I recently read (ok, mostly skimmed) a pretty dense book called “Classifiers” by Alexandra Aikhenvald. If I took one thing away, it’s that there are many ways to do classifier systems. I think if it’s fun and makes sense to you, and you can stress test it and it holds up, then it’s probably good!

I think it would also depend on the way plant words are constructed. Like if rose is plantClass-blood, then swapping the affix would be confusing. So maybe if someone is called “Rose”, maybe just the grammatical agreement around it changes to animate, but the word itself keeps the plant affix.

Good question. I only know one language with classes (Kunwinjku), and I’ve not heard of people being named after plants. I feel like nicknames based on doing things with plants would be more common. Eg plantClass-bla = log, femaleClass-foot-plantClass-bla, “that woman who stubbed her toe on a log” 🤷

Yes I think you can probably allow wild allophonic variation of vowels, or consonants, but not both, otherwise you reduce your available sounds drastically 😅 Sounds like a good idea with the letters. I’m thinking of just doing little diacritic for voicing like Japanese, since it’s not phonemic.

Interesting:) I was thinking actually to have no voiced/unvoiced distinction in consonants, so people could freely express with that. Eg if “tek” is “tap”, then teg/dek/deg could be onomatopoeic variations depending on the force of tapping. Maybe more free expression in languages is the zeitgeist.

How many options-ish are you thinking for the options created by the vowels? If that makes sense. I’m thinking something similar, but I’m only doing (C)V(C) with 5 vowels, so there are only 5 possibilities there

Nice. It looks like the city that shares my name