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Re: Conlang Areal Tests

Posted: 15 Mar 2018 09:05
by Iyionaku
I just looked through the natlang section and I feel that either some of the grammar stats for Mandarin are incorrect or I don't understand the stat itself.

5. The passive in Chinese is not formed with any verb for "to be". The preposition 被 is used. Furthermore there is no past participle in Chinese at all.
15. Chinese has medial connectives, you can translate "you and I" literally as 你和我 or 你根我.
22. Chinese has SVO word order.
31. Chinese favors prepositions compared to postpositions. Circumpositions are also very common, but if 0 implies that postpositions are more common than prepositions, this is wrong.
34. Chinese has symmetric standard negation, WALS even says that is has "both". It should have 0.5 or 1 point therefore.
41. Degree words in Chinese can precede the adjective, some might not but many definitely do. 非常好,好 do while 好极了 does not, for example. Should be 0.5 points.
44. Chinese doesn't have verbal suppletion, except you mean the past tense negation 没 being different from the present tense negation 不.
48. Chinese doesn't have a past/non-past-distinction, but rather perfective/imperfective.
50. Chinese does have a T-V distinction even if it is (apparently, am no expert) less prevalent than in French, Spanish or German. 你 vs 您.

There are propably more, but those are just the ones that immediately jumped me.

Re: Conlang Areal Tests

Posted: 17 Mar 2018 22:25
by Reyzadren
While griuskant scored the highest in the SAE phonology test there, I was slightly surprised that it only scored 28% on the SAE grammar.

I assumed that there would be more SAE influences as a non-linguist's typical boring normal standard conlang, but I guess some people who commented otherwise were right after all.

Re: Conlang Areal Tests

Posted: 17 Mar 2018 22:28
by Parlox
Does anyone know where I can find that SAE grammar test? I can't seem to find it.

Re: Conlang Areal Tests

Posted: 17 Mar 2018 23:01
by alynnidalar
Do you mean the ones linked in the first post of this thread?

Re: Conlang Areal Tests

Posted: 17 Mar 2018 23:18
by Parlox
alynnidalar wrote: 17 Mar 2018 23:01 Do you mean the ones linked in the first post of this thread?
I didn't notice that, thanks for pointing that out!

Re: Conlang Areal Tests

Posted: 18 Mar 2018 20:15
by Parlox
I put Bàsupan through these tests, and the results I got were a bit interesting. Bàsupan is 9.5% European, 25% Siberian, 10% West African, and 10% east Asian. (According to the points I got, I only did the grammar tests).