User:EmperorZelos/Kitchen sink language

As this is something many conlangers worry this is addressed here in and adapted blog post from EmperorZelos.

Some think that a kitchen sink language (or KSL) is a conlang that has a lot of features and/or a large sound inventory. This cannot possibly be the case because there are many languages with lots of weïrd things stuck together into what could be considered a mess but have an inherent structure to the language. The same goes for sound inventories: there are natural languages with tens of consonants and vowels which are, again, seemingly randomly put together. Most, certainly none of us conlangers, would in their right mind call a perfectly natural language a KSL now would we? Of course not, that's absurd. Saying to a native speaker and say "your language is a kitchen sink language, change it" is more of a joke than anything else.

I would say the key difference between real languages or feature rich languages (or sound rich) and a KSL is structure and limitations. A KSL can contain nearly no limitations or have barely any at all. Anything might be expressed in the most complicated of arrays in loops and the- loops without perhaps anything really limiting it. Usually a language will in real life have some form of limitations that removes a large portion of what we Europeans consider a natural choice on sentence construction; we do the same in some ways relative to other languages too as ours aren't the perfect language construction but merely one of many.

If one incorporates structure into a conlang, where perhaps things make sense culturally, historically but mostly importantly semantically and pragmatically and my personal point of importance: grammar. Throwing it all together into a resulting random mess where structure on all 3 levels are is kitchen sink level whilst having a sensible structure of huge, and I mean really huge, tables like Basque's half a million ways to decline its nouns is perfectly fine, but again notice the structure must be sensible and well thought out.

The same goes for sounds, structure here is most important. Zompist in his LCK book gave advice for phonology that I would find invaluable in this context and it essentially went as follows "Add or remove entire sound classes". In that way you are having a structure because entire groups will show a sound structure, Hebrew for example has a rather good fetish for many back throat sounds, perhaps your language enjoys various trills, fricatives, fronted sounds et cetera. They are all a form of structure to be taken or removed and used.

Does this mean you must have a regular set of inflection tables or sound system? Of course not, although a completely regular system screams artificiality - randomness, irregularities and so on make it realistic too, a personal tip is that an over-all structure, internal minor randomness and a few off-shoots that makes no sense what so ever (languages accumulate a lot of dirt over the aeons).

Don't be afraid of complexity either because that doesn't necessarily make a kitchen sink, but be wary of it because it's easy to get into KSL area there. That said, if you work around the many loop-the-loops it might be entirely realistic and pleasant looking at (beauty is after all in the eye of the beholder).

But a thing to be fearful of in this would is moreover a lack of constrains, if there are things that can be expressed in tons of ways without a limited structure you've got a KSL. Real languages have forbidden constructions of a sentence that cannot possibly be allowed, this differs greatly from language to language but a great way to take a step away from KSL territory is to create limitations and then a way to go around them. Instead of having genitives to say "my house" perhaps you could do like some native American languages do and say "house me" as the house imposes some form of feeling on you, take few things here and there and create limitations your language have that don't necessarily make sense. Since English has nonsensical limitations as well, from the point of view of other languages. You can do it on all levels, what is grammatically plausible can be pragmatically forbidden because that's just not how it is said. Japanese can express "Mr X is an American" but that just isn't possible, rather they say "Mr X, he is an American". It's a rather pointless little thing but gives a natural feeling and limits the language, thus taking it a step away from a KSL.

I'll finish off this summary of my personal thoughts with a tip that I heard on a forum in my conlanging youth (perhaps even infancy): "If you worry about making KSL and constantly question yourself about it, then you are highly unlikely to ever make one."

Good luck conlanging!