The SAE Grammar Test

This test is taken from Nortaneous's test in the thread "How to design a non-European grammar" on the original ZBB, revised by clawgrip, which was in turn based on Wikipedia's article on Standard Average European. Some of the wording has been modified for clarity. The score is out of 100.

Five points:

1. postnominal relative clauses with inflected relative pronouns (e.g. English "who" vs. "whose")
2. a periphrastic perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle (e.g. English "I have said")
3. a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, i.e. experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case (e.g. English "I like music" instead of "Music pleases me")
4. a passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb (e.g. English "I am known")
5. dative external possessors (e.g. German "Die Mutter wusch dem Kind die Haare")
6. negative indefinites that preclude verbal negation (e.g. English "Nobody listened" instead of *"Nobody didn't listen")
7. word equivalent to "than" in comparisons of inequality (e.g. English "bigger than an elephant")
8. equative constructions based on adverbial-relative clause structures (e.g. Spanish "grande como un elefante")
9. subject person affixes as strict agreement markers, i.e. the verb is inflected for person and number of the subject, but subject pronouns may not be dropped even when this would be unambiguous
10. differentiation between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns
11. no distinction between alienable (e.g. legal property) and inalienable (e.g. body part) possession
12. number distinction in pronouns, but no distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns ("we and you" vs. "we and not you")
13. no productive usage of reduplication
14. no marking of arguments other than the subject on the verb
15. obligatory plural marking and no collective or singulative marking
16. masculine/feminine-based gender system

Two points:

1. obligatory definite and indefinite articles/suffixes
2. non-initial verb order in statements but verb-initial order in yes/no questions
3. comparative inflection of adjectives (e.g. English "bigger")
4. conjunction "A and-B", i.e. "and" does not precede or follow the whole list and is not a suffix
5. SVO or V2 word order
6. topic and focus expressed by intonation and word order, not particles or affixes
7. specific "neither-nor" construction
8. predominantly suffixing inflectional morphology
9. nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment
10. only one converb (non-finite subordinate verb), preference for finite subordinate clauses

Calculate score

Score: