Re: a "natural language" ?

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 08:16:51 +0000, Chris Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

>After English, Spanish and other Indo-European languages I am constantly
>shocked by the regularity of some (especially agglutinating languages,
>although Hungarian is a bit of an exception to this rule) like Swahili
>and Basque that in the main don't have different noun declensions, large
>numbers of irregular verbs/nouns etc... I don't think there is any
>completely regular language, but its still surprising how regular some
>languages can manage to be. Of course, very isolating languages are also
>extremely straightforward when it comes to morphology, but  that's just
>because they don't have much. :)
> I'm not saying that I think they seem fake but... sometimes I think of
>naturalistic as partly meaning full of irregularities, which is one of
>the reason I find some of my own (half finished) conlangs "fake", so its
>nice to know that there are nice regular languages out there.
>
Turkish, especially after the complex vowel harmonies of Kazakh, has always
seemed more than a little artificial in its comparative simplicity; rather
like a Turkic language pared down to the minimum and regularised for ease
of use.
Still, I guess the Ataturk language reform would do that- they did try to
eliminate borrowings and regularise the language, so it _is_ partly
artificial.

Geoff

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