#morphology

What color morphs are these guys? Are they standard crosses (the closest I can find) with the black just being more prominent and a brighter orange, or a different kind? Apologies if you already have these kinds somewhere on your account I don't believe I've seen them xd

Yes, these are Standard Cross foxes! The brighter orange is very likely due to editing. Cross foxes can have bright orange markings, but that extremely bright color would likely never occur, unfortunately. Cross foxes with more silver fur present are also called Silver Crosses (Pictured below) but I don't believe either of the foxes you showed would qualify.

TLDR: they're Standard Cross foxes like the one below, but they were edited to look more vibrant.

I've been thinking about Kshafa nominal declension (the Evil) again, and came to the conclusion that in some parts it is just too complicated to be kept that way in the regular system. Maybe for select irregular words, but not in general. So I've done some reworking (the Curse).

The Problem

The main problem is that of the indefinite ergative, locative singular, and nominative plural. They are the yellow cells in this table showing the paradigm of liman (I wrote a detailed post on how this paradigm evolved here):

As you can probably see, they have vastly different stems: li(m)V(n)- vs zhaen-, basically only the final nasal is the same. Now I support stem alternations wholeheartedly, but idk. This just feels a bit two much. These aren't even that used forms. like yes the ergative is a pretty important case, but the indefinite ergative, specifically? it just feels too underused to survive this. And so! I propose a single step of sweeping analogical leveling!

The Solution

For this example I will use the dummy form *rikep. The state of affairs just before the analogy takes place is like this:

There are 4 stems in the paradigm atp:

*rikap- the bare stem is the form used when the noun is followed by modifiers, so it's very common

*ricap- the stem used for most definite forms, so also a very dominant stem

*rikip- a stem that appears in a fair number of cells, both definite and indefinite

*rʲàcép- the talked about problem child, a stem that appears in only 1/5 cells, all of them of the less used indefinite.

The indefinite paradigm is the most varied, even though it is less common, and so it gets completely remodeled. The stem *rikip- gets extended into all indefinite forms barring the nominative singular, which keeps its special stem because of how common it is. The singular dative analogizes because its stem is seen as "the definite stem", and the yellow cells analogize because they are just too different.

Now we have a nice simple system of only three stems! a definite stem *ricap-, an indefinite stem *rikip- (which appears in three definite forms), and a basic stem which is derived from the indefinite stem through a vowel change ❤️ yay ❤️

But things don't stop here. After this period of analogy, sound changes continue to happen, and the final paradigm in modern Kshafa is this:

A new forth stem rikhi- is created for the indefinite dative and plural locative. It's the same as the regular general stem with just the stem final consonant dropping because of the prohibition of clusters, and these forms have consonant initial suffixes.

For those wondering, the updated paradigm of liman is this:

It depends how you're thinking of complexity. All the languages of the world are equally complex. They have to be, because they all need to perform the same function, and they're all used by the same human brains living inside the same humans living human lives. I think English speakers (and hypothesize that, by extension, the same would be true of Chinese speakers, Hawaiian speakers, Vietnamese speakers, Swedish speakers) look at certain other languages and think of them as more complex in the meta sense because they are more morphologically complex.

By this, I mean in English, for a noun you need to know its singular and plural form—that's it. For a verb, you need to know its -s form, its -ed form, its -ing form, and, very rarely, its -en form. There is some irregularity in form for almost all of these (-ing appears to always be regular), but there aren't more forms, outside of "to be", which has a unique first person singular form.

And...that's it, really. We have adjectival comparison, I guess, but even that can be traded out for an expression (aside from "better" which can't be replaced easily by "more good", most comparatives can be replaced—e.g. you can say something is "more red" than something else even though you can also say it's "redder" than something else). There aren't many word form changes in English a user has to learn in order to be able to use those words in a sentence. The same is true of those languages I listed in the parenthetical phrase above.

Compare that to Spanish, where there are more word form changes for verbs in the present tense (indicative and subjunctive) than in the entirety of English. And that's just one tense for verbs! There's loads more that needs to be memorized; many more word form changes you need to know to be able to use words effectively in a sentence. And there are irregularities on top of that!

Is it the case, therefore, that Spanish is more complex than English?

Certainly, Spanish is more morphologically complex, but does that mean you can express more in Spanish than you can in English? Certainly not! So then what does it mean when we say Spanish is more morphologically complex than English? What's the upshot? What does it mean for the language user?

Perhaps it would help if we compare some Spanish verbs and their English translations:

hablabas "you were talking"

hablé "I spoke"

hable "you would speak"

The precise translation of these verbs will depend on context, but this is a fine example. These are all single words of Spanish. They're different forms that must be memorized, but they're single words. The English requires at least two words for each concept.

So which is more complex? On the one hand, you have fewer words but more forms. On the other, more words, and more words = bigger.

And that, essentially, is the crux of it.

Any time you have complexity baked into single words morphologically in one language, you'll find complexity in the form of multiword expressions in a less morphologically complex language. The meanings are always there(*), but they're expressed in different ways.

As English speakers, we're used to having to express things in multiword expressions, and a speaker of a given language will find their own language to be simple just because. We extend that to think of languages like ours as simpler than those that are different. But, in truth, it's six of one, half dozen of another. Furthermore, there's just as much complexity in languages with less morphological complexity. Consider the following expressions in American English:

I walked to the store. ✅

I walked to a store. ✅

I walked to store. ❌

That's pretty standard. English has articles and you need to use them, right?

I ate the dinner. ✅

I ate a dinner. ✅

I ate dinner. ✅

All those are okay. They don't mean the same thing—and, indeed, the first two have much more restricted contexts—but they're all okay. That's a little weird, isn't it?

Not as weird as this:

I made it by the hand. ❌

I made it by a hand. ❌

I made it by hand. ✅

The first two aren't just weird: they're yikes-a-doodle-do wrong. You might try to brush it aside and say that it's just an expression, and, sure, it is, but ask yourself this: how'd that expression come about in the first place? This one is actually from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) and still works the same way in American English:

You kiss by the book. ✅

You kiss by a book. ❌

You kiss by book. ❌

And just for funsies:

He won by the nose. ❌

He won by a nose. ✅

He won by nose. ❌

You might think the way these shake has to do with what they stand for—that the semantics of the noun in question condition whether or not you can use articles—but consider the first one "store" and compare it to this one:

I walked to the Barnes & Noble. ✅

I walked to a Barnes & Noble. ✅

I walked to Barnes & Noble. ✅

Barnes & Noble is a store, but refer to it by title, and suddenly it's all okay.

Now, if your native language is English, ask yourself: when and how did you learn all of this? Did someone sit you down and tell you where to use which articles and where not to? I'm sure there was some level of instruction you got in elementary school (whether it was accurate or not), but how much of a difference do you think that made? Did you just not use articles before then? And even now, could you explain this? Do you even think about it? Or do you just do it—flawlelssly and effortlessly? Adult learners of English will tell you learning this stuff is a nightmare. Throw in phrasal verbs (pick up vs. pick out vs. pick on vs. pick up on vs. plain old pick) and suddenly English doesn't look too simple anymore.

Bringing this back to your question, when you look at High Valyrian, is there a natural language with an equal amount of morphological complexity? Sure. Maybe something like Latin. But understand that any language will be as complex—not more, not less: as. The only difference with High Valyrian, actually, is its vocabulary isn't as large (give me a couple decades), and it doesn't have nearly as many users as any natural languages. It's also being kept artificially small, in that the language is built up to fit a fictional reality, rather than being expanded to handle anything, the way modern languages are. But pick up any language and it will be equally complex.