How common are SAE features?

[bradrn]

I suspect that one important reason why people often want to include things like "switch reference" in their conlangs in the first place is because they see discussions of them where they're called interesting or implied to be interesting. This is especially true when phenomena receive a distinct name, I think, such as "fluid-S active-stative alignment", or "topic-prominent language", or "egophoricity", or "evidentiality".

You're probably onto something, though I don't think offering people the name "long-distance anaphora" would really change too much. I'd think it's got more to do with anaphora being a fairly heavy syntactic phenomenon---binding theory, locality, that sort of thing. My impression is that many conlangers find it easier and more interesting to sink their teeth into semantic phenomena like agency or control or animacy (and to probably a lesser extent pragmatic phenomena like topicality and definiteness). Anyway I know this has been true of me, and the linguistics literature that's generally most useful for conlangers (the functionalist literature) tends to highlight that sort of thing.

I think this is true for me. I quite like those sorts of semantic and pragmatic stuff — mainly because I think they’re a bit under-appreciated in conlangs — but syntactic phenomena are even more under-appreciated.

(Also, completely off-topic tangential question: what is functionalism? I’ve heard you use the term a couple of times, but I have no idea what it means.)

Another factor, maybe, is the tendency you sometimes see to approach language design templatically. This foregrounds certain kinds of issue, like how case-marking or agreement is aligned, or whether you've got evidentials, an issue that to begin with might just be a question of whether to add another slot to your template. (I suppose egophoricity could also go on that list, though actually I doubt many conlangers have heard of it.) But there are plenty of other issues you're never going to get to that way, including interesting binding stuff.

I find myself often thinking templatically — like ‘what sort of consonant inventory do I want, what sort of vowel inventory do I want, what sort of phonotactics do I want, what sort of word order do I want, what sort of relative clause construction do I want…’. As you say, it’s easy to miss stuff that way, so I’m not too happy when I find myself thinking like that, but I’m honestly not sure what other way there is of making the fundamentals of a conlang.

(Another tangential question: what is ‘binding’?)

My current vote for coolest English thing that people could have a lot of fun playing with are the phrasal verbs.

That gives me an idea! As I have said previously, I’m currently working on an isolating conlang, and I think phrasal verbs would actually work really well there. I haven’t seen a conlang with phrasal verbs before… I think that’s because they’re often thought of as being ‘too English-y’. Actually, how common are phrasal verbs outside SAE?

[akam chinjir]

(Also, completely off-topic tangential question: what is functionalism? I’ve heard you use the term a couple of times, but I have no idea what it means.)

Probably you'd say "typology" in about the same contexts? I more or less mean it as a cover term for non-formal typological work; but I don't want to call it (just) typology because I also like more formal stuff that also pays attention to typology.

The name "functionalism" expresses the idea that you think about linguistic phenomena largely or primarily in terms of the purposes they serve (their functions). But the work I'm thinking of varies quite a bit in how deeply it's committed to any particular theoretical point of view.

(Another tangential question: what is ‘binding’?)

Roughly, when you've got a relation between something like a pronoun and an antecedent, you'll say that the antecedent binds the pronoun. Though afaik people only really say "binding" when the relation is syntactically significant. For example, the rule that a referring expression can't be bound---which is valid in at least a great many languages---doesn't mean it can't corefer with an earlier expression, but it rules out things like "Sheᵢ said that Maryᵢ was there," where "she" is supposed to bind, or be the antecedent of, "Mary." There's an overview on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_(linguistics).

The kind of case that Ser mentioned in part is because reflexives like Latin se or Mandarin ziji 自己 seem to violate a rule that reflexive pronouns must be locally bound, a rule that seems to govern many other reflexive pronouns. (Saying exactly what "locally" means in this case is really difficult, but the rule entails that a reflexive pronoun in a finite clause must have an antecedent in that clause, unlike the reflexive in Ser's example.)

My current vote for coolest English thing that people could have a lot of fun playing with are the phrasal verbs.

That gives me an idea! As I have said previously, I’m currently working on an isolating conlang, and I think phrasal verbs would actually work really well there. I haven’t seen a conlang with phrasal verbs before… I think that’s because they’re often thought of as being ‘too English-y’. Actually, how common are phrasal verbs outside SAE? [/quote]

I'm not actually sure. Lots of languages seem to use serial verb constructions to similar ends, I'm not sure how many use nonverbal particles. I was recently reading a bit about Hungarian, which I gather does something similar; not sure if that's an independent data point, though.

[bradrn]

Thanks akam chinjir! I think I’ll have a more detailed look at binding… I haven’t heard of it before, and it looks interesting!

My current vote for coolest English thing that people could have a lot of fun playing with are the phrasal verbs.

That gives me an idea! As I have said previously, I’m currently working on an isolating conlang, and I think phrasal verbs would actually work really well there. I haven’t seen a conlang with phrasal verbs before… I think that’s because they’re often thought of as being ‘too English-y’. Actually, how common are phrasal verbs outside SAE?

I'm not actually sure. Lots of languages seem to use serial verb constructions to similar ends, I'm not sure how many use nonverbal particles. I was recently reading a bit about Hungarian, which I gather does something similar; not sure if that's an independent data point, though.

Oh, that’s true about serial verbs. I wanted my conlang to have productive serialisation, so in that case phrasal verbs are probably unnecessary.

[Richard W]

For example, the so-called "reflexive pronouns" of Classical Latin always refer back to the subject of the main verb no matter where they are in the sentence. This means that they aren't quite the stereotype of "reflexive pronouns" in modern Western European languages, but rather "subject-reference pronouns" if you will.

Dux dūcēbat cīvēs sibi invīsūrōs.
leader.NOM thought.3S citizens.ACC 3S.REFL.DAT envy.FUT.PTCP.ACC.PL
'The military leader was thinking the citizens were going to envy him.'

Here, the pronoun referring back to the main subject (dux 'leader') is the "reflexive" sibi even though it is inside a subclause, a subclause with accusative cīvēs 'the citizens' as the subject. If you wanted to replace the object of envy with a true reflexive (the citizens envying themselves), you use the intensive pronoun ipse instead (ipsīs invīsūrōs). And if you wanted to replace it with yet another person, you'd use the anaphoric demonstrative is or the distal demonstrative ille instead (illīs invīsūrōs). This behaviour of reflexive pronouns is also true of subclauses with a finite verb.

Actually, the reflexive pronoun is ambiguous, e.g.:

Nerviōs hortātur nē suī līberandī occāsiōnem dīmittant.
Nervii.ACC urge.3s not REFL.GEN.S free.GERUNDIVE.NT.GEN.S opportunity.ACC.S lose.SUBJ.3PL
He urɡes the Nervii not to lose the opportunity of freeing themselves.

(This is Caesar, not Livy. Taken from Kennedy's Latin Primer, article 463.)

[alice]

Perhaps someone actually ought to create a conlang called "Standard Average European", so that at least we all know what we're taking about

[Starbeam]

Perhaps someone actually ought to create a conlang called "Standard Average European", so that at least we all know what we're taking about

I’m kicking myself for not thinking of that!

[zompist]

I also only have so much patience and resources to learn languages, and many of the ones i find interesting feature-wise I don't per se want to learn but just know a good deal about.

A little more answering the question you didn't ask: though learning a language is best, there are shortcuts. You can simply study it for awhile: read through a grammar. One really good one is Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese— there's no morphology to learn, and every example is glossed, so you can see how a major non-European language works without learning the vocabulary. Or read a survey volume that gives sketches of multiple languages. Two good ones are Comrie's The World's Major Languages, and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages.

[aporaporimos]

Note that to specify a time, you use a neuter ordinal in Latin (no idea how Greek does this): tertium 'the third time', quartum 'the fourth time'.

Greek uses a neuter ordinal too, but with the article: to prôton "the first time," to triton "the third time."

On the subject of reflexive pronouns, Attic Greek has an "indirect reflexive" pronoun cognate to se; it can be used in indirect statement to refer back to the subject of the main verb, when the subject of the subclause is different. An example from Smyth:

ἠρώτα αὐτὴν εἰ ἐθελήσοι διακονῆσαί οἱ.
êrôta autên ei ethelêsoi diakonêsai hoi.
ask-impf.3s 3s-fem.acc.s if be.willing-fut-opt.3s serve-aor.inf ref.dat.
He asked her if she would be willing to do him a service.

To my knowledge this is specific to the Attic dialect of Greek; for the others it's just a normal 3rd-person pronoun.

[Pabappa]

I have no formal education in linguistics and I didnt pursue Spanish beyond what I learned in high school. Yet my languages' grammars dont come anywhere close to either English or Spanish ... I basically have two sprachbunds, one that includes Poswa and Pabappa and one that covers most of the tropics. The tropical languages, such as Andanese, have noun class prefixes like Bantu languages do, but I did literally no research on Bantu and as far as I know, nothing else in Andanese resembles Bantu except a few things that might have happened by chance. Meanwhile Poswa resembles nothing on Earth, but has some similarities with Inuktitut, which again, I only noticed after the fact, since I have not done any significant research on Inuktitut either. I do admit that when I started Pabappa, it was fairly IE in terms of grammar, and I consider Poswa to be a vast improvement over Pabappa. But I managed to come up with a fully functional non-SAE language without doing any significant research on non-European natural languages.

I would not say to ignore the advice that others are giving, but just to consider that taking the path of least resistance, as I did, does not mean that your languages will be forever bound to the SAE template.

[Ares Land]

An interesting shortcut I found is, whenever you want to incorporate a feature that seems interesting, to try and figure out how it could have evolved from something more familiar.
You come up with a lot of naturalistic constraints and irregularities you wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
(And believe me, it's particularly satisfying when you encounter these very same constraints in the reference grammar of a language you'd never studied before.)

[Kuchigakatai]

(I suppose egophoricity could also go on that list, though actually I doubt many conlangers have heard of it.)

I mentioned egophoricity because it was a meme/fad here some three or four years ago. Various people here for some reason started to talk about and include egophoric stuff in their conlangs.

My current vote for coolest English thing that people could have a lot of fun playing with are the phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs are great. I especially like those that can be read literally or idiomatically, like how "to talk back" can simply mean "to reply" (I talked to the robot and it talked back!) or, more commonly, "to reply with no respect" (Don't talk back [at me], kid!). Or how "to bring forward sth" usually means "to present sth" (She brought forward a number of recent problems), but in accounting it can mean "to carry [numbers] to another part of the ledger" ("carry sth forward" is also used for this, but why not "take sth forward"?). Airport tower people also use "to talk [a plane] down" meaning "to guide [a plane] in its landing".



Personally I find the various uses of subject-verb inversion in English (especially old-fashioned modern English) to be the most amusing part of its grammar, including (especially including) the part of inserting "to do" as an auxiliary verb for all non-basic verbs if they don't have an auxiliary already (You're ready ~ Are you ready?, I can do it ~ Can I do it?, but You think so. ~ Do you think so?). Funnily, it only does it in main clauses (*Will you tell me why did you do that?, *He doesn't know when will you be ready, both ungrammatical).

Besides questions, it is also used in if-less conditions with had and more old-fashioned-ly should (Had my teacher thought of it, he would have survived), and (increasingly old-fashioned-ly) after negative function words (You haven't laughed, nor have I; nowhere shall I see again such stable resentment). This, besides its use with many more types of verbs in older literature, like this speech by Professor Van Helsing to his followers in Stoker's Dracula (chapter 18):

• "There are such beings as vampires [...] I admit that at the first I was sceptic. [...] My friends, this is much, it is a terrible task that we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave shudder. For if we fail in this our fight he must surely win, and then where end we? Life is nothings, I heed him not. But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best. To us forever are the gates of heaven shut, for who shall open them to us again? We go on for all time abhorred by all, a blot on the face of God's sunshine, an arrow in the side of Him who died for man. But we are face to face with duty, and in such case must we shrink? For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?"

And still earlier, the V2 order of Early Modern English sometimes effectively creates pronoun salads for today's natives, like this rendering of "I give it to you": Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee: bury thy dead (Genesis 23:11).

I find myself often thinking templatically — like ‘what sort of consonant inventory do I want, what sort of vowel inventory do I want, what sort of phonotactics do I want, what sort of word order do I want, what sort of relative clause construction do I want…’. As you say, it’s easy to miss stuff that way, so I’m not too happy when I find myself thinking like that, but I’m honestly not sure what other way there is of making the fundamentals of a conlang.

Another way is to be creative modifying the patterns you know. Typical techniques would be:
- using morphology for what you normally use syntax for (or syntax for what you use morphology for)
- changing the type of morphology involved (say, stress shifts or tonal inflections instead of suffixes)
- changing the type of syntax involved (say, adpositions or adverbs instead of word order, or word order instead of agreement)
- changing the word category of functional words you know and thinking how they could be adapted to express what you want
- thinking of ways the morphosyntax you know could've been created historically through reinterpretation and/or phonetic decay (as Ars Lande said above)

Here's an example of turning syntax into morphology. Let's say a conlanger one day goes, "I always use syntax to mark yes/no questions by using a particle. How could I turn this into morphology? Let's have interrogative conjugations". And then they ask themself, "How could this come about?" Maybe the old language had a sentence-final particle and was SOV (rather like Japanese: kono nani desu ka?), and as time passed, the final particle merged with the conjugations of the verb. Or maybe the old language had an initial particle and then verb-subject inversion, and as time passed, the particle and the subject pronouns merged into the conjugations (this, in fact, happened in some varieties of High German, but our conlanger doesn't know that).

Another such example. "I always express conditions with a word like 'if' plus constructions with an auxiliary verb like "be" or "do". How could I turn this into morphology, without literally having a bunch of different verb tenses for each possibility, like Latin and Greek?" And then they realize, "Instead of focusing on the verb, let's focus on the word 'if'. Let's have 'if' inflect for tense instead of the verb." And then they wonder, "How could this come about?" Maybe the unreal conjugations of 'if' are actually reduced forms of old imperative verbs ("imagine", "suppose"), while the realis ones meant 'if' before. Maybe the longer conjugations have actually had adverbs or adpositions, previously used as idioms, merged into them. (Cf. Standard Arabic and its three words for 'if': ʔin 'if (realis, formal/archaizing register)', ʔiðaː 'if (realis, neutral register); when', law 'if (irrealis)'.)

Here's an example of turning morphology into syntax. "I always use an equivalent of English -er or -ator to derive agent nouns from verbs. How could I use syntax? Let's have a subordinator of sorts for that." Whence such a thing? Maybe a phonetically reduced relative pronoun, which is still clearly independent, closer to an article, because any number of words may come between itself and the verb (in an OV order), as in "destroyer" -> "AGT destroy", and also "destroyer of worlds" -> "AGT the.PL world destroy", where "AGT" is the old nominative relative pronoun that now creates agent noun phrases. (Something similar is attested in Classical Chinese, but the other way around: V (+ O) + 者/AGT.)

This is really neat, and it's immediately going into the file of "things I wish I'd put in my syntax book and will have to go into the 2nd edition".

Actually, the reflexive pronoun is ambiguous, e.g.:

Nerviōs hortātur nē suī līberandī occāsiōnem dīmittant.
Nervii.ACC urge.3s not REFL.GEN.S free.GERUNDIVE.NT.GEN.S opportunity.ACC.S lose.SUBJ.3PL
He urɡes the Nervii not to lose the opportunity of freeing themselves.

(This is Caesar, not Livy. Taken from Kennedy's Latin Primer, article 463.)

Thank you, Richard. I have now read that the explanation I gave above is wrong. It turns out I remembered it wrong, as ipse is used to disambiguate what sē refers to (by making ipse stand for the subject of the subclause), but nevertheless sē itself is ambiguous that way in most subclause types, just not so inside a subclause said or thought by someone (or implied to be said or thought by someone). It is only if the subclause is said or thought that sē's reference gets limited to the sayer or thinker (typically but not necessarily the main verb's subject). Quoting Zompist so to make sure he sees this.

I also think it's cool ipse supplies sē with a nominative form (sg. ipse, pl. ipsī), since otherwise it doesn't have one available for the role with a finite verb (like gerunt):

Helvetii ... reliquos Gallos virtute praecedunt,
quod ... cum Germanis contendunt,
cum aut suis finibus eos prohibent
aut ipsi in eorum finibus bellum gerunt.
Helvetii.NOM.PL ... other.ACC.PL Gauls.ACC.PL valor.ABL exceed.3PL,
because ... with Germani.ABL.PL fight.3PL,
when or their.ABL.PL borders.ABL.PL them.ACC forbid.3PL
or themselves.NOM.PL in their borders.ABL.PL war.ACC wage.3PL
'The Helvetii .... are braver than other Gauls, because they ... fight with the Germani, when pushing them back from their own (the Helvetii's) borders or when they themselves (the Helvetii) have battles at their (the Germani's) borders.' (Caesar, De Bello Gallico I)

Here both suīs and ipsī are reflexives going back to the Helvetii, but as sē doesn't have a nominative to be used with gerunt, it is supplied one by ipse.

Looking forward to it!

I apologize that time passes and I keep not posting the thing, but I wanted it to do some detail on it. For now, the list of things I was (am) going to mention was (is):
- negative conjunctions in Latin (nec/neque, nē), which are a bit more interesting than English "nor"
- phrase "sandwiching" in Latin, like "noun + [phrase + participle]", where the phrase depends on the participle (by being its direct object or adverbial), and similarly "noun + [degree adverb + adjective]"
- a few morphophonological things in Spanish involving clitic pronouns: medieval amad + lo = amaldo, early modern amar + lo = amallo, modern colloquial den + se = desen, modern colloquial estén + se = estesen (the latter two motivated by being weirdly accented at the end i.e. den and estén, cf. amar ~ amen, besar ~ besen, so ámense and bésense)
- something about the survival of nominative/accusative case in French relative pronouns, which survived only there (unless you count initial qu'est-ce qui [kɛski], qu'est-ce que [kɛsk(ə)], qui est-ce qui [ki.ɛski] and qui est-ce que [ki.ɛsk(ə)] as pronouns on their own nowadays).

[Estav]

Personally I find the various uses of subject-verb inversion in English (especially old-fashioned modern English) to be the most amusing part of its grammar, including (especially including) the part of inserting "to do" as an auxiliary verb for all non-basic verbs if they don't have an auxiliary already (You're ready ~ Are you ready?, I can do it ~ Can I do it?, but You think so. ~ Do you think so?). Funnily, it only does it in main clauses (*Will you tell me why did you do that?, *He doesn't know when will you be ready, both ungrammatical).

Besides questions, it is also used in if-less conditions with had and more old-fashioned-ly should (Had my teacher thought of it, he would have survived), and (increasingly old-fashioned-ly) after negative function words (You haven't laughed, nor have I; nowhere shall I see again such stable resentment). This, besides its use with many more types of verbs in older literature, like this speech by Professor Van Helsing to his followers in Stoker's Dracula (chapter 18):

• "There are such beings as vampires [...] I admit that at the first I was sceptic. [...] My friends, this is much, it is a terrible task that we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave shudder. For if we fail in this our fight he must surely win, and then where end we? Life is nothings, I heed him not. But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best. To us forever are the gates of heaven shut, for who shall open them to us again? We go on for all time abhorred by all, a blot on the face of God's sunshine, an arrow in the side of Him who died for man. But we are face to face with duty, and in such case must we shrink? For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?"

With this example, though, you should remember that Van Helsing is not a native speaker of English and not represented as such in the text: there are a number of strange elements in his usage like the "s" at the end of "nothings" and the treatment of "life" as masculine in this passage (which I'm not sure is even a very plausible error for a non-native speaker of his background since the cognate noun in Dutch and German is neuter).

[bradrn]

I find myself often thinking templatically — like ‘what sort of consonant inventory do I want, what sort of vowel inventory do I want, what sort of phonotactics do I want, what sort of word order do I want, what sort of relative clause construction do I want…’. As you say, it’s easy to miss stuff that way, so I’m not too happy when I find myself thinking like that, but I’m honestly not sure what other way there is of making the fundamentals of a conlang.

Another way is to be creative modifying the patterns you know. Typical techniques would be:
- using morphology for what you normally use syntax for (or syntax for what you use morphology for)
- changing the type of morphology involved (say, stress shifts or tonal inflections instead of suffixes)
- changing the type of syntax involved (say, adpositions or adverbs instead of word order, or word order instead of agreement)
- changing the word category of functional words you know and thinking how they could be adapted to express what you want
- thinking of ways the morphosyntax you know could've been created historically through reinterpretation and/or phonetic decay (as Ars Lande said above)

I’ve already started doing that! Not by diachronics, as you suggest, but by simply changing the type of language I’m making. I’ve always made very agglutinative languages, but I decided a while ago that I wanted to make an isolating language, and as part of that I’ve needed to represent a bunch of things using syntax when I would normally represent them using morphology. So far, the end result is looking much better than my usual conlangs! And, since I’m not just doing the same old thing, I’ve started to think less templatically now.

Here's an example of turning syntax into morphology. Let's say a conlanger one day goes, "I always use syntax to mark yes/no questions by using a particle. How could I turn this into morphology? Let's have interrogative conjugations". And then they ask themself, "How could this come about?" Maybe the old language had a sentence-final particle and was SOV (rather like Japanese: kono nani desu ka?), and as time passed, the final particle merged with the conjugations of the verb. Or maybe the old language had an initial particle and then verb-subject inversion, and as time passed, the particle and the subject pronouns merged into the conjugations (this, in fact, happened in some varieties of High German, but our conlanger doesn't know that).

Another such example. "I always express conditions with a word like 'if' plus constructions with an auxiliary verb like "be" or "do". How could I turn this into morphology, without literally having a bunch of different verb tenses for each possibility, like Latin and Greek?" And then they realize, "Instead of focusing on the verb, let's focus on the word 'if'. Let's have 'if' inflect for tense instead of the verb." And then they wonder, "How could this come about?" Maybe the unreal conjugations of 'if' are actually reduced forms of old imperative verbs ("imagine", "suppose"), while the realis ones meant 'if' before. Maybe the longer conjugations have actually had adverbs or adpositions, previously used as idioms, merged into them. (Cf. Standard Arabic and its three words for 'if': ʔin 'if (realis, formal/archaizing register)', ʔiðaː 'if (realis, neutral register); when', law 'if (irrealis)'.)

Here's an example of turning morphology into syntax. "I always use an equivalent of English -er or -ator to derive agent nouns from verbs. How could I use syntax? Let's have a subordinator of sorts for that." Whence such a thing? Maybe a phonetically reduced relative pronoun, which is still clearly independent, closer to an article, because any number of words may come between itself and the verb (in an OV order), as in "destroyer" -> "AGT destroy", and also "destroyer of worlds" -> "AGT the.PL world destroy", where "AGT" is the old nominative relative pronoun that now creates agent noun phrases. (Something similar is attested in Classical Chinese, but the other way around: V (+ O) + 者/AGT.)

I would quite like to try figuring out such things myself, but unfortunately my knowledge of diachronics is so horribly limited that I’ve decided to just not try deriving any child languages until I’ve read a bit more about it.

[Kuchigakatai]

I’ve already started doing that! Not by diachronics, as you suggest, but by simply changing the type of language I’m making. I’ve always made very agglutinative languages, but I decided a while ago that I wanted to make an isolating language, and as part of that I’ve needed to represent a bunch of things using syntax when I would normally represent them using morphology. So far, the end result is looking much better than my usual conlangs! And, since I’m not just doing the same old thing, I’ve started to think less templatically now.

[...]

I would quite like to try figuring out such things myself, but unfortunately my knowledge of diachronics is so horribly limited that I’ve decided to just not try deriving any child languages until I’ve read a bit more about it.

Oh, I included diachronics in the three examples there for fun, but I also meant to say you don't have to think of everything historically (hence why I put diachronics in its own bullet point). I find it useful to think about diachronics though. I mean, I don't know of any language that actually has a non-past 'if' vs. a past 'if', or a language where an initial or final particle has merged into verb conjugations, but I find both possible. (Maybe there's something similar to the initial particle merge thing in Ancient Egyptian though...)

[mèþru]

Perhaps someone actually ought to create a conlang called "Standard Average European", so that at least we all know what we're taking about

You know what, I will create a language named after the concept in some way! Although it won't be located on this world, much less Europe.

[Linguoboy]

Oh, I included diachronics in the three examples there for fun, but I also meant to say you don't have to think of everything historically (hence why I put diachronics in its own bullet point). I find it useful to think about diachronics though. I mean, I don't know of any language that actually has a non-past 'if' vs. a past 'if', or a language where an initial or final particle has merged into verb conjugations, but I find both possible.

So Welsh doesn't have a past vs non-past if but it does have an open-condition vs counterfactual if like many other languages. It also has a strong tendency toward using bod "be" as an auxiliary verb, which has helped it develop and retain a relatively large number of functionally distinct forms. Somehow this has led to the development of a distinct set of imperfect subjunctive forms which merge the conjunction pe into the verb, e.g. "Petai'n gwenu, byddai peryg i'w wyneb gracio" "If he were to smile, his face would be in danger of cracking". (I think this may result from the contraction of *ped byddai > *ped bai > petai, dd being a weak consonant that is dropped in other forms, but this is Welsh so the byddai forms could also have acquired their stem analogically from the future/habitual. Incidentally, this would be the only example I know of of Welsh /db/ yielding /t/ rather than /p/.)