So, here are some things I want for English:
Agglutinating inflection of person, tense, aspect, number for verbs (agglutination refers to the adding of word elements with a single specific meaning to a base to make a complex word)
Agglutinating declension of nouns for case and number
Four biological genders--male, female, mixed (for groups of men and women), unknown
Four numbers--singular, plural, fluid/collective, unknown
No artificial gender (that is, a ship is not feminine, a female dog is neither "he" nor "it")
A variety of cases that would elliminate prepositions (which for some reason I despise)
Accusative and dative, two locative cases (one to show containment, one for other applications), Genitive. I don't understand the ablative case yet, so I don't know if it would be required. There may also be more relationships that need to be shown, for which an illogical and random preposition is substituted.
For unknown gender and number, I mean "the anonymous they." One could use "someone" but that is not specific enough, and too much of a mouthfull to function as a pronoun. I suggest "eyth" with apropriate case endings.
Extensive spelling overhaul (put off until later, or my examples will make even less sense than they already will)
I've already come up with the following:
Verbs
Tense:
Past Present Future
-d -u/ -wu
Perfect
-ga
Person
First Second Third
-i- -a- o
Number
Singular Plural Collective unknown
-s- -n- -th-
Suffixation of "ing" for progressive aspect, as in standard English
Examples using "to bring." /i/ is pronounced short in all of these, as in "bit" /i/ + (vowel) becomes iy. U in the future tense is pronounced "oo" and will eventually be represented by w (this is discarded for now, as I want to be clear).
"I was bringing" is bring+s+i+d+ing "bringsiding"
"We were bringing" bring+n+i+d+ing= "bringniding"
We will have brought: bring+n+i+u+ga "bringniyuga"
Nouns
Nominative -z
Dative -n
Accusative -m
Genitive -sh
Posessive -zh
Contained -g
locative -b
Singular -e-
Plural -ä- (as in english cat)
Collective -o-
unknown -/\- (a vowel as in english "but." IPA symbol not available on my keyboard)
"The keys are in the drawer" "Thaz keyaz be drawereg"
I'm too tired to pull an entirely new system of pronouns out of my ***, but I was thinking of something similar to the English nominatives with case endings.
Now, not all uses of prepositions can be replaced with cases. Example: The fan is on. When examined closely, however, this turns out to be a case of a word that can function both as a preposition and another part of speech. When you say "the fan is on," "on" is used as an adjective. You can therefore keep the word "on" and use it to describe a functioning appliance.
Case is fun for conlangs.
Wouldn't want much of it in English though.
Posessive is useful.
Instrumental/Instructive case would be useful. A rearragnment of grammatical rules would make even that useless.
Our grammatical structural needs no differentiation between nominative and accusative.
Aside from that, I say we just modify the normal case with prepositions, which are added, it seems, much easier than are cases to a language.
Preferably, the fewer cases the better.
There's a reason we only kept possessive outside the pronoun.
Of course, I love the fluidity prepositions and only like case as a conlanging tool, so I'm rather opposed to you here.
Like the numbers, (dual can be fun, but rather unecessary), might even just make it three: fluid/collective, definite number, indefinite number.
Like four better of course, but singular seems in many ways unecessary to me, when "one" can be used to specify.
Don't see the point of genders.
I'd like to eliminate them from grammatical usage, except when the information is needed (eg, "my female friend").
I think a nice simplication and elaboration of the pronouns may go like this:
I
We (inclusive)
We (exclusive)
You
They (present)
They (absent)
Again, I see singular/plural distinction as unecessarily messy.
Some sort(s) of objective pronoun (It). I'm found of creating several, but only one is really needed.
Formal vs. familar might also be useful (two forms of the royal we for example), though I'm thinking the distinction should be between a stranger and a friend rather than boss and flunky.
Were I to formalize the perfect, I'd use "en"
"En" goes nicely with "iŋ" as I see it, and that's how I do it with ingaux.
And you could say "the fan is functional."
As I said though, I like prepositions.
Prepositions could use some simplification though, as with pronouns, which also need some regularization, and some special adjectives and adverbs (such as still).
Also need a rule like in Spanish where any adjective can become a general noun or person described by adjective.
Es idiota.
It's idiotic or He's idiotic or He's an idiot.
So I suppose we'll at least need some inflections in that case to keep such things clear.
Also, we need some more letters added to our alphabet.
New letters for every phoneme without them, and for the sake of historical continuity, some for "wr" "gh" and "ph" and such as well. And for the alveolar tap ("tt" in latter), which it'd be neat to see if it can be made a new phoneme simply by orthnography.
Might make keyboards a bit larger and cause some whining, but it'd be much better in the long run.
At the very least we need to reinstate thorn, eth, and eng, and add some for esh and ezh, and for t+esh as well (And no more "soft" Gs. G was created as a "G" sound. If the French didn't like it, that's their problem). The vowels cannot be done halfway though.
My goal was to elliminate prepositions. I think they lend themselves naturally to irrelevant and illogical usage. I also want to free up word-order to make it more meaningful, that is, in showing emphasis.
Instrumental case can be useful. I know that ablative in Latin covers its uses, in addition to others (the ablative of means). Comitative is another possibility, with respect to case, but I'm not certain either is entirely necessary.
-th seems a reasonable instrumental ending (as in with).
Writesi peneth paperen.
There really is no need to contrast t in letter and t in toast, as the distinction is allophonic and it's exact pronunciation is supplied from context. I'd also like to drop all the etymological spellings.
In fact, I think a Cyrillic-based orthography may be what we need. Latin was only designed to cope with twenty sounds, and it has only expanded to include three more--v, w, and j (and j was originally just /i/ as a consonant).
Cyrillic presents a good alternative, especially the old Church Slavonic version. In fact, to adapt OCS to MnE, there are more letters to be discarded than the be added! Short vowels could be shown with the cyrillic soft vowels, Old Church Slavonic Fita would be given its original value of /th/, and thorn could be added to that. Yati (as opposed to ya) could be used for eye, osu for ow, and esu for oi.
Cyrillic already has keyboards designed for it, although some of the extra letters may be missing like fita, esu, osu, otu and yati. Yo is confusing and better discarded.
Letter would of course have the same value in all positions.
I've been reading about Finno-Ugric languages on wikipedia, and their diversity of cases gives me ideas. I'll have to try some translation to see which are necessary and which can be inferred from logic and context.
Some reasonable-seeming pronoun stems
I/we: Im-
You: It-
He: Eh-
She: Ish-
Mixed: Et-
Unknown: Eyth-
I= miyez
We= miyaz
Us= miyan, miyam
They (mixed group)= Etaz
They (males) = Ehaz
They (females) = Eshaz
They (anonymous)= Eythuhz
(uh= u in but)
Imezh is my, Imazh is our.
As I said, I like prepositions.
Easier to add and improvise than cases.
And I really so no point in bother with genders.
Boy/girl, man/woman, and male female should be quite enough to my mind withou adding it to the grammar.
And except where there's one of a kind (e.g. "I" plurality seems unecessary when numerals can be used.)
Instrumental has to be one of my favorite cases, largely because I invented it on my own (I called it "vessel") long before I knew that it existed linguistically. I still don't really like the idea of re-instating case in English.
I like the etymological spellings for historical sake, as I said.
I'm probably odd though.
And new phonemes are created by distinguishing allophones.
Now that I'm aware of it, I treat the tap as a seperate phoneme myself.
Distinguishing the tap would also make it easier for people learning English, most of whom see it as an "r."
I'm looking at Cyrillic, I suppose I'd have to see a keyboard before I know how it'd work. Though I suppose a new keyboard could be made.
It'd just take some programming knowledge to translate into Unicode, and some tap over the letters. Unfortunately, I don't have a clue as to how to reprogram a keyboard.
You could probably find a keyboard online.
The thing with prepositions is that all they do is substitute for case; in fact, most theories show case evolving out of attachment of pre- and postpositions to words. Which is why the inflexions I can't borrow from other languages I derived from english words like will, with, etc. Formalise the distinction and you have a great deal of freedom.
I guess what really bugs me about them is that they confuse me. If they were not available for use, things like telling time would be more precise and easy for me to understand.
So I admit it's rather self-serving. But let's face it, nobody's going to adopt any of this, so might as well have fun with it. This is basically going to be another conlang anyway, there are very few things I would bother advocating for English anyway, like better spelling.
I think it is better to refer to animals as their actual sex, instead of as "it." I think it would make abuse less likely, if they were concieved of as deserving recognition.
The unknown gender would be used for internet conversation and for unidentified parties. You can't say "he" or "she" in these instances, because there is really no way to tell. Using they implies plurality, which may also be untrue. Eythz is more precise and less given to male chauvinism
Adding gender only refers to pronouns, and it's use is entirely biological. Like I said, a female dog is not an "it" and anyone who cares to look can tell she's not a "he." Mixed gender comes from declining pronoun roots, instead of having separate pronouns for every instance. There is no need to learn I, me, we, us, when you can take a single first-person morpheme and decline it according to case and number.
Regardless of how case evolved, note that English and Spanish both dropped it, except on pronouns, and in the English possessive.
So clearly it proved not linguistically useful. Prepositions meanwhile, are versatile.
I've occasionally considered really messing with the English language before. In the end, I generally just start a new conlang instead.
I'm saying I don't see the need for genders in humans.
It's still rather forced, which is why you had to create the unknown and mixed genders. And frankly, rather useless. And arbitary.
Spanish distinguishes all third person and plural genders, English only third person singular, for example.
You could create a seperate gender for animals, or just use a single human gender.
Besides which, the unknown gender would be used most of the time anywhen, except in pets.
Both English and Spanish experienced influence from foreign languages, which usually results in a simplified grammar; one doesn't have to learn the whole grammar to be understood, and since both proto-spanish and old English already had prepositions, these were employed more and more with the Vikings and Normans (in the case of English) and the German barbarians and Arabic-speaking Moors (in the case of Spanish).
Indeed, one can drop all verbal indications of case, and still be understood. But prepositions don't vary with declension or other word class, so a foreigner is more likely to learn and use them than bother with seven or eight declension paradigms, which I would not ever suggest creating.
This is also why pidgin languages are the simplest form of communication; one might think they were perfect, yet when a pidgin is adopted as a first language and becomes a creole, it's grammar becomes elaborated.
Icelandic, in fact, has preserved its cases, and elaborated its grammar to include situations that require the definite article to be suffixed. This may seem a small development, but the general trend in Iceland is towards conservatism; there is relatively little dialect variance, even after more than a millenium.
Linguistic complexity is more than mere requirement, simply because there IS no requirement for it. Need does play a smal role, but more as a limit on aesthetics.
Spanish appears to distinguish gender, but in cases of ambiguity it always assumes the masculine, which I disagree with on an ideological grounds. I also disagree with distinguishing humans from animals in language, for the reasons stated. I think it makes abuse easier, and it's also scientifically inaccurate. We are all from the same primordial slime, and I find that the quality of character in animals to be vastly superior to that of humans. I'm tired of that old crap about humans being the pinnacle of creation, when obviously we are not.
Prepositions are still complex.
Case endings are basically simplified postpositions that may vary by gender, number, and other such issues.
Since one now *can* end a sentence with a preposition, I think that they provide more variety, because they're now movable, than case can. I also like to split infinitives for a similar reason.
Icelandic's an interesting language for sure.
As you mentioned, languages can only afford to be that conservative when they're not widely used.
When you have other groups using them, they tend to simplify.
Which allows easier borrowing of words, among other advantages.
So I like the versitility of English.
I think the loss of versatility is tied up in the declension/verb class thing. If you have eight or nine declension paradigms, and you find a word that doesn't fit any of them, what are you going to do?
That's why I picked agglutinating rather than fusional construction of word-endings.
I also think that all languages, at their core, are equally complex. Lack of formal complexity--suffixes, prefixes, ablaut and the like--leads to an informal complexity of adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and more, while declensional paradigmns are just the interplay of sounds within those categories. Formal complexity by contrast reduces the number of adverbs, adjectives and so on that are required, resulting in informal simplicity.
So a language that was completely analytical is de-facto no less complex than a language that was purely polysynthetic (as opposed to having tendencies to agglutinate, as what I've come up with here).
I like to explore things like this in ways that are unfamiliar to me. I could have gone a purely analytical route with this, but with English there is no point. It's already highly analytical as it is.
I thought that you were trying to simplify and regularize English.
I generally only use drastically different grammars on English when illustrating a concept.
I'm sort of confused by the first part of your post, what you mean to say exactly.
Oh, and I forgot to respond on gender.
Basically my point is that "he, she, he/she/they, and they" can all use "they" without any loss that I can see.