As a conlanger and language learner, I spend
a lot of time researching various languages from across the world, and over the years,
I’ve discovered I have a predilection for certain phonological and grammatical features
over others, and as such, I have gravitated to a select few languages that exhibit these
features. These are the languages that I keep coming
back to, the ones I can always find new inspiration in, and I’m here to share them with anyone
who’s interested. First of all, I admit from the outset that
this list is entirely subjective; no language is truly better than any other, these are
simply the ones I personally find most interesting. I am also aware that there are many thousands
of languages in the world, and I’m only familiar with a tiny fraction of them. I have
no doubt that there exist numerous languages that have fascinating and enigmatic features
that I’ve never heard of, and should I at some point discover some such language, I’ll
be sure to update the list. Also, be aware that this is probably going
to contain a lot of linguistic terminology. I’m going to try my best to not get too
technical, but I know from experience that I am almost certainly going to fail miserably.
So, be prepared for some epic-level language geekery. If at any point you have a hard time
following me, or you’d like clarification on any particular point, feel free to leave
a comment letting me know. So, with that out of the way, I humbly present
to you, my top 10 favorite languages, starting off with… Number 10 - Fijian Many of the Austronesian languages are really fascinating. Hawaiian, Maori, and Malagasy
are beautiful and very nearly made it onto the list, but for me, Fijian just ever-so-slightly
beats out the others. Spoken by over half a million people, and one of the official
languages of Fiji, Fijian has a pretty simple grammar that betrays number of curious features.
It has a pretty unorthodox phonology: It’s still a CV language, which fits right in with the oceanic mould, but its consonant inventory features a bizarre series of asymmetries:
What look like plain voiced stops when written in the Romanization are actually prenasalized
stops, which contrast with plain voiceless stops. More surprising is the fact that the
labiodental /f/ contrasts not with labiodental [v] as you'd expect, but instead with bilabial [ß], which may be because /f/ only exists in loadwords, but then for some reason the alveolar sibilant
/s/ corresponds not with the voiced equivalent /z/, but with the dental fricative [ð]. Um,
okay. And then there’s this… thing. What is that? Uh… A prenasalised trill? How the
hell does that work? Although I personally prefer Hawaiian and
Maori in terms of sheer phonesthetics, I find Fijian’s grammar slightly more interesting. Grammatically,
Fijian fits right in with other Austronesian languages, but it’s got some features that I find extra
interesting. Fijian has an enormous abundance of pronouns.
There are four grammatical numbers: single, dual, paucal, and plural, which are all distinguished
on pronouns. First person pronouns also contrast on clusivity, that is, there are two forms
of the pronoun ‘we’: one that means “you and I” and one that means “us but not
you”. Additionally, every pronoun has a subject, object, and cardinal form, adding
up to over 45 pronouns. Probably the most well-known thing about Fijian
grammar is the way it handles possession. Many languages make a distinction between
alienable and inalienable possession, that is the possession of something separate
and distinct from the possessor, like a person’s house, versus something that is inherently
part of the possessor, like a person’s hair. However, Fijian takes this one step further:
For inalienable possession, the possessive pronoun becomes a suffix on the head noun,
whereas in the case of alienable possession, the possessive pronoun attaches to one of
a number of clarifying particles, which change to signify specific forms of possession, such
as whether the head noun is edible, inedible, or even drinkable.
Like many Austronesian languages, the default word order verb-initial, which is always awesome,
but in Fijian, it’s specifically Verb-Object-Subject, which is one of my favorite word order patterns,
strange, but not outlandish or inconceivable. As I said though, there’s plenty of things
to love about the other Austronesian languages, many of which have fascinating features of their own that I don’t have time to get into here. If you’re stuck in an Indo-European rut and looking for something new and interesting and you’re not too familiar with the region, look no further than the
Austronesian languages. They’re simple, they’re elegant, and they’re full of surprises. Number 9 - Manchu The first of many languages on this list that
are critically endangered or extinct, Manchu was once one of the official languages of
the Qing dynasty, which was founded by the Jurchen invaders in the 17th century. But
for some reason, rather than supplanting the local Chinese dialect with their native language,
they decided to use Chinese as the common tongue, and, consequently, Manchu fell out
of use and is now on the verge of extinction, which is a great shame because this language
deserves more people knowing about it. Maybe in a parallel universe Manchu is the common
language of East Asia and Chinese went extinct ages ago. I don't know, one can only dream… The language could have made the list thanks to its script alone. Just look at it, it’s mesmerizing. There’s something very tolkein-esque about it, despite the fact that is uses a completely
different system. It’s more like a vertical Arabic than anything else I’ve seen. It’s
an alphabet with a top-to-bottom writing direction and characters that change their form depending
on whether they’re at the beginning of the word, at the end of the word, in the middle, or just on their own. Related scripts are also used in many Mongolic languages, and I find them to
be critically underrated and undervalued. The phonology is fairly standard, with a contrast
between plain and aspirated stops with no voicing distinction, nasals and fricatives
that match their corresponding stops in place of articulation, and the typical set of approximants.
Manchu is exclusively head-final, meaning word order is Subject Object Verb, Adjectives
precede nouns, and there are postpositions. The grammar features a case system broadly
similar to that of Japanese: cases are marked by particles following nouns. Some cases have
broad non-canonical functions. For example, the genitive can also be used as an instrumental,
and the locative also marks indirect objects. There are also a menagerie of other cases
that clarify more specific relationships. The case system works in combination with
a series of other postpositions that refine meanings even further.
Although Manchu doesn’t have any grammatical gender per se, there is a strong sound symbolism
where feminine things are associated with front vowels and masculine things are associated
with back vowels, which, much like in Korean, are referred to in Manchu grammar as yin and
yang vowels respectively. Not only that, but Manchu features front vowel harmony, meaning
that front and back vowels cannot co-occur within the same word.
That means that words will have an inherent masculine or feminine connotation despite
no true grammatical gender being present. That’s the coolest sex-based gender system
I’ve ever seen, and it’s not even a real gender system!
Manchu is also one of the relatively few non-European languages to have a separate comparative form
for its adjectives, which I always love to see.
For the most part, the verbal system is fairly straightforward: verbs are not marked to agree
with any of their arguments, and are suffixed to encode tense, aspect, and mood. The wild
card here is the grammatical voices: anyone who’s dabbled in the romance languages knows that
verbs can be either active or passive, that is if the subject is performing the action,
or if the subject receives the action Those familiar with Ancient Greek or Somali,
will also be familiar with the mysterious middle-voice, which encodes that the subject
both initiates and receives the action in some way
Manchu, has a whopping EIGHT voices. Which can convey some really specific meanings that
I’ve never seen encoded in the same morphological slot as traditional and active and passive
voices Not only that, but many of them use the similar
or sometimes exactly the same morphology, and the only way to infer the voice being used
is by referring to the verb type. But what’s really notable about Manchu is its prolific use of converbs, special non-finite
verb forms that convey some kind of adverbial subordination. Senses like “While doing”,
“Having done”, and “Although doing”, rather than being marked with separate adverbs
like in English, are given their own special verb form, which I find a really useful way
to consolidate otherwise particle-heavy subordinate clauses.
Converbs are observed in some other languages such as the Turkic languages, but Manchu makes
more use of them than I've seen in any other language This language simply has too many interesting
features to just be forgotten and go extinct. Any aficionados of Asian languages out there,
don’t let this phenomenal language slip past you! Number 8 - Tamil One of the most prolific of the Dravidian Languages, Tamil has over 70 million speakers across Malaysia and the Indian subcontinent. And, thanks to a written tradition going back
thousands of years, we have a great understanding of Tamil’s history and evolution.
The phonology features the classic 5-vowel system and a retroflex series, as well a single
dental stop [t]. There’s also a distinct lack of voiced and aspirated obstruent phonemes,
both of which are common in many other languages of the region.
Nouns are grouped into 5 genders, or classes, which are themselves grouped into two super-classes
amusingly named ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’. These classes are typically marked with suffixes,
so there’s no memorization involved. There are at least eight noun cases, which
for the most part are reminiscent of those in some European languages.
But my favorite thing about Tamil nouns are their deictic prefixes: any given noun may
take one of four prefixes that correspond to English demonstratives.
I love how simple they are: they are all single vowels that cause the following consonant
to geminate, sort of like the dothraki causative now that I think about it.
It’s such a straightforward and regular pattern, it looks like something an amateur
conlanger would come up with. This is what I like to call a “I can’t believe it’s
not a conlang” feature, a feature so regular and seemingly artificial that if you saw it
in a conlang you’d immediately jump on it as too unnatural or unlikely, and yet it exists
in a natural context. Verbs follow an agglutinative pattern, with
suffixes agreeing with the subject in person and number, plus the normal tense, aspect,
and mood information, but there are some other interesting encodings as well. For example,
Tamil has a couple of interesting ways of marking evidentiality, that is, how the speaker
knows what they are saying is true, whether they saw it directly, heard about it from
someone else, or can deduce it from available evidence.
Rather than using relative pronouns, relative clauses are instead marked using a special
non-finite verb form referred to as the relative participle. Plus, as Tamil is head-final,
the relative clause precedes the noun, unlike in English. Finally, Tamil features another fantastic script. Typical of a south Asian script, it’s
an abugida, with every glyph representing a consonant with some modifying mark to represent
the following vowel (if any). I have a great fondness for the abugidas of the Indian subcontinent
and the surrounding territories, and Tamil’s has to rank among my favorites from that region.
And equally fascinating as the script itself is observing the way it’s evolved thanks
to its immaculate preservation over thousands of years.
Tamil is considered one of the oldest classical languages in the world, and based on the number
of speakers it maintains, it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon, and
thank goodness for that, because it is awesome. Number 7 - Hebrew I have to admit, I had a lot of difficulty choosing between Hebrew and Arabic for this spot. They’re both very closely related and share many features in common, so I knew I couldn’t include both. In the end though, I did decide to give the edge to Hebrew just because I’ve
had slightly more exposure to it, but both languages are wonderful and deserve all the
attention they can get, mainly thanks to the majestic awesomeness that is the triconsonontal
root system, a system so epic it had to be featured at least somewhere on this list.
In both Hebrew and Arabic, root words are composed of a linear sequence of three consonants
and no vowels. To create words, both inflectionally and derivationally, vowels are infixed between
the consonants in particular ways in accordance with regular patterns.
This is reflected in their amazing scripts: for the most part, Hebrew and Arabic have
no separate characters for vowels. There are diacritics that go above and below consonant
characters to indicate the vowels that come after them, but most native speakers don’t even need them to get through a sentence, they can just infer the vowels from context.
Hebrew’s phonology features a plethora of post-velar phonemes, like /R/ and /ħ/, which
results in the various accusations from European language speakers of it being “harsh”
and “guttural”, whatever that means. It’s interesting to note that despite how closely
related they are to each other, Hebrew has /p/ as a phoneme, whereas Arabic does not.
Like other Semitic and many Indo-Europeans languages, Hebrew has a sex-based gender system.
Nouns are either masculine or feminine, but unlike Tamil, they are not marked for gender,
you just need to memorize what gender a given noun is, rather like French. The gender of
the subject is also marked on the verb, meaning there are separate verb forms for male and
female subjects. Hebrew also makes use of the so-called construct
state: this is when the head noun is given a special suffix that indicates that it is
possessed by the following noun, kind of like a reverse-genitive case. This is also frequently
used to make noun compounds. The verb conjugation is elegantly simple:
Active, Passive, and Reflexive forms combine with simple, intensive, and causative forms
to produce a range of verbal meanings. And plus I always thought it was really sweet the way
they draw the conjugation table to resemble a menorah. But, perhaps most importantly, you can’t mention Hebrew without mentioning that it’s
the only language that’s ever been “resurrected”. Even though biblical Hebrew was no longer
spoken after the 6th century BC, it was preserved in holy texts and remained as a liturgical
language thereafter. However, with the Zionist movement of the late 19th century, millions
of Jews returned to their ancestral homeland in the Middle East, and it was decided that
Hebrew, despite the fact it hadn’t been spoken as an official language in over two
and a half thousand years, would be the common tongue of these people, making Hebrew the
only language to have ever been considered extinct for an extended period of time only
to suddenly regain a tremendous number of native speakers. It’s fascinating and quite
empowering to see that a relic of the distant past can be brought back in such a big way.
Now if only we could do this with some other languages, speaking of which… Number 6 – Greek and Latin Much like with Hebrew and Arabic, I have a
really hard time calling this one. Besides taking French in Middle-School, Latin was the first foreign language I ever had a chance to study, and I got onto Greek, both Modern
and Ancient, shortly thereafter. As such, I’ve developed a deep-seated love of their
phonesthetics and grammar. I admit it’s probably just my Anglophone disposition and
the level of prestige these languages have attained, but there are a lot of legitimate
reasons to find interest in them, particularly places where they deviate from the typical
associations of European languages. First of all, I know Modern and Ancient Greek
have a lot of differences, but I really love both of them, and dissecting and analyzing
the differences between them is in and of itself an interesting exercise, so I’m going
to include both in this spot. And Latin ispretty different in many respects from them, but they share enough in common in my mind that they can tie for this spot.
Most native English speakers will be pretty familiar with their phoneme sets, the only
thing that might cause confusion to new learners is Ancient Greek’s aspiration distinction.
As I say, I have a particular love of the way they sound, probably just due to years
of exposure. In the Western world, these languages are pretty much synonymous with poetry, art,
and scientific nomenclature, and has doubtlessly conditioned me to find them appealing.
Verbs are highly inflectional, having a single suffix that encodes the subject as well as tense,
aspect, and mood. Again, the system should be pretty familiar to anyone who’s studied
any romance languages. Ancient Greek adds an extra level of complexity by having a separate
optative mood and including the notorious middle voice in addition to the standard active and passive. The main thing that differentiates Latin and Greek from most modern romance languages is
their case systems, which combine gender, case, and plurality into a single affix, Latin and
Modern Greek having just singular and plural forms, while Ancient Greek has a dual number
as well. Since the cases serve to mark roles, both Latin and Greek have a fairly free word
order, with ancient Greek going absolutely insane in this regard.
Greek also has a really nice script, so tantalizingly similar to the Latin script, and yet different
enough to be interesting and evocative. Of course, it’s virtually impossible for me
to judge the Latin script objectively since it’s my native writing system, so I won’t
go into it. On the whole, I admit this one probably just
comes down to nostalgia. I can’t really put into words why I love these languages
so much, they just have very powerful associations for me. While Greek, especially Ancient Greek,
is certainly more interesting from a European perspective, I cannot in good conscience leave
Latin off this list, I just love it too much. So, in the end, I’m just going to call it
a tie and declare Greek in all of its various incarnations and lifetimes plus Latin as some
of my favorite European languages. Number 5 - Basque The most mysterious language on this list. Between the pedestrian landscapes of Spanish
and French, on the slopes of the Pyrenees exists a language like no other. It’s a
language isolate so different from its neighboring languages that some pretty exotic hypotheses
have been put forward over the years as to its exact origins.
Conspiracy theories aside, the phonology is fairly standard with the exception of a phonemic
contrast between lamino-dental and apical alveolar obstruents, which I’ve never seen
in any other language, and I still don’t really understand how you’re supposed to tell the difference between them... The language is highly agglutinative, with
both nouns and verbs taking a huge number of affixes. Basque employs a fairly comprehensive
case system to mark roles on nouns, but also marks subject, direct object, and indirect
object on the verb, meaning most roles end up being double-marked.
Because of this, strict word order isn’t needed to convey any such information, and
as such is coopted to mark focus and topic. To emphasize any particular element, the word
order is shuffled around such that the noun that comes immediately before the verb is
the focus, or the most salient piece of information in the clause, and the initial phrase is the
topic, the thing being talked about in the larger discourse.
A neat feature of Basque is that the case system can also be used for derivational purposes,
appending nouns with multiple case suffixes at the same time, with only one actually marking
case and the other becoming a sort of derivational suffix.
Like Manchu, Basque has separate comparative forms for adjectives, but it also has superlative,
equative, and excessive forms, too. Although verbs take stupendous amounts of
affixes, only a very small subset of verbs can actually take the full spectrum of verbal
marking, with most verbs requiring the use of auxiliaries to carry the grammatical meaning.
But probably Basque’s most notorious feature is its ergative predisposition: without going
too much into detail, the subject of an intransitive verb is marked in the same way as the object
of a transitive verb, with the subject only receiving overt marking if a direct object
is present. This isn’t a particularly uncommon feature,
many languages across the world have similar systems, but Basque is strange because this distinction
also exists in the verb system: subject markers will suddenly become object markers if an object
is present. Needless to say, the grammar is pretty mind-bending
to try to learn. If you’re tired of the typical romance and Slavic languages and looking
to add some flare to your European language inventory, have a gander at Basque. It’s
about as weird a European language as you can possibly get. Number 4 - Georgian From the windswept peaks of the caucuses comes the agglutinative splendor that is Georgian,
the most famous and most widely spoken of the Kartvelian languages. The languages of
the Caucasus are famous for their grammatical extravagance, and one quick look at Georgian
should tell you all you need to know in that respect.
Although the consonant inventory is already quite exotic from a European standpoint, featuring both
the uvular stop and ejectives, the signature aspect of Georgian phonology is the complex
phonotactics that allows for the creation of some truly incomprehensible consonant clusters.
Like Basque, Georgian has both a case system and polypersonal agreement. Nouns take case
marking and the plural suffix as their primary morphology. Interestingly, Georgian adjectives
are transparently related to nouns, so much so that an adjective’s head noun can be
deleted to turn the adjective into a plain noun. While nouns are relatively simple verbs are monstrously complex, being marked for the
subject via suffix and direct and indirect objects with prefixes. Additionally, also like Basque, Georgian displays
ergativity in the verb system, but unlike the true ergativity of Basque, Georgian exhibits
split-ergativity based on tense, meaning you only apply the ergative pattern if the verb
is in the past tense. On top of that, the person markings change form to reflect the change in tense, And not only that, but some tense encodings
come with inescapable semantic baggage that you need to use entirely separate verb forms
or periphrastic constructions to get around. And not only that, but there are modal affixes
and other morphology that you only add to non-past forms and is either done differently
or is completely absent in past-tense forms, And not only that, there’s loads of other
stuff that would take WAY too long for me to get into, especially since I have a hard
time understanding it all myself, but basically, the end result is that the past and non-past
forms are totally different from each other. In fact, the Georgian conjugation is so weird
it gets its own name: it’s called the screeve system, which comes from the Georgian… …um…ms...muskr...that word. As you can probably tell, Georgian is extremely
difficult to learn for an English speaker. You can get lost in the myriad verb forms
and their seemingly infinite permutations for months, and figuring how all the pieces
fit together is a great source of inspiration for me.
And to top it all off, Georgian uses a really beautiful script. It’s an alphabet, but
it’s got its own characters for ejectives and aspirated stops, which is quite a rarity,
and I just find that it generally looks quite unique and interesting.
Overall, a fascinatingly compact phonology and an ornate writing system coupled with
one of the most complicated verbal systems I’ve ever seen in any language. But it’s not the most complicated, oh no. That honor would have to go to… Number 3 - Navajo Oh man, now we’re getting serious! Taking home the bronze medal is the most widely-spoken of all the remaining Native American languages, the sheer badassery that is Navajo, an Athabaskan
language spoken in the southwest of the United States, and still has a healthy body of over
150,000 speakers, both native and otherwise. The phonology is unlike anything I've ever seen, with an
aspiration distinction in stops, a fortis/lenis distinction in the fricatives, a smattering
of ejectives, and glottalized nasals, which I still don’t understand how your supposed to pronounce. Best of all, though, it has a lateral series of alveolars, both in stops and fricatives,
[tˡ], [ɬ], [tɬʰ], and [tɬʼ], which I just think sound cool. It features a four-vowel
system, but each vowel can be low or high tone, or oral or nasalized, or short or long,
or any combination thereupon. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of the phonesthetics, but the
grammar more than makes up for it. There isn’t too much to talk about when
it comes to nouns, simply because Navajo has quite possibly the densest, most jam-packed
verb system I’ve ever seen, so much so that most of the time you don’t really need nouns
to form a sentence. Seriously, if you thought Basque and Georgian had complicated verbs,
get a load of this morphological insanity: The verb template has 11 prefix slots, which
include marking for subject, direct object, indirect object, beneficiary, postpositional
object, and loads of other roles that I can’t even wrap my head around.
Whereas the verbs of most European languages usually encode 2 aspects (perfective vs imperfective),
and some languages can have as many as 5 aspects encoded into the verb structure, Navajo has
12 primary aspects that combine with an additional 10 subaspects to produce a mind-boggling variety
of highly specific meanings, like the semeliterative “to do something one more time”, and the
Diversative “to do something here and there”, Not only that, the template is divided into
conjunct and disjunct prefixes, those closer to the stem and those further away, which
basically signifies that those further away were affixed more recently in history and
are comparatively regular, whereas those close to the stem are much older and, as a result,
have a tendency to become phonologically reduced in fiendish and unpredictable ways. Sometimes
a crucial piece of verbal information that seems really important to distinguish between
different verb forms will get horribly mangled by sound changes until it’s become unrecognizable.
Verb stems also change to classify the shape of their object, whether it’s a solid round
object, a long flexible object, an open container, non-compact matter, or any number of other
shapes. The way all of these features interact is
truly something to behold, a veritable smorgasbord of staggering verbal complexity.
Plus, Navajo has a number of different nominalization strategies, whereby new nouns, often with
highly specific meanings, can be coined very easily from verbs. This is so easy that the
majority of Navajo nouns are derived this way, with root nouns only comprising a small
subset. An interesting byproduct of this is that Navajo
is one of the languages most resistant to loanwords in the world. Even with the advent
of the settlers and the resultant cultural exchange of concepts and technologies the
Navajo peoples had never seen before, they didn’t borrow the words from English like
one would expect, but instead simply created new nouns from verbs.
This tendency persists even into the modern day. When the Navajo people saw a tank for the first time, they didn’t just borrow the word ‘tank’, they created their own word: ...oh you’ve
got to be kidding me… [hopelessly pathetic butchering of Navajo] And that literally translates to "the vehicle that crawls around by means of which big explosions are made and that one sits on top of at an elevation" Wow. If you’re a conlanger, Navajo is a truly endless source of inspiration for things you can accomplish with verb derivation. But the thing that really elevates Navajo
into the top three is its truly epic animacy hierarchy. Most languages have some method
of distinguishing animate and inanimate subjects. In English, the distinction is fairly basic,
pretty much exclusive to third person pronouns. In many languages there are much more diverse and interesting strategies for coping with this, but in Navajo, every noun fits into one of eight levels of animacy, with each one getting
special syntactic treatment, with nouns higher up the hierarchy being viewed as inherently
more important to the discourse. Therefore, nouns of higher animacy will always
appear earlier in the sentence than those of lower animacy. That alone is a really cool
and unique feature, but the most amazing thing of all is how levels of animacy are distinguished.
Starting at the bottom with abstractions, places, moving up to rocks, water, wind, other
semi-animate natural phenomena, and ultimately teetering up toward the very top of the hierarchy,
where you find things that normally get top animacy-billing in most languages, you know:
men, women, occupations, AND LIGHTNING. That’s right, Lightning occupies the very top of the animacy hierarchy along with adult humans. You don’t get more awesome than that.
For me, Navajo is a limitless reservoir of inspiration and fascination, a language that
I truly hope can stand the test of time and survive through its endangerment. If you’re
a conglanger and you haven’t seen Navajo yet, what the hell are you waiting for? Number 2 - Swahili The Bantu languages are a goldmine of fascinating
linguistic features. Many of the other Bantu languages could just as easily have taken this spot,
but Swahili is the only one that I’ve studied extensively. Spoken by over 50 million people,
most of whom are non-native, Swahili is the king Lingua Franca of Africa and, although
fundamentally Bantu, has moderate influences from Arabic, as well as further borrowings
from English, French, Portuguese, and a myriad of others.
The consonant inventory is nice and symmetrical, and the phonology gives the language an instantly
recognizable phonetic character. The prenasalized stops that split into syllabic nasals are
iconic, and even though I’m not the biggest fan of implosives, it’s interesting that
they don’t contrast with any plain voiced stops, instead only with plain voiceless and
aspirated ones, and they help to add to that characteristic sound. I find it interesting
that the language is technically CV like Fijian and Hawaiian, but most people tend not to
think of it that way because its prenasalized stops and syllabic nasals give the illusion
that it’s word shapes are more complex than they really are.
If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a big fan of polypersonal agreement and head-marking
in general, but Swahili really goes the extra mile on this front thanks to its awesome noun
class system. You know how many European and Semitic languages group nouns into genders,
like masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter? Well Swahili does that too, except instead
of two or three genders, there’s 16 of them. Yes, 16, some of which include some really
weird groupings of oddly specific nouns. Every noun is given an obligatory prefix that
marks for gender and plurality. However, these noun classes can also be used derivationally,
changing the meaning of a root simply by swapping out the class prefix, so it’s much more
practical than the often rage-inducing gender systems of other languages.
Additionally, verbal nouns like infinitives and gerunds are formed by applying certain
gender prefixes directly into verbs to nominalize them.
Best of all, the gender of the subject and object are also marked on the verb, which
often elucidates any ambiguities if two 3rd person arguments are involved.
For example, in such a situation, most languages with polypersonal agreement will mark the
verb with two third person markers, so there’s no way of disambiguating which is the subject
and which is the object based on the verb alone, and so they therefore have to rely
on case marking and/or word order to infer the roles. In Swahili, however, because the
gender of the subject and object are marked on the verb, we can clearly figure out who
did what to whom. Not only that, but adjectives also agree with
their head nouns in class and number, similar to the agreement patterns found in many European
languages, meaning adjectives can be theoretically separated from their head nouns and we still
know the two are related because of their shared marking.
This system is so intuitive and useful that I can’t believe I haven’t seen more conlangs
that pull off similar systems. It’s the apotheosis of an ‘I can’t believe it’s
not a conlang’ feature, and yet I’ve never seen a conlang that pulls of anything so ambitious!
Tense and Aspect are marked by way of prefixes that occur between the subject and object
markers. The verb complex also includes some really useful inflectional and derivational
morphology like passive, causative, and applicative affixes. Plus, verbs also encode negation by attaching a simple verb prefix to the subject marker.
There’s so many great ways to chop and change verbs without them becoming bloated and cumbersome.
While Navajo is interesting because of the sheer amount of stuff that can be crammed
into the verb, Swahili is interesting in what it manages to include in the verb without
going to ludicrous polysynthesic extremes. It almost comes down to a quality vs quantity
distinction. Swahili has everything I find interesting
in a language but still maintains a degree of simplicity and manageability. It combines
a great phonetic system with a fascinating and intuitive inflectional paradigm and a
load of great features that you could spend years studying, and there’s only one language
on earth that can top it… I find all of these languages I’ve featured
on this list fascinating, but there were plenty of others that didn’t quite make it into
the top 10, and, as you can probably tell, in many cases it was really difficult for me to put
them in any kind of order of preference. But there is one language that stands exalted
above all the others, the language that has everything I love in one place and then some,
the language that first made me interested in linguistics, my favorite language of all
time… Number 1 Classical Nahuatl The language of the Mexica empire (AKA The
Aztecs). Sadly now extinct, the only remnants of this beautiful language are a scattered variety
of dialects spoken across much of Mexico. Many of these are also interesting in their
own right, but the original classical dialect is the one I fell in love with.
I don’t know how it’s possible for a language to have such a simple consonant inventory
and yet manage to sound so beautiful. It has no voiced obstruents at all, having only the
typical three voiceless stops, two sibilants, and a four vowel system. But by far the most
iconic sound in all of Nahuatl is that omnipresent lateral affricate /tl/, a sound so pervasive
that, much to the chagrin of speakers of European languages who can’t pronounce it correctly,
every singular noun, unless it’s possessed, takes the sound as a suffix, rendering it
in the so-called ‘absolutive’ state. If it is possessed, the suffix is omitted and
the noun takes a prefix that agrees with its possessor in both person and number.
Nouns can also take a variety of other affixes that encode various derivational meanings.
Nahuatl is also the only language I’ve ever seen where the diminutive is also used to
encode respect, to the point where the word for ‘child’- ‘pilli’ is the same as
the word for ‘nobleman’. The socio-linguistic implications of that detail alone makes the
language special. Much like Swahili, the verbs are complex enough
to encode lots of useful information but not to the bewildering extremes of Navajo. This
was my first encounter with polypersonal agreement in a natural language, and I instantly fell
in love with it. The verb template has a slot for the subject and object, but the object
slot always agrees with the indirect object if there is one present in the clause, and leaves the direct object stranded. There’s also ample use of noun-incorporation,
whereby verb arguments can be backgrounded from the discourse by assimilating them into the verb stem to create new verbs, which leads to compact sentences and loads of cool derivational possibilities. But the coolest thing about the verb system is that in Nahuatl, everything, literally
EVERYTHING, can be a verb. This means that, since the language doesn’t have a copula,
all you have to do to make any kind of predicate is conjugate the noun as if it were a verb.
This system is so robust, that it even works for pronouns! You can turn pronouns into verbs!
Naturally, this allows you to pull off some really cool derivational tricks. Technically
speaking, adjectives as English-speakers would understand them, don’t really exist in Nahautl,
what look like adjectives are actually either stative verbs or just nouns that modify a
different noun in the clause through juxtaposition. With the latter type, much like Georgian,
these adjectives can also be used on their own to stand as a noun.
But remember, this is Nahuatl, where EVERYTHING can be a verb, so even a noun-like adjective
can be conjugated to make a new adjective-like stative verb, which is derived from an adjective that is actually a noun! Since the basic word classes of noun, adjective, and verb bleed into each other so much, Nahuatl
also has a pretty free word order. There's a general tendency for the verb to be the first word in the sentence, but that is by no means a hard-and-fast rule, and the arguments can be shuffled about anywhere
the speaker wants to, normally for purposes of focus and to draw attention to the most salient
parts of the clause. There’s just so many amazing ways to play with the grammar while
maintaining such relative simplicity. I’ve never seen any other language where
both the phonology and the grammar appeal to me so much simultaneously. Classical Nahuatl
will always have a special place in my heart, and I hope that I’ve instilled some interest
in you as well. If you’ve made it this far, what are some
of your favorite languages? What elements of language do you find most interesting?
Did I enlighten you, infuriate you, or just baffle you? Let me know in the comments below.
Thank you all for watching.
