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Re: Conlang Typology Survey

From:Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 21, 2003, 8:25
Staving Garrett Jones:
>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: > >multiple choices can be selected for any of these questions if that makes >sense for your conlang.
My anwers are for Khangaþyagon. Its descendents are intended to differ.
>1. morphological type >a. agglutinative > > >2. Word order > >c. VSO > > >3. adposition/noun order >a. noun - preposition
Postpositions are affixes in Khangaþyagon.
>4. adjective/noun order > >b. noun - adj
With agreement of postpositions.
>5. genitive/noun order > >b. noun - genitive > >6. relative clause/noun order > >b. noun - rel. clause > >7. main verb/aux verb order >a. main verb - aux verb
Modal verbs, such as exist, form compounds with the main verb. It's a bit complex, and they don't follow the normal rules of compounding in every respect. They can't really make up their minds whether they're roots or affixes.
>8. adverb/verb order >a. adv - verb >b. verb - adv
Not yet fully decided. Either a or free.
>9. compounding type >a. head-last compounding
except in the case of modal verbs, which follow the main verb.
>10. case type >a. nominative/accusative
But Khangaþyagon's agglutinating system doesn't lend itself to description in terms of cases. Subject and object are distinguished by word order.
>11. tense system >a. time (past/present/future) >b. aspect
Both tense and aspect are expressed.
>12. script > >c. con-script
bukhstav runes.
>and some free answer questions: > >13. number of genders/noun classes
None
>14. number of cases
N/A
>15. number of phonemes
About 40.
>16. lexicon size
Slowly increasing, never counted! Pete