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Re: Conlang Typology Survey

From:Nokta Kanto <red5_2@...>
Date:Friday, May 23, 2003, 9:21
For Harpelan:

> 1. morphological type
d -- primarily isolating, with a few agglutinative and inflecting characteristics. I understand 'agglutinating' to mean that graphemes/characters are intermingled somehow, while 'isolating' keeps them distanced from one another, and 'inflecting' means that a grapheme changes, rather than appending more graphemes. Verb inflections are agglutinating.
> 2. Word order
The language is positional and verb-first, but none of these apply. Very little can be said about word order, in fact.
> 3,4,5 do not apply to this language.
> 6. relative clause/noun order
b. noun - rel.clause
> 7. main verb/aux verb order
b. aux verb - main verb Most sentences take an infinitive-noun and a verb which does little more than act as a case marker for the other nouns. (It's comparable to Japanese "benkyou suru" or English "make love"). Auxiliary verbs go between the infinitive-noun and the verb.
> 8. adverb/verb order
There are no adverbs.
> 9. compounding type
a. head-last compounding
> 10. case type
It is an active language (agent/patient).
> 11. tense system
c -- realis/irrealis, with a number of different irrealis forms. The inceptive aspect is also expressed in verb tense. Verbs also inflect for focus, which is an idea that I callously stole from Ebisedian. Irrealis is genenerally used to express future events. Do any natlangs have a realis/irrealis distinction instead of a past/present/future distinction? I really thought I had come up with something alien there...
> 12. script
c. con-script
> 13. number of genders/noun classes
It is not a closed set; classes can get added to or lost from the language easily. I would estimate 25 genders/classes in conversational writing, with a good deal more if you consider technical, scientific, and other domain-specific terminology. Classes include concrete, abstract, quality (-ness), sentient/agent, patient, direction, substance, legged animal, fish, simple verb (e.g. throw), agent-participatory verb (e.g. bounce), event, location, duration, style/method. At times the choice of class expresses subtle differences in meaning. For example, "some ice" vs. "lumps of ice/ice cubes", "computer, a malfunctioning machine" vs. "computer, an obstinate imbecile".
> 14. number of cases
Fourteen cases; fifteen if you count the infinitive-noun 'verb' case.
> 15. number of phonemes
I'd estimate the language has 150 graphemes.
> 16. lexicon size
Only around 150 words at present.