Re: First Conlang...? & What Happened?

Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> On Tuesday, January 6, 2004, at 11:36  PM, David Peterson wrote:
>
>> <<snip discussion>>
>>
>> I didn't mean to say that all first conlangs were that way (indeed,
>> mine was a rip-off of the Arabic triconsonantal root system); I was
>> just trying to remember what the stereotype was.  A stereotype's not
>> always true, and it also isn't to say that euroclones or agglutinating
>> languages are bad.
>
>
> I didn't understand you to mean those things. However, there is a
> reason stereotypes exist. When I first joined CONLANG and the
> artlangers started coming out of the woodwork and joined the list,
> there seemed to me to be a proliferation of languages which had the
> following features:
>
> *  ergative/absolutive alignment
> *  large noun classification systems (i.e., gender)
> *  Celtic-style mutation
> *  an abundance of case forms (à la Finnish)
> *  simple agglutinative morphology
>

That's probably because they're all as far from English as you can get.