答:
When I started creating my language I started with whatever words I thought would come up regularly (a, the, as...etc) then I would take a book, flick to a random page and translate what was there, creating the words as I went.

The advantage of this method is that if you are creating a language for a specific genre then you can use books from that genre to get a more useful vocabulary for what you are looking for.

Title: What's a good starting place to work on vocab?

Body:
Obviously, generating a lexicon is very time-consuming, and there's so much that needs to be done, I often find myself suffering with analysis paralysis, because I just can't decide where to begin.

Word frequency lists don't help all that much, because there's an inverse relationship between how useful a word is and how common it is. The most commonly used word in English is 'the', for instance. If you just made words for the 100 most commonly used words, you wouldn't really be able to make that many sentences, which would make it difficult to work on the grammar.

I've seen some people use the Swadesh list, but I fail to see how that is useful in any way since the list was arbitarily chosen rather than thought through. And besides, it would require you make words for things that are highly unlikely to ever be mentioned, such as a word for 'louse'.

The Conlanger's Lexicon suggests you work by categories, so that that way you can at least form complete sentences, even if this does limit you to writing about one topic. Of course, there's still the problem of which list to begin with. He just lists the categories in the book alphabetically.

Are there other methods to use? And yes, I know about word-generating programs, but those spit out stuff that's much lower quality than stuff generated by hand. And besides, my conlang will have a highly productive word-derivation system, so I don't need that many roots (when I'm writing down lists of words, often times I just write what I want the compound word to literally translate as, though I rarely go back to fill it in because I never get to the words that would comprise the compound).

I've mostly been looking at frequency lists and the Conlanger's Lexipedia, but I would like to know if there was a better way.


问:
What's a good starting place to work on vocab?
Obviously, generating a lexicon is very time-consuming, and there's so much that needs to be done, I often find myself suffering with analysis paralysis, because I just can't decide where to begin.

Word frequency lists don't help all that much, because there's an inverse relationship between how useful a word is and how common it is. The most commonly used word in English is 'the', for instance. If you just made words for the 100 most commonly used words, you wouldn't really be able to make that many sentences, which would make it difficult to work on the grammar.

I've seen some people use the Swadesh list, but I fail to see how that is useful in any way since the list was arbitarily chosen rather than thought through. And besides, it would require you make words for things that are highly unlikely to ever be mentioned, such as a word for 'louse'.

The Conlanger's Lexicon suggests you work by categories, so that that way you can at least form complete sentences, even if this does limit you to writing about one topic. Of course, there's still the problem of which list to begin with. He just lists the categories in the book alphabetically.

Are there other methods to use? And yes, I know about word-generating programs, but those spit out stuff that's much lower quality than stuff generated by hand. And besides, my conlang will have a highly productive word-derivation system, so I don't need that many roots (when I'm writing down lists of words, often times I just write what I want the compound word to literally translate as, though I rarely go back to fill it in because I never get to the words that would comprise the compound).

I've mostly been looking at frequency lists and the Conlanger's Lexipedia, but I would like to know if there was a better way.

答:
In the language learning area there's a list of the essential 625 words that are required to speak a language reasonably fluent; those might be a good starting point.

You will probably want to look at the list and decide which words should have a similar form (eg the colours), but if the main issue is what lexical items to cover, then that should get you started.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
How to "Naturalize" a Conlang?
Many conlangs that I have encountered have an “artificial” feel to them–all conjugations and declensions are perfectly regular, stress rules for speaking are rigorously adhered to, and so on. Obviously, changing that (e.g., introducing irregular conjugations or declensions, variant stress, etc.) is necessary to make the language feel more natural, but is it sufficient? What other ways are there to make a conlang less “artificial”?</p>

答:
Easy. Apply analogy and sound changes—see a few natural examples at Index Diachronica, a list of sound change types at Wikipedia Sound Change, and also David Peterson (maker of Game Of Thrones's Dothraki) on youtube— to your conlang, and make it replace (not evolve from) the unnatural language. These two elements automatically create irregular conjugations/declensions.

This field of linguistics is diachronics or historical linguistics (I prefer the former).

Title: How to "Naturalize" a Conlang?


问:
"Turing-completeness" in conlangs
Programming languages & programs are often said to be Turing complete when it's possible to simulate any Turing machine with it.

I'm now designing a constructed language for my game and I want everything to be possible to say in it. How can I know if the language is "Turing complete", that  is possible to say/describe everything using it? What would be the requirements for it? What words does the language need to have to be able to speak in it?

For now, everything I thought about:

It's possible to describe the past, the present and the future (ex. "I bought a car", "I'm buying a car", "I will buy a car")

It's possible to describe something (words?) (ex. "The cat is red")

It's possible to describe nearby area/terrain (ex. "There is a tree")

It's possible to describe plans (ex. "I want to buy a car")

Any more ideas?

答:
A language doesn't require grammatical structures specifically for expressing something to express it.

In Chinese, there aren't separate future and past tenses. At the same time, it's possible to describe the past, the present and the future. Auxiliary verbs like
 要 yào  "to want, to be going to" and many others can be used to describe what one would use the future tense for in English.

Grammatical constructs like "but" aren't  necessary to convey meaning. We can use words like "caveat", "unfortunately" or "I'm afraid that" instead.

Languages reflect their culture. You should make your game's language reflect the culture that speaks it. If they value respect, add lots of ways of expressing deference, like Japanese.

If you went back in time to 1700s England and attempted to describe the different forms of RNA Polymerase, they would not have a robust understanding of what you meant.

A language is a shared context between the speaker and the listener. The common context allows them to communicate some subset of thoughts the human mind is capable of to each other. No language can communicate every thought- some languages have much less room for ambiguity than English, for example.

A good example is trying to communicate colors to a colorblind alien race. You can teach them about the human optical system all you want, but they will still not understand the sensation of color.

Title: "Turing-completeness" in conlangs


答:
Every natural language has more or less loanwords. Adding some loanwords to your conlang adds to the naturalness.

So how do loanwords differ from the original words, after all it is a conlang and the loanwords are constructed, too?

Let the donor language have a different phonology and different phonotactics, than the loan words stick out by their shape. You may choose a classical precursor of your actual language as the donor language (We see borrowings from Latin in French), or an unrelated language. Also the loan words may have a different stress pattern preserved in your conlang.

The loan words may also have unusual endings or prefixes not occurring naturally in your main conlang, or show different mechanisms of word formation and derivation.

If you want to go a little further, the loan words even may exhibit loan inflections (just as some English loaned plurals such as hippopotami or cherubim do).

Title: How to "Naturalize" a Conlang?

Body: Many conlangs that I have encountered have an “artificial” feel to them–all conjugations and declensions are perfectly regular, stress rules for speaking are rigorously adhered to, and so on. Obviously, changing that (e.g., introducing irregular conjugations or declensions, variant stress, etc.) is necessary to make the language feel more natural, but is it sufficient? What other ways are there to make a conlang less “artificial”?</p>


答:
There is one big point here that really ties it all together:

Languages have history

Any conlang that wishes to look naturalistic therefore needs to emulate history as well. I’ll show in what ways history can manifest with a bunch of examples from different areas.

Orthography

Almost no language with a history of writing has a fully regular orthography. Even if there are regular writing reforms, some aspects of the orthography will just be considered “part of it” and stick. English is of course a very extreme example of this, but you don’t need to take it that far. German for example generally has a rather regular orthography. But the digraph ⟨ie⟩ represents a long /iː/, reflecting that in the past (and in some dialects until the present) there was a diphthong /iə/ in German, which became to be pronounced that way. It also has two separate graphemes for the phonemes /ɛ eː/, namely ⟨e ä⟩, reflecting whether the sound originates from a fronted /a aː/ or not. On top of this, there are some segments which have unpredictable pronunciation: word final -ig for example is pronounced /ɪç/ instead of expected /ɪk/. In short, unless your writing system was designed very recently by linguists, it likely shows leftovers from the past. In the most extreme cases, writing systems can lag behind centuries (English, French, Tibetan), but even if they don’t they can preserve some old features.

Morphology

Most languages with inflections show some degree of irregularity among them. This can manifest in many degrees, from almost entirely regular (Swahili has only one class of six slightly irregular verbs, one of which is suppletive in the present tense) to a basically complete lack of predictability (Navajo verb stems have defied any attempts to find rules for their inflections thus far. There don’t seem to be distinct paradigms, every verb does its own thing!). However, these irregularities are not random. To show what I mean, compare these two sets of declensions. The first two are latin singular nouns (in an less traditional order), the second two made up on the spot.

```<code>NOM filius rēx      kwero   tulya
VOC filiī  rēx      kwerap  tulte
ACC filium rēgem    kweruf  tultsu
GEN filiī  rēgis    kwerim  tulne
DAT filiō  rēgī     kwerx   tulum
ABL filiō  rēge     kwert   tulwo
</code>```

Two things should stick out:

The Latin forms of rēx show two distinct stems, those ending in /k/ (rēx, where the spelling hides the fact that really it’s rēc-s) and those ending in /g/ (all other forms). Looking a bit closer, we can see that the /g/ appears exactly before those forms with a vowel in the suffix. Intervocalic voicing (which accounts for /k/ becoming /g/) is a common sound change and applies here.

While in both languages, some of the affixes seem to be unrelated, there are still patterns: nominative takes -s, accusative takes -m, genitive has an -i in the suffix… If we added other paradigms into the comparison, even more such patterns would arise, indicating that they really originate from a much more regular system that got changed up over time by various factors like sound changes. In the made up language, on the other hand, the affixes are entirely random, and this causes the irregularity to look more unnatural than if everything took the same affixes.

Phonology

Consider the Japanese consonant inventory. It looks something like this (omitting allophones):

```<code>  m |   n |   ɴ |
p b | t d | k g |
    | s z |     | h
    |   r |     |
    |   j |   w |
</code>```

What this table does not show however is that /p/ is significantly rarer than /t k/. Why would that be? Simply because many instances of that sound somewhat recently shifted to what is /h/ in modern Japanese. In other words, a sound change caused a significant imbalance in the distribution of sounds. If one were to simply generate words with a word generator, not paying attention to the history of the language, all sounds would show up with similar frequency.

Vocabulary

If I give you any word, you can probably find several alternative ways of expressing that meaning. “big”, “tall”, “large”, “spacious”, “gigantic”… they all have different connotations, sure, but in the end they’re all descriptions for roughly the same thing - objects which take up a big fraction of your field of view when near them. Meanwhile, many conlangs will have a dictionary entry like gwop adj “big” and that’s it. Adding synonyms, especially ones with subtly different meanings allows you to greatly affect the way texts read (in a positive way).

At the same time however, often complicated words are derived from simpler concepts. This naturally has the effect of making them longer, causing a variation in the lengths of words - many short words with a few longer ones in-between is a common pattern. But if you simply create a new root every time you make a word, you won’t get that - and your hypothetical speakers will have to remember every single word without help, even ones they barely ever use.

I could go on and on and list things in every category of linguistics I can think of, but in the end it all boils down to this:

Irregularity in languages either preserves older, then-regular systems in now untransparent ways (English verbs are another great case study for this) or are the creation of sound change messing with regularity. The former is the reason why common words tend to be less regular - if you commonly hear a word it’s easier to preserve its original form and remember the irregularity once it has arisen. In the case of Navajo I mentioned above, curiously it seems to be that first sound change caused irregularity, and then the native speakers applying analogy caused the whole system to become even more irregular. See the paper I linked above for some hypotheses on how that worked.

Now, onto the actual question: Assume you have a conlang already, and it lacks history and is entirely too regular. “Sterile”, one might say. What can you do? I’d like to present you two options:

Invent a history for your language. Sketch out how your verbal system may have looked in the past and see if you can lead that to some interesting irregular forms or alterations. Come up with some sound changes that may have led to the current state of the language. You don’t have to do this in great detail, but obviously (as always with conlangs) the more effort you put in, the better it will look.

Make your language the history. If you don’t mind your end result potentially looking vastly different from what you have now, you can decide to move the  current state of the language into the past. You may have to make some changes to vocabulary to keep it in line with technology, but otherwise there’s not really any difference between a modern language and a “proto-language”. Then, you can track its changes through history in great detail, and in doing so introduce its natural flavour. No one has to know that the proto-language you worked from was unnaturalistic (but you’ll have to live with that knowledge. Just remember that you have to start somewhere, you can’t derive every conlang from the first utterances of mankind).

As a footnote, I’d like to make a book recommendation: The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. In this book, Deutscher discusses (in a very accessible manner) exactly what this question boils down to: how and why did languages become the way they are - messy and irregular and oh so complicated. I believe every conlanger should read this book, regardless of level of experience.

Title: How to "Naturalize" a Conlang?

Body:
There is one big point here that really ties it all together:

Languages have history

Any conlang that wishes to look naturalistic therefore needs to emulate history as well. I’ll show in what ways history can manifest with a bunch of examples from different areas.

Orthography

Almost no language with a history of writing has a fully regular orthography. Even if there are regular writing reforms, some aspects of the orthography will just be considered “part of it” and stick. English is of course a very extreme example of this, but you don’t need to take it that far. German for example generally has a rather regular orthography. But the digraph ⟨ie⟩ represents a long /iː/, reflecting that in the past (and in some dialects until the present) there was a diphthong /iə/ in German, which became to be pronounced that way. It also has two separate graphemes for the phonemes /ɛ eː/, namely ⟨e ä⟩, reflecting whether the sound originates from a fronted /a aː/ or not. On top of this, there are some segments which have unpredictable pronunciation: word final -ig for example is pronounced /ɪç/ instead of expected /ɪk/. In short, unless your writing system was designed very recently by linguists, it likely shows leftovers from the past. In the most extreme cases, writing systems can lag behind centuries (English, French, Tibetan), but even if they don’t they can preserve some old features.

Morphology

Most languages with inflections show some degree of irregularity among them. This can manifest in many degrees, from almost entirely regular (Swahili has only one class of six slightly irregular verbs, one of which is suppletive in the present tense) to a basically complete lack of predictability (Navajo verb stems have defied any attempts to find rules for their inflections thus far. There don’t seem to be distinct paradigms, every verb does its own thing!). However, these irregularities are not random. To show what I mean, compare these two sets of declensions. The first two are latin singular nouns (in an less traditional order), the second two made up on the spot.

NOM filius rēx      kwero   tulya
VOC filiī  rēx      kwerap  tulte
ACC filium rēgem    kweruf  tultsu
GEN filiī  rēgis    kwerim  tulne
DAT filiō  rēgī     kwerx   tulum
ABL filiō  rēge     kwert   tulwo

Two things should stick out:

The Latin forms of rēx show two distinct stems, those ending in /k/ (rēx, where the spelling hides the fact that really it’s rēc-s) and those ending in /g/ (all other forms). Looking a bit closer, we can see that the /g/ appears exactly before those forms with a vowel in the suffix. Intervocalic voicing (which accounts for /k/ becoming /g/) is a common sound change and applies here.

While in both languages, some of the affixes seem to be unrelated, there are still patterns: nominative takes -s, accusative takes -m, genitive has an -i in the suffix… If we added other paradigms into the comparison, even more such patterns would arise, indicating that they really originate from a much more regular system that got changed up over time by various factors like sound changes. In the made up language, on the other hand, the affixes are entirely random, and this causes the irregularity to look more unnatural than if everything took the same affixes.

Phonology

Consider the Japanese consonant inventory. It looks something like this (omitting allophones):

  m |   n |   ɴ |
p b | t d | k g |
    | s z |     | h
    |   r |     |
    |   j |   w |

What this table does not show however is that /p/ is significantly rarer than /t k/. Why would that be? Simply because many instances of that sound somewhat recently shifted to what is /h/ in modern Japanese. In other words, a sound change caused a significant imbalance in the distribution of sounds. If one were to simply generate words with a word generator, not paying attention to the history of the language, all sounds would show up with similar frequency.

Vocabulary

If I give you any word, you can probably find several alternative ways of expressing that meaning. “big”, “tall”, “large”, “spacious”, “gigantic”… they all have different connotations, sure, but in the end they’re all descriptions for roughly the same thing - objects which take up a big fraction of your field of view when near them. Meanwhile, many conlangs will have a dictionary entry like gwop adj “big” and that’s it. Adding synonyms, especially ones with subtly different meanings allows you to greatly affect the way texts read (in a positive way).

At the same time however, often complicated words are derived from simpler concepts. This naturally has the effect of making them longer, causing a variation in the lengths of words - many short words with a few longer ones in-between is a common pattern. But if you simply create a new root every time you make a word, you won’t get that - and your hypothetical speakers will have to remember every single word without help, even ones they barely ever use.

I could go on and on and list things in every category of linguistics I can think of, but in the end it all boils down to this:

Irregularity in languages either preserves older, then-regular systems in now untransparent ways (English verbs are another great case study for this) or are the creation of sound change messing with regularity. The former is the reason why common words tend to be less regular - if you commonly hear a word it’s easier to preserve its original form and remember the irregularity once it has arisen. In the case of Navajo I mentioned above, curiously it seems to be that first sound change caused irregularity, and then the native speakers applying analogy caused the whole system to become even more irregular. See the paper I linked above for some hypotheses on how that worked.

Now, onto the actual question: Assume you have a conlang already, and it lacks history and is entirely too regular. “Sterile”, one might say. What can you do? I’d like to present you two options:

Invent a history for your language. Sketch out how your verbal system may have looked in the past and see if you can lead that to some interesting irregular forms or alterations. Come up with some sound changes that may have led to the current state of the language. You don’t have to do this in great detail, but obviously (as always with conlangs) the more effort you put in, the better it will look.

Make your language the history. If you don’t mind your end result potentially looking vastly different from what you have now, you can decide to move the  current state of the language into the past. You may have to make some changes to vocabulary to keep it in line with technology, but otherwise there’s not really any difference between a modern language and a “proto-language”. Then, you can track its changes through history in great detail, and in doing so introduce its natural flavour. No one has to know that the proto-language you worked from was unnaturalistic (but you’ll have to live with that knowledge. Just remember that you have to start somewhere, you can’t derive every conlang from the first utterances of mankind).

As a footnote, I’d like to make a book recommendation: The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. In this book, Deutscher discusses (in a very accessible manner) exactly what this question boils down to: how and why did languages become the way they are - messy and irregular and oh so complicated. I believe every conlanger should read this book, regardless of level of experience.


问:
Use of string reversion in conlangs
I came across the Esperantido Universal where reversion of stems (e.g., mega "big" ⁒ gema "small", -a is the adjective ending) is used to denote antonymy. Are there other conlangs using this unusual and un-naturalistic device?

答: Solresol actually reverses the syllable order of a word to denote an opposite meaning, though this occurrence is inconsistent through the creator's published dictionary. For example, fala means good, but lafa means bad, and falaredo means accessible, but dorelafa means inaccessible.

Title: Use of string reversion in conlangs


问:
Are there any constructed languages designed for legal agreements / country constitutions?
A few weeks back i've watched a talk of Stephen Wolfram. I think was this video. Plus this article is also relevant.

The idea discussed was: how to build a language for formalizing every day discourse.

A language that can be understood and acted upon by both humans and computers. With the advancements in AI, crypto-currencyes, decentralization etc.. i feel this problem has become more then just the philosophical curiosity that Leibniz had.

What is our general status on this issue?

What are some successful / failed attempts of building languages specially designed for handling legal matters ? Are there any?

So far I have not been able to find any language of this nature - maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

答: I am not aware of an attempt on legal language (legal terms tend to differ very much depending on national traditions and culture), but in the technical domain there is Eugen Wüster's Terminologieschlüssel as a basis for standardised technical terminology.


问:
What tools exist for creating syntactically correct generated text in new languages?
Another way to put this is, what tools exist to generate sentences in the same way that some conlanging tools generate phonotactically valid words.

I've heard people suggest using word generators to generate sentences. I'm open to the idea, but it seems that morphology and syntax aren't close enough and I'm not smart enough to put my finger on why. If there is a word generator that can do sentences, I'd be interested in looking at it.

Here is an example I laboriously wrote for Toki Pona.

Note: I'm well aware there are a bunch of tools for just generating a random sampling of a dictionary, but that doesn't create syntactically valid sentences.

答:
It is difficult for a machine to passively understand a language (it takes tons of time with machine learning, and that's for Google). Actively, that's even more difficult, as many machine responses are pre-programmed and rarely actually generated (and in that case, mostly nonsensical, but the question isn't for sensical utterances). It will be extremely difficult and without appropriate backing impossible to make one that learns a new language.

That said, the one like the Toki Pona in your question could be made. But you'd have to program most of it yourself, and in languages like Toki Pona that's easy. Try generating artlangs which more like natlangs.

This doesn't mean it couldn't seem like one. You could:

Extract text (in English or some language) from books or such. You can find enough text online.

Translate it (i.e. Google translate) between many languages, obscuring the information. (optional)

Translate it from English—or better, i.e. Lojban, Esperanto, Toki Pona or raw predicate logic, as they are less complicated and easier to translate from—to your conlang.

Dispose of invalid sentences using some kind of lightweight parser. (optional)

I couldn't find any (good) generators, but you could have the first!


问:
Features of unlearnable languages
In this article about miniature artificial languages on motherboard.com experiments are described where children learn carafully designed miniature artificial languages. It is also said that children give up on learning "unlearnable" languages. A mentioned miniature artificial language is named "Sillyspeak" or "Sillysprochen".

What features of languages make them unlearnable? Is the full documentation of Sillyspeak available?

答:
If you search for the researchers mentioned in the article, you can find some of their research papers. In those, they describe their methodology. In one paper that I looked at briefly, for example, they mention that they varied the consistency by making the placement of determiners random. (This is actually also mentioned in the Motherboard article).

Their research seems to be focused on finding out how children can learn languages, and what universal features of languages there are, so they up the difficulty of their experimental mini-languages by using rare elements, such as OSV word order (most (Western) languages use SVO). Discovery that some mini-languages are unlearnable is thus a side-effect of pushing the limits as to what are possible human languages. From a cursory glance at several papers I'd think that you can make a language 'unlearnable' if you add some random variation and choose a lot of rare grammatical features.

PS: in the Motherboard article they actually give a reason why no documentation of Sillyspeak is available: they want to avoid it 'escaping' into the wild, as its purpose is to be a completely unknown language to the subjects of the experiments.

Title: Features of unlearnable languages


问:
Klingon: does anyone actually use pIqaD, or is the Latin transliteration sufficient?
Having just started the Duolingo Klingon course, I'm wondering if anybody is using the Klingon writing system (pIqaD) at all, or whether the Latin transliteration is always used?

As the characters look pretty hard to learn for someone with a Western background, I tend towards the transliteration only; I guess one issue is a cursive (ie handwriting) script, as the original characters seem hard to write by hand.

答:
The official Klingon orthography according to the Klingon Language Institute is the Latin transcription. It is what Marc Okrand, the language's creator, developed and uses.

The Klingon script used in from Star Trek: the Next Generation on, known as the Okuda script (Michael Okuda was the set designer for Next Generation), is used, but it's worth noting that while the sounds of Klingon have been mapped onto these letters, the movies and shows just put random jumbles of letters on signs and things (this may not be true of Star Trek: Discovery, however -- I've heard they may actually have translated the signage). It's also not the only Klingon script to have been used -- according to an article in HolQeD, the Klingon Language Institute's journal, the 1980 U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual (now out of print) featured a completely different Klingon script, though this one was a mere way of encoding English text rather than being mapped onto Klingon phonemes (Okrand did not publish The Klingon Dictionary until 1985, after all).

Given this sort of background, you can by no means take for granted that the Okuda script is the "real" Klingon pIqaD, even though it will be occasionally used to write Klingon. The Okrand transliteration is the only truly official orthography.

In any case, resources and activities written in Klingon are more often written using the official Okrand transliteration than with the Okuda script -- the Klingon subtitles on Star Trek: Discovery, for one example, are in the transliteration (can't make Unicode add new characters for such things, after all!) In general, you'll be fine with just the transliteration -- in fact, you may have an easier time, as the transliteration is easy to type. That said, no one will judge you if you use the Okuda script because you want the writing to feel less Terran or something.


问:
How to make good analogy in one's constructed language?
What steps can be taken to reproduce analogy in a constructed language? Which parts of grammar are more likely to evolve with analogy, and why? Are there rules for what analogy does to which words, or rules that show where analogy may take place?

答:
Let's look at a made-up example. Assume that we want to apply a sound change from /g/ to /d͡ʒ/ before /e/ and /i/ in Esperanto. Then, the conjugation of the Esperanto verb pagi "to pay" suddenly becomes irregular:

paĝi, pagas, paĝis, pagos, pagus (The infinitive and the past tense have a different consonant (ĝ) than the rest).

Analogy will force one consonant for all forms but we cannot predict which one. In this respect, analogy is quite irregular, and we can end up either with the original Esperanto paradigm, or with all forms shifted to the new consonant (paĝi, paĝas, paĝis, paĝos, paĝus).

Analogy affects usually inflected or agglutinative word forms, such as verbs and nouns, but it can also be applied to derivational morphology.

Another type of analogy tries to level out differences between conjugations or declensions. Assume, your language features two different conjugations. Than borrowing an ending (or prefix, or vowel change) from one conjugation to the other is also an analogy.


问:
How could my to be constructed language reflect a culture of carefulness?
For a role-playing setting, I want to construct an elven language. The society of these elves strongly values being careful, thinking things through, taking one’s time and preventing mistakes. This is not a recent development but has been that way for centuries.

I feel that the language should somehow reflect their culture of being careful and preventing mistakes — somewhat like the Japanese language mirrors the importance of showing respect to the other party with a wide range of respectful address suffixes, respectful grammatical features and a respectful vocabulary.

In what way could I implement my elves’ carefulness and mistake-preventing ideal in their language?

As requested in the comments, here is some further elaboration of what I have in mind.

In cultures, certain behaviour is considered acceptable, certain behaviour is considered well-mannered and other behaviour is considered rude. For example, in Germany coming straight to the point is considered the normal, accepted behaviour while giving white lies is frowned upon to different degrees leading to Germans outright stating what they observe even in other languages in what is elsewhere considered an unfriendly manner.

On the other hand in China, not being able to provide an answer to a question is considered rude so accepted behaviour instead is to provide an answer even if one has no idea if it is true or not. (That is the impression I got from interaction with previous Chinese colleagues.)

In the culture of my elven society, it would be perfectly acceptable and even considered well-mannered to let a deadline pass or let somebody wait in order to perfection a good or a service. On the other hand, providing someone with a flawed product or a not fully thought-through piece of advice would considered disrespectful because one should have taken the time to ensure the error within does not exist. (Such behaviour would be entirely unacceptable in Germany where it is expected for the finished product to arrive five minutes before the deadline.)

A number of common — to them — proverbs would underline this expectation. Maybe something along the lines of ‘the time you lose from a bad result outweighs the gain from finishing quickly’ or ‘even the king will gladly wait for his crown’ etc.

I hope I have made the general idea more clear.

答:
Apart from the already mentioned evidentiality, you could look at modality. This expresses a speaker's attitude using a variety of aspects, such as obligation, possibility, probability, etc. The exact set depends on the language and the linguistic framework you are using.

You could have a default modality of 'optionality', so the sentence I am going to the shop could actually mean "I might perhaps go to the shop" -- notice how in English we use adverbials (perhaps) and mood (might) to express this. In your language you would have modals for definitely, or actually, so you make explicit that you are performing an action, rather than contemplating it.

As dithering is the default behaviour, your linguistic features should express the opposite, ie the rarer cases where dithering does not apply. So in a way the answer to your question of how to implement this in your language is "not at all". Because that's what you do anyway, you don't need to talk about it. But you do make explicit where it doesn't apply.


问:
How does the Wede:i language reflect their cultural focus on government?
We can see that the Wede:i have a focus on the state in their culture:

The central fact of existence has always been the state, always essential. The southern religions had always preached support for the state, the importance of the collective good, and the social lubrication necessary to a populous and busy state: manners and decorum; respect for superiors; fair and just treatment for inferiors.

Can we see this in their language? i.e., are there more government-related words than in other languages?

答:
I don't think you can generally assume a strong correlation between the vocabulary of a language and culture of the kind you are asking about. Just like the "50 Eskimo words for snow" is a myth, it would also apply to other languages...

Not knowing the language in question I would think that there is a cultural influence, but not as obvious as having more words in a given topic area. I would expect a fine-grained system of honorifics, expressed in, for example, different verbal affixes depending on whether you speak to someone who is superior to you or not. So you express respect by using a different form of the verb, but not a different lexical item.

The same would apply to other areas of discourse. Politeness markers, modality (should, could, would,...) all play a role in social interaction, but do not necessarily manifest themselves directly in the vocabulary.


答:
I do not know of any tools that are specifically designed for producing syntactically valid text, but my own word generator Logopoeist could be made to work for that purpose, and it wouldn't be terribly difficult to update it to produce a program actually intended for that purpose.

The reason for this is that Logopoeist already treats morphophonology as an extension of syntax, and generates words according to explicit word-syntax parse trees, rather than, e.g., just filling in slots in a CV-style syllable structure template. So, if you are able to write up a formal grammar of the language's syntax above the word level, and put it into a format that the tool can read, then you just need to replace the phoneme/grapheme lists with word lists instead (repurposing phonetic classes to serve as syntactic classes / parts of speech), and it'll spit out random sentences instead of random words.

Title: What tools exist for creating syntactically correct generated text in new languages?

Body:
Another way to put this is, what tools exist to generate sentences in the same way that some conlanging tools generate phonotactically valid words.

I've heard people suggest using word generators to generate sentences. I'm open to the idea, but it seems that morphology and syntax aren't close enough and I'm not smart enough to put my finger on why. If there is a word generator that can do sentences, I'd be interested in looking at it.

Here is an example I laboriously wrote for Toki Pona.

Note: I'm well aware there are a bunch of tools for just generating a random sampling of a dictionary, but that doesn't create syntactically valid sentences.


答:
pIqaD shows up here and there, but in my experience (which is 20 years old, but I haven't seen much to contradict it), its use is emblematic. People will put a word up here and there, and it will appear in T-shirts; but people do not read connected texts in it.

As is, pIqaD is indeed unwritable with a pen. I experimented in my time with ways of making it more writeable: see my handiwork at Klingonska Akademien, linked from the discussion of some pictures of pIqaD.

Title: Klingon: does anyone actually use pIqaD, or is the Latin transliteration sufficient?

Body:
Having just started the Duolingo Klingon course, I'm wondering if anybody is using the Klingon writing system (pIqaD) at all, or whether the Latin transliteration is always used?

As the characters look pretty hard to learn for someone with a Western background, I tend towards the transliteration only; I guess one issue is a cursive (ie handwriting) script, as the original characters seem hard to write by hand.


答:
Lojban is often considered unusuable by humans because of its design.

A better example however, may be languages that have features that humans simply can not use. For example, Elkaril has an odd grammatical feature where precise measurements can be given by how long a consonant is held, and mentions that the 'infinite space' in-between vowels can also be used to encode precise information, though I can't seem to recall what purpose that serves. Obviously, humans couldn't possibly use a language like this, and that was intentional.

Personally, I limit myself to features natlangs have. Not that I try to create naturalisitic conlangs, I just do that because natlangs are of course tried and tested beyond what any conlang could be, so I can be certain that the features they have are something a human could actually use. I used to have a problem with creating weird languages that were clearly unusable by humans.

Human minds work a specific way, and despite our diversity there ARE universals (for example, all languages have nouns and verbs, though otherwise the list of parts of speech within a language can vary widely). So there are limits to what ways a language can work. You may have some wiggle room, but you can't just make up whatever you can imagine and expect it to be usable.

Title: Features of unlearnable languages

Body:
In this article about miniature artificial languages on motherboard.com experiments are described where children learn carafully designed miniature artificial languages. It is also said that children give up on learning "unlearnable" languages. A mentioned miniature artificial language is named "Sillyspeak" or "Sillysprochen".

What features of languages make them unlearnable? Is the full documentation of Sillyspeak available?


问:
Why do I have such a problem with my conlangs being ugly?
This is a perpetual problem I have and I find it quite annoying. Yes, I know its kinda subjective, but that doesn't change the fact that, to me at least, my conlangs are always hideous.

For a recent example, my most recent conlang has agglutinating pronouns. For instance, the word for 'I' is 'ta' and the word for 'we' is 'tai' (pronounced like 'tie', minus the aspiration of course). That's not too bad. The issue is when I add the nominative marker -s: 'tas' and 'tais'. To me, 'tais' just sounds hideous.

In past I think it was because I used the voiceless velar fricative far too often. But even if I don't include the phoneme my language sounds hideous, and artificial to the point that its sounds robotic. Though the latter is probably because I have a hard time NOT making conlangs 'logical'.

There are of course nice-sounding conlangs out there, and even natlangs, but I just can't seem to imitate the sound of any other language for some reason, and I don't get why. And I specialize in phonology, so I don't get why I can't get the sound right. Even if my conlang has the exact same phonemes, allophony, intonation, and phonotactics as a natlang, it will sound completely different and I can't figure out why. I mean, how can I screw up the latter? What am I missing?

答:
What you need is to adjust your phonotactics. Since you mention it in your question you apparently know what they are, but you aren't using them to get the sounds you want.

You say you find "tais" to be hideous, but you don't explain why, so let's say you don't like the way that a diphthong sounds in a closed syllable. (If this isn't the case, take this as an example for whatever the problem is.)

Once you've located the problem, you have to determine how to eliminate it by making rules for new phonotactics. You can think of lots of ways:

The diphthong becomes a monophthong: tais > tas,  tis or tes in a closed syllable (tas might be problematic since it creates ambiguity with the singular). Or, alternatively, two monophthongs: tais could be [ta.is] instead of [tajs]

A new consonant could be placed to separate the diphthong: tais could transform into tayis, maybe taus could be tawus (based on a simple rule of adding y before a front vowel and w before a back vowel)

The diphthong could monophthongize and simple color the next consonant: tais could be pronounced [taɕ]. You could create a pattern with other consonants, e.g. tait > [tac], taid > [taɟ]

Even if some of these options are problematic in your case (maybe you don't want to "contaminate" your agglutinative language), you could still retain the phonemes /tajs/ and just have some of these options as allophones of it (so e.g. [e] or [e:] could be an allophone of /aj/ in a closed syllable, [ɕ] could be an allophone of /js/)

What you need to do is just determine what sounds ugly to you and create phonotactic rules that cover whatever the problem is.


答:
The obvious point is: Design your conlang for pleasantness.

Several conlang inventors had clear ideas about pleasantness: Zamenhof liked the sound of the Italian language and designed that into Esperanto; Tolkien liked Welsh (designed into Sindarin) and Finnish (designed into Quenya).

So "taste" different syllables and sounds, "taste" combinations of them, and than set up strong phonotactic rules forbidding ugly sounds. Whenever your morphology tries to introduce an ugly sound, think of a remedy:

Change the morphology

Apply some transformation that removes the ugly sound (this also adds irregularity, naturalness, and flavour to the language); for detailed suggestions see @b a's answer.

I think getting at a list of pleasant sound combinations (and a list of ugly ones to be avoided) is the difficult part of the program, getting rid of them once you know them is the easier task.

Title: Why do I have such a problem with my conlangs being ugly?

Body:
This is a perpetual problem I have and I find it quite annoying. Yes, I know its kinda subjective, but that doesn't change the fact that, to me at least, my conlangs are always hideous.

For a recent example, my most recent conlang has agglutinating pronouns. For instance, the word for 'I' is 'ta' and the word for 'we' is 'tai' (pronounced like 'tie', minus the aspiration of course). That's not too bad. The issue is when I add the nominative marker -s: 'tas' and 'tais'. To me, 'tais' just sounds hideous.

In past I think it was because I used the voiceless velar fricative far too often. But even if I don't include the phoneme my language sounds hideous, and artificial to the point that its sounds robotic. Though the latter is probably because I have a hard time NOT making conlangs 'logical'.

There are of course nice-sounding conlangs out there, and even natlangs, but I just can't seem to imitate the sound of any other language for some reason, and I don't get why. And I specialize in phonology, so I don't get why I can't get the sound right. Even if my conlang has the exact same phonemes, allophony, intonation, and phonotactics as a natlang, it will sound completely different and I can't figure out why. I mean, how can I screw up the latter? What am I missing?

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


答:
I have a less sophisticated explanation. Tastes change with exposure, so any new language sounds less pretty.

Also, what sounds right or pretty, after you've gotten used to a language, are words that follow the phonotactic rules.

I'm skeptical of the idea that some sounds are apriori prettier or more pleasant.  Cellar door sounds good because it is a perfectly ordinary bit of English phonotactics, a language Tolkien was obviously familiar with.


问:
Can Pokemon language encode enough information to be a language?
I know that like Star Wars' droid, Pikachu's language is just nonsense with emotionally appropriate intonation, that said...

Can suprasegmental features (accent, tone, etc) encode a single three syllable word in enough different ways to get the vocabulary up to toki pona size? (about 100-125) Or up to a natural language size lexicion (say 7000-15000)

The question occurred to me because Alexa has a "speak to pikachu" feature where it then pretends to let you converse with Pikachu in Pikachu-ese.

答:
There is such thing as 'whistled' languages which rely solely on tone. Though they're all based on spoken languages. All the 'speaker' does is mimic the tonal pattern without pronouncing any phonemes. Such languages are used by hunters to communicate without alerting their quarry, because the language sounds just like bird song. But they don't use this language for most day-to-day communication.

As for a pikachu, well their 'words' are made up of three possible syllables: pi, ka, and chu. Thus a pikachu would have a total of 3 possible one-syllable words, 9 two-syllable words, and 27 three-syllable words. As we see, words would need to get quite long to get the possible vocabulary up to 100. Using tones though would easily multiply this. Even a simple two-tone system would double the number of possible syllables. Thus the syllable count would be 6 one-syllable words, 36 two-syllable words, and 216 three-syllable words. And there are real languages that have as many as 6 tones. With such a system, a pikachu would have 18 possible syllables to work with. Of course, you could say pokemon are more sensitive to tone than humans, which could increase the number of tones beyond what any human could manage.

Though a problem arises with cross-species communication. Obviously, no two species have the same set of syllables. Thus, for different species to be able to communicate with each other, the poke-language would probably have to be purely tonal, like a whistled language. Though you could 'multiply' the number of tones using length. A tone held for a short time could be considered a separate 'phoneme' from the same tone held longer. But we might just be fooling ourselves. The pokemon may just see a long tone as two identical tones right next to each other.

Most pokemon of course aren't intelligent enough to warrant a full-fledged language. Even Toki Pona would like contain some words they wouldn't make use of. Yeah, there's things like Alakazam which have an IQ higher than humans, but of course they can communicate telepathically, which would completely remove their need to use a language. And of course, there's some that can learn human language. Team Rocket's Meowth not only can speak, but he even taught himself how to! There's also one of the early movies which features a talking slowking. And one episode of the anime has a tenacool possessing meowth and speaking through him, which would imply it knows and understands human language, but lacks the ability to actually produce human sounds. Though honestly, its astounding that any pokemon could pronounce a human language. We have a lot of features in our mouths unique to our species that allow us to talk. Some birds in the real world can mimic human speech, but they accomplish this differently from how we do. I believe there is a pokemon in one of the later generations that can mimic human speech, though it can't understand language. By the way, the franchise is quite inconsistent as to whether pokemon can understand spoken speech or not.


答:
From what I remember from the cartoon, Pikachu could only say certain permutations of its name, with any combination of vowels elongated.

```<code>3 syllables   pikat͡ʃu   8 words
2 syllables   pika      4 words
1 syllables   pi        2 words
</code>```

Pikachu is also capable of producing at least 4 different tones:

```<code>Tone     IPA   Made when
High     ˥     Excited
Mid      ˧
Rising   ˧˥    Curious
Falling  ˧˩    Disappointed
</code>```

So, knowing this, Ash's pikachu should be able to say at least 584 distinct "words", which is well above the toki pona threshold.

Sadly it's pretty much impossible for this system to match the lexicon size of a natural language. Using an 8 tone system and adding primary and secondary stress brings the number of distinct words up to 25104, which is significantly larger than the Esperanto lexicon but still far away from that of a natural language, which is around 200K words.

From here on you could introduce some questionable features like 8 more tones, 7 different vocal registers, or the ability to say different permutations of its name (which is probably not as dodgy but also imagining pikachu say /ka.chu.pi/ makes me extremely uncomfortable).
The best way in my opinion would be to introduce the syllabic thunder shock ⚡, which would require pikachu to release up to three thunder shocks whilst saying a word, all for the good cause of bringing the lexicon size of Pika-ese to a final 198688 words.

(No wonder Meowth learnt how to speak a human language, imagine being stuck with a one-syllable name.)

Title: Can Pokemon language encode enough information to be a language?

Body:
I know that like Star Wars' droid, Pikachu's language is just nonsense with emotionally appropriate intonation, that said...

Can suprasegmental features (accent, tone, etc) encode a single three syllable word in enough different ways to get the vocabulary up to toki pona size? (about 100-125) Or up to a natural language size lexicion (say 7000-15000)

The question occurred to me because Alexa has a "speak to pikachu" feature where it then pretends to let you converse with Pikachu in Pikachu-ese.

Body:
From what I remember from the cartoon, Pikachu could only say certain permutations of its name, with any combination of vowels elongated.

3 syllables   pikat͡ʃu   8 words
2 syllables   pika      4 words
1 syllables   pi        2 words

Pikachu is also capable of producing at least 4 different tones:

Tone     IPA   Made when
High     ˥     Excited
Mid      ˧
Rising   ˧˥    Curious
Falling  ˧˩    Disappointed

So, knowing this, Ash's pikachu should be able to say at least 584 distinct "words", which is well above the toki pona threshold.

Sadly it's pretty much impossible for this system to match the lexicon size of a natural language. Using an 8 tone system and adding primary and secondary stress brings the number of distinct words up to 25104, which is significantly larger than the Esperanto lexicon but still far away from that of a natural language, which is around 200K words.

From here on you could introduce some questionable features like 8 more tones, 7 different vocal registers, or the ability to say different permutations of its name (which is probably not as dodgy but also imagining pikachu say /ka.chu.pi/ makes me extremely uncomfortable).
The best way in my opinion would be to introduce the syllabic thunder shock ⚡, which would require pikachu to release up to three thunder shocks whilst saying a word, all for the good cause of bringing the lexicon size of Pika-ese to a final 198688 words.

(No wonder Meowth learnt how to speak a human language, imagine being stuck with a one-syllable name.)


问:
Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?
This has always been a conundrum for me. I like how grammatical case frees up word order, but hate how it puts a limit on what nouns can end in. Years ago someone told me of a natlang that uses 6 declensions, one for each vowel and the 6th for nouns that end in consonants. This allowed nouns to end in any phoneme in the language, though from my own research only plurals were allowed to end in -u. Sadly, I haven't been able to find that language again.

Such a language, if it were to exist, would make it abnormally important to remember each noun's declension class, because what would be the nominative for one noun may be another case entirely for a different noun.

I find it annoying that I can't find that natlang again. I think it was a part of the Slavic family, but I'm not sure. I think it was spoken like somewhere around Eastern Europe or the Caucus mountains.

答:
Any declensional system that involves suffixes will limit "what nouns can end in", because nouns can only end in the declensional terminations of that language!

Even if you maximise by disallowing repeats, you can come up with say eight stem formations and say eight cases across four numbers. If you make each of these 256 forms "unique" (such that -am never repeats) that's 256 possible syllables.

English has something like ten to maybe fifteen or more thousands of syllables. The number of distinct monosyllabic words in astounding. This source lists hundreds if not several thousand.

I don't see how it could be possible to both create a reasonable declensional system and do anything but limit what nouns can end in.

Any solution to this query will involve something silly like having tens of thousands of discrete morphological forms for nouns. One for each possible syllable. Or, the equally silly notion of restricting the number of valid syllables to, say, 256, thus equalling the number of nominal case endings.


答:
Ignoring the lost natlang, I'll just answer the title question:

There are several possibilities to let nouns end in any phoneme of the language and still have case inflections:

Most simple: Have a zero ending in the nominative singular

Base your inflection on prefixes (like in Bantu languages) or infixes (like in Semitic languages)

BTW, inflections with thematic vowels (like in Latin and Greek) aren't particularly difficult to remember, because the thematic vowel is easily recognisable throughout the whole inflection paradigm.

PS Many natural languages have only a restricted set of allowed phonemes at the end of a word. Classical Greek is an extreme example of this kind of restriction, but also German has Auslautverhärtung aka final devoicing: Final consonants are always devoiced. This feature does not show up in writing but only in the spoken language.

Title: Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?

Body:
This has always been a conundrum for me. I like how grammatical case frees up word order, but hate how it puts a limit on what nouns can end in. Years ago someone told me of a natlang that uses 6 declensions, one for each vowel and the 6th for nouns that end in consonants. This allowed nouns to end in any phoneme in the language, though from my own research only plurals were allowed to end in -u. Sadly, I haven't been able to find that language again.

Such a language, if it were to exist, would make it abnormally important to remember each noun's declension class, because what would be the nominative for one noun may be another case entirely for a different noun.

I find it annoying that I can't find that natlang again. I think it was a part of the Slavic family, but I'm not sure. I think it was spoken like somewhere around Eastern Europe or the Caucus mountains.


答:
There are some languages with unusually irregular plurals or verbal forms, but I don't think any language has something quite as stark as what you're demanding here. Mostly because, as you point out yourself, a system that basically makes it impossible to recognize what case a noun is in unless it was previously learned by rote would be so taxing on the mind that it would inevitably regularize to at least some degree within a few generation (French verbs in middle/old French had a very high degree of root alternation, which are now greatly reduced, and English strong verb tend to regularize too).

However have you considered a system of vowel/consonant harmony? I don't think consonant harmony is a widespread feature in any natural language, but for conlanging, the sky's the limit. This would create endings that are affect by the last sound(s) of the root and increase the options.


答:
I've seen a paper that children have a lot of trouble learning nonconservative determiners.

For instance, "every" is a conservative determiner because every dog is brown is equivalent to every dog is a brown dog – objects that are brown but not a dog don't count toward the truth of the sentence. In contrast, if we define equi dogs are brown as "the number of dogs is equal to the number of brown objects", then equi would be nonconservative because the sentence above is different from equi dogs are brown dogs.

(Interestingly, my conlang Jbl has nonconservative determiners; for instance, glsh is the equi mentioned above.)

Title: Features of unlearnable languages


问:
How can I become a professional conlang designer?
There is some market for constructed languages in film, television, computer games and literature. Some conlangs designs were commissioned to linguists who did the real word.

Is there a possibility to become a professional conlang designer? What prerequisites are needed?

答:
It's not strictly impossible to become a professional conlanger (obviously, since professional conlangers do exist), but it's highly unlikely. There are very, very few conlanging jobs out there, and at this point most who want to hire a conlanger will look for a known entity. Most of the professional conlangers you've heard of got their first conlanging job because they were very, very lucky and got any subsequent conlanging jobs because of their first one. So unless you know a surefire way to increase your luck or you happen to know people who work in showbiz already (nepotism never hurts), your odds of becoming a professional conlanger are not that great.

That said, the Language Creation Society does have a job board where people looking for conlangers to hire can solicit someone -- it's usually empty, but it's really the only good place to look.

As for prerequisites, there really aren't any besides being interested in conlanging (and ideally having done so before) and having the right connections to get someone to actually hire you. A background in linguistics will likely make you better at conlanging, but it's not necessarily going to be required for you to get hired.


答:
The list of ways to make money with a conlang is short, so step one is to be creative.

Write Genre Fiction Books.
Authors do make a living writing and selling books, sometimes with an artificial language bundled with it. Wardesan, Láadan, Tolkien's books are good examples. I'm guessing the conlang part though is reducing their income, they could write more books if they skipped writing a conlang. Personally, I'd buy a book with a conlang if the author tried to make it simple enough to enjoy for 10 to 20 hours. Instead we get unusable languages that require 2000 hours of study to appreciate them, same or worse than a natural language. And I'm an outlier, so I'd imagine regular genre fiction buyers see a bundled language as a low value gimmick.

Communication Systems for the Disabled.
Blissymbols made money, albeit in a rather dishonorable way by suing the institution that was trying to help the profoundly disabled communicate with a symbol board, which was in essence an artificial language. I spoke with a specialist in the more modern versions of these, and often vendors don't even bother to acknowledge that symbol boards are not English, but conlang-like systems with all the challenges.

In the realm of conscripts, there is a commercial writing system for ASL. I'm failing to re-find the link.

Historical BSL was essentially a franchise and BSL was something of a trade secret.

Movies.
Movies have been hiring professional linguists (Klingon, Na'vi) The Klingon dictionary and Avatar handbook sold a lot of copies, but the authors both became professional linguists first, and these books are really side projects.

Selling learning materials.
This has got to be the worst way to monetize a conlang. The artificial language section of any large library has to be littered with books of people who thought they could sell a lot of copies of their grammar summaries, workbooks and dictionaries. No one wants the grammar summary. What they want is to meet their significant other by learning a language which brings me to...

Esperanto
Esperanto actually has economic activity, but the language is already written. Building a language starts with grammar and vocabulary, but to extract money from people, people need to learn it. If your interest in conlang building is in the community building part, then it might make more sense to make a living working with an existing conlang that has attracted a community, complete with conferences, etc. That said, I'm guessing no one is getting rich off of Esperanto, but there are teachers of Esperanto, etc.

Games
There have been reports of people writing full languages for computer games, card games. Magic the Gathering's Phyrexian comes to mind. So far, these have been gimmicks and the amount of money, I'm guessing is not a lot. Some of the game makers don't even bother to publish the grammar and dictionary! This makes it sort of into a laborious game of decipherment.

Title: How can I become a professional conlang designer?

Body:
There is some market for constructed languages in film, television, computer games and literature. Some conlangs designs were commissioned to linguists who did the real word.

Is there a possibility to become a professional conlang designer? What prerequisites are needed?


问:
Why are sign languages considered to be natural rather than constructed languages?
Linguists consider sign languages to be natural languages. Surely they had been invented/constructed at some point in time by someone.

So why are they not categorized as constructed, but as natural languages? And in what circumstances could they be considered to be constructed languages?

答:
The constructed versus natural language distinction is less of a binary opposition, and more of a continuum. There are many spoken languages as well that can partially qualify as 'constructed', including Standard Italian and Nynorsk. Every language to some degree has been modified by someone's conscious choice. A conlang is set apart largely by the degree of conscious choice that's been applied to it.

Signed languages, though they are relatively new on a linguistic scale, are not typically made up by a majority of constructed grammar rules and so on. The signs themselves are often consciously created (though just as often not), but the grammar around them is mostly generated spontaneously as the language is used more and more - rules begin to coalesce as people need to use their language in more and more circumstances. No one sat down and decided that in ASL, for example, you could set up a location as a pronominal referent and direct future signs toward that location as a way of referring to that pronoun. It simply happened - someone started doing it, what they were doing was sufficiently clear to get across, and then it was grammar. In a conlang, that grammar would have been the result of a conscious choice.

Honestly, spoken languages could have a very similar history. There's nothing that sets signed languages apart from spoken ones in this regard except their newness - we've watched sign languages come into being out of nothing, while all spoken languages are derived from some ancestor that's been lost in the depths of time. Spoken languages could have had an absolutely identical genesis, for all we know.


问:
What has the impact of Star Trek: Discovery been on the development of Klingon?
Has Klingon changed significantly since it has started being used for Star Trek: Discovery? Has the vocabulary grown significantly? Has there been novel grammar revealed? To what extent is the language still developing under Marc Okrand's guidance to meet the demands of the script, and how much leeway does Robyn "Qov" Stewart have in coming up with Klingon translations for the script?</p>

答:
The language still has Okrand's guidance, and he trusts Robyn to do it correctly.

From IndieWire:

Before Stewart initially took the “Discovery” job, she did check in with Okrand himself to make sure he approved. “He said, ‘You know what? I’m really glad you’re doing this for two reasons: One is so I don’t have to do it.’ Because just for a movie, it’s a lot of work, and the series goes on,” Stewart said.

But Okrand then added that he knew “the language is in good hands.” Said Stewart, “It was a huge ego boost for me — his confidence that I’ll do it correctly."

And even though Robyn Steward has Okrand's approval, every change has to get his stamp of approval before officially being added to the language.

TrekMovie tells us:

As was noted in the video, Okrand isn’t working on Star Trek: Discovery, as the translating for the show is being handled by Klingon expert Robyn Stewart. However, Okrand is still the only person who can introduce new words into the Klingon language, which is maintained by the Klingon Language Institute. As he does at each annual conference of the KLI (called the qep’a’), Okrand introduced a number of new Klingon words in the summer of 2017. You can see the full list at KLI.org (words noted as “qep’a’ 24” were announced this year).

So to address each question:

Has Klingon changed significantly since it has started being used for Star Trek: Discovery?

Nope - the people working on it are hardcore Klingon speakers, doing their utmost to keep everything accurate.

Has the vocabulary grown significantly?

Yes, it's grown - you can see exactly which words were added recently in the above link.

Has there been novel grammar revealed?

As far as I am aware, and from what Google turns up, no. The grammar is still the same as it was - just words are being added.

To what extent is the language still developing under Marc Okrand's guidance to meet the demands of the script, and how much leeway does Robyn "Qov" Stewart have in coming up with Klingon translations for the script?

As mentioned in the above quote from TrekMovie, Okrand still has control over the language - while Steward has some wiggle room like any other translation to any other language, she has to work with the language, only adding words when absolutely necessary.


问:
Brahmic conscript with European style
The scripts of South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent), e.g. Devanagari, and Southeast Asia, e.g. Thai, are almost all derived from the Brahmic script. They show gradual visual relationships and most of them are structurally similar. They are syllabaries with non-default vowels being denoted by diacritics and consonant clusters often forming complex ligatures.

Is there any constructed variant of this family of scripts that intentionally uses shapes found in the major European scripts (Roman, Cyrillic and Greek)? Preferably, it would be based upon the stems and loops of lowercase Roman letters. I think it’s impossible to achieve in a readable way, but maybe there is even a mimicry or "faux Latin" font for one of the existing scripts (e.g. Burmese or Malayalam) that would qualify.

PS: I have attached some roman letters in red to similar looking glyphs in the picture below. The imagined conscript would have a consistent set of letters and diacritics that looked much like roman ones.

答: Next project: Pama-Nyungan inspired vocabulary, but using English words

Title: Brahmic conscript with European style


问:
What's a good starting place to work on vocab?
Obviously, generating a lexicon is very time-consuming, and there's so much that needs to be done, I often find myself suffering with analysis paralysis, because I just can't decide where to begin.

Word frequency lists don't help all that much, because there's an inverse relationship between how useful a word is and how common it is. The most commonly used word in English is 'the', for instance. If you just made words for the 100 most commonly used words, you wouldn't really be able to make that many sentences, which would make it difficult to work on the grammar.

I've seen some people use the Swadesh list, but I fail to see how that is useful in any way since the list was arbitarily chosen rather than thought through. And besides, it would require you make words for things that are highly unlikely to ever be mentioned, such as a word for 'louse'.

The Conlanger's Lexicon suggests you work by categories, so that that way you can at least form complete sentences, even if this does limit you to writing about one topic. Of course, there's still the problem of which list to begin with. He just lists the categories in the book alphabetically.

Are there other methods to use? And yes, I know about word-generating programs, but those spit out stuff that's much lower quality than stuff generated by hand. And besides, my conlang will have a highly productive word-derivation system, so I don't need that many roots (when I'm writing down lists of words, often times I just write what I want the compound word to literally translate as, though I rarely go back to fill it in because I never get to the words that would comprise the compound).

I've mostly been looking at frequency lists and the Conlanger's Lexipedia, but I would like to know if there was a better way.

答: As mentioned by @Sparksbet the Leipzig-Jakarta list comes in very useful (especially if you use conworkshop as there's a lexibuild list for it). If you want something more comprehensive that has the basics that is actually useful I would try using this google sheet for the universal language dictionary. It already has words listed in categories to make things easier! Atlernatively the Globish list is a decent starting point, though it was not designed for this purpose.</p>


答:
Franabugida by François Boullion, though developed for writing French, is a faux roman script with abugida features that fulfills the criteria pretty well, although some of the resulting shapes look quite foreign.

Akkhara Muni by Ian James comes close to being a roman-looking script with Brahmic abugida structure, although it lacks complex ligatures and (non-inherent) vowels are not diacritic-like.

The historic (but unused) Ariyaka script for writing Pali from 19th-century Siam/Thailand is also obviously inspired by Latin and Greek letter forms and the Brahmic system.

BLUIS by Punya Pranava Pasumarty does not meet the criteria, but due to its design, it could be used as a base: One would just need to make the letter forms more roman-looking.

Title: Brahmic conscript with European style

Body:
The scripts of South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent), e.g. Devanagari, and Southeast Asia, e.g. Thai, are almost all derived from the Brahmic script. They show gradual visual relationships and most of them are structurally similar. They are syllabaries with non-default vowels being denoted by diacritics and consonant clusters often forming complex ligatures.

Is there any constructed variant of this family of scripts that intentionally uses shapes found in the major European scripts (Roman, Cyrillic and Greek)? Preferably, it would be based upon the stems and loops of lowercase Roman letters. I think it’s impossible to achieve in a readable way, but maybe there is even a mimicry or "faux Latin" font for one of the existing scripts (e.g. Burmese or Malayalam) that would qualify.

PS: I have attached some roman letters in red to similar looking glyphs in the picture below. The imagined conscript would have a consistent set of letters and diacritics that looked much like roman ones.


答:
If the speakers of the language are not your average humans of Earth, first make/find some texts that are suitable for the speakers: narratives, what happens during a regular, boring day, what happens in the market, at a restaurant, when traveling, making food, at the doctor's etc. Have a look at travel dictionaries for ideas.

Start with very short texts, no more than a paragraph. (The following paragraph would work for many an ordinary human in the West in the current era:) "I get up in the morning. I have breakfast then leave for work. At midday I have lunch. I go home in the early evening. I have dinner with my family. Finally, I go to bed."

Then figure out how to do the most frequent words (you might have 'em all covered already. But which set you need will vary. If for instance, you don't want articles, make a DO NOT-wordlist: the word you don't want (like "the") followed by what you do instead. This is very handy for future translations.)

After the most frequent words, do the remaining nouns and verbs. Whether there are adjectives and adverbs and many other word classes will depend on the language, so wait a while with those.

Later, pick one sentence and expand it to a paragraph: "I sleep alone in a bedroom. The bedroom has a floor, a ceiling, several walls, a bed, a window, a door, a light, and an alarm clock. The dog sometimes gets in during the night and also sleeps in my bed." Expand the other sentences in the first paragraph before you expand anything in the second paragraph. This will give you the words needed for daily life quite quickly.

Be wary of translating things that are the wrong tone and age at an early stage, like medieval tales or older if your speakers are of the modern era, or specific religious texts if your speakers don't do that religion.

For instance, if you translate the Babel-text early you risk having a word for an outdated technique for joining bricks (and a word for non-fired bricks) before you have a term for "to eat", "to speak", "to go"...


问:
International Auxiliary Language created by a Japanese person
I remember some facts about an international auxiliary language (IAL) created by a Japanese person, but unfortunately I both forgot the name of the inventor and the name of the IAL. Can someone help me out?

Features that I can remember:

Created by a Japanese around the turn of 19th to the 20th century

Based on European languages (mostly latinate vocabulary)

Having a schematic and simplified inflection

When the author became aware of Esperanto he dumped his own IAL project and became one of the first Japanese Esperantists

I want to know the name of the author and (if available) the name of the language. Additional information is always welcome!

答: Assuming that the OP misremembered a few facts, the language may be Babm, invented by the Japanese philosopher Rikichi [Fuishiki] Okamoto (1885–1963) and first published in 1962. It uses the Latin script as a syllabary (which is not the same thing as using a latinate vocabulary) and has "some degree of analytic inflection".</p>


问:
What legal aspects should one consider when creating a constructed language?
Constructed languages, like everything, is an intellectual property, and most countries worldwide do care about protecting the rights of the owners.

If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?

My common sense suggests me that something is obvious here:

entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;

lots of things are public domain, e.g. SVO/OVS clause order or the Latin alphabet;

…but I'm totally lost about the case if some aspect(s) of existing works can be incidentally copied or deliberately borrowed.

Where should I start here?

答:
If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?

No. It is conceivable that conlangs might be patentable under US law, but none so far have been.

entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;

Probably not. Again, it might infringe a patent, but there are very few patents on writing systems. Copying a specific font or typeface would constitute copyright infringement, but not copying the writing system in abstract.

Where should I start here?

I'd start by reviewing Sai's talk at LCC 6 on the legal status of conlangs, and the accompanying slides and legal memo.

You might also review the Language Creation Society's involvement in the Axanar case regarding whether or not Paramount "owns" Klingon.


问:
How does one determine the date a constructed language was invented?
Some constructed languages list a date, or at least year, of creation. Is there any official or unofficial standard to determine that date for any given conlang? The way I see it, there are several possibilities, at least the ones I thought up:

The date that work began on the language

The date of the first evidence of work on the language, if the prior date is not known

The date of the first usage of the language (this could be broken down into public or private usage)

The date of the first publication that mentions the language

The publication date of the first dictionary and/or grammar

答:
For auxiliary languages it's usually publication date of the first grammar/dictionary released to the public or the first work dedicated to the language, whichever comes first.

For Esperanto this was Unua Libro, which was published in 1887 - more than a year after Zamenhof began working on the language. Wikipedia also lists the year of creation of Occidental as 1922, the year de Wahl published the first edition of the Kosmoglotta magazine, despite there being evidence that the language was used much before then, both in private conversation (letters etc.) and even a publication written entirely in Occidental.

The "date of creation" for other types of conlangs seems to be less well-defined, although I'd expect that fictional languages would be associated with the publication of the first book/movie/game that uses them (perhaps with the exception of Tolkien's languages). Wikipedia also uses the day Lojban began being developed as its creation date.


问:
How would the grammar of a conlang develop as a creole from other languages?
Assume that the backstory of a conlang is that it developed from a set of other languages. In other words, speakers of these (different) languages were living in the same area and were communicating with each other and from this a new language emerged, a creole.

In such a situation which aspects of the original languages would be inherited by the new languages? Obviously the vocabulary would be somewhat mixed but what happens with the grammar? Would the easiest concepts prevail? Would it be necessary that one of the original languages would be dominant in some sense or could they have an equal influence?

答:
I would think that it relates to the power structures behind the language communities, and to their relative size.

This can be kind of observed with English after the Norman invasion. The basic English grammar still remained Anglo-Saxon (as the majority of the population spoke it), and the main influence of Norman French (the powerful but small elite) was in the vocabulary. There are a few instances (eg putting some specific adjectives after the noun, as in president elect or times past) where French structures were adopted.

I would think that vocabulary is more a conscious choice, and Norman power made people adopt French words, but the grammatical structures being more sub-conscious meant that they were harder to change.

Another issue is how closely related the origin languages are. Obviously, while Norman French and Old English are different families, they both share the Indo-European ancestry, so are not that radically different. Compare that to, eg the Philippines, where there is a great language variety, and Asian/Polynesian languages clashed with Spanish/English in the colonial period. Here is one creole, Chavacano, which apparently has mostly Spanish vocabulary (so that it is classed as a Romance language), but their grammatical structures are generally similar to other Philippine languages (Wikipedia).

So it seems that power drives the vocabulary, but quantity of speakers determines the grammar.


问:
What tools exist for creating syntactically correct generated text in new languages?
Another way to put this is, what tools exist to generate sentences in the same way that some conlanging tools generate phonotactically valid words.

I've heard people suggest using word generators to generate sentences. I'm open to the idea, but it seems that morphology and syntax aren't close enough and I'm not smart enough to put my finger on why. If there is a word generator that can do sentences, I'd be interested in looking at it.

Here is an example I laboriously wrote for Toki Pona.

Note: I'm well aware there are a bunch of tools for just generating a random sampling of a dictionary, but that doesn't create syntactically valid sentences.

答: I've done stories and rhyming poems with my own JABBER.EXE, but it is 16 bit (windows XP or earlier).  Besides filling out a dictionary (which includes verb affordances and hyponym trees), you have to set 'parameters' for the language, and ConLangs do too much with those parameters.  There can be no general purpose ConLang generator unless it learns like a human. </p>


问:
Features of unlearnable languages
In this article about miniature artificial languages on motherboard.com experiments are described where children learn carafully designed miniature artificial languages. It is also said that children give up on learning "unlearnable" languages. A mentioned miniature artificial language is named "Sillyspeak" or "Sillysprochen".

What features of languages make them unlearnable? Is the full documentation of Sillyspeak available?

答: Original Fith is a stack-based conlang (LIFO, reverse polish notation) and considered to be unspeakable in real-time since in order to speak good Fith you need to be able to remember more parts and recurse deeper than what is practically possible for a human. It also has a full set stack operators like "swap the order of the two last stack items" and *rotate the top three stack items".</p>

Title: Features of unlearnable languages


问:
What notation do constructed sign languages use?
What notation do constructed sign languages use?

Many well-known big sign languages (such as ASL) have their own form of notation, but that notation is very specific and may not be able to express a sign in other sign languages. For example, ASL school is

```<code>OpenB@Palm-PalmDown-OpenB@CenterChesthigh-PalmUp Contact Contact
</code>```

but some constructed sign language X might require signals that don't appear in ASL, like 'touch your elbow with the thumb of your non-dominant hand'. The notation could be extended but would be complicating it. Language X thus requires its own system for its own signs or an 'international' one in analogy with the International Phonetic Alphabet.

What are the notations commonly used by constructed sign languages?

Which sign languages use them?

答:
The best I've found, for linguistic purposes, is HamNoSys ("Hamburg Notation System", Hanke (2004)). It works like IPA: it is more an instruction-notation than observation-notation. For example; IPA allows glottal stop [ʔ] together with (i.e.) palatal, dental, alveolar and labial fricatives, but these are indistinguishable. Another example: [m͡n] (depending on notation, I'll use x͡y is simultaneously x and y) is [m] + [n] but sounds like plain [n].

This concept continues on in HamNoSys: see this chart, where overlapping segments are indistinguishable but technically doable and thus notatable. According to Millar (2001), it is the most used notation, alongside Stokoe and derivatives.

Also, HamNoSys has programs that convert HamNoSys into imagery and videos.

Hanke, T. (2004), “HamNoSys - representing sign language data in language resources and language processing contexts.” In: Streiter, Oliver, Vettori, Chiara (eds): LREC 2004, Workshop proceedings : Representation and processing of sign languages. Paris : ELRA, 2004, - pp. 1-6.

Miller, C., 2001. Some reflections on the need for a
common sign notation. Sign Language and Linguistics.
4(1/2):11-28.


答: I have found the language again, it is named Zilengo and it was designed by OKA Asajiro in 1890. Apparently not much information about the language is preserved.</p>

Title: International Auxiliary Language created by a Japanese person

Body:
I remember some facts about an international auxiliary language (IAL) created by a Japanese person, but unfortunately I both forgot the name of the inventor and the name of the IAL. Can someone help me out?

Features that I can remember:

Created by a Japanese around the turn of 19th to the 20th century

Based on European languages (mostly latinate vocabulary)

Having a schematic and simplified inflection

When the author became aware of Esperanto he dumped his own IAL project and became one of the first Japanese Esperantists

I want to know the name of the author and (if available) the name of the language. Additional information is always welcome!


问:
Are there any constructed languages designed for legal agreements / country constitutions?
A few weeks back i've watched a talk of Stephen Wolfram. I think was this video. Plus this article is also relevant.

The idea discussed was: how to build a language for formalizing every day discourse.

A language that can be understood and acted upon by both humans and computers. With the advancements in AI, crypto-currencyes, decentralization etc.. i feel this problem has become more then just the philosophical curiosity that Leibniz had.

What is our general status on this issue?

What are some successful / failed attempts of building languages specially designed for handling legal matters ? Are there any?

So far I have not been able to find any language of this nature - maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

答:
It strikes me that, while this is not precisely what you're asking, Law French I think it might be argued fits the bill.

While French, of course, was the everyday language of the upper class in England from the mid-11th to the late 14th century, and was therefore naturally the language of the Law, it can hardly be called a "constructed language". But after this time, it might be said that, divorced of all real connexion with French or Anglo-French culture, Law French came to be something like an invented language based on natural French. It was certainly a group project (lawyers and judges, all others need not apply).

Later examples are both humorous and instructive:

Richardson Chief Justice de Common Banc al assises de Salisbury in Summer 1631 fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony, que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice, que narrowly mist, et pur ceo immediately fuit indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner et son dexter manus ampute et fix al gibbet, sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court.  -- Sir George Treby

ahem

Perhaps Law French might best be called a deconstructed language?

About all that's left in modern times are a few set phrases, mostly in Parliament:

La reyne (or le roy) remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult -- (The Queen/King thanks her/his good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so)

La reyne (or le roy) le veult -- (The Queen/King wills it)

La reyne (or le roy) s'avisera -- (The Queen/King will advise)

Soit fait comme il est désiré -- (Let it be done as it is desired)

Even in the USA, we still hear oyez, oyez, oyez when court comes to order.

Some interesting notes on Law French, especially pertinent to the question:

"The effort of reporting English speech in French was not merely an expression of affection for the past, for in the long run it probably saved a lawyer more time and trouble than was taken to learn it. ... The formalised French phrases used in the year books gave him a shorthand ready made and adapted for legal purposes."

"To the linguist, Law French is a corrupt dialect by definition. Anglo-French was in steady decline after 1300. ... (That English lawyers could seriously complain that French, spoken in France, had deteriorated considerably as compared to its use in England) is in itself a clear demonstration that by the middle of the fifteenth century there was a marked difference between the French of English lawyers and the French of France."

A Frenchman living in England during Elizabeth I's reign noted of Law French "...now it seemeth that almost there is no language more far from the true French, then the French of our lawes: There being almost no word, which either by intermingling, or adding, or diminishing, or changing of a letter into another, they have not altered and corrupted."

"The lawyers also took what seemed to be a perverse delight in pronouncing Law French as if it were English: indeed, 'their pronunciation differeth so much from ours (French) as it is impossible for a Frenchman to understand them'.

"Few of those who used French paid the slightest attention to grammar or vocabulary."

All taken from J.H. Baker's Manual of Law French


问:
Is there a specific term for a constructed writing system purportedly used for a conlang but actually for a natlang?
Many constructed writing systems are purportedly used to write conlangs, but in reality are actually used to write English or another natlang.

For example, omniglot.com says that Kryptonian is "a transliteration alphabet containing symbols for each of the letters of the English alphabet. ... They just used this alphabet to write things in English in the comics."

Matoran has been called "similar to the English alphabet, being a simple substitution cipher".

And in Star Wars, Aurebesh is essentially the same, a different way of writing English, although technically it's actually "Galactic Basic". Apparently another script was also used to write Galatic Basic, called Outer Rim Basic, although there's very little information about it.

I'd consider these example to be a different kind of thing compared to something like the dancing men script from Sherlock Holmes as they're ostensibly constructed writing systems for other languages, whereas the dancing men script is explicitly another way of writing English.

In the conlang community, is there a specific term for this type of constructed writing system? Or should we just refer to them as "transliterations" or "substitutions"?

Please note that I am specifically asking if there is a term which excludes these categories:

new orthographies for natlangs (ex. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics or Deseret for English)

a new writing system actually used to write a conlang (ex. Tengwar for Quenya)

答:
I don't think there's already a word for this exact subset of scripts.

However, I think such a term would be a useful one -- we certainly have to refer to these sorts of scripts in the conlanging community -- and I think there are a number of options here.

1. Circumlocution

We could refer to these sorts of scripts in paraphrastic ways, like how you have in your question. "Transliteration alphabet" and "substitution cipher" both work for this purpose. However, I don't think this is a particularly attractive option, as these are long and rather unwieldy. Shortenings of these phrases end up being pretty ambiguous, as well. "Transliteration" in particular is usually used to describe completely separate things entirely, so using it in isolation to refer to these scripts would be confusing at best, and "substitution" is too vague.

2. Neologism

Since these sorts of scripts are really the neographic equivalent of relexes, we could also coin a new term like "relex" to refer to these scripts. Just spitballing, here are a few examples of the sorts of coinages that could work:

transbet (from "transliteration alphabet")

subscript (from "substitution script" -- though this word does obviously already have another meaning so that might not be desirable)

rescript (from analogy with "relex")

keychain script (because these sorts of scripts are easily used to sell keychains with people's names on them 'in another language')

There are any number of ways that such a term could be derived beyond these, but I feel that in order to have a term that describes this subset of scripts, some sort of new coinage is necessary.


答:
The history of sign languages is more akin to that of creoles than that of a constructed language which later gained native speakers. Consider the following two examples:

The grammar of Esperanto and a large chunk of its vocabulary was created, codified and written down by L. L. Zamenhof. People who were interested learned his language according to his rules and later passed it on to their children, creating the first native speakers of it.

The development of Tok Pisin is described as follows: Contact between English speakers and locals of Papua New Guinea gave rise to a pidgin, an incomplete and bare-bones not-quite-language that was just good enough to communicate - everyone would have spoken it a bit differently at that point in time. It became used more commonly and was passed down as a native language to children, creating a full-fledged language. At no point however did its speakers sit down and decide on what grammar Tok Pisin ought to have.

Now compare these with the case of the Nicaraguan Sign Langauge, the currently only natural langauge which we have actively seen develop. Deaf children of Nicaragua previously communicated with the people closest to them with improvised home signs and gestures (in other words they had at best something akin to a pidgin). When they were brought together in a new school for the deaf, they had the need to communicate with each other. The school encouraged use of mouthing or fingerspelling Spanish, but the students, who were not native speakers of Spanish failed at learning these skills. Instead, they started communicating by using their own home signs, forming a pidgin that developed over the following years and was taught to younger students who later arrived. Over time, the language developed complexities similar to what you would find in other signed languages - evidence that it had developed beyond the initial pidgin stage.

It is clear that the example of Nicaraguan Sign Language is much more similar to that of Tok Pisin than that of Esperanto.

Title: Why are sign languages considered to be natural rather than constructed languages?

Body:
Linguists consider sign languages to be natural languages. Surely they had been invented/constructed at some point in time by someone.

So why are they not categorized as constructed, but as natural languages? And in what circumstances could they be considered to be constructed languages?


问:
By what criteria can we say that a conlang has a functional speech community?
On another question I commented that I doubted that if Lojban had a functional speech community that its purity would last very long.

By what criteria can we say that a conlang has a functional speech community?

答:
I'd lower the criteria significantly and already admit that a conlang has a speech community when it is used on some occasions for real-time face-to-face communications. By these criteria, even Klingon has a speech community.

Whether a speech community is functional or not is probably difficult to decide, I'd go for a kind of temporal criterion like having a speech community (as sketched above) for 30 years with no year left out. This is similar to the criterion biologists use to define an established new species in a certain area.