Re: conlang servey

Language name, creator's name, realative date of
creation (just any old number will do), country and
first language of creator, purpose of conlang
(auxlang, conlang, loglang, . . . ).

Bendeh.
Nathaniel Lew.
In constant flux since ca. 1982, went through many changes, including from
a posteriori to a priori, and reached current syntax ca. 2000.
USA.
English.
I created it for fun and as the result of fascination with linguistics.
I suppose I would class it as an experimental language, since it is highly
regular and grammatical precise.  It is not, however, a loglang in the
usual sense.
It is a priori - the syntax and lexicon are entirely generated by my will
and whim.

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Phonetics:  number of consonants, number of vowels,
presence of nasalization, tone and how many, where the
accent generally falls.

21 consonants, 6 vowels with no significant nasalization of vowels.
No tone.
Accent falls predictably on last syllable of stem (i.e. not on suffixes)

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Morphemes:  presence of allomorphs, mutation,
assimilation, prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
suprafixation, dicontinuation, exclusion, total
fusion, subtraction, reduplication.  Is the conlang
agglutinating, isolating or fusional?

No allomorphs, mutation, assimilation.
Ca. 40 prefixes in several grammatical classes.
Additional ca. 24 "prefixes" that are really proclitic pronouns and
prepositions.
Ca. 15 "suffixes" that are really enclitic pronouns.
No infixes, suprafixation, or the other processes mentions.
Strictly agglutinating with no fusion.

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Nouns and such:  subclasses of nouns (common/proper,
abstract, things that may not be expressed explicitly
in affixes), presence of cases and how many and what
kind, kind of possession (alienable, inalienable, no
distinction, etc.) presence of gender, number,
articles, demostratives, adjectives, quantatives.  Are
comparatives expressed by affix, word order or both?
Do pronouns express gender, number, declension?  Are
there indefinite pronouns, possessed pronouns?
Others?  Are prepositions bound, unbound?  How many
prepositons (approximate).  Presence of clitics.  Is
derivational morphology mostly by compounding words or
by affix or both?

It is hard to answer some of the grammar questions, because they assume
the presence of a lot of traditional grammatical categories.  Bendeh
grammar marks the syntactic relationships between words, but does not
recognize parts of speech, cases, etc.  Its grammatical structures cut
across and recombine elements of the grammars of natlangs.  I will try my
best to answer the specific questions here.
There are no separate parts of speech.  Words are almost all substantives
and are classed semantically as concrete (sort of like nouns), stative
(sort of like adjectives) and dynamic (sort of like verbs), but these
classes don't affect their use in syntactic structures.  The grammar
further recognizes the distinctions transitive/intranstive and count/mass
for words.  No other semantic distinctions have implications in the
grammar.  Almost all grammatical relations are expressed by the
interaction of substantive roots.
There are no cases in the traditional sense, but there are prefixes that
mark subjects, predicates, and direct objects.
Possession and the meaning "to have" are handled by two different
prepositions, one each for alienable and inalienable.  (Prepositions are
substantives too, and as such are indistinguishable from predicates
like "to have," "to be located in," etc.)
No gender except with 3rd-person singular human pronouns.
No number except with 1st-person and 3rd-person pronouns, but the latter
can be used to mark number on other words.
Articles are formed regularly from demonstrative and other pronouns
(e.g., "this that is a cat").
The demonstrative is the same as the 3rd person inanimate pronouns.
Deictics are produced by combining this one demonstrative with
substantives referring to location areas ("the are here by me," "the area
there by you," etc.)
No adjectives as such; relative clauses serve to modify words (e.g. "the
cat that is a black thing")
No separate class of quantitatives/quantifiers; numbers are just ordinary
substantives.
Comparatives are expressed with substantives of amount, not inflection or
word-order.
Only 3rd-person singular human pronouns have gender.  Only 1st-person and
3rd-person pronouns have number.
No declension of any kind in the traditional sense on any word.
There is a single indefinite pronoun.  No separate possessive pronouns.
(What are possessed pronouns?)
Prepositions are proclitic, and there are only 9 (!) of them.  As
mentioned above, they are really just short substantives, all of which can
be mapped onto simple predicates in other languages.
Two classes of words, prepositions and pronouns, are always clitic (in
effect, they form prefixes and suffixes).  No other clitics.
There is widespread compounding for creating new words, and there is a
limited set (14) of prefixes.  There is no real distinction, however,
between inflection and derivation with these prefixes.

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Verbs and such:
Are person, number, object expressed with the verb?
Are there static verbs (to be)?  Is the object
incorporated into the person marker (making a
phonetically different affix like in the Native
American languages)?  Is transitivity marked for
transitive, intransitive, bitransitive or other?  Is
the person inclusive, exclusive, no distiction?  Kind
of gender.  Are past, present, future expressed?
Recent, remote?  Is mode express, what kind?  Is voice
expressed?  What kind?  Manner?  Aspect?  Please list
what kinds of manner and aspect the conlang expresses
in its verbs.  Presence of adverbs, pro-drop.  Can
nouns, adjectives, adverbs be changed to verbs and
vice versa?

No verbs as such.  The predicate of a clause is simply another substantive
or substantive phrase, which is connected to the subject by an implied
copula.  (There is no actual word for the copula, since it is present in
every clause.)
Person, number, and object are never expressed by inflection of the
predicate, because it is not a verb in the ordinary sense.  (Object
pronouns are enclitic to the predicate, but that is not real verbal
inflection).
There are no stative verbs, but adjective-like stative substantives
(e.g. "a green thing") can be used as predicates like any other
substantives.
There is no verb "to be" - it is always understood.  No object
incorporation.
Every predicate is obligatorily marked as either transitive or
intransitive, but all predicates can occur in either valence, with a
change in meaning.  There are no bitransitive structures.
1st-person plural pronouns have inclusive/exclusive distinction not found
elsewhere.
3rd-person human singular pronouns have male/female distinction not found
elsewhere.
The only inflected tenses are past and nonpast.  There is no recent or
remote distinction in the tense/aspect inflectional system.
Mode is expressed not by inflection but by compounding modal substantives
to the predicate.  (I need to flesh out the modal system, but there are
ca. 6 words that I know can be used to make modal distinctions.)
No voice system.  No passive construction (free word order and
detransitivized neuter predicates make it unnecessary).
There is an elaborate system of five aspects for predicates: perfect,
progressive, inceptive, completive, and habitual.
You didn't ask about moods, but in addition to indicative, there are a
hypothetical mood, an imperative mood, and an infinitive  or "verbal
noun").
There is a small closed class of true adverbs (i.e., nonpredicate
invariant clause-modifiers), although any word can be marked to modify a
clause or individual word "adverbially".
No obligatory pronoun drop from subordinate clauses (is that what you mean
by pro-drop?).  Instead, the subject pronoun of any clause can be omitted
if it is clear from context.  In practice, this means that a subordinate
clause whose subject is coreferential with that of the head clause is
omitted.
Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are already all the same thing in Bendeh.
With a small number of exceptions, every word can be used in any syntactic
spot in a clause.  Derivational prefixes can, however, change concrete,
stative, and dynamic words into words of other such classes, but that is a
semantic change, not a matter of part of speech.

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Presence of adjective, adverbial clauses and relative
pronouns.

No adjectives as such.  Any word can modify another in a relative clause.
"Adverbial" clauses must have a specific stated semantic relationship to
the main clause.
There is only one relative pronoun, which is the same as the interrogative
pronoun.  The relative pronoun is optional when it is the subject of the
relative clause; in other positions it is obligatory.

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Sentences:
Does the conlang have an ergative or accusative
system?  Word order and is it free or strict?  Are
adjectives, adverbs and prepositions before or after
the modified word?  Is the word order changed in a
question?  How many (approximately) conjugations are
there?

Accustive syntax.
Word order of constituents and major grammatical roles is free, with some
simple restrictions.
"Adjectival" relatives phrases follow the modified word.
"Adverbial" modifiers of individual words follow the modified word.
Direct objects follow the "verb" (predicate).
Prepositions precede their objects.
Word order in questions is free, although questioned words and the
interrogative pronoun tend to front as much as possible.
Since there is no category of "verb," there is no conjugation in the
technical sense, but the term is used for the single complex inflectional
system that marks (1) value (affirmative/negative), (2) valency
(transitive/intransitive), (3) aspect, and (4) tense/mood.  This set of
prefixes is the same for all words and has 100 possible forms.

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Other:
What is the number base for the numeral system (10?
12?)?  Presence of idioms, irregular forms of nouns
and verbs.  Is the language syntax very predictable,
or are there many exceptions?  How much literature has
been produced and what kind (I'm not talking about
translations, but stuff you wrote yourself).  Is there
a history and dictionary of the conlang?  Script
invented?  Other conlangs produced by the creator of
this one.

Base 10.
I haven't developed many idioms, but I will eventually.
No irregular forms.
The syntax is completely predictable, if rather odd in places.
I have only produced several paragraphs and lots of sample sentences so
far.
No history or conworld to go along with the language.
I keep a small, insufficient dictionary of a few hundred words.  I need to
expand it.
I have devised the principles of a script, but not the actually letter
forms.
This is my only conlang.

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If you could summarize your conlang in a sentence,
what would you write?

Bendeh is a compact, completely regular, easily pronounced language with a
relatively simple grammar but with the odd trait that all the words are
essentially nouns; an implied copula in every sentence makes one noun
phrase the predicate, rendering verbs and adjectives unnecessary.

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On my survey, I knew I couldn't possibly cover
everything that conlangs will be, so I included a long
notes section.  If you want to provide any other
information about the conlang, just keep typing!

I think that it is all in there somewhere.  For more detail, see

     http://www.geocities.com/natlew/bendeh/bendehmain.html