Do conlangs have quirks like natlangs?

Discuss various conlangs here
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Do conlangs have quirks like natlangs?

Post by Zhasho » May 10th, 2019, 4:17 am

We all remember those questions we asked our grade school language teacher, for which the only answer was, "because language isn't logical." Well, probably the Vulcan language would be :D But that is a fundamental difference between natural languages (which grow organically and illogically over time, and constructed languages (which are systematically formulated).

Among the illogical quirks of natural languages is that those that inflect verbs have some irregular verbs that don't follow the standard patterns. In other cases, there are words whose pronunciation doesn't fit the usual rules of phonics, including those "sight words" that frustrated us as school children, since we couldn't sound them out but had to memorize the spelling. In some Native American languages, and in Chinese, the words for the numbers differ according to what is being counted.

These are the quirks that add spice to the study of language. But I don't know of such quirks in conlangs. Some of them seem as logically consistent as a machine.

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Joined: January 5th, 2019, 12:56 am

Re: Do conlangs have quirks like natlangs?

Post by Steve » May 10th, 2019, 8:26 pm

Hi Zhasho. Natlangs have a lot of odd rules and a lot of those rules are attributed to either earlier versions of the language that stuck around (even if they're not needed anymore or complemented other parts that did disappear) or they came from other languages entirely.

Not to clutter the conversation but, for the purposes of this conversation, "conlang" will mean constructed languages for the purposes of international communication (ex. Esperanto, Ido, Novial, Occidental, etc.). This isn't a knock towards artlangs or modern conlangs but that class of conlang was for a serious attempt at a global unifying language as opposed to the typical "I wanna make a language for my mega-cool Elves in my fan fiction story!" constructed language.

The general trend in conlangs has been to become more naturalistic over the decades. Esperanto & Ido were very regular with few "exceptions" but there was a price to be paid for that regularity. Words became unwieldy, prefixes and suffixes either were too vague or overlapped each other &, even if they didn't the addition of too many prefixes and suffixes also caused problems.

Loglan & it's successor, Lojban, are extremely regular and are considered "loglangs" (or logical languages) than conlangs meant at a serious attempt to unify the world.

Novial & Occidental represented the first main attempts at being "slightly" naturalistic. Novial, for instance, has a main verb "es" (to be) that doesn't end in certain vowel letters like other verb words.

Interlingua (IALA) is much more naturalistic with plenty of irregularity but by design; It's meant to be readable (or, at least, vaguely understandable) to the somewhat uninitiated.

How much exception & irregularity to bring to a conlang is always tricky. The typical response from those conlangs that take being an universal language seriously appears to be just enough to keep the language from sounding "same-y" without sacrificing ease of learning. After all, if a conlang is as hard to learn as a natural language, the thought is that people will just learn a natural language instead.

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