Re: irregularities

>It occurred to me the other day that there is a decent mechanism at hand
>for making conlangs more naturalistic, if that is something one values.
[snip]

>For example, in Iltârer, I made a passing remark in the initial
>language sketch that nouns ending in -l are often concrete nouns for
>plants, animals, or other things found in nature. As I got to coining
>words, I developed a preference for the ending -il to refer to plants, -el
>to animals, and -al to inanimate things, like geographical forms. The early
>coinages of course do not reflect these preferences. I could go back and
>reconstruct those first words to make them consistent, but if I leave them
>as they are, they become irregularities in the language, giving it a more
>naturalistic feeling. It can be beneficial to resist the urge to regularize
>everything each time a change is made in the language description.
A similar thing happened in Géarthnuns. In the hoary past, there were
seven genders:

nouns ending in "bs" masculine
nouns ending in "rs" masculo-feminine
nouns ending in "ts" feminine
nouns ending in "ns" femino-neuter
nouns ending in "ks" neuter
nouns ending in "ls" neutro-omnigenous
nouns ending in "ths" omnigenous

Awkward, and hard to explain what the three intermediate ones really
meant, but hey, I was in my early teens. As the language evolved,
gender classifications began to shift:

nouns ending in "bs" plants and vegetation, "green things"
nouns ending in "rs" don't remember off the top of my head
nouns ending in "ts" feminine
nouns ending in "ns" pleasant things
nouns ending in "ks" unpleasant things
nouns ending in "ls" phenomena associated with language
nouns ending in "ths" phenomena associated with nature and time

That's quite limiting, but those were only considered broad
classifications and mnay nouns falling into the various genders did
not adhere to those classifications, hence the system began to erode.
In modern Géarthnuns, the seven declensions still exist, but the
notion of gender, grammatically speaking, has fallen away. Female
entities can end in "bs" and so on. However, while this may have
produced semantic irregularities if one sticks with the old rules (à
la "nauta" is masc. but falls in the first declension), it has not
created any grammatical irregularities.

Kou