Conlang template

[bradrn]

Following from the discussion about dissyllable predominance, the mention of Indonesian is unsurprising as is. Indeed, as I mention in my Master's thesis (page 96-97 https://www.academia.edu/40314155/LE_LE ... E_MALGACHE), 94% of Proto-Austronesian roots are dissyllabic. This Austronesian tendency stays to some extent in Réunion Creole words, especially in those of Malagasy origin.

That’s good to know — most of my conlang’s roots are disyllabic, and I was wondering how realistic that was. Do you know if there is any pattern amongst the monosyllabic roots, or does it seem mostly random which roots get monosyllables and which ones get disyllables?

@bradrn: Thank you for the mention of Gordon’s Syllable Weight: Phonetics, Phonology, Typology, I'll check it out when I can.

You’re welcome! It has a lot of interesting information in it — e.g. even within a single language, stress assignment and minimal word constraints frequently use different definitions of mora weight. (Though actually it was akam chinjir who originally recommended it.)

[MacAnDàil]

I would need to go back to my sources e.g. Blust to check that out.

[bradrn]

I would need to go back to my sources e.g. Blust to check that out.

No need to do it in that case; I just was asking in case you happened to know the answer. (Though now that I think of it I could use the Comparative Dictionary to figure that out myself — was that dictionary the Blust you were thinking of?)

[Qwynegold]

Thanks for the replies and examples. Though I don't know how to proceed with this. It seems like no language has rules that it 100% adheres to.

[Kuchigakatai]

Yes, it definitely should — despite the orthography, d really is a full word (it has an epenthetic vowel), and I believe both d and ap may be used alone as verbs (though that usage is pragmatically infelicitous).

I don’t think so, though this does raise the thorny question of how exactly one defines a word. I don’t have access to a Kalam reference grammar (my sources are a few articles Pawley wrote), so I’m not entirely sure about this, but I do think that the Kalam sentence genuinely uses multiple verbs rather than a compound.

That doesn't contradict (or support) what I said... As a similar case, ancient Roman grammarians used to say the derivational verbal prefixes of Latin (in-, ad-, ob-, sub-, dē-, con-, re-, sē-...) were "prepositions" much like the actual prepositions (in, ad, ob, sub, dē, cum, apud, sine...)—it just happened that they always appeared right before a verb. That doesn't mean we should consider those derivational prefixes to be separate words too in e.g. inesse 'to be inside', addūcere 'to lead sb to a place' or obtinēre 'to obtain sth', justifying it saying they also exist as independent words (in 'in, on; into', ad 'to, towards; at', ob 'in front of (as an obstacle); because of'). The set of prefixes and the set of actual prepositions are not identical either (re- is only a prefix, apud is only a preposition).

For a similar example in English, consider 'loved' vs. 'beloved'. Is be- a separate word because it also exists as the preposition 'by'? I don't know Kalam to say, but I'd very suspicious of d ap being a compound word of d+ap, if only because my Chinese/Burmese analogies are pretty suggestive...

Possibly…? There certainly is a commonality, in that these all seem like idiomatic expressions, though it’s hard to know whether the cases are exactly comparable. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Kalam serial verbs are far more productive and common than those of Chinese and Burmese.

I don't know about that man. I gave those idiomatic expressions as examples because your 'massage' example also seemed idiomatic, but in Chinese at least (I'm not familiar enough with Burmese to say) you can use X上X下 X-shàng-X-xià (X-up-X-down) and X來X去 X-lái-X-qù (X-come-X-go) with some degree of productivity with movement verbs: 走上走下 zǒu-shàng-zǒu-xià pretty transparently means 'to go up and down repeatedly' (走 zǒu 'walk'), 走來走去 zǒu-lái-zǒu-qù 'to pace around to-and-fro', 跑來跑去 pǎo-lái-pǎo-qù also 'to run around back and forth' (跑 pǎo 'run'). And note that 上 shàng and 下 xià, besides some use as adverbs meaning 'up' and 'down' and as the postpositions 'on' and 'below', are also transitive verbs meaning 'to go up to [a place]' and 'to go down to [a place]'.

EDIT: Possibly some more examples along the same lines might help:

A bunch of those seem pretty idiomatic, so they don't help much—if anything they strengthen my position. What kind of productive generative rules would turn 'shoot withdraw displace' into 'to disperse [the enemy] in a war'? However, I'd be easily convinced that 'thought bad perceive' and 'touch perceive' involve productive 'resultative' constructions as they're called in Chinese grammar, cf. 聞見 wén-jiàn hear/smell-perceive 'to feel sth by hearing/smelling it', 準備好 zhǔnbèi-hǎo prepare-be.good 'to be ready, get ready (successfully)'.

I don't affirm/doubt/deny that d occurs as a transitive verb some of the time right next to a direct object NP (and I'm making no comment on whether Kalam is oligosynthetic either, that's a separate topic), but I'm talking about the analysis of the d ap in that 'massage' example. It seems to me like Pawley isn't distinguishing diachrony from synchrony, thinking all compound words are the product of syntax (assuming d is not an affix to begin with), even those with idiomatic meanings. Some linguists work with that model, but in this case it seems it undermines his claim that there might be something very peculiar about Kalam here...

(I also suspect Shanghainese might provide better analogies to Kalam than Mandarin, since tone has decayed further in it than in Mandarin, and it seems to me it has a higher overall number of trisyllabic words, or at any rate words that are etymologically three Middle Chinese syllables...)

But I wonder, are there any languages where roots are always two syllables, or three syllables, or more? And are there languages with roots of varying length, but where the mininum length is more than two? What about languages with a maximum length of two syllables, or three syllables, or more?

To add to other people's examples, Standard Arabic mostly has triliteral roots in content words, and because of its strong CVC constraint, this means content words are minimally CVCC(-V...) or CVCVC, with at least two syllables. (There are a few words with biliteral roots though, and some morphophonological process can reduce /w j/ to a vowel or drop them, but anyway it is generally true. There are also longer roots of more than three consonants, with five or more appearing in borrowings: عنكبوت ʕankabuut(un) 'spider', plural عناكب‎ ʕanaakib(un).)

I'm not sure whether Mandarin has any roots at all with more than two syllables that are not either 1) proper nouns e.g. 斯德哥爾摩 Sīdégē'ěrmó 'Stockholm', or 2) pretty recent borrowings e.g. APP ēipīpī 'mobile app'. So you could arguably count it as having, with some caveats, maximally disyllabic roots, the vast majority being monosyllabic.

Some disyllabic ones would be 蝴蝶 húdié 'butterfly', 蚯蚓 qiūyǐn 'earthworm', which are not analyzable into hú+dié or qiū+yǐn. There are cranberry monosyllabic morphemes too, like the chōng- of 憧憬 chōngjǐng 'to yearn/long/pine for sth', not attested outside this compound.

[KathTheDragon]

For a similar example in English, consider 'loved' vs. 'beloved'. Is be- a separate word because it also exists as the preposition 'by'?

This isn't terribly similar to the Latin examples, because the English prefix is entirely fossilised and no longer has any synchronic relation to "by".

[bradrn]

Yes, it definitely should — despite the orthography, d really is a full word (it has an epenthetic vowel), and I believe both d and ap may be used alone as verbs (though that usage is pragmatically infelicitous).

I don’t think so, though this does raise the thorny question of how exactly one defines a word. I don’t have access to a Kalam reference grammar (my sources are a few articles Pawley wrote), so I’m not entirely sure about this, but I do think that the Kalam sentence genuinely uses multiple verbs rather than a compound.

That doesn't contradict (or support) what I said... As a similar case, ancient Roman grammarians used to say the derivational verbal prefixes of Latin (in-, ad-, ob-, sub-, dē-, con-, re-, sē-...) were "prepositions" much like the actual prepositions (in, ad, ob, sub, dē, cum, apud, sine...)—it just happened that they always appeared right before a verb. That doesn't mean we should consider those derivational prefixes to be separate words too in e.g. inesse 'to be inside', addūcere 'to lead sb to a place' or obtinēre 'to obtain sth', justifying it saying they also exist as independent words (in 'in, on; into', ad 'to, towards; at', ob 'in front of (as an obstacle); because of'). The set of prefixes and the set of actual prepositions are not identical either (re- is only a prefix, apud is only a preposition).

For a similar example in English, consider 'loved' vs. 'beloved'. Is be- a separate word because it also exists as the preposition 'by'? I don't know Kalam to say, but I'd very suspicious of d ap being a compound word of d+ap, if only because my Chinese/Burmese analogies are pretty suggestive...

From what I’ve seen, serial verb constructions and verb compounding are usually distinguished on phonological grounds. The biggest problem here is d- — all of Pawley’s papers write it as an independent word, but according to the grammar (which I finally managed to find) it forms a phonological word with the next verb. On the other hand, most other verbs do seem to be phonological words: for instance am d aw-an ‘go get come-2s.IMP = fetch it’ is phonologically the two words /am dawan/, where am is phonologically separate even if d is not. So phonologically at least, most verb sequences do genuinely seem to be verb sequences rather than compounds, at least when d- is not involved (a case which I will return to later).

Possibly…? There certainly is a commonality, in that these all seem like idiomatic expressions, though it’s hard to know whether the cases are exactly comparable. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Kalam serial verbs are far more productive and common than those of Chinese and Burmese.

I don't know about that man. I gave those idiomatic expressions as examples because your 'massage' example also seemed idiomatic, but in Chinese at least (I'm not familiar enough with Burmese to say) you can use X上X下 X-shàng-X-xià (X-up-X-down) and X來X去 X-lái-X-qù (X-come-X-go) with some degree of productivity with movement verbs: 走上走下 zǒu-shàng-zǒu-xià pretty transparently means 'to go up and down repeatedly' (走 zǒu 'walk'), 走來走去 zǒu-lái-zǒu-qù 'to pace around to-and-fro', 跑來跑去 pǎo-lái-pǎo-qù also 'to run around back and forth' (跑 pǎo 'run'). And note that 上 shàng and 下 xià, besides some use as adverbs meaning 'up' and 'down' and as the postpositions 'on' and 'below', are also transitive verbs meaning 'to go up to [a place]' and 'to go down to [a place]'.

Some of those Kalam verb sequences may be becoming lexicalised, but they’re mostly pretty semantically transparent, and there seems to be a lack of productive idiomatic patterns such as the ones you gave. I suppose you could describe some of the more lexicalised sequences as idiomatic, but only if you’re prepared to accept ‘idioms’ which are semantically transparent. (Is English go around and about idiomatic? It’s somewhat lexicalised, but still fully transparent.)

(Oh, and by the way your first sentence is a bit confusing: I spent quite a bit of time trying to guess who ‘that man’ was supposed to be before I figured out the correct parse! )

EDIT: Possibly some more examples along the same lines might help:

A bunch of those seem pretty idiomatic, so they don't help much—if anything they strengthen my position. What kind of productive generative rules would turn 'shoot withdraw displace' into 'to disperse [the enemy] in a war'? However, I'd be easily convinced that 'thought bad perceive' and 'touch perceive' involve productive 'resultative' constructions as they're called in Chinese grammar, cf. 聞見 wén-jiàn hear/smell-perceive 'to feel sth by hearing/smelling it', 準備好 zhǔnbèi-hǎo prepare-be.good 'to be ready, get ready (successfully)'.

For ‘shoot withdraw displace’: we ‘shoot’ at the enemy, who ‘withdraw’ and ‘displace’ themselves. (As I said already, Kalam verbs are extremely polysemous: ‘displace’ is just one sense of a verb which can also mean ‘remove’, ‘dislocate’, ‘get rid of’, ‘banish’ etc.)

As for the other two, it’s quite possible that they’re resultatives, since that is a productive pattern in Kalam, e.g.:

pk wk- ‘strike shattered = shatter sth.’
puŋi ask- ‘pierce open = prise sth. open’
taw lug- ‘step.on slide = push sth. away with the feet’
taw pag yok- ‘step.on broken displace = break sth. off by stepping on it’

(source)

You might notice a pattern: the object of the first verb is the subject of the second verb (a cross-linguistically common pattern in resultative SVCs): e.g. ‘strike shattered’ is ‘strike [X], [X] is shattered’. And if you think about this a bit, it turns out that you could interpret ‘shoot withdraw displace’ as a resultative as well: ‘shoot [the enemy], [the enemy] withdraw and displace’. (This is in fact precisely parallel to my last example: ‘step.on broken displace’ is ‘step on [X], [X] is broken and displaced’.)

I don't affirm/doubt/deny that d occurs as a transitive verb some of the time right next to a direct object NP (and I'm making no comment on whether Kalam is oligosynthetic either, that's a separate topic), but I'm talking about the analysis of the d ap in that 'massage' example. It seems to me like Pawley isn't distinguishing diachrony from synchrony, thinking all compound words are the product of syntax (assuming d is not an affix to begin with), even those with idiomatic meanings. Some linguists work with that model, but in this case it seems it undermines his claim that there might be something very peculiar about Kalam here...

Yes, d ap is an interesting case: as I mentioned above, it’s one phonological word rather than two. On the other hand, d behaves exactly like the other verbs: for instance, d am yok- ‘get go move.away = get [X], [X] goes away = get rid of sth., take sth. away’ is a resultative construction just like those others. Since the syntactic behaviour of d is parallel to that of all the other words, I’m inclined to think of it as an independent word rather than as a part of a compound. (More precisely, it seems to be a clitic: a grammatical word which is not a phonological word.)

[MacAnDàil]

I would need to go back to my sources e.g. Blust to check that out.

No need to do it in that case; I just was asking in case you happened to know the answer. (Though now that I think of it I could use the Comparative Dictionary to figure that out myself — was that dictionary the Blust you were thinking of?)

No, but I do believe I had found Blust online although I can't seem find the link any more. It's a hefty 2013 book called The Austronesian languages Revised Edition. The original source for the syllable analysis is Chrétien 1965.

He mentions (page 725 of the pdf) that there are 'Disyllabic canonical targets' and some languages, such as Javanese, use epenthesis or reduplication to get back to this canonical target in loanwords or cases of native words where this has been lost due to intervocalic lenition.

[Qwynegold]

To add to other people's examples, Standard Arabic mostly has triliteral roots in content words, and because of its strong CVC constraint, this means content words are minimally CVCC(-V...) or CVCVC, with at least two syllables. (There are a few words with biliteral roots though, and some morphophonological process can reduce /w j/ to a vowel or drop them, but anyway it is generally true. There are also longer roots of more than three consonants, with five or more appearing in borrowings: عنكبوت ʕankabuut(un) 'spider', plural عناكب‎ ʕanaakib(un).)

I'm not sure whether Mandarin has any roots at all with more than two syllables that are not either 1) proper nouns e.g. 斯德哥爾摩 Sīdégē'ěrmó 'Stockholm', or 2) pretty recent borrowings e.g. APP ēipīpī 'mobile app'. So you could arguably count it as having, with some caveats, maximally disyllabic roots, the vast majority being monosyllabic.

Some disyllabic ones would be 蝴蝶 húdié 'butterfly', 蚯蚓 qiūyǐn 'earthworm', which are not analyzable into hú+dié or qiū+yǐn. There are cranberry monosyllabic morphemes too, like the chōng- of 憧憬 chōngjǐng 'to yearn/long/pine for sth', not attested outside this compound.

Thanks! I'll have to think about whether I'll add anything about word length, and in that case, how I'm gonna do it.

[Qwynegold]

Sorry for taking so long, but I have finally written enough about morphosyntactic alignment to show it here.



1.2 Morphosyntactic alignment
Decide what your conlang's morphosyntactic alignment should be. Note that a language can have a few verbs that behave differently than all the other verbs in terms of morphosyntactic alignment. In this section, though, we are dealing with the conlang's main alignment. If you are doing a conlang with split alignment, consider this section to be about the conlang's most basic or most commonly used alignment. More about split alignments will follow below.
Morphological alignments deals with how the arguments of transitive and intransitive verbs are handled. The subject of an intransitive verb is conventionally called the S argument, and the subject of a transitive verb is called the A argument. The object of a transitive verb is called the O argument.
A language might use noun cases or some kind of separate words (particles, adpositions) to mark different arguments. If a language doesn't mark any of the arguments overtly, then usually it uses word order to determine what is what.

Picture from WP displaying a few different alignment.

Tripartite alignment
In tripartite alignment all of S, A and O are marked differently. If the language only uses word order for marking the arguments, then it means that A and O must be on the same side of the verb, and S must be on the other side, e.g. AOV and VS.
Accusative alignment
In accusative (or nominative-accusative) alignments S is marked the same way as A. If the language has case, then this is the nominative case. O is marked differently, and for cased languages this would be the accusative case. If only word order is used for marking the arguments, then A and O must appear on different sides of the verb, while S must appear on the same side as A would, e.g. AVO and SV

Ergative alignment ↗Ergativity for Novices
In ergative (or ergative-absolutive) alignments S is marked the same way as O. If the language has case, then this is the absolutive case. A is marked differently, and for cased languages this would be the ergative case. If only word order is used for marking the arguments, then A and O must appear on different sides of the verb, while S must appear on the same side as O would, e.g. AVO and VS.

Direct alignment
In direct alignment none of S, A and O are distinguished from one another, not even by word order. (So the language would have be either verb-initial or verb-final, or not have any default word order.) Unfortunately I have no information about this other than that what is what relies “entirely on context and common sense” — Wikipedia. This alignment is extremely rare, though it occurs in some languages with split ergativity. ***Link to split systems.

Transitive alignment
In transitive alignment A and O are not distinguished from one another, while S is separated. This alignment makes no sense, because separating S does not serve any purpose, while having A and O distinguished makes the language ambiguous. There is maybe only natlang with this alignment: Rushani, and it has transitive alignment only in the past tense (see ***split alignments). Alledgely this happened because Rushani is in the process of turning from an ergative language into a nominative one. Rushani has a transitive case used for marking A and O, and a zero-marked intransitive case for S. Though one could also imagine this alignment being marked by word order alone, in which case A and O would both appear on the same side of the verb, and S on the other side. But there would have to be no default rule, according to which one of A and O appears first, and which one appears second.

Austronesian alignment
Languages with Austronesian (or Philippine-type) alignment have both accusative and ergative alignments. In these languages verbs are marked with either agent trigger (actor focus) or patient trigger (undergoer focus). Phrases with agent trigger are accusative, and phrases with patient trigger are ergative. What's typical for these languages is that patient trigger is the default trigger, that they have cases, and that the nominative and absolutive cases are identical. {***Why would one choose one trigger over the other?} Note that all the natlangs with this alignment are Austronesian, though Dinka Bor is claimed to have something resembling Austronesian alignment.

Active-stative alignment
***Should this go under split alignments instead?

Direct-inverse alignment
Languages with direct-inverse alignment have an animacy hierarchy. Animacy hierarchies typically involve person/number and animacy, with things higher in the hierarchy counted as having higher animacy, for example: 1st person → 2nd person → 3rd person → non-human animates → inanimates. When a verb has two arguments, the one with higher animacy will be A and the other one O. This is the only way to tell what is what. The arguments may break the animacy hierarchy though, in which case the verb will be marked with a special inverse construction. The inverse construction marks that A and O are opposite from what one would expect from the animacy hierarchy. ***Isn't this alignment very rare and/or restricted to North America?

Semantically-based marking
***Is this attested?


I'm planning on adding a subheading to this, which is about split alignments, hence the references to a split alignment section that doesn't exist. Anyway, when it comes to some of these alignments, I have no idea what I'm doing, so I was wondering if you all can check whether what I've written is correct. I have also inserted a few questions and comments, marked with ***. One more thing, I know about languages that are split ergative, but are there languages with split alignments that aren't ergative?

[bradrn]

Ergative alignment ↗Ergativity for Novices
In ergative (or ergative-absolutive) alignments S is marked the same way as O. If the language has case, then this is the absolutive case. A is marked differently, and for cased languages this would be the ergative case. If only word order is used for marking the arguments, then A and O must appear on different sides of the verb, while S must appear on the same side as O would, e.g. AVO and VS.

Ooh, my posts got a mention! (Which reminds me… I really do have to get around to writing the last chapter…)

Direct alignment
In direct alignment none of S, A and O are distinguished from one another, not even by word order. (So the language would have be either verb-initial or verb-final, or not have any default word order.) Unfortunately I have no information about this other than that what is what relies “entirely on context and common sense” — Wikipedia. This alignment is extremely rare, though it occurs in some languages with split ergativity. ***Link to split systems.

I’d say that Wikipedia’s description is a bit overblown. You can have direct alignment with respect to case-marking — in which case there are no noun cases. Or you can have direct alignment with respect to word order — in which case you have free word order. Only if you have both do you need to rely ‘entirely on context and common sense’. (Though even this extreme sense is still attested, in some topic-prominent languages.)

(Oh, and it seems that ‘neutral’ is a much more common term for this than ‘direct’, though both are seen.)

Austronesian alignment
Languages with Austronesian (or Philippine-type) alignment have both accusative and ergative alignments. In these languages verbs are marked with either agent trigger (actor focus) or patient trigger (undergoer focus).

Or a bunch of other triggers, effectively corresponding to applicatives. (Wikipedia lists locative and instrumental focus as well.)

{***Why would one choose one trigger over the other?}

As it happens, no-one’s come to a firm answer yet about this, but at the highest approximation the triggered object is focused and somewhat definite. (A vaguely similar English example: ‘I gave the box to you’ is sort of like a patient trigger, whereas ‘I gave you the box’ might be called a dative trigger.)

Active-stative alignment
***Should this go under split alignments instead?

Another tricky question! There is no consensus yet. I’d say it does, but possibly the majority of linguists would disagree.

***Isn't this alignment very rare and/or restricted to North America?

I believe so, though I don’t have any data on this.

Semantically-based marking
***Is this attested?

Yes it is! e.g. in Manipuri/Meithi, a Sino-Tibetan language of India. I recommend Dixon’s Ergativity for this; possibly there are more up-to-date sources covering this stuff, but if so I haven’t encountered them yet.

One more thing, I know about languages that are split ergative, but are there languages with split alignments that aren't ergative?

You could say that English is one: we have accusative case-marking for pronouns, but direct marking for nouns. Still, for some reason the term ‘split accusativity’ seems to be pretty much never used.

[Richard W]

You could say that English is one: we have accusative case-marking for pronouns, but direct marking for nouns. Still, for some reason the term ‘split accusativity’ seems to be pretty much never used.

You might have accusative case marking; I mostly have nominative case-marking for pronouns. Whom is exceptional, in that the accusative seems to be the marked form.

[bradrn]

You could say that English is one: we have accusative case-marking for pronouns, but direct marking for nouns. Still, for some reason the term ‘split accusativity’ seems to be pretty much never used.

You might have accusative case marking; I mostly have nominative case-marking for pronouns. Whom is exceptional, in that the accusative seems to be the marked form.

I just meant ‘accusative’ as an abbreviation for ‘nominative-accusative’, without making a statement either way on marking; of course English is (to an extent) marked nominative, it’s just that I didn’t feel a need to mention that.

[Moose-tache]

If a language had ergative/absolutive marking on pronouns but had lost case marking on nouns, I doubt anyone would call that "split ergativity."

But "split ergativity" is already usually a form of "split accusativity." If a language uses nominative-accusative for agentive verbs and ergative-absolutive for stative verbs, then it's both split ergative and split accusative.

[Torco]

The main reference grammar template that I’m aware of is the Lingua Questionnaire, an amazingly thorough set of questions covering pretty much every aspect of grammar.

man, this is cool enough that it might just make me get back into building conlangs.

[bradrn]

The main reference grammar template that I’m aware of is the Lingua Questionnaire, an amazingly thorough set of questions covering pretty much every aspect of grammar.

man, this is cool enough that it might just make me get back into building conlangs.

Glad I could help! Though I find it hard to share your enthusiasm about that questionnaire, as should be very evident from my complaints about it above.

[Moose-tache]

What about a grammar template that was based on increasing complexity in a single sentence?

Chapter 1: The Bird (noun derivation, articles, simple noun phrases)
Chapter 2: The Pretty Birds (more complex noun phrases with adjectives or possessives, case and number agreement)
Chapter 3: The Pretty Birds Sit (stative verbs, copulas, predicate nominatives)
Chapter 4: The Pretty Birds Sit On the Roof (prepositional phrases)
Chapter 5: The Pretty Birds Sat On the Roof, Apparently (tense, mood, evidentiality, aspect)
etc...
You'd need a pretty complex sentence to showcase everything, but you could have a few parallel sentences being built alongside the main one, like "Who sees the pretty birds now?"

[Neon Fox]

I've got a set of sentences roughly like that - in fact I could have sworn I was pointed to it by someone here!

1. Birds sing.
2. Children play.
3. Dogs bark.
4. Bees hum.
5. Baby laughed.
6. The sun shines.
7. The wind blows.
8. The car started.
9. School began again.
10. The child ran quickly.
Etc.

It goes up to 285.

[bradrn]

Could that be this one? https://web.archive.org/web/20120427054 ... tests.html Though it only goes to 218.

[Vardelm]

What about a grammar template that was based on increasing complexity in a single sentence?

Chapter 1: The Bird (noun derivation, articles, simple noun phrases)
Chapter 2: The Pretty Birds (more complex noun phrases with adjectives or possessives, case and number agreement)
Chapter 3: The Pretty Birds Sit (stative verbs, copulas, predicate nominatives)
Chapter 4: The Pretty Birds Sit On the Roof (prepositional phrases)
Chapter 5: The Pretty Birds Sat On the Roof, Apparently (tense, mood, evidentiality, aspect)
etc...
You'd need a pretty complex sentence to showcase everything, but you could have a few parallel sentences being built alongside the main one, like "Who sees the pretty birds now?"

I like this idea. To a small extent, I've done this in my scratchpad threads, but more because I haven't made vocabulary yet so I'm making up words on the fly. I may give this a go - more intentionally - when I write up the grammars in a more organized fashion. I think that just changing the words used but keeping the same types of sentences for different languages might make a fairly easy way to keep a consistent organization across the grammars.

I've got a set of sentences roughly like that - in fact I could have sworn I was pointed to it by someone here!

1. Birds sing.
2. Children play.
3. Dogs bark.
4. Bees hum.
5. Baby laughed.
6. The sun shines.
7. The wind blows.
8. The car started.
9. School began again.
10. The child ran quickly.
Etc.

It goes up to 285.

Could that be this one? https://web.archive.org/web/20120427054 ... tests.html Though it only goes to 218.

I think this is a little different from what Moose-tache is suggesting. This is more of a Swadesh list of sentences. There will be some variance in structure (some with adverbs vs not) but they don't build upon each other.