Re: Natlang most similar to your conlang [WAS: Analyzing Ayeri's syntactic and voice alignment (long)]

Thanks, Philip.

A couple of things occurred to me as I reread my deathless prose from 2003.
In that version of the Language Code, I have:

M       morphology
        a       agglutinating (+/-)
        i       isolating (+/-)

I think that these features can be replaced with a single feature, Green
(short for Greenberg). This feature is the ratio of morphs to words and is
expressed as a real number. For example, Miapimoquitch is 2.43. That is, on
average there are 2.43 morphs per word. I think this is a more accurate
reflection of the agglutinating/isolating dimension and isn't too hard to
figure out, given some amount of text. Joseph Greenberg, of typological
fame, proposed this (and other ratios) as a measure of morphological
typology.

Also in this version of the Language Code, I claimed that English has 24
consonants and 9 vowels. For the record (which is also in the archives) this
is not correct, and should be more like 14 or 15 for American English and
19-22 for British English. Consult the archives for a nice little discussion
of this.

Dirk

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 8:55 AM, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Dirk Elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
> wrote:
> > Many years ago I proposed a "Language Code," which was intended to
> provide a
> >  typological profile for a given constructed or natural language. It
> should
> >  still be in the archives somewhere.
>
> Here's Take 4: http://archives.conlang.info/ge/suezhae/qhuevhunwhian.html
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>


--
Miapimoquitch: Tcf Pt*p+++12,4(c)v(v/c) W* Mf+++h+++t*a2c*g*n4 Sf++++argh
La----c++d++600

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