If you want to go full-on megalomaniac with regards to conlanging, how about designing the language universals (both absolute and universal) for the world of your conlangs!
However, we could start out with some things that would end up somewhat different from human languages (or maybe these things exist, but no one's come up with the idea of analyzing things in terms of these exact structures?) Let's first look at hierarchies.
Hierarchies are a popular thing in universals research, and a good one is the relativization accessibility hierarchy:
subjects ← objects ← ...
But how about cyclical hierarchies? Here, the implications would need a restriction - a circle of "true implications" would obviously lead to either all features or none of them. However, let's use some other "operator".
A1 ⇴2 A2 ⇴2 A3 ⇴2 A4 ⇴2 A5 ⇴2 A6 ⇴2 A1 ...
The superscript 3 signifies the length of the implication chain. Basically, ⇴x should be read as 'if a language has An, but not An - 1, then it also has An+1 and An+2 and ... and A⇴n+x.
Notice that implication only goes one way: if we're dealing with ⇴2 and the hierarchy described above, the language could very well have A1 to A5 - it only tells us how short the chain at least is, not how long it maximally is.
A language could also imaginably have several discontinuous bits of a long universal cycle. We can also imagine different superscript-operators in different parts of the hierarchy. An extra possibility would be 'bolded' operators as well - if another chain of properties reaches a bolded operator, it is forced to continue at least as long as the bolded operator says. (Alternative, there could be bolded and nonbolded superscripts - bolded ones apply for long chains, non-bolded ones for a chain that is within its 'natural' reach.)
No comments:
Post a Comment