Typological Questions and Attestation

Every now and then, people post typological/universal-related questions on conlanging fora and groups, such as 'is so-and-so reasonable/possible/attested in languages'.

Oftentimes, people will respond by pointing to languages whose names you've never heard. This is of course not all that much of a problem ­­- the fact that I had never heard of Choroté before starting this article does not make Choroté less relevant for understanding all the wonderful things human languages can do.

Some other languages that have the same property - viz. that I had never heard of them before starting this article are less relevant for understanding all those wonderful things, however. Two of them are Mis Hio and Rangyayo. What makes them less relevant? They are conlangs. They tell us what a conlanger can imagine, not what is possible within the range of what a human speech community can maintain over generations.

So, when answering whether so-and-so is possible, think a bit. Either make it clear somehow that it's a conlang you are posting about (less known real natural languages might benefit from having their geographical location or family included), or even try to figure out whether the question benefits at all from an answer that includes conlangs.

The fact that a conlang has a feature only means the feature can be imaginable and is not somehow self-contradictory. I could very well construct a conlang in which the phonemes /e/, /i/, /f/ and /r/ have associated integer values, and all well-formed words for different word classes or different forms have the sums of the numbers associated with those phonemes add up to something, modulo something else.

This is possible, but it doesn't inform us whether humans actually can learn and speak such a thing.

Thus, me pointing out that my conlang Blarghhargh has that feature is not helpful at all to understanding anything about real languages. Let's grant whoever asks a question of typological nature some consideration - let's evaluate whether what our imaginary languages do is relevant to whoever asks the question. Your conlang is not an attestation of anything than the power of imagination. And if you post about your conlang, try to make it clear that it's a conlang - no one can know the names of all the conlangs, and no one can know the names of all the natural languages.

Let's help other conlangers keep their typological real-world data untainted from imagination.