Omni-kan syntax

[Qwynegold]

Intro
This is an old IAL project of mine that I've started working on again. I don't have any words finalized yet, so I'm going to just use glossing to show you how I've been thinking about the syntax. The main idea behind the grammar is to make everything as simple as possible, so that it will be easy to learn, and would minimize the number of mistakes people make due to influence from their L1. When there is no obvious simplest way to do things, I usually just go with what is most common world wide, using WALS as my source.

Omni-kan is quite isolating, because people often struggle with inflection, especially if their L1 has very little inflection. So there is no case marking.

Word order
The two most common word orders in the world are SVO and SOV. I chose SVO because the verb separates the two arguments. With SOV you could potentially run into this problem:
If you have a sentence like N₁ N₂ V, is this N₁.A N₂.P V.tr, or is it compound_noun.S V.intr?

And I'll write this here, just to remind myself, because it's not obvious to me: S and O don't have to be single words. They can be long-ass noun phrases, they may contain relative clauses (maybe?), and O can consist of another VP.

Word order is strict, so there's no wh-movement. Question words are used in situ. The strict word order poses some problems for relative clauses though...

Grammatical number
It was hard to decide on whether to have a singular - plural distinction or not. When East Asians speak European languages they make tons of mistakes where they leave out pluralization. But when Westerners learn East Asian languages, they often misunderstand something as being singular, when it's actually meant to be plural. But at least it's easy to explain the concept of plurals to Asians, while Westerners have a difficult time understanding how you can do without plurals, so I decided to include plural marking.

It's optional if there is a numeral or quantifier modifying the noun, but obligatory otherwise.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

It was hard to decide on whether to have a singular - plural distinction or not. When East Asians speak European languages they make tons of mistakes where they leave out pluralization.

Do you know if this is true when they speak languages like Italian, where the plural is audibly different from the singular (English plurals, for example, usually have only a tiny difference between them and the singular phonetically, unless they have a borrowed plural form, or an inherited irregular one); some East Asian languages do have plurals, notably Japanese on pronouns, sometimes through reduplication — 我々 (wareware) — or through a suffix 僕ら (bokura), 俺たち (ore-tachi) — and in some fossilised forms, like 桜 (sakura), and I suspect also 空 (sora) and 村 (mura), however I don't have very clear evidence for the latter two beyond the surface forms. Some Sinitic languages also have them, as Mandarin 我們 wōmen. Making the plurals very predictable, but also very morphologically distinct, will probably help if you want them.

But when Westerners learn East Asian languages, they often misunderstand something as being singular, when it's actually meant to be plural. But at least it's easy to explain the concept of plurals to Asians, while Westerners have a difficult time understanding how you can do without plurals, so I decided to include plural marking.

As far as this goes, perhaps having plurals marked for definite nouns, but not indefinite ones (perhaps having some sort of marker for indefiniteness or collectiveness, to distinguish between them).

It's optional if there is a numeral or quantifier modifying the noun, but obligatory otherwise.

Also a possibility.

[Qwynegold]

Do you know if this is true when they speak languages like Italian, where the plural is audibly different from the singular (English plurals, for example, usually have only a tiny difference between them and the singular phonetically, unless they have a borrowed plural form, or an inherited irregular one);

Wait, what? Although it's just one consonant, I don't think it's that tiny a difference. I've mostly noticed this in English, though I think they do the same thing in Swedish as well.

Anyhow, pronoun plurals don't matter. I've seen Japanese, Chinese and Korean people do the same mistakes. Mostly I've seen this in writing. I'm not sure if it's as common in speech, though I would expect that. When you're writing you get more time to think about your grammar.

In Omni-kan I'm using a suffix. It's one of the few morphemes I've decided about: -kal. The same suffix is also used on pronouns.

[Qwynegold]

The omissive pronoun
This is an idea I've been thinking about, but I don't know if it's good. A pronoun, that I'm calling "omissive" for now, which is used for marking that something has been omitted from the sentence. I can think of three usages for it. One is when you omit a noun after an adjective.

I want red OMIS.PRON
I want the red one.

Another usage is basically that it can optionally be used when the subject in a subclause is the same as in the main clause.

A third usage could be if I decide to make passives like this:

OMIS.PRON hit I
I was hit.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Do you know if this is true when they speak languages like Italian, where the plural is audibly different from the singular (English plurals, for example, usually have only a tiny difference between them and the singular phonetically, unless they have a borrowed plural form, or an inherited irregular one);

Wait, what? Although it's just one consonant, I don't think it's that tiny a difference. I've mostly noticed this in English, though I think they do the same thing in Swedish as well.

Perhaps it's simply its being "foreign" to me, but i fiori as a plural of il fiore strikes me as a much bigger difference than the flowers being the plural of the flower. Same with bokura or ore-tachi, which add entirely new words. Swedish also seems to have plurals I would consider more significant than in English (at least for some of its nouns; adding -or, -rar, &c. strikes me, at least, as more noticeable than a simple -s).

Anyhow, pronoun plurals don't matter. I've seen Japanese, Chinese and Korean people do the same mistakes. Mostly I've seen this in writing. I'm not sure if it's as common in speech, though I would expect that. When you're writing you get more time to think about your grammar.

Oh, no, I didn't mean to say it doesn't happen with those language, rather that it would probably be not as difficult for them to learn it as might be imagined. English and Swedish are probably both phonologically difficult for speakers of most East Asian languages (none of the three mentioned regularly have terminal consonant + s clusters, at least as far as I'm aware, and only Mandarin Chinese seems to have a consistent terminal -r that is both really terminal and distinct from its /l/ phoneme), so my guess has been that, in speech, it's frequently (at least as far as English goes) an issue of difficulty of articulation (possibly coupled with insufficient instruction from or practice with native or near-native speakers), or of hearing the forms in -s as very distinct from the singular, rather than some sort of conceptual difficulty. Of course, I may be entirely mistaken — I simply meant it probably won't be as much of an issue as you might think it would, as long as the pluraliser is easy to pronounce and stands out from the rest of the word.

[Kuchigakatai]

As he said, they do it in writing a lot, and I think this shows it's not a problem of articulation but grammar. Even pretty advanced learners do it, when it's a less common noun for which they're not sure whether it's countable or not. And yeah, they also get plurals wrong when speaking and writing Italian...

Incidentally, I don't know about Japanese/Korean, but funnily Mandarin has something similar to countability... The classifier 種 zhǒng 'type(s) of' and container classifiers (a bowl of...) are "mass/uncountable" in some sense, used for materials like e.g. 牛奶 niúnǎi 'milk' and such (like when we say "three milks" = three types of milk, or three bottles of milk). And the shape/metonymic classifiers are "countable" in some sense, like 口 kǒu 'mouth' to count people and pets living in a house (and jars, coffins, cannons, wells... "three mouths of jars").

But of course, they don't match English a lot of the time, e.g. 語言 yǔyán 'language' is "uncountable" and takes zhǒng, as if saying lit. "three types of language" to say 'three languages' (same for 氣候 qìhòu 'climate', ~weather). And 天 tiān 'day; sky' and 年 nián 'year' are container classifiers in their own right, but mysteriously 月 yuè 'month; moon' is a "countable" noun (taking classifier 個 ge). Oh, and to make matters worse nominalized verbs take their own distinct action classifiers (次 cì, 遍 biàn... these aren't lexicalized though)... And on top of this, there can also be nuances between these three categories, such as 改革 gǎigé 'reform' taking (countable classifier) 項 xiàng if it's a concrete reform plan, (mass classifier) 種 zhǒng if it's more abstract or to emphasize the reforms are of different types, and the verbal action classifiers (e.g. 次 cì) if it's about processes (actions) of reform.

I'm sorry if I'm derailing the thread a bit...

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Eh, I suppose my thoughts really were a non-starter.

[Qwynegold]

Rounin: So you're thinking that their difficulty with plurals is phonologically influenced? While I think it purely has to do with differences in grammar. Though yesterday I happened to observe the following:
I was watching the YouTube channel ReacThing which is hosted by a Korean woman called Zoey. She was trying to teach her grandmother some English slang, and there was some word, I forget which, that ended with /s/. When her grandmother would repeat that word she would skip the /s/. So Zoey tried to call her attention to it by going [s::::::], but grandma could not register that at all. So Zoey had to resort to [sM].

[Qwynegold]

Kuchi: That reminds me, recently I've observed a lot of Asians on YouTube pluralizing uncountable nouns. >_< It seems like there is no really good option to go with. Also, I don't quite know what to do with mass nouns. Should I say that this conlang has nouns that can't be pluralized? But then how would you know which nouns those are?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Rounin:

(The "Ryuuji" part is the actual name; "Rounin Ryuuji" means something like "Ryuuji the Unemployed".)

So you're thinking that their difficulty with plurals is phonologically influenced? While I think it purely has to do with differences in grammar. Though yesterday I happened to observe the following:
I was watching the YouTube channel ReacThing which is hosted by a Korean woman called Zoey. She was trying to teach her grandmother some English slang, and there was some word, I forget which, that ended with /s/. When her grandmother would repeat that word she would skip the /s/. So Zoey tried to call her attention to it by going [s::::::], but grandma could not register that at all. So Zoey had to resort to [sM].

It might actually be both, then. I don't believe modern Korean has final [s], though it did historically (I believe it shifted to /t/, Korean does allow terminal voiceless stops, and I believe /m n ŋ l/, making it, I think, slightly more permissive than Cantonese). Either way, I don't think Westerners doing without plural-ness would be so difficult, either.

[Qwynegold]

(The "Ryuuji" part is the actual name; "Rounin Ryuuji" means something like "Ryuuji the Unemployed".)

ごめんね。 I had no idea what Ryuuji was.

Either way, I don't think Westerners doing without plural-ness would be so difficult, either.

Hmm, I'll check which one is more common worldwide, to have obligatory plurals or not.

[bradrn]

Either way, I don't think Westerners doing without plural-ness would be so difficult, either.

Hmm, I'll check which one is more common worldwide, to have obligatory plurals or not.

WALS has three relevant maps. The most comprehensive is 33A, which lists 968 languages with some sort of nominal plurality, vs 98 with none (mostly in SE Asia, plus various smaller clusters elsewhere). If you look at pronouns (35A), this number decreases further to 9 lacking pronominal plurality.

[Kuchigakatai]

Where plurality also occurs varies. Arabic nouns are singular for the numbers 3-10, and I recall there are languages (in India? I don't remember) where the singular noun form is used with all numbers, and after plural demonstratives (so "thing", "things", but "this thing, these thing").

[Rounin Ryuuji]

French still maintains nominal plurals orthographically, but with most nouns (though there are exceptions, cheval, chevaux, vitrail, vitraux) plurals are only marked by particles, le, la v. les, au, à la, v. aux (au/aux is also often a purely orthographic distinction); du, de la or un, une v. des, and so forth).

[Qwynegold]

Relative clauses
I'm looking through ways one could form relative clauses. To check one idea, I would like to ask everyone to tell how they interpret the following sentences. Just rewrite the sentences in normal English please.

1) snake jump cat fight
2) cat jump hiss
3) I see snake cat fight
4) cat jump fight snake
5) I see cat fight snake

[Creyeditor]

1) A snake jumps and a cat fights.
2) A cat jumps and hisses.
3) I see a snake and a cat fight.
4) A cat jumps and fights a snake.
5) I see a cat fighting a snake.

[Qwynegold]

Either way, I don't think Westerners doing without plural-ness would be so difficult, either.

Hmm, I'll check which one is more common worldwide, to have obligatory plurals or not.

WALS has three relevant maps. The most comprehensive is 33A, which lists 968 languages with some sort of nominal plurality, vs 98 with none (mostly in SE Asia, plus various smaller clusters elsewhere). If you look at pronouns (35A), this number decreases further to 9 lacking pronominal plurality.

Actually, 34A is more relevant. The option "all nouns, always obligatory" was the most common. The sample was smallish, but this option was more than twice as common as the second most common option, "all nouns, always optional". So I'll go with what I had already decided. But that map showed that "all nouns, always obligatory" is common everywhere except in easterna and southern Asia (and Australia). So that is going to be a bit of a problem.

[Qwynegold]

and I recall there are languages (in India? I don't remember) where the singular noun form is used with all numbers,

I know. Finnish does this. So that's why I chose to make it optional when used together with numerals; the meaning will remain unambiguous.

[Qwynegold]

@Creyeditor: Thanks for the reply. I'll wait and see if there'll be more replies before I comment.

[bradrn]

Relative clauses
I'm looking through ways one could form relative clauses. To check one idea, I would like to ask everyone to tell how they interpret the following sentences. Just rewrite the sentences in normal English please.

1) snake jump cat fight
2) cat jump hiss
3) I see snake cat fight
4) cat jump fight snake
5) I see cat fight snake

I agree with Creyeditor’s interpretation. To me, these seem more like SVCs than relative clauses. (And this is fine! SVCs are a perfectly natural thing to have in a language — and they’re readily interpretable by English-speakers, as Creyeditor showed.)

Hmm, I'll check which one is more common worldwide, to have obligatory plurals or not.

WALS has three relevant maps. The most comprehensive is 33A, which lists 968 languages with some sort of nominal plurality, vs 98 with none (mostly in SE Asia, plus various smaller clusters elsewhere). If you look at pronouns (35A), this number decreases further to 9 lacking pronominal plurality.

Actually, 34A is more relevant. The option "all nouns, always obligatory" was the most common. The sample was smallish, but this option was more than twice as common as the second most common option, "all nouns, always optional". So I'll go with what I had already decided. But that map showed that "all nouns, always obligatory" is common everywhere except in easterna and southern Asia (and Australia). So that is going to be a bit of a problem.

Why not just go with ‘all nouns, always optional’? Yes, it’s less common and (slightly) less expressive, but it has the advantage that both people whose native language has number and people whose native language doesn’t will make grammatical sentences from the start.