Zamũzi Qamà

[brnath]

Hello, everyone. Today I want to start a presentation of Zamũzi Qamà (pronounced za'muŋzi dʒa'maʊ).

PHONOLOGY

CONSONANTS
/ b d g / < b d g >
/ v z ʒ ð ʐ ɣ / < v z j t x k >
/ dz dʒ dʐ gɣ / < c q s h >
/ w l j / < w l y >
/m n ŋ* / < m n ˜ >
/ ɾ / < r >

VOWELS
/ a ɛ i o u ɪ** ʊ** ə** / < a e i o u ´ ` ˆ >

* the phoneme /ŋ/ only appears after vowels and is written with a tilde. (<ã> = /aŋ/)
** the phonemes /ɪ ʊ ə/ only appear in diphthongs as off glides, and are written with acute, grave, and circumflex accents, respectively (<á à â> = /aɪ aʊ aə/)

The alphabet is ordered like this: w m b v u t j z q c e n l r d x s i y g k h a
Every consonant letter has a natural vowel, which is the vowel thought most easy to pronounce along with that consonant. A consonant's natural vowel is the one found closest to the right of it in the alphabet.



NOUN DECLENSION: Using Class and Order to create Case and Number Suffixes

Nouns have two innate properties that affect how case and number suffixes are added.

1. Class affects the suffixes used to create CASE.
Class refers to the consonant that ends the word. There are four classes, each with a different natural vowel (the vowel most easily pronounced after consonants in that area) which is used to form the nominative case. Accusative, Dative, and Genitive are formed through other unnatural vowels added to the noun stem.
Labial (Class I): w, m, b, v (natural vowel: u)
Dental (Class II): t, j, z, q, c (natural vowel: e)
Alveolar (Class III): n, l, r, d, x, s (natural vowel: i)
Palatal/Velar (Class IV): y, g, k, h (natural vowel: a)

The same four vowels form all four cases for all four noun classes. It may seem confusing, but if you understand which class a noun belongs to, you can easily tell the case it belongs in. Both across and down the case table, notice the consistent pattern -u, -e, -i, -a, which causes each vowel to determine a different case for each noun class.
Class/Case Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive
Labial (I) -u -e -i -a
Dental (II) -e -i -a -u
Alveolar (III) -i -a -u -e
Palatal/Velar (IV) -a -u -e -i


2. Order affects the suffixes used to create NUMBER, as well as ARTICLES.
Order refers to the semantic group to which a word belongs. There are 5 orders: Human, Animal, Nature, Tangible Object and Concept. Each forms its plural differently. Notice the pattern à, á, â, an, ã and how it repeats down the Plural and Collective Plural columns, so each form is the plural of one order, and the collective plural of another.
Order/Number Singular Plural Collective Plural
Human (I) -u/e/i/a -ò/è/ì/à -ú/é/ó/á
Animal (II) -u/e/i/a -ú/é/ó/á -û/ê/î/â
Nature (III) -u/e/i/a -û/ê/î/â -un/en/in/an
Tangible Object (IV) -u/e/i/a -un/en/in/an -ũ/ẽ/ĩ/ã
Concept (V) -u/e/i/a -ũ/ẽ/ĩ/ã -ò/è/ì/à

Articles are different for each order, but do not change according to class or express number.
Order: definite, indefinite
Human: di, e
Animal: mã, o
Nature: ba, xo
Tangible Object: zo, ã
Concept: ja, u
With these tables, the correct form for any noun (all are regular!) can be created. Let’s take a few examples. Here are a couple nouns, listed as noun (Order, Class.) definition

qam (I, I) person
Case/Number Singular Plural Collective Plural
Nominative qamu qamò qamú
Accusative qame qamè qamé
Dative qami qamì qamó
Genitive qama qamà qamá

dãz (IV, II) thing
Case/Number Singular Plural Collective Plural
Nominative dãze dãzen dãzẽ
Accusative dãzi dãzin dãzĩ
Dative dãza dãzan dãzã
Genitive dãzu dãzun dãzũ

joh (III, IV) tree
Case/Number Singular Plural Collective Plural
Nominative joha johâ johan
Accusative johu johû johun
Dative johe johê johen
Genitive johi johî johin

bél (II, III) bird
Case/Number Singular Plural Collective Plural
Nominative béli béló bélî
Accusative béla bélá bélâ
Dative bélu bélú bélû
Genitive béle bélé bélê

There are many different ways there are to convey each case and number. In total, if we multiply the five orders times the four classes, there are a total of twenty different declension patterns for case/number.


ADJECTIVE DECLENSIONS: Using Class for Adjectives and Agreement

Adjectives are words that modify nouns, and must agree with them in case. Adjectives lack the five orders present in nouns (used to express plurals), but do have class (used to express case). Therefore, an adjective only has four forms: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, and Genitive. Thankfully, the same endings are used as those used for nouns. Take a look at this table. Look familiar? It’s the same table for noun case suffixes. Adjectives work the same way!
Class/Case Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive
Labial (I) -u -e -i -a
Dental (II) -e -i -a -u
Alveolar (III) -i -a -u -e
Palatal/Velar (IV) -a -u -e -i

Let’s look at an example adjective in all it’s forms: en (III) good.
Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive
en (good) eni ena enu ene


The word en can directly modify a noun as well. This is done by placing the adjective immediately before the noun. Make sure that the cases agree! Here are all the forms of an example noun, qam (person), with the agreeing adjective forms.
Case/Number Singular Plural Collective Plural
Nominative eni qamu eni qamò eni qamú
Accusative ena qame ena qamè ena qamé
Dative enu qami enu qamì enu qamó
Genitive ene qama ene qamà ene qamá

When modifying a noun through a predicate, the nominative form is simply used alone. (No verb “to be” used here!)
The person is good. / Di qamu eni.
A thing is good. / Ã dãze eni.


VERB CONJUGATION: Using Class to Determine Conjugation Patterns

Verbs are special because, unlike adjectives and nouns, they are linguistically marked as verbs. If one did not know the words, adjectives and nouns could appear the same in many contexts. Verbs are different however, because they all begin with the vowel i-. In every morphological form of a verb that acts as a verb (agent nouns/verbal nouns etc… NO), the initial -i is present.

Verb mood, aspect, and voice are expressed through an extra word, while tense is expressed through the natural vowel series. Number and Order agreement are expressed through suffixes.

Present Indicative
This is formed with the addition of a natural vowel to the verb stem.
Past Indicative
This is formed with the addition of a subtracted vowel (one forward in the ueia series)
Future Indicative
This is formed with the addition of an additive vowel (one backward in the ueia series)
Present Subjunctive
This is formed with a word added before the present indicative.
Past Subjunctive
This is formed with a word added before the past indicative.
Conditional
This is formed with a word added before the future indicative.
Imperative
This is formed directly from the present indicative.

Order/Number Agreement:
Order/Number Singular Plural Collective Plural
Human (I) -u/e/i/a -ò/è/ì/à -ú/é/ó/á
Animal (II) -u/e/i/a -ú/é/ó/á -û/ê/î/â
Nature (III) -u/e/i/a -û/ê/î/â -un/en/in/an
Tangible Object (IV) -u/e/i/a -un/en/in/an -ũ/ẽ/ĩ/ã
Concept (V) -u/e/i/a -ũ/ẽ/ĩ/ã -ò/è/ì/à


in (go)

The person goes. Di qamu ini. The person went. Di qamu ina. The person will go. Di qamu ine.
The people go. Di qamò inì. The people went. Di qamò inà. The people will go. Di qamò inè.
People go. E qamú iní. People went. E qamú iná. People will go. E qamú iné.

ijãm (eat)

The bird eats. Mã béli ijãmu. The bird ate. Mã béli ijãme. The bird will eat. Mã béli ijãma.
The birds eat. Mã béló ijãmá. The birds ate. Mã béló ijãmé. The birds will eat. Mã béló ijãmá.
Birds eat. O bélî ijãmû. Birds ate. O bélî ijãmê. Birds will eat. O bélî ijãmâ.

Verbal nouns are formed with the natural vowel + ˜ and -z. (That's where we get "speech"/zamũz, from izam (to speak)).

Let me know what you think!

[Omzinesý]

I like this.
I didn't read it well enough to comment properly.
No voiceless plosives! Do you have some reason for it?

[brnath]

I like this.
I didn't read it well enough to comment properly.
No voiceless plosives! Do you have some reason for it?

I didn't include any voiceless consonants just as an artistic decision. I thought it would sound cool to have only voiced sounds.

[brnath]

Sorry! Now realizing this should actually be called Zamũze Qamà because the natural vowel of 'z' is 'e'. Zamũzi would be the accusative!

[idov]

Woah! Your romanization must be really dense if [aɪŋ] can be represented with just <á̃>. And even though there seems to be no clusters, the examples seem to be roughly as short as English.
Is this lang supposed to be naturalistic? 'Cause I've trouble seeing how that -/a/ means the genitive in one class of nouns and no other, and still be present in all other classes where it means always something different from all others, would evolve naturally. Though, I must say, that every consonant comes with one associated vowel and that the alphabet is built around that is pretty cool.

It's far from a relex but the English vibe is undeniable. All grammatical affixes are suffixes, there are definite and indefinite articles that don't seem to be agreeing with anyone else and come before the noun, the adjectives come before the noun, the imperative is formed from the present indicative, the language is nominative-accusative and I will take a stab in the dark and guess that it's SVO.

I will reserve my judgement though. There's much more to syntax than that. Things like relative clauses, questions, variable word order, serial and auxiliary verbs, conjunctions and surely many things I cannot recall now will all give your lang a chance to be something unique. Or maybe you just want to be englishy.

[brnath]

Woah! Your romanization must be really dense if [aɪŋ] can be represented with just <á̃>. And even though there seems to be no clusters, the examples seem to be roughly as short as English.
Is this lang supposed to be naturalistic? 'Cause I've trouble seeing how that -/a/ means the genitive in one class of nouns and no other, and still be present in all other classes where it means always something different from all others, would evolve naturally. Though, I must say, that every consonant comes with one associated vowel and that the alphabet is built around that is pretty cool.

It's far from a relex but the English vibe is undeniable. All grammatical affixes are suffixes, there are definite and indefinite articles that don't seem to be agreeing with anyone else and come before the noun, the adjectives come before the noun, the imperative is formed from the present indicative, the language is nominative-accusative and I will take a stab in the dark and guess that it's SVO.

I will reserve my judgement though. There's much more to syntax than that. Things like relative clauses, questions, variable word order, serial and auxiliary verbs, conjunctions and surely many things I cannot recall now will all give your lang a chance to be something unique. Or maybe you just want to be englishy.

1. Actually, the ´, `, ˜, ˆ accents can only be placed on vowels one at a time, so á̃ actually can't occur.
2. It is supposed to be naturalistic... I guess it is kind of unlikely that the vowels would evolve like that. What I thought could cause this was different cases using vowels farther and farther from the natural vowel. I was trying to achieve a complex feature that could have natural origins.
3. Yeah, I realize the English-ness of it. I'm gonna play around with word order and grammar to change that.

Thanks for the feedback!!

[HoskhMatriarch]

I like this.
I didn't read it well enough to comment properly.
No voiceless plosives! Do you have some reason for it?

I didn't include any voiceless consonants just as an artistic decision. I thought it would sound cool to have only voiced sounds.

Voiceless obstruents are more common than voiced. I'm pretty sure it's impossible for a natlang to have only voiced sounds. It's also impossible to have only voiceless, as vowels and sonorants are always present as voiced in languages even if there are voiceless counterparts. You can have more voiced or more voiceless consonants than average depending on how you do your phonology though. Mongolian has some random voiced obstruents that it doesn't have voiceless equivalents for, for example, and there are way too many examples I can think of that go the other way.

Here is a page on consonant voicing and devoicing so you can know some common processes that'll lead more to sounds you want: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consona ... _devoicing

Woah! Your romanization must be really dense if [aɪŋ] can be represented with just <á̃>. And even though there seems to be no clusters, the examples seem to be roughly as short as English.
Is this lang supposed to be naturalistic? 'Cause I've trouble seeing how that -/a/ means the genitive in one class of nouns and no other, and still be present in all other classes where it means always something different from all others, would evolve naturally. Though, I must say, that every consonant comes with one associated vowel and that the alphabet is built around that is pretty cool.

It's far from a relex but the English vibe is undeniable. All grammatical affixes are suffixes, there are definite and indefinite articles that don't seem to be agreeing with anyone else and come before the noun, the adjectives come before the noun, the imperative is formed from the present indicative, the language is nominative-accusative and I will take a stab in the dark and guess that it's SVO.

I will reserve my judgement though. There's much more to syntax than that. Things like relative clauses, questions, variable word order, serial and auxiliary verbs, conjunctions and surely many things I cannot recall now will all give your lang a chance to be something unique. Or maybe you just want to be englishy.

1. Actually, the ´, `, ˜, ˆ accents can only be placed on vowels one at a time, so á̃ actually can't occur.
2. It is supposed to be naturalistic... I guess it is kind of unlikely that the vowels would evolve like that. What I thought could cause this was different cases using vowels farther and farther from the natural vowel. I was trying to achieve a complex feature that could have natural origins.
3. Yeah, I realize the English-ness of it. I'm gonna play around with word order and grammar to change that.

Thanks for the feedback!!

1. That seems like a weird rule. Languages evolve and then their orthographies must fit themselves to them, not the other way around.
2. Actually, you could probably do something like that with ablauts and vowel gradiation, whether or not it's the same thing. I've never seen exactly that, but I've seen similar things to that, so I'm not going to say that's completely unnaturalistic. I think you'll just have to research ablaut morphology and stem change morphology more yourself.
3. You can still have a lot of features in common with English and have a very different language. Just get familiar with all the things languages can do and pick your favorites. I have a language that has determiners and adjectives before nouns, but it also has polypersonal agreement and stuff English doesn't have. Also, to help with words once you get there so you don't just relex English, this is good: http://fiatlingua.org/wp-content/upload ... 024-00.pdf Again, it's OK to have stuff in common with English (or any other language for that matter), you just need to be aware of the options on things before you make decisions. I find looking at WALS and entering my language on CALS has helped me. http://wals.info http://cals.conlang.org

I like the animacy-based genders you have. That's definitely attested, although definitely not common. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy

[Omzinesý]

It's far from a relex but the English vibe is undeniable. All grammatical affixes are suffixes, there are definite and indefinite articles that don't seem to be agreeing with anyone else and come before the noun, the adjectives come before the noun, the imperative is formed from the present indicative, the language is nominative-accusative and I will take a stab in the dark and guess that it's SVO.

I will reserve my judgement though. There's much more to syntax than that. Things like relative clauses, questions, variable word order, serial and auxiliary verbs, conjunctions and surely many things I cannot recall now will all give your lang a chance to be something unique. Or maybe you just want to be englishy.

I don't find those especially Englishy characteristics. There are many langs that have much more suffixes than English. Arabic, for example, has a definite article that doesn't agree with anything. I would guess imperatives are normally formed from the indicative stem. Those may 'be the standard choices', but many conlangers (I at least) look for exotics and make languages that just don't work. Finding a good combo is much more important. It's enough to have one oddity to play with.

A language without voiced plosives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yidiny_la ... Consonants

[idov]

Thanks for the feedback!!

No probs.

Here is a page on consonant voicing and devoicing so you can know some common processes that'll lead more to sounds you want.

I think that is pretty much the best page you could have recommended. The only question left is: If the voiced sounds devoice about half of the time, how do we know that it's not just unvoiced sounds that get voiced? That is of course a meaningless question, though, they are one and the same.
If brnath prefers to write /b d g/ [p t k] it's cool.

1. That seems like a weird rule. Languages evolve and then their orthographies must fit themselves to them, not the other way around.

Implying the velar nasal ever follows a diphthong (or triphthong) in English. Can't you imagine the Zamuuzian scribes of olden times realizing one day that one certain glyph only occurred after letters without diacritics and thus, began to write it as though one as a shorthand?

2. Actually, you could probably do something like that with ablauts and vowel gradiation, whether or not it's the same thing. I've never seen exactly that, but I've seen similar things to that, so I'm not going to say that's completely unnaturalistic. I think you'll just have to research ablaut morphology and stem change morphology more yourself.

Yes, ablauts (and umlauts) do work but they are often quite simple. They do things like moving the vowel one step further down or one step forward. Seeing the vowels go around like a circle is what makes me skeptical. I could see that they would start out as the "natural" vowel corresponding to the previous consonant and then proceed in whatever direction but that when they had gotten to their most extreme position the vowels would stay there, rather than wrapping around, and all further inflections would be concatenative.

Also, I should probably read up on the Conlanger's Thesaurus.

I don't find those especially Englishy characteristics. There are many langs that have much more suffixes than English. Arabic, for example, has a definite article that doesn't agree with anything. I would guess imperatives are normally formed from the indicative stem. Those may 'be the standard choices', but many conlangers (I at least) look for exotics and make languages that just don't work. Finding a good combo is much more important. It's enough to have one oddity to play with.

The "problem" isn't having one englishy feature, it's having loads of them. Even if the chance of having anyone of the features I mentioned would be one half, the chance of having all of them would be less than one hundredth, enough for me to question how unique this lang is (going to be).
If you want to calculate the more exact chance of hitting some of them I've got you covered:

Probability of case suffixing: 452/1031
Probability of definite article distinct from demonstrative: 216/620
Probability of indefinite word distinct from numeral for 'one': 102/534
Probability of modifying adjective precedes noun: 373/1366
Probability of nominative - accusative alignment on pronouns: 64/172
Probability of SVO: 488/1377 or 677/1377 if you also count those where no word order is dominant.

The probability is less than 0.15% even if we use the highest possible results. Of course, I could go to WALS and show that two very different natlangs happen to end up in the same categories tens of times. But there would be many more categories where they would disagree. This far, Zamũzi Qamà has landed in the same category as English more than not.

[qwed117]

Spoiler:

Thanks for the feedback!!

No probs.

Here is a page on consonant voicing and devoicing so you can know some common processes that'll lead more to sounds you want.

I think that is pretty much the best page you could have recommended. The only question left is: If the voiced sounds devoice about half of the time, how do we know that it's not just unvoiced sounds that get voiced? That is of course a meaningless question, though, they are one and the same.
If brnath prefers to write /b d g/ [p t k] it's cool.

1. That seems like a weird rule. Languages evolve and then their orthographies must fit themselves to them, not the other way around.

Implying the velar nasal ever follows a diphthong (or triphthong) in English. Can't you imagine the Zamuuzian scribes of olden times realizing one day that one certain glyph only occurred after letters without diacritics and thus, began to write it as though one as a shorthand?

2. Actually, you could probably do something like that with ablauts and vowel gradiation, whether or not it's the same thing. I've never seen exactly that, but I've seen similar things to that, so I'm not going to say that's completely unnaturalistic. I think you'll just have to research ablaut morphology and stem change morphology more yourself.

Yes, ablauts (and umlauts) do work but they are often quite simple. They do things like moving the vowel one step further down or one step forward. Seeing the vowels go around like a circle is what makes me skeptical. I could see that they would start out as the "natural" vowel corresponding to the previous consonant and then proceed in whatever direction but that when they had gotten to their most extreme position the vowels would stay there, rather than wrapping around, and all further inflections would be concatenative.

Also, I should probably read up on the Conlanger's Thesaurus.

I don't find those especially Englishy characteristics. There are many langs that have much more suffixes than English. Arabic, for example, has a definite article that doesn't agree with anything. I would guess imperatives are normally formed from the indicative stem. Those may 'be the standard choices', but many conlangers (I at least) look for exotics and make languages that just don't work. Finding a good combo is much more important. It's enough to have one oddity to play with.

The "problem" isn't having one englishy feature, it's having loads of them. Even if the chance of having anyone of the features I mentioned would be one half, the chance of having all of them would be less than one hundredth, enough for me to question how unique this lang is (going to be).
If you want to calculate the more exact chance of hitting some of them I've got you covered:

Probability of case suffixing: 452/1031
Probability of definite article distinct from demonstrative: 216/620
Probability of indefinite word distinct from numeral for 'one': 102/534
Probability of modifying adjective precedes noun: 373/1366
Probability of nominative - accusative alignment on pronouns: 64/172
Probability of SVO: 488/1377 or 677/1377 if you also count those where no word order is dominant.

The probability is less than 0.15% even if we use the highest possible results. Of course, I could go to WALS and show that two very different natlangs happen to end up in the same categories tens of times. But there would be many more categories where they would disagree. This far, Zamũzi Qamà has landed in the same category as English more than not.

He's made 19 posts. Ease up on him, his language is more than interesting enough. I'd rather have his language be the way it is rather than having him kitchen-sinking this. Second of all, have you heard of the gambler's fallacy, it seems that you've fallen for a heavy dose of that, and possibly the ticket paradox. Second of all, if the probability is 0.15%, then YOU find a combination of patterns that no language has, but still has a probability of greater than 0.15%. Second of all, English has no case suffixing. Next, use the CALS subset. idov, you're acting like a prick. Let him have his learning day, but don't overwhelm him.

[MrKrov]

Implying the velar nasal ever follows a diphthong (or triphthong) in English.

Well, this's where things get spooky. Like so many ghastly North Americans, I happen to have at least one diphthong before a velar nasal. Basically /ei/.
This's of minimal consequence, but the more you know!

[Lao Kou]

Sorry! Now realizing this should actually be called Zamũze Qamà because the natural vowel of 'z' is 'e'. Zamũzi would be the accusative!

Would it be possible to change the thread title to reflect this so the correct rather than the incorrect form gets seared into my eyeballs? Beyond that, looking forward to more.

[idov]

At no occasion have I've been mean to him (I am not sure about gender here but if you say so...) or called his language is uninteresting. I've called it "not unique" and "englishy" but that is the full extent of my criticism, ignoring my concerns for how naturalistic it is. And I asked him quite politely if his intent was to make a naturalistic non-englishy lang and got an affirmative on both. Of course, I may have done one faux pas or another or not picked up on a social cue, (I'm admittedly prone to do that). If so, I owe an apology. Be kind to us both, I've only been posting on these forums for 73 days myself (my days of lurking have gone on for years though), and not tremendously many times a day have I posted.

My reasoning still stands, more features than not have lined up with English.
I'm well aware of the fallacies involved, thank you. The gambler's fallacy is about the fact that randomness doesn't have a memory. So even if I have rolled four 5's in a row on a regular die the next roll still has the probability of one in six of being a 5.
If you mean by "the ticket paradox" the fact that anyone ticket in a lottery is extremely unlikely to win but that it would be downright foolish to say that no lottery ticket will win, we are on the same page. My concern is not about simple probabilities alone. We all want to explore and exploit the whole range of possibilities that languages offer, no? And we often over-use features that are close to us, like those in our most fluent languages. Obviously, brnath is well-versed in English and therefore it stands to believe that he will use features from English more than he would ideally want to. This is no attack on him as a new conlanger, the seasoned kanejam, just as an example, got some wake-up call when realizing how common double negation is.
Were this a French forum, I'd be 'concerned' if most features lined up with French.
Were this a Chinese forum, I'd react the same way to a very mandarin lang and so on...

You're absolutely right, my qwed. Making a kitchen-sink would be bad. I'm trying to find a middle way. Cases are shown on pronouns in English, if i misinterpreted the WALS chapter, there is nothing I can do but say I'm sorry.

One of the things I was less skeptical about than it seemed the other posters were, was the lack of the velar nasal after diphthongs. It is understandable that others would be, especially now if their dialects do allow it. (I had actually no idea about that, so thanks.) I was just a bit flabbergasted by the assumption that the conlang would have evolved due to its script rather than that the script got denser due to its language.

Brnath says that there will be many things not reminiscent of English and I believe in that and that these things we've seen so far are more like flukes than a representative sample of the conlang.

For renaming this thread to into the nominative.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Thanks for the feedback!!

No probs.

Here is a page on consonant voicing and devoicing so you can know some common processes that'll lead more to sounds you want.

I think that is pretty much the best page you could have recommended. The only question left is: If the voiced sounds devoice about half of the time, how do we know that it's not just unvoiced sounds that get voiced? That is of course a meaningless question, though, they are one and the same.
If brnath prefers to write /b d g/ [p t k] it's cool.

1. That seems like a weird rule. Languages evolve and then their orthographies must fit themselves to them, not the other way around.

Implying the velar nasal ever follows a diphthong (or triphthong) in English. Can't you imagine the Zamuuzian scribes of olden times realizing one day that one certain glyph only occurred after letters without diacritics and thus, began to write it as though one as a shorthand?

2. Actually, you could probably do something like that with ablauts and vowel gradiation, whether or not it's the same thing. I've never seen exactly that, but I've seen similar things to that, so I'm not going to say that's completely unnaturalistic. I think you'll just have to research ablaut morphology and stem change morphology more yourself.

Yes, ablauts (and umlauts) do work but they are often quite simple. They do things like moving the vowel one step further down or one step forward. Seeing the vowels go around like a circle is what makes me skeptical. I could see that they would start out as the "natural" vowel corresponding to the previous consonant and then proceed in whatever direction but that when they had gotten to their most extreme position the vowels would stay there, rather than wrapping around, and all further inflections would be concatenative.

Also, I should probably read up on the Conlanger's Thesaurus.

I don't find those especially Englishy characteristics. There are many langs that have much more suffixes than English. Arabic, for example, has a definite article that doesn't agree with anything. I would guess imperatives are normally formed from the indicative stem. Those may 'be the standard choices', but many conlangers (I at least) look for exotics and make languages that just don't work. Finding a good combo is much more important. It's enough to have one oddity to play with.

The "problem" isn't having one englishy feature, it's having loads of them. Even if the chance of having anyone of the features I mentioned would be one half, the chance of having all of them would be less than one hundredth, enough for me to question how unique this lang is (going to be).
If you want to calculate the more exact chance of hitting some of them I've got you covered:

Probability of case suffixing: 452/1031
Probability of definite article distinct from demonstrative: 216/620
Probability of indefinite word distinct from numeral for 'one': 102/534
Probability of modifying adjective precedes noun: 373/1366
Probability of nominative - accusative alignment on pronouns: 64/172
Probability of SVO: 488/1377 or 677/1377 if you also count those where no word order is dominant.

The probability is less than 0.15% even if we use the highest possible results. Of course, I could go to WALS and show that two very different natlangs happen to end up in the same categories tens of times. But there would be many more categories where they would disagree. This far, Zamũzi Qamà has landed in the same category as English more than not.

I think you should just wait until s/he has posted more things about their language to judge how similar it is to English. You could cherry-pick things from my language and make it look like an English clone if you wanted to.

[idov]

Yes.
As previously stated, I will reserve my judgement though. There are many more things to syntax than that.