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

Are we talking about principles and parameters here? I'm dubious, since:

1. The list never seems to be complete. New parameters always seem to be
required to deal with a new case found.

2. Many of the parameters seem to be an attempt to turn a situation
without obvious hard boundaries into a set of binary options (This is
why people in linguistic typology started talking about "clines",
because they realised that simply yes/no for a list of features was not
sufficient to describe a language's grammar, or the variation between
languages). This seems doomed to failure, as you will always have
languages which do not seem to clearly choose either option.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but any attempt to collect together all the currently
proposed parameters and then classify a large number of natural
languages for all of them would simply expose the gaping holes in the
system, so I doubt any of its proponents have done such a thing. And why
would anyone who didn't believe in the framework devote so much time and
effort to it?

> On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 4:49 AM, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
>>  Originality is interesting - natlang clones can be so boring  ;)
>>
>
> This makes me wonder which natlang(s) are most similar to Asha'ille,
> and whether it has any truly unattested, original aspects to it.
>
> I've read in passing about parameterization as a way of explaining how
> different languages end up with different surface forms. Are there any
> efforts to describe many languages based on such parameters, so that
> you can then compare your language's parameters against other
> languages'?
>
>
> --
> AA
>
>

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