New CBB

As far as I can tell I used it correctly. Basque is, to my knowledge, an example of a purely ergative language; thus, the ergative ideal. And in spite of (read: notwithstanding) Basque, not all ergative languages are the ergative ideal.

But back to isolating languages, I'm currently working on an isolating language, and it's hard to go for the ideal: monosyllabic words, relatively simple morphology, no real declensions, etc. If your language is highly isolating or just mostly isolating, I would still call it isolating.

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Hra'anh, Ponese

Then you're wrong. Basque is not the ergative ideal, and in fact far from it. (See, your correct use of notwithstanding helped me disabuse you of a mistaken notion regarding Basque, who'd've thunk! However, I favour assuming people know things more accurately than they know how to use words, and therefore tend to err on the side of guessing that someone's using words wrong rather than erring on the side of assuming they are wrong about facts.)

Then maybe I should read about it instead of relying on what I hear others saying next time. :P I wish I had more time to do these things.

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Hra'anh, Ponese

I'd like to see more isolating conlangs with some polysyllabic roots instead of tones.

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‹› · Ḿḿ Ńń Ĺĺ Śś Źź Ąą Ǫǫ Ųų Æ̨æ̨ Ǽǽ Œ̨œ̨ Œ́œ́ Ɣɣ Y̋y̋ Įį Şş Z̧z̧ θ
Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū ↗ Ṭṭ C̣c̣ Łł Ḍḍ Ṣṣ Ẓẓ Ṇṇ Ŋŋ e˞ o˞ ʷ ʲ ʰ ə

With an average number of consonants (20) and an average number of vowels (5), a language could have 10,000 CVCV roots or 1,000,000 CVCVCV roots or 4,000,000 CVCCVC roots.

If roots could take any of the forms CVCVC CCVCV VCCVC CVCCV VCVCC, there could be 5*20,000 = 1,000,000 of them.

There are natlangs whose roots almost all are CVCV in form; many Polynesian languages, for instance.

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OTOH you're asking for polysyllabic roots in an isolating conlang.

In an isolating analytic language every word has only one morpheme. So you might as well say that the word's only morpheme is its root morphome.

Maybe you'd want to call the verbs and nouns and adjectives, and maybe also the adverbs, "roots", and let them be polysyllabic. "Polysyllabic" may mean up to three syllables; or it may mean only up to two syllables.

Conjunctions, and probably adpositions, and likely pronouns, and maybe also adverbs, might be "particles" instead. Maybe you'd want most of them to be shorter.

There'd be many minor parts-of-speech. There'd probably be a hell of a lot of auxiliaries, for instance; these would also be "particles". There'd also be articles and quantifiers and determiners and degree-words and so on and so forth.

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I don't know whether you'd allow apophony or ablaut to operate on a "root", or whether that would be a violation of isolatingness or of analyticity, or whether instead you would count that in with a "tone" system as something you'd rather avoid.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

Some of my languages could possibly qualify as isolating - or at least analytical - while still having most words bi- och more-syllabic.

Mii is quite radically isolating. 6 consonants and 3 vowels with 2 lengths - that means 36 syllables. Or 1296 bisyllabic, or 46656 trisyllabic, words.

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constructedlanguages.net

And nonpolysyllabic roots without tones?

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Up in blue sky silly blimp goes by
Where it come from where it go
Ziggy-Zaggy it fly high

Without tones, it's hard to get many monosyllabic roots (or morphemes) with an average number of consonant phonemes and an average number of vowel phonemes and an average syllable-structure.

For instance suppose we have 25 consonants and 5 vowels and syllable-structure (C)(R)V(C) where R means a sonorant and there are 6 sonorants. That'd be something around 23,660 syllables. That's probably not enough; you'd probably want 30,000-50,000 at a minimum. Having two different tones could do that for you.

OTOH with a more complicated syllable-structure you could get more syllables.
(C)(C)V(C)(C) could give you 804,005 different syllables with 20 consonants and 5 vowels.

And, with a larger phoneme-inventory, you could get more syllables even with a simple syllable structure.
Suppose there are 32 consonants and 14 vowels. (C)(R)V(C) could get you 100,352 syllables.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

Your answer has nothing to do with what Skógvur would like to see more of and whether meeting one of the criteria would still be OK.

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Up in blue sky silly blimp goes by
Where it come from where it go
Ziggy-Zaggy it fly high

A few thousand roots would probably be more than enough to cover the basic, everyday terminology. More specialised terminology could be handled through loanwords or compounding. Surely, you could claim that this would violate the criteria of monosyllabicity and isolation - if you interpret these criteria in the most literal sense.

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constructedlanguages.net