Standard Average You: A Revival and Revisit

[StrangerCoug]

I was looking back over this thread from the old board that I made one time, and I thought I'd bring it up again.

Here's the original OP:

Have you noticed that there are certain features (not necessarily SAE) that you end up sticking in your conlangs a lot?

Here are mine:

1. The consonant inventory often ends up using one of these two as a basis:
   1. One inspired by ancient Greek, with tenuis, aspirated, voiced, and nasal obstruents at three places of articulation. A major difference from it that I seem to like making is that, instead of just the one /s/ for the fricatives, sibilants behave just like plosives and can also be tenuis, aspirated, voiced, and nasal (though /z̃/ is given a habit of not wanting to sticking around).
   2. The plosives are like SAE but they have corresponding glottalic versions as well, maybe missing otherwise expected /pʼ ɠ/.
   Whichever choice I make, /ʔ h l r j w/ have a strong tendency of rounding off my consonant inventory.
2. /a e i o u/ are nearly invariably present, at least at some point. To this I may add /ɛ ɔ/ or /y ɯ/ or, if I don't want them in the earlier stages yet, delete /e o/. Length distinctions may or may not be present, but they often are for smaller vowel inventories. When I do have length distinctions, a conversion from that to a tense-lax distinction is on the common side.
3. Where /θ ð/ show up, they're remarkably stable if Let's Reform English is any indication. (What? I like those sounds )
4. An avoidance of more complex syllable structures than CCVC.
5. The phonotactics rules tend to be very simple on a morphophonemic level, often behaving on the syllable and not the whole word (though sound change may have something to say about that). Onset rules are fairly liberal (syllable-initial /ŋ/? Why not?), with plosive+approximant clusters being par for the course, though I will sometimes have a lang force there to be an onset for every syllable. My three most common rules for codas are any consonant, only certain types of consonants (I usually permit at least /p t k m n ŋ s/), or none at all.
6. Nearly every language has a case system, with nominative-accusative and active-stative my two favorites to use. As regards treatment of ditransitive verbs, secundative languages show up noticeably more often than in real life, but they're not the majority. Suffixaufnahme is not unknown for genitive constructions.
7. Nouns may have gender, but it's less common than in SAE. When they do, though, the neuter is more common than in SAE. My older conlangs that had gender occasionally also had a rule where third-person genitive/possessive pronouns had to agree with BOTH the subject AND the object (i.e. my words for "his", "her", and "its" all had masculine, feminine, and neuter forms).
8. Higher numbers tend to be formed like in East Asian languages rather than there being separate words for multiples of powers of ten and the first few numbers past ten. (Replace "ten" with "twenty" if I decide I want that base instead, in which case expect there to be a sub-base of 5.)
9. Fusional languages invariably trace their origins from an earlier agglutinative stage.
10. Typically no infinitive; the base form of a verb is the third-person singular.
11. Causative constructions are more productive than in SAE, especially when deriving verbs.

That's all I can think of for my tendencies. What are yours?

I don't feel like Standard Average Me has changed much in three years, though now I'd make these edits:

1. Something I neglected in my original post: SO word order like crazy. If OS is even allowed for, it's because my case marking system allows freedom of word-order.
2. For the last few langs I've done, if I went with the glottalic option for my plosive series, I've also thrown in an ejective affricate or two in the inventory as well. Invariably when I do, I add /t͡sʼ/, with my second being /t͡ʃʼ/ or /t͡ɬʼ/ (see addenda below) if I want another.
3. I now disfavor adding JUST /y ɯ/ to /a e i o u/—if they're there, expect /ø ɤ/ to be as well. (This is part of the strong tendency I still have for any front rounded vowels to have a back unrounded counterpart.) If I want a seven-vowel inventory but don't want to add the low mid vowels to the SAE five-vowel set, expect /ə ɨ/ instead if it's newer, and if I want a daughterlang to have a bigger vowel inventory, don't be surprised if I push them to /ɤ ɯ/ to make room for /ø y/.
4. I'd say my avoidance of more complex syllables than CCVC is weaker than it used to be since I've dabbled a bit more with CCC onsets since I created the original thread. I still tend to like having simpler codas than onsets overall, however.
5. I still have a tendency to have one lateral and one rhotic, but these days, if I have more than two liquids, expect multiple laterals, and one or more of them to be based around /ɬ/ in particular. If I have multiple rhotics, expect /r/ to have been split off from an original geminate /ɾ/; failing that, expect my rhotics to be /r ʀ/, especially if it's an older lang.
6. When coming up with an orthography, for its Latin transcription I tend to favor diacritics over digraphs (I favor transliteration over transcription), though the latter is not unusual to represent an aspirated or glotallic consonant. If I ever get around to the conscript, don't be surprised if I have an abugida in mind, though I've planned for alphabets and (for small numbers of allowed syllables) syllabaries as well.

What about you? In particular, if you posted in the original thread, is there anything you'd say has changed since your post there?

[Pabappa]

My preferences havent changed a bit since the old thread .... though I've fleshed out the post a bit better at http://www.frathwiki.com/Languages_of_T ... _languages and http://www.frathwiki.com/Languages_of_T ... _languages , which is written from an external point of view. I do most of my writing here in Poswa, which is my favorite language all around, and expresses all of the traits I like that dont contradict each other. Pabappa is inferior, but I still maintain it because it has an important place in the story and because it's a lot more accessible to an outside audience due to its simpler (but still fairly fusional) grammar.

I have languages with phonologies more typical of Earth, but I find it difficult to work on them because there's no gimmick to a language like that .... even the best of the "normal" languages can only offer me things that Poswa also has.

[Xwtek]

I don't make many languages, and it's mostly offline, but there is some cliche

1. it tends to be polysynthetic
2. large consonant inventory or very small consonant inventory, with a small-average number of vowels.
3. Affricates pattern as stops, stops are paired with nasals. (a native language effect, since I speak Indonesian)
4. It tends to use relational nouns, with a small number of prepositions. (also a native language effect)
5. It corporates a feature of SAE languages' grammar, but ignores others. Asent'o has relative pronoun, but the rest of the grammar is rather un-European, closer to a fusion of Ojibwe(conjugation, proximal-obviative, direct-inverse) and Japanese (SOV word order, postposition, relational noun, the fact that relative clause comes before noun). Rkou has characteristic European conjugation and declension, but also a syntax that is also un-European. (Asent'o thinks Rkou has a strange grammar, but from European standpoint, it's like a pot calling the kettle black)
6. If a noun is marked for case, then it has a small number of them. (Probably only Core-Noncore, or Core-Genitive-Locative).
7. satellite-framing by directional affix to verb. Rkou is still satellite-framed even if there is no directional affix.

[missals]

I've never brought any conlang to even a very meager degree of fleshed-outness, but when I fiddle around with and sketch out different ideas, things that tend to come up again and again are:

• Strong tendency for maximal CV syllable structure
• Simple vowel inventory, usually the five cardinal vowels, sometimes plus schwa and/or a length distinction
• Smallish consonant inventory (10-20)
• Voiced prenasalized stops
• Preaspirated stops
• Initial consonant mutation and other sandhi-like phenomena
• Mixed nominative-accusative and split intransitive alignment
• Frequently obligatory and semantically weak definite article
• Usually no tone, but if tone, just a simple two-way contrast in stressed syllables or at the word level

[Zaarin]

Much of what I wrote in the original thread is still true.

1. Ejectives. The overwhelming majority of my languages have them. This is generally part of a three-way distinction of voiced/unvoiced/ejective, but I also have plain/aspirated/ejective, plain/ejective, and one case of voiced/aspirated/ejective.
2. Big consonant inventories. Uvulars are pretty typical, pharyngeals/epiglottals are frequent. Palatals other than /j/ are rare.
3. I like fricatives, but I don't tend to have many (or any) voiced fricatives.
4. Quite a few of my languages have /ɬ/.
5. Most of my languages distinguish both laterals and rhotics; if they have only one, it's probably a lateral. Very few have neither. Most of my languages with rhotics have /r/.
6. Vowel inventory tends to be /ɑ e i o u/, usually with length distinction.
7. Nearly all of my languages disallow null onsets. C(C)V(C), CV, and CV(C)(C) are my typical syllable constraints.
8. Probably 60% of my languages are VSO; most of the rest are SOV.
9. At least half of my languages are ergative/absolutive, though my most significant and largest language family is nominative-absolutive (except for one language in the family, which is an outlier in a lot of ways).
10. Quite a few of my languages have obviative pronouns.
11. Most of my languages have verbs that decline only for aspect without tense.
12. I've recently become a big fan of languages with a huge number of directional morphemes like the languages of the Pacific Northwest, and so many of my newer languages have these.
13. Oddly, I'm a big fan of vowel harmony but only three of my languages have it.
14. A little over half of my languages have gender, either masculine/feminine or animate/inanimate. Only one has noun classes. The rest have no grammatical gender.

I'd say #12 is no longer true, and per #13 I've still done very few languages with vowel harmony. I'd also say #9 has become less true as I've gradually acknowledged I don't understand ergativity as well as I'd like. As for #7, the bulk of my languages have been CV(C), though one of my main focuses lately has much more complicated phonotactics--I haven't analyzed them, but I'd guess something like (F)(C)(R)V(V)(C)(C). It's also one of my few languages with /r/ but no /l/; it has voiced fricatives; it's SVO; it has no ejectives; it has no obviative pronouns; and just in general is an exception to everything I said here. But most of my languages still conform to what I said there.

[Nortaneous]

extreme gerund abuse

/p t c k/ * /ph p b mb/, sometimes minus one MOA and/or plus /ts/
6-8 vowels, no length contrast
If consonant clusters are allowed, the sonority hierarchy doesn't real
Person marking on verbs
No articles

...except the phonological features here are mostly large-scale areal effects! On the other side of the mountains, you have /p t ts k kʷ/ * /pp p/ or /p b/, sometimes with more affricates.

[Frislander]

Let's have a look and compare

1. I also have problems with not liking my phonologies, which generally means that there aren't any voicing distinctions in obstruents without some other manner of articulation distinctions as well (which often means a single stop and fricative series)
2. More generally, I hardly ever have more than 15 consonants.
3. If possible I have fewer than five vowels, though I generally include a length distinction to compensate.
4. I don't often allow clusters, instead strongly preferring CV(C)
5. It's been ages since I last started a language without polypersonal agreement. However, I will often have a few cases as well to denote grammatical relations.
6. I don't like large gender systems, though I'm happy with numeral classifiers.
7. I'm a sucker for large numbers of moods and voices, but I avoid past-present-future tense systems like the plague. Furthermore, now I understand what it is, I much prefer aspect over tense. I also like to mix in evidentials with the moods.
8. I really enjoy having relative clauses use nominalisation, and further to this I don't have a separate category of adjectives, them being covered by either nouns or verbs.
9. I generally just enjoy large amounts of synthesis, so my languages, though they may have a few fused affixes, end up being generally agglutinative out of pure necessity, with no general bias in favour of either prefixes or suffixes.
10. I often drift towards ergativity, but I do like to do funky things with, say, perception verbs, and to make ditransitive verb dechticaetiaive
11. I also strongly avoid SVO.
12. Preference for subsuming prepositions under verbs, or marking locational concepts on verbs.

OK, 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 11 and 12 are still pretty much entirely true. 7 is partly true in a slightly modified form - I still like aspect tense, but I've stopped filling everything out with moods, mainly just going for a realis-irrealis contrast. Similarly 9 I do still like, but neither Frislandian nor my Ugricised-IE-lang can be described as having "large amounts of synthesis". I think I've got over 3, and I don't think any of my current conlangs have fewer than five vowels/diphthongs. 5 is no longer true - my Ugric IE-lang still only marks the subject like in IE and Ugric, and Frislandian verbs now lack person marking entirely - phrase-level clitics are where I've gone with that. Similarly 5 is pretty much dead - neither my IE lang nor Frislandian have gender, but Asta has 5, and I might put numeral classifiers into Frislandian but I haven't yet, so I wouldn't say I happy with them over large gender systems as the above implies.