答:
It sounds like you're after a trie.

The closest example I can think of is this glosbe site. It has a search tool, which orders matches in the way you want, but not in the structure you want.

.

The only issue is that there are fan created/added word combinations which may not be 'official'.

Title: Is there a structured toki pona dictionary/thesaurus?

Body:
I'm currently working on an NLP project using toki pona, analysing and generating sentences. I was wondering if there was a structured dictionary available for it, or whether people have attempted to create one.

Let me explain what I mean by "structured dictionary":

There are only 120-odd words in toki pona. The word jan refers to a person. Compounds are used to be more specific, ie jan pona is "friend", jan utala is "fighter", jan alasa is "hunter", etc. This is reminiscent of expressing the meaning of nouns through semantic primitives, a bit like Wilks (1975). So the set of words described by jan would be {"person", "friend", "fighter", "hunter", ...}. There are subsets which are more specific, so jan utala is {"fighter", "soldier", "mercenary", ...}. jan utala pi ma would be {"soldier", "private", "general", ...}

You can envisage it as a tree structure, where the leaves are the word meanings, and the roots (as there would be multiple trees: one for each 'top' primitive) encompasses all of them. As you wander down the tree, the path is an ever longer chain of toki pona words, and the set of meanings covered by those words becomes smaller and smaller.

Another example would be ilo, "tool". ilo toki is a tool for communication: {"telephone", "telegraph", "vhf radio", "loud hailer", ...}; ilo toki uta suli (tool talk mouth big) could be a loud hailer. Another sub-tree would capture wireless communication devices, perhaps ilo toki pi kon.

I know this somewhat goes against the toki pona philosophy of being a simple and small language, but it seems to me to more or less accidentally provide a useful set of semantic primitives that can be used to describe word meanings in general. So before I embark on creating such a structure, has anyone already attempted something similar? Surely there must be dictionaries of mulit-word toki pona expressions? I haven't been able to find a good one yet.

Wilks, Y (1975) An Intelligent Analyzer and Understander of English, Communications of the ACM 18(5):264-274


问:
Has AI technology yet provide a language composed of multiple human languages yet?
I'm from South Florida and noticed that my Haitian neighbors speak a language called Creole. Then It got my fantasizing a possibility that is well within our reach of no more than a decade.

Using AI to create languages by mixing other languages.

Question

Does anyone know any specific technologies that provide practical languages yet?

答:
IF I ever get around to constructing a conlang I'll probably algorithmically generate its vocabulary from Wiktionary entries.  Wiktionary includes pronunciations in IPA format (and audio files), spellings, and translations between hundreds of languages.

(I'd build up an inventory of easily distinguished phonemes, match words of like meaning, and then use machine learning to synthesize a vocabulary out of like-sounding synonyms.)

While some prominent conlangs have attempted something like this in the past, they were forced to cherry-pick and use subjective judgements.  Today modern technology enables us to do it with a thoroughness and at a scale previously unfeasible.  Lojban spliced together vocabulary from 6 languages; with machine learning and Wiktionary, we can algorithmically splice together hundreds.

I'd find it interesting to see what kind of language you would come up with if you algorithmically synthesized your vocabulary and pronunciations from Wiktionary's database of worldwide languages and developed your syntax from Galactical Dependencies' most representative grammars.  Would it resemble Esperanto or Lojban, or would it look like something else entirely?

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
Words for Mercy in Toki Pona?
I would like to translate Bismillah Ir-Rahmani Ir-Rahim into Toki Pona.

The parts I'm struggling with are the Rahma part, and the Raheem part, as they encompass similar but subtly different meanings of Mercy.

Rahma is more closely associated with motherly love. Rahim is more of an extreme mercy regardless of what is being forgiven.

I haven't found a translation for mercy, let alone one that encompasses these subtle differences.

答:
toki!

Toki Pona has a word for mercy, and it is simply olin, just like love, tenderness, warmth, etc.

For instance:

mi jo e olin tan sina

(I have mercy because of you),
or

mi jo e olin tawa sina

(I have mercy for you).

Title: Words for Mercy in Toki Pona?


问:
Usage of different plural systems in the same language
Let's assume a language once had an extensive plural system, indicating singular/dual/paucal/plural distinctions on nouns, pronouns, verbs, et cetera. Over time, as has happened in real languages, this was simplified to a simpler singular/plural system except in personal pronouns, which retained the original distinctions. In other words, the language would distinguish only between "woman" (one woman) and "women" (more than one woman), but when you used a pronoun, you'd have "she" (one woman), "she2" (two women"), "she+" (a few women), and "she++" (many women).

Your conversations would thus look like the following:

"That woman came out of the store. She is carrying a bag."

"Those women came out of the store. She2 are carrying bags." (Two women came out)

"Those women came out of the store. She+ are carrying bags." (More than two women came out)

"Those women came out of the store. She++ are carrying bags." (Many women came out)

A similar situation situation would occur with all personal pronouns.

So, the question: while this sort of thing is obviously possible, since I just described it, is this a feature which has been documented in a natural language? I'm not just restricting it the way I've done, but the general situation where the grammar of the language has simplified down the grammatical number, perhaps even to not having a singular/plural distinction at all, except for retaining a more elaborate grammatical number system in one single common grammatical element.

答:
An example from a different grammatical component, to widen the perspective.

In Czech, the former dual number has been retained as a special plural form for some paired body part nouns to distinguish them from their non-body-part meanings. For example, ucho means "ear" or "pot handle", uši - the former dual form - means "ears" (but not "pot handles") and ucha - the former plural form - means "pot handles" (not "ears"). Similarly for oko ("eye"/"flake of grease on a soup") with differing plurals oči/oka.


问:
What things can `la` mark in Toki Pona?
I was under the impression, until recently, the la in Toki Pona is a topic marker of sorts similar to the Japanese topic marker wa but used less frequently since Toki Pona is not topic-prominent.

In particular, I thought that la

Requires the noun phrase it marks to appear at the beginning of the clause.

Does not give the noun phrase it marks a particular semantic role.

However, a section about it on Wikibooks suggests that its usage is much more limited.

Time-Manner-Place Schema

Time comes first in a la fragment, manner is a modifier to the main verb, and place is always last in a lon prepositional phrase.

Time la S li V Manner lon Place

What is la in Toki Pona? What are the limits on the noun phrases la can mark and the roles they can have in the clause?

答:
The particle la in Toki Pona is used mainly for two scenarios.

The first scenario is for the If/when something, then that condition. The la particle is placed in the second half of a sentence. Some examples:

mi lape lili, la mi pilin ike (If I sleep a little, then I feel bad
or When I sleep a little, I feel bad)

sina moku e telo mute, la sina anpa e telo mute lon tenpo lili (If
you drink much water/liquid, you are going to pee much in a short time)

The second scenario is for the context, like time, possibilities, or even non yes/no questions. The la particle is placed in the first half of a sentence. Some examples:

tenpo pimeja ni la, mi lukin e lipu sin (I am going to read the new book tonight)

tenpo suno pini lili la, mi kute mute e kalama musi (Yesterday I listened to much music)

ken la, pilin pi meli lili li pilin ike (Maybe the girl's sad —literally, "Maybe the heart of the girl feels bad")

tan seme la, kulupu pi jan lili sona li tawa ala tomo sona? (Why are the scholars not going to the school?)

Hope this helps!

Title: What things can `la` mark in Toki Pona?


问:
Is there an open-source set of topics and vocabulary for making a language tutorial?
Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and grammar by topic. Instead of stealing from Berlitz or Duolingo, I'd like to steal from people who give me permission to do so.

An example of what I have in mind, I'd like a set of topics and vocabulary like the following:

Lesson 1: Greetings

Hello

How are you?

Fine.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

Lesson 2: Classroom objects

pencil

notebook

textbook

paper

Lesson 3: Simple sentences

I

You

a

have

I have a pencil.

You have a textbook.

Of course, given a standard template, I'm willing to adjust according to the needs of my grammar, but a starting point could help a lot.

答:
I found a great blog post called Avoiding the "Boing" by author and conlanger E.M. Epps, in which she laid out a lot of information on conlanging that's helpful for new and experienced conlangers. One resource she recommends for vocabulary is the McGuffey readers. These are books that were used to teach English-speaking children to read. They're numerically ordered by difficulty, so that you can start with the Primer or start with the "New First Reader", and that's likely to be plenty of content for a lot of conlangs.

A few downsides to this:

It tries to focus on a small number of English letters at a time, so the vocabulary choices are affected by English. Solution: Don't follow this slavishly.

The subject material is intended for children, so adults may find it hard to connect. Solution: For a more adult vocabulary, replace "milk" with "coffee" and replace "play" with "awkward smalltalk".

It was originally intended for people who are already fluent in the language, so it doesn't directly teach the grammar. Solution: You can call attention to new grammar points as they come up. The primer does some of this for you in that it takes multiple pages before plural nouns, possessives, and conjugated verbs are introduced.


答:
There could be errors in this since I'm not very familiar with it.

Fluent Forever's approach looks like it's adaptable to any language. Fluent Forever is a language learning app you can buy. Their approach involves the learning taking steps to make their own flashcards and get materials, so I think it's adaptable for new languages.

I'm going to highlight specifically their vocabulary learning approach because I think that's usable to conlangers. They provide a 625 word core vocabulary of easily pictured frequent words that you can copy from their website. It might not be exactly 625 words in your language, because you might divide up the semantic space differently. For each of these words, you can make multiple flashcards with example pictures. The learner makes their own flashcards by selecting pictures and example sentences. If you don't have the app, they recommend you create your flashcards in random order on the the Anki flashcard program, and then it will quiz you with spaced repetition.

They also have a method of teaching phonetics through recordings of minimum pairs. That could be worthwhile if you have the time to make many recordings.

Their approach to teaching grammar is with naturally occurring example sentences and just enough translations to give people their bearings. Since there aren't naturally occurring sentences in your language, you'll have to come up with your own. My opinion is that you can't learn a grammar solely from a small number of example sentences.

Title: Is there an open-source set of topics and vocabulary for making a language tutorial?

Body:
Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and grammar by topic. Instead of stealing from Berlitz or Duolingo, I'd like to steal from people who give me permission to do so.

An example of what I have in mind, I'd like a set of topics and vocabulary like the following:

Lesson 1: Greetings

Hello

How are you?

Fine.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

Lesson 2: Classroom objects

pencil

notebook

textbook

paper

Lesson 3: Simple sentences

I

You

a

have

I have a pencil.

You have a textbook.

Of course, given a standard template, I'm willing to adjust according to the needs of my grammar, but a starting point could help a lot.


问:
Naming language based on real language
I apologize if similar question has already been answered, I tried to look for it but didn't find anything.

I'm trying to make a simple naming language that looks/sounds vaguely like nahuatl (if I manage it, I'd like to do this with more languages).

I tried Atwords, but I can't figure out the phonotactics and the results rarely look anything like the language I'm "imitating".

Real words tend to be long, hard to read and include lots of loan words.

Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?

答:
Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and
create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an
insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?

There is: look it up. For example: Nahuatl Phonology.

Nahuatl phonotactics turn out to be pretty simple: maximally one onset consonant, a long vowel, and one coda consonant per syllable. Here's an Awkwords script that'll give you 100 random 3 syllable words conforming to Nahuatl phonology:

```<code>#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV(C)
n:100
nle
</code>```

If you don't care about the source language morphology, that oughta be good enough. Not all of the words will be winners, but you can generate tons and just pick the few you like best.

To get words that really look like plausible source-language words, though, you do need to care about morphology. In that case, you do have to learn something about the source language, but not necessarily "an insane amount". For example, a simple change to that Awkwords script will generate plausible dictionary-forms of Nahuatl nouns with 3-syllable bases and <-tl> or <-tli> suffixes:

```<code>#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV[tl/CVtli]
n:100
nle
</code>```

It is not too hard to look up lists of other morphemes and add their patterns into your word generator. If you want to get really fancy, you can try to find a pre-made computational morphological model for the source language (e.g., a PC-KIMMO or KLEENE or HFST file) and then generate random underlying forms to run through it, but that probably does start to get into the realm of "an insane amount of linguistics"...

There are a couple of decent middle ground, rather than copying the source language morphology. One is to generate a bunch of short, one-or-two-syllable con-morphemes of your own that match the source phonology, and then use those as the base units from which you generate conlang words, rather than going directly from the phonology.

Another is to try to imitate the source language phonemic distribution. For that, you basically just need a big list of source language words, from which you can extract statistical information. The simplest way to do that is to just count up occurrences of each phoneme, but if you know a little bit more statistics, or are willing to learn, you can construct a conditional distribution model for which phonemes occur most often in different particular positions, and then generate random words based on those specialized distributions, rather than the default uniform distribution. Awkwords can't handle that kind of model sophistication, but other word generators, like Logopoeist, can, and it's also not too hard to write up a custom generator just for your particular naming language.

Title: Naming language based on real language

Body:
Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and
create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an
insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?

There is: look it up. For example: Nahuatl Phonology.

Nahuatl phonotactics turn out to be pretty simple: maximally one onset consonant, a long vowel, and one coda consonant per syllable. Here's an Awkwords script that'll give you 100 random 3 syllable words conforming to Nahuatl phonology:

#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV(C)
n:100
nle

If you don't care about the source language morphology, that oughta be good enough. Not all of the words will be winners, but you can generate tons and just pick the few you like best.

To get words that really look like plausible source-language words, though, you do need to care about morphology. In that case, you do have to learn something about the source language, but not necessarily "an insane amount". For example, a simple change to that Awkwords script will generate plausible dictionary-forms of Nahuatl nouns with 3-syllable bases and <-tl> or <-tli> suffixes:

#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV[tl/CVtli]
n:100
nle

It is not too hard to look up lists of other morphemes and add their patterns into your word generator. If you want to get really fancy, you can try to find a pre-made computational morphological model for the source language (e.g., a PC-KIMMO or KLEENE or HFST file) and then generate random underlying forms to run through it, but that probably does start to get into the realm of "an insane amount of linguistics"...

There are a couple of decent middle ground, rather than copying the source language morphology. One is to generate a bunch of short, one-or-two-syllable con-morphemes of your own that match the source phonology, and then use those as the base units from which you generate conlang words, rather than going directly from the phonology.

Another is to try to imitate the source language phonemic distribution. For that, you basically just need a big list of source language words, from which you can extract statistical information. The simplest way to do that is to just count up occurrences of each phoneme, but if you know a little bit more statistics, or are willing to learn, you can construct a conditional distribution model for which phonemes occur most often in different particular positions, and then generate random words based on those specialized distributions, rather than the default uniform distribution. Awkwords can't handle that kind of model sophistication, but other word generators, like Logopoeist, can, and it's also not too hard to write up a custom generator just for your particular naming language.


问:
What is a realistic *upper bound* on the complexity of nominals that can be incorporated into a verb?
Some languages feature noun incorporation. Here's an example from Lahkota from the Wikipedia article on incorporation. I suspect the difference in meaning is similar to the man chopped the wood vs the man chopped wood, but I can't say that with confidence based on the short section of the article.

```<code>wičháša kiŋ čháŋ kiŋ kaksáhe
man     DET wood DET chop

wičháša kiŋ čhaŋkáksahe
man     DET wood.chop
</code>```

In most of the examples I can find, incorporated nouns are devoid of the following features

overt case marking

overt number marking

possessive modifiers

adjectives

What are some options for allowing more complex nominals to be incorporated that are still somewhat naturalistic?

答:
Part of the confusion here is that the loss of the grammatical markers you note are a logical consequence of the the semantic use of incorporation.

An incorporated noun may be best compared, in my opinion, to a nonfinite verb, which will also typically lack much of the morphological features of a normal verb. This alone makes it evident why the standard markers a noun may present will usually be absent. Marianne Mithun describes four major reasons to incorporate a noun (quoting summary from Rosenfelder, Advanced Language Construction, pp. 182-184):

Narrow the focus of a verb by adding some sort of descriptor to it. You may want to incorporate tools, for example. In Nahuatl, such incorporation often translate to "X like (a) Y(s)".

Allow an otherwise oblique argument (usually of a semantically, if not syntactically labile verb) to become its subject (cf. English, "My head aches" vs. "I have a headache").

Background an argument that has already been mentioned.

Adding a classifier of some sort. This is an integral part of verbal morphology in the Algonquian Languages, for example. Chinese also does it to create suppletive forms of single-syllable verbs that may be highly polysemous or homophonous.

Add to this the fact that in most languages, you cannot incorporate the subject noun of an unergative verb (probably no language at all allow it, but I haven't looked into it in details), it is easy to see why incorporated/nonfinite nouns have little need for all the bells and whistles of regular arguments: you are either generalizing or backgrounding the noun, so you don't want or need to add these syntactic elements.

Regarding possessive markers specifically, I should point out that even in languages without incorporation, possessive markers are liable to be dropped if the possessor is already a separate argument in the sentence: I stole money from him, It struck him on the nose, J'ai mal à la tête, Je lui ai cassé le bras.

Finally, if a language has incorporation, it is usually rare for it to have a fully separate word category of adjectives as we understand them to begin with! In many of these languages, adjectives take the form of descriptive verbs or adjunct nouns that can themselves be incorporated into themain noun (cf. English Bluebeard, whiteboard, blackbird...), and syntactically, it doesn't typically work to incorporate an entire relative sentence.

However, some languages, such as Chukchi do allow for the whole noun+adjective phrase to be incorporated, and quite a few languages allow for numeral markers to be incorporated, although this is actually part of the verbal paradigm itself i.e. if you incorporate "I saw two persons" you are incorporating the noun "person" to a verb root that means "see two X", not incorporating "two men". That's what happens in Southern Tiwa or Algonquian languages (Nishnaabemwin: Giibimdaaswishiniizhdaabaan’gizwag, "They came in twelve carloads").

So, in summary, I would say aside from adjuncts noun and adjectives (which itself would make your language unusual, though not outside the realm of human experience), any other grammatical attribute of the noun you want to "incorporate" you should do so as an integral part of you verb paradigm, not as part of the incorporated root per se. If you are seeking a language that looks as natural as possible, anyway.


问:
How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?
I'm trying to design a conscript for my conlang Atili and would like to create punctuation in order to deliminate sentences and transcribe limited prosody. However, I don't just want to create new symbols for the full stop, comma, colon, semicolon, etc. I am especially cautious of non-terminating punctuation and how it can be used differently from in English.

I'm aware of distinctions like the Oxford comma and Spanish inverted punctuation, so I know that punctuation is not universal. How do other languages use punctuation differently from English?

答:
In fact, each language has its own punctuation rules that have to be learned. German is very different in its punctuation rules from English (relative sentences always require a comma, dependent clauses are separated from the main clause by a comma, but no "Oxford comma" and no comma after sentence-initial adverbials. Studying the rules of punctuation for some non-English languages should give you an idea of how things can be regulated differently.

I also learned that Russian and Kyrgyz and probably other languages have more ellispis-type multiple punctuations like !.. and ?.. and even !?. and ?!..

And than there are creative extensions to punctuation like the interrobang ‽, its inverted counterpart gnaborretni ⸘ and lots of proposals for an Irony mark.

Title: How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?


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

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

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

答: Just have two different words, like "twelve" (T) and "dozen". Than the number 1T is one-dozen-and-twelve.</p>


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 would call this a cipher. Dictionary.com's 6th entry for "cipher" reads, in part:

a secret method of writing, as by transposition or substitution of letters, specially formed symbols, or the like.

This gives us two requirements for being a cipher:

Secrecy

Substitution

Since this sort of script is ostensibly used to write a constructed language while actually just transcribing English (or another natlang), the requirement for secrecy is satisfied. As the conscript comprises symbols that stand in for Latin (or other natural script) letters or symbols, the requirement for substitution is satisfied.

Let's look at the examples of scripts you want to exclude:

Deseret: This is explicitly for the purpose of writing English and is widely published for such purpose and thus it fails the requirement of secrecy.

Tengwar: Tengwar are not primarily used to replace otherwise extant letters or symbols and thus fails the requirement of substitution

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
What are resources for conlangers designing a knot writing?
I have not encountered many con-scripts encoding information in knots, rather than by marking flat media. I imagine that many conlangers would enjoy the inspiration of Andean khipus, which, going back to about 3,000 BCE, are ancient comparable with Proto-cuneiform.</p>

答:
I made one such conscript. I found another for writing English.

Some useful resources include:

Ashley's Book of Knots

Animated Knots

Various macrame websites and the concept 'sinnet' (you could decorate "nodes" within)

I think khipus and knot-writing most fascinating and I have greatly enjoyed the exercise. If people comment with specific curiosities, I will try to help. This question doesn't, per se, require an "answer" but I hope posting it may be useful and fruitful for the community.

Thanks, jk - Reinstate Monica, Andrew Ray, and curiousdannii for your input about correct posting!


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

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

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

答:
If you have a situation where the entry in the conscript is taller than the textual material discussing it, you’ll have to accept ‘wasted’ white space filling out the rectangle. Really, the only sensible way to do this if your textual material is in English is to have your conscript entry run down on the left edge of the rectangle, and fill in the English on the right.

If you have an alternative horizontal orthography (even if it uses the same characters, like happens in Chinese and Japanese), I would recommend using that for the dictionary/lexicon.


问:
Is Tolkien's Dwarvish really based on Hebrew?
Many sources say that Tolkien's Dwarvish resembles the Hebrew language.  The Lord of the Rings Wikia states that:

It appears to be structured, like real-world Semitic languages, around the triconsonantal roots: kh-z-d, b-n-d, z-g-l.

Also, from folk.uib.no:

The basic structure of Khuzdul resembles that of Semitic languages, like Arabic and Hebrew. The stems from which words are derived are not by themselves pronounceable words, but consist of consonants only. Nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. are derived not only by prefixes and suffixes (if such devices are used at all), but also by inserting certain vowels between these consonants, sometimes also by doubling one of the consonants. Often the words are actually inflected by internal vowel-changes instead of adding affixes: Rukhs means "Orc", but plural "Orcs" is Rakhâs. The root consonants - the so-called radicals - remain the same, like *R-Kh-S in this case. In Khuzdul as well as in Semitic languages, there are usually three radicals in the root; several such roots are mentioned in TI:174 and RS:466: B-R-Z "red", B-N-D "head", K-B-L "silver", N-R-G "black". An example of a biconsonantal root is Z-N "dark, dim" (RS:466).

and:

Baruk Khazâd! is said to mean "Axes of the Dwarves!" Baruk is usually taken to be an example of something similar to the Hebrew "construct state": the state a word is said to be in when it is placed in front of a noun to express a genitival relationship: X Y meaning "X of Y" or "Y's X". (Compare Hebrew סוס (sûs) "horse", המלך (hammelekh) "the king", סוס המלך (sûs hammelekh) "the king's horse, the horse of the king".) Of course, we cannot be certain that baruk is the normal plural "axes" and not a specialized form meaning "axes of". It may be significant that all the other attested plurals contain a long vowel: Khazâd "Dwarves", Rakhâs "Orcs", tarâg "beards", shathûr "clouds", ûl "streams", dûm "excavations, halls", bizâr "valleys". Could the normal plural "axes" be *barûk? Shathûr "clouds" may represent a plural pattern in -a-û-. In Hebrew, the vowels of words in the construct state are often shortened.

Was it actually based on Hebrew / Semitic languages, or is that simply an impression?

答:
Yes.

According to this interview with Tolkien, he really did design it to be Semitic.  He says,

The dwarves of course are quite obviously,  wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.

In other words, he did design their tongue to be very like the Semitic language, possibly since their history resembled that of the Jews.


问:
How to distinguish [i] from [iː] in Cyrillic
Renglish/Рэнглиш (not mine)
is an adaptation of Cyrillic for English. Most of the sounds seem ok, but how would you normally differentiate [i] in bit from the [iː] in beet using Cyrillic or would they both just use 'И'?
The sample text they give is:

Ал Хйюмън бееингз ар борн фри энд еекўъл ин Дигнити энд Райтз. Ђей ар ендауед ўић Реезън энд Каншънс энд шюдд якт тъўордс ўун ънуђер ин ей Спирит ъв Бруђергхюд.

In the Latin alphabet that is:

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

I know some characters are very differenṭ from their normal sounds, like я for 'æ' instead of 'ja' & ц for dʒ instead of 'ts' (стяк ексчэнц would be 'stack exchange'.) I use џ instead of ц for dʒ. I thought about using ы for [i] and и for

I previously posted this in the Linguistics community but was told this was a better fit.

答: If ы is otherwise unused, it seems like the best fit here to me. It certainly seems at least as close a match as some others you've accepted (e.g. ц for dʒ)</p>


答:
This adaptation seems to use either "ее" (as in "бееингз" beings or "еекўъл" equal) or "и" (as in "фри" free) for /i/ and "и" (as in "ин" in) or "ъ" (as in "Каншънс" conscience) for /ɪ/. In particular, the word "Дигнити" dignity uses "и" for both sounds.

It seems this transcription has retained a number of etymological spellings, such as the retention of certain silent letters, like the second "е" in "ендауед" endowed or the "ъў" in "тъўордс" towards, the use of "с" and "з" seemingly interchangeably for word final /s/ and /z/ ("Райтз" rights and "бееингз" beings vs. "Каншънс" conscience and "тъўордс" towards), and the distinction between stressed ("у" as in "ўун" one or "ей" a) and unstressed /ʌ/ ("ъ" as in "ънуђер" another).

Here is a chart of how English vowels are spelled in your sample:

```<code>VOWEL  LETTER SAMPLE WORD     POTENTIAL CYRILLIC SPELLING
TRAP      э   (энд)           трэп
          я   (якт)           тряп
BATH
PALM      а   (ал)            пам
LOT
CLOTH     а   (Каншънс)       клађ
THOUGHT
KIT       и   (ин)            кит
          ъ   (Каншънс)       кът
DRESS     е   (ендауед)       дрес
STRUT     у   (ўун)           струт
          ей  (ей)            стрейт
          ъ   (ънуђер)        стрът
FOOT      ю   (Бруђергхюд)    фют
FACE      ей  (ђей)           фейс
GOAT
FLEECE    ее  (бееингз)       флеес
          и   (фри)           флис
GOOSE     ю   (Хйюмън)        гюс
PRICE     ай  (Райтз)         прай
CHOICE
MOUTH     ау  (ендауед)       мауђ
NURSE
START     а  (ар)             старт
NORTH     о  (борн)           норђ
FORCE     о  (тъўордс)        форс
NEAR      и  (Спирит)         нир
SQUARE
CURE
COMMA
LETTER    е  (ънуђер)         летер
HAPPY
</code>```

Title: How to distinguish [i] from [iː] in Cyrillic

Body:
Renglish/Рэнглиш (not mine)
is an adaptation of Cyrillic for English. Most of the sounds seem ok, but how would you normally differentiate [i] in bit from the [iː] in beet using Cyrillic or would they both just use 'И'?
The sample text they give is:

Ал Хйюмън бееингз ар борн фри энд еекўъл ин Дигнити энд Райтз. Ђей ар ендауед ўић Реезън энд Каншънс энд шюдд якт тъўордс ўун ънуђер ин ей Спирит ъв Бруђергхюд.

In the Latin alphabet that is:

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

I know some characters are very differenṭ from their normal sounds, like я for 'æ' instead of 'ja' & ц for dʒ instead of 'ts' (стяк ексчэнц would be 'stack exchange'.) I use џ instead of ц for dʒ. I thought about using ы for [i] and и for

I previously posted this in the Linguistics community but was told this was a better fit.

Body:
This adaptation seems to use either "ее" (as in "бееингз" beings or "еекўъл" equal) or "и" (as in "фри" free) for /i/ and "и" (as in "ин" in) or "ъ" (as in "Каншънс" conscience) for /ɪ/. In particular, the word "Дигнити" dignity uses "и" for both sounds.

It seems this transcription has retained a number of etymological spellings, such as the retention of certain silent letters, like the second "е" in "ендауед" endowed or the "ъў" in "тъўордс" towards, the use of "с" and "з" seemingly interchangeably for word final /s/ and /z/ ("Райтз" rights and "бееингз" beings vs. "Каншънс" conscience and "тъўордс" towards), and the distinction between stressed ("у" as in "ўун" one or "ей" a) and unstressed /ʌ/ ("ъ" as in "ънуђер" another).

Here is a chart of how English vowels are spelled in your sample:

VOWEL  LETTER SAMPLE WORD     POTENTIAL CYRILLIC SPELLING
TRAP      э   (энд)           трэп
          я   (якт)           тряп
BATH
PALM      а   (ал)            пам
LOT
CLOTH     а   (Каншънс)       клађ
THOUGHT
KIT       и   (ин)            кит
          ъ   (Каншънс)       кът
DRESS     е   (ендауед)       дрес
STRUT     у   (ўун)           струт
          ей  (ей)            стрейт
          ъ   (ънуђер)        стрът
FOOT      ю   (Бруђергхюд)    фют
FACE      ей  (ђей)           фейс
GOAT
FLEECE    ее  (бееингз)       флеес
          и   (фри)           флис
GOOSE     ю   (Хйюмън)        гюс
PRICE     ай  (Райтз)         прай
CHOICE
MOUTH     ау  (ендауед)       мауђ
NURSE
START     а  (ар)             старт
NORTH     о  (борн)           норђ
FORCE     о  (тъўордс)        форс
NEAR      и  (Спирит)         нир
SQUARE
CURE
COMMA
LETTER    е  (ънуђер)         летер
HAPPY


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

答:
In terms of spelling opacity, there's a continuum between exactly mirroring speech at the phonetic or phonological level and writing in a different language. Historical spelling normally refers to writing segments, especially consonants in clusters or inflectional morphology, that have been lost over time. I think adding back lost morphology or undoing sound changes in a much more common kind of historical spelling than adding back lost syntax.

There are some historical changes that cause words to be dropped without turning into affixes, though. For instance, a language can develop a null copula construction like Russian did for the present tense.

It would not be too much of a stretch to imagine a language where the null copula is a fairly recent innovation, and therefore the copula is usually written despite not being spoken. This may have been the case for Russian at some point in time.

I don't know of any examples, but you might create a language where things such as articles or measure words existed at one point but were lost. I think spontaneously losing articles or measure words is uncommon, so it would probably be a contact-induced change.

Title: Can entire words be silent?


答:
Dropping words happen (the ne of negation notoriously drops pretty systematically in spoken French) and commonly a that, as Gregory points out. However, I believer a true "silent word" is a nonsensical concept.

For starters,  Silent letters are historical artifacts of a writing system. They are not a feature of the spoken language, so right there, a "silent word" cannot be something that happens in the spoken language unless the words in question are composed of phonemes or features that are merely difficult to hear from locutors of a different language. Still not silent in their native language. If a writer writes down a word, they typically do it with some sort of communicative intent (even if not consciously so).

Second, in the spoken language, something that isn't pronounced in one way or another literally doesn't exist by definition (we can argue about stuff like sandhi and the side effects of sound change, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion IMO).

So unless your language has a need to transcribe something that is literally not said (and we usually have punctuation and emoticons for that), then a "silent word" is, in my opinion, a self-contradicting concept.

Title: Can entire words be silent?

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


答:
I'll start by saying I'm not an expert, only an enthusiast.

But I believe this could be entirely possible. Written languages such as Egyptian never had punctuation. So they would not be capable of using punctuation to indicate certain moments in speech indicated by them. I could see how a similar constructed language would be capable of having a silent word being used that represents these punctuation moments.

For example, a sentence where you want to indicate a emphatic pause could simply use a word that might not have a normal use, like combining the words for "wait" and "moment" into a new word that when written symbolize the spoken need for a pause of emphasis.

Title: Can entire words be silent?


问:
Alternatives to independent verbs for encoding desiderative meaning
English uses an independent verb to encode desiderative meaning, namely want. It normally takes an infinitival complement, although I can take a direct object as well if the subject of the infinitival clause is not the same as want's subject.

```<code>I want to swim tomorrow.
</code>```

and

```<code>I want you to swim tomorrow.
</code>```

However, there are some limits to its flexibility in English. It cannot take a dependent clause headed by that.

```<code>*I want that I find a yellow pencil soon.
</code>```

Some languages use a verb similar to want in English, and others use dedicated verb morphology to encode the same meaning. I can't think of any natural languages that use a strategy for encoding the meaning of want (Y) to X that isn't one of those two.

What are some alternative constructions for expressing desiderative meaning, particularly those unattested in natural languages?

答:
Quite a few languages have desiderative as an affix within the verbal system (whether it is analysed as an affix or a full mood being irrelevant here). Japanese and Sanskrit do, for example. It is fairly common (as one would expect) for agglutinating or polysynthetic languages to have one such as Quechua, Finno-Ugric or Turkic languages. It is by no mean universal for these languages: while Hungarian has such a suffix Finnish (and I believe Estonian) lacks it.

Desiderative construction otherwise tend (again not unexpectedly) to be mediated via an auxiliary verb (in Nahuatl, that verb is one of a couple that can be directly integrated into other verbs).

Note that desiderative applies (typically) only to the subject. That is, a form like "I want X to Y" is not a desiderative per se. More accurately, in most language with derivational desiderative affixes, these affixes do not have a "separate" argument structure the way an auxiliary verb an have, so they cannot insert an additional argument. Indeed in Nahuatl, that is exactly what you'll see:

Ticchīhuaznequi (You want to do it)

Ticnequi nicchīhuaz (You want me to do it)

I have not found an easy way to search for information about the three-argument version ("I want X to Y") cross-linguistically, but I'd wager it tends to be formed with some form of Optative or Subjunctive structure.


问:
Could you have a language with only three words?
Don't immediately dismiss this! Just give me a moment to explain and you might realize it's an idea that might have merit, especially considering the question title is a little misleading. Also, I'm no conlang or linguistics expert, so if there's a couple small things I got wrong but don't necessarily make this impossible, especially if fixing it might make it possible, correct me in the comments and I'll integrate it into my question to make the question something that can actually be answered.

Could you construct a language--or, at least, a grammar system--with only three words? OK, so first of all, "word" is not the proper term for what I'm trying to say, but I don't know of a term that fits. So. When I say three words, I mean three combinations of consonants and vowels that morphemes can be derived from. From now on, though, I'm going to refer to them as "words", just because it's the only term that vaguely fits. Again, don't dismiss me immediately. Let me explain my idea, and then please critique it.

The three base words would each have particular consonants and one particular vowel, in the structure 1v2v3 (where v represents the vowel, and the numbers represent the three consonants). For a silly example, let's say the three words are:

Sazar: Fire (s, z, r; a)

Kitiv: Lie (k, t, v: i)

Lomon: Truth (l, m, n; o)

(If I were to actually construct this language, I would definitely use different base words, but let's stick with these for the sake of example.)

There are thirteen distinct combinations of these letters to be derived from these words (1, 2, 3, v, 1v, 2v, v2, v3, 1v2, 2v3, v2v, 1v2v, v2v3), and that's without rearranging the letters at all. If you allow for rearranging letters, there are thirty-one  distinct combinations (if I did my math right). Including the original "word", it's thirty-two.

All these combinations templates can result in 96 different roots/suffixes/prefixes/morphemes/etc. If you somehow made each combination represent some kind of modifier that can be made to a root word, could you construct, if not a language, then at least a grammar system, this way?

For example, if we made v3 represent plurality (-iv=singular, -on=plural, -ar=dual) and v2 represent person (-it=first person, -om=third person, and -az=second person) then that could be the conjugation for the language, giving you:

I: -itiv

You: -aziv

He/She/It: -omiv

We: -iton (or -itar for special, dual cases)

You pl.: -azon (or -azar for special, dual cases)

They: -omon (or -omar for special, dual cases)

Then, -omiv could be extended using v1, which would represent gender (-as=neuter, -ik=female, -ol=male). Using this, the conjugation for he would be the way-too-long-for-conjugation "-omivol".

You could make a modifier for roots that determine whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective, and you could also have the three tenses (it's fascinating how much language fits into groups of three) and make cases using combinations of the vowels and consonants, and you would have to stretch some things for prepositions, but maybe instead of having prepositions be words, you could make this an entirely written language and use visuals to convey prepositions (essentially making sentence order influence the physical positions of the objects the words refer to, instead of the grammatical meaning of the words).

I would probably need to create a couple (or many) other roots that the modifiers would be added to (or at least start with more flexible words than fire, lie, and truth), but could I at least base the grammar system off of only the three original words and modifiers derived from those three words?

I don't see any obvious issues with this language, besides long words, but I would appreciate it if more experienced conlangers could critique this. Also, if there are no issues with a conlang with only the grammar based on the three base "words", what about an entire language, where you could only build basic words by combining roots based on the three base words? This would limit the number of morphemes you could use for grammar, which might be an issue if there are a certain grammatical components every language needs and there aren't enough morphemes for all the components.

答:
I haven't (and won't) check your math, but you have defined a grand total of 96... I'll call them blocks.  I'll take the position that a block represents a sufficiently new type of language element that it doesn't have an existing name already.  Maybe they're a special case of morpheme or of something else, I don't really care.  They're blocks, and there are 96 of them.

You allow for 96^2 and 96^3 combos, which is nearly 900,000 blocks or polyblocks.  That's plenty of room to define a language.  That's bigger than many lexicons, and you can certainly spare a large subset for grammatical functions.  Chinese for example is said to have 50,000 characters --- yes those are graphemes and there's apples and oranges here, but you take the point.

Imagine a person who only speaks and writes Chinese and has no awareness that other languages even exist.  One day they are told, you can write everything in a language using 26 letters and some punctuation and so forth, you can get away with old-school ASCII with a maximum of 256 graphemes!  He'd think you're talking doo-doo kaka.

You could probably do it with a great deal less.


问:
How can syntactic ambiguity with pronouns be avoided?
Due to the way pronouns work in place of any particular noun (subject or object) in the sentence, this often leads to ambiguous grammatical constructions.

Take this phrase in English for example:

Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing

Do him and his refer to Adam (where James will help edit Adam's essay or give him suggestions) or James (where Adam is sending James an exemplar to help James see examples of good writing)?

How would ambiguities like this be avoided in constructed languages? I know a simple solution is to just eliminate pronouns from the language but is there an alternative solution to allow pronouns to be used unambiguously?

答:
In addition to the options mentioned by Adarain and Jan, various reflexives and reflexive-like operations can often be of use in dealing with such situations. English already has some reflexives, providing some amount of disambiguation, Danish goes a little further has a compulsory reflexive/non-reflexive distinction in 3rd person possessives, and while the specific example you mentioned doesn't work well in translation, a similarly problematic sentence "Adam sent James his essay" can be easily somewhat disambiguated with this system:

Adami sendte Jamesj sini stil

Adami sendte Jamesj hansj(/k) stil

It is possible for reflexive systems to be significantly more broad than this, rather than just referring to antecedents in the same clause, even if it's omitted via some other rule, e.g. in "Jonh saw Adam and shot himself in the foot", where there is no overt reference to John in the second clause, because it's been omitted due to subject coreference (such deletion rules, when constraints are put on them is actually another way of reducing ambiguity, I have relatively recently written a rather long forum post on this which goes into much more detail about them), it's possible to have "long-distance reflexives" which take antecedents outside of the clause.

In Mandarin, the reflexive ziji can refer to both local and non-local antecedents in some cases:

Zhangsan renwei Lisi kan-bu-qi ziji

  Zhangsan think Lisi look-not-up REFL

  "Zhangsani thinks Lisij looks down on selfi/j"

Certain things block this though, for example shifts in perspective:

Zhangsan renwei wo zhidao Wangwu xihuan ziji

  Zhangsan think I know Wangwu like REFL

  "Zhangsani thinks Ij know Wangwuk likes self*i/*j/k"

In Igbo, in complements of communication, entities that are coreferential with the source of information are marked by what is known as "logophoric pronouns":

ọ́  sị̀rị̀ nà   ọ́  byàrà

  he said that he came

  "hei said that hej came"

ọ́  sị̀rị̀ nà   yá  byàrà

  he said that LOG came

  "hei said that hei came"

Gokana also has such a system, though the marking is on the verb, though the constraints on what can be coreferential are quite free:

aè kɔ aè dɔ

  he said he fell

  "hei said that hej fell"

aè kɔ aè dɔ-ɛ

  he said he fell-LOG

  "hei said that hei fell"

aè kɔ oò div-èè e

  he said you hit-LOG him

  "hei said that you hit himi

aè kɔ oò ziv-èè a gĩ́ã́

  he said you stole-LOG his yams

  "hei said that you stole hisi yams"

The wikipedia article on logophoricity goes into more depth.

It is also possible to have two different reflexives, requiring respectively local and non-local antecedents. Danish has a rather limited case of this in bare complements to perception verbs, where the two reflexives sig and sig selv which are usually either only different in level of emphasis or in complementary distribution, respectively require non-local and local antecedents:

Holger hørte Peter tale om sig.

  "Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himi."

Holger hørte Peter tale om sig selv.

  "Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himselfj."

Holger hørte Peter tale om ham.

  "Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himk."

"4th Person systems" such as seen Eskimo languages are rather similar, though more general as they are used in all subordinate clauses are also another type of reflexive-like construction (the "fourth" person is often labeled 3R) and they are also used intraclausally in possessive marking. In all of these cases they mark that a participant or possessor is coreferential with the subject of the main clause (which is defined in terms of S/A despite the case marking being ergative). An example from Siberian Yupik:

esghaghyagu quyaaq

  see:CNSQ:3s>3s happy:IND.3s

  "when hei saw himj, hek was happy"

esghaghyamigu quyaaq

  see:CNSQ:3Rs>3s happy:IND.3s

  "when hei saw himj, hei was happy"

esghaghyatni quyaaq

  see:CNSQ:3s>3Rs happy:IND.3s

  "when hei saw himj, hej was happy"

In addition to all these various reflexive constructions, switch reference, the overt marking of whether the "subject" is either the same or different, either between two coordinate clauses, or a subordinate and main clause can also resolve some ambiguity. Take for example this pair of sentences from Hua:

ebgi-Ø-na korihie

  hit-SAME-3sg.ANTICSU ran.away.3sg

  "hei hit himj and hei ran away"

ebgi-ga-na korihie

  hit-3sg.DIFF-3sg.ANTICSU ran.away.3sg

  "hei hit himj and hej ran away"

Switch reference can only deal with one set of coreference though what exactly is tracked varies. In some languages, it is specifically the actor that is tracked, while others may track the topic or some other pragmatically prominent NP, or may even differ in what is tracked in the controlling clause as opposed to the clause recieving the marking. Additionally the marking may occasionally also be sensitive to changes in things like time, place, discourse coherency and/or reality status, and as a result, switch reference may fulfill may other roles than simply dealing with ambiguity. This paper, particularly chapters 5 and 6, goes into quite a bit of detail about the highly varied and interesting usage of switch-ref in Papua New Guinean languages.


问:
A biphonic language
How could a language evolve such that the vowels are biphonic (like in throat singing)?

Note: Biphonicity is when two notes/tones are sung simultaneously.

There are languages that are whistled or toned, so I'd imagine it'd be possible, just how?

Perhaps, the language developes an unwieldy tone system that begins to overlap itself, creating vowels with two separate tones being used simultaneously?

答:
You already hint a possible answer in the question: There is an art form named throat singing. A community where throat singing is practiced may carry over the some biphonic distinguishing features to their language. This may include borrowing a biphonic pattern for some formulaic expression from a throat song, or words with special poetic or religious meanings. Once established as a linguistic feature it may spread all over the language.

I think, linguistically this would be still described as a tone system, but with rather complex tones in it.

P.S. I once listened to a biphonic whistler who was able to whistle some classic music with two voices simultaneously. A flashing experience.

Title: A biphonic language


答:
In a way, vowels are already biphonic! Acoustically, vowels (and most sounds, actually) are simply combinations of formants: specific frequencies at which the vocal tract resonates. The differences between vowels are then caused by differences in the frequencies of the formants. This can be easily seen on a spectrogram, like this one from Wikipedia:

In this spectrogram, the vowel [i] has its first two formants at roughly 500 and 2500 Hz, while [u] has its first two formants at roughly 500 and 1000 Hz.

Now, it turns out that biphonic singing works on exactly the same principle! Biphonic singing works through shaping the mouth so that one of the formants becomes loud enough to be perceived as a separate note. Note that this uses exactly the same mechanism used in vocalising vowels; the only difference is that the shape of the mouth is changed slightly to emphasise the formants. To experience this yourself, you can try saying [u͡ʉ͡y͡ʉ͡u] very slowly; if you listen carefully to what you are saying, you should be able to hear a note growing higher and then lower in pitch. This note is one of the formants of the vowels (the first formant, I think); Biphonic singers simply emphasise this formant so it becomes loud enough to easily hear.

So, to summarise, languages already use vowels which could be described as ‘biphonic’ — the only reason we don’t hear it that way is because the formants aren’t as strong as they are in biphonic singing.

(For more information, you may find https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/voice.html and https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/xoomi.html interesting.)

Title: A biphonic language

Body:
How could a language evolve such that the vowels are biphonic (like in throat singing)?

Note: Biphonicity is when two notes/tones are sung simultaneously.

There are languages that are whistled or toned, so I'd imagine it'd be possible, just how?

Perhaps, the language developes an unwieldy tone system that begins to overlap itself, creating vowels with two separate tones being used simultaneously?


答: One potential obvious answer would be to use double letters for long vowels like Mongolian does. (And e.g. Finnish does in the Latin alphabet.)</p>


问:
Have language regulators ever made concessions and changed the language to adopt naturally occurring changes?
A few conlangs have language regulators or academies. Have any of these ever been faced with naturally occurring linguistic change and changed the official version of the language to match?

Please consider only grammatical, morphological, or syntactic changes, and not simply the inclusion of new words, as I expect that to be very common.

答:
L'Académie has done this in the past, and is dealing with the blowback today.

French, as people tend to know, uses gender in its grammar. Originally, there were feminine forms such as philosophesse in widespread use, but in the 1600s, around the time L'Académie was founded, the idea that "the masculine prevails over the feminine" became a standard French published grammars and dictionaries used, and they explicitly declared this to be the case not because it was an existing linguistic rule in French but because the language should reflect the "natural" male-dominant society of the time. So words such as la philosophesse was declared grammatically incorrect: le philosophe was the only proper term. (Besides, they probably chuckled, it's not like the little ladies could really think anyway, amirite?)

No really, they said that. And L'Académie, who still don't like girl cooties, was on board and kept enforcing that. So you'd see situations where, for instance, if you had an symphony orchestra of entirely female musicians, they'd be referred to as les musiciennes (fem.pl). If they added a single man to the orchestra, now the group is les musiciens (masc.pl), even though the man is outnumbered 100:1.

The blowback happening now, which les immortels (of course, never les immortelles) are fighting hard against, is to tweak French to be a bit more inclusive, by doing things like creating constructions analogous to the "Latinx" term, changing some nouns so that the feminine form is fully accepted as grammatically equal to the male, and perhaps even considered the default; to use an example I just made up, if you referred "an engineer" as a generic, you'd use une ingénieure instead of un ingénieur. And even stopping that stupidity where a single man changes the entire grammatical gender of a group, regardless of how outnumbered he is.


答: The archaeological site L'Anse aux Meadows is pronounced (in English) /lænsi mɛdoʊz/, i.e. the aux is silent, if random internet sources can be believed. Of course, it is not quite a typical example - a proper name, derived from another language, and English speakers unaware of the local pronunciation are likely to read differently. But that's the fate of the English orthography.

Title: Can entire words be silent?


问:
Is there a structured toki pona dictionary/thesaurus?
I'm currently working on an NLP project using toki pona, analysing and generating sentences. I was wondering if there was a structured dictionary available for it, or whether people have attempted to create one.

Let me explain what I mean by "structured dictionary":

There are only 120-odd words in toki pona. The word jan refers to a person. Compounds are used to be more specific, ie jan pona is "friend", jan utala is "fighter", jan alasa is "hunter", etc. This is reminiscent of expressing the meaning of nouns through semantic primitives, a bit like Wilks (1975). So the set of words described by jan would be {"person", "friend", "fighter", "hunter", ...}. There are subsets which are more specific, so jan utala is {"fighter", "soldier", "mercenary", ...}. jan utala pi ma would be {"soldier", "private", "general", ...}

You can envisage it as a tree structure, where the leaves are the word meanings, and the roots (as there would be multiple trees: one for each 'top' primitive) encompasses all of them. As you wander down the tree, the path is an ever longer chain of toki pona words, and the set of meanings covered by those words becomes smaller and smaller.

Another example would be ilo, "tool". ilo toki is a tool for communication: {"telephone", "telegraph", "vhf radio", "loud hailer", ...}; ilo toki uta suli (tool talk mouth big) could be a loud hailer. Another sub-tree would capture wireless communication devices, perhaps ilo toki pi kon.

I know this somewhat goes against the toki pona philosophy of being a simple and small language, but it seems to me to more or less accidentally provide a useful set of semantic primitives that can be used to describe word meanings in general. So before I embark on creating such a structure, has anyone already attempted something similar? Surely there must be dictionaries of mulit-word toki pona expressions? I haven't been able to find a good one yet.

Wilks, Y (1975) An Intelligent Analyzer and Understander of English, Communications of the ACM 18(5):264-274

答:
I think you may find some of what you're looking for in the paper Basic concepts and tools for the Toki Pona minimal and constructed language by Renato Fabbri.

A first Toki Pona Wordnet was constructed relating each of the TP words in the dictionary to English Wordnet synsets [19] through the English lemmas. The canonical (i.e. Princeton) Wordnet only contains nouns, adjectives,verbs, and adverbs. Thus, particles were not considered. Numbers were considered adjectives. Words presented as adjectives in the dictionary were considered both as adjectives and adverbs. Prepositions were considered inall classes. [19]

The TPWordnetclass [10], provides such tentative TP Wordnets in their simplest form: the TP words are keysin a dictionary that returns the corresponding synsets.

A "synset" in WordNet is a set of cognitive synonyms, so this seems like a start towards what you want. pali pona!

The references are:

George Miller. 1998. WordNet: An electronic lexical database. MIT press

https://github.com/ttm/tokipona


问:
Which constructed languages have been used to write scientific articles?
One of the most interesting aspects of Interlingua is that during its early days there were a number of scientific articles published in it. This is in contrast with most other constructed languages, which are primarily used to publish things that are of interest only to their own communities.

Have other constructed languages been used for that purpose?

答: Esperanto is not only used to write scientific articles but there is also a scientific journal published in Esperato, namely Science Revuo.</p>


问:
Has anybody created an Arabic inspired shorthand for english?
I'm thinking of a system where all fricatives look similar to each other, all plosives look similar, etc; the same base shape could be used for similar sounds using the dots placed above/below letters (see I'jām) to distinguish between voiced/unvoiced. For example ز and ژ could both be fricatives but one voiced & one unvoiced with the number of i'jām dots indicating voiced & unvoiced. As an example 1 dot (خ) could be unvoiced, & 2 dots (ت) could be voiced , 3 dots (ش/چ) could be digraphs(?) like sh/ch/th etc;. Their placement above or below could even mean something (پ/ث)? vowels could be diacritics like how Arabic harakat are used. I'm not really talking about adapting Arabic itself to write english. Plenty of those have been done, some good, some bad. I'm talking about a script inspired by Arabic, but that is really suited to write English because it is designed for English. Dots & vowels could even be omitted to further speed up writing if the dots/vowels could easily be inferred from context as in (Rasm). To use an example that can be typed: 'تُن' could be 'dot', but without diacritics could be 'date' depending on context & with i'jām reversed it could be represent 't-d'. 'O' wouldn't have to be  ُ  (damma), I'm just using that as an example. I like the look of connected letters but disconnected could be used too. It could be designed to be written in either direction by rotating certain letters to face in the direction of writing as was done with Egyptian hieroglyphs. It would be easier to learn because similar sounds would look similar which is rarely the case in Arabic. Has anybody created something like this or could it be created? The table is here

答:
I created a script, سۛٗط࣫ٮ࣭هَں࣪ٮ࣮ shorthand:

Arabic
English

ط࣪ / ط࣫
r / l

ک࣮ / ک࣭
k / g

ح࣪ / ج
v / f

ٮ࣮ / ٮ࣭
t / d

ٮ࣫ / ٮ࣪
p / b

س࣪
z

ی
y

و
w

ں࣪
n

ں࣫
m

ز
j

ه
h

س࣫ / س࣪
z / s

عُ
u

عٗ
o

عِ
i

عؘ
e

عَ
a

ٮِۛس࣫ عِس࣫ سۛٗط࣫ٮ࣭هَں࣪ٮ࣮/ٮس عس سطٮهںٮ

Unvoiced have one dot above/below, voiced have two. Letters don't match their sounds in Arabic in most cases.

Edit: Here's a spreadsheet. The keyboard is linked there also. I have a chromebook, so it installs as a chrome extension, then can be used as an input method.


问:
Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible?
I and other people are making a collaborative conlang. It features mood/evidentiality contrast. There are 4 moods:

Indicative

Imperative

Optative

Conditional

There are also 6 evidentials:

Direct

Hearsay

Egophoric

Gnomic

Inferential

Dubitative

The problem is we disagreed whether Imperative/Optative/Conditional (i.e. Irrealis moods) are compatible with evidentials. I feel they are incompatible, but the other conlangers think they are.

答:
The most prototypical evidentials are a class of verbal affixes. They are not commonly tenses or moods of their own (though they can be). As such, they are not structurally incompatible with the irrealis/conditional, and ultimately it really depends on what exactly that mood is being used for by a language.

In Quechua, counterfactuals (If I had hooves, I'd be a horse) use the irrealis marker -man, but cannot (as I understand it anyway) take evidentials, but a statement of probability (She may be at school), which also uses the same marker, definitely can.

Irrealis statements about future events or hypotheticals, on the other, can also reasonably be said to be semantically unsuitable to use evidentials: in I will try to feed her some soup, the "feed her some soup" subclause is not really a statement you can really describe the source of the information (unless you have a dedicated evidential for that case, but natural languages don't). Nonetheless, WALS notes that some languages do:

Because evidentials are used to describe the speaker’s involvement with events, they tend to occur in realis contexts, especially in past tense situations. Nevertheless, evidentials do occur in what can be described as irrealis situations. Example (9) from Barasano (Eastern Tucanoan; Colombia; Jones and Jones 1991: 116) shows an interrogative evidential, and (10), from Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Daghestanian; Georgia; Holisky and Gagua 1994: 180) shows an evidential with a future event.

Title: Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible?


答:
I think it could be argued that some of your evidentials may be compatible with some of your moods.

Expressing something hoped hoped for or wished for (optative) seems it might pair nicely with the dubitative marker, perhaps expressing unlikelihood. It would also pair naturally with the direct marker, as, obviously, the speaker has direct knowledge of that which she hopes for!

Conditional seems to be compatible with hearsay, gnomic, and perhaps inferential markers.

Imperative, I think, subsumes direct evidentiality to the exclusion of the others. It would be a pretty poor general who commands his men "Charge-I think, maybe?"

I think it could also be argued that evidential marking of those other moods would be redundant, because obviously the source of information regarding a command is the one who issues the command! Perhaps evidential marking in those instances could be put to other uses?

Title: Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible?

Body:
I and other people are making a collaborative conlang. It features mood/evidentiality contrast. There are 4 moods:

Indicative

Imperative

Optative

Conditional

There are also 6 evidentials:

Direct

Hearsay

Egophoric

Gnomic

Inferential

Dubitative

The problem is we disagreed whether Imperative/Optative/Conditional (i.e. Irrealis moods) are compatible with evidentials. I feel they are incompatible, but the other conlangers think they are.


答:
Remember that "grammar is born hungry" (attr. to W. Annis). While evidentials probably won't mix with the conditional mood in an additive fashion, they may produce other non-combinatorial meanings. So ("if" + conditional + direct) might be a normal condition, while ("if" + conditional + hearsay) might end up meaning that the scenario is especially unlikely, and ("if" + conditional + inferential) could indicate that the scenario would be bad.

Similarly, evidentials could be added to imperatives more directly to indicate the knowledge on which the command is based. (imperative + inferential) could be a normal imperative, while (imperative + direct) implies authority and (imperative + hearsay) indicates that you're passing down a command from your superior.

Wikipedia mentions that the same particles that indicate evidentiality are not infrequently also used to indicate mirativity, modality, tense, or aspect, though it doesn't give any examples, so take that with a grain of salt.

Of course it's also absolutely possible (or even probable) that certain combinations of modality and evidentiality are simply disallowed in your language. I would be very surprised if all 32 potential combinations of modality and evidentiality in your language were permitted (for example, a gnomic optative seems pretty contradictory to me).

Title: Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible?


答:
From an information theory point of view, you can express anything if you have at least two signs: computers do this through the use of binary, where the signal is either "on" or "off", or "1" or "0". If you have a "message" with just one bit of information, you can express two meanings, which are "on" or "off". If you want to express more complex ideas, you need a longer message. For example, if you want to express the decimal numbers from 0 to 15 in binary, you need at least four bits to represent them.

We as people have created a system where we know beforehand what the bits mean when we send and receive them. So if we send a message consisting of four binary digits, e.g. "0010", then we know that that means the number "2", because that's the convention we've agreed upon.

So you could certainly expand this principle by using three signs instead of two, and use conventions and codes to create meanings. The snag is that the complexity of the message would increase massively. For example, if I want to write the word "message" in English, I only need a total of seven symbols, and each symbol can be one of 26 signs (the English alphabet.) If I want to write the word "message" in binary, however, it will look like this:

0110110101100101011100110111001101110011011000010110011101100101

Which is a considerably longer message, because I only have two signs to work with, not 26.

The other disadvantage is: you need a convention or a "code" which both the sender of the message (the speaker) and the receiver (the listener) to be understood before a message can be transmitted. If you saw the above binary sequence out of context, you would have no way of knowing it meant "message", because I haven't told you that it represents a sequence of ASCII characters. It could just be meaningless computer code, or a very large number, or part of a recipe for a salmon bake.

So you could theoretically create a language with three "signs" and combine them to make meanings. For example, if your words were "ka", "pi" and "ol", then you could have the following sequences:

```<code>kapi = woman
kapiol = man
olka = cat
olpipika = dog
</code>```

And so on. But you would have two problems with such a language:

The complexity of each resulting "word" would vastly increase as you make the message longer, and

There's no obvious relation between your signs and your word, so you would have to make your messages understood by pre-existing codes, agreed between the speaker and listener.

Title: Could you have a language with only three words?

Body:
Don't immediately dismiss this! Just give me a moment to explain and you might realize it's an idea that might have merit, especially considering the question title is a little misleading. Also, I'm no conlang or linguistics expert, so if there's a couple small things I got wrong but don't necessarily make this impossible, especially if fixing it might make it possible, correct me in the comments and I'll integrate it into my question to make the question something that can actually be answered.

Could you construct a language--or, at least, a grammar system--with only three words? OK, so first of all, "word" is not the proper term for what I'm trying to say, but I don't know of a term that fits. So. When I say three words, I mean three combinations of consonants and vowels that morphemes can be derived from. From now on, though, I'm going to refer to them as "words", just because it's the only term that vaguely fits. Again, don't dismiss me immediately. Let me explain my idea, and then please critique it.

The three base words would each have particular consonants and one particular vowel, in the structure 1v2v3 (where v represents the vowel, and the numbers represent the three consonants). For a silly example, let's say the three words are:

Sazar: Fire (s, z, r; a)

Kitiv: Lie (k, t, v: i)

Lomon: Truth (l, m, n; o)

(If I were to actually construct this language, I would definitely use different base words, but let's stick with these for the sake of example.)

There are thirteen distinct combinations of these letters to be derived from these words (1, 2, 3, v, 1v, 2v, v2, v3, 1v2, 2v3, v2v, 1v2v, v2v3), and that's without rearranging the letters at all. If you allow for rearranging letters, there are thirty-one  distinct combinations (if I did my math right). Including the original "word", it's thirty-two.

All these combinations templates can result in 96 different roots/suffixes/prefixes/morphemes/etc. If you somehow made each combination represent some kind of modifier that can be made to a root word, could you construct, if not a language, then at least a grammar system, this way?

For example, if we made v3 represent plurality (-iv=singular, -on=plural, -ar=dual) and v2 represent person (-it=first person, -om=third person, and -az=second person) then that could be the conjugation for the language, giving you:

I: -itiv

You: -aziv

He/She/It: -omiv

We: -iton (or -itar for special, dual cases)

You pl.: -azon (or -azar for special, dual cases)

They: -omon (or -omar for special, dual cases)

Then, -omiv could be extended using v1, which would represent gender (-as=neuter, -ik=female, -ol=male). Using this, the conjugation for he would be the way-too-long-for-conjugation "-omivol".

You could make a modifier for roots that determine whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective, and you could also have the three tenses (it's fascinating how much language fits into groups of three) and make cases using combinations of the vowels and consonants, and you would have to stretch some things for prepositions, but maybe instead of having prepositions be words, you could make this an entirely written language and use visuals to convey prepositions (essentially making sentence order influence the physical positions of the objects the words refer to, instead of the grammatical meaning of the words).

I would probably need to create a couple (or many) other roots that the modifiers would be added to (or at least start with more flexible words than fire, lie, and truth), but could I at least base the grammar system off of only the three original words and modifiers derived from those three words?

I don't see any obvious issues with this language, besides long words, but I would appreciate it if more experienced conlangers could critique this. Also, if there are no issues with a conlang with only the grammar based on the three base "words", what about an entire language, where you could only build basic words by combining roots based on the three base words? This would limit the number of morphemes you could use for grammar, which might be an issue if there are a certain grammatical components every language needs and there aren't enough morphemes for all the components.

Body:
From an information theory point of view, you can express anything if you have at least two signs: computers do this through the use of binary, where the signal is either "on" or "off", or "1" or "0". If you have a "message" with just one bit of information, you can express two meanings, which are "on" or "off". If you want to express more complex ideas, you need a longer message. For example, if you want to express the decimal numbers from 0 to 15 in binary, you need at least four bits to represent them.

We as people have created a system where we know beforehand what the bits mean when we send and receive them. So if we send a message consisting of four binary digits, e.g. "0010", then we know that that means the number "2", because that's the convention we've agreed upon.

So you could certainly expand this principle by using three signs instead of two, and use conventions and codes to create meanings. The snag is that the complexity of the message would increase massively. For example, if I want to write the word "message" in English, I only need a total of seven symbols, and each symbol can be one of 26 signs (the English alphabet.) If I want to write the word "message" in binary, however, it will look like this:

0110110101100101011100110111001101110011011000010110011101100101

Which is a considerably longer message, because I only have two signs to work with, not 26.

The other disadvantage is: you need a convention or a "code" which both the sender of the message (the speaker) and the receiver (the listener) to be understood before a message can be transmitted. If you saw the above binary sequence out of context, you would have no way of knowing it meant "message", because I haven't told you that it represents a sequence of ASCII characters. It could just be meaningless computer code, or a very large number, or part of a recipe for a salmon bake.

So you could theoretically create a language with three "signs" and combine them to make meanings. For example, if your words were "ka", "pi" and "ol", then you could have the following sequences:

kapi = woman
kapiol = man
olka = cat
olpipika = dog

And so on. But you would have two problems with such a language:

The complexity of each resulting "word" would vastly increase as you make the message longer, and

There's no obvious relation between your signs and your word, so you would have to make your messages understood by pre-existing codes, agreed between the speaker and listener.


问:
Are there any successful conlangs using information density as a design goal?
I'm interested in the idea of a conlang which could be used to create extremely information dense statements - such that, for example, a single word could be built up from morphemes to express a complete sentence. It would probably be a highly agglutinative language, similar to Eskimo-Aleut languages.

Are there successful* examples of conlangs which have been created with this principle in mind? I'm interested in seeing how other people might have applied this principle in creating another language.

*When I say successful: I'm aware of fictional examples like Speedtalk, where each phoneme is meaningful, and has incredibly complex and subtle distinctions. I don't consider that successful, because it's far too complex for anyone to reasonably learn. Japanese verbs can be informationally-dense in the way that I mean in terms of its inflectional morphology, e.g. the single word 行かせられたくなかった (ika-se-rare-ta-kuna-katta) can express the complete sentence "[I/he/she/they] didn't want to be made to go," using inflectional morphemes.

答:
Answering this question is tricky. As you obtain higher and higher levels of information density, you have to sacrifice some naturalism or some simplicity in order to get there.

Marking the point where you've sacrificed too much naturalism or simplicity to be learnable is a judgment call.

Short answer:

Possibly guaspi, but it's obscure.

One famous example of this is Ithkuil. Parts of Ithkuil are reasonably naturalistic, such as its phonology, which is less complex than Ubykh or Chechen (which also has a large number of vowels). Other parts are not, such as the very fine-grained case distinctions or how meanings are organized into roots, which is more complex than the system of triliteral roots in Semitic languages that it is based on.

Is Ithkuil learnable? I really don't know. My guess is no but I don't have proof.

An example of an informationally-dense written language is Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is not a conlang, but it was written centuries after it stopped being spoken and uses a heavily abbreviated style where nearly everything that's pragmatically inferable is dropped.

If you want to make an informationally dense conlang, Classical Chinese is a good starting point. It has pervasive zero marking (although you can optionally mark possessors and relative clauses with an overt marker) and the reconstructed roots are monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic.

One possible example of an intentionally information dense language is guaspi, a tonal derivative of lojban.

I don't know whether lojban is considered learnable or not and I don't know whether to consider guaspi successful or not, but efficiency is one of its stated goals.

Gua\spi is efficient. Words are short, and extensive defaults on
articles and modal cases eliminate the majority of structure words.

In my personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, a human can speak "informal" lojban riddled with logic errors and this should count as speaking lojban.

Closing remarks:

Looking at some of these examples reveals an important design decision that creators of an informationally-dense language face: whether to allow the speaker to drop things that are pragmatically inferable and how to account for that when evaluating how well their language achieves its goals.

For instance, suppose a language has very specific tenses that are marked on all verbs or person marking on all verbs. Tense information is frequently recoverable from context, as are pronominal arguments. If information is recoverable from context, does the language get any points for encoding it directly, however efficiently it may do so?


答:
There is a general trade-off between two aspects of any encoding or language: redundancy versus information density.

If you have an information-dense language, that means there won't be much redundancy (as every symbol has a distinct meaning). This makes for efficient communication in perfect conditions, but as soon as there is any noise (in the widest sense of 'noise'), communication could get disrupted. If any symbol is changed during transmission (ie misheard, or dropped), then the meaning of your message will change in a way that cannot be recovered. It would also require perfect production, ie no typos or other mistakes, as they would all change the meaning. Because there is no redundancy, you cannot even recognise a typo, as it would simply be another, different, word. That of course is in the extreme case only. Imagine you numbered all the words in your dictionary and would simply transmit a sequence of numbers.

Another aspect of information density is not in the language but the texts created in the language. Any text requires shared context between author and recipient for the receiver to be able to interpret the message. Anything not shared between the sender and receiver needs to be contained in the message itself. So even if your language itself is very information dense (or redundant), your messages don't have to be the same.

There is probably a natural limit for information density in human languages. If every letter you write has an impact on the meaning of your message, you need a huge cognitive effort to create it (either when learning the language, or when writing a text in it). And similarly, the receiver needs to spend a lot of effort into decoding/understanding your message. So while it is space efficient (you get away with shorter messages), the time efficiency is pretty poor. And if your message content gets lost in the process, you need to re-transmit, which adds to that as well.

For those reasons languages tend not to be on the extremes of density (or redundancy). And any conlangs that would go there, would be hard to use. So it doesn't really make sense to have this as a design goal for a language.

Title: Are there any successful conlangs using information density as a design goal?

Body:
I'm interested in the idea of a conlang which could be used to create extremely information dense statements - such that, for example, a single word could be built up from morphemes to express a complete sentence. It would probably be a highly agglutinative language, similar to Eskimo-Aleut languages.

Are there successful* examples of conlangs which have been created with this principle in mind? I'm interested in seeing how other people might have applied this principle in creating another language.

*When I say successful: I'm aware of fictional examples like Speedtalk, where each phoneme is meaningful, and has incredibly complex and subtle distinctions. I don't consider that successful, because it's far too complex for anyone to reasonably learn. Japanese verbs can be informationally-dense in the way that I mean in terms of its inflectional morphology, e.g. the single word 行かせられたくなかった (ika-se-rare-ta-kuna-katta) can express the complete sentence "[I/he/she/they] didn't want to be made to go," using inflectional morphemes.


问:
Are there differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show?
Belter Creole is a conlang creole spoken in the novel series The Expanse by James S. A. Corey. When the novel was adapted into a TV series they got linguist Nick Farmer to develop the language.

Are there substantial differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show? Or is what is in the books just less developed, and Farmer created a more complete but still fully compatible version for the show? Do the later novels, from after the show started to be produced, use Farmer's version or Corey's original version?

答:
Yes they are totally different.

In the books

Maybe because Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck are not language experts, the Belter language in the books is very simple, and not really a con-lang. It does not exhibit a plausible grammar and etymological evolution. In short, it's just words from different languages pieced together.

You can find a good list of examples inside the fan wiki https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books), with also the real languages the Belter expression come

A couple examples that pop up often in the books:

Bist Bien: "Are you okay" from German bist and bien spanish

The usage of "dui" from Chinese to say "yes!" "correct!"

In the TV

In the series, maybe producers had a bigger budget and commissioned the creation of a real con-lang, even if it is seldom spoken.

The words you hear in the TV are not in the books, and instead sound very plausible from etymologycal analysis:

Beltalowda = from "belter", corrupted in "belta" and "lowda" people

And this is a good example, you see the consistensy in how the word component is used:

Inyalowda = from "inner" corrupted in "inya" and "lowda" again! = Inner people.

The spelling corrupt from Belter -> Belta and Inner -> Inya is plausible in a language evolution context in the future.

Another example:

Welwala = from "well-dweller", the person who live in a gravity well

And in the TV movie, Belter language is also speak in longer sentences with full grammar rules. When in books it's always just random foreign words in the same sentence, but mainly in English

I hope this help you solving your doubt. English is not my mother language, sorry if is not clear.


问:
How would having a logographic writing system work in a conlang?
Creating a logographic writing system for a language can quickly become overwhelming; having a different symbol/image for each word can quickly become overwhelming; it’s why Sequoyah switched to a syllabary instead of a logogram. The more words there are in a language the more symbols there have to be.

However, there are historically successful uses of logograms - for instance, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese (when it first started). I’m not aware of any modern natural language that actually uses a logographic system as its primary writing system, though.

How would a conlang use a logographic writing system after the language grew to any extant? Would it be possible to create a conlang that actually uses a sustainable logographic system?

答: The problem with pure logographies is that languages tend to have a significant amount of morphemes, be these bound or free, that mark relatively abstract concepts, such as posession, the roles of NPs, etc., and some abstract words are rather hard to draw symbols for. As such, a purely logographic system cannot really deal with natural languages to their full extent, and therefore pick up "impurities", not just out of convenience, but out of necessity, since without them they are generally at best mnemonic aids and not a full (or almost full) representation of the spoken language. If you want a pure logographic system to be realistically viable for your conlang, going the oligomorphemic route, like Toki Pona, is probably the most reasonable, as the low number of morphemes reduces the strain of learning a large number of symbols, as well as the issue of coming up with new ones for new or rarely written-about concepts, since morphemes are a closed class, and the necessarily relatively general meaning of these morphemes means that it would likely be relatively straightforward to represent the majority of them with mostly intuitive iconography.</p>