问:
How is it not ambiguous that the parts don't add up to the whole when creating compound words?
This question was sparked off a recent question: Are Sanskrit words more than the sum of the parts? I am serious when I ask, because as an outsider to Sanskrit, I would think the parts would add up to the whole, but they don't. Likewise, in English (as @Draconis pointed out), the word "fireman" has no notion of "fighting fires", but that's what it means.

So from a conlanging perspective, I have been fighting with this issue for probably a year. At one point I was thinking about wrapping noun phrases in affixes to let it be known:

This is a formal gray fox or gorilla ("large monkey" in the conlang), we are not simply describing a gray fox or a large monkey.

So it was either going to be:

```<code>a- [...noun phrase...] -wa
</code>```

as opposed to just

```<code>[no prefix] [...noun phrase...] [no suffix]
</code>```

So like a-gray fox-wa or a-large monkey-wa. Then I thought, maybe create words instead (bounding words), so form gray fox morf or form large monkey morf, but then things started to get long and verbose.

So coming across Sanskrit, and coming to this realization that in real languages, you can have words which mean more than the sum of the parts, that means I can say "large monkey" (without any extra words or affixes), and have it be known that "large monkey" is always talking about gorilla. This seems like how Chinese works actually, but I always thought that was kind of limiting or strange.

For example, in Chinese, "river horse" is "hippo", but if you want to talk about a horse of the river, you can't say the string "river horse", you have to say something else like "the horse of the river", otherwise you are talking about hippo. In Chinese, these words must be memorized and avoided, which to me that would cause errors, because say in year 1800 you said "The river horse was cool" (talking about a horse of the river), then in year 1900 "river horse" came to be defined as "hippo", then the old text would maybe be misinterpreted (you would have to take the day of writing and word origin history into account when interpreting, jeez!).

So I am wondering, how can you reason with yourself to determine that saying "fire man" in your conlang means "fire fighter" basically, and yet also be able to say the abstract descriptive "fire man" (meaning man of the fire, or other meanings based on context)? Is it okay to leave off my affixes (or extra words), and do like Sanskrit does and just have "fire man" mean "one who fights fires"? Rather than saying "a-fire man-wa" (which would be more unambiguous). How do I make sure that you can still talk about fire man as a general adjective thing, if this word takes up a specific meaning?

I don't get how to think through that and make sure the conlang isn't going to run into problems.

答:
Fundamentally, all words have meanings by convention, and a learner of the language simply has to learn them. Even when the meaning of the whole does come straightforwardly from the meaning of the parts, how do you know that a "firefighter" fights against fire, while a "swordfighter" fights with a sword? The answer is that you've learned this as part of your knowledge of English. Similarly, you can't replace "firefighter" with something like "firekiller" that seems like it should mean the same thing: that's simply not the word for this thing.

Compound words exist because they're an easy way to make new words, and they're easier to learn than just a random string of syllables. But they're still words, which have to be learned as part of the mental lexicon.

As for ambiguity, since a compound word is made of specific pieces, you can get the literal meaning by just exchanging a synonym for one of those. Something like "flame fighter" doesn't have the fixed meaning that "firefighter" does.

Or you can use different syntax: in Latin and Greek, compound words remove the case marking from all components except the last one. In English, compound words are single words, so they take different stress patterns than a full phrase would: "ríverhorse" vs "ríver hórse". And so on.


问:
Is Loglan still alive?
Loglan is a predecessor of the Lojban language. Is it still supported and actively used/developed, or is it a dead language?</p>

答:
Yes.

Loglan is continuously being developed and modified, as the website shows. There are new reports about changes to the language (and proposals to do so). The CEO of the Loglan Institute, Randall Holmes, has written periodic reports on the language; the one from 2015 shows that several speakers have proposed changes, including the addition of new words (see Appendix 9). For the most part, excluding specific major developments like the Great Morphological Revolution of 1989, the structure has stayed the same, but grammar and vocabulary continue to grow and evolve.

In terms of the total number of speakers, we have little to no data. My impression is that since the split, Lojban has become more popular than Loglan. The Lojban community is largely Internet-based, and perhaps 20-200 people use it in some non-negligible capacity. Loglan's userbase is probably smaller than that, although I don't know how small. It's clearly non-zero, but not by much - perhaps 10 or 20 people.

Now, the question of whether Loglan is dead or alive rests in part on how you define a "dead language". I don't think anybody has ever learned Loglan or Lojban as a native language; you could therefore argue that it was never alive in the first place. So I suppose the best answer to your questions is that yes, Loglan is still being used and changed, but it's not "alive" in the sense of most languages.

The Loglan Institute considers Loglan to be alive because of the constant grammar/vocabulary changes; they define a dead language as one that isn't evolving. Based on that definition, Loglan is indeed alive.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0

Title: Is Loglan still alive?


问:
How to handle modifiers within modifiers in noun phrases?
I asked How does Chinese handle the -ing and -ed in common names, like "Black-bellied whistling duck"? in an attempt to learn better how analytic languages deal with complex noun phrases like:

Black-bellied whistling duck

Black-capped warbling finch

Black-striped woodcreeper

Black-throated blue warbler

Chipping sparrow

These are all "proper names" for birds in English. By having the -ed and -ing, it is constructing adjectives which are applied to the final noun. Modifiers within modifiers, essentially. I am still unclear how Chinese deals with them, but that is beside the point.

In the conlang I am working on, the "base" word form is a noun-verb-adjective all at the same time, and you suffix this "base" word with -a, -i or -u to make it those, respectively. But it's starting to get cumbersome with this approach (it seems), because to do the above would be basically (using this word list):

```<code>veg   balin leg     wisal   mek  barvaza
black belly contain whistle make duck
</code>```

But really this is composed of (as english demonstrates) modifiers within modifiers (the -ing and -ed being modifiers on the modifiers). So I was thinking of:

```<code>vegu balin legu wisal meku barvaza
</code>```

Here, the -u "compiles" the previous unsuffixed things into a modifier/feature/adjective (whatever you want to call it). Then the -a tells us the final noun.

Would this be unambiguous or would it lead to ambiguity? What are the pros and cons you can see with this, where does it break down?

Basically, I am still struggling figuring out what is a word-within-a-word and what is just a word, sometimes it seems to be 3 levels of nesting:

```<code>[big [black [belly -ed] [whistle -ing] duck]]]
</code>```

I was thinking of somehow capturing this nesting, but then you would have to end with like 3 words at the end saying essentially "remove parenthesis remove parenthesis remove parenthesis" haha, and that would be hard to understand when communicating (and speaking).

So what do you think of my approach, will it break down or have ambiguities that you can see? If so, what is an example and how might you resolve it? This language is highly analytic (I think of it as "atomic" where everything is a word, like Chinese or Vietnamese).

To elaborate further, sometimes these phrases are composed of many "compound words". The only example I have is "skilled circumciser" (I was looking at Jewish tradition words, sorry).

```<code>skill -ed circumcise agent
[skill -ed] [around cut] agent
skill -ed  around cut   agent
kasal legu sok    kratu zeka
</code>```

But "around cut" (or "circumcise"), that is a verb really, but I am making it into an adjective. So it feels incorrect to me what I'm doing, I feel like I should make it a verb, but then people would maybe hear:

```<code>skill containing around, CUT agent
</code>```

Which is kind of non-sensical... But still, I am confused. Looking for some guidance.

I'm wondering if I can do without the -u and just do:

```<code>veg balin leg wisal mek barvaza
</code>```

Would that make sense? Seems like Chinese might do it like that more.

Another example:

```<code>מְנוֹרָה
menorah
7-armed candelabra
7-armed candle holder
7   arm contain candle hold tool
xab lim leg     lazup  rug  tula
</code>```

答:
In Sumerian, the first noun of a phrase is the "head" (the thing the others are modifying), and the end of a phrase (whether it's one word or multiple words) is marked with a clitic that indicates its role. (The clitic for "noun modifying another noun" is =ak.)

For example:

simug nanše=ak=ra

smith Nanshe=GEN=DAT

Or with brackets:

(simug (nanše)=ak )=ra

(smith (Nanshe)=GEN )=DAT

to Nanshe's smith

Adding in more layers isn't a problem:

mu ensik ŋirsu=ak=ak=še

name governor Girsu=GEN=GEN=TERM

With brackets:

(mu (ensik (ŋirsu)=ak )=ak )=še

(name (governor (Girsu)=GEN )=GEN )=TERM

for the name of the governor of Girsu

In general, a new noun acts as an open bracket, and a case marker acts as a close bracket. This works just as you'd expect with multiple modifiers:

udu gu=a sipad=ene=ak=am

sheep consume=PART shepherd=PL=GEN=be

Bracketed:

(udu (gu)=a (sipad=ene)=ak )=am

(sheep (consume)=PART (shepherd=PL)=GEN )=be

these are the used-up sheep of the shepherds

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


答:
In Lingála, modifiers are tagged with the gender of the noun they modify. Since Lingála has at least fourteen genders in the literary dialect, this tends to eliminate any ambiguity.

Numbers in the glosses indicate gender marking, from 0 (personal names and words for family members) to 15 (actions).

e-lamba y-a m-pembe

7-garment 7-of 9-whiteness

a white robe

n-tina y-a li-kambo li-ye

9-cause 9-of 5-problem 5-this

the cause of this problem

e-pai y-a n-zete y-a bo-moi

7-place 7-of 9-tree 9-of 14-life

the location of the Tree of Life

ma-koki m-a ∅-yo m-a mw-ana w-a li-boso

6-right 6-of 0-you 6-of 1-child 1-of 5-front

your rights as the firstborn child

This can still sometimes cause ambiguity, when there are multiple nouns of the same gender in the sentence:

m-buma y-a n-zete e-ye

9-fruit 9-of 9-tree 9-this

the fruit of this tree or this fruit of the tree

Does "this" attach to "tree" or "fruit"? In this case, it's almost certainly the former; if you wanted to indicate the latter, you could put "this" right after "fruit". As a result, the ambiguity isn't really an issue in practice.

Title: How to handle modifiers within modifiers in noun phrases?

Body:
I asked How does Chinese handle the -ing and -ed in common names, like "Black-bellied whistling duck"? in an attempt to learn better how analytic languages deal with complex noun phrases like:

Black-bellied whistling duck

Black-capped warbling finch

Black-striped woodcreeper

Black-throated blue warbler

Chipping sparrow

These are all "proper names" for birds in English. By having the -ed and -ing, it is constructing adjectives which are applied to the final noun. Modifiers within modifiers, essentially. I am still unclear how Chinese deals with them, but that is beside the point.

In the conlang I am working on, the "base" word form is a noun-verb-adjective all at the same time, and you suffix this "base" word with -a, -i or -u to make it those, respectively. But it's starting to get cumbersome with this approach (it seems), because to do the above would be basically (using this word list):

```<code>veg   balin leg     wisal   mek  barvaza
black belly contain whistle make duck
</code>```

But really this is composed of (as english demonstrates) modifiers within modifiers (the -ing and -ed being modifiers on the modifiers). So I was thinking of:

```<code>vegu balin legu wisal meku barvaza
</code>```

Here, the -u "compiles" the previous unsuffixed things into a modifier/feature/adjective (whatever you want to call it). Then the -a tells us the final noun.

Would this be unambiguous or would it lead to ambiguity? What are the pros and cons you can see with this, where does it break down?

Basically, I am still struggling figuring out what is a word-within-a-word and what is just a word, sometimes it seems to be 3 levels of nesting:

```<code>[big [black [belly -ed] [whistle -ing] duck]]]
</code>```

I was thinking of somehow capturing this nesting, but then you would have to end with like 3 words at the end saying essentially "remove parenthesis remove parenthesis remove parenthesis" haha, and that would be hard to understand when communicating (and speaking).

So what do you think of my approach, will it break down or have ambiguities that you can see? If so, what is an example and how might you resolve it? This language is highly analytic (I think of it as "atomic" where everything is a word, like Chinese or Vietnamese).

To elaborate further, sometimes these phrases are composed of many "compound words". The only example I have is "skilled circumciser" (I was looking at Jewish tradition words, sorry).

```<code>skill -ed circumcise agent
[skill -ed] [around cut] agent
skill -ed  around cut   agent
kasal legu sok    kratu zeka
</code>```

But "around cut" (or "circumcise"), that is a verb really, but I am making it into an adjective. So it feels incorrect to me what I'm doing, I feel like I should make it a verb, but then people would maybe hear:

```<code>skill containing around, CUT agent
</code>```

Which is kind of non-sensical... But still, I am confused. Looking for some guidance.

I'm wondering if I can do without the -u and just do:

```<code>veg balin leg wisal mek barvaza
</code>```

Would that make sense? Seems like Chinese might do it like that more.

Another example:

```<code>מְנוֹרָה
menorah
7-armed candelabra
7-armed candle holder
7   arm contain candle hold tool
xab lim leg     lazup  rug  tula
</code>```


问:
Asian and African auxlangs like Interslavic?
What are examples of African and Asian auxlangs like Interslavic?</p>

答:
The simple answer is Asian languages don't share a common ancestor like Slavic languages do, and don't have the same degree of mutual intelligibility. Knowing Ukrainian will help you understand Polish; knowing Korean won't help you understand Vietnamese in the same way.

Many African languages do share a common ancestor (they're part of the Bantu family) but they've also diversified much more than the Slavic languages have since that era. I wouldn't be surprised if someone's tried to create a pan-Bantu conlang, but it's also not surprising if they haven't. It's a much harder task than making Interslavic.


问:
How to ensure a NATO-esque spelling alphabet works?
I thought my conlang would need a NATO-esque spelling alphabet. In my current sketch, they are words borrowed from Korean and few other languages. They are to serve as mere spelling alphabets, and not to have any meaning in my conlang. (And sorry for changing the phonology and orthography again)

Spelling alphabet
IPA
Origin
Meaning

AGAŠI
ɑ gɑ ɕi
Korean "아가씨"
madam

ÄGUGGA
æ guk kɑ
Korean "애국가"
anthem

CÌNAMI
t͡sɯ nɑ mi
Japanese "津波"
tsunami

ČIČARÌM
t͡ɕi t͡ɕɑ ɾɯm
Korean "치찰음"
sibilant

EIGO
e i go
Japanese "英語"
English

ÈRINI
ə ɾi ni
Korean "어린이"
child

GIRÈGI
ki ɾə gi
Korean "기러기"
goose

ISUNŠIN
i sun ɕin
Korean "이순신"
Yi Sunsin

ÌMGÌGSÈN
ɯm gɯk sən
Korean "음극선"
electron beam

KARSENTÈR
k͡xɑɻ sen təɻ
Korean "카센터"
garage

LISSÌNÈR
lis sɯ nəɻ
English "listener"
-

MINARI
mi nɑ ɾi
Korean "미나리"
dropwort

NAPOLI
nɑ po li
Italian "Napoli"
Naples

OSAKA
o sɑ k͡xɑ
Japanese "大阪"
Osaka

ÖSAMČON
ø sɑm t͡ɕon
Korean "외삼촌"
maternal uncle

PAULA
pɑ u lɑ
German "Paula"
Paula

ROMEO
ɻo me o
English "Romeo"
-

SAMAGÜ
sɑ mɑ gy
Korean "사마귀"
mantis

ŠIGTAGPO
ɕik tɑk po
Korean "식탁보"
tablecloth

TEGAMI
te gɑ mi
Japanese "手紙"
letter

URETAN
u ɾe tɑn
Korean "우레탄"
urethane

ÜSSARAM
ys sɑ ɾɑm
Korean "윗사람"
elder / senior

At first glance, this seems to work well, especially for the syllables are distinctive per alphabet. But how can I ensure this? Is there a caveat I've overlooked?

答: The best way is to do the same thing they did in real life: test it! Record yourself spelling something out with these words, distort it and add some static, then see how well you can make out the words. (Or better yet, see how well someone else can make out the words.) See if any of the words sound too similar, or if you could shorten some of them without causing a problem (the NATO one has several one-syllable words).


答: There is the case of Union Ibo, a version of Igbo created by missionaries and used in the Igbo Bible translation. It is a rather inconsistent make-up of different Igbo dialects/languages of Nigeria and it is termed an Igbo Esperanto, for a reference see e.g., this paper Ben Filford (2002). An Igbo Esperanto: A history of the Union Ibo Bible 1900-1950.

Title: Asian and African auxlangs like Interslavic?

Body: What are examples of African and Asian auxlangs like Interslavic?</p>


问:
How likely is it for conlangs to have verbs that have the same conjugation as another verb?
So I have been studying Spanish recently (mainly verb conjugations because I'm great at constructing sentences, but still am horrible when it comes to verb conjugations), and decided to teach myself the verb conjugation for ser (to be, used to identify something in a permanent state) in the preterite form.

However, I thought that I was getting a feeling of déjà vu because it looked sort of similar to the verb conjugation for ir (to go) in the preterite form. I looked back at my notes to refresh myself on the conjugation of ir in the preterite form to make sure that it was just a fake feeling of déjà vu, however, it turned out that the verb conjugations were in fact the same in the preterite form.

For anyone who wants to know, these are the verb conjugations for ser and ir in the preterite form:

```<code>Yo          fui
Tú          fuiste
Él/Ella/Ud. fue
Nosotros    fuimos
Vosotros    fuisteis
Ell@s/Uds.  fueron
</code>```

Proof:

Conjugation of ser

Conjugation of ir

This made me think: Is it usually okay for conlangs to have verbs that have the same verb conjugations, leading to the listener having to interpret what is being said entirely based on context, or should this happen more as the language evolves?

Japanese and Chinese

I bring up Japanese and Chinese because I feel like they would make good examples of where pretty much anything that is said in those two languages is interpreted based on how the listener chooses to interpret what is being said, although being natural languages and not conlangs.

Example for Mandarin Chinese (Simplified)
Example for Japanese

"我吃了一个苹果" (Wǒ chīle yīgè píngguǒ "I ate an apple") could be interpreted by the listener as "我吃了依各凭果" (Wǒ chīle yī gè píng guǒ "I ate yogurt", although could be interpreted as "I ate the fruit of Ezekiel", a more oldspeak way of saying it, per se)
This one is more obvious, albeit it being different from the previous example because this example is more just similar sounding words, like "参加" (sanka "participation") could be interpreted as "酸化" (sanka "oxidation"). Some other examples of this are "漢字" (kanji "Chinese characters") and "感じ" (kanji "feeling"), "死亡" (shibou "death"), "脂肪" (shibou "grease") and "志望" (shibou "ambition")

On the topic of Old Spanish

Old Spanish

I wasn't really able to find anything that really related to similar sounding words/verbs on the Wikipedia for Old Spanish, since the only thing that I could find to relate to this was osso "bear" v.s oso "I dare", which while looking different despite being pronounced the same, apparently are written the same in Modern Spanish today (oso "bear" and oso "I dare") so I feel like this would at least be a somewhat good example at least.

According to the Old Spanish Wikipedia

The Old Spanish spelling of the sibilants was identical to modern Portuguese spelling, which, unlike [modern] Spanish, still preserves most of the sounds of the medieval language, and so is still a mostly faithful representation of the spoken language. Examples of words before spelling was altered in 1815 to reflect the changed pronunciation:

...

osso 'bear' versus oso 'I dare' (Modern Spanish oso in both cases, cf. Portuguese urso [a borrowing from Latin], ouso)

For anyone who is wondering, "cf." means "confer".

My question

Is it likely that new conlangs will have verbs that will be conjugated the exact same as another verb, or should this happen more as the language evolves?

Links that I used when researching this

Old Spanish Wikipedia

Similar sounding words in Japanese source

Google Translate (I usually use Google Translate to get rōmaji "ローマ字" (Literal translation to English: Roman characters) and pīnyīn "拼音" (Literal translation to English: Pinyin) if I can't remember it off of the top of my head.)

DeepL Translate (This is more for getting an extremely accurate translation if I want to provide an example to what I am talking about, however I usually always then go to Google Translate to get the pronunciation if I can't exactly remember it)

To clear up any confusion

I am sorry if I lost you really anywhere in my thought process, I'm good at writing short questions but I feel like whenever I try to write a long essay explaining my question, it always has seemed like I tend to more or less accidentally go off track on what my question is supposed to be about.

This is more of an addendum to point #1, but I also feel like sometimes I also don't seem to add a whole lot of evidence to long essays that I write, so sorry if it feels like that.

I am also sorry if any of my tags are not related to my post.

答:
This is known as suppletion: when a particular verb, for whatever reason, is missing some of its forms, and they have to be filled in by another verb. This is why "go" and "went" look so different in English: "go" is missing its past tense, so we've filled it in with the past tense from the unrelated verb "wend" (as in "wend your way"). For a more modern example, "can" has no future tense, so we have to fill in the gap with "be able to" ("she could do it", "she can do it", "she will be able to do it").

In Latin, as in English, the verb "to be" ended up becoming an amalgamation of a bunch of different stems via this process. Some forms are cognate with "is", from a PIE root meaning "be" (sum, est, esse, etc), and others are cognate with "be", from a PIE root meaning "become" (fuī, futūrus, etc). This process only got worse in Spanish: regular sound changes made some of these forms indistinguishable, so forms from another verb (sedēre, "reside") were co-opted to fill in the gaps. This is where forms like ser come from.

Meanwhile, the verb "to go" in Latin was fairly regular, but had a very short stem: a single i-. This meant that a lot of its forms became indistinguishable when sound changes merged this stem into the endings. As a result, Spanish once again co-opted forms from other verbs to fill in its gaps: some forms come from vadere "to walk" (like voy), while others were taken from the already-suppletive verb for "to be".

So, how common is this? Suppletion is very common! But if it creates too much ambiguity, more suppletion will happen to reduce that ambiguity: in Latin, the past tense of tollere "lift" were used to fill in gaps in the paradigm of ferre "carry", so tollere started using the past tense of the prefixed form sustollere instead.

Evidently in this case, the ambiguity didn't create too much of a problem, so it survived unchanged (like "can" and "be able to" in English). But it's easy to imagine Alternate Spanish where things turned out mostly the same, but ir borrowed a different verb's past tense to reduce this ambiguity (like how the past tense of "wend" is now "wended" instead of "went").

It's also possible for verbs to end up with the same conjugation, not because of suppletion, but because sound changes made them into homophones. Similarly, when this happens, either the ambiguity will be acceptable, or it won't be (and one of the verbs will fall out of use as a result).


答:
TLDR: It is very ambiguous, with some regularity.

I struggle with the problem of ambivalence versus economy a lot. I have terrible memory, and I think I am much too afraid of ambivalence. In reality, such an awful lot is context-dependent, convention-dependent, semi-systematic, and it still works.

I think that the details are largely due to intuition, convention, and just day-to-day use. People need a word for someone who kills others. Killing-man, killer, murderer, dead-making-person, king of collecting heartbeats - whatever, one of them sticks. If there are two competing words, and both survive, they will likely mean something slightly different.

How do I know that a fireman fights fires, as opposed to lighting them? Only from hearing the word many times. There is some rule to it: I know that -man is often used for a "-doer" (because only men were allowed in the workforce in the past, I guess). I can make educated guesses. But ultimately, as a foreign speaker, I just have to learn it.

Indeed, many jokes work by misinterpreting those conventional meanings. "Haha, look how his head burns, he's a real fireman..." (it's a TERRIBLE joke, I know) - hahaha, how funny.

In a naturalistic conlang (for worldbuilding), I would try and find a few "compound schemes" like XYZ-doer, ABC-type-thing, DEF-abstraction etc., derive those from some root, and try not to copy too much from my own language. And I would have a few separate root-words for a concepts specific to that culture. Eg "free slave", a derogatory term for an employee - "money worker", a neutral term for the same, and "tidhi" - a term of endearment.

Title: How is it not ambiguous that the parts don't add up to the whole when creating compound words?

Body:
This question was sparked off a recent question: Are Sanskrit words more than the sum of the parts? I am serious when I ask, because as an outsider to Sanskrit, I would think the parts would add up to the whole, but they don't. Likewise, in English (as @Draconis pointed out), the word "fireman" has no notion of "fighting fires", but that's what it means.

So from a conlanging perspective, I have been fighting with this issue for probably a year. At one point I was thinking about wrapping noun phrases in affixes to let it be known:

This is a formal gray fox or gorilla ("large monkey" in the conlang), we are not simply describing a gray fox or a large monkey.

So it was either going to be:

```<code>a- [...noun phrase...] -wa
</code>```

as opposed to just

```<code>[no prefix] [...noun phrase...] [no suffix]
</code>```

So like a-gray fox-wa or a-large monkey-wa. Then I thought, maybe create words instead (bounding words), so form gray fox morf or form large monkey morf, but then things started to get long and verbose.

So coming across Sanskrit, and coming to this realization that in real languages, you can have words which mean more than the sum of the parts, that means I can say "large monkey" (without any extra words or affixes), and have it be known that "large monkey" is always talking about gorilla. This seems like how Chinese works actually, but I always thought that was kind of limiting or strange.

For example, in Chinese, "river horse" is "hippo", but if you want to talk about a horse of the river, you can't say the string "river horse", you have to say something else like "the horse of the river", otherwise you are talking about hippo. In Chinese, these words must be memorized and avoided, which to me that would cause errors, because say in year 1800 you said "The river horse was cool" (talking about a horse of the river), then in year 1900 "river horse" came to be defined as "hippo", then the old text would maybe be misinterpreted (you would have to take the day of writing and word origin history into account when interpreting, jeez!).

So I am wondering, how can you reason with yourself to determine that saying "fire man" in your conlang means "fire fighter" basically, and yet also be able to say the abstract descriptive "fire man" (meaning man of the fire, or other meanings based on context)? Is it okay to leave off my affixes (or extra words), and do like Sanskrit does and just have "fire man" mean "one who fights fires"? Rather than saying "a-fire man-wa" (which would be more unambiguous). How do I make sure that you can still talk about fire man as a general adjective thing, if this word takes up a specific meaning?

I don't get how to think through that and make sure the conlang isn't going to run into problems.


问:
Why learn constructed languages?
I understand why create conlangs - they are sometimes needed for world of a book or game.

But... why learn them?

If most people in the world know normal languages and speak them, we can communicate with them using existing languages. There is no problem with talking with someone without knowing his language, because nowadays a lot of people in the world speak English, which is kind of an international language.

I couldn't find a real reason why. We don't talk with characters inside books or movies. We do eventually talk with in-game characters, but they rather speak a normal language, not a conlang. If they don't do so, then we can still understand what they want to say, because games often add some kind of translation, if creators of the game want the player to understand the message.

Is learning constructed languages ever necessary? What are the possible reasons of learning a conlang?

EDIT: I don't think this is opinion based. I'm not asking "why do you learn conlangs?" I'm asking for the most common reasons why people learn conlangs, not for opinion.

答:
Jan's answer covers most of the reasons to learn conlangs.  I just want to add more on why people create them, which should illuminate why people learn them.

You say you understand that people create conlangs for the "world of a book or game."  This is the case, but there are many other types of conlangs. Conlangs can be created as a linguistic experiment, an attempt for people to speak more logically, as a language intended to become universally accepted (arguably the most famous conlang, Esperanto, is for this purpose).  They can be created to add spice or realism to a world, like Dothraki, Klingon, Quenya; they can be just for fun, or a secret language to speak with your friends.  You can even make a language for only women, so they can communicate on an equal footing with men.

But then why do people learn conlangs?  Well, it depends what type it is.  Maybe you just want to because you can--or maybe you genuinely believe that it is the only logical way to communicate.  Or maybe you're a huge fan of Star Trek and you want to speak klingon.  Or maybe you just want to be able to communicate with your siblings without your parents understanding.

The great thing about conlangs is that you don't need to care about them unless you're interested.  They don't affect your lives unless you want them to.

Title: Why learn constructed languages?


答:
A NATO style phonetic alphabet needs three things:

The words have to be clearly distinct from other words in the list.

The words should ideally be short with uncomplicated sounds.

The words should be unique enough that if you know the alphabet, you don't need to actually hear the entire word to know what it is when transmitted over a bad radio connection or in a noisy environment.

Give you an example: let's say you have a patrol out in a city and they report having come under fire from a building, and for whatever reason they don't use grid coordinates but instead give you the street address. This is what you hear over a bad radio connection:

"...number fife niner tree lima (static) -dia papa (static) -erra (static) -arlie alpha (static) -ovem- (static) india."

If you know the alphabet, you wouldn't have much of an issue decoding that even having only received fragments of the words: they're reporting the building as 593 Lipscani. This works because none of the words share a sequence of the same syllables, or nearly the same syllables, in the same order.

So looking at your word list, you have "OSAKA" and ÖSAMČON. You have both words starting with two similar sounding syllables, and both are three syllables long. That can cause confusion over a bad connection.

Your word list should also keep it simple as possible for non-native speakers. The first phoneme is obviously the most important as it represents the required letter, but the rest should be as "basic" as possible, using sounds that are as common in multiple languages as possible to make it as easy to pronounce by as many different speakers as possible.

Going to the NATO alphabet, take "whiskey". You need it to represent "w", but the actual phoneme /w/ isn't present in many languages, thus you don't see that phoneme present in any of the other words. Someone speaking who doesn't have that phoneme in their language doesn't even have to worry about trying to pronounce it: if you hear "viskee" or "hwiskee" or "isskay" or something, it doesn't matter because you know what word they are trying to pronounce, thus what letter they are indicating.

And that works for all of the words. "Quebec" is often pronounced "kwa-bek" by English speakers, but is properly "kay-bek". Doesn't matter, it's distinct enough from all the other words that the receiver knows that word it's supposed to be.

ADDENDUM

You should also consider if you expect people with assorted accents and/or dialects and/or other first languages to be using this alphabet. "OSAKA" and ÖSAMČON provide the example here again. The speaker and listener may not differentiate between those two initial vowels; their own language may pronounce them the same, or they may not have one or the other, or neither. So that's why you need the words representing them to be as different as possible. Consider, in the NATO alphabet, "KILO" and "QUEBEC". If you pronounce the latter properly, both have the same initial consonant but there is absolutely no way to confuse the two words, and thus what letter they represent. Similarly, in my accent, the initial sounds in "ALPHA" and "OSCAR" aren't that different, but the words are so distinct there isn't a problem in determining if I mean "A" or "O".

Title: How to ensure a NATO-esque spelling alphabet works?

Body:
I thought my conlang would need a NATO-esque spelling alphabet. In my current sketch, they are words borrowed from Korean and few other languages. They are to serve as mere spelling alphabets, and not to have any meaning in my conlang. (And sorry for changing the phonology and orthography again)

Spelling alphabet
IPA
Origin
Meaning

AGAŠI
ɑ gɑ ɕi
Korean "아가씨"
madam

ÄGUGGA
æ guk kɑ
Korean "애국가"
anthem

CÌNAMI
t͡sɯ nɑ mi
Japanese "津波"
tsunami

ČIČARÌM
t͡ɕi t͡ɕɑ ɾɯm
Korean "치찰음"
sibilant

EIGO
e i go
Japanese "英語"
English

ÈRINI
ə ɾi ni
Korean "어린이"
child

GIRÈGI
ki ɾə gi
Korean "기러기"
goose

ISUNŠIN
i sun ɕin
Korean "이순신"
Yi Sunsin

ÌMGÌGSÈN
ɯm gɯk sən
Korean "음극선"
electron beam

KARSENTÈR
k͡xɑɻ sen təɻ
Korean "카센터"
garage

LISSÌNÈR
lis sɯ nəɻ
English "listener"
-

MINARI
mi nɑ ɾi
Korean "미나리"
dropwort

NAPOLI
nɑ po li
Italian "Napoli"
Naples

OSAKA
o sɑ k͡xɑ
Japanese "大阪"
Osaka

ÖSAMČON
ø sɑm t͡ɕon
Korean "외삼촌"
maternal uncle

PAULA
pɑ u lɑ
German "Paula"
Paula

ROMEO
ɻo me o
English "Romeo"
-

SAMAGÜ
sɑ mɑ gy
Korean "사마귀"
mantis

ŠIGTAGPO
ɕik tɑk po
Korean "식탁보"
tablecloth

TEGAMI
te gɑ mi
Japanese "手紙"
letter

URETAN
u ɾe tɑn
Korean "우레탄"
urethane

ÜSSARAM
ys sɑ ɾɑm
Korean "윗사람"
elder / senior

At first glance, this seems to work well, especially for the syllables are distinctive per alphabet. But how can I ensure this? Is there a caveat I've overlooked?


答:
To extend on Keith Morrison answer:

Split up all the words per syllables and put them in a spreadsheet program. Sort alphabetically and manually go through to validate that there's not a repetitive sounding written patterns.

Then go over sounds in a similar manner.


问:
Are there any general rules for creating verb conjugation for a conlang?
So I have been thinking a lot about trying to make my own conlang. I have attempted before to create one in the past, however, all of them have sadly been abandoned. Looking back at them (since I still have the original pieces of paper for all of them), it seems that I have always had a difficult time with creating the verb conjugations for the conlang for some reason. Are there any general rules for creating verb conjugation for a conlang, or is there not?

Edit: Sorry about the confusion that I caused with my question (as pointed out by @nearsighted), I am asking about creating conjugations.

答:
The thing about an artificial language is that you get to create the rules.

They can resemble any real language or be totally outrageous.

I recommend to you:

Skip over some general rules on how verb conjugation works

Look at some examples (I recommend more than 10 distinct languages)

Try to find a pattern, twist it, flip it, at the end that's how you'll arrive on what conjugation ought to achieve in your language


问:
Are there languages that don't prefix verbs with "to be" or "to do" in continuous or progressive aspect and the like?
I am working on a conlang and wondering how we can rework the "continuous" aspect, like present continuous, looking for how other languages implement such a grammatical verb feature. Some examples in English are:

The boy is laughing.

My parents are always making me go to school!

Chinese seems to have:

现在 - xiàn zài - now

此刻 - cǐ kè - at the moment

目前 - mù qián - at present, currently

As in one example:

他现在过得怎么样?

Tā xiànzàiguò dé zěnme yàng?

How is he doing now?

But I don't speak Chinese yet, still working with English. What are 2 or 3 examples from some other non-English language which have the continuous aspect _without the verbs "to do" or "to be" around them, like we have in English?

I would like to say:

He eating.

He wearing clothes.

Why do we need the "to be" as in is in there to make it sound right in English? Is that just an English quirk? Are there languages that have it exactly like I've written? Or even better, where the -ing is itself also a separate word/particle, like in this pseudo-gloss:

```<code>He eat <ASP.continous>
</code>```

I think Chinese has continuous aspect separate, but not sure about the "to be" part preceding it.

Are there languages which do continuous aspect very differently than even these 2 approaches I've described? For example, maybe they have a new word instead of a "to be" form prefixing the main continuous verb, or perhaps they do something else entirely.

I guess I could also ask the same for the perfect aspect, if there are languages which don't precede verbs with "to have" in this context.

"I have always guided him".

答:
Latvian language uses verb conjugation to indicate "to be" and "to do". In fact, many perceive "to" as a separate concept in English, i.e. they don't perceive "to be" as a unit, which it clearly is.

Examples:
Es skrienu. I run.
Es skriešu. I am going to run.
Es skriedams. In middle of a run, I am.
Es skrēju. I did run.
Es kļūšu par skrējēju. I will become a runner.
Es vēlos būt skrējējs. I want to be a runner.

Analysis of the last example:
Es (I) vēlos (wish to) būt (to be) skrējējs (a runner).

Different examples:
Es mācīšos. I am going to study.
Tu mācīsies? Are you going to study?
Mēs mācīsimies! We are going to study.
Ja mēs mācīsimies, tad tu mācīsies un es mācīšos. If we are going to study, then you are going to study and I am going to study.

Analysis of last example:
Ja (if) mēs (we) mācīsimies (will study), tad (then) tu (you) mācīsies (will study) un (and) es (I) mācīšos (will study).

And this one represents exactly what I mean.


问:
What are mandatory words groups a language have to have?
I'm creating Merovian (meroo) constructed language since about 2004 and I have yet to settle down on standartisation. Merovian currently has 5 word groups and "other words".

Noun
Verb
Adjective
Science/Field of study/Work industry
Executor/Noun conjugated in a way that refers to the agent who's doing the thing non represents

Other words are broad, catch-all category that includes items such as: and, if, me, you, us, also, etc.

Is there a word category I absolutely must have?

答:
It seems to be generally agreed that all languages have "nouns" and "verbs"—or if you prefer, some way to refer to entities and some way to refer to predicates.

Everything else is optional, or can be covered by one of these categories. Treating pronouns as a subset of nouns, for example, is quite common. In Swahili, many English adjectives are expressed with nouns instead: to say that something's green you use -a kijani, literally "of leaf". Same for most prepositional phrases: "the cat is in the box" is paka iko ndani ya sanduku, "cat is-located interior of box". Akkadian uses nouns for most English determiners and quantifiers: "all the kings" is šarrū kalû=šunu "kings, entirety of-them". In Mandarin, most English adverbs and prepositions are expressed with verbs, sometimes called "coverbs": instead of doing something "for you", you attach the extra verb phrase bāng nǐ "(and) help you".

The hardest things to reduce to either nouns or verbs are small grammatical markers, like "and" (a conjunction). But some languages do without these entirely: in Ancient Egyptian, for example, there's usually no explicit marker of how one sentence connects to the previous one. Others, like Biblical Hebrew, mark this on the verb instead of using a separate word.

So, is there any language that has only nouns and verbs, and no other categories? Probably not. I certainly can't think of any. But for any category other than nouns and verbs, there's some language that doesn't have it. So the answer to "is there any other category I absolutely must have" is no. Every other category can be done without.


答:
Word

You can get away with having only one category, and this has been done before. I won't claim to have read very deeply into how it works, but Tom Breton came up with an invented language in the 1990s that works at least as a proof of concept that you can get away with making a language that has only nouns in it. Technically, in addition to all of its nouns, he uses four grammatical "operators", which are punctuation marks, but those could easily be replaced by nonce words.

Check out this ancient relic of an invented language in all its ur-internet glory here! --- ALLNOUN.

Title: What are mandatory words groups a language have to have?

Body:
I'm creating Merovian (meroo) constructed language since about 2004 and I have yet to settle down on standartisation. Merovian currently has 5 word groups and "other words".

Noun
Verb
Adjective
Science/Field of study/Work industry
Executor/Noun conjugated in a way that refers to the agent who's doing the thing non represents

Other words are broad, catch-all category that includes items such as: and, if, me, you, us, also, etc.

Is there a word category I absolutely must have?


问:
Is a language in which a person will not have rhotacism, neither lambdacism when speaking it realistic?
I imagined a language created by humans, not common humans (Homo sapiens), I mean a fictional species named tusked humans, commonly named orcs (their scientific name is Homo desertum) (which means human from deserts).

In the most common language created by orcs, the following phonemes are:

There are two nasal consonants: the /m/ sound (as in English mother) (as in French mère, which means mother) (as in Spanish madre, which also means mother), and the /n/ sound (as in English night) (as in French noir, which means black) (as in Spanish negro, which also means black);

There are six fricatives, four voiceless, and two voiced: the /ɸ/ sound (as in Maori whakapapa, which means genealogy), the /s/ sound (as in English snake) (as in French serpent, which means both snake and serpent) (as in Spanish sangre, which means blood), the /x/ sound (as in Spanish juego, which means game), the /h/ sound (as in English house), the /z/ sound (as in English zoology), (as in French zoologie, which naturally means zoology), and the /ɣ/ sound (as in Spanish amigo, which means friend);

There are six plosives (or stops, if you want), four voiceless, two voiced: the /p/ sound (as in English princess) (as in French père, which means father) (as in Spanish padre, which also means father), the /t/ sound (as in English turtle) (as in French tortue, which means both turtle and tortoise), the /k/ sound (as in English kilogram) (as in French kilogramme, which means kilogram) (as in Spanish casa, which means house), the /q/ sound (as in Somali qaab, which means shape), the /d/ sound (as in English dipteran) (as in French diptère, which means dipteran), and the /g/ sound (as in English green) (as in French gorille, which means gorilla);

There are five affricates, three voiceless, and two voiced: the /ps/ sound (as in French psychologie) (which naturally
means psychology), the /ts/ sound (as in French tsar, which means czar), the /dz/ sound, the /ks/ sound, and the /gz/ sound (respectively, as in French réflexe, which means reflex, and as in French xylophone, which naturally means xylophone);

There is only one subfricate (which means inverted affricates): the /sk/ sound (as in English scarlet) (as in French scarabée, which means scarab);

There are three semivowels: the /j/ sound (as in English yellow) (as in French hyène, which means hyena), the /w/ sound (as in English world) (as in French oiseau, which means bird) (as in Spanish abuela, which means grandmother), and the  /ɥ/ sound (as in French fruit, which naturally means fruit);

There are ten standard vowels: the /a/ sound (as in French arbre, which means tree), the /æ/ sound (as in English cat), the /ə/ sound (as in French atelier, which means workshop), the /e/ sound (as in French étranger, which means stranger), the /ø/ sound (as in French bleu, which means blue), the /o/ sound (as in French automne, which means autumn), the /i/ sound (as in English hippie) (as in French illusion, which naturally means illusion), the /u/ sound (as in English cook) (as in French ouvrier, which means worker), the /y/ sound (as in French univers, which means universe), and the /ɯ/ sound (as in Japanese kuki, which means air);

There are zero nasal vowels;

There are seven diphthongs: the /aj/ sound (as in English knife) (as in Spanish aire, which means air) (as in French chandail, which means shirt), the /aw/ sound (as in English cow) (as in Spanish menopausia, which means menopause), the /ej/ sound (as in English day) (as in Spanish rey, which means king), the /ew/ sound (as in Spanish neutro, which means neutral), the /oj/ sound (as in Spanish hoy, which means today), the /ow/ sound (as in English show), and the /uj/ sound (as in French ratatouille, which naturally means ratatouille).

So, I wonder why would a language created by humans almost completely lack approximants (the only ones are semivowels).

答:
To answer the actual question asked, lacking /r/ and /l/ doesn't seem especially odd. It's very plausible for /l/ to turn into /w/, for example, or for /r/ to turn into /z/ or /h/.

But the rest of your inventory strikes me as very weird in its asymmetry. It's not just about what sounds are missing, but about what sounds you have.

To see this, I recommend putting your phonemes into a table, rather than listing them out like this; most conlangers already know what /d/ means (or can easily look it up if they don't), and giving English and French examples with translations is just clutter. It also doesn't offer much clarity into the pronunciation, because e.g. English and French /d/ are pronounced somewhat differently—is your intent to have it be alveolar, like in English, or dental, like in French?

Once you make a table, some things will stand out:

Having only a labial nasal is quite weird. Is there a reason for the lack of /n/? Similarly, the stops are strangely asymmetrical. Having /p/ and /d/, but no /b/ or /t/, is quite unusual. Having gaps in the inventory is fine, like how Arabic has /b/ but no /p/, and /q/ but no /ɢ/. But these gaps usually still have a pattern to them: notice how these gaps in Arabic happen right at the edges of the inventory, to the frontmost and backmost stops.

If you add /t/ and /n/ to your inventory, it'll be more symmetrical and come off as more naturalistic.


问:
Can you construct garden path sentences in Lojban?
A garden path sentence is a sentence whose beginning suggests one parsing which is invalidated as the whole sentence is read and then re-parsed. Some examples in English (from fun-with-words.com):

Fat people eat accumulates.

When Fred eats food gets thrown.

The girl told the story cried.

It is claimed that Lojban is a syntactically unambiguous language. Does that mean that garden path sentences cannot be constructed in Lojban?

答:
Lojban's official formal grammar is written in YACC, which is a LALR(1) parser generator. Since this means that the parser only ever "looks ahead" a maximum distance of one token while parsing, garden path sentences are impossible in the traditional sense.

This just means that the parse tree can't be drastically transformed during the sentence—it doesn't mean that the meaning of sentences can't be changed signficantly later on within them. The first example that comes to mind is the song NA KU from Djemynai's ZA'O, which contains the chorus "pu ku zvati fa do .ije ca ku zvati fa do... na ku." This glosses roughly as follows:

```<code>pu-ku zvati   fa-do
PST   present 2sg.NOM
You were here.

.i-je ca-ku zvati   fa-do   na-ku
and   PRES  present 2sg.NOM NEG
Now you are not here.
</code>```

Note that the use of ku allows the negation particle to be moved to the very end of the sentence. This does not affect the parse, so it's not a traditional garden path sentence, but it still allows the creation of a surprising effect, which is similar in some senses.

Body:
Lojban's official formal grammar is written in YACC, which is a LALR(1) parser generator. Since this means that the parser only ever "looks ahead" a maximum distance of one token while parsing, garden path sentences are impossible in the traditional sense.

This just means that the parse tree can't be drastically transformed during the sentence—it doesn't mean that the meaning of sentences can't be changed signficantly later on within them. The first example that comes to mind is the song NA KU from Djemynai's ZA'O, which contains the chorus "pu ku zvati fa do .ije ca ku zvati fa do... na ku." This glosses roughly as follows:

pu-ku zvati   fa-do
PST   present 2sg.NOM
You were here.

.i-je ca-ku zvati   fa-do   na-ku
and   PRES  present 2sg.NOM NEG
Now you are not here.

Note that the use of ku allows the negation particle to be moved to the very end of the sentence. This does not affect the parse, so it's not a traditional garden path sentence, but it still allows the creation of a surprising effect, which is similar in some senses.


问:
Which types of conlangs are the most popular to construct?
For example, can it be shown that there are more auxiliary than artistic conlangs? Note that I'm not talking about use, but about which type is more popular to create. The answer can address any level of specificity; i.e. it could address types, subtypes, very broad generalizations, etc. (I'm afraid I don't know very specific categorizations to be more clear; feel free to edit or suggest better words in the comments.) I would prefer answers focused on conlangs from more "modern" times; say, starting with the introduction of Tolkien's languages forward.

If no answer is possible because the data doesn't exist or isn't organized in a way that allows for such an inventory to be taken, that is also acceptable.

答:
This is a hard to answer question, as there isn’t any statistically useful database. CALS has a bunch of data, but only a small subset of conlangers have ever entered their data there. There, there seems to be a clear preference for the creation of Artlangs, i.e. creating languages simply for the sake of creating art, not to fulfill any purpose. A priori langs seem to be favoured over a posteriori, likely because the latter is quite a bit more work-intensive (every new vocabulary item needs to be researched if one wants to do a good job at it…).

A larger sample size can be found on reddit. However, there are no statistics there, and the sample is skewed in favour of beginner conlangers (only few experienced conlangers ever frequent it. source: personal experience as a moderator). To get an idea of the data, we can use Google search results. With the added restriction site:reddit.com/r/conlangs here are some results (first number total of following search results):

Auxlangs: 893

Auxlang: 469

Auxiliary Language: 212

IAL: 212

Artlangs: 430 (this number is problematic because this category appears to be taken as the default by many, yielding no search results)

Artlang: 191

Artistic Language: 239

A priori: 1'170

A posteriori: 328

Naturalistic: 363

“Romance” languages: 1'403

romlang: 363

romance: 1'040

“Germanic” languages: 1'210

germanic: 1'210

Indo-European: 730

Creole: 364

As you can see, on reddit, taking inspiration from existing European language families is very common. From personal experience, among more experienced conlangers there are very few people trying to create auxiliary languages, most people striving to either create naturalistic languages or to push the boundaries of linguistics in some way or another. But I cannot provide any data for this.


问:
How common is it for the creator of a conlang to be fluent in that conlang?
This was one of my example questions but I now am actually interested in the answer.  I am an amateur conlanger; I have one pretty complete language and a couple in the process.  But I can't construct a sentence in any of my languages without referencing the lexicon and grammar.  How common is it for the creator of a conlang to be fluent in that conlang? (especially for languages that are not meant to be spoken like all of Tolkien's, where there is not a very significant fluent community).</p>

答:
From personal experience (active member in a large server of avid conlangers) very few people ever learn to speak their own conlangs. Language learning is a very time-intensive progress and there is not much gained from learning a language no one else speaks. The occasional exception tends to be found in group projects, in which sometimes at least to a part “creating by using” is used as a technique, which naturally leads to at least rudimentary command of the language. Some languages have also been developed exclusively by using them, such as Viossa, but this is an exception.

You may also be interested in this talk at LCC6, held by Jim Hopkins in his conlang (with an interpreter, of course).  Summary of the talk:

In this presentation Jim Hopkins, creator of Itlani, will share his tips and techniques for recording, learning, and living the Language of your Soul. He will discuss the need for finding and ensuring stability in your language’s vocabulary and structure to facilitate easier learning, and how to immerse yourself in your language for mental and emotional engagement, even though you aren’t living full time among native speakers. The presentation will be done entirely in the Itlani language, with interpretation into English by Tony Harris.


问:
Were Tolkien's Elvish languages based on known natural languages?
I'm a great fan of Tolkien's books, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. One thing I have always wondered about in his books though, is whether the Elvish tongues were actually fully new languages. Were they totally constructed as it were from scratch, or was Tolkien patterning them after some European / other languages that were actually in use (or ancient languages out of use)?

答:
As mentioned on Wikipedia, it was modelled on Welsh and some other Norse languages:

Sindarin was designed with a Welsh-like phonology. It has most of the same sounds and a similar sound structure, or phonotactics. The phonologies of Old English, Old Norse and Icelandic are also fairly close to Sindarin and, along with Welsh, certainly did have an influence on some of the language's grammatical features, especially the plurals (see below).


问:
What is a constructed variety of a natural language called?
What would a conlang created to be an alternate version of an already existing natural language be classified as?

For example, a version of English that could have been spoken in an alternate steampunk-era Victorian England, or a conlang of the Finnish language in the year 2349. To be clear, I'm assuming that the conlang would be an actual, dedicated one, and not just a few "alternate" words thrown in for flavor; the examples I picked were just the first ones that came to mind.

(Bonus: is there a classification for a conlang created to be a conlang of a conlang in this same way?)

答:
For naturalistic languages placed in an Alternative History setting the term Altlang (short from Alternative Language) is used.

An example of such an Altlang is Alternese (an alternative history English) by Justin B. Rye.


答:
My experiences are largely the same as those of Adarain, though I have access to a data-set that perhaps better shows the predominance of artlangs, as I moderate a moderately sized discord server in which users can request roles that show what kind of languages they make and at the same time get a fancy-coloured name. Many users have more than one roles and the roles are not mutually exclusive either. The first number is the amount of people who have the role, the second number is the amount of people who have it as their primary colour:

A posteriori: 24, 8

A priori: 73, 19

Artistic: 66, 43

Auxiliary: 11, 8

Engineered: 16, 16

Joke: 8, 4

Secret (for secret communication): 12, 4

These numbers clearly show the dominance of a priori artistic languages. Additionally, all but one of the people with auxiliary as their main colour are relative beginners, though this a rather small sample and it may come down to server culture as much as anything.

Title: Which types of conlangs are the most popular to construct?

Body:
For example, can it be shown that there are more auxiliary than artistic conlangs? Note that I'm not talking about use, but about which type is more popular to create. The answer can address any level of specificity; i.e. it could address types, subtypes, very broad generalizations, etc. (I'm afraid I don't know very specific categorizations to be more clear; feel free to edit or suggest better words in the comments.) I would prefer answers focused on conlangs from more "modern" times; say, starting with the introduction of Tolkien's languages forward.

If no answer is possible because the data doesn't exist or isn't organized in a way that allows for such an inventory to be taken, that is also acceptable.


答:
It's probably a lot more common for a person to be fluent in his own conlang when dealing with auxiliary languages. Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, etc. all have large communities of speakers (relative to most conlangs), and I assume their creators also spoke them.

This is likely because the languages were designed for communication, and because the vocabulary is usually designed to be easily recognizable to as many people as possible, which makes learning it easier than learning an a priori vocabulary and grammar.

An example of a relatively recent auxlang is Lingua Franca Nova, created in 1998, which already has a lot of speakers. By contrast, a systematic "engelang" (engineered language) like Ithkuil would be extremely hard for anyone to master, and its creator is not fluent in it.

Body: This was one of my example questions but I now am actually interested in the answer.  I am an amateur conlanger; I have one pretty complete language and a couple in the process.  But I can't construct a sentence in any of my languages without referencing the lexicon and grammar.  How common is it for the creator of a conlang to be fluent in that conlang? (especially for languages that are not meant to be spoken like all of Tolkien's, where there is not a very significant fluent community).</p>


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

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

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

a love for inanimates

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

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

ab love for one liked but not respected

  [...]

oham love for that which is holy

sham love for the child of one’s body

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

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

答:
Everything in this answer is taken from the website of the Láadan language (link to the page).  I am by no means an expert, but this is directly from the mouth of Laáadan's creator.  The following quote contains pertinent excerpts of the article, parts of which I have put in bold:

Another goal I had for Láadan was that it should be as easy as possible to figure out what a particular word or morpheme means just by looking at it...I wanted the language to work like a Tinkertoy® set works, so that people could take the pieces and fit them together easily to make larger forms. For example: the Láadan word for “bee” is “zhomid”; that word is made from “zho” — the Láadan word for “sound,” and “mid” — the Láadan word for “creature.” The meaning is transparent from the word’s parts.

First, however, I had to construct the most basic elements of the language — the words/ morphemes that are called “roots” and can’t be taken apart into smaller meaningful pieces. When linguists begin working with a language for which no grammar or dictionary is available, they ordinarily start with a set of roughly 100 very basic words made up of items like “eat” and “sleep” and “food.” I followed that practice, and began by constructing a core vocabulary of those basic words; when I had those done I began adding additional roots that I felt were needed. Sometimes I can explain to some extent how I chose a particular shape for one of those words; much of the time I can’t.

For example… I can explain that I chose “oódóo” for “bridge” because when pronounced its tune makes the shape of a humpback bridge. I can explain that I chose “rul” for “cat” because the purring of a cat sounds to me like “rulrulrulrul…” But the choice of “ana” for “food” and “ina” for “sleep” was arbitrary; I have no explanation for those choices other than that I tried to give them a shape that could easily be combined with other morphemes. For any constructed language that isn’t based on some existing language, the hardest part will always be putting together the inventory of roots.

An update to the Láadan dictionary shows that not all of the words were created by Suzette Haden Elgin (the creator of Láadan) but all that are not roots in and of themselves--roots which seem to have been created rather arbitrarily--can be figured out from these roots.  For example, in the dictionary I linked, the word for beaver is "eduthemid."  This contains the rood for animal, "mid," and some other root, I presume "eduth."  I do't know what this means, but it was constructed in this way so that someone who knew these roots but did not know the word could discern that it means beaver.

The original creator of Láadan made a couple of arbitrary roots that could then become a lexicon through a logical process of morphology, with help from multiple other people.

Title: Where do the words in Láadan come from?


问:
On what license Lojban can be used?
Given the fact that inventor of the Loglan language started to claim his copyright on the language's components, and Lojban is basically a successor to Loglan, on what license Lojban is published? Can it be freely used without any limitations?</p>

答:
Logical Language Group, Inc. retains the copyright, but grants permission to copy, redistribute, and create derivative works from the official book, under conditions such as attribution and a requirement to include a permission notice identical to the one below.

Copyright © 1997 by The Logical Language Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this book, either in electronic or in printed form, provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this book, provided that the modifications are clearly marked as such, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this book into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation that has been approved by the Logical Language Group, rather than in English.

The contents of Chapter 21 are in the public domain.

From the Boring Legalities section of the Lojban Reference Grammar

The Formal Grammar (chapter 21) is in the public domain, as the above license says.

Title: On what license Lojban can be used?


问:
What is the key to realistic inventories
Shy of simply recreating or stitching together natural languages' phonological inventories, what is the solution for making a naturalistic conlangs' inventory naturalistic?</p>

答:
There are some websites providing phoneme inventories of natural languages, among them:

A very simple interface to the UPSID database

PHOIBLE Online

The WALS survey also has several chapters on phoneme inventories, including data about the size of the inventories and about the distribution of rare segments and the absence of frequent segments.


答:
The above answers didn't rely resonate with me. I will try to explain why i started to learn a constructed language called lojban.

1. Better Meaning extraction for human-computer interaction

I want to build AI's and talk to them like real humans. The problem i'm facing is how to convert my English from speech to - text form - then into meaning - so that the computer can take different programmatic actions depending on that meaning..

And i want to do this with complex thoughts - not "Cortana close the light" type of commands. That is easy to do it in English already.

English and most other languages is not well suited for easy parsing of meaning. The amount of ambiguity in any non trivial phrase is enormous. Exponential complexity is a big problem. We humans solve it by putting things into context - and also trough lot's and lot's of experience.

And even so  - we sometimes misunderstand each other.. Keep in mind that we are very smart. Computers are kind of dumb at this point.

Building this context and this experience in an AI is almost an inapproachable task. Building the context is even a bigger problem then parsing the relations between words. It's called an AI hard problem. Only big companies like Google and Microsoft have the resources to approach a problem of this size. Cortana is mostly pre-scripted answers at this point (feb 2018). Is not the real deal.

Now if you have a constructed language like lojban - you have at least 2 big benefits:

the speech to text conversion happens very easily - because lojban has no phonetic ambiguity. Words are typed the way they are pronounced. Is a 1 to 1 mapping. I don't need to understand what you meant in order to know for certain what you said.

the grammar is very congruent / precise - and is said to have zero exceptions - this makes parsing and meaning extraction easier by orders of magnitude. Ambiguity is still an issue - but a manageable one.

In English - we extract meaning and solve ambiguity by relying mostly on statistics. We garter billions of phrases - and based on that we infer what is the most probable meaning of a phrase. We do this with models based on neural networks - that are black boxes for the most part. Point is - grammar rules are not that useful in English. When you debug your program - you can't clearly see why a certain chunk of text was summarized to a certain phrase. You can use your human intuition - and you can agree or disagree with the summary - but if you disagree - you can't easily inspect the decision that the computer took at each step.

Introduction to the parsing problem is a good place to start. The production systems are more advanced then this.

In lojban, by contrast things are simpler: there are only verbs(selbri) and nouns(sumti) - actually is more like - functions and arguments to those functions.

One can heavily rely on rules - and that is enough to get the meaning out with a very high accuracy. And in principle is scalable  .. phrases, paragraphs, pages .. hole speeches, hole books, the entire Wikipedia - a web of meaning..

So this is why i'm interested in it. A web of meaning - as opposed to a web of data. Right now computers can see the data - but they can't see the meaning.

2. Answer to questions the way an Expert would do it

Another even more interesting use-case for a constructed language is it's ability to provide a sufficient and universal representation of knowledge that is easy to query by computers. We are interested in getting useful answers from big amounts of unstructured data.

Google is trying to do this for ages. You still get bad results even for easy to answer questions. The way an expert answers a question - is different from google.

We need more of that expert answer. This is almost always true for complex questions.

You want the answer alone not 10's of articles that might or might not contain the answer - articles that you need to read yourself.

And this situation is primarily because 99.9% of human knowledge is represented as text - mostly in English - which is very hard to parse, and query in a meaningful way.

So one way to solve this - is to have all this knowledge in a system that is easy to query by design. And this is what constructed languages can potentially offer. And i don't mean sql databases - is way better - is in the computation itself. The way we humans do it internally - the computers will be able to do it as well. We are still a far cry form that - but i think this direction is promising..

3. On a personal level. Language might affect the way you think.

This is best express by watching an awesome movie like Arrival. or by reading articles like this.

If lojban were to be our default language instead of English - i think our entire civilization we would have been centuries more advanced that we are now - not just technologically - but in general.

I'm just learning this stuff myself. But hopefully this allows you to see that there are much more practical applications - with very serious consequences then just: "you look more smart in front of your friends" - that is not something would convince me to get trough the struggle of learning a new language.

Yet there are people that don't struggle that much - for them the other reasons might make more sense.

Title: Why learn constructed languages?

Body:
I understand why create conlangs - they are sometimes needed for world of a book or game.

But... why learn them?

If most people in the world know normal languages and speak them, we can communicate with them using existing languages. There is no problem with talking with someone without knowing his language, because nowadays a lot of people in the world speak English, which is kind of an international language.

I couldn't find a real reason why. We don't talk with characters inside books or movies. We do eventually talk with in-game characters, but they rather speak a normal language, not a conlang. If they don't do so, then we can still understand what they want to say, because games often add some kind of translation, if creators of the game want the player to understand the message.

Is learning constructed languages ever necessary? What are the possible reasons of learning a conlang?

EDIT: I don't think this is opinion based. I'm not asking "why do you learn conlangs?" I'm asking for the most common reasons why people learn conlangs, not for opinion.


问:
Why is the Lord's Prayer so common as a translation?
I'm an amateur conlanger, but I've seen multiple instances of people using the Lord's Prayer as a test or a way of showing off a translation of their conlang.  I've even done it a couple times myself.

Why is this such a common practice among conlangers?

答:
It is a long standing tradition to use the Lord's prayer as a sample text for illustrating natural languages, for instance, the mid-16th century Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster contains the Lord's prayer in Finnish as an illustration of the Finnish language.

It has the advantage of being available in many languages, including otherwise ill-documented or dead languages.

Its disadvantages are the religious bias and the fact, that some very marked constructions tend to occur in this text (in German, there is a relative clause in the second person singular ..., der Du bist im Himmel, ... a really rare beast).

In addidition, the Greek source contains a word whose meaning is not securely known, namely the word ἐπιούσιος (epiousios), for more information see this answer on linguistics.se.


答:
In addition, inventories should be remotely gridlike. That is, if a series of phonemes of one manner of articulation occurs (let's say /p t k q/), then a similar series is likely to occur at another (e. g. /ɸ s x χ/ is more likely to occur than /θ ʒ h/).

This is an example of what not to make. The article shoehorns the inventory into a grid, but you should notice that there are a lot of gaps. This is a somewhat more realistic inventory.

Title: What is the key to realistic inventories

Body: Shy of simply recreating or stitching together natural languages' phonological inventories, what is the solution for making a naturalistic conlangs' inventory naturalistic?</p>


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

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

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

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

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

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

答:
It depends very much on the purpose of your language.

The generic advice is: Create the words and sentences you need for your purpose.

When you want to draw a map of a fictional world, create a system for naming geographical features. When you want to name fictional people, create a system of given names. When you want to have some dialogues, mottoes, or set phrases: Create just them.

When you are aiming at an international auxilliary language, create a system of derivational morphology first, then fill in stems and roots and function words. At some time, you will go through some dictionary and think of a word or expression for every dictionary entry. The risk of doing it too early is ending with a relex of the starting language.

BTW, the comment by @The Mattbat999 also has good advice: before creating words, think of the sounds of your language (phonology) and of allowed combinations of the sounds (phonotactics).


答:
If you're new to conlanging and want to start an entire language from scratch:  I would recommend reading The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder.  It's a fun read and is very helpful to a new conlanger, and helps you know what to create for your purposes, how to do this, and gives you a good understanding of basic linguistics.

For creating vocabularies from scratch:  A common practice is to begin with a list of roots and expand outwards, usually using some kind of derivational morphology.  The words you're going to want to begin with, besides words that come up in your grammar, which I think should be close to done by the time you start building a lexicon, are the basic concepts.  Things like man, tree, water, eat, do, green.  One famous example of such a list is the Swadesh list.  The way I made my vocab for my first language, Simean, was by coming up with roots for the concepts on this list and using morphological rules to expand that list.

Another alternative, though one I don't personally use, is to simply translate things and make up the necessary words as you go along.  Even so, I'd start with the Swadesh list to get a good grounding in terms of what your language feels, looks, and sounds like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


答:
Apart from the historical usage that Sir Cornflakes brings up, the Pater Noster is simply a short, relatively straightforward, universally well known text. Probably the other most common text is the Tower of Babel story. Again, short & straightforward. Perfect texts for the glossopoet whose language is not yet all that robust either lexically or grammatically.  This one also touches kind of near to the heart of all glossopoets.

I don't see any particular religious bias in either text, so that's a ymmv (and anyway, not a good road to go down, please). As for that 2s relative clause in the German translation, of course, the same kind of rarity is in the English text. Good exercise for the nascent invented language! And good exercise for the glossopoet, having to think about and sort out curiosities of grammar right from the start!

Title: Why is the Lord's Prayer so common as a translation?

Body:
I'm an amateur conlanger, but I've seen multiple instances of people using the Lord's Prayer as a test or a way of showing off a translation of their conlang.  I've even done it a couple times myself.

Why is this such a common practice among conlangers?


问:
Grammar concepts required for every conlang
Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?

For example, is there a list of such concepts available?

答:
Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?

The primary issue here is trying to find out what is necessary for a language to function; not even 'Chomskyan tenets' like recursion (or broader concepts like classifiers and numbers) seem to be obligatory, and language in essence seems to boil down to a glorified predicate machine with parts tacked on by Broca's area — and so, the answer is, for now, no: we'd very much like to see a way of doing this, and it would be truly groundbreaking in linguistics, seeing as it's a major focus point for many researchers in many fields of philosophy, linguistics, psychology and neurology.


答:
You should think of phonology  in terms of distinction. You have to distinguish certain consonants and vowels from others, and you have to figure out the best way to do that.

A realistic inventory has spread out places of articulation, often symmetrical. It's much easier to make a distinction between spread-out consonants that between consonants that are articulated similarly. That's why this is a really common inventory:

```<code>             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close
Mid-Close
Mid          e             o
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open           a
</code>```

And this is unheard of:

```<code>             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close   ɪ             ʊ
Mid-Close          ɘ
Mid
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open
</code>```

You should always make sure a language makes distinctions that are spread apart, e.g. /p t k/, rather than distinguishing three types of t-sounds /t̼ t ʈ/ without also having a distinction from /p k/ (unless for some reason you're making a language to be spoken by aliens without lips, for instance). There's also no reason to have only three consonants /p d kʰ/; you should either have only one set (such as /p t k/), or have a set for each of them (i.e. /p pʰ b, t tʰ d, k kʰ g/).

Every rule has its exceptions, but this is true of most natural languages, and you should use this as a starting point.

(Some more details can be found in my answer on Linguistics, from which I copied some of the examples)

Body:
You should think of phonology  in terms of distinction. You have to distinguish certain consonants and vowels from others, and you have to figure out the best way to do that.

A realistic inventory has spread out places of articulation, often symmetrical. It's much easier to make a distinction between spread-out consonants that between consonants that are articulated similarly. That's why this is a really common inventory:

             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close
Mid-Close
Mid          e             o
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open           a

And this is unheard of:

             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close   ɪ             ʊ
Mid-Close          ɘ
Mid
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open

You should always make sure a language makes distinctions that are spread apart, e.g. /p t k/, rather than distinguishing three types of t-sounds /t̼ t ʈ/ without also having a distinction from /p k/ (unless for some reason you're making a language to be spoken by aliens without lips, for instance). There's also no reason to have only three consonants /p d kʰ/; you should either have only one set (such as /p t k/), or have a set for each of them (i.e. /p pʰ b, t tʰ d, k kʰ g/).

Every rule has its exceptions, but this is true of most natural languages, and you should use this as a starting point.

(Some more details can be found in my answer on Linguistics, from which I copied some of the examples)


问:
What is an overview of sound changes?
One of my works-in-progress is a language called Proto-Oreadin.  As the name suggests, it is a proto-language, which eventually I am hoping to expand into a family of languages.  Currently I have a completed phonology, most of the grammar, and I'm beginning the lexicon.  My plan to create these daughter languages is by using the zompist.com sound change applier app to evolve the words of my language into multiple daughter languages, and then apply semantic shifts, borrowings, and other pieces of worldbuilding context—but that's a separate issue.

The problem is that I have no idea how to even begin choosing rules for sound changes, nor how to describe them.  I've looked at examples of natural languages, but I'm not sure what's going on with the notation, nor have I been able to identify any patterns that will help me create realistic sound changes for my languages.

How are sound changes notated?

What are the general categories of sound changes?

答:
I guess this forum really isn't set up for the kind of intense assistance & interaction you really need. Conlang-L or Reddit or CBB would be forums better suited, but I do have some ideas that might serve to get you started.

Since it seems like you've got a handle on the basics and are really asking for a directional nudge, I'd suggest the following:

Make a short list (maybe a dozen) of Proto-Language words and sort them by various characteristics: words that begin with a voiceless stop; words that contain a voiced stop followed by a syllabic liquid; words with an accented long vowel root.

Pronounce one of the words over and over and try "permutations in the phonetic neighbourhood" like CWADRUT CWADRUT CHWADRUT CHWADHRUT CHWAAHRUTH HWAARRUS HWAARUH HAWARƏH HAWWAR

Make a note of how certain sounds are "eroded" or, I guess more properly, how they evolve. [kw] relaxes into [hw]; [dr] > [ðr] > [r]; as the final syllable weakens, the accent shifts towards the word head; as the accent shifts towards the word head, medial long vowels become shortened.

Sit back in astoundment how you've just discovered several sound change rules!

If you don't like that progression, try another one.

Kind of a simplistic exercise, but it's a good method to start. Eventually, other rules you discover are going to intersect and sometimes abrogate another law. Sometimes two parallel dialects run along slightly different tracks.

Sometimes dialects are "behind the times" when compared to others, and this will launch you into the wonder world of diachronics. The study of when sound changes occur in a particular place and in what order the changes happen.

And of course, you're considering a whole family tree, so you're going to need to do this exercise multiple times. You might find that two or three daughter lineages kind of align in certain ways. For example, *cwadrut yields hawar in language A and qewarro in language B and kawrs in language C but shwuntz in language D and shhwandaras in language E.

As you examine other words, you notice that ancestral [k-] remains [k] or becomes [h] (both palatal sounds) in several languages, all of which are at the eastern end of this proto language's continuum; while most of the languages where ancestral [k-] has become [ʃ] are all in the west. A nice geographic split (that may or may not actually mean much), much like that which exists within Indo-European languages.

Title: What is an overview of sound changes?


答:
To answer part a), the basic syntax of the notation goes like this:

[before] > [after] / [context]

The part after the slash gives the situations in which the sound changes occur. For example, the hypothetical spirantization of [b] to [v] intervocalically could be notated as follows:

b > v / V__V

This rule indicates that b becomes v when surrounded by a vowel (V) on each side. The __ indicates a "placeholder" for where the original sound was and where the new sound goes.

Some other common notations are # for word boundaries and [+feature] or [-feature] to indicate the presence or lack of a certain feature respectively. For example, final-obstruent devoicing in e.g. Russian could be

[+stop][+voiced] > [-voiced] / __#

where the __# means that the stop in question (__) is at the end of a word (#).

As for b), the best way to get an idea for what kinds of things generally happen in languages is honestly probably just by reading about lots of different languages and seeing what tends to happen. Some of the most common general processes are:

Lenition, probably one of the most common sound changes, in which a "softer" sound becomes a "louder" sound. (There are some general rules that determine what this actually means, although it can vary between languages). A few examples are intervocalic flapping in many English dialects (/bɛtər/ → [bɛɾɚ]) and the pronunciation of /b, d, g/ as fricatives or approximants, roughly [β, ð, ɣ], in most contexts in Spanish.

Assimilation is another frequent sound change. This occurs when features of a given phoneme are influenced by the phonemes around it. For example, in English and Spanish, /n/ becomes [m] before bilabials and [ŋ] before velars (e.g. <rainbow> [ɹ̠ʷejmbow], <concordar> [koŋkoɾðaɾ]).

Similar ideas are umlaut and vowel harmony, in which vowels change depending on other vowels in the word. Remnants of Germanic umlaut can be seen in English, e.g. foot/feet, and vowel harmony is prominent in e.g. Turkish, where all of the vowels in a word have to harmonize (for the most part) so that affixes have several different forms (for example, the genitive suffix is [in] after front unrounded vowels, [ɯn] after back unrounded vowels, [yn] after front rounded vowels, and [un] after back rounded vowels).

While there are general patterns, it's also important to note that some sound changes seem completely illogical and random, and just... sort of happen. The most infamous examples are the ruki rule, where [s] became [ʃ] but only after [r, w, k, j] (?), and strangest of all, Proto-Indo-European *dw to Armenian erk (???). So you really have a lot of room for creativity here, while still being able to be naturalistic.

Title: What is an overview of sound changes?

Body:
One of my works-in-progress is a language called Proto-Oreadin.  As the name suggests, it is a proto-language, which eventually I am hoping to expand into a family of languages.  Currently I have a completed phonology, most of the grammar, and I'm beginning the lexicon.  My plan to create these daughter languages is by using the zompist.com sound change applier app to evolve the words of my language into multiple daughter languages, and then apply semantic shifts, borrowings, and other pieces of worldbuilding context—but that's a separate issue.

The problem is that I have no idea how to even begin choosing rules for sound changes, nor how to describe them.  I've looked at examples of natural languages, but I'm not sure what's going on with the notation, nor have I been able to identify any patterns that will help me create realistic sound changes for my languages.

How are sound changes notated?

What are the general categories of sound changes?


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

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

For now, everything I thought about:

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

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

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

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

Any more ideas?

答:
Think:

What features does a language you understand fluently have. Does your language contain that?

For example:

In English, we get plurals: apple , apples.

Does your language contain a way to use plurals?

In English, we have exceptions to cover things that feel incomplete, or "out of place": James's but James'  We have leaves not leafs

Does your language contain exceptions to make your language feel "complete" and "tidy"?

it's up to you to think of other examples, but I think that these were some good guidelines to follow.

Title: "Turing-completeness" in conlangs


问:
Is there an existing constructed language that once was dead?
That means, are there any such conlangs that exist today but were once declared as dead or not in use by any community?</p>

答:
Since conlangs by their very nature don't start out with any speakers, and in most cases the author is not immediately a skilled user of the language, conlangs tend start out dead, and so under this definition almost any conlang with a speaker community would technically once have been dead.

However, going by "dying" as having a community, then losing it, reliable data is somewhat hard to find, as a small remainder of a community (which could be as little as two individuals' private postal correspondence) can be very hard to locate especially in pre-internet days, though it seems that Idiom Neutral, published in 1902, once had largely fallen out of use, but has recieved a recent revival by enthusiasts in a couple of internet usergroups and blogs.


问:
How can boustrophedon writing systems be published?
Boustrophedon writing systems are ones in which the direction of writing swaps after each line.

At least one conlang is intended to be written as a boustrophedon (in that case vertically.)

Now if you manually typeset a document your could reverse the lines, but that doesn't allow for plain text boustrophedon writing, nor does it allow for reflowable text (such as on a webpage.)

Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon? There are multiple text direction control codes in Unicode, can any of them be used for boustrophedon text? Or has anyone proposed a control code to be included in Unicode, or designated one in a Private Use Area?

Or are there any other practical ways of publishing boustrophedon text (because a custom PUA code wouldn't be supported by most software) such as some kind of CSS filter for a webpage?

答:
Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon?

From the unicode.org FAQ about bi-directional text[1]

The Unicode Standard does not provide formatting codes to signal boustrophedon text. Specialized word processors for ancient scripts might offer support for this. In the absence of that, fixed texts can be written in boustrophedon by using hard line breaks and directionality overrides.

I don't know of any online method of inputting reflowable boustrophedon text, however there seems to be a LaTeX package[2] availible that offers automation of the process at least in LaTeX documents, both for "regular" boustrophedon and the Rongorongo style where glyphs are rotated rather than mirrored, which would allow for relative ease of publishing pdf documents at leat.