Re: Lindiga and naturalism

Another thing to remember is that irregularities are there for a reason
(usually historical) - thus a verb will tend to become irregular from
overuse. I sem to remember that "to be" is the only irregular verb in
Turkish. This happens a lot with adjectives too, since some can cross
semantic boundaries. In many natlangs the word for "first" often comes from
another term meaning "early", "main, chief" or suchlike.
Omina has no irregular verbs for the reason that there are no conjugated
verbs as such, but there are irregularities. I hope that these have been
allowed to proceed out of the "genius" of the language. Of course here I am
using "genius" in the original sense of 'spirit, inherent nature' - I am not
claiming any genius on my part!!
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Henrik Theiling" <theiling@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2008 1:13 PM
Subject: Re: Lindiga and naturalism


> Hi!
>
> Herman Miller writes:
>>...
>> Are there languages without irregular verbs? Lindiga verbs are pretty
>> much regular so far.
>
> I assume you mean inflecting/agglutinating natlangs.  I.e., ignore
> isolating natlangs and conlangs.
>
> IIRC, Turkish has only 1 or maybe even 0 irregular verbs.  There were
> some comments on this list that, given its degree of regularity, it
> really looks like a conlang. :-)
>
>> But irregularity and other complications are only part of what makes a
>> language naturalistic. I'm thinking I might want to try building
>> earlier versions of the language to give it a bit of history. I've had
>> mixed success with that sort of thing, but I didn't have much of an
>> understanding of historical linguistics when I tried it before.
>
> To achieve some natural feeling, it is always good to never have a
> completely pure concept, but one with a few exceptions.  E.g. there
> are no fully isolating or inflecting or agglutinating natlangs.
> You'll always find at least one or two phenomena that are a different
> paradigm.  Some natlangs come close to the idealised concept, but in
> the vast majority of cases, they are not completely pure.  The same
> holds for, say, accusative vs. ergative vs. split-s.  Or even simple
> things like word order.  To have this impurity on most levels of the
> language will feel quite natural.  Of course, you're in danger of
> messing things up if you introduce arbitrary exceptions.  It's very
> hard to find the right balance, I think.
>
> **Henrik
>
>
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