This thesis compares the consonant inventories of constructed languages with the consonant inventories of natural languages, in an attempt to find out what natural languages are most similar to...Show moreThis thesis compares the consonant inventories of constructed languages with the consonant inventories of natural languages, in an attempt to find out what natural languages are most similar to these constructed languages in terms of consonant inventories. The main objective is to find out whether language creators are influenced by their native languages when creating their own languages. For this purpose, two programming scripts were created in order to quickly compare consonant inventories with each other. Using these programs, 7 constructed languages were each compared to 3,019 natural languages from the online database PHOIBLE. In more than half of the analysed constructed languages, the consonant inventories of the constructed language and the creator’s native language had an overlap of 70% or more, which, when compared to the overlap with other natural languages, is on the higher end of the scale, but rarely the highest end. These results point towards an influence of the native language of the creator on the consonant inventory of their created language.Show less
Dothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical...Show moreDothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical investigation into one of the language’s more idiosyncratic features, namely its double marking of negation. A corpus of 46 negative Dothraki sentences was analysed to determine the position of negation with in a sentence. These results were discussed in reference to a number of theories on the syntax of negation in natural languages. This was done with the ultimate aim of discovering whether negation in Dothraki adheres to the syntactical patterns of natural languages, or whether it is constructed differently and in that way evidence of the language’s artificiality. This thesis ultimately concludes that the double marking of negation in Dothraki can be accounted for by existing theories based on negation in natural languages, arguing that Dothraki resembles languages like Berber in that NegP is the left-most phrase in the split-IP, with the subject in the specifier of TopP.Show less
