If natlangs were conlangs

[Frislander]

Also Osage guy why you do this as well French kinda has an excuse because it's got a cramped vowel system anyway but you started off with a simple five-vowel system!

[zyxw59]

Does the person who made Spanish think they can get away with having /ɣ/ just devoice before front vowels? And how come /θ/ is spelled <z>?

[Kuchigakatai]

Does the person who made Spanish think they can get away with having /ɣ/ just devoice before front vowels?

Ideally we don't post misanalyses in this thread though...

Old French is quite silly with its use of -s for different numbers depending on case in most masculine nouns. For example, this is the complete declension of the word for 'finger':

singular nominative: doiz [doits]
plural nominative: doit [doit]
singular oblique: doit [doit]
plural oblique: doiz [doits]

It is made easier by the fact the language uses articles often: uns/li doiz, un/le doit, -/li doit, -/les doiz, but still.

[Vijay]

Whoever created Malayalam really really needs to go see a shrink about that nagging inferiority complex. It's so annoying. If at least one other person created the other major South Asian languages, they should take them along while they're at it. Especially the one who created Hindi, just...what are you even doing?!? You're just copying Persian and mixing it with English now! Oh, and the political split between Hindi and Urdu? Whose bright idea was that?

[Richard W]

Oh, and the political split between Hindi and Urdu? Whose bright idea was that?

Probably copied it from Serbian v. Croatian. At least that split was duplicated for several dialects.

[Moose-tache]

I can't believe no one has mentioned the elephant in the room yet. In Spanish (the language of Span, apparently), and most of the other languages from the same author, mixed gender groups are treated as masculine by default. Uh, hello? It's 2019 already. That kind of misogyny shouldn't be a part of any serious conlang.

[gestaltist]

My favorites so far in this thread:

PIE-creator: [snip]
If this were a natlang, I'd imagine it would quickly die out and leave no legacy. Keep up the good work, though.

Spanish (the language of Span, apparently)

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Have you seen that guy's writing system for his conlang, Japanese? How insanely dense is that?

Not content in borrowing a damn ideogrammic system, it gives each character a couple of pronunciations, and said pronunciations can be overridden when some specific other characters appear next to each other, with multiple possibilities, except irregularly it can revert to normal. (明日、which can be read myouniti, asita, asu and akebi, though the last one is a really special reading) Oh and TWO suppletive phonemic writing systems? And them not making the ideograms disappear?

[Moose-tache]

Have you seen that guy's writing system for his conlang, Japanese? How insanely dense is that?

Not content in borrowing a damn ideogrammic system, it gives each character a couple of pronunciations, and said pronunciations can be overridden when some specific other characters appear next to each other, with multiple possibilities, except irregularly it can revert to normal. (明日、which can be read myouniti, asita, asu and akebi, though the last one is a really special reading) Oh and TWO suppletive phonemic writing systems? And them not making the ideograms disappear?

Don't even give them the benefit of the doubt. You know they haven't bothered to actually make all those characters. They know nobody will read past the first dozen or so, so they probably didn't even finish the whole list.

[Frislander]

Also they do a terrible job at making their characters actually distinct from each other, like in one of the phonemic systems has sa, chi and ki be distinguished from each other by being mirror-images or plus an extra stroke, and in the other their shi and tsu syllables are only distinguished by the precise angle of two small dashes in the top left corner of the character, like have you never heard of dyslexia mate?

[Linguoboy]

Also Osage guy why you do this as well French kinda has an excuse because it's got a cramped vowel system anyway but you started off with a simple five-vowel system!

And it's totes fine if you want to add /l/ to your phonology but surely you could have come up with some less arbitrary source than /kð/.

[Raholeun]

Proto-Indo-European reminds me of conlangs in the early days of the internet. Rather than straight away writing your laryngeals in IPA, you had to develop some sort of algebraic orthography notation: h1, h2, h3, etc.

[Moose-tache]

And don't even get me started on Esperanto! So unnatural the way nouns can only end in o.

...oh wait.

[Xwtek]

I can't believe no one has mentioned the elephant in the room yet. In Spanish (the language of Span, apparently), and most of the other languages from the same author, mixed gender groups are treated as masculine by default. Uh, hello? It's 2019 already. That kind of misogyny shouldn't be a part of any serious conlang.

Wrong. Don't forget while today's gender freedom is widespread now, it wasn't not too long ago.

[Richard W]

And don't even get me started on Esperanto! So unnatural the way nouns can only end in o.

...oh wait.

Perhaps he nicked the idea from Hurrian? Very few Hurrian nouns don't end in -i.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

And don't even get me started on Esperanto! So unnatural the way nouns can only end in o.

...oh wait.

Well, all non-past positive verbs in Japanese end in -u, so there is precedent for a category to end with a common element. Pretty sure Zam was not aware of that though.

[Xwtek]

Also Osage guy why you do this as well French kinda has an excuse because it's got a cramped vowel system anyway but you started off with a simple five-vowel system!

Don't forget Ancient Greek

[Risla]

Malagasy. Oh, Malagasy.

• Seven deictic degrees of distance. Seven. Really, seven? Seven??? Who needs seven??????
• Um, you also mark visibility and invisibility on your demonstratives in addition to the seven degrees of distance? Couldn't you have encoded that somewhere in the deictic distinctions that already existed? Why the hell do you have a distinct form for the seventh level of distance from the speaker but visible? When do you use this, for talking about celestial bodies???
• Oh, you also mark tense on your demonstrative adverbs? You know, what, I give up. This is fine.

[Richard W]

I can't believe no one has mentioned the elephant in the room yet. In Spanish (the language of Span, apparently), and most of the other languages from the same author, mixed gender groups are treated as masculine by default. Uh, hello? It's 2019 already. That kind of misogyny shouldn't be a part of any serious conlang.

Are you sure it isn't a matter of respect to be paid to the feminine, which masculine items should not be allowed to share in? Feminine started out as a type of marked animate. Greek had adjectives which, as we now see them, used masculine forms for both genders ('adjectives of two terminations').

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Malagasy. Oh, Malagasy.

• Seven deictic degrees of distance. Seven. Really, seven? Seven??? Who needs seven??????

WAT?