问:
Do I need to start with a phonology when creating a new conlang?
The few conlangs I've read about/watched being developed in videos (such as those by Biblaridion) either started with phonology, or the description begins that way.

Whether that's a representative sample or not, is there a benefit to starting with phonology, especially when making a natural conlang?

It feels like an easier thing to add in later, vs. things like grammar.

答:
NO.

Videos and how to books often present a cookie cutter method of language construction. There is nothing wrong with this at all. Except that it leads many people to a) follow the recipe and b) get stuck on phonology.

The truth is we can start working on a new language anywhere. We can start with phonology or grammar or syntax. I often start with poetry. The other truth is that there is no particular benefit to the glossopoet or to the language maker of starting in one place over another.


问:
How did Tolkien model diachronic changes in his Elvish languages?
Wikipedia explains that Tolkien modelled changes to his Elvish languages, something we'd call diachronic conlanging these days:

Tolkien conceived a family tree of Elvish languages, all descending from a common ancestor called Primitive Quendian. He worked extensively on how the languages diverged from Primitive Quendian over time, in phonology and grammar, in imitation of the development of real language families.

What is a summary of the major changes he modelled? For example, did he describe something akin to the Great Vowel Shift?

答:
What is a summary of the major changes he modelled? For example, did he describe something akin to the Great Vowel Shift?

For Sindarin, there are some big changes in vowels comparable to the Great Vowel Shift.

For example, under certain circumstances and in different periods:

á > au

au > o

That's one of the reasons why Sindarin looks quite different from Quenya sometimes. e.g.

Q. - S.

náre - naur

anar - anor

If you want a more detailed "summary", or rather "study", David Salo spent some forty pages to analyze Sindarin's historical sound changes in his book: a Gateway to Sindarin. And here's an essay by Helge K. Fauskanger discussing the Evolution of Quenya.

Or if you want the description from Tolkien himself, you can get Parma Eldalamberon #19, where you can find big phonetic tables by Tolkien.

The biggest Elvish dictionaries made by Tolkien himself are organized by roots - Words in different Elven languages are listed under the proto root from which they are derived.
Here's an example from the Etymologies.

KHER rule, govern, possess. Q[uenya]. heru master, heri lady ...
O[ld ]N[oldorin] khéro master ... N[oldorin]. hîr. N. herth house-hold ...

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
Where do the words in Láadan come from?
Láadan is a language created as an experiment in seeing if a constructed language designed specifically for women could better express the views of women better than natural Western languages.

As explained in @RaceYouAnytime's answer, in Láadan there are several different words for different types of love, for example.

The language has many affection words, for example, of love.[...]

a love for inanimates

áayáa mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome

áazh love for someone sexually desired in the past, but not anymore

ab love for one liked but not respected

  [...]

oham love for that which is holy

sham love for the child of one’s body

Excerpt from the above mentioned answer. Parts have been left out ([...])
 for brevity

How were these words created? Were they created arbitrarily or did they have an inspiration/something they were based on?

答:
I don't know how to add comments to other answers, but this is just to say that 'eduth' means 'engineering' (because beavers engineer their dams and lodges, presumably) and is itself constructed from the prefix 'e' meaning '-ology' or 'science/study of', and 'duth' meaning 'use'.

Although Láadan is an a priori language and therefore does not derive on the whole from existing natlangs or other conlangs, it has a few loanwords from both:

buda/óobuda/óobudahá (a buddha / the Buddha, Buddhism, Buddhist) -- Sanskrit

Muhamad -- Arabic, 'Muhammad'

Thóra/óothóra/óothórahá (Torah, Judaism, Jew/Jewish person) -- Hebrew

wísha/wíshahá (wicca, wiccan)

Zheshu/óozheshu/óozheshuhá (Jesus, Christianity, Christian/Jesusist) -- Aramaic/Latin, 'Jesu'

sháam (psalm)

Arahanesha/Aranesha -- Arkansas

emeth (to clown) -- based on famous clown Emmet Kelly's name

mathom (knick-knack, useless object) -- a Tolkien conlang

shé (with regard to) -- French, 'chez'

théle (television) -- ancient Greek 'tele'

thera (Terra)

anahelilith (feminist angel) -- Greek/Akkadian, the character Lilith from the Apocrypha

modem -- English, 'modem'

shenéedera (metaphorical sister, one who shares not only hearth and home but lover and child-loving) -- Mercedes Lackey fantasy works

Sources are laadanlanguage.org and laadanlanguage.com and some words were contributed by others than SHE.

I'll lastly note that Suzette attributes partial inspiration for the phonology and phonotactics (particularly the 'lh' phoneme) to Diné, and the comparison mechanism to Kumeyaay.

Title: Where do the words in Láadan come from?


问:
How to Indicate Idea Flow

Are there any other schemes to indicate the flow of words/thoughts in writing? (Outside of what I have researched.)

I am specifically asking about how languages present complete grammatical statements and controlling which statements a reader is to comprehend first. Were I not looking for other solutions, I would ask 'how do you order sentences to create paragraphs?', but this assumes structures like sentences and paragraphs. It seems most writing systems indicate the flow of thoughts and ideas by have a general rule, like always reading "from left to right, top to bottom" (Indo-European), "from bottom to top, left to right" (Japanese), or "along the line" (Ogham).

If you are curious, this constructed language is built around the idea of sentence diagramming. Add to regular diagramming the option to branch new diagrams off of words already in your diagram, and you can chain these to express paragraphs as networks of connecting ideas. (So "I caught a fish this morning", "The fish costs 50 shells", "It will be delicious", and "The fish was blue" all come together around the symbol for "fish".)

The problem then comes with ordering ideas with no obvious relations. (Ex: "The king likes dancing. A camel spat." Vs "A camel spat. The king likes dancing.") With how things currently are in this conlang, the writer has no control over which order the reader interprets grammatically complete statements. What are approaches to ordering thoughts/grammatically complete statements?

答:
On Swamps and Morasses

There are a couple of schemes that come to mind immediately that might provide some grist for the mill, if not a full English breakfast.

First, of course, is the one we already use! You assume the existence of sentences and paragraphs already, but I think we should quickly look at them for efficiency sake. We generally learn to write a text, like an essay or a thesis, beginning with the thesis statement, the sort of summation of the whole problem the essay addresses. This is considered to be the statement a reader is to comprehend first. Next down from the entire essay in hierarchy is the paragraph. Likewise, we're taught to begin each one with the main sentence, that one that introduces the main idea to be discussed or revealed in that paragraph. Lastly in the hierarchy are sentences themselves. Interestingly, we don't order sentences "logically" but rather grammatically. Even though one might write a dissertation in Latin and put the thesis statement first, the sentence itself might not actually get to the point until you get to the verb way down at the end.

This scheme is both Linear in the spatio-temporal sense and Top Down in the hierarchical sense.

Secondly, we could consider extending this basic scheme by standardising and increasing the power of punctuation and section markings. Many technical documents do this by noting every paragraph with what amounts to a unique serial number. Often in historical grammars we find references to things like P4a.2.N3 which denotes paragraph four-A (a subset of lesser importance than para 4 itself), section 2, note 3. All in all , a very low importance reference as it's relegated to a foot or end note.

We have lots of interesting, unusual and unused punctuation marks that could be regularised, standardised and ammended to fulfil several key roles from marking importance to speculation or editorialisation. We have things like interrobangs and exclamation commas and the like; some languages have sectional punctuation. All of these could be incorporated into the existing scheme relatively easily.

Thirdly, we should take a look at other systems entirely different. First, let's take a look at music and in specific the conductor's score. Unlike an individual musician, the conductor has access to all the parts that are playing at any moment in the piece of music. Very much like what you're looking for, the conductor needs to be aware at any moment of "what is to be comprehended first" and "how does the whole text flow". Although music itself is linear, and the most important theme or idea isn't necessarily the first thing you hear!, the reader of the score needs to comprehend all the different sections, moving parts, thematic ideas and when they all occur.

As you look in the images in the link, the conductor has marked up the "text" of the music by coordinating various divisions by colour, notes when various themes, motifs and entrances occur and the like.

Even in an individual musician's score or in a piano work, you'll find plenty of "flow" markings: dynamic changes, pedal settings, phrasal markings, accentuation types as well as stylistic & tempo markings.

Some types of music rely heavily on flow marking, for example the genre of unmeasured music. Melodic and harmonic flow are indicated by the composer through the use of sweeping and flowing lines, but the interpretation and execution of the flow is the work of the player.

Another system to look at is hypertext. We've all used it when we hover over highlighted key words and clicked on links to supporting data. And we've all wondered why the composer chose to link two things together that don't make sense just because the other word is spelled the same.

This system allows the writer to make use of the linear nature of reading to ensure that more important topics are marked and read first, but also allows freedom to move between sections and also to dive deeper into a topic through the system of links and hovertext.

Wiktionary puts this to good use by ordering the Important Stuff on the main article page, while linking to supporting data, historical changes, usage quotations, and hiding grammatical apparatus and the like in spoilers.

Take at-baill for instance, an Old Irish verb meaning to throw. The key points and flow are handled here on this primary page with its sections delineated (word, etymology, pronunciation, parts of speech, declension/conjugation, descendants, etc. Clicking on the spoiler bar opens up a whole new view into the agony of grammar. Especially for anyone who thinks Greek verbs are truculent.

The links in all the sections lead one down rabbit holes of time and space and history into other languages, other peoples' perceptions, related forms, semantic drift and all kinds of other interesting inquiries that don't have anything at all to do with the basic thesis you started out with!

Title: How to Indicate Idea Flow


答: You don't have to start there. But it is a convenient place to start; it's hard to create words or grammar if there's nothing to make them concrete. If I have a phonology, I can start creating words and then short sentences. If I don't have a phonology, I can't create words without creating some sort of phonology; "london" and "rover" and "fog" imply an l-r contrast and nasals and fricatives and plosive and some sort of voicing or aspiration distinction. If you want to have a reasonable Latin orthography, you either have to change the words or accept a phonology consistent with that. If you don't have a phonology or words, grammar is a lot more figurative; "plurals are indicated by an s on nouns and a lack of an s on verbs" implies you have an s in your phonology and that noun + "s" is reasonable for your phonology. Starting with phonology leaves everything else a blank slate; starting somewhere else is going to create a lot of phonology implicitly.</p>

Title: Do I need to start with a phonology when creating a new conlang?

Body:
The few conlangs I've read about/watched being developed in videos (such as those by Biblaridion) either started with phonology, or the description begins that way.

Whether that's a representative sample or not, is there a benefit to starting with phonology, especially when making a natural conlang?

It feels like an easier thing to add in later, vs. things like grammar.


问:
How do I change the word order of this complex sentence?
I have an English sentence that I need to switch the word order of so I can translate it into my conlang smoothly, but the sentence is pretty complex and I’m not sure how to go about it. The sentence is “ I feel like he would like to try it after then.” I would like to switch the word order to SOV. Thanks in advance!</p>

答:
Presto Didgo Abbaca da Barabba Ortem Changeo!

“I feel like he would like to try it after then.”

I as if he would like to try it after then feel.

This example changes the main verb only, leaving the relative clause SV.

I as if to try it after then would like he feel.

This example makes the main clause SOV and the subordinate clause OVS.

I as if he to try it would like after then feel.

This one changes both the main and subordinate clause SOV.


答:
Perhaps the best way is to transate it into a different natlang, preferrably one with the intended word order.

While German is not your typical SOV language (what is typical, after all?), it is close:

```<code>Ich habe das Gefühl, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde. [1]
</code>```

Note there are aready some idiomatic differences from English: "to feel like" is "das Gefühl haben", i.e. "to have the feeling", and the subordinating conjunction is obligatory (as in majority of European languages). Also note that "to try it" is kind of ambiguous in English.

To turn it into a better SOV sentence, let's rearrange the word order a bit:

```<code>Ich das Gefühl habe, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.
</code>```

No longer syntacticaly correct German, but a good start for the translation. Also note that word order classification does not creeate hard constraints - especially in complex sentences, some constituents just like to stick together or to the clause boundaries[2]. So we can turn it into:

```<code>Das Gefühl habe ich, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.
</code>```

which in fact is again better German (a bit poetic perhaps).

Remove pronouns as fit if your conlang is a pro-drop one, and you can start translating...

[1] corrections are welcome, this is just my best bet

[2] let's try the sentence in Slovak: "Mám pocit, že by to rád potom vyskúšal". (have-1P-SG feeling-ACC that-CONJ would-AUX it-ACC like-MSC then try-PAST). Almost perfect SOV, despite Slovak being prototypically SVO. Note that the "by" auxilliary particle turns the verb into a conditional,  but it does not have to be next to the verb itself. And as a very happy pro-drop language, there are almost no pronouns left, and the word order is quite fixed (changing it would remain grammatical, but bring emphasis to different parts of the sentence)

Title: How do I change the word order of this complex sentence?

Body: I have an English sentence that I need to switch the word order of so I can translate it into my conlang smoothly, but the sentence is pretty complex and I’m not sure how to go about it. The sentence is “ I feel like he would like to try it after then.” I would like to switch the word order to SOV. Thanks in advance!</p>

Body:
Perhaps the best way is to transate it into a different natlang, preferrably one with the intended word order.

While German is not your typical SOV language (what is typical, after all?), it is close:

Ich habe das Gefühl, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde. [1]

Note there are aready some idiomatic differences from English: "to feel like" is "das Gefühl haben", i.e. "to have the feeling", and the subordinating conjunction is obligatory (as in majority of European languages). Also note that "to try it" is kind of ambiguous in English.

To turn it into a better SOV sentence, let's rearrange the word order a bit:

Ich das Gefühl habe, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.

No longer syntacticaly correct German, but a good start for the translation. Also note that word order classification does not creeate hard constraints - especially in complex sentences, some constituents just like to stick together or to the clause boundaries[2]. So we can turn it into:

Das Gefühl habe ich, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.

which in fact is again better German (a bit poetic perhaps).

Remove pronouns as fit if your conlang is a pro-drop one, and you can start translating...

[1] corrections are welcome, this is just my best bet

[2] let's try the sentence in Slovak: "Mám pocit, že by to rád potom vyskúšal". (have-1P-SG feeling-ACC that-CONJ would-AUX it-ACC like-MSC then try-PAST). Almost perfect SOV, despite Slovak being prototypically SVO. Note that the "by" auxilliary particle turns the verb into a conditional,  but it does not have to be next to the verb itself. And as a very happy pro-drop language, there are almost no pronouns left, and the word order is quite fixed (changing it would remain grammatical, but bring emphasis to different parts of the sentence)


答:
You don't have to start there, but it is a good place to start.  What often tends to happen if you don't start with phonology is that you will default to the phonology of your native language, perhaps with an additional "weird sound" or two thrown in if you try hard.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this.  That said, if you don't set your phonology at the beginning, it's very hard to make changes later.  Everything else you build about your language will use your implied phonology, which again, is likely to be the same as your personal native language's phonology with minor changes.


问:
Can entire words be silent?
Most people will be familiar with the idea that naturalistic spelling can be tricky. Some examples of natlangs with annoying spelling that come to mind are English ("ough" can be pronounced /ʌf/, /ɔf/, /ʌp/, /au/, /u/, /ɔ/, or /o/), French ("Qu'est-ce qu'il mangent ?" /kɛs kɪl mãʒ/), and Modern Greek (/i/ can be spelled "η", "ι", "ει", "υ", "οι", or "υι"). But how bad can it get? Are completely silent words (that is, written but unpronounced) words attested in any language? I'm aware that Irish mutations developed from completely lost particles, but I don't think these particles are still written as separate words.

答:
There's a phenomenon in Chinese where two different written words are pronounced the same way in a sense, but a word is inserted in spoken speech. For a made-up example (because I don't know Chinese and but vaguely remember this), the words for chemistry and science are both pronounced the same way, so when the word for chemistry is read, "chemical" is inserted in front. A silent word could be the reverse; if two words were pronounced differently but written the same (either historically, or due to a very deficient writing system), a disambiguating word could be inserted.

A better example might be Egyptian; Egyptian hieroglyphics end in a determinative that shows meaning but isn't pronounced. If that's not enough of a silent word for you, they could evolve to be more word-like; if words are separated by spaces, they could be spaced out, perhaps become more complex; e.g. English snspt ☀⚫.

Title: Can entire words be silent?


问:
Words for numbers in a language with bijective numeration
Bijective base-k numeration (or k-adic numeration) is a system of writing numerals such that the digits are 1 through k. Thus counting in bijective base-12 (such as my conlang Atili has) works as follows, using X, E, and T for ten, eleven, and twelve, respectively:

```<code> 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9,  X,  E,  T,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1X, 1E, 1T,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 2X, 2E, 2T,
...
</code>```

What are reasonable ways to assign names to these numbers, specifically combining tens? Obviously, I could just name the numbers the way English does and just have the names for numbers not line up with how they are written (so "a dozen" would be T, but "a dozen and one" 11), but are there other solutions for naming that better align with the way that numbers are written?

答: The solution I've gone with is to use two different words as jk suggests in his answer. In speech, both "one-dozen and twelve" ("rurinye-tendi") and "two dozen" ("barinye") are acceptable, but have slightly different meanings. Rurinye-tendi means exactly 24, while barinye means at least 24, but not more than 36. The latter is frequently used for approximations and estimations. In writing, rurinye-tendi can be either written as 1T or fully spelled-out, but barinye must be spelled out because there is no way to write it with numerals.


答:
if the base system is deeply ingrained in the language (in most (all?) natlangs it isn't, numbers predate modern positional notation by millennia; let's say your language had the notation for a long long time and historical language changes made the language conform to the notation), then the most natural system is just to read the digits - T is dozen, 11 is one-one.

or make the base multiplier obligatory for numbers bigger than the base - T is dozen but 11 is one dozen (and) one

Title: Words for numbers in a language with bijective numeration

Body:
Bijective base-k numeration (or k-adic numeration) is a system of writing numerals such that the digits are 1 through k. Thus counting in bijective base-12 (such as my conlang Atili has) works as follows, using X, E, and T for ten, eleven, and twelve, respectively:

```<code> 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9,  X,  E,  T,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1X, 1E, 1T,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 2X, 2E, 2T,
...
</code>```

What are reasonable ways to assign names to these numbers, specifically combining tens? Obviously, I could just name the numbers the way English does and just have the names for numbers not line up with how they are written (so "a dozen" would be T, but "a dozen and one" 11), but are there other solutions for naming that better align with the way that numbers are written?


问:
Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?
Exactly what it says on the can - I'm looking for a word in tlhingan-Hol (Klingon) for "skull".

Fallback: In case there isn't a canon word, I'm defaulting to using "head bone" as a replacement. I know from TKD that nach is "head" and Hom is "bone". Is this combination nach Hom correct? e.g. is jaghpu'ma' nach HomDu' a reasonable translation for "our enemies' skulls"?

答:
[Update from 2022]

Turns out the word was (semi-officially?) added to the lexicon a few months after the question and @Richard's answer - at qepHom 2019 (an annual meeting of Klingonists in Germany).

The word for "skull" is DughrI'

(Added on 11/17/2019)

See kli.com New Klingon Words (not in the original lexicon) page as citation.

Title: Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?


问:
Were Tolkien's languages used in the works of C. S. Lewis and other inklings?
It is well-known that J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and others were members of an informal club named inklings and spoke which each other about their literary work. I also remember that some of the inklings used Tolkien's languages to create names for places and figures in their works but I forgot about the details.

Is there a list of words from Tolkien's languages used in the works of C. S. Lewis or any other member of the inklings?

Can someone provide examples of such words?

答:
Tolkien addresses the use of some of his words by C.S. lewis in a letter to Dick Plotz on September 12, 1965. The letter is numbered 276 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

This is the relevant part of the letter:

Núminor. C. S. Lewis was one of the only three persons who have so far read all or a considerable pan of my 'mythology' of the First and Second Ages, which had already been in the main lines constructed before we met. He had the peculiarity that he liked to be read to. All that he knew of my 'matter' was what his capacious but not infallible memory retained from my reading to him as sole audience. His spelling numinor is a hearing error, aided, no doubt, by his association of the name with Latin nūmen, nūmina, and the adjective 'numinous'. Unfortunate, since the name has no such connexions, and has no reference to 'divinity' or sense of its presence. It is a construction from the Eldarin base √NDU 'below, down; descend'; Q. núme 'going down, occident'; númen 'the
direction or region of the sunset' +nóre 'land' as an inhabited area. I have often used Westernesse as a translation. This is derived from rare Middle English Westernesse (known to me only in MS. C of King Horn) where the meaning is vague, but may be taken to mean 'Western lands' as distinct from the East inhabited by the Paynim and Saracens. Lewis took no pan in 'research into Númenor'. N. is my personal alteration of the Atlantis myth and/or tradition, and accommodation of it to my general mythology. Of all the mythical or 'archetypal' images this is the one most deeply seated in my
imagination, and for many years I had a recurrent Atlantis dream : the stupendous and ineluctable wave advancing from the Sea or over the land, sometimes dark, sometimes green and sunlit.

Lewis was, I think, impressed by 'the Silmarillion and all that', and certainly retained some vague memories of it and of its names in mind. For instance, since he had heard it, before he composed or thought of Out of the Silent Planet, I imagine that Eldil is an echo of the Eldar; in Perelandra 'Tor and Tinidril' are certainly an echo, since Tuor and Idril, parents of Eärendil, are major characters in 'The Fall of Gondolin', the earliest written of the legends of the First Age. But
his own mythology (incipient and never fully realized) was quite different. It was at any rate broken to bits before it became coherent by contact with C. S. Williams and his 'Arthurian' stuff – which happened between Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. A pity, I think. But then I was and
remain wholly unsympathetic to Williams' mind.

This was mentioned in the 2005 paper "The Inklings: Connecting the Unconnected: Genre, intertextuality and intersemiosis" by Tommi Nieminen (Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki, Finland):

When Tolkien and Lewis made an mutual agreement to write two science fiction stories—Tolkien of a time travel, Lewis of a space travel—, and Lewis produced the first part of the Ransom trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1943), it was just as much an allegory as were his previous works, or the later ones such as the Narnia series (1950–56). Even the names borrowed from Tolkien to the Ransom novels—taken not from Tolkien’s writings but his reading aloud The Silmarillion stories in the Inklings meetings—were given so different second-world interpretations that they do not carry anything of Tolkien’s world to Lewis’s.

This was the only confirmed use that I could identify. Others have theorized that other words were borrowed from Tolkien's conlangs, such as the name of the palace in Narnia, Cair Paravel. "Cair" in Sindarin means "ship". This is discussed in more depth on TheTolkienForum.com, but ultimately it looks like both sources of Cair come from the welsh word "Caer", which means a stronghold.

The only confirmed use I found was the use of names by Lewis in the Ransom trilogy mentioned above.


问:
How can I format a dictionary that mixes vertical and horizontal scripts?
My conlang Atili is written in a vertical script. I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how to write out words in the Atili script within my dictionary. This is important because Atili spelling is not predictable, and the normal Romanization that I use for Atili is phonetic and thus does not convey how a word is meant to be spelled in the Atili script. Right now, I'm using a secondary Romanization as a proxy for the native script that does convey the spelling of words in the conscript, which leads to dictionary entries like the following:

azih   ÄZYIH n. (A) hand; (B) the first letter of the Atili alphabet, which represents the consonant /∅/

I would rather just write the Atili word in the native script, but I'm not sure how to sensibly mix the horizontal Latin alphabet with the vertical Atili script. I'm not looking for technical details about implementing such a thing, just how to lay out the entries on the page.

答:
One possibility, if the vertical words are fairly long, is to have multiple parallel columns on a page. Gives you rather short line-length for English, but since you are just writing dictionary definitions, most of those are probably very short.

Example:

(Image Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/darkangel8980/art/Vulcan-Script-Pon-Farr-212492799)


问:
How to decay (remove) vowel harmony system by conlang evolution?
So I have a Back vowel harmony system in my conlang, where front and back vowel cannot occur in the same word. Now that I am evolving my conlang, How can I decay the harmony system giving space to more morphological vowel diversity?</p>

答: A constant annoyance for vowel harmony are borrowings from languages that don't have it. So let your conlang be in contact with another conlang without vowel harmony and borrow words from it. Make sure that the words cannot be regularised without creating homophones. Once the vowel harmony is perturbed, it may be dissolved entirely.</p>


问:
What is the word-grammar transcription thing called?
What is the thing used under a sentence in a conlang that looks sort of like this: NOM-he.F-PAST said.F-PAST called?
I know I probably used it completely wrong in that example, but what is this called, and how does it work? Thanks in advance.</p>

答: The thing is called a gloss. There is a widely used standard for such glosses, the Leipzig glossing rules.</p>


问:
How do conlangs/natlangs have prefixes suffixes and not get them jumbled up?
When thinking how to build a conlang system of prefixes/suffixes, I get stuck right at the beginning: how do you prevent clashes within the prefix/suffix/base system?

By that I mean the following. Say you have these prefixes:

a

an

ani

amo

am

ami

amo

ach

acho

Then say you have these word "bases":

ma

man

mother

noise

nose

norm

match

cheek

chim

chin

aman

amish

achy

norma

macha

And you have these suffixes:

chum

ma

ama

amo

ana

vana

chana

I just picked random ones for demonstrative purposes. These will come into conflict in the following scenarios:

a + amish = aamish?

an + noise = annoise?

am + macha + ama = ammachaama?

The point is, some of them won't be able to combine:

If one ends with a vowel and the other starts with the same vowel (or even a vowel at all), and you don't have long vowels, then what do you do?

If one ends with a consonant and the other starts with the same consonant (and you don't have long/geminate consonants), then what do you do?

I am vaguely starting to imagine a system where you have two forms to each prefix/base/suffix, so like:

If ending in a consonant, it can end in a sibilant/fricative like s or f, or a nasal like m or n, so you have pairs like "mas" and "mam", and you pick one depending on the following word chunk you are working with.

If ending in a vowel, and the next begins with a vowel, you put a y or w between. So a + ama would become "awama".

Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.

How do natural languages (or conlangs for that matter) deal with this problem? Like in Sanskrit, or Latin, I see these sorts of prefixes/suffixes like my examples, and yet somehow the system seems to work (I haven't studied enough examples in each language though to know how/why it seems to work). What constraints do they place on the system? Etc. How do they create a prefix/suffix system that just works?

I ended up making all prefixes/suffixes/bases have to start/end with a consonant, and to combine you join with a vowel. That means for extra syllables, which I would like to get rid of. So instead of "kan" and "van" combining to form "kanavan", for example, I would like to just do "kanvan". Or even better, just have things that don't start/end with consonants, like "ka" and "an", and have them be, I don't know, "kan" or "kawan". How do you accomplish such a system? What are the range of possibilities which you can use (taking inspiration from natlangs or conlangs the like)?

答:
Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the
head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.

This happens in natlangs all the time. Consider French: the overabundance of silent letters at the ends of words means, for example, chien (dog) and chiens (dogs) are pronounced exactly the same. The language gets around it through the articles; you know that "le chien" is "the (male) dog" and "les chiens" is "the (male) dogs", thus in this case the difference is indicated by the difference between [lə] and [le].

And in some cases, it can get ridiculous. Consider the conjugations of the present tense "to run":

je cours (I run)

tu cours (you run)

il court (he runs)

elle court (she runs)

ils courent (the males run)

elles courent (the females run)

Every single one of those verbs are pronounced exactly the same, [kuʁ]. The only way you can differentiate them in speech is by the pronouns. Except, well, il/ils is pronounced the same, as is elle/elles. So there is, just from isolation, no way for someone to differentiate between "he is running" and "they are running".

So, what can you do? Well, context. Sometimes it's clear what you're talking about. Sometimes you have to add words to make the context clear: "Ils courent" (They are running) vs "Louis, il court" (Louis, he is running). Sometimes you can use other adjective which may have different words for male/female or singular/plural. All the normal tricks languages use.

ADDENDUM

I just realized, with my example of the conjugations of "courir", that it provides a good example of how someone trying to understand the linguistics of another language could get it really wrong from a limited sample size. We know French is written that way because of its historical development, and that it conjugates the verbs for different persons, and has gender and number coded in the pronouns, which the written language maintains. But if French wasn't written down (or it was written in a script that was strictly phonetic), and you only had a small sample size, you might come to the conclusion that the verb "to run", koor, wasn't conjugated in the present tense, and that French didn't differentiate between singular and plural in the third person.

Similarly, if you only had the written text, you might think that my examples above were pronounced je koors, too koors, ill koort, ell koort, ills koor-ent and ells koor-ent (or maybe koo-rent).


问:
Are there any thesauri that use a small controlled-language to define terms?
I have been looking for what I believe would be a very valuable resource in language construction. Ideally, this would be a full-size dictionary, where every description is a short list of words that approximate the meaning.

Ex:

Sleep: Still, Human, State, Noun.

Or something like this? Seems like this could be a good guide to creating more complex portmanteau words from a smaller base.

答:
You are probably thinking about WordNet, where a synset is a set of words with exactly the same (not just approximate) meaning. But WordNet is much more than this, it also contains informations about relations of hypernym, hyponymy and more...

The original Princeton WordNet was created for English, but there are WordNets (of different sizes, quallity and level of usefulness) for many different languages.

Modern take on the idea is the approximation of semantic closeness in word embeddings models, which has the advantage that it needs "just" a big corpus and no human annotation (and a disadvantage that lacking human proofreading, it contains a lot of errors). See e.g. here (disclaimer: I am the author of that webpage and models).


答: Looking for a controlled vocabulary to bootstrap the semantics of a conlang brings Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) by Anna Wierzbicka and other authors to my mind. I'm not sure how far any language description in NSM is really worked out and written down, but it may give you a starter for thought.</p>

Title: Are there any thesauri that use a small controlled-language to define terms?

Body:
I have been looking for what I believe would be a very valuable resource in language construction. Ideally, this would be a full-size dictionary, where every description is a short list of words that approximate the meaning.

Ex:

Sleep: Still, Human, State, Noun.

Or something like this? Seems like this could be a good guide to creating more complex portmanteau words from a smaller base.


答:
In addition to loanwords as raised by JK, you can also have consonants colour neighbouring vowels.

Consider a language where /i/ & /u/ form a harmonic pair with no word containing both, and that has the consonants /c/, /k/, & /q/ (amongst others). Let's also include some nonce words nutaculu & saqimi, and a suffix -fi/fu.

You might then have /c/ front an adjacent /u/ to [i], and /q/ back an adjacent /i/ to [u]. This would mean that our nonce words would be pronounced [nutacilu] & [saqumi]. At this point, the colouring is allophonic, so people would likely still understand the underlying forms of these words as harmonic, and would likely still take the expected suffixes -fu & -fi respectively.

If we lose the opposition between the dorsals now though, we have [nutakilu] and [sakumi] with no obvious trigger for why the anharmonic vowels appear. If enough of these oddities build up, at some point remembering all the exceptions to harmony becomes untenable, and the system will collapse.

Title: How to decay (remove) vowel harmony system by conlang evolution?

Body: So I have a Back vowel harmony system in my conlang, where front and back vowel cannot occur in the same word. Now that I am evolving my conlang, How can I decay the harmony system giving space to more morphological vowel diversity?</p>


问:
phonology design for a nonhuman species
I'm working on an alien species for a fantasy-ish world I'm making, and I recently started on making a language for them. For the most part, their consonant-making abilities are very similar to humans, but with one very key difference: alveolar plosives can only appear in affricates, and not by themselves, due to having their tongue operate with two muscles conjoined in parallel instead of meeting at a point, making all alveolar plosives (or any other similar consonants that involve pressing the tip of the tongue against something) be affricates. What I'm curious about is, with that in mind, would it be reasonable for such a species to naturalistically have all of (in xSAMPA) /ts s dz z tS S dZ Z/, or even have alveolar affricates at all?

additional question: if not, would it make more sense for the language to have only palatal consonant analogs, but not any alveolar consonants?

(also I'm not entirely sure this is the right stackexchange branch to go to for help on something like this, so if it would better fit on the wordlbuilding one or something, please let me know so i can move it)

答:
Those are some very good question!

On your first question, I'd say yes. In fact, there are natural languages that contain all these phonemes together! (e.g. Czech) Since your species does not have any alveolar plosives, one could even say that the affricates would be proportionally more common than in natural human languages (where they take a back seat to plosives) to compensate.

The one thing I'd recommend against is including voiced affricates without their voiceless counterparts; it is very rare for a language to have any voiced consonant without its voiceless analogue (this is also a language universal in the Universals Archive).

On your second question: That would be imaginable, but /s/ is among the most common consonants in natural human languages (9th most common acc. to Phoible), while /C/ is much rarer (similar for other alveolar vs palatal analogues), so I'd say lacking the former and having the latter would be rather unlikely.

Of course, this analysis is based on human languages; it's your species and language, and things could be completely different in whatever way you choose! (Like, if you want your aliens to like alveolar consonants less, maybe giving them shorter tongues, or putting their tongues further back, would be possible? I'm not an expert here, that's just a guess.)

Title: phonology design for a nonhuman species


问:
What resources are there on tone system creation?
What resources are there on tone system creation?
Resources could include

Documentation on conlangs that have tone systems

Guides on tone system creation

Resources on tone in natural languages, for a posteriori naturalistic conlang creation

答:
Artifexian has a decent pair of videos (#1, #2) on tones which discusses various types of tone systems, how they work in natural languages, how they developed there, and ways you could work them in to a diachronic approach to conlanging. I don't think it discusses conlangs that do have tone systems though.

The Wikipedia page for Four Tones (Middle Chinese) also does a decent job of discussing the evolution of tone across the Sinitic languages.


问:
I want to build a language that expresses the maximum amount of information with minimal words spoken
I'm trying to come up with a conlang for a setting where spoken word casts magic etc. In this case, a group of wizards, etc. Develop arcadian, which functions to give the most information with the least amount of time spoken. I'm very new to conlangs, but I got a crude idea of how this could work. You start with a base, maybe a verb. Then, you add modifiers to designate direct objects, adjectives, etc. I know that this is pretty difficult, especially for a beginner. But, I'm hoping I can get some good tips and feedback on approaching this.</p>

答:
One already-existing conlang that goes in that direction is Ithkuil, a language made to compress information as much as possible, mainly by having a big number of phonemes (including tone) and short morphemes.

The most impressive example given by the author (in my opinion) is

Aukkras  êqutta  ogvëuļa  tnou’elkwa  pal-lši  augwaikštülnàmbu.

‘An imaginary representation of a nude woman in the midst of descending a staircase in a step-by-step series of tightly-integrated ambulatory bodily movements which combine into a three-dimensional wake behind her, forming a timeless, emergent whole to be considered intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically.’

On the other hand, Ithkuil also strives for perfect exactness, so I'd suggest you could take some inspiration from it, but should cut e.g. some of the 96 cases, to make your language actually usable in practice.


答:
First of all, natural languages seem to have a rather constant rate of information (measured in information per time), independent of genetic relations and of the typological classification of the language, for a scholarly reference see this answer on linguistics.se.

But as a conlang designer, you can strive for a higher information rate, specially when your conlang is used by people with some superhuman powers. As an example to achieve higher information rate, you may look at Dutton Speedwords.

Title: I want to build a language that expresses the maximum amount of information with minimal words spoken

Body: I'm trying to come up with a conlang for a setting where spoken word casts magic etc. In this case, a group of wizards, etc. Develop arcadian, which functions to give the most information with the least amount of time spoken. I'm very new to conlangs, but I got a crude idea of how this could work. You start with a base, maybe a verb. Then, you add modifiers to designate direct objects, adjectives, etc. I know that this is pretty difficult, especially for a beginner. But, I'm hoping I can get some good tips and feedback on approaching this.</p>


答:
This sounds like a bad idea to me. Redundancy (ie "superfluous" information) improves the robustness of transmission of a message, so while you can reduce it in artificial languages to increase the bandwidth, you trade this off against a higher rate of errors and failed transmissions.

Now imagine you had a list of spells, and in order to reduce the time needed to cast them, they are all abbreviated with a six-digit/letter code. Now you have a noisy environment, say during a storm or a battle, and you want to cast a particular spell. How likely is it that one of the letters or digits is coming across wrongly to the receiver of that spell? And then, instead of a fireball, you might create a bunch of flowers instead. Or you summon the wrong demon. There's a reason why phonetic alphabets ("alpha", "bravo", "charlie"...) exist. Similarly, a single spelling mistake (no pun intended) can achieve the same disastrous outcome in writing.

If you want to increase the robustness of your words, you could reduce the number of phonemes (as there is, say, no danger of confusing /k/ and /g/ if they don't make a distinction in your language); then either the words need to be longer (see eg some Hawai'ian words), or you need longer phrases (as you will have fewer words available that are not long) or multiple sentences (see eg toki pona).

Unfortunately there are certain quantitative properties of language (or any code for that matter) which cannot be overcome: you can't increase the amount of information transmitted without also increasing the danger of corrupting the message. Natural languages seem to have found a good balance over time to ensure adequate speed of information transmission overall.

If your message can be transmitted repeatedly (eg in a casual conversation), getting it wrong occasionally might not be a problem (as long as you notice it), but for a high-stakes, one-off communicative event (spell casting, military comms [see Charge of the Light Brigade], safety warnings, ...) I would want enough redundancy to make sure the message comes across correctly the first time.


问:
Are there set example sentences used when developing a conlang?
When working on fonts, it's typical to use a pangram to show how it handles letters, like so:

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

Is there an equivalent set of sentences for testing how a conlang handles things like clauses, conditionals, pronouns etc?

I'm asking as I'm trying to figure out how my conlang with an idiosyncratic sentence structure (topic marker (linked to the class of subject or object or the verb) - one of several first person pronouns - relationship marker - object and/or subject and verb.) would handle some of the above things?

答: Probably the closest thing is the text of the  Tower of Babel legend that has been (is still?) customarily used to demonstrate your conlang (the alternative being the Lord's Prayer, but this suffers from stilted, archaic language and a necessary religious bias; OTOH, it is available for almost all natlangs). Not quite demonstrating all the possible grammatical features, but the text is rich and long enough to demonstrate basic concepts, and yet short enough to be easy to translate without too much effort.</p>


问:
Evolution of irregular declensions and conjugations from reconstructed proto-languages
In designing an artificial dialect of the Greek Language, most words and inflections have predictable patterns with a well-guessed/documented evolution which show the origin of the word's roots and stems. This makes it fairly easy to go back in time, change the evolution of the sounds or orthography, and use an existing vocabulary from the already existing Greek Language to create an artificial dialect.

For example, I could thus look at the dialectical declension of a word like σύ, and see that in the Genitive, Attic renders it σοῦ, Ionic σεῦ and others σέο, and infer that the root/stem is σε-, and that the contraction rules show that the irregular declension is σε-ο, then insert my own sound changes based off my own set of rules.
Likewise I can find out that σφᾶς is a normal contraction of σφέας or σφέανς with an irregular enclitic of σφε.

What I can't seem to do is take a root that is only used in the dual and transfer it to the plural. In the rare First Person dual, the pronouns used are (NA) νώ and (DG) νῷν. I want to make a plural pronoun using that root in the manner of Latin "nos" instead of ἡμεῖς (which possibly reconstructs from ἀσμέες or the likes.)
I can conjecture several possibilities based off a pattern, like (NADG) νῷ, νώς, νῷς, νῶν. But these have no real basis in the Greek evolution from its first ancestors to Classical Greek. I can't use σφεῖς or σφώ or σφωέ to trace a pattern without a good reason, because all of them seem to have their patterns traced from the evolution of ὑμεῖς, σφι, and νώ.
Where do irregular declensions come from, and how are they most authentically reproduced in a constructed dialect?
I am not a professional, so please give me some leeway if I have made errors presenting this question.

答:
I know some fellow conlangers are much more proficient in Greek and its history than me, therefore I want to concentrate on some more general aspects of the question.

First of all, you are the conlang designer, so you always have the license to do what you want, even in a very naturalistic and diachronic framework.

Second, irregularities can enter a language in many different ways. Very frequent function words tend to acquire phonological simplifications like contractions that the majority of words don't show. One can see suppletion, i.e., the merger of different forms of different origins into one paradigm. One can see cross-borrowing between different dialects, adding to irregularities in sound laws.

Third, it is easier to work in a forward direction in time than backward or sideward (from one dialect to another at the same time). The outcome of sound shifts is usually unique (taking all constraints by the environment into account), but the progenitor of a given form often isn't. So just postulate a plausible progenitor and evolve it according to the rules you set for yourself. If you don't like the results, try another one. You can play around with this. And don't forget the first point: You are the conlang designer, you decide.


问:
What significant traits are found in conlangs and not in natlangs?
Recently I encountered the acronym ANADEW, which I found to mean A natlang's already dunnit, except worse. Pondering a comment from Logan R. Kearsley where he speculated that "... it's mildly positive in naturalistic circles, since if a natlang already does it, you know you're justified in using it." I began to wonder what did not eventually fit in the ANADEW concept.

I gather that Lojban might be unique in its strong attention to being logical, as explained in two excellent answers to What makes lojban such a “logical” language?. If it is not unique, at least it still is something that I don't thing any natlang has as a strong point.

In the short time that this site's been open, it has struck me that conlangs might be improvements in one way or another over natlangs, yet despite their diversity, they haven't matched the diversity, and utility, of natlangs.

So, what I'm wondering is, other than Lojban and its "logic" is there some other significant traits that some human conlang has which is not found in a natlang somewhere?

I wouldn't consider using never-before-heard sounds as significant, though that's been mentioned in another question. I would have considered having a super minimal verb set significant, as in Kēlen, except that, well ANADEW, or in this case maybe better.

Full disclosure, I am not a conlanger, likely never will be. Nonetheless, I find many fields interesting, and created languages is one of them. With that in mind, please excuse some of my oversights or misconstrued concepts.

答:
There are a broad range of answers possible here and it would be impossible to list everything. In general, it is rather easy to come up with a feature that does not seem to occur in natural languages: simply take a feature every language appears to possess (for example: phonemes, verbs, hierarchical syntax that can be described with syntax trees, a very large amount of words) and reject it. Then see what you can do with the language. This leads to so-called Engelangs, short for “Engineered Languages”.

Alternatively, one can from the ground up decide to build structure from a different “philosophy”, e.g. build on predicate logic, or stacks (the CS concept), or… well, whatever you can think of that can organize information, really.

To make an example, there is Ithkuil. Ithkuil does not strive to be a naturalistic language. Instead, its goal is to allow for unambiguity. Among the things it does to provide that are a range of grammatical inflections not found in any natural language - too many to list, but one example I can make is its case system. In most natural languages, case is something of a helper to syntax. Case marks words for their syntactic roles and thus helps create the structure necessary to understand a sentence. In Ithkuil however, case marks semantics. The sentence “I hit you” in ithkuil would require different cases for “I” and “you” depending on whether e.g. I was a volitional actor, or whether the hitting was an unavoidable circumstance, or an accident, or mediated by someone else… While traces of such systems are found in natural language, none get even close to the extreme of Ithkuil.

Finally, an interesting anecdote is the Conlang Trigger System, a novel way of structuring languages employed in naturalistic conlangs (i.e. ones striving to be mistakable for natural languages). The trigger system developed from misunderstandings of the way certain Austronesian languages (such as Tagalog) work. It’s a perfectly plausible system… just not actually attested in natural languages. I believe there’s a nice writeup on the whole topic, but cannot find it right now.


问:
How many different interjections like 'aha,' 'oh' would you make up for a conlang?
I wonder if other people have thoughts and experience on this topic from the conlanging perspective. Have people with lots of translation experience found the  distinction between (for example) 'aha' and 'oh' worth translating into a conlang? What interjections are worth "translating" into parallel words?

I could get foreign language dictionaries and check for how many are listed there.

Thanks for considering.

答: Essentially, you can add as many interjections that you could keep in your memory. Be it a hundred or more interjections with similar meaning (e.g. aha + yes) or a couple of interjections with definitive meanings (yes!, No!, What?, etc.)</p>


答:
For other people considering this question in future, these 20-odd are what I have happened to think of since I first starting thinking of these 13 months. Specifically, this is copying from the definitions column in case someone else wants to check their "interjection toolkit" against mine. I brainstormed like half a dozen originally (surprise, pain, hello, yes, etc.) and the rest have come up over time: from translating things, budding naturally off related words, etc.

hey, hello, look, see here: an interjection calling for attention

shh, a call for quiet, often repeated like a bird call

good health, wellness; as an interjection, used as a wish and valediction by itself like 'goodbye' or more formally with 'aŋcyo' as 'aŋcyo aŋcyala,' like 'farewell'

leisure, free time; as an interjection, used as a wish and valediction by itself like 'bye' or more formally with 'aŋcyala' as 'aŋcyo aŋcyala,' like 'farewell'

good evening or good night, when you are expecting the person to go to sleep

good evening or good night, when you aren't expecting the person to go straight to sleep

wow, aha!: expressing surprise which is not unpleasant

a cry of pain or alarm

dang, whoa, oh man, shoot: expressing surprise or alarm which can be pleasant or unpleasant

dirt smell; as an interjection, an expression of assent equivalent to "no problem," "alright"

okay, fine, alright

yes

intensified yes

no

intensified no

dark cloud, temper; as an interjection, an expression recognizing a bad situation, as crap, damn, alas, yikes

warning; as an interjection, warning

"lizard's loincloth": a mild curse alluding to something ill-fated, ruined, or worthless

I have some other idiomatic/cursing phrases that "feel like" interjections, but the line between what's an interjection and what's just an expressive thing reflexively to exclaim seems blurry. So, I omit here further short, idiomatic responses and regular words that could obviously be curses. I include here hello/goodbye, which don't feel reflective but which do feel worth the reader's considering for their own lexicons.

Title: How many different interjections like 'aha,' 'oh' would you make up for a conlang?

Body:
I wonder if other people have thoughts and experience on this topic from the conlanging perspective. Have people with lots of translation experience found the  distinction between (for example) 'aha' and 'oh' worth translating into a conlang? What interjections are worth "translating" into parallel words?

I could get foreign language dictionaries and check for how many are listed there.

Thanks for considering.


问:
is it naturalistic for a language to change alignment like this?
I'm working on another conlang for my world and its evolution, and one of the defining qualities of its handling for transitive verbs in sentences is using nominative-accusative alignment, but switching sentence structure from SVO to VOS when doing so. what im wondering is if it could potentially make sense that a language that does this would switch from nominative-accusative to ergative-absolutive (on the idea of languages preferring context initial grammar rules) without changing the sentence structure again, and if so, are there any natural languages which have ever done anything similar?</p>

答: VOS languages are rare, but frequent enough for some analysis. Combining basic word order and alignment in the WALS sample we find two languages with VOS and absolutive/ergative alignment, and only one language with VOS and nominative/accusative alignment. This is not enough data to draw statistical conclusions, but probably enough to justify a switch of alignment in your conlang as naturalistic.</p>


答:
I have found these 218 Sentences to Test Conlang Syntax quite useful.

The sentences range from demonstrating tense, aspect and mood:

The sun shines.

Happy people often shout.

You should go.

to demonstrating more sophisticated concepts such as clausal subjects:

Why he has left the city is a mystery.

and inferential knowledge and evidence:

Evidently that gate is never opened, for the long grass and the great hemlocks grow close against it.

I did find it useful to make many more variants over time, and a version which indexes the grammatical concepts so that you can look up later how you did it would be an improvement. But it's a very good foundation, for my [unspent] money.

This google doc is my master copy, of which you are welcome to make your own in the file menu.

I originally found it here, 8/25/13. The original site was down, so I saved them. I understand credit is due a Mr. Gary Shannon.

Title: Are there set example sentences used when developing a conlang?

Body:
When working on fonts, it's typical to use a pangram to show how it handles letters, like so:

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

Is there an equivalent set of sentences for testing how a conlang handles things like clauses, conditionals, pronouns etc?

I'm asking as I'm trying to figure out how my conlang with an idiosyncratic sentence structure (topic marker (linked to the class of subject or object or the verb) - one of several first person pronouns - relationship marker - object and/or subject and verb.) would handle some of the above things?


问:
If there was a group of perfect-pitched alien, who spoke in whistles, would humans without perfect pitch be able to learn that language of whistles?
Essentially, without perfect pitch, could someone learn a language that requires you to have the pitch perfect.</p>

答:
I think no one knows this answer for the general case because no one knows whether all people can learn perfect pitch. I don't think we know what causes this "talent" to say what are its limitations. There is evidence that some people can.

A 2015 study found that some adults can acquire perfect pitch for months. Presumably the initial study's methods are theoretically improvable and repeatable. If you can accept the sci-fi speculation that warp drive is plausible with effort, then surely you can accept the lesser speculation that perfect pitch is plausible with effort. If you want to make the solution more colorful, then maybe write that medically inducing some kind of synesthesia is easier than teaching conscious, full-speed perfect pitch ;)


问:
Where do you start when you try to translate from an unknown artificial language?
The question is sparked in part by an article about Phyrexian language on Polygon.

Imagine you have a text written in a language that nobody knows. You might have some loose idea what the text is about, but that's pretty much all you know. You have no idea about the number of vowels/consonants (assuming they even makes sense for this language speakers), no idea of how the alphabet is built (and if there is even an alphabet, or a set of hieroglyphics), no idea of any grammar constructs and so on.

The question is: where and how do you start to make any sense what is written in this unknown language? What are the steps to do to translate the text from such a language?

To limit the scope of reasoning let's assume that:

The language is created by another human being.

The language is not a cypher of any sort.

No Rosetta stone is available (You don't have examples of text translated from this language).

In case of the Phyrexian language used in Magic: The Gathering, I believe it is just 10-ish cards written in it, all with English copies available. I guess those 10 cards are enough of a Rosetta stone to translate things. My question is more about what to do when there is no such Rosetta stone at all.

Thank you!

答:
This is a rather hard question, the only script I know of that was deciphered without a bilingue is Linear B, and that was possible only because it turned out that Linear B was used to write Ancient Greek.

Let's get the negatives out first:

I believe this is truly impossible if the language is written in an idiographic script, or if you don't have a lot of written material.

Even then, it will obviously be impossible to discern the language's phonology; at best, if the script is alphabetic, you might be able to find out which letters are consonants and which are vowels/syllabic consonants, if you're lucky and the language has an easy syllable structure.

Also, you very very likely won't find out most of the vocabulary. At best, if you find a word commonly next to a picture of a tree, you could assume the word actually does mean "tree", and try to deduce the meanings of a few other words from that? (Or, as Chadwick did with Linear B, guess that a word is the name of a city) (Or, as Champollion did with Hieroglyphics, guess that a word is the name of a ruler/pharaoh, because it's written in a special way and repeats across documents)

Now, onto the positives though:

What might be your best bet to find out is actually the grammar of the unknown language! (Though still only in tiny bits) If your language is written in an alphabet or abjad, you got the jackpot, because then you can with super high probability (given enough material) identify common affixes in words, and likely identify different sets of words which use different kinds of affixes, which allows you to distinguish word classes. Given that verbs are usually rarer in sentences than nouns (English has a lot of helper verbs, but other languages don't necessarily), and particles are usually rather short, you can even identify word classes.

If you have a language written in a syllabary, this might well be possible as well, but will be harder. (Worse, though also better sometimes, the syllables might stretch across multiple parts of speech; see again the decipherment of Linear B, which relied critically on Alice Kober's insight that exactly this was happening, allowing her to identify syllables with common consonants/vowel contents, but afaik that only enables Chadwick's identification of some words as city names due to repeated consonants/vowels, e.g. ��� as Ko-No-So=Knossos)

Of course, all this is way way way way way WAY more complicated than this, might well not work at all, and is probably impossible if the language is polysynthetic or the script doesn't include spaces or the script is any more complex than just "alphabet" or just "syllabary". But at least, I hope I could give you some scope on the problem.


答: this seems like a similar problem to translating the Voynich Manuscript, which is a long text written in a still untranslated alphabetical writing system, where there are no translations of it written in any other languages, and it is seemingly unrelated to any other writing system. approximately zero words in it have been successfully translated, even though the book is full of detailed illustrations of almost everything it talks about. the main problem is that, with so little specific information on whats written, and with so little similarity to anything else, there isn't any convenient starting point for deciphering it. in order to translate something, you need to have a lot of information on what is being said. even with detailed drawings on many pages, there isn't nearly enough to figure out the individual words.</p>

Title: Where do you start when you try to translate from an unknown artificial language?

Body:
The question is sparked in part by an article about Phyrexian language on Polygon.

Imagine you have a text written in a language that nobody knows. You might have some loose idea what the text is about, but that's pretty much all you know. You have no idea about the number of vowels/consonants (assuming they even makes sense for this language speakers), no idea of how the alphabet is built (and if there is even an alphabet, or a set of hieroglyphics), no idea of any grammar constructs and so on.

The question is: where and how do you start to make any sense what is written in this unknown language? What are the steps to do to translate the text from such a language?

To limit the scope of reasoning let's assume that:

The language is created by another human being.

The language is not a cypher of any sort.

No Rosetta stone is available (You don't have examples of text translated from this language).

In case of the Phyrexian language used in Magic: The Gathering, I believe it is just 10-ish cards written in it, all with English copies available. I guess those 10 cards are enough of a Rosetta stone to translate things. My question is more about what to do when there is no such Rosetta stone at all.

Thank you!


问:
Did the Elvish languages converge before they diverged?
I have the impression that Tolkien, for whom pinning anything down permanently was Not The Point, worked his philology forward and backward almost equally.

Is it known whether or not Qenya and Goldogrin (early versions of what became Quenya and Sindarin) were initially conceived as related?  Or did Tolkien begin them independent of each other (though perhaps with many loanwords) and later think “oh, they ought to be related” and adapt them to fit each other?

答:
Tolkien did work out the history of his languages both forward and backward, that is:

construct a pseudo-historical background and deduce the form you have
actually decided on from an antecedent and different form (conceived
in outline); or you can posit certain tendencies of development and
see what sort of form this will produce. - A Secret Vice

But AFAIK, these two languages have always been related from the earliest materials so far published (Qenya Lexicon, Gnomish Lexicon, The Books of Lost Tales …), just as their speakers in the Legendarium.

I'm not aware of any material regarding even earlier stages of them.

The ‘Sindarin’, a Grey-elven language, is in fact constructed deliberately to resemble Welsh phonologically and to have a relation to High-elven similar to that existing between British (properly so-called, sc. the Celtic languages spoken in this island at the time of the Roman Invasion) and Latin. - Letter #165

I can't say whether Tolkien had Gnomish in mind, or which idea came to him first: to resemble Welsh phonologically, or to have a relation to Quenya.


问:
Are there any free online conlang creation tools?
I was wondering if anyone knows of any conlang creation websites that are free to use.

I know this sounds silly but I have little experience to go on as for creating a custom language.

答: I know you are probably not still wondering, but I use https://conworkshop.com, if that helps.</p>


问:
How to translate to Black Speech this sentence "Eye of the Sauron is always watching"?
How to translate to Black Speech phrase "Eye of the Sauron is always watching"? or more simply: "Sauron is always watching", or even more simply "Sauron is watching".

and how to write it in tengwar.

As I try to translate words: eye - hont, Sauron - Shakhbûrz. always - ûkil. watch - hon- , gon-.

I used Black Speech online translator: http://www.blackspeech.ru/los/index.php?page=5

But I doubt how to make full sentence from it. And How to write it.

答:
I am not an expert in Black Speech, so I'm going to follow the information from the blackspeech.ru website.

The basic word order of Black Speech is SVO (subject-verb-object), as in English, so the subject is Sauron, the verb is watch, and there is no object. Adverbs (always) are to be placed after the words they modify, so we end up with

Sauron watches/is watching always

as the basic starting point. Sauron is straight forward,as there are no cases. With watch I would actually choose the translation tud-, as it has the sense of guard, which seems more appropriate here; in the third person singular this would be tudat. The adverb suffix is -arz, which gives us ûkilarz. So our sentence would be

Shakhbûrz tudat ûkilarz

With the Tengwar transcriber on the same site it would be rendered as

UPDATE: In case you want to say "Eye of Sauron", that would be the possessive ("eye Sauron-of"):

Hont Shakhbûrz-ob tudat ûkilarz

and

There are no articles, so it's either The Eye of Sauron or Eye of Sauron — there is no distinction in Black Speech.


问:
Is the language of The Gostak more than just relexified English?

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.

Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.

But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

So begins The Gostak, an Interactive Fiction game based on the classic phrase "the gostak distims the doshes".

The game is filled with words with no meaning in English, but which are used consistently, such that the player can at least learn their functions and relationships, if not what they actually mean. The grammar of the text seems to just be normal English, but are there places in the game where it starts to transform its grammar as well?

答:
Well,

it is pretty clear that this is just relexified English, just look at the function words: at, the, of, where, but, is, with, .... Also the syntax is 1:1 English syntax, and even the inflections (plural in -s, perfect participle in -ed, third person singular present tense in -s) are the original English one. All in all, it sounds like a strange kind of English slang.


问:
How to know if a language is constructed or natural?
Imagine you get access to a rather long book for which the following is true:

It is written in an unknown language with an unknown script.

We can't rely for whatever reason on the fact that the language of the book is not in Ethnologue.

The book came with no translation, and no known dictionary of the language exists.

Given all the above is there a way to say if the language of the book natural or constructed? How should one approach determining this based only on the content of the book?

答:
Unknown language and unknown script is a very hard combination to draw any conclusions. Even with a substantial amount of text we are usually lost in making sense of that.

Things become a little bit better when we have some clues on the script like

words are separated somehow

we know the principle of the script (alphabetic, syllabary, ideographic)

In this case we can try some statistical methods on things like word frequency and word length (does the language follow Zipf's law?), trying to identify morphemes, especially inflectional ones, trying to infer syntactical features, and compare that to natural languages.

But, unless the language is very schematic and unnatural in its construction, we will probably be unable to give a decisive answer to the question natural or constructed.


问:
What is the second most elaborate constructed language up to date after Esperanto?
What would be the most elaborate constructed language today in terms of size of vocabulary, complexity of grammar, number of exceptions to the rules of the language, etc.?
If we exclude Esperanto, of course, which I suspect would be the number one on the list.</p>

答:
My personal guess would still be IALA Interlingua which has an established language community and some tradition. It came with a rather elaborate dictionary right from the start.

But there are some contenders, Klingon driven by fandom with an active language community, and Toki Pona.

I am not sure about the status of the various projects of zonal Slavic languages like Interslavic—tracking and distinguishing all the ongoing projects with vexingly similar names and frequent renamings or synonyms is already really difficult.


问:
How do trade languages form?
I’ve read books (mainly Star Wars) that tend to have a species language (e.g. cheunh for chiss) and then trade languages that the greater part of a region also speaks (e.g. Minniesiat and Sy Binsti). That made me curious as to how trade languages form.</p>

答:
There are a few different uses of the term "trade language".

One is a language that lots of different groups learn as an L2 (i.e. not as their native language) because it's useful for trade. For example, during the Roman era, people all across Europe and the surrounding areas had some proficiency in Latin; people in North Africa might speak Punic as their native language, and people in Iberia might speak Iberian, but they would both know enough Latin to do business with each other. Or, think about the role of English in the modern world.

These sorts of trade languages tend to come about when one group has enough social or political power that people across a wide area consider their language valuable to learn. I don't know much about Star Wars, but I can easily imagine the language of a Galactic Empire becoming one of these.

Another meaning of the term is a language variety that arises specifically for trade. In this meaning, it's something like a creole, with features of different languages combining together as people try to figure out a way to communicate across language barriers (and then pass the language down to their children). The "lingua franca" used across the Mediterranean during the Renaissance, for example, was probably one of these; people speaking Romance, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish ended up adopting words and pieces of grammar from the other languages in order to do business and ended up with an amalgam of all four. Or for another example, Arabic-speaking traders wanted to do business with Bantu-speakers along the east coast of Africa, and the end result was Swahili.

For this sort of language to arise, you need two or more groups of people with a strong need to communicate with each other, and without the sort of power differential that leads to one group's language being adopted as a default.

It's also worth noting that these two meanings aren't mutually exclusive: they're more like different points on a spectrum. When languages come into contact they always have an influence on each other; the question is how strong that influence is, and how intelligible the end result is to someone who only speaks one of the parent languages.

Title: How do trade languages form?


问:
Why would a language lack a T-V distinction, but with a pronoun system that is the opposite of English?
In English, you is used both in the second-person singular and in the second-person plural (thou is now only used in some old proverbs and old expressions).

At the opposite, French (my native language) has a T-V distinction: tu is always used when addressing to only one person, but vous is often used when addressing to multiple people; however, sometimes, vous is used for only one person despite being always syntactically plural. When addressing to only one person, vous is reserved for strangers, or people older than oneself, or authority figures.

In my world (in the sense of a fictional universe I want to create), in the most spoken language used by therianthropes (their scientific name is Homo pilosus, so they are humans, just not Homo sapiens) (Homo pilosus means "hairy human"), Di is exclusively used in the second-person singular (even when addressing to a monarch, a president, a stranger, a deity, an elder, etc.) and Wos is exclusively used in the second-person plural (in their language, pronouns are always capitalised) (if you ask me, in the most spoken language used by therianthropes, the w is pronounced like the English w as in "world").

So, I wonder why would a language have a second-person pronoun system opposite to English.

答:
You don't really need a reason to not implement a T-V distinction. Just because your native language does, doesn't mean every language does.

But if you insist: In German, "du" (the T pronoun) is used to address God, suggesting that they (or rather, the people in charge of these things want them to) think of God as more a friend than a ruler. Perhaps your therianthropes have a populist leader who insists he's "just one of the guys", so pluralis majestatis (i.e., the royal we) never got off the ground. No royal we, no royal you; no royal you, no T-V distinction.

Of course, this is a significant departure from human psychology, as plural=power is an old, old cheat code, and we love power and flaunting it. But you've already stated that these people are Homo, but not Homo sapiens. Different species within a genus can have significant psychological differences, such as that between Pan troglodytes (the chimpanzee) and Pan paniscus (the bonobo). All of this, however, is worldbuilding - I'd suggest any follow-ups go there.


答:
I agree with most of No Name's answer, but I disagree with "this is a significant departure from human psychology".

Look at this map (via linguisticmaps.tumblr.com) showing which languages in the world have a T-V distinction—that is, a formality distinction in the second-person pronouns.

A T-V distinction is common in Europe, and more elaborate formality systems are more prominent in Asia, but large parts of the world (and in fact most of the world's languages) don't have such a distinction. In Swahili, for example, a single person is always wewe and a group of people is always ninyi (or nyinyi depending on dialect), whether you're showing respect or not. Instead, respect can be shown in other ways, such as adding a title like bwana (the equivalent of English "you" vs "you, sir"). Even in Europe, in Classical Latin the plural pronoun vōs (presumably the source of your Wos) was primarily used for groups of people; the T-V distinction was a later development in Romance.

So you don't need any justification at all for your language to work that way; it's how most languages on earth already work.

Title: Why would a language lack a T-V distinction, but with a pronoun system that is the opposite of English?

Body:
In English, you is used both in the second-person singular and in the second-person plural (thou is now only used in some old proverbs and old expressions).

At the opposite, French (my native language) has a T-V distinction: tu is always used when addressing to only one person, but vous is often used when addressing to multiple people; however, sometimes, vous is used for only one person despite being always syntactically plural. When addressing to only one person, vous is reserved for strangers, or people older than oneself, or authority figures.

In my world (in the sense of a fictional universe I want to create), in the most spoken language used by therianthropes (their scientific name is Homo pilosus, so they are humans, just not Homo sapiens) (Homo pilosus means "hairy human"), Di is exclusively used in the second-person singular (even when addressing to a monarch, a president, a stranger, a deity, an elder, etc.) and Wos is exclusively used in the second-person plural (in their language, pronouns are always capitalised) (if you ask me, in the most spoken language used by therianthropes, the w is pronounced like the English w as in "world").

So, I wonder why would a language have a second-person pronoun system opposite to English.


问:
For a whistling language, what other keys could be used to represent tones/tone actions
I already have used ~,<,>,’,=,-,^, and v for trills, rising tones, falling tones, glottal stops, chord tones, neutral tones, rising/falling tone, and falling/rising tone. This language is structured like music. Letters in exponents denote the lowest part on a chord, or the final tone in any other sequence. All moving tones are 3 tones except trills, which are 4 tones. Are there any other keys on a standard english keyboard that could be used and make sense for whistling? Please include how to get the character if option is used.</p>

答:
If one of your main goals is to be easy to type, I'd recommend repurposing Latin letters. This is quite common in real-world languages, since a lot of international standards are now based on the English alphabet.

The Romanized Popular Alphabet, for example, repurposes miscellaneous letters for the tones of Hmong (aka Hmoob). B indicates a high tone, s a low tone, j a falling tone, v a rising tone, m or d a creaky tone, and g a breathy tone. There's no inherent connection between these letters and the tones they represent, but they're easy to type and won't cause issues on passports and official documents.

If you don't want to use letters, it would help if you explained your goals in more detail (like what other things you're trying to represent).


问:
How would a language of whistles work
The language consists of 3 different tones: high, medium, and low. There are trills (~), chords(=), neutral tones (-), rising tones (<), falling tones (>), and rising/falling tones (^). Would the combinations of the whistles make words, or would the collection of tones limit it to a 6 letter alphabet?

答:
Real-world "whistled languages" are generally adaptations of spoken languages, taking some aspect of the phonology (tone, prosody, sometimes formants) and conveying it through whistling. A lot of information is lost, but there's enough redundancy that native speakers can still understand—much like how English-speakers can understand whispering, which discards most information about voicing, or styles of singing that discard some formant information.

It sounds like that's not what you're looking for, though. The rest of the answer is built on the assumption that you're trying to make a language which is only whistled, rather than using whistling as a lossy way of conveying a spoken language.

Languages with very few phonemes exist in real life, so an inventory like that is plausible enough. If you want to figure out what the words would look like, I think this is a place where some basic information theory could be useful.

The core idea behind information theory is that you can consider a lot of different things (including a spoken language) as a series of discrete signals, transmitted one at a time from a source to a receiver, and then use some mathematical structures to analyze that. If you've got three tones and six contours, and each phoneme consists of exactly one tone and one contour, then you've got eighteen possible signals. Not knowing anything else about your language, this means you can transmit a bit over two bits of information per phoneme. Each English word generally conveys about eight bits of information (given context and such)—so completely ignoring phonotactics, syntax, and various other aspects of your language, you could theoretically encode the same amount of information as an English word with four phonemes.

Once you add those aspects in, the information load per phoneme will probably decrease somewhat (since all the signals won't be equally probable in all contexts), so I'd expect it to take about six of your tone-plus-contour phonemes to convey the equivalent of one English word. That sounds like a plausible word size to me.

Title: How would a language of whistles work


问:
What is opposite of "burzum", "darkness", in Tolkien's Black Speech?
I'm aware that burzum means darkness in The Black Speech.

Do we know what the opposite is? How is lightness written?

答:
In short: no.

In a bit long: not really, and some people have gone to the effort of analysing the Black Speech. In essence, the list of words we know thus far is rather scant:

agh "and"

   ash "one"

            -at infinitive suffix, or possibly a specialized "intentive" suffix indicating purpose: Ash nazg durbatulûk "one Ring to rule them all"

            bagronk (DBS) "cesspool", possibly bag+ronk "cess+pool"

            búbhosh (DBS) "great"

            búrz "dark", (isolated from Lugbúrz, q.v.), burzum "darkness"

            dug "filth", tentatively isolated from pushdug, q.v.

            durb- "rule", infinitive durbat, only attested with suffixes:
     durbatulûk "to rule them all". The verb durb- is remarkably similar to Quenya tur- of similar sense.
            ghâsh "fire" (stated to be derived from the Black Speech, may or may not represent Sauron's original form of the word)

            gimb- "find", infinitive gimbat, only attested with a pronominal suffix: gimbatul, "to find them"

            glob (DBS) "fool"

            gûl "any one of the major invisible servants of Sauron dominated entirely by his will" (A Tolkien Compass p. 172). Translated "wraith(s)" in the compound Nazgûl, "Ringwraith(s)".

            hai "folk", in Uruk-hai "Uruk-folk" and Olog-hai "Troll-folk"; cf. also Oghor-hai.

            ishi "in", a suffixed postposition: burzum-ishi, "in the darkness".

            krimp- "bind", infinitive krimpat, only attested with a pronominal suffix: krimpatul, "to bind them"

            lug "tower". Isolated from Lugbúrz, q.v.

            Lugbúrz the Dark Tower, Sindarin Barad-dûr (Lug-búrz "Tower-dark")

            nazg "ring": ash nazg "one ring", Nazgûl "Ring-wraith(s)"

            Nazgûl "Ring-wraith(s)", nazg + gûl (q.v.)

            Oghor-hai "Drúedain" (UT:379; this may or may not be pure Black Speech)

            olog a variety of Troll apparently developed by Sauron. Olog-hai "Olog-people".

            pushdug (DBS) "dungfilth", possibly push+dug "dung+filth"

            ronk (DBS) "pool", tentatively isolated from bagronk, q.v.

            skai (DBS) interjection of contempt

            sha (DBS) interjection of contempt

            sharkû (DBS?) "old man"

            snaga "slave" (May be DBS.) Used of lesser breeds of Orcs (WJ:390).

            thrak- "bring", infinitive thrakat, only attested with suffixes: thrakatulûk "to bring them all"

            u (DBS) "to"

            -ûk "all", suffixed to pronominal suffixes: -ulûk, "them all"

            -ul pronominal suffix "them".

            -um "-ness" in burzum "darkness".
            uruk a great variety of Orc. According to WJ:390, Sauron probably borrowed this word "from the Elvish tongues of earlier times".

The abbreviation DBS stands for Debased Black Speech, a colloquial idiom variety of the Black Speech as used by the orcs and goblins.


问:
How do tones disappear from a language?
There have been many good writeups on Tonogenesis, i.e. how language acquire tones. But never have I seen such a writeup on the opposite phenomenon, which one might call Tonoexodus. Obviously, one way for tone to get lost is to simply have tones merge until there’s only one left. However, doing that without any thought to a highly tonal language would be rather disastrous. If any Chinese language suddenly lost all its tones this would likely make communication rather challenging. This makes me think that perhaps, there is more to tonoexodus than just a disappearance of tone. So my question is:

Are there any phenomena which go hand in hand with the loss of tone, analogous to how the acquisition of tone goes hand in hand with the loss of consonants or phonations?

答:
I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I think it may be because that while tonogenesis is a "special" process, in that it produces a whole new dimension to the phonology (as opposed to something more "trivial" like clusters becoming new single segment phonemes), whereas tonoexodus seems to not be much different from other processes of loss in segmental contrasts. Yes, a sudden collapse of the tone system in a Chinese language, or any other language with a high functional load on tonal contrasts would be rather challenging to deal with, but so would any sudden collapse of significant scope, whereas a slow collapse, where contrasts are lost slowly, one after one, in some environments before others gives plenty of time to resolve any disasterous mass ambiguity with innovations.

I have tried looking around for examples of tone loss, and this seems to be the pattern I have been able to find. The Oto-Manguean languages with fewer tonal contrast that the reconstructed protolanguages seem to simply come from mergers of tones, either consistently or only in some environments (e.g. unstressed syllables) though the data is not quite clear[1].

Classical Chinese had 8 tonal categories divisible into yin and yang registers occuring respectively after voiced and unvoiced consonants, and into four different categories, ping, shang, qu and ru(checked syllables). While some modern lects such as Songjiang maintain all of these as seperate categories (Songjiang also retains contrastive onset voicing), others collapse the system in various ways. Beijing Mandarin collapses the yin/yang distinction of the shang and qu tones and merges ru into the other tones, while the relatively nearby Tianjin Mandarin keeps yin shang seperate, while merging yang shang with other tones. Along similar lines the different Chinese lects have radically different distinction-dimininshing sandhi processes, from the well-known relatively limited 214 > 35 / _214 rule of Beijing Mandarin to the complete loss of surface realisation of all but one dominant lexical tone in Northern Wu variants such as Shanghainese. Again, there does not seem to be any phonological compensatory measures associated with any of these losses of contrasts.[2]

Tonoexodus that isn't a simple collapse seems to be hard to find, though the Danish glottal suprasegmental feature stød likely originates in a pitch accent system (note that some dialects have pitch-accent and some collapse the distinction entirely), and it seems reasonable to expect that other collapses of a two-way tone system to a phonation system could be found. As for other things, the largely autosegmental nature of tone means that it doesn't leave much room for other segmental changes, however there seem to be a few cases of such influences, primarily on consonant voicing discussed in sections 2.6 and 2.7 of Yip's Tone[3] and references therein, though she notes that it has been argued by Thurgood that all such alternations are a product of phonation types (which may then coincidentally be associated with tone) influencing voicing rather than tone itself.

In conclusion it seems that the most likely process of tonoexodus is simply a slow gradual loss of contrasts in an increasing number of environments, with the associated lexical replacement/innovation that comes with language change, and a tone system evolving into something else rather than just being lost entirely is likely to become a phonation system, possibly with a minor influence on consonant voicing as well.

Title: How do tones disappear from a language?


答:
I personally oftentimes stick to the basic template of:

An interjection meaning yes, true, and correct.

An interjection meaning no, false, and wrong.

An interjection meaning f*ck, ouch, damn it.

This is, of course, merely my opinion. Your conlang may have as many or as few as you see fit.


问:
Are there set example sentences used when developing a conlang?
When working on fonts, it's typical to use a pangram to show how it handles letters, like so:

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

Is there an equivalent set of sentences for testing how a conlang handles things like clauses, conditionals, pronouns etc?

I'm asking as I'm trying to figure out how my conlang with an idiosyncratic sentence structure (topic marker (linked to the class of subject or object or the verb) - one of several first person pronouns - relationship marker - object and/or subject and verb.) would handle some of the above things?

答:
The first article of the Universal Declaration of Humar Rights seems quite popular in some circles, i.e. r/conlangs.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

I use it for my conlangs. For some classes of conlangs, it might be hard to translate; especially in worldbuilding, some of the less concrete cultural things like "freedom" and "a spirit of brotherhood" might be a difficulty.


问:
What are artlangs?
I often hear the term artlang applied to some conlangs (e.g. Toki Pona). What does it mean? How would I determine if a conlang I am creating is an artlang? What are some examples of artlangs?

答: According to Wikipedia, an artlang is a conlang made to be aesthetically pleasing or to be part of a piece of literature. Some notable artlangs include Toki Pona, Quenya, and Klingon. Klingon was created to be part of a work of literature, specifically Star Trek. Quenya was created as part of Tolkien's Middle-Earth worldbuilding project. Toki Pona was an experiement in minimalism and the conclusions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.</p>

Title: What are artlangs?


问:
What are auxlangs?
I often hear certain conlangs (e.g. Esperanto) referred to as auxlangs. What exactly is an auxlang? How can I tell if a conlang is an auxlang? What are some examples of auxlangs?</p>

答:
According to Wikipedia, auxlangs are languages intended to facilitate international communication. Some notable examples include Esperanto and Interlingua. Of these, Esperanto is the most well-known and successful. Zamenhof created it in the 1880s.

Edit: As pointed out in the comments by @RadovanGarabik, these are only some notable examples of constructed auxlangs. See the comments for examples of natural ones.

Title: What are auxlangs?


答:
Auxlang is a short word for "auxiliary language", i.e., a language that is designed and promoted as a bridge language between people of different languages.

There are International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) aiming at the whole world as a target, and Zonal Auxiliary Languages aiming at a group of linguistically or culturally related people.

Examples for international auxiliary languages are Volapük, Esperanto, or Interlingua; examples for zonal languages are Interslavic or Afrihili.

Title: What are auxlangs?

Body: I often hear certain conlangs (e.g. Esperanto) referred to as auxlangs. What exactly is an auxlang? How can I tell if a conlang is an auxlang? What are some examples of auxlangs?</p>


答:
Another common one I've seen among conlangers is The North Wind and the Sun, from Aesop's fables. The IPA (the association, not the alphabet) uses it as a demonstration text; after they describe a language's phonetics and phonology, they'll usually give a transcription of the fable in that language. This means that there are a lot of parallel versions out there to compare.

For reference, this is the version they used for General American English:

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd ən (ð)ə ˈsʌn wɚ dɪsˈpjutɪŋ ˈwɪtʃ wəz ðə ˈstɹɑŋɡɚ, wɛn ə ˈtɹævəlɚ ˌkem əˈlɑŋ ˈɹæpt ɪn ə ˈwoɹm ˈklok. ðe əˈɡɹid ðət ðə ˈwʌn hu ˈfɚst səkˈsidəd ɪn ˈmekɪŋ ðə ˈtɹævəlɚ ˈtek ɪz ˈklok ˌɑf ʃʊd bi kənˈsɪdɚd ˈstɹɑŋɡɚ ðən ðɪ ˈəðɚ. ðɛn ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd ˈblu əz ˈhɑɹd əz i ˈkʊd, bət ðə ˈmoɹ hi ˈblu ðə ˈmoɹ ˈklosli dɪd ðə ˈtɹævlɚ ˈfold hɪz ˈklok əˈɹaʊnd ɪm; ˌæn ət ˈlæst ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd ˌɡev ˈʌp ði əˈtɛmpt. ˈðɛn ðə ˈsʌn ˈʃaɪnd ˌaʊt ˈwoɹmli ənd ɪˈmidiətli ðə ˈtɹævlɚ ˈtʊk ˌɑf ɪz ˈklok. ən ˈso ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd wəz əˈblaɪʒ tɪ kənˈfɛs ðət ðə ˈsʌn wəz ðə ˈstɹɑŋɡɚ əv ðə ˈtu.

Various translations into other natlangs are catalogued at the Aesop Language Bank. For example, here's Turkish.