People other than conlangers don't just invent languages out of the blue and start speaking them. You can't have 29 places of articulation, although you probably could get 200 phonemes if you had clicks (100+ consonants in some click languages) and tons of vowels with a tense-lax distinction and suprasegmentals (some Germanic languages have 70 vowel phonemes I've heard), and the language would still be humanly learnable, although it wouldn't arise naturally due to the fact that diachronics tends to make phonologies less complex than the most complex thing a human could learn. On the other hand, 730 verb forms is nothing. If you have a verb that agrees for the person, number, and gender of its subject and object, and there are 3 persons, 2 numbers, and 3 genders, and you only mark the gender in the 3rd person, you have 2 + 2 + 6 = 10 affixes for subject and object, and I'm going to assume that the 1st person ones of th same number aren't going to be used with themselves even if in 2nd person you could say something like "you *points to person* go with you *points to other person*", so (10 x 10) - 2 = 98 verb forms just with a polypersonal agreement system. Now, if you have a past-present-future distinction, that's 294 verb forms, and add a realis-irrealis distinction and you have 588, and a positive-negative and that's 1,176. Now, if you add moods like imperative and necessitiative, you can double that for every mood you have since moods stack, so 2,352, 4,704, and so on, and if you have a direct and indirect evidential (like more than half of languages) with two moods, you can have 9,408 verb forms. Yes, lots and lots of real languages are like this, and languages can also have causatives, applicatives, passives, antipassives, reflexives, reciporicals, and numerous other things I haven't listed, so you could have tens of thousands and maybe over a hundred thousand verb forms. Languages where you can keep adding the same morpheme, such as a causative, over and over again ("she made him make him make her...") basically have infinite verb forms. So if you ever want to make a language with 730 verb forms, go ahead, since it's really not ridiculous. Joersc (talk) 03:07, September 15, 2015 (UTC)
- I'll change 29 to 10. File:Ul3.png UnfazedEveryman Annoy Me 05:52, September 15, 2015 (UTC)
