If natlangs were conlangs

[Vijay]

Bad dog, jes.

[anxi]

Swedish - what's up with your phonology? You don't get to just invent a new IPA symbol just for your own language! Also what sound is it anyway - saying it is unpronounceable for foreigners is a cop-out that doesn't explain anything! Plus way too many vowels, especially front rounded!

I don't think even the author themself knows how to pronounce it. All the recording I've come across sound exactly like either [ʂ] or [x], even though the author insists it's neither of those.

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.

And all German infinitive verbs end in -n. So if you are doing a German crossword, and a verb is asked for, you can always fill in the last letter.

Well, all Polish infinitive forms end with either -c or -ć, all the second person singular present forms end with -sz (except for jesteś you are ending with -ś, which is its own can of worms), all the third person masculine past forms end with -ł, and so on.

Having a specific ending for a specific form isn't weird, having a specific ending for a speech part is.

Speaking of Polish, the individual who created it surely couldn't decide about what type to make the verb morphology, so they made the present tense fusional, the past tense agglutinative and the future tense analytic…

Also, making the gender agreement obligatory in the past tense, absent in the present tense and optional in the future tense? Who would even bother about it if it's optional?!

Also also, the only irrealis mood being the same as past tense with an added affix, despite all the thought put into all the other forms? I guess the folk just forgot about non-realis forms and had to concoct something quickly.

[Qwynegold]

To add to this specific part of speech ending with a specific vowel: In Finnish all verbs end in -a or -ä. If it wasn't for vowel harmony, all verbs would end with the same letter/phoneme. In Swedish all verbs, except for a small group of monosyllabic verbs, end with -a.

[Linguoboy]

To add to this specific part of speech ending with a specific vowel: In Finnish all verbs end in -a or -ä. If it wasn't for vowel harmony, all verbs would end with the same letter/phoneme. In Swedish all verbs, except for a small group of monosyllabic verbs, end with -a.

Lataat and lataavat aren't verbs?

[Qwynegold]

To add to this specific part of speech ending with a specific vowel: In Finnish all verbs end in -a or -ä. If it wasn't for vowel harmony, all verbs would end with the same letter/phoneme. In Swedish all verbs, except for a small group of monosyllabic verbs, end with -a.

Lataat and lataavat aren't verbs?

I mean the lemma form.

[mèþru]

Lemma forms of all native verbs in French end with -r or -re. The lemma forms of all Latin verbs end in -O. I think it's a common feature, at least in Romance-speaking Europe, for all verbs to have only a small pool of possible endings in the lemma form.

[Linguoboy]

To add to this specific part of speech ending with a specific vowel: In Finnish all verbs end in -a or -ä. If it wasn't for vowel harmony, all verbs would end with the same letter/phoneme. In Swedish all verbs, except for a small group of monosyllabic verbs, end with -a.

Lataat and lataavat aren't verbs?

I mean the lemma form.

The lemma in both cases is identical to the radical form of the infinitive. As other replies have established, it's not at all unusual for a language to have a common infinitive ending across verbs.

What is odd, from a crosslinguistic standpoint, is having certain endings be exclusive to entire word classes. Not the phrasing: It's not even just that all members of a particular word class share a common ending, it's that no other words outside that class do. But -a isn't exclusive to infinitives in either Finnish or Swedish. Both languages have thousands of words in other classes which end in -a.

I feel like people are so anxious to somehow disprove the original comment they've completely lost track of what it was even saying.

[Qwynegold]

What is odd, from a crosslinguistic standpoint, is having certain endings be exclusive to entire word classes. Not the phrasing: It's not even just that all members of a particular word class share a common ending, it's that no other words outside that class do. But -a isn't exclusive to infinitives in either Finnish or Swedish. Both languages have thousands of words in other classes which end in -a.

Oh, okay. I've missed that.

[Pabappa]

Russian and Finnish:

OK guys, I get that you don't like each other that much but is it really necessary to keep making all these little changes to make sure you don't ever ever end up using the same idea even once? "oh he's got word-initial stress now? I'm going to use dynamic stress and always put it on the least likely syllable!" ... "Oh, he's using palatalized consonants all over the place!! I'd better get rid of mine" ..."He got rid of the word-initial clusters? Okay Im going to make words that begin with FOUR consonants!" ... "Hmm, he's not using vowel or consonant length, I'd better add some .... wait, even better ... THREE vowel and consonant lengths!"*

Props to Russian for a nice clean alphabet, though. Finally somebody who understands the concept of one letter per sound.


*Found in Estonian but sometimes claimed for early stages of Finnish.

[Travis B.]

Actually, Finnic IIRC lost palatalization, but then some Finnic varieties such as Estonian re-added palatalization later on...

[Salmoneus]

French creator, we are still awaiting a justification for wholesale fronting of /u/ to /y/. You figured out something sensible yet?

Just wanted to point out, this is an extremely common vowel shift.

[Neon Fox]

I understand that collaborative projects can get big. Everyone wants their own niche. But for the love of tiny green monkeys, does that Indo-European thing have to be everywhere? Not that some of the creators haven't done cool things with it! But some of the early stages of the project are really poorly documented and it's really unclear which, for example, phonology is the canon one, or what order the splits are supposed to have happened in. Someone needs to go through and clear that stuff up.

[zompist]

Yeah, the mega-thread probably went something like this:

Sam: Here's the final map,
Lenny: Is that a penis?
Sam: It's a peninsula. OK, everybody pick a location and a family. Remember, we want it to be diverse and naturalistic.
Gerald: Top of this area. Indo-European.
Ross: I'll take the area to the east. Indo-European.
Greta: I'll take this little peninsula... just east of the penis. Indo-European.
Alia: I wanted that area... how about if I take this tiny little area right above you? Indo-European.
Sam: You can take bigger areas, you know. A few empires and such are naturalistic.
Lenny: I take the penis. Indo-European. Oh, we've also spread to this entire continent to the west.
Gerald: That's not even close to your peninsula. Fine, my family takes the northern continent. Also this big island continent in the east.
Ross: My area extends all the way across the top of the map.
Sam: Sigh. Please, we can't have the whole world be one family. I'll take this area in the center. Semitic.
Irene: I'll take the region to the east of that. Indo-European.
Jake: I'll take the eastern half of the mega continent and all these islands.
Sam: Oh come on, you can't take an area that big.
Jake: Fine. Just this little island group then, and it's an isolate.
Cory, Jake's younger brother: I'll take this peninsula. Jake's family.
Jake: You can't be right next to me and you can't be in my family.
Sam: He can be next to you if he wants. But Cory, Jake wants to be an isolate.
Cory [reading Jake's notes]: Yeah, yeah.
Inge: I want this big area east of Irene. Indo-European.
Sam: Goddammit. Fine. I'm taking the coast opposite this Indo-European megafamily so nobody can make more Indo-European there.
Calvin: I have a great idea for an Indo-European language which...
Sam: No more land grabs.
Calvin: It's OK. It's a family that's hung on just on the fringes of Gerald's area.
Gerald: What? Mine is obviously the dominant language of the planet, how could a whole language family continue to exist there?
Sam: You two work it out. Since it's not new territory, I'll allow it.

Not shown: the group decides that their species evolved in Africa, which should therefore have the most diversity, only Ben has already grabbed most of the continent for his "Bantu" and won't give any of it up.

Also not shown: to cover up Gerald and Lenny's outrageous land grab, the group puts all their older and wackier conlangs on those continents in random locations.

[Raphael]

*applauds*

(Thing is, there are so many vaguely penis-shaped peninsulas that I have no idea which one you mean.)

[mèþru]

Same. I'm currently thinking Florida, Korea or Indochina.

[mèþru]

Lenny: Is that a penis?
Sam: Which one are you pointing at?

[Zju]

Finally somebody who understands the concept of one letter per sound.

> One letter per sound
> Russian orthography

Pick one. That vowel allophony ain't joke.


Rotuman language: Are you really sure about that synchronic metathesis and allophony? How are even the speakers keeping all that in mind?

[zompist]

(Thing is, there are so many vaguely penis-shaped peninsulas that I have no idea which one you mean.)

Hint: they all named their families, or their first languages, after themselves. E.g. Greta = Greek.

[mèþru]

Italy is one of the least-penis like peninsulas though!

[Das Public Viewing]

So, Lenny = Latin? Idk, I always thought Scandinavia was the most penisy of the peninsulas
Also, Lenny takes the penis peninsula. I see what you did there. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)