Re: Lindiga and naturalism

Henrik Theiling wrote:
> 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.
Right, I'm sure there's no shortage of conlangs without irregularities.
Lindiga is more or less an agglutinating language. I guess the idea of
irregular verbs doesn't apply so much to isolating langs, but you could
still have verbs with similar complications.

> 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. :-)
Well, since I'm having a hard time imagining how Lindiga verbs might get
to be irregular, I'll take that as a precedent for now.

> 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.
I should be able to come up with a few cases where I can introduce some
fusional elements to the morphology. For word order, are you thinking of
cases like Spanish "me gusta", where the subject is put after the verb
instead of the usual position? I'm sure I can come up with some context
where an unexpected word order has been established as the usual order.