Re: Conlang Typology Survey

On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 08:43:11AM -0700, Garrett Jones wrote:
> 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.
OK, here are the answers for Ebisedian.

> 1. morphological type
> b. fusional/inflecting
Mainly fusional/inflecting. There's a lot of vowel inflections (ablaut?).

> 2. Word order
> g. free
>
> 3. adposition/noun order
> b. preposition - noun
>
> 4. adjective/noun order
> a. adj - noun
There no separate category for adjectives. All adjectives are just nouns
appearing in a relative clause.

> 5. genitive/noun order
> a. genitive - noun
There are no genitives either. Possession, etc., are expressed using
relative clauses.

> 6. relative clause/noun order
> a. rel. clause - noun
> 7. main verb/aux verb order
There are no auxilliary verbs.

> 8. adverb/verb order
> a. adv - verb
Strictly speaking, adverbs are just nouns in the instrumental case, and
hence may appear before or after the verb. However, it conventionally
precedes the verb.

> 9. compounding type
> a. head-last compounding
>
> 10. case type
> d. other
Case is more semantic than syntactic. Not sure how else to describe it...
Ebisedian's case system is pretty unique so far.

> 11. tense system
> b. aspect
Also "focus":
- incidental: unspecified focus or random event
- deliberative: speaker believes that event happened for a reason
- consequential: event is a result of another event

There's also "domain", but that's arguably different categories of cognate
verbs than a real verb "tense".

> 12. script
> c. con-script
>
> and some free answer questions:
>
> 13. number of genders/noun classes
5 genders: masculine, feminine, epicene ("wildcard" for masc/fem), neuter
(neither masc/fem), double (both masc & fem, hermaphroditic, or conjugal).

3 numbers: nullar (absent), singular, plural.


> 14. number of cases
5 cases, originative, receptive, instrumental, conveyant, locative.

> 15. number of phonemes
Hmm, hard one to answer. Theoretically, about 2160 possible syllables, 27
times that if you count final syllables. However, only a small subset is
actually used.

> 16. lexicon size
Currently 461 entries.


T

--
MASM = Mana Ada Sistem, Man!

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