If natlangs were conlangs

[bradrn]

Here’s an amusing example of orthographic weirdness I found recently (source: Julien’s Syntactic Heads and Word Formation). Here are two sentences in two very closely related languages. From Jicaltepec Mixtec:

ča

T

ní

ASP

čákuda

sit.down

rá

he

He has already sat down.

And from Chalcatongo Mixtec:

a-ni-ndatu

T-COMPL-wait-I

uù

two

órá

hour

I’ve already been waiting for two hours.

Note that the authors seemingly could not make up their minds about whether the tense and aspect morphemes are particles or prefixes.

(Oh, and by the way, Mesoamerica must have the worst naming conventions! It all just ends up as a blur of Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tzʼutujil, Chontal, Chol, Chorti, Chichimec, Chinantec, Chiapanec, Mazatec, Mixtec, Mixe, Manguean, Zoque, Zapotec — seemingly none of which are in the same family. I keep on wanting to look up Mixtec and end up at Mixe, or want Zapotec but end up at Zoque… it’s so frustrating!)

EDIT: And now that I think about it, I should probably also mention Setswana and relatives, a group of Bantu languages where spaces are placed between morphemes rather than words, which makes them look like isolating languages: Go tloga kgale le kgale ntse go na le ditlhopho mo nageng e. (Compare a sentence from the same article in SiSwati: IRiphabhulikhi yaseNingizimu Afrika (INingizimu Afrika), live lelitfolaka entansi neningizimu kwesichingikati se Afrika.)

[Richard W]

Note that the authors seemingly could not make up their minds about whether the tense and aspect morphemes are particles or prefixes.

I'm afraid that's not very surprising. I've been looking at a fair bit of Pali recently, and the word divisions are all over the place. Still, I should be thankful that they are there. Word division is a great Irish reinvention.

[bradrn]

Note that the authors seemingly could not make up their minds about whether the tense and aspect morphemes are particles or prefixes.

I'm afraid that's not very surprising. I've been looking at a fair bit of Pali recently, and the word divisions are all over the place. Still, I should be thankful that they are there. Word division is a great Irish reinvention.

You’re right, it isn’t very surprising at all — that’s just a particularly impressive example. But what’s even worse is that we can’t even agree on what a word is in the first place! (In fact, those examples I gave are from a discussion of whether prefixes count as words or not.)

Of course, we could speculate that if these languages had been designed properly then this sort of thing would never happen…

[Richard W]

Of course, we could speculate that if these languages had been designed properly then this sort of thing would never happen…

That's a very tricky feature in a conlang - hiding the fact that it has been designed.

[Kuchigakatai]

From the opening post in page 1:

Old Church Slavonic has many cases marked and distinguished by a single vowel: gradŭ grade grada gradě gradu gradi grady.

And there's a bit of syncretism of different case and number combinations, to make matters worse: gradŭ 'the city, of the cities', grade 'oh city!', grada 'of the city, the two cities', gradě 'in the city', gradu 'to the city, of/in the two cities', gradi 'the cities (nom.)', grady 'the cities (acc.), with the cities'.

Terrible conlang.

I just made a nice visualization of this:



(EDIT: fixed vocative form from *tʃlovæke to tʃlovætʃe! EDIT: now with colour!)

(I have no idea why imgur.com seems to enlarge the original images when hotlinking to them. If I right-click on them and select "View Image", I get the original crisp versions... Not sure if it might be my Linux Firefox that is doing this. EDIT: Actually, I just checked Chromium and I see it is the case Firefox is the problem!)

Note that the actual speakers of old Slavic likely distinguished some of these forms using pitch accent or length, even though neither was written down in Old Church Slavonic spellings. Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian apparently has nominative singular [ʒěna] (with a short vowel, rising tone [ě]) vs. genitive plural [ʒěːna] (with a long vowel).

[zompist]

What leapt out at me there was that Sanksrit has exactly the same syncretism in the dual: nom/voc/acc has one form, gen/loc another, and dat/ins(/abl) a third. Is this an IE thing?

[Moose-tache]

This system goes back to Proto-Balto-Slavic as well. Unfortunately, there's not much to compare it to. Ancient Greek had dual nom/acc/voc and dual everything else, but that could be the result of this system after a single round of simplification. Tocharian had a productive dual, but the oblique cases were lost, so that doesn't help. Old Latin duals are, so far as I'm aware, only present as ossified nominatives. Proto-Celtic is presumed to have had a dual form that combines nom/acc/voc, and one that combines abl/ins, but separate dual forms for genitive and dative. Since this is a sample of one, and the endings (uus and obom, respectively) have "synthetic case suffix" written all over them, it's hard to say if this is the original way of counting the dual, or if Celtic expanded on a Slavic/Indic system (for example, -uus looks suspiciously like nominative dual -ou with an added genitive ending -es, especially since long o merged with long u in final syllables). As far as I'm aware no IE language, not even Hittite, has a full set of dual forms that are distinct in every case and can be reconstructed to a proto-language.

On topic: The creator of Proto-Germanic forgot about their own suffixes! There is a suffix that turns adjectives into nouns, which is fine. Then those derived nouns appear in apposition to the head noun of a phrase. Again, not a problem if slightly confusing. But then, get this, the moron forgets he derived those nouns form adjectives, and since they're functioning like adjectives again he treats the adjective-to-noun suffix as an adjective-to-adjective suffix, that marks definiteness. I mean, come on, this is why we keep charts, dude! Keep your own suffixes straight.

[Kuchigakatai]

Note to anyone who may have downloaded the images: someone pointed out to me that the vocative singular of tʃlovækʊ was wrong. I fixed that and added colour at the same time.

On topic: The creator of Proto-Germanic forgot about their own suffixes! There is a suffix that turns adjectives into nouns, which is fine. Then those derived nouns appear in apposition to the head noun of a phrase. Again, not a problem if slightly confusing. But then, get this, the moron forgets he derived those nouns form adjectives, and since they're functioning like adjectives again he treats the adjective-to-noun suffix as an adjective-to-adjective suffix, that marks definiteness. I mean, come on, this is why we keep charts, dude! Keep your own suffixes straight.

Which suffix do you have in mind there?

[HourouMusuko]

What leapt out at me there was that Sanksrit has exactly the same syncretism in the dual: nom/voc/acc has one form, gen/loc another, and dat/ins(/abl) a third. Is this an IE thing?

Seems to be.

Ringe reconstructions -ous as the gen/loc dual ending (Sihler reconstructs -e/oyous). Neither of them bother reconstructing a dat/abl/ins ending, though they seem to agree that was the division. It's only based on evidence from a couple branches though. Wish the dual evidence wasn't so scanty, but the dual seems to have been inherently unstable.

[Richard W]

On topic: The creator of Proto-Germanic forgot about their own suffixes! There is a suffix that turns adjectives into nouns, which is fine. Then those derived nouns appear in apposition to the head noun of a phrase. Again, not a problem if slightly confusing. But then, get this, the moron forgets he derived those nouns form adjectives, and since they're functioning like adjectives again he treats the adjective-to-noun suffix as an adjective-to-adjective suffix, that marks definiteness. I mean, come on, this is why we keep charts, dude! Keep your own suffixes straight.

Which suffix do you have in mind there?

Moose-tache is talking about the weak adjective suffix.

[bradrn]

More weird orthographies! Our latest offender is the Skouic language Dumo/Vanimo, which represents the glottal stop using the digraph ⟨gh⟩. Perhaps surprisingly, this is one of the more defensible choices: cognate words in related languages generally have /ɡ/ or /h/ where Dumo has /ʔ/. Less obviously good are the choices of ⟨-h⟩ for vowel length and ⟨-ng⟩ for nasalisation, the combined effect of which is to produce words like ⟨ghwehng⟩ /ʔwẽː/.

[Creyeditor]

Less obviously good are the choices of ⟨-h⟩ for vowel length and ⟨-ng⟩ for nasalisation [...]

That might be German influence.

[bradrn]

My new favourite misplaced phoneme: a pharyngeal fricative /ħ/… found in Teiwa, a Papuan language of Pantar in eastern Indonesia. This phoneme is strange enough that the grammar felt obliged to single it out specifically as being unusual.

Oh, and while I’m in the area, I’d like to complain about the orthography of Xârâcùù, an Austronesian language of New Caledonia. As us conlangers are well aware, one must be careful when using diacritics to ensure that they are used consistently and with a predictable meaning. Which is apparently one principle that the designers of the Xârâcùù orthography took great care to violate to the fullest extent possible:

/i ɨ u/ ⟨i ù u⟩
/e ɤ o/ ⟨é e o⟩
/ɛ ʌ ɔ/ ⟨è ë ö⟩
/a/ ⟨a⟩

/ĩ ɨ̃ ũ/ ⟨î ü û⟩
/ɛ̃ ʌ̃ ɔ̃/ ⟨ê ä ô⟩
/ã/ ⟨â⟩

(I must commend them for this, actually; I don’t think I would be able to make an orthography with no regular patterns at all! Except for the circumflex, apparently; possibly they didn’t notice that regularity until it was too late?)

[Kuchigakatai]

My new favourite misplaced phoneme: a pharyngeal fricative /ħ/… found in Teiwa, a Papuan language of Pantar in eastern Indonesia. This phoneme is strange enough that the grammar felt obliged to single it out specifically as being unusual.

Western and central dialects of Galician developed a guttural fricative pronunciation of older /g/, locally called "gheada", which is typically [ħ] but increasingly a uvular [X] nowadays (one of the many influences of the Spanish of Spain on it, I suppose), or sometimes [h], all while surrounded by languages without [ħ]. The closest language with [ħ] is all the way south, in Morocco.

[bradrn]

My new favourite misplaced phoneme: a pharyngeal fricative /ħ/… found in Teiwa, a Papuan language of Pantar in eastern Indonesia. This phoneme is strange enough that the grammar felt obliged to single it out specifically as being unusual.

Western and central dialects of Galician developed a guttural fricative pronunciation of older /g/, locally called "gheada", which is typically [ħ] but increasingly a uvular [X] nowadays (one of the many influences of the Spanish of Spain on it, I suppose), or sometimes [h], all while surrounded by languages without [ħ]. The closest language with [ħ] is all the way south, in Morocco.

But haven’t Spanish languages been in heavy contact with Arabic for quite a while? Certainly, the distance from Spain to Morocco is far shorter than that from Pantar to the Caucasus!

[Linguoboy]

But haven’t Spanish languages been in heavy contact with Arabic for quite a while? Certainly, the distance from Spain to Morocco is far shorter than that from Pantar to the Caucasus!

Well, yes, but not one Iberian language I know has adopted [ħ] from Arabic. It gets mapped to /h/ or /f/ and then follows their evolution further.

[aliensdrinktea]

I'd like to personally call out the creator of the Romance language family for their horrible orthography. Classical Latin had nice, straightforward orthography, I'll give them credit for that, but some of its daughter languages are just a mess.

First offender: Spanish. I get the desire to get creative and add a unique touch to a conlang's spelling, but Spanish takes it too far. Using <v> for /b/ is something I can forgive, because it exists alongside <b>, and the distinct spellings preserve the historical distinctions from before /b/ and /v/ merged. The addition of /θ/ was a nice touch to distinguish Spanish's phonology from the other Romance languages, but <z> and <c> are completely nonsensical choices for it. <j> and <g> for /x/ are hardly better. Sure, there may be historical reasons behind the spelling, but there's a point where orthographic changes are needed to reflect the sound change. Spanish has long passed that point. In its current form, it looks like the creator just threw darts to determine the orthography. Pairs of darts, apparently.

Then there's French. Don't get me started on French. I feel like the person who created it got inspired by all the silent letters in English and decided to turn that up to eleven. Take the word /ɔk.tɛ/, which for whatever reason is spelled hoquetais. Seriously? But wait! It's got a homophone: hoquetaient! Why the ever-loving fâcherie (pardon my French) is a two-syllable, four-phoneme word spelled with eleven letters? I'm not saying a language needs to have a one-to-one grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence or that silent letters are inherently bad, but honestly, if you've got words where over half the letters are silent, you need to re-evaluate your orthography.

[bradrn]

Then there's French. Don't get me started on French. I feel like the person who created it got inspired by all the silent letters in English and decided to turn that up to eleven.

Au contraire, I believe English was inspired by French. (That being said, I do have exactly the same complaint, and I’ve posted it about two times in this thread already!)

[aliensdrinktea]

(That being said, I do have exactly the same complaint, and I’ve posted it about two times in this thread already!)

Sorry -- I'm new here!

[Kuchigakatai]

The addition of /θ/ was a nice touch to distinguish Spanish's phonology from the other Romance languages, but <z> and <c> are completely nonsensical choices for it. <j> and <g> for /x/ are hardly better. Sure, there may be historical reasons behind the spelling, but there's a point where orthographic changes are needed to reflect the sound change. Spanish has long passed that point.

I like the way someone who used to come here in the past liked to put it:

"Hi, I'm the Spanish language, and I'ma use <j> for [x], because fuck everyone else."