<!>Advice sought (2014-04-19 17:07:48)
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? Rhetorica Your Writing System Sucks
posts: 1292
, KelatetĂ­a message
1) One last plea: why not have both? Merge the syntax and morphology sections, then have an appendix of tables. After all, it works for teaching grammars.

6) That sounds promising. Above all else, include lots of examples.

8) My real issue is that I feel you set out a lot of vague descriptive categories without providing a concrete justification—e.g. a grammar of a Bantu language can justly get away with vaguely summarizing what each noun class tends to include without being exact, but it would be indefensible for an English grammar to go over the basic verb forms and merely mention the existence of irregular verbs. I feel there are some parts in the grammar where such gaps exist; the description of what verbs prefer the "-so" formant feels particularly obtuse and unhelpful. In the "other adjustments" section, this mostly manifests when you describe qualitative criteria (e.g. in object demotion and IDO extraction) without examples.

The result of these omissions is that the grammar errs on the side of being a featural overview, not a technical breakdown or teaching resource; it feels sometimes like someone was conducting a census for a overly-detailed, Akana-only version of WALS, and didn't really care about how the language works.