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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