Your Conlang's Type

[Atluk]

What type is your conlang?

By type, I mean is it inflecting, agglutinating, analytical, etc? Which one do you generally prefer.

Idk if I really have a preference, but my current conlang is agglutinating. Before that, I did almost exclusively inflecting languages, but I'ce grown tired of those.

[Mentilliath]

Primarily inflexive. In general, a single Halvian morpheme encodes multiple features. -osom means "masculine, genitive, plural"; -ti means "3rd person, singular, present", etc.

[razlem]

I've never been good with agglutinating languages. I think Mandarin is easier than Spanish.

Angos is mostly isolating, with very few synthetic features.

[Atluk]

I've never been good with agglutinating languages. I think Mandarin is easier than Spanish.

Angos is mostly isolating, with very few synthetic features.

I don't think Spanish is agglutinating, but fusional instead. I could be wrong, though.

After experimenting with agglutinating languages, I think I'm better off with doing a fusional language like Spanish since, like you, I am not very good with agglutinating languages.

[Levike]

What type is your conlang?

I'd say it's still inflecting.

As the conlang progressed it got less and less inflecting since I really didn't see the point in for example nouns agreeing with their adjectives. Or for example it started with having 4 genders and now the only distinction I make is animate vs inanimate. Maybe eventally I'll get rid of that as well since I don't need an ending telling me that a rock is... well not a person.

it might end up agglutinating because all my prepositions are now postpositions and each of my grammatical cases are more like postpositions that got glued to their noun.

[Llawygath]

Mine have always been inflectional/fusional, probably because I only know fusional languages. I tried making an isolating one with a lot of particles, but it got too long-winded for my liking (e.g. "we" was expressed as "fmwu acrg ig", i.e. "person [proximal] [plural]"). It also had a deliberately annoying orthography.

I don't think Spanish is agglutinating, but fusional instead. I could be wrong, though.

Yes, it is fusional. Wikipedia even gives it as an example of a fusional language.

[Atluk]

What type is your conlang?

I'd say it's still inflecting.

As the conlang progressed it got less and less inflecting since I really didn't see the point in for example nouns agreeing with their adjectives. Or for example it started with having 4 genders and now the only distinction I make is animate vs inanimate. Maybe eventally I'll get rid of that as well since I don't need an ending telling me that a rock is... well not a person.

it might end up agglutinating because all my prepositions are now postpositions and each of my grammatical cases are more like postpositions that got glued to their noun.

I agree. Gender kinda is pointless. Like you said, you don't need a suffix to no something is inanimate. I feel the same way about masculine and feminine.

[Dormouse559]

That line of logic can be used to call any linguistic feature pointless. And yet languages have these features anyway. I listed some possible benefits to having gender in an earlier post. My third point is that redundancy, saying things we already know, is built into human language; it's not a defect.

viewtopic.php?p=1014336#p1014336

[Atluk]

That line of logic can be used to call any linguistic feature pointless. And yet languages have these features anyway. I listed some possible benefits to having gender in an earlier post. My third point is that redundancy, saying things we already know, is built into human language; it's not a defect.

viewtopic.php?p=1014336#p1014336

I stand corrected. While it may be true that I don't need an inflection to know that a noun is feminine, I can just say "La gata" to refer a female cat instead of just saying "female cat." By the article and suffix, I know it is a girl cat.

[Llawygath]

Gender kinda is pointless. Like you said, you don't need a suffix to no something is inanimate.

Animate vs. inanimate seems less "pointless" to me than masculine vs. feminine, as it has practical meaning for all words instead of only a few. Tables are objectively inanimate, but they are not male or female. Animacy can also play a role in morphosyntactic alignment.

[Dormouse559]

Long time, no see, Llawygath. Welcome back.

On the relative pointlessness of sex-based gender, I'll direct you to another post I've made lately.

viewtopic.php?p=1014385#p1014385

I'd just add two things:

1) Avoid conflating "masculine/feminine" with "male/female". One pair is a linguistic concept, the other a biological one. And also avoid conflating a noun with the object it describes. In French, the word "table" is in the feminine grammatical gender. That does not mean that tables themselves are somehow feminine, nor does it mean they are of the female sex. Neither of those things is the point. See my previous post (in this thread or the linked one) for more on that.

2) The names "masculine" and "feminine" are totally arbitrary. If we called these genders something else, like Gender A and Gender B, they'd still function the same way, but there'd be a lot fewer misconceptions about them.

[Levike]

I stand corrected. While it may be true that I don't need an inflection to know that a noun is feminine, I can just say "La gata" to refer a female cat instead of just saying "female cat." By the article and suffix, I know it is a girl cat.

Yes, this and what Dormouse said, for my conlang I considered it's not reason enough, like why categorise all nouns this way, just because it can clear things up for a minority of them. Matter of taste after all.

The same case is with conjugating verbs by person, why have them when you can just put its pronoun before it, much easier to understand and learn, one could say, but I kept this feature because I felt it's more convenient for me to put a letter at the end of the verb and indicate the person this way rather then to use the whole pronoun each time which sometimes even has 2 syllables.

[Llawygath]

Long time, no see, Llawygath. Welcome back.

On the relative pointlessness of sex-based gender, I'll direct you to another post I've made lately.

viewtopic.php?p=1014385#p1014385

I'd just add two things:

1) Avoid conflating "masculine/feminine" with "male/female". One pair is a linguistic concept, the other a biological one. And also avoid conflating a noun with the object it describes. In French, the word "table" is in the feminine grammatical gender. That does not mean that tables themselves are somehow feminine, nor does it mean they are of the female sex. Neither of those things is the point. See my previous post (in this thread or the linked one) for more on that.

2) The names "masculine" and "feminine" are totally arbitrary. If we called these genders something else, like Gender A and Gender B, they'd still function the same way, but there'd be a lot fewer misconceptions about them.

I see. I understand that masculine and feminine genders are arbitrary, but the arbitrariness of it was precisely my point: whether or not one considers that a table is being stated to have a sex, the gender of its word conveys no information except perhaps for the benefits of redundancy. Of course, none of that is to say that such a gender system is "bad". I did say "seems ... to me".

[Atluk]

I stand corrected. While it may be true that I don't need an inflection to know that a noun is feminine, I can just say "La gata" to refer a female cat instead of just saying "female cat." By the article and suffix, I know it is a girl cat.

Yes, this and what Dormouse said, for my conlang I considered it's not reason enough, like why categorise all nouns this way, just because it can clear things up for a minority of them. Matter of taste after all.

The same case is with conjugating verbs by person, why have them when you can just put its pronoun before it, much easier to understand and learn, one could say, but I kept this feature because I felt it's more convenient for me to put a letter at the end of the verb and indicate the person this way rather then to use the whole pronoun each time which sometimes even has 2 syllables.

That is what I like about Spanish. I can say "Hablo" meaning "I speak" without putting "yo" in front of it. I guess that why all of my conlangs had conjugating verbs.

[linguoboy]

That is what I like about Spanish. I can say "Hablo" meaning "I speak" without putting "yo" in front of it. I guess that why all of my conlangs had conjugating verbs.

You should have a look at how pro-drop languages work. They both lack person inflections on verbs and avoid using personal pronouns.

Colloquial English can actually be very pro-drop at times:

A: Goin' to work today?
B: Dunno. Haven't decided yet. You?
A: Gotta. Get fired otherwise.
B: Goin' out later?
A: Can't. Don't get paid till next week.
etc.

[rubs]

I have quite decided beyond inflectional polysynthetic.
However the language has a very low frequency of punctuation[goes without saying since it's usually between words]