Standard Average You: A Revival and Revisit
Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2019 11:14 am
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:
Here's the original OP:
I don't feel like Standard Average Me has changed much in three years, though now I'd make these edits:StrangerCoug wrote:Have you noticed that there are certain features (not necessarily SAE) that you end up sticking in your conlangs a lot?
Here are mine:That's all I can think of for my tendencies. What are yours?
- The consonant inventory often ends up using one of these two as a basis:
Whichever choice I make, /ʔ h l r j w/ have a strong tendency of rounding off my consonant inventory.
- 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).
- The plosives are like SAE but they have corresponding glottalic versions as well, maybe missing otherwise expected /pʼ ɠ/.
- /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.
- Where /θ ð/ show up, they're remarkably stable if Let's Reform English is any indication. (What? I like those sounds )
- An avoidance of more complex syllable structures than CCVC.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.)
- Fusional languages invariably trace their origins from an earlier agglutinative stage.
- Typically no infinitive; the base form of a verb is the third-person singular.
- Causative constructions are more productive than in SAE, especially when deriving verbs.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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/.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.