.

Hate:
The sound /ø/.
Gender in nouns.
The French future and conditional conjugation paradigms.
I'll have to edit this later with more.

[Sumelic]

French

I like the phonology (despite the fact that a lot of conlangers seem to hate it). I think it sounds better than English, anyway, or at least it does in my voice.
I like how gender inflection works phonetically/phonologically
I think it's cool that the third-person plural subject pronouns are generally identical to the third-person singular subject pronouns; the only time they are distinguished is before vowel-initial verbs. And some, but not all verbs have special third-person plural forms, generally with an extra consonant at the end compared to the third-person singular form.

Don't like:
The way gender and number inflection is written even in places where there is no phonetic difference (for number inflection, this is nearly all the time)
This especially goes for past participle agreement, since for like 99% of the verbs it makes no audible difference.
I'm not a big fan of the imperfect paradigm (too much word-final /ɛ/; also it can have weird sequences of double "ii" such as "étudiions")

Hungarian

Like: vowel harmony, palatal stops, two words for "red," the fact that short "a" is further back than long "a," inflection of verbs for definiteness of their objects, the unusual way of writing sibilants (<sz z s zs c dz cs dzs> = /s z ʃ ʒ ts dz tʃ dʒ/)

Don't like: not a huge fan of all the case suffixes. In the orthography, compound words are fairly common, and the use of digraphs means that ambiguous sequences of consonant letters can arise fairly easily when you put two words together. I'm a little bothered by the inconsistency of using <ty> for /c/ and <gy> for /ɟ/.

[finlay]

Japanese
love: kanji

hate: kanji

[Jonlang]

Welsh:

I don't really like the inflected prepositions - it's just a pain in the arse for a learner.

[Vijay]

The phonology. I think modern Japanese sounds ugly. Specifically because my favorite sounds are either missing or extremely rare: /p b l w/.

Really? All of those are pretty common in modern Japanese, with the exception that Japanese doesn't really have /l/ (but then it doesn't really have /r/, either).

is /hirame/ "sole" 鮃 or 平耳?

Isn't 鮃 Japanese halibut? I have no idea what 平耳 is, and /me/ doesn't appear to be one of the kun'yomi for 耳.

[Soap]

The phonology. I think modern Japanese sounds ugly. Specifically because my favorite sounds are either missing or extremely rare: /p b l w/.

Really? All of those are pretty common in modern Japanese, with the exception that Japanese doesn't really have /l/ (but then it doesn't really have /r/, either).

is /hirame/ "sole" 鮃 or 平耳?

Isn't 鮃 Japanese halibut? I have no idea what 平耳 is, and /me/ doesn't appear to be one of the kun'yomi for 耳.

Thanks for the reply. It was 平目, not 平耳. I was copying from a paperback dictionary and couldnt make out the difference between those two glyphs. Anyway 平耳 and 鮃 seem to be simply two acceptable ways to spell the same word, /hirame/, "sole, flounder, halibut" etc.

I could also add "has an elusive tone/pitch system that never seems to be addressed in teaching the language to foreigners" to the list of things I hate, but I cant specifically pin that on the language itself.

As for the phonology, I believe /p b w/ are indeed the three rarest consonants in the language, unless /b/ edges out /z/ largely by being more common in native words where /z/ is more common in Chinese loanwords. Im excluding allophones like [dz] for /d/ from this analysis; I think this is standard, since otherwise you'd have a phonology with a lot of gaps, e.g. */je/ never occurs.

But its not just the guttural-heavy consonant system, there's a certain "vowel-strong" character to the language that I dont like, such that consonants dont even have an independent existence, which I suspect is common among languages where most syllables are CV. And the way vowels affect consonants seems to free up the speakers to speak so quickly that the vowels are completely inaudible in some environments, such that /sukoši/ was borrowed into English as "skosh".

Basically its just a matter of taste of course, and I dont expect others to agree with me. Even as I say this, Im working on a family of "vowel-strong" conlangs that somewhat resemble modern Japanese in phonology, and I've picked out a favorite, Gilà, and that seems to be the one whose phonology resembles Japanese the most even though I wasnt trying to make it such. However, it still has a lot of /l/, and has a more robust tone system than Japanese (hence the grave accent in the name). I suspect Gilà would be spoken much more slowly than modern Japanese as well.

[finlay]

It's definitely not tone - japanese people are as confused by chinese pronunciation as we are. I think it's overhyped, as there are not that many minimal pairs, and pronouncing it the wrong isn't going to impede pronunciation. like i don't see how it's that different from having an elusive stress system.

[linguoboy]

Welsh:

I don't really like the inflected prepositions - it's just a pain in the arse for a learner.

I love the inflected prepositions. They're one of the most distinctive features of modern Celtic languages.

I love them in other languages, too. Like I wish there were a whole paradigm for con in Spanish, not just conmigo, contigo, and consigo.

[Jonlang]

Welsh:

I don't really like the inflected prepositions - it's just a pain in the arse for a learner.

I love the inflected prepositions. They're one of the most distinctive features of modern Celtic languages.

I love them in other languages, too. Like I wish there were a whole paradigm for con in Spanish, not just conmigo, contigo, and consigo.

I don't dislike them as a feature, they're interesting and I've thought about using them in a future conlang. But just when it comes to learning the language they're a pain to remember. I mean, I know so many people who think Welsh is hard because of the mutations, which I don't find hard at all, it's other aspects I find trip me up more.

[linguoboy]

I don't dislike them as a feature, they're interesting and I've thought about using them in a future conlang. But just when it comes to learning the language they're a pain to remember. I mean, I know so many people who think Welsh is hard because of the mutations, which I don't find hard at all, it's other aspects I find trip me up more.

My biggest problems with Welsh have always been with the verbs. Particularly in dependent clauses. It's taken me a long time to nail down when to use bod (or some other verb-noun) and when to use an inflected form, and I still have trouble remembering with certain conjunctions. Irish seems more straightforward in this regard, though Danu knows it's got its complications as well (such as the existence of distinct dependent conjugations for several irregular verbs, not just one).

[Zaarin]

Welsh:

I don't really like the inflected prepositions - it's just a pain in the arse for a learner.

I love the inflected prepositions. They're one of the most distinctive features of modern Celtic languages.

I love them in other languages, too. Like I wish there were a whole paradigm for con in Spanish, not just conmigo, contigo, and consigo.

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

[linguoboy]

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!)

[Frislander]

I'm really fond of polysynthesis, especially languages that go crazy with it like Tlingit (which IIRC has somewhere around 60 locative prefixes, for example, many of which are quite specific and local). I also really like ejectives, which is +1 point for Tlingit.

I totally second that, but I do have a problem with the Tlingit orthography in that most of its prefixes, including its pronouns, are written as separate words. I mean, don't pretend they're not part of the word!

I also have a problem with Indo-European style arbitrary gender systems, mostly because I've not been taught them efficiently at school, so can't remember them properly and didn't tell me what patterns there are (it was my mother who first told me that -ung, -keit and -heit nouns in German are feminine).

[Zaarin]

I'm really fond of polysynthesis, especially languages that go crazy with it like Tlingit (which IIRC has somewhere around 60 locative prefixes, for example, many of which are quite specific and local). I also really like ejectives, which is +1 point for Tlingit.

I totally second that, but I do have a problem with the Tlingit orthography in that most of its prefixes, including its pronouns, are written as separate words. I mean, don't pretend they're not part of the word!

I love Tlingit, but I'm not going to lie: I hate its orthography. Using <. .w> for /ʔ ʔʷ/--I'll take even Salish's <7> over using a punctuation mark for the glottal stop. Also using digraphs like <ei ee oo> for /eː iː uː/ as opposed to /ei eː oː/ is rather confusing (though at least in context it's helpful that Tlingit doesn't have /o oː/, but I'd still prefer more typical <ee ii uu> for /eː iː uː/). Tlingit seems to stand out among PNW languages for its strange orthography--Haida, Tsimshian, Kwak'wala, etc. are all much more straightforward. Saanich (or should I say SAANICH), of course, looks frighteningly like Klingon...

[mèþru]

I'm really fond of polysynthesis, especially languages that go crazy with it like Tlingit (which IIRC has somewhere around 60 locative prefixes, for example, many of which are quite specific and local). I also really like ejectives, which is +1 point for Tlingit.

I totally second that, but I do have a problem with the Tlingit orthography in that most of its prefixes, including its pronouns, are written as separate words. I mean, don't pretend they're not part of the word!

I also have a problem with Indo-European style arbitrary gender systems, mostly because I've not been taught them efficiently at school, so can't remember them properly and didn't tell me what patterns there are (it was my mother who first told me that -ung, -keit and -heit nouns in German are feminine).

French, with its large number of clitics written as separate words and gender system so messed up that even its native speakers have trouble with it, must be your worst nightmare. Aside from the spelling, it is my favourite dream.

[Zaarin]

French, with its large number of clitics written as separate words and gender system so messed up that even its native speakers have trouble with it, must be your worst nightmare. Aside from the spelling, it is my favourite dream.

I love French orthography: any language that can spell a single-phoneme word with eight letters is awesome in my books. How is the French gender system confusing, though? Feminine words overwhelmingly end in one of -e -ion; masculine words tend to end in consonants. It's pretty straightforward, IMO.

[mèþru]

As a beginner in French, I don't know what word you're talking about.
There is a pattern, but it is a bit hard to see under all of those spelling conventions. Relying on -e is, in my French learning experience, not reliable enough. From Advanced Language Construction:

Dalila Ayoun (2007) has tested native speakers on 93 masculine and 50 feminine nouns, and they did terribly. They agreed on just 17 of the masculines, just one of the feminines. Adults did better than teenagers; less than half of the teens got the feminine nouns alcôve, crypte, idole, oasis right. More work is needed, but perhaps this is a case where linguists have found regularities that native speakers are not necessarily aware of.

[Zaarin]

I wasn't referencing a specific word, just a general trend in French of having a high letter-to-phoneme ratio.

You're right, there are masculine words ending in e (and other vowels) and feminine words ending in consonants aside from -ion, but I've found French to be pretty straightforward in terms of gender compared to other Indo-European languages (as opposed to Afroasiatic where feminine nouns are conveniently marked by -t--except that a noun ending in <t> isn't always feminine and some languages like Hebrew have lost the t...).

[mèþru]

With Hebrew, knowing the plurals help.

[Zaarin]

With Hebrew, knowing the plurals help.

Unless they're broken plurals. Intriguingly, according to Krahmalkov Phoenician doesn't seem to have broken plurals.

[Viktor77]

I love French orthography: any language that can spell a single-phoneme word with eight letters is awesome in my books. How is the French gender system confusing, though? Feminine words overwhelmingly end in one of -e -ion; masculine words tend to end in consonants. It's pretty straightforward, IMO.

This is funny. As an advanced speaker of French I can tell you it's not that straight forward. For example: le modèle, le contexte, le chauvinisme, le chaume, le message, le musée, le pêle-mêle, etc. It's not at all straight forward. There are patterns such as -isme, and -ge but then you have la plage, la page, etc. Unfortunately I still second guess myself on gender to this day. I often just say things in the plural haha.

[linguoboy]

You're right, there are masculine words ending in e (and other vowels) and feminine words ending in consonants aside from -ion, but I've found French to be pretty straightforward in terms of gender compared to other Indo-European languages

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I frequent find myself referring to the nearest cognate in Catalan or Spanish when trying to determine the gender of a French word.

(As for the mute es, you can't see them in speech.)