Miscellaneous Conlang Ideas

[dɮ the phoneme]

Oftentimes, I get a random idea for a particular feature or other small element that I'd like to include in a conlang, but it doesn't really fit into any of my current projects. Or perhaps the idea isn't well fleshed-out enough for me to consider adding it to one of my more "serious" conlangs. Sometimes these ideas end up getting used eventually, but most often they just float around in my head, cropping up to torment me in the middle of the night. So I figured it might be a good idea to just make a thread to dump them all in. And I figured I'd invite anyone else to dump their miscellaneous conlang ideas here too. My impression is that some of our members are already in the habit of posting these sorts of conlang tidbits on far-flung society media sites that I dare not invoke by name, but for ideas that don't really warrant their own their, it seems this forum has no place for them at present. So perhaps this thread can serve that function.

Here's the idea that prompted this whole thing: my very first conlang, made when I was a teenager, had prepositions that were always strained from their object (not that I would have known any of that terminology back then). When a PP acted as adjunct to a clause, the word order was basically [preposition]-SOV-[prepositional object] (where clauses with multiple PPs would have them wrapped around the outside in layers). A PP modifying a noun would similarly use the order [preposition]-[head noun]-[modifying noun]. Now, obviously this is extremely unnaturalistic, but... maybe something in this general spirit could be pulled off in a naturalistic way, with the benefit of quite a bit more linguistic knowledge than I had back then.

Consider a language with VSO basic word order, which makes heavy use of SVCs and has Mandarin-style coverbs in place of adpositions. So, you'd get maybe:

nr̩s sag gʷlaɨ
be.at 1sg home
"I am at home"

sfnan sag ŋir nr̩s gʷlaɨ
eat 1sg soup be.at home
"I eat soup at home"

Admittedly this looks a bit odd, and I wouldn't be surprised if these two features together violate some typological universal, but, well, let's run with it.

Together with this, there are internally headed relative clauses. Presumable adjectives are also just equivalent to verbs. So adjectives and "prepositional phrases" modifying nouns have the structure [adjective]-[head noun] and [preposition]-[head noun]-[modifying noun], respectively.

wei sag nr̩s zdat gʷlaɨ
see 1sg be.at man home
"I see the man who is at home"

Next, in order to get propositions stranded when acting as adjuncts to the VP, we just... add some topic raising with no pied-piping!

sfnan sag ŋir nr̩s gʷlaɨ
eat 1sg soup be.at home
"I eat soup at home"

gʷlaɨ sfnan sag ŋir nr̩s
home eat 1sg soup be.at
"At home, I (do things such as) eat soup"

And hey, there you go. Kinda a Frankenstein that could probably be improved with a bit of research (I know very little about internally headed relativel clauses for example), but it seemed like an interesting idea.

In any case, if anyone has their own conlang tidbits that haven't made it into full languages, feel free to post them here!

[Kuchigakatai]

This thread seems pretty similar to this other thread:
http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=412
Except this one is more general rather than specifically about grammar.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Ah, I thought I recalled something like that so I did a search before hand, but I didn't see it I guess. What is the etiquette exactly in this situation?