Re: a "natural language" ?
From: | Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...> |
Date: | Monday, November 29, 2004, 8:17 |
After English, Spanish and other Indo-European languages I am constantly
shocked by the regularity of some (especially agglutinating languages,
although Hungarian is a bit of an exception to this rule) like Swahili
and Basque that in the main don't have different noun declensions, large
numbers of irregular verbs/nouns etc... I don't think there is any
completely regular language, but its still surprising how regular some
languages can manage to be. Of course, very isolating languages are also
extremely straightforward when it comes to morphology, but that's just
because they don't have much. :)
I'm not saying that I think they seem fake but... sometimes I think of
naturalistic as partly meaning full of irregularities, which is one of
the reason I find some of my own (half finished) conlangs "fake", so its
nice to know that there are nice regular languages out there.
> yep, back to this fun. :)
>
> rather than ask for the technical mumbo-jumbo of "what makes a language
>seem natural or fake?".....I'll ask something better....
>
> What natural language in the real world, if you only encountered it for the
>first time today or tomorrow, would you say "no, that's not a natural
>language" ?
>
> thoughts?
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