Re: Conlang Typology Survey

From: "Garrett Jones" <conlang@...>
Subject: Conlang Typology Survey


> I'm curious about the distribution of the types of conlangs on this list.
> So, a survey. Maybe it will generate some on-topic discussions. Answer it
> for your respective conlangs:
Joe Fatula, several conlangs

> 1. morphological type
> a. agglutinative
> b. fusional/inflecting
> c. polysynthetic
> d. isolating
Most are on the somewhat agglutinative to inflectional end.  Oldvak is
polysynthetic.  Valaccene is isolating, though drifting towards
agglutinative (sort of where French is, I think).

> 2. Word order
> a. SOV
> b. SVO
> c. VSO
> d. VOS
> e. OVS
> f. OSV
> g. free
SVO and VSO are most common, followed by SOV.  One language, Ats^adalzur is
VOS.

> 3. adposition/noun order
> a. noun - preposition
> b. preposition - noun
Most are B: preposition-noun.

> 4. adjective/noun order
> a. adj - noun
> b. noun - adj
About 50/50.

> 5. genitive/noun order
> a. genitive - noun
> b. noun - genitive
About 50/50.

> 6. relative clause/noun order
> a. rel. clause - noun
> b. noun - rel. clause
Usually B, but a few A.

> 7. main verb/aux verb order
> a. main verb - aux verb
> b. aux verb - main verb
All except Oldvak are B.

> 8. adverb/verb order
> a. adv - verb
> b. verb - adv
Reasonably free adverb placement is normal, otherwise it tends to follow
adjective/noun patterns.

> 9. compounding type
> a. head-last compounding
> b. head-first compounding
Patterned after adjective/noun.

> 10. case type
> a. nominative/accusative
> b. ergative/absolutive
> c. split ergative
> d. other
The Stovorish languages (a major family in my conworld) are ergative, most
others are nominative, a few are in the "other" category.

> 11. tense system
> a. time (past/present/future)
> b. aspect
> c. realis/irrealis
Most languages distinguish two of the three, with aspect being the most
commonly distinguished.

> 12. script
> a. latin
> b. other existing natlang script
> c. con-script
All of them have a standard Latin transcription (so I can type them easily),
but being in a conworld, they have their own con-scripts.  In a moment of
whimsy, I devised a standard Greek transcription for one of them, but it's
not official.

> and some free answer questions:
>
> 13. number of genders/noun classes
Varies from none to about 12, somewhere around three being most common.
None are masc/fem based.  Most are based on animacy (human, living,
non-living, etc.), one is based on part of the world (earth, sea, sky), some
are based on shape and size.

> 14. number of cases
The smallest number of cases is three, all the way up to about 24.

> 15. number of phonemes
Between 20 and 52.

> 16. lexicon size
The smallest languages have only a few words, but the most developed have
almost 2000.

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