If natlangs were conlangs

[gestaltist]

Speaking of horrible phonologies, Hixkaryana has the weirdest five vowel system I've ever seen: /æ e ɔ ɯ u/. I get it, you want to be special, but really? This and your language is OVS? You know there's more to conlanging than being weird, right?

[WeepingElf]

Let me post a more positive review, for a change. The Kartvelian language family is a gem: a nice consonant inventory which captures the linguistic genius loci of the Caucasus - uvulars, ejectives, multiple sibilant series - without going kitchen-sinky; an interesting ablaut system; a morphosyntactic alignment that is not run-off-the-mill and subtly and interestingly differs from language to language; a beautiful writing system (even if it is a simple, phonemic alphabet). OK, those consonant clusters are a bit overdone, and the verbs, well, a bit less complicated morphology would have been better. But overall, a decent job!

[Xwtek]

Speaking of horrible phonologies, Hixkaryana has the weirdest five vowel system I've ever seen: /æ e ɔ ɯ u/. I get it, you want to be special, but really? This and your language is OVS? You know there's more to conlanging than being weird, right?

Actually, having OVS (or rigid SOV) typical of Cariban languages. On other hand, Warao, why you have OSV default word order? Your adjacent languages either have OVS or SOV

[Richard W]

Thai alphabet (or abugida) too. They all look the same but with the twiddles and crosses in marginally different locations, facing different directions, and is it 6 letters for a "k" sound??

Well, no. It's one letter for /k/ and 5 for /kʰ/, though that was reduced to the standard 3 for voiceless aspirates when typewriters came in. The other two used to represent fricatives, but it did take a long time to actually drop them after they merged with the aspirate. They're now used as a sort of heavy metal umlaut - they're formed by an extra dent in the letter compared to the corresponding letter in the official orthography.

However, it is 6 letters for /tʰ/ - two sets of three.

However, one of the letters in each trio marks a tone difference. The five tones are divided into two sets of three, and the consonant selects which set of three is used. Two tone marks then select which of the three is used. (The two other tone marks cover the case of consonants which do not come in pairs - the tone set shifting letter is only available for some consonants.)

Now, there are about 18 different letters for writing final /t/, but that takes the dodgy view that speech is primary. It works much better if you realise that writing is often primary.

[malloc]

Now, there are about 18 different letters for writing final /t/, but that takes the dodgy view that speech is primary. It works much better if you realise that writing is often primary.

Says who? Spoken language existed for many thousands of years before the first writing and most languages had no written form at all until very recently. Furthermore, people readily acquire spoken language without conscious effort or deliberate instruction whereas people must attend school to learn reading and writing. Plenty of people are illiterate, able to speak and understand yet unable to read and write, whereas the reverse situation is virtually unknown. The assumption that speech is primary and writing secondary seems pretty well founded to me.

[Birdlang]

I think whoever created Sundanese wanted to copy the phonology of Indonesian, throw out some sounds used in foreign words, and add ‘eu’ for /ɤ/ and use é for /e~ɛ/. Ok, and none of the words are similar to related languages like Javanese and Indonesian.
Also, the creator Madurese decided they would mess around with Javanese’s phonology, add in voiceless aspirated consonants spelled with letters used for voiced ones, and add some vowels, namely â.
And also, the sound changes are crazy. Like Indonesian banyak to Madurese bhânnya’. That’s crazy to change several sounds (maybe a little normal but a -> ɤ is a bit crazy).

Also, whoever did Aceh put a lot of vowel accents on the letters. Namely è, é, ë, ô, and ö. As well as the Sundanese eu. As well as putting a language related to Jarai and Rhade in Indonesia where there aren’t any others.

Speaking of Jarai and Rade, they basically extended Quốc ngữ to add a ton of letters including omitting the tones which they don’t have and putting breves on random vowels. Plus, they have ƀ which is used for an implosive.

[Richard W]

Now, there are about 18 different letters for writing final /t/, but that takes the dodgy view that speech is primary. It works much better if you realise that writing is often primary.

Says who? Spoken language existed for many thousands of years before the first writing and most languages had no written form at all until very recently. Furthermore, people readily acquire spoken language without conscious effort or deliberate instruction whereas people must attend school to learn reading and writing. Plenty of people are illiterate, able to speak and understand yet unable to read and write, whereas the reverse situation is virtually unknown. The assumption that speech is primary and writing secondary seems pretty well founded to me.

Wow! Did you know almost all the words in that paragraph before you could read? One Thai final /t/ letter (do dek) is for native words, and the rest are for foreign loans, mostly Pali, Sanskrit and English. (English gets one privilege - loanwords from English can use final do dek.) Old Chinese loans are treated as native.

Additionally, I think we forget how much effort we put into mastering our native tongue - and by no means all succeed.

[Mornche Geddick]

Does the person who made Spanish think they can get away with having /ɣ/ just devoice before front vowels? And how come /θ/ is spelled <z>?

And <c>!

Oh, and whoever made Welsh: <y> is the only bad point about an otherwise pleasant and consistent orthography - but please, throw out some of the plurals. No language needs as many as twenty.

[Linguoboy]

Oh, and whoever made Welsh: <y> is the only bad point about an otherwise pleasant and consistent orthography - but please, throw out some of the plurals. No language needs as many as twenty.

Agreed. Like it's really cool how they derived several from stems in the protolanguage but they should have only kept those around on a couple irregular nouns. Extending them by analogy is just egregious.

And speaking of the nouns, they really need to make some damn decisions about noun gender and stick them instead of saying, "Um, I guess it can either." Seriously, if you're going to be that wishywashy, just dump it entirely already. Same with the mutations. If you're not going to use them consistently, then you don't need three.

[anteallach]

Manx. It looks like you realised that English-style orthography wasn't going to work for that phonology a bit too late, and added a few random Hs and Ys to try to fix it. Oh, and <çh> for /tʃ/ is an unusual idea, but it's too obviously a fudge when you realised you were using <ch> for two completely different sounds.

[Richard W]

Manx. It looks like you realised that English-style orthography wasn't going to work for that phonology a bit too late, and added a few random Hs and Ys to try to fix it. Oh, and <çh> for /tʃ/ is an unusual idea, but it's too obviously a fudge when you realised you were using <ch> for two completely different sounds.

But that's how real languages work (or stagger along). In that sense, it's a good touch. At least, I presume English is a major feature of the conworld this conlang inhabits.

[Xwtek]

Not a conlang, but let's assume that Earth is a conworld.

The creator of this conworld must like misery. Your Capitanian Extinctions, P-T Extinction, and Smithian-Spathian Extinction are too close together. And why is there extinction event, when the diversity is already so low? That said, I like the details of Smithian-Spathian Extinction event. It reminded me of Zompist's Almea. If it occurs at least 50 million years later, it would be as well written as K-Pg Extinction event.

[Vijay]

Okay, I know most of my vocabulary in my joke of a conlang is just English or whatever, and I totally understand throwing French words into conlangs set in former French colonies, but whoever created Persian: Seriously? Your word for 'to serve' is serv kardan?

[akam chinjir]

Okay, I know most of my vocabulary in my joke of a conlang is just English or whatever, and I totally understand throwing French words into conlangs set in former French colonies, but whoever created Persian: Seriously? Your word for 'to serve' is serv kardan?

I dunno, I like systems that are heavy on light verbs.

(Former French colonies?)

[Vijay]

I dunno, I like systems that are heavy on light verbs.

That's not what I mean. I mean using a French (English?) loanword for that particular verb in a language whose speakers were never colonized by speakers of French (or English, for that matter).

Former French colonies?

Yes, why? For instance, I could understand using this as a loanword in a language like Wolof (primarily spoken in Senegal, a former French colony), but in Persian?

[akam chinjir]

Ahh, misunderstood, sorry.

[Vijay]

No worries!

[Travis B.]

I dunno, I like systems that are heavy on light verbs.

That's not what I mean. I mean using a French (English?) loanword for that particular verb in a language whose speakers were never colonized by speakers of French (or English, for that matter).

Former French colonies?

Yes, why? For instance, I could understand using this as a loanword in a language like Wolof (primarily spoken in Senegal, a former French colony), but in Persian?

Take Romanian, for instance, which borrowed a lot of words from French despite never being subjected to French colonization. French was once in the place that English is today, albeit not to quite the same degree.

[Vijay]

The situation surrounding Romanian is a bit unusual IMO since Romanians often take great pride in the fact that their language is Romance unlike all the surrounding major languages and they apparently see borrowing from French as a positive thing because French is also Romance. Of course you're right, though; French was the prestige language not so extremely long ago, and Paris if I'm not mistaken was a favorite destination for relatively wealthy Iranian emigrants who were in favor of the monarchy. I guess that prestige still exists on some level in Iran today (a little bit like in English, really). It still throws me off when I'm hearing a stream of Persian and then suddenly I also hear words like serve, merci, or chic randomly thrown in, though. I guess I just haven't learned to get used to it yet.

[zompist]

Having mersi from French is one thing, but the inventor of Persian couldn't think of anything for "bad" except bad? Probably they heard about Mbabaram "dog" and wanted to imitate it.