Re: Conlang Typology Survey

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.