答:
There are a few other sample texts that are especially common for Indo-European conlangs.

The King and the God is a short passage based on an episode from the Brahmanas:

The King and the God

Once there was a king. He was childless. The king wanted a son. He asked his priest: "May a son be born to me!" The priest said to the king: "Pray to the god Werunos." The king approached the god Werunos to pray now to the god. "Hear me, father Werunos!" The god Werunos came down from heaven. "What do you want?" "I want a son." "Let this be so," said the bright god Werunos. The king's lady bore a son.

Various PIE scholars have used this as a way to demonstrate different reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European. For example, here's Byrd's:

H₃rḗḱs dei̯u̯ós-kwe

H₃rḗḱs h₁est; só n̥putlós. H₃rḗḱs súhxnum u̯l̥nh₁to. Tósi̯o ǵʰéu̯torm̥ prēḱst: "Súhxnus moi̯ ǵn̥h₁i̯etōd!" Ǵʰéu̯tōr tom h₃rḗǵm̥ u̯eu̯ked: "h₁i̯áǵesu̯o dei̯u̯óm U̯érunom". Úpo h₃rḗḱs dei̯u̯óm U̯érunom sesole nú dei̯u̯óm h₁i̯aǵeto. "ḱludʰí moi̯, pter U̯erune!" Dei̯u̯ós U̯érunos diu̯és km̥tá gʷah₂t. "Kʷíd u̯ēlh₁si?" "Súhxnum u̯ēlh₁mi." "Tód h₁estu", u̯éu̯ked leu̯kós dei̯u̯ós U̯érunos. Nu h₃réḱs pótnih₂ súhxnum ǵeǵonh₁e.

Another text used for the same purpose is Schleicher's Fable:

The Sheep and the Horses

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

This was introduced by August Schleicher in the 1800s (hence the name) to demonstrate his theories about PIE, and since then has become a standard way of showing the difference between PIE reconstructions. For consistency, here's Byrd again:

H₂óu̯is h₁éḱu̯ōs-kʷe

H₂áu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osméi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁ést, só h₁éḱu̯oms derḱt. Só gʷr̥hₓúm u̯óǵʰom u̯eǵʰed; só méǵh₂m̥ bʰórom; só dʰǵʰémonm̥ h₂ṓḱu bʰered. H₂óu̯is h₁ékʷoi̯bʰi̯os u̯eu̯ked: "dʰǵʰémonm̥ spéḱi̯oh₂ h₁éḱu̯oms-kʷe h₂áǵeti, ḱḗr moi̯ agʰnutor". H₁éḱu̯ōs tu u̯eu̯kond: "ḱludʰí, h₂ou̯ei̯! Tód spéḱi̯omes, n̥sméi̯ agʰnutór ḱḗr: dʰǵʰémō, pótis, sē h₂áu̯i̯es h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ gʷʰérmom u̯éstrom u̯ept, h₂áu̯ibʰi̯os tu h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁esti". Tód ḱeḱluu̯ṓs h₂óu̯is h₂aǵróm bʰuged.

You can find a nice overview of several different reconstructions in the Wikipedia article.

Neither of these is as common among conlangers as The North Wind and the Sun or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but they're moderately popular among people making a posteriori Indo-European languages, because you can find several different reconstructions for different stages of Proto-Indo-European and its descendants (Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, etc) to compare against.


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

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

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

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

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

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

答:
Whilst I also think that this question is too broad as you could argue that almost all conlangs that weren't created to be "naturalistic" have some feature never before seen in a natural language. Wikipedia talks about many a priori languages which, by definiton, contain features not based on existing languages. With that being said, here are some of my favourite (perhaps less well known) philosophical languages that are vastly different from all natural languages.

Pasigraphies

A pasigraphy is a constructed writing system which aims to be intelligible to all people. Unlike other writing systems, pasigraphies generally only exist in written form and cannot be spoken. Some notable pasigraphies include

Characteristica Universalis by Gottfried William Leibniz

Leibniz ws one of the earliest proponents of a universal pasigraphy or "alphabet of human thought" assigned "charactaristics" to objects so that they would be able to be manipulated by means similar to algebra.

Real Character by John Wilkins

The most successful of Wilkins' many philosophical languages and one of the first to gain popular attraction, Real Character is an ideographic system that uses the combination of different symbols to form new concepts.

Blissymbolics by Charles K. Bliss

   The most successful pasigraphy to date, Blissymbolics is fundamentally similar to Real Character and are now mainly used to teach people with speech and physical disabilities.

(Examples of Blissymbols stolen from All Things Linguistics)

Transcendental Algebra by Jacob Linzbach

Inspired by Leibniz's Characteristica, Transcendental Algebra was created to accompany Edgar de Wahl's international auxiliary Occidental and allows for the "algebraic manipulation" of facts to calculate truth.

I feel like this list wouldn't be complete without a shoutout to Solresol (not having words seems pretty un-natlang-y to me)

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
How does one go about designing phonotactics for a conlang?
Most every conlanger has heard of phonotactics. However, I have yet to encounter resources about how should one go about the design of a conlang's phonotactics. How should one go about creating a language's phonotactics?</p>

答:
Though I had never heard of phonotactics for years after I started my language, I found working on phonotactics very worthwhile. I would definitely do it at the start if I began a new language.

Why did I?

In the first big iteration of my language, I had many sounds and no concepts of phonotactics. To me, it never sounded good or distinctive because of this unintentional "anything goes." I could not see or hear any a pattern or rhythm in the sounds. Learning the concept of phonotactics gave me a framework to think how I could redo my phonetics altogether and have it come out differently. I deleted and redid each lexicon entry in the new system. For me, sound is important and motivating. Once the words had some structure and cohesive identity producing aesthetic value, generating words felt less like I'm just an RNG. It's been a lot of fun. I have made up thousands more words, rather more than doubling in 2.5 years what I had done without much enthusiasm in the 8 before. In part thanks to the purposeful aesthetic and cohesiveness, I've just about always enjoyed it more than I did for any words before this sound revamp. The greater enjoyment of generating words and concepts has made world-building more engaging and more immersive throughout.

Suggestions

You could take these in steps after first reading all the bullets.

Read what phonotactics is in more or less detail first if
you have not. 'Onset,' 'nucleus,' and 'rime' are useful at the very least.

Personally I am not familiar to recommend any of the large number of videos on this topic, but if you prefer that medium you might add your own useful resources answer.

Search videos for poetry and news broadcasts in multiple languages to find what sounds good to you. In my case, I picked one language as a phonotactical starting point, though multiple inspirations informed my language elsewhere. I would not spend too much time on it, but briefly picking a counterexample language could also be informative for the next step.

Study the phonotactics of your selected languages for insight and inspiration. Note how their syllables structure and don't structure in terms like CVC, CVCC, VC, etc.

Do you want syllable rules to change in the beginning, middle, or end of a word?

You're not trying to find every possible syllable in these languages. You want to recognize some patterns you like and hypothesize why. You'll test with your language.

Make a spreadsheet of your sounds/syllables for your reference. For instance, I noted which consonants and which vowels can appear in which position in a syllable, with the first syllable being different from mid-word syllables. In my case, I only allowed 3 consonants to "cluster" CC (e.g., my-), so I treated clusters like phonemes for spreadsheet convenience. You may benefit from a different format.

Start relatively restrictive to form a baseline of core syllables for your core words. As you make up more and more words and reconsider "Ok, maybe I shall allow k to end words after all" or something, you can polish in some less usual-sounding words onto your main line.

Brainstorm a bunch of cool-, alright-, and rule-breaking-sounding example words according to your rules. These proof of concept words don't need to be real or grammatical necessarily, just proof of concept. Shuffle and read these to test your above hypothesis. Do you like the phonotactic patterns you thought you would like? Why do you like what you like now?

Consider carrying on brainstorming while you're in the right gear so that when you're not you can draw on this pool of good words. I have a tinkering section at the top of my lexicon spreadsheet for words/definitions available, to-do, or up for revision, which I find helps workflow and organization.

Wherever you keep your lexicon (google sheets, for me), look into the tools like advanced find and replace, conditional formatting, slicers, etc. These will save you so much time if you ever decide to edit your phonotactics (or probably anything) or see how often you use certain patterns.

As you work on grammar or other aspects, you may now consider reserving certain phonotactical patterns for certain purposes. For examples, I make any word an adjective by repeating the first vowel and otherwise restrict duplicate VVs.

Make notes on how you are placing the word stress. Starting simply, develop word stress rules. You'll complicate these or realize they were more complicated already naturally as you get more used to your language.

Keep these phonotactical and prosodic rules both in mind and in a written reference as you devise and revise words. Sometimes you make up a nice-sounding word later to realize your pronunciation challenges your norms. When you understand what your rules are doing for you, you can understand whether to break them.

Some word-property concepts that might interest around this stage

Sonority Hierarchy

Phonostheme

Syllabic Consonant

Nonconcatenative Morphology

Vowel harmony (I don't know this site's tool at all; just the explanation was clear)

Voiceless Vowel

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
Why would a language created by humans lack the /j/ semivowel, and even the /i/ vowel?
What I mean is the sound /j/ (as in English yellow and French hyène 'hyena') is the most common semivowel around the world. This phoneme is highly conserved in Indo-European languages (this language family include Italic languages like French and Italian, Germanic languages like English and Dutch, Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, etc.).

Also, the sound /i/ (as in English hippie) (the word hippie is also used in French) in one of the most, if not the most common vowel around the world.

Both phonemes are almost universal, as is the consonant /m/ (as in English mother, and French mère 'mother').

I know many languages that lack the semivowel /w/ like Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Russian (the semivowel /w/ is found in both English as in world, and French as in oiseau 'bird').

In the universe I am creating, there is a species named ogres (their scientific name is Homo corpulentus 'obese human', so they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). In the most spoken language used by ogres, there are five basic vowels:

/a/ (as in French arbre 'tree'), the sound corresponding to the /a/ in English gasp;

/ɔ/ (as in English oar, and French ordinateur 'computer');

/u/ (as in English cool, and French ouvrier 'worker');

/y/ (as in French univers 'universe');

and the sound corresponding to French /ø/ (as in euphémisme 'euphemism').

There are no diphthongs in the most spoken language used by ogres, but there are long vowels, and two nasal vowels: /ɑ̃/ as in French antagoniste 'antagonist', and /ɔ̃/ as in French mouton 'sheep; mutton'.

Also, the most spoken language used by ogres has both the semivowel /w/, and the semivowel corresponding to the /ɥ/ in French fruit 'fruit'.

So, I wonder why would a language created by mammals from the Homo genus lack the semivowel /j/, and even the vowel /i/.

答:
One simple way to make this happen would be to make ogres unable to raise their tongues to the roof of their mouths.

[i] and [j] both require that, so they are now impossible for ogres.

Most of the other sounds you mentioned ([a], [o], [u], [ø], [ɑ̃], [ɔ̃] and [w], if I counted correctly) do not use a raised tongue and are still possible.

The only problem would be [y], [ɥ]. (That second one is the IPA symbol for the labio-palatal approximant, the French ui.) I propose that you could open [ø] to the open front vowel [œ] and lower [y] to the now-unused mid front vowel [ø]. On the other hand, I admit, I don't know how to best take care of [ɥ] here.

Another way would be to just say that the ogres can't raise their tongues without also rounding their lips, that might be biologically feasible, and it would allow [y] and [ɥ], while ruling out [i] and [j]. (Rounded [j͗] would still be possible.)

On the very other hand, if you're just wondering whether it could naturally happen: Probably. According to Phoible, 92% of human languages have [i] and 90% have [j], so it stands to reason that at least about 1%, i.e. one or two dozen (!) languages, have neither. Lacking both of them is therefore still naturalistic.


问:
Creating a language for intelligent, sapient creatures that resemble large cats
In my world, there is a race of intelligent, sapient creatures that resemble large cats. They have fur, tails, and whiskers, and can purr and meow like regular cats, but they can also walk upright on two legs and use their front paws as hands. What would be the best way to go about creating a language for these creatures that sounds like a mix of meowing and purring?</p>

答:
You would start with the phoneme-inventory. What kind of distinct sounds can these creatures make? How can they be combined to form longer units? Would there be a gesture-based system? A sound could have different meanings whether the tail is wagging or not, for example. You probably end up having very few distinct sounds, so that's a constraining factor.

Then think what they would talk about most commonly. Food? Interpersonal relationships? Assign shorter units to more frequent elements.

As for grammar, that's really up to you -- there's nothing inherent in the nature of the speakers that influences the grammar.

As inspiration for a language that has a small vocabulary and simple syntax, have a look at toki pona; that might be a good starting point.

OwnerDisplayName: Jacob Valdez


答:
Lacking /j/ and [j] is entirely plausible, no explanation needed. Attic Greek, for example, lost [j] and did just fine without it for hundreds of years.

Lacking [i] is harder to explain. There's a strong tendency for vowels to expand to fill the available space, metaphorically speaking. Human languages are under a lot of evolutionary pressure to convey as much information as possible without exceeding the limits of our auditory systems, so if there's a way to convey more information without causing problems for processing, languages will use it.

What this means is, since [i] is very easy for humans to hear, human languages tend to make use of it in one way or another. Even if a language doesn't have /i/, [i] will tend to appear as an allophone of something else. This is why it appears in so many different languages. For example, Ubykh is generally analyzed as having only two vowel phonemes, a high one and a low one, but that high one will still surface as [i] to convey more information about the surrounding consonants.

If you don't want any [i] sound in your language, while still being naturalistic, you'll probably want to invoke some physical reason. The speakers of your language, from the sound of it, are biologically different from modern humans. You could simply make [i] difficult for them to produce or distinguish, for various reasons—Richard suggests production difficulties but you could also invoke some perception difficulties. The human ear is tuned to be more sensitive to some frequencies than others, and perhaps the large gap between the formants in [i] is not as distinctive to them as it is to us.

Title: Why would a language created by humans lack the /j/ semivowel, and even the /i/ vowel?

Body:
What I mean is the sound /j/ (as in English yellow and French hyène 'hyena') is the most common semivowel around the world. This phoneme is highly conserved in Indo-European languages (this language family include Italic languages like French and Italian, Germanic languages like English and Dutch, Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, etc.).

Also, the sound /i/ (as in English hippie) (the word hippie is also used in French) in one of the most, if not the most common vowel around the world.

Both phonemes are almost universal, as is the consonant /m/ (as in English mother, and French mère 'mother').

I know many languages that lack the semivowel /w/ like Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Russian (the semivowel /w/ is found in both English as in world, and French as in oiseau 'bird').

In the universe I am creating, there is a species named ogres (their scientific name is Homo corpulentus 'obese human', so they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). In the most spoken language used by ogres, there are five basic vowels:

/a/ (as in French arbre 'tree'), the sound corresponding to the /a/ in English gasp;

/ɔ/ (as in English oar, and French ordinateur 'computer');

/u/ (as in English cool, and French ouvrier 'worker');

/y/ (as in French univers 'universe');

and the sound corresponding to French /ø/ (as in euphémisme 'euphemism').

There are no diphthongs in the most spoken language used by ogres, but there are long vowels, and two nasal vowels: /ɑ̃/ as in French antagoniste 'antagonist', and /ɔ̃/ as in French mouton 'sheep; mutton'.

Also, the most spoken language used by ogres has both the semivowel /w/, and the semivowel corresponding to the /ɥ/ in French fruit 'fruit'.

So, I wonder why would a language created by mammals from the Homo genus lack the semivowel /j/, and even the vowel /i/.


问:
What is a good way for a speaker of English to get started learning Toki Pona?
I am interested in learning Toki Pona. As a speaker of Toki Pona and English, what would be a good learning path for someone that speaks primarily English and has a moderate amount of knowledge about linguistics? Are there specific methods that are particularly useful for learning Toki Pona as an English speaker?</p>

答:
I used /dev/urandom's course, which is structured as a series of 13 lessons. Each lesson introduces 10 new words, some aspect of the grammar, and concludes with a series of English-to-tp and tp-to-English exercises using the words that have been introduced so far.

As it happens, 10 new words is also Anki's suggestion for how many new things to introduce per day. Each day I put the lesson's 10 words into flash cards (using the "basic with reversed card" type so it'll quiz me on both tp-to-English and English-to-tp translation) and then used Anki to learn and review them.

I'm told the 12 days of sona pi toki pona course uses the same structure, though it's not the one I used myself. The o kama sona e toki pona course was similar, but has been deprecated by the creator; an old version can be downloaded from that link, but be warned, it's remarkably difficult to use on modern browsers (and also the author no longer recommends using it).


答:
(Posting a separate answer so it can be voted up or down separately.)

If you prefer a book rather than a lesson series, there are the classic lipu pu ("Toki Pona: the Language of Good") and lipu ku ("The Toki Pona Dictionary") by Sonja Lang. These are the original authoritative references on the language.

There's also an unofficial book by B. J. Knight, which has the advantage of being free.

Title: What is a good way for a speaker of English to get started learning Toki Pona?

Body: I am interested in learning Toki Pona. As a speaker of Toki Pona and English, what would be a good learning path for someone that speaks primarily English and has a moderate amount of knowledge about linguistics? Are there specific methods that are particularly useful for learning Toki Pona as an English speaker?</p>


问:
Why would a language created by humans lack both the /k/ and the /g/ consonants?
In my story, there is a species of aquatic humans often called merfolk (Homo maritimus, so they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). They do not look the typical descriptions of merfolk (I want to go on a semi-realistic way instead of a psychedelic-like creature as Princess Ariel from a famous Disney animated film): they are MUCH more massive than anatomically modern humans (they are as large as adult belugas), they have a seal-like blubber, they have webbed digits (both toes and fingers), they do not typically have visible hair, and they can drown (it just takes a MUCH longer time than anatomically modern humans).

In the most spoken language used by merfolk, there are many strange features:

There are no /k/ and /g/ consonants (almost all real-life human languages have at least one of those phonemes) (/k/ is the sound corresponding to English "crash", this word is also sometimes used in French) (/g/ is the sound corresponding to English "green", this sound is also found in French, as in graisse, which means "fat").

There are twelve standard vowels: the /a/ phoneme (as in French arbre, which mean "tree"), the phoneme corresponding to the "a" in English "madness", the /e/ sound (as in French étatisme, which means "statism"), the /o/ sound (as in French agneau, which means "lamb"), the /u/ sound (as in French ouvrier, which means both "worker"), the /i/ sound (as in English "hippie", this word is also used in French), the /y/ sound (as in French univers, which naturally means "universe"), the sound corresponding to the French "o" in ordinateur (which means "computer"), the sound corresponding to the "e" in English "red", the sound corresponding to the Japanese "u", the sound corresponding to "eu" in French euphémisme (which naturally means "euphemism"), and the schwa (as in English "about", or as in French petit, which means "petite", "little", and "small"). All vowels can be long. There are also the same nasal vowels as in French. There are four semivowels: the /w/ phoneme, as in English "world" (or as in French oiseau, which means "bird"), the /j/ sound, as in English "yellow" (or as in French hyène, which means "hyena"), the sound corresponding to the "u" in French fruit (which naturally means "fruit"), and the sound corresponding to the Japanese "w". Finally, there are five diphthongs: the sound corresponding to the "y" in English "fly" (or as in French chandail, which means "shirt"), the sound corresponding to French réveil (which means "awaking"), the sound corresponding to English "toy", the sound corresponding to English "brownie" (this word is also used in French), and the sound corresponding to English "slow".

There are the following consonants: /s/ (as in English "snake"), /z/ (as in English "zebra"), /f/ (as in English "fool"), /v/ (as in English "virus"), /h/ (as in English "heroine"), the sound corresponding to the English "sh" (as in "shower"), the sound corresponding to the French "j" as in joie (which means "joy"), the voiceless English th sound (as in "thick"), the voiced English th sound (as in "father"), the sound corresponding to the Dutch "w", the /p/ sound (as in English "parrot"), the /b/ sound (as in English "big"), the /t/ sound (as in English "transgender"), the /d/ sound (as in English "danger"), the /l/ sound (as in English "lesbian"), the /n/ sound (as in English "nerd"), and the /m/ sound (as in English "mother").

There are four rhotic sounds, in order from the most common to the rarest: the guttural "r" (as in French rédemption, which naturally means "redemption"), the sound corresponding to the English "r", the voiced alveolar trill (the Russian "r"), and the sound corresponding to the Japanese "r".

Also, merfolk mostly communicate by singing, because they are as solitary as blue whales, but they still CAN speak.

So, I wonder why would a language created by mammals from the Homo genus lack both the /k/ and the /g/ consonants?

答:
Your list of phonemes doesn't include any closures at the velum. You could simply say one of the anatomical differences from modern humans is that they can't produce a full closure there. Maybe there's a ridge that makes it so, if the back of the tongue is pressed against the velum, some air can still get through.

You don't really need to justify this, though, especially when your creatures look more like belugas than modern humans. If they're that physically different from modern humans, I imagine most readers will immediately accept that their vocal tract is a little bit different too.


答:
Because it Just Happens Not To.

Hawai'ian has free variation between [t] and [k]. The more standard pronunciation, reflected in spelling, is [k], but you can replace all the [k]s with [t]s and it doesn't make any difference.

[t], it turns out, is the "default" plosive. If you test a bunch of people who speak different languages by asking them to identify phones, [p] and [k] are confused for [t] more often than [t] is confused for [p] or [k]. That is in tension with a tendency towards contrast-maximization--[p] and [k] are more distinct from each other than either is from [t]--but that just means there are in fact reasons for going either way. Hawai'ian happens to have drifted more in the [k] direction... but you just happen to have a language that happens to have settled on using [t] instead of [k].

Title: Why would a language created by humans lack both the /k/ and the /g/ consonants?

Body:
In my story, there is a species of aquatic humans often called merfolk (Homo maritimus, so they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). They do not look the typical descriptions of merfolk (I want to go on a semi-realistic way instead of a psychedelic-like creature as Princess Ariel from a famous Disney animated film): they are MUCH more massive than anatomically modern humans (they are as large as adult belugas), they have a seal-like blubber, they have webbed digits (both toes and fingers), they do not typically have visible hair, and they can drown (it just takes a MUCH longer time than anatomically modern humans).

In the most spoken language used by merfolk, there are many strange features:

There are no /k/ and /g/ consonants (almost all real-life human languages have at least one of those phonemes) (/k/ is the sound corresponding to English "crash", this word is also sometimes used in French) (/g/ is the sound corresponding to English "green", this sound is also found in French, as in graisse, which means "fat").

There are twelve standard vowels: the /a/ phoneme (as in French arbre, which mean "tree"), the phoneme corresponding to the "a" in English "madness", the /e/ sound (as in French étatisme, which means "statism"), the /o/ sound (as in French agneau, which means "lamb"), the /u/ sound (as in French ouvrier, which means both "worker"), the /i/ sound (as in English "hippie", this word is also used in French), the /y/ sound (as in French univers, which naturally means "universe"), the sound corresponding to the French "o" in ordinateur (which means "computer"), the sound corresponding to the "e" in English "red", the sound corresponding to the Japanese "u", the sound corresponding to "eu" in French euphémisme (which naturally means "euphemism"), and the schwa (as in English "about", or as in French petit, which means "petite", "little", and "small"). All vowels can be long. There are also the same nasal vowels as in French. There are four semivowels: the /w/ phoneme, as in English "world" (or as in French oiseau, which means "bird"), the /j/ sound, as in English "yellow" (or as in French hyène, which means "hyena"), the sound corresponding to the "u" in French fruit (which naturally means "fruit"), and the sound corresponding to the Japanese "w". Finally, there are five diphthongs: the sound corresponding to the "y" in English "fly" (or as in French chandail, which means "shirt"), the sound corresponding to French réveil (which means "awaking"), the sound corresponding to English "toy", the sound corresponding to English "brownie" (this word is also used in French), and the sound corresponding to English "slow".

There are the following consonants: /s/ (as in English "snake"), /z/ (as in English "zebra"), /f/ (as in English "fool"), /v/ (as in English "virus"), /h/ (as in English "heroine"), the sound corresponding to the English "sh" (as in "shower"), the sound corresponding to the French "j" as in joie (which means "joy"), the voiceless English th sound (as in "thick"), the voiced English th sound (as in "father"), the sound corresponding to the Dutch "w", the /p/ sound (as in English "parrot"), the /b/ sound (as in English "big"), the /t/ sound (as in English "transgender"), the /d/ sound (as in English "danger"), the /l/ sound (as in English "lesbian"), the /n/ sound (as in English "nerd"), and the /m/ sound (as in English "mother").

There are four rhotic sounds, in order from the most common to the rarest: the guttural "r" (as in French rédemption, which naturally means "redemption"), the sound corresponding to the English "r", the voiced alveolar trill (the Russian "r"), and the sound corresponding to the Japanese "r".

Also, merfolk mostly communicate by singing, because they are as solitary as blue whales, but they still CAN speak.

So, I wonder why would a language created by mammals from the Homo genus lack both the /k/ and the /g/ consonants?


答:
You might want to take a look at the Kzinti language (the "Heroes Tongue"), created by Larry Niven for the Kzinti (pretty much the creatures you described), in his Known Space Universe.

While it has a limited lexicon, it does have a complex system of modes and accents, based on feline anatomy, that may help you develop your language.

Given the behaviour of cats, the Kzinti have a society based on dominance and are very warlike.  This is reflected in their language, as modes vary based on the rank of the person you are talking to.  Modes are implemented by using the wide range of vocalizations cats can make.  This range also contributes to complex melodic accents.

Title: Creating a language for intelligent, sapient creatures that resemble large cats

Body: In my world, there is a race of intelligent, sapient creatures that resemble large cats. They have fur, tails, and whiskers, and can purr and meow like regular cats, but they can also walk upright on two legs and use their front paws as hands. What would be the best way to go about creating a language for these creatures that sounds like a mix of meowing and purring?</p>


问:
Is this translation of "May we drink from the empty skulls of our enemies" correct?
I'm trying to translate this sentence:

"May we drink from the empty skulls of our enemies"

to tlhIngan-Hol / Klingon, this will be used as a toast at a friends' wedding (of all things). While my understanding of Klingon grammar is pretty basic, this task seems reasonable enough. Using The Klingon Dictionary I've got this far:

jaghpu'ma' chim nach HomDu'vaD matlhutlhjaj

Where:

jaghpu'ma' is "our enemies"

chim is "be empty"

nach is "head", Hom is bone - I'm using nach HomDu' as a stand-in for "skulls" unless I find something better (see my other question*, also, see update below)

-vaD (if I understand correctly) marks the sentence so far as a purpose clause, so roughly "used for"

matlhutlh is "we drink"

-jaj makes the sentence into a "wish", XXXjaj translates as "may XXX"

So a rough literal translation back to English is something like "May we drink using our enemies' empty head-bones"

Is this correct? Any way to translate the sentence better?
Thanks.

[Update from 2022]
The word for "skull" is DughrI' (details in other question, it was added to the lexicon after this question was posted).

So the corrected rendition is:

"May we drink from the empty skulls of our enemies"

jaghpu'ma' chim DughrI'Du'vaD matlhutlhjaj

Still not sure that's a correct / the best phrasing.

*: Addressing this explicitly as this question was marked as duplicate. This is not a duplicate of the question Is there a word for 'skull' in Klingon - that question asks for a specific word, while this question deals with the validity and best phrasing of a sentence (regardless of what's the best Klingon term for that specific term).

答: Looking at the grammar page on the Klingon Wiki, it seems to be correct.</p>


问:
Are there any languages with a vertical consonant distinction?
Are there any languages which distinguish consonants exclusively by manner of articulation instead of place of articulation and such, akin to a vertical vowel system?</p>

答:
I am not aware of any natural language with that feature, and I quick-checked that Damin hasn't it either.

But you can certainly construct such a language, there are enough different manners of articulation to make up a sufficient consonant phoneme inventory.


答:
I don't know of any, and I wouldn't expect to find any.

From an information-theory point of view, consonants tend to convey much more information than vowels. I can't think of any natural language that has more vowel phonemes than consonants, even if you include tone as a property of the vowel (rather than of the syllable); there are just a lot more possible ways to obstruct an airflow than to let it go through, so there's a much larger space for the phonemes to occupy without crowding each other and becoming difficult to distinguish.

Vertical vowel systems take some of the information load from the consonants and duplicate it on the vowels. If vowels before labialized consonants become rounded, now you have a bit more redundancy there, and you don't have to worry as much about distinguishing labialization on consonants. This is most useful when each consonant is conveying a lot of information, like in Ubykh, with its 84 phonemic consonants and 3 phonemic vowels.

A "vertical consonant system", presumably, would take some of the information load from the vowels and duplicate it on the consonants. But in natural human languages, this isn't very useful—the consonants are already carrying a lot more information than the vowels are. Over time, I would expect this to simplify into only marking the information on the consonants—and now it's just a normal consonant system, not a vertical one any more.

Title: Are there any languages with a vertical consonant distinction?

Body: Are there any languages which distinguish consonants exclusively by manner of articulation instead of place of articulation and such, akin to a vertical vowel system?</p>


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

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

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

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

The language is created by another human being.

The language is not a cypher of any sort.

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

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

Thank you!

答:
The short answer is, without some bilingual information, it's nigh impossible. I don't know of any language that was successfully deciphered without this.

But, the bilingual doesn't necessarily have to be very long! For Linear B, it was a few guesses at city names, like "Knossos". For Egyptian, it started with names of Ptolemaic rulers who were also known from Greek (Ptolemy, Cleopatra, etc). And for Phyrexian, we have some Phyrexian names translated into English and vice versa! The original decipherment hinged on "Elesh Norn" on a judge promo card, "Yawgmoth" in an illustration from a Dominaria card, and eventually the names of the other praetors and Tamiyo from the Neon Dynasty promos.

From these seven or so names, it's possible to work out how the writing system works, and from there start working at the language. In cryptography this is known as a "crib" (a bit of known information about the text you're working with) and just one or two words can make a world of difference.


问:
What uncommon letters are there?
I have made an alphabet, but I think that I need to add more letters. I don't want to invent random letters.

Is there a letter that doesn't exist in most other languages?

My language's alphabet has 16 consonants and 5 vowels, but I think that I need to add a new letter like ñ or ç, but I don't want to add a letter that exists in common languages.

Is there any list of uncommon letters?

(My conlang's alphabet doesn't include b, g, v, y, z).

答: Well, the number of letters that do not exist in any languages (or better, their orthographies) is potentially unbounded. As for uncommon letters, you might want to look into scripts used only for one (or few) languages, such as Armenian or Georgian, or uncommon diacritics, such as some Slovak and Czech letters (ř, ť, ď, ň, ľ, ĺ...) or Vietnamese for a diacritical explosion. But generally, if you want your language to be consistent and aesthetically pleasing, you should perhaps avoid mixing letters from different scripts (but there are exceptions, e.g. common transliteration of Old Church Slavonic into Latin script uses ь ъ and they fit the orthography nicely); or using diacritics haphazardly, or adding new letters just for its own sake - there should be some (perhaps unstated, perhaps not outlined in all the details) reason behind the orthography.</p>

Title: What uncommon letters are there?


答:
Unicode is basically a list of characters that you can use on computers. The code charts offer a full list; if the rest of your alphabet is Latin-based, the various combining marks offer unlimited flexibility, and Latin Extended-B through -G offer many rarely-seen characters, including some never used in actual languages and some only used in long obsolete orthographies.

Making more interesting orthographies can be quite fun and make a conlang jump off the page. I quite encourage the use of ñ and ŋ for the nasal sounds normally associated with them, ʒ or ȥ instead of zh, even ƿ or ȣ for w. But while the first four letters don't really need explanation, the last two would probably make more sense in some sort of historical context.

I'd recommend picking your sounds and then finding appropriate letters for them, instead of the other way around, unless you have a historical reason in world otherwise. I'd also think about goals; if this is a language set in a setting where the writers use the Latin alphabet, most such alphabets use one or two diacritics and often diphthongs where Latin's alphabet doesn't cover it. If this is just for fun, it's a balance of interesting and visually attractive versus ease of understanding versus ease of typing. ñ isn't that far away on any normal system, and any of the other characters is a simple alt-xxxx sequence on Windows. But characters like ȥ, ƿ and ȣ noticeably stand out for me on this system, like they're being pulled from a different font. Your font selection may be limited if you go beyond Latin Extended A, and some other people may have a harder time seeing the characters (though that could be overstated; I'm seeing them on a fairly default Windows 10 box, and up-to-date Linux and MacOS boxes should display pretty much everything but the latest additions as well.)

Title: What uncommon letters are there?

Body:
I have made an alphabet, but I think that I need to add more letters. I don't want to invent random letters.

Is there a letter that doesn't exist in most other languages?

My language's alphabet has 16 consonants and 5 vowels, but I think that I need to add a new letter like ñ or ç, but I don't want to add a letter that exists in common languages.

Is there any list of uncommon letters?

(My conlang's alphabet doesn't include b, g, v, y, z).


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

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

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

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

答:
The Graded Sentences for Analysis list (mirror) provides 1000-plus sample sentences, apparently from an old out-of-copyright textbook on English grammar and sentence diagramming.

Rather than trying to translate every single one, you might browse through them looking for interesting features—things you may well take for granted in your native language!

A sample:

Directly opposite stands a wonderful palace.

Rip's dog walked along slowly after him.

The warm south wind, heavy with the perfume of blossoms, came through my window.

He tried, but failed.

She had a little narrow blue ribbon over her shoulders, that looked like a scarf.

I think that that man is a Swede.

I must now relate what happened to me a few days before the ship sailed.


答: If you're looking for letters that are obscure but still used somewhere, the Case Variants of IPA Letters table can be a good resource. This lists IPA symbols that someone's invented a capital form of, which usually means they've been integrated into the orthography of some language (used somewhere), but are still an IPA symbol first and foremost (not too common).</p>

Title: What uncommon letters are there?


问:
What sounds would snake-people be able to pronouce?
The snake-people are humanoid creatures with snake-like traits:

Their mouth and nose are longer than in humans. The tongue can work as in humans, but sits only in the front half of the jaw and is forked. The rear half contains the opening of the larynx, which has no epiglottis. The nasal passage is roughly human in its structures, and their face has muscles as in humans

I have already worked out some of the sounds which would be impossible to pronounce, specifically the velar, uvular, and epiglottal sounds (their tongue can't reach velum and uvula, and they don't have an epiglottis). It also seems they may have issues with back vowels. However, I am unsure if there are other sounds which their anatomy could prevent

答:
If they can independently control each half of their forked tongue(s) they have unique phonology accessible - double articulation in human languages is rare and only some consonant combinations are observed, but with such a tongue they can co-articulate almost all the possible consonants (most likely alveolars, but if they have lips, also labials+alveolars, dentals etc...). This alone might give you enough richness to compensate for the missing consonants (and quite uniquely sounding languages) - and if not, perhaps their languages will have to resort to tones to get enough syllables.

To summarize:

if they have flexible mouths and finely controlled tongues, the languages will prominently feature double articulation (of some consonants)

if not, their languages will be likely prominently tonal


问:
Can programming languages be categorized as conlangs?
Would it be correct to say that the majority of computer programming languages (such as functional or procedural) are the form of constructed languages? If so, what makes it a constructed language in this case?

Let say a "Hello, World!" program as the example.

Hello World! by Brian Kernighan, from Artsy's Algorythm Auction based on a 1978 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version. 2 lines of C Code. -
   Wikipedia

答: No. "Constructed languages" on this site refers to artificially created languages for intelligent beings, not machine languages. In the absence of another qualifier a "language" is, as I wrote on another site, a system for communicating propositional and conceptual information to other beings. This is different from communication. Programming languages can definitely be used to communicate - and they carry meaning - but that doesn't make them languages. Purely referential communication (using symbols to directly refer to things in the world without metaphorical extension) is not enough to be a language, language must be able to communicate abstract concepts that are beyond any sensory or referential basis. Programming languages are systems for encoding instructions for machines, and not general purpose concept exchange systems.


问:
How to safely import loan words in a conlang?
Some examples of loan words:

Human names like "Paul" or "Bhavya".

Proper nouns like "White House" or "United States".

Using any word at all from the other language ("which" from English, "the", etc., even if the conlang doesn't have these words). Basically this might be like how we use syntax highlighting (<- like that) to designate "code" when doing software documentation.

What I am wondering is what are the different ways you can "safely" import these words into another lang? Say you have the word bin in your conlang, which is a taboo/swear word for example. Then when you import/use an Arabic name like Aktham bin Sayfi, technically that might make an impression of the swear word, even though it would be used out of context. Then in English, we have the word "bin" (container), which when used in a conlang sentence like "I closed the bin" (mea closa tha bin), where those first 3 words are theoretical conlang words and the bin is English, like saying "Give me back my perro" and we know that it is being used (Spanish perro).

What I was thinking of doing is wrapping each foreign/import word in an opening and closing sound, like i-<word>-o or something. Then it would be like i-barak-obama-o, but that seems like it would be a lot if you used multiple loan words one after the next.

Then there is the question of, do you change the pronunciation or use the native pronunciation? Sometimes you hear Spanish (Mexican) speakers say "I lived in Méheeko" rather than the regular "Mexico". But other times, like when we pronounce Arabic or Hebrew words like "Israel", we just say it with an American accent.

Or instead of adding affixes or manipulating pronunciation, you could come up with a completely new name (like Chinese does, which I think partially solves the problem of things meaning weird things, like I read with CocaCola initially was phonetically translated and meant something strange like "bite the wax tadpole", which they changed to be "happiness in the mouth").

But in my case, I have a conlang which only has words in these patterns (c = consonant, v = vowel):

cvc

ccvc

cvcc

cvcvc

cvccvc

ccvcvc

cvcvcc

There are about 500 cvc, 1000 ccvc and cvcc, and 100k cvcvc, 300k+ 6-sound. But maybe only 20k of those will be used. I am picking all the "good sounding" ones to be real words at first, and then the less-good sounding ones are left over. I don't want these necessarily to be used as names, they would be the least-pleasant sounding words. So I am not really sure how to handle generating the names. But you mix this with the problem of importing foreign words, and I might have "paul" mean "past tense" in the conlang, then you import "Paul" the name and it reads initially as "past tense", which is less than ideal.

So what are the techniques you can use to "safely" import foreign words (and do things like importing foreign names)? Figuring out how to name things within the language is a separate problem, but importing foreign "people" names and proper noun names just seems hard to do, and I'm not sure what a clean approach would be.

答:
What I am wondering is what are the different ways you can "safely" import these words into another lang?

In natlangs, the one overarching purpose behind everything in a language is to communicate. If some aspect of the language is getting in the way of this, then evolutionary pressures will remove that obstacle over time.

Homophones, in general, don't seem to pose an obstacle. English-speakers are generally fine with the fact that "dam" (block the flow of water) and "damn" (mild profanity) are pronounced the same, because they're used in such different contexts; even when there's an actual ambiguity, like a frustrated engineer shouting "damn this river!", it's a source of puns and humor more than actual confusion.

And the same is true when they involve loanwords. The loanword "junk" (a type of ship, going back to Chinese 船) is pronounced identically to the native word "junk" (trash, worthless things) but actual confusion is rare. And if a problem arises, you can just add another word to disambiguate it, calling it a "junk ship" or the like. Some people consider this redundant, but it happens all the time with loanwords: "chai tea", "naan bread", "miso soup", etc. Some conlangs, like toki pona and a handful of others inspired by it, require this: loans and names have to be used as adjectives, not nouns, which means they're always attached to a native noun showing what sort of thing they are.

Then there is the question of, do you change the pronunciation or use the native pronunciation?

In natlangs, it generally depends on how speakers see the word. At first, generally, the word will be seen as thoroughly foreign. It will be written in italics*, imitating the original orthography when possible, and people will do their best to imitate the pronunciation (and usually not succeed, because every language's phonology is different). It won't inflect in any way or combine with other morphemes.

Eventually, if the word catches on, it'll be naturalized and incorporated into the language more thoroughly. It will be adapted fully into the surrounding phonology and morphology and not seen as something distinctly different from the rest of the language.

For example, look at some Japanese loans in English. Ukiyo-e and gaijin tend to be italicized and pronounced with particular care, and people don't tend to say *gaijins for more than one. But dojo and shogun can be pluralized like any other English word (dojos, shoguns) because they've been more thoroughly integrated into English. This difference can show up more starkly in languages like Latin and Greek, which have more mandatory inflection on both nouns and verbs; it tends to be very clear which foreign words are treated as foreign and indeclinable, rather than being adapted to the rules of the borrowing language.

* This is an English convention, not universal.

Or instead of adding affixes or manipulating pronunciation, you could come up with a completely new name (like Chinese does, which I think partially solves the problem of things meaning weird things, like I read with CocaCola initially was phonetically translated and meant something strange like "bite the wax tadpole", which they changed to be "happiness in the mouth").

This is because of the writing system, not the language. Chinese is written logographically, which means you can't write a foreign word without referencing existing morphemes.


答:
Toki Pona, a rather-successful minimalist conlang, has a (IMO) really nice process called tokiponization.
The steps are these:

If possible, it should be avoided. Simply translate things like "White House" or "United States".

If that is not possible, find a "head noun", which goes in front of the loaned word. This can be any noun.

Then, the word itself is "tokiponized", which is basically just changing pronunciation.

Examples:

Paul -> jan Pali (jan is a noun meaning person)

Bhavya -> jan Bawiwa

White House -> tomo walo ni (a phrase meaning that white house)

Title: How to safely import loan words in a conlang?

Body:
Some examples of loan words:

Human names like "Paul" or "Bhavya".

Proper nouns like "White House" or "United States".

Using any word at all from the other language ("which" from English, "the", etc., even if the conlang doesn't have these words). Basically this might be like how we use syntax highlighting (<- like that) to designate "code" when doing software documentation.

What I am wondering is what are the different ways you can "safely" import these words into another lang? Say you have the word bin in your conlang, which is a taboo/swear word for example. Then when you import/use an Arabic name like Aktham bin Sayfi, technically that might make an impression of the swear word, even though it would be used out of context. Then in English, we have the word "bin" (container), which when used in a conlang sentence like "I closed the bin" (mea closa tha bin), where those first 3 words are theoretical conlang words and the bin is English, like saying "Give me back my perro" and we know that it is being used (Spanish perro).

What I was thinking of doing is wrapping each foreign/import word in an opening and closing sound, like i-<word>-o or something. Then it would be like i-barak-obama-o, but that seems like it would be a lot if you used multiple loan words one after the next.

Then there is the question of, do you change the pronunciation or use the native pronunciation? Sometimes you hear Spanish (Mexican) speakers say "I lived in Méheeko" rather than the regular "Mexico". But other times, like when we pronounce Arabic or Hebrew words like "Israel", we just say it with an American accent.

Or instead of adding affixes or manipulating pronunciation, you could come up with a completely new name (like Chinese does, which I think partially solves the problem of things meaning weird things, like I read with CocaCola initially was phonetically translated and meant something strange like "bite the wax tadpole", which they changed to be "happiness in the mouth").

But in my case, I have a conlang which only has words in these patterns (c = consonant, v = vowel):

cvc

ccvc

cvcc

cvcvc

cvccvc

ccvcvc

cvcvcc

There are about 500 cvc, 1000 ccvc and cvcc, and 100k cvcvc, 300k+ 6-sound. But maybe only 20k of those will be used. I am picking all the "good sounding" ones to be real words at first, and then the less-good sounding ones are left over. I don't want these necessarily to be used as names, they would be the least-pleasant sounding words. So I am not really sure how to handle generating the names. But you mix this with the problem of importing foreign words, and I might have "paul" mean "past tense" in the conlang, then you import "Paul" the name and it reads initially as "past tense", which is less than ideal.

So what are the techniques you can use to "safely" import foreign words (and do things like importing foreign names)? Figuring out how to name things within the language is a separate problem, but importing foreign "people" names and proper noun names just seems hard to do, and I'm not sure what a clean approach would be.


问:
Strategies for dealing with limited/simple phonologies
What problems arise when creating a language with an extremely simple phonology and what are some good strategies for dealing with them?

I'm calling this type of phonology extremely simple for the purposes of this question, but limited or rigid might be a better fit. I'm also not sure whether "phonology" is the right term here or if something like "phonological inventory" would be better. Using "phonemes" or "phonemic inventory" is close, but does not cover phonotactics and suprasegmental features.

An extremely simple phonology is one that does not allow the speaker to pack many bits of information in each syllable/mora/unit of speech time. Prototypical extremely simple phonologies have some or all of the following features:

Few segmental contrasts

Restrictive phonotactics

Limited or no phonemic use of gemination or vowel length

Limited or no phonemic use of tone

Phrased another way, a simple phonology in the sense of the question is what you would get if you started with an inventory like Hawaiian's, Rotokas', or Pirahã's and removed contrastive vowel length or contrastive tone.

Conlangs like Toki Pona have extremely simple phonologies.

What are some common problems that appear in languages with phonologies like this?
What are some strategies for dealing with them?
One example of a possible "problem" might be a large number of homophones.

答:
Elision would become the norm.

Speakers of a language with a small inventory and strict CV phonotactics would speak rapidly to compensate for longer words, like speakers of Spanish or Toki Pona. They would elide weaker phonemes, and listeners would identify the dropped sound through their effect on neighboring sounds.

Start with the inventory of Rotokas and simplify it even further. Give it six consonant phonemes p, b~v, t~s, ɾ~d~z, k, ɣ~ʝ and three vowel phonemes a, i, u without contrastive length. You end up with eighteen syllables, some showing anticipatory assimilation before /i/: pa, pi, pu, va, vi, vu, ta, si, tu, da~ra, zi~ri, du~ru, ka, ci, ku, ɣa, ʝi, ɣu. This allows up to 5,800 three-syllable sequences (or more realistically a fraction of that).

In rapid speech, /i/ and /u/ might tend to drop out in syllables before or after a syllable that has /a/. This sort of elision is productive in Japanese and occurred diachronically with the short "yer" vowels in Russian, which had been /ĭ/ and /ŭ/ and were reduced to traces on consonants. Likewise, diphthongs may arise at the surface when /ɣ/ weakens. Slow, careful speech would bring them back, at least until reanalysis a century or two later causes the next sound shift.

To illustrate, populate the lexicon with a few English loans:

/vurara/ "brother", [vɾaɾa]

/titita/ "sister", [sista]

/titaku/ "stack", [stak]

/taki/ "touch", [tac]

/raɣutu/ "route, doubt", [ɾaut]

/vaɣutu/ "vote", [vaut]

/patu/ "pat", [pat]

/pati/ "pass", [pas]

Even though /patu/ and /pati/ have lost their final vowel, the listener can tell them apart because of how vowel /i/ has changed the consonant. Likewise with the final consonants in /titaku/ and /taki/.


答:
It's spoken faster.

For natlangs, there's evidence that the amount of information conveyed per second is consistent across different languages. This is "information" in the sense of Shannon's information theory, measured in bits.

If you have a smaller phonology, then there are fewer possible "signals" (in Shannon's terms), so each signal conveys less information. Thus, you need more signals per second to convey the same amount of information.

The end result is:

Words are longer, as mentioned by others

More phonemes are spoken per second

This is one reason why English-speakers tend to perceive Japanese as being spoken very quickly. Japanese has a much smaller phonemic inventory than English (and a much more restrictive syllable structure), so the number of syllables spoken per second is dramatically higher. I imagine the same would apply to Hawai'ian and various other Polynesian languages, which are also famous for their small phonemic inventories, though I'm not aware of any studies on them specifically.

Title: Strategies for dealing with limited/simple phonologies

Body:
What problems arise when creating a language with an extremely simple phonology and what are some good strategies for dealing with them?

I'm calling this type of phonology extremely simple for the purposes of this question, but limited or rigid might be a better fit. I'm also not sure whether "phonology" is the right term here or if something like "phonological inventory" would be better. Using "phonemes" or "phonemic inventory" is close, but does not cover phonotactics and suprasegmental features.

An extremely simple phonology is one that does not allow the speaker to pack many bits of information in each syllable/mora/unit of speech time. Prototypical extremely simple phonologies have some or all of the following features:

Few segmental contrasts

Restrictive phonotactics

Limited or no phonemic use of gemination or vowel length

Limited or no phonemic use of tone

Phrased another way, a simple phonology in the sense of the question is what you would get if you started with an inventory like Hawaiian's, Rotokas', or Pirahã's and removed contrastive vowel length or contrastive tone.

Conlangs like Toki Pona have extremely simple phonologies.

What are some common problems that appear in languages with phonologies like this?
What are some strategies for dealing with them?
One example of a possible "problem" might be a large number of homophones.


问:
What are necessary elements to morphologies that rely upon syntax in 2D?
I've seen several approaches to non-linear 2D syntax for written languages. Circular arrangements of glyphs (ring, spiral and axial), clumping-assemblages (akin to Maya glyphs, etc).

Are there necessary elements or aspects to the glyphs, in order for them to best leverage (or be used in) a 2D syntax arrangement?   i.e can glyphs has some affordance(s) that support 2D glyphs?

My question is more in the terrain of semasiology and semasiography — and what necessary for a related system of syntax.  For an excellent background context of this matter, see The Elephant's Memory [1], [2]

答:
One aspect would be an indication of reading direction. E.g. Egyptian hieroglyphs can be written in multiple directions, but you can see from the orientation of (non-symmetric) glyphs which is the reading direction.

I would think that this is even more important in writing systems which are not just one-dimensional.


答: Syntax follows a tree structure and the writing system can be used to display this tree structure in a transparent way. There are many artistic and creative possibilities to display tree structures far beyond the standard diagrams in linguistics text books, e.g. nested boxes of different sizes.</p>

Title: What are necessary elements to morphologies that rely upon syntax in 2D?

Body:
I've seen several approaches to non-linear 2D syntax for written languages. Circular arrangements of glyphs (ring, spiral and axial), clumping-assemblages (akin to Maya glyphs, etc).

Are there necessary elements or aspects to the glyphs, in order for them to best leverage (or be used in) a 2D syntax arrangement?   i.e can glyphs has some affordance(s) that support 2D glyphs?

My question is more in the terrain of semasiology and semasiography — and what necessary for a related system of syntax.  For an excellent background context of this matter, see The Elephant's Memory [1], [2]


答:
All natural spoken languages are linear. Phonemes come one by one in a sequence over time1.

As a result, all writing systems for natural spoken languages are also linear2. Glyphs come one by one in a sequence over space. The order can be fairly convoluted—you might change reading direction three times in a single Egyptian word, for example, and Mayan hieroglyphs are arranged in three dimensions—but there's always a linear order. Right now, you're reading the letters in these words left-to-right, the words left-to-right, and the lines top-to-bottom.

If your conlang is linear3 (which some especially-alien conlangs aren't!), you'll also need some way for people to put those glyphs into the proper order. Oliver Mason mentioned how Egyptian uses glyph orientation to indicate whether the horizontal direction is left-to-right or right-to-left; it also uses differently-sized gaps between units to indicate whether you should be reading horizontally or vertically at any particular time. If the gaps between columns are wider than the gaps between rows, you should read vertically, and vice versa horizontally.

But, depending on the details of your system, you can also make this order entirely predictable: Mayan glyphs are arranged three-dimensionally but the order is always top-to-bottom, left-to-right, front-to-back. As long as readers can figure out the order, you can really design your glyphs any way you like.

1 Well, it's not quite this simple. There are also supersegmental features, which don't fit into this nice linear order. But the system is linear overall and writing systems reflect this.

2 Specifically spoken languages. Signed languages aren't necessarily linear in time in the same way. But we also don't have a lot of writing systems for signed languages to look at as examples.

3 jk mentions tree structures as well. It's generally accepted that language is structured recursively (with some sort of tree) in the mind, but it's still put into a linear order to be spoken, since it's hard to speak a tree out loud.


问:
What parts of speech (nouns, adj., verbs, etc.) could be limited to make a language with fewer words?
Essentially, in the English language how many adjectives, nouns, adverbs, verbs, etc. could be combined to make the language possess a single word for a term. E.g. huge, giant, enormous, and big could all just go under big.</p>

答:
The thing about languages is that they can all say the same things. If it can't say something, it hasn't come across the concept yet. And when it has, it will make up or borrow a word to fill the gap. As a result, there will always be at least one "open" class of words, "open" meaning it can accept new members, like the classes "noun", "verb" and "adjective" in English.

This is not to say that those particular classes must be open for all languages, just that at least one of them must be (or even a different one entirely, like prepositions, one of English's closed classes - although I don't know of any examples of that...).

In a language with a closed verb class, for instance, new "verbs" are one of the native verbs with a noun or adjective complement, basically "I do a run" or "I am a runner" instead of "I run". If nouns are closed, new "nouns" are a native noun with a verb or adjective complement, "one who paints" or "painting one" for "painter", for example.

That last example also highlights another way that word classes can be "closed": inflection and derivation. Consider the case of English adverbs. Under a very niche definition that I just made up, this is a closed class: The only way new adverbs show up is when a new adjective shows up, and the productive -ly suffix turns it into an adverb. New adverbial concepts either take an adjective and stick on -ly or take a noun and stick it into a prepositional phrase.

Side note: this is what Esperanto - the person - was trying to do with Esperanto - the language: turn word class into an inflectional paradigm. The problem is, he was inconsistent. A broso is a brush - a thing that brushes - but a kombo is an act of combing, not a thing that combs. This is not to say that this is impossible, but you do have to be careful.

With all that out of the way, there's another problem. Using your example: while big, huge, giant and enormous all denote (that is, mean) the same thing, they connote (that is, imply) different things. "Enormous" is bigger than "huge" is bigger than "big". "Giant" is around "huge", but also implies that what is big isn't normally big, and sees use as a noun (meaning giant human). If you want to get around this, you'll need inflectional paradigms to change connotations, and connotation is a much wibblier concept than denotation - and denotation is plenty wibbly, which is why we even have different words for different things in the first place!

But if you're going to ignore all of that, then what you have is a pidgin at best, and an Orwellian nightmare at worst.


答:
This question is probably more suited for the English stackexchange, where it would be promptly closed (or at least that's my gut feeling).

However, there is a way to estimate the number: the (English) WordNet groups words into synsets, each synset having a precise, pinpointed meaning (and covers a lot of vocabulary). So, for each of the parts of speech, just divide the number of  words (literals) by the number of synsets to get the ratio of "words per meaning". For example, adjectives have the ratio 1.62.

However, there is a catch: words often mean more than just one thing, English is especially (for a European language) rich in homonymy. So, e.g. the noun giant has 7 different meanings, some of them perhaps differing only slightly, but some of them meaning very different things. Thus if you are after a quantitative number, you have to account for this somehow (would you count giant once or 7 times?).

And of course, you are opening a Pandora's box, because the deeper (beyond what WordNet covers) you go into less frequent words and more specialized terminology, the more and more unexpected meanings will surface and the numbers won't tell you anything anymore.

Title: What parts of speech (nouns, adj., verbs, etc.) could be limited to make a language with fewer words?

Body: Essentially, in the English language how many adjectives, nouns, adverbs, verbs, etc. could be combined to make the language possess a single word for a term. E.g. huge, giant, enormous, and big could all just go under big.</p>


答:
This is an example of a non-linear approach to written languages, which I have made up.

https://omniglot.com/charts/yomoal.pdf

Essential elements?

This system considers consonants, vowels, and spaces its essential elements. The vowels and consonants are the necessary elements and the example script makes vowels the most important element. For context, many scripts take consonants as their primary marks (abjads, abugidas) while marking vowels is of less importance. Alphabets make these types equal in importance. Regarding spaces, like several ancient and contemporary scripts, where a word begins or ends could possibly be left to context (especially if all reading is expected to be aloud). That said, I judged spaces practically necessary since all viewers of the script would be humans accustomed to spaces and not fluent in the conlang.

Are spaces necessary elements?

A general comment: spaces may be completely unnecessary for some languages. Phonotactic rules could, in theory, make the beginning of new words perfectly obvious or unlikely ambiguous even without the use of spaces. For instance, if words can only start with a certain set of letters and those letters never appear elsewhere in the word, then these letters would also serve like spaces. Something that takes minimal space like a period or underlining first letters could also save space on "spaces."

How to minimize written elements?

A writing system could reduce the amount of information it needs to write by accessing the reader's prior knowledge to help communicate the structure of words and thoughts. For an example of words, suppose everybody memorizes a couple poems which between them contain all syllables in a syllabary once: then the syllabary could be just numbers (and a reference to which poem, if needed).

What does Yomoal's example contribute?

Yomoal isn't attempting to minimize the amount of 2d information, per se, and actually it is rather space inefficient on paper. But it does use reader's prior knowledge to structure words and thoughts. The former: Yomoal's consonants refer to common words all speakers would know: the W-sound is written as a frog, the word for which is 'waŋ.'

Visually themed as a written river, Yomoal acceses its audience's familiarity with rivers to help communicate relationships between written ideas. For instance, readers are assumed to understand that streams contribute to a main river, and in that way the writer can communicate the sequence and importance of her ideas by writing one "stream" of thought to flow into others. It is necessary to clarify which way the river is "flowing," and for that purpose a mountain symbol heads each "river," its peak tilting also to indicate "left" and "right" of the river (important for syllables). Yomoal has punctuation to expand on the river theme at the same time is helps structure thoughts.

Another novel example for further reading

https://omniglot.com/conscripts/oriscript.htm

Oriscript also has an unusual inherent structure for constructing text. Suppose that the space each character (like a letter) occupies is a box. The characters are distinguished by certain positions within each box, rather than by variously shaped letters. I am not best informed to discuss Oriscript at length, but I did think it could be useful further reading to add to my "refers to prior knowledge for structure" point and for a potential "only minimal marks" approach.

I hope this analysis of one example's essentials and structure helps inform the general question of what elements are necessary in any written system.


问:
How to structure sentences to be able to distinguish between verbs, nouns, and adjectives etc.?
In my budding conlang called Tune, I have "base" words which start and end with a consonant, either 3, 4, 5, or 6 sounds, with 1 or 2 vowels. Examples:

tun ("tune")

tunan ("tunahn")

torvan ("torvahn")

twin ("tween")

(where each Roman/Latin letter has a specific sound associated with it).

I was initially thinking of having these "bases" mean simultaneously a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Basically they would mean the full range of possibilities of that concept. Then you would append a -a to make it an explicit noun, append a -i to make it a verb, and a -u to make it an adjective. But the problem with this is that every word now is at least 2 syllables. I noticed that at least in English, most words are 1 syllable, if I were to guess, most words in regular English conversation are:

1 syllable (50%)

2 syllables (25%)

3 syllables (15%)

4+ (10%)

Just a feeling there, but the feeling is many words are simply 1 syllable. I would like to make most words one syllable if possible. But that means ditching my idea of the suffixes potentially.

So I'm wondering, if every word starts/ends with a consonant and is one or two syllables, how will you be able to tell which is a noun, verb, or adjective (or determiner/etc., if it's similar to English or Chinese in structure). What do I need to do to make sure I don't run into complex problems down the road when the language gets more vocabulary? It seems like some sort of fixed sentence word order with word "slots" would be required, but I'm not sure what the possibilities are. Can you outline some things I could do if I get rid of the suffix (or only use it in some cases) to make sure I can effectively include nouns, verbs, and adjectives without confusion? I am not sure what to imagine in trying to solve this.

If I make it so all words fit these patterns (start and end with consonant, 3-6 sounds long), and each word can be used as a noun, verb, or adjective "noun modifiers" (or adverb for verb modifiers), then I could do like buffalo buffalo buffalo... sentence, if there are no suffixes to distinguish in the common case. I am just not sure if I need to fix the word order or something like that.

It seems hard because:

The tree-y tree treeified treeily.

The [adjective] [noun] [verbed] [adverb]

If tree was written/pronounced dip ("deep"), then:

dip dip dip dip.

That could mean anything. So it seems like you need in certain context to add the suffixes, but I'm not sure what the possibilities are. The suffix system might have it be:

dipu dipa dipu dipi.

Which would make more sense, but then we are at 2-syllable words for everything again.

What I'm considering doing is the following. Making each "base" mean the most common frame of reference (noun vs. verb vs. adjective), and then the suffixes turn it into the other forms. So the most common reference for a "tree" (base), would be the tree as a noun, not treeify (verb). Then there is "walk" which is most commonly considered an action, but could also be a noun, so the default base means the verb, not the noun in that case. But some cases are in between like "calm" (to calm or the calm?), so those perhaps always distinguish with the suffixes -i or -u. But maybe you are allowed to add the extra information to specify if desired or to disambiguate, but otherwise you can use the base form to mean the most common form of the concept.

答:
There are plenty of languages that require explicit marking on certain categories of word. In Latin, for example, all nouns need to be marked with case and number, and all verbs need to be marked with TAM and person. This means that all nouns and verbs are polysyllabic; Latin-speakers just spoke faster to compensate for the longer words. Esperanto famously works this way, with -o for nouns, -a for adjectives, -i (or some others) for verbs. Or you can change something inside the root to indicate the category; in Akkadian, parās- is a noun, pāris- is an adjective, purus is a verb, all from the stem P-R-S (along with a good dozen other patterns).

(Well, technically all Latin nouns and verbs are sometimes polysyllabic. Occasionally the ending combines with the stem and makes a single syllable: falc + -s = falx "sickle", da + -ō = dō "I give". But forms with different endings still end up being multiple syllables: falcī "for a sickle", dare "to give".)

There are also plenty of languages where there's no explicit marking on these parts of speech, and you have to rely on syntax to know which is which. In English, pretty much any word can be used as a verb. And the fairly-rigid syntax means this is seldom an issue. "Index this file by tomorrow" is unambiguous that "index" is the verb and "file" is the noun, and vice versa for "file this index". Some languages require the verb to be the first phrase in the sentence, or the second, or the last. In toki pona, the first phrase in a construction is always the subject, then the predicate (separated by li), then the object (separated by e).


问:
I want to create a family of languages. Should I do one first or should I concentrate on all of them?
I want to create a whole family of related languages like a natural language family, like Semitic,  Italic and Germanic languages. In what ways can this be done? What are the requirements, drawbacks and benefits of each?</p>

答:
For a naturalistic language family one has to apply naturalistic sound shifts and other naturalistic language changes. Those rules and changes are usually directed, therefore it is the best to design the oldest stage of the language (aka the proto-anguage) first and to apply sound shifts and language changes afterwards.

Designing a whole language familiy requires a lot of historical linguistic background, but it is not impossible, as the family of Elvish languages by Tolkien shows.


问:
How should my conlang enable arbitrarily large integers to be said?
Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. It's named Leksah.

Leksah is heavily influenced by the programming language Haskell. As such, Leksah has only 3 parts of speech:

Literals, which usually correspond to nouns. These are always written titlecased. (Yep, like German!)

Functions, which usually correspond to verbs.

The particle "-el", which applies a function.

As such, Leksah has word order VSO.

Yet there is a special kind of literals: Numerals. There are infinite number of integers, and I cannot make every single new word for every integer.

Furthermore, it seems no natural languages can spell every integers. The maximum units are "vigintillion" for English, "무량대수"(無量大數) for (Sino-)Korean and so on.

That said, let me introduce some aspects of my world. The main residents of my world are angels (dubbed moderators in my world), and some of those whose "duties" are related to math (cryptologists in particular?) has obligations involving huge numbers. That's why my conlang must enable such numbers to be said.

So here's a sketch of how numerals would be dealt. Integers shall be written and said in decimal. Here's how digits are said:

0 = "Nad" (from NADAZERO)

1 = "Un" (from UNAONE)

2 = "Bis" (from BISSOTWO)

3 = "Ter" (from TERRATHREE)

4 = "Kar" (from KARTEFOUR)

5 = "Pan" (from PANTAFIVE)

6 = "Sox" (from SOXISIX)

7 = "Set" (from SETTESEVEN)

8 = "Ok" (from OKTOEIGHT)

9 = "Nov" (from NOVENINE)

Though these are literals, as an exception, they can be applied by "-el". In this context, it concatenates digits to make bigger numbers:

42 = "KarelBis"

108 = "UnelNadelOk"

65535 = "SoxelPanelPanelTerelPan"

Note that the spellings are camelcased.

Yet I think there are some disadvantages compared to natural languages:

This scheme wastes time when saying a power of 10. "10000" is spelled "UnelNadelNadelNadelNad".

This scheme is very prone for a listener to accidentally omit or duplicate a digit, especially when the same digit is repeated.

How should I modify this scheme to avoid such situations? Is there any conlang can say arbitrarily large integers?

答:
After some thinking, I think I can confirm how it should. Let me self-plagiarize from this post on Code Golf SE, with respect to the updated phonology and orthography.

Though this conlang's numeral system is still essentially decimal, it expresses run-length encoding on zeros. (Thanks @Austin for suggestion)

The basic words for the nonzero digits are:

1 = uma

2 = piso

3 = terra

4 = qarte

5 = pamta

6 = soçi

7 = sete

8 = oto

9 = mowe

Note that the vowels in these words are all positive. (Yep, now my conlang has vowel harmony.)

For every positive integer, with its decimal expansion, let d be the least significant nonzero digit.

First, d shall be spelled out like above.

Second, if d has any trailing zeros, the length of the zeros shall be spelled out recursively, with the lastly spelled word having its vowels replaced by their negative counterpart (represented by circumflexes).

Third, if d was not the most significant digit, "wa" shall attach to the lastly spelled word as a suffix. And then d and its trailing zeros (if any) shall be stripped off, and the remaining digits shall be spelled out recursively.

All the words spelling out an integer shall be hyphenated.

Examples:

1 = uma

2 = piso

7 = sete

10 = uma-ûmâ

11 = umawa-uma

12 = pisowa-uma

19 = mowewa-uma

20 = piso-ûmâ

42 = pisowa-qarte

69 = mowewa-soçi

100 = uma-pîsô

109 = mowewa-uma-ûmâ

440 = qarte-ûmâwa-qarte

666 = soçiwa-soçiwa-soçi

1945 = pamtawa-qartewa-mowewa-uma

2000 = piso-têrrâ

2022 = pisowa-pisowa-piso-ûmâ

2080 = oto-ûmâwa-piso-ûmâ

44099 = mowewa-mowewa-qarte-ûmâwa-qarte

44100 = uma-pîsôwa-qartewa-qarte

10^60 (one novemdecillion) = uma-soçi-ûmâ

10^63 (one vigintillion) = uma-terrawa-sôçî

10^63 + 2 × 10^33 (one vigintillion two decillion) = piso-terrawa-têrrâwa-uma-mowewa-pîsô

10^100 (googol) = uma-uma-pîsô

10^(10^100) (googolplex) = uma-uma-uma-pîsô

The asymptotic complexity of this numeral system has logarithmic upper bound. As for the lower bound, I haven't calculated it precisely, but it is at most super-logarithmic.


问:
Language statistics and constructed languages
Natural languages are known to follow some statistical laws, the most famous among them is Zipf's law.

Are there published studies of some conlangs with respect to statistical laws of language, not necessarily restricted to Zipf's law, and what are the results of them?

答:
Zipf's Law and other similar laws regarding the statistical behaviour/properties of languages are studied in Quantitative Linguistics. Using QL as a search term together with the name of a conlang (eg Esperanto) will likely lead to some relevant results:

Quantitative analysis of Zamenhof's Esenco kaj estonteco

Investigating Esperanto's Statistical Proportions Relative to other Languages using Neural Networks and Zipf's Law

Equilibrium (Zipf) and Dynamic (Grasseberg-Procaccia) method based analyses of human texts. A comparison of natural (english) and artificial (esperanto) languages


答: If you don't want to introduce another syllable, have your markers be final consonants, so you get e.g.,"tunant" is a noun, "tunans" is a verb., "tunansh" an adjective, etc. You may have to jigger things to keep the final cluster pronounceable, or have multiple final consonants that serve the same role (e,g., using "-d" or "-t" to match the voiced/unvoiced last vowel of the root).</p>

Title: How to structure sentences to be able to distinguish between verbs, nouns, and adjectives etc.?

Body:
In my budding conlang called Tune, I have "base" words which start and end with a consonant, either 3, 4, 5, or 6 sounds, with 1 or 2 vowels. Examples:

tun ("tune")

tunan ("tunahn")

torvan ("torvahn")

twin ("tween")

(where each Roman/Latin letter has a specific sound associated with it).

I was initially thinking of having these "bases" mean simultaneously a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Basically they would mean the full range of possibilities of that concept. Then you would append a -a to make it an explicit noun, append a -i to make it a verb, and a -u to make it an adjective. But the problem with this is that every word now is at least 2 syllables. I noticed that at least in English, most words are 1 syllable, if I were to guess, most words in regular English conversation are:

1 syllable (50%)

2 syllables (25%)

3 syllables (15%)

4+ (10%)

Just a feeling there, but the feeling is many words are simply 1 syllable. I would like to make most words one syllable if possible. But that means ditching my idea of the suffixes potentially.

So I'm wondering, if every word starts/ends with a consonant and is one or two syllables, how will you be able to tell which is a noun, verb, or adjective (or determiner/etc., if it's similar to English or Chinese in structure). What do I need to do to make sure I don't run into complex problems down the road when the language gets more vocabulary? It seems like some sort of fixed sentence word order with word "slots" would be required, but I'm not sure what the possibilities are. Can you outline some things I could do if I get rid of the suffix (or only use it in some cases) to make sure I can effectively include nouns, verbs, and adjectives without confusion? I am not sure what to imagine in trying to solve this.

If I make it so all words fit these patterns (start and end with consonant, 3-6 sounds long), and each word can be used as a noun, verb, or adjective "noun modifiers" (or adverb for verb modifiers), then I could do like buffalo buffalo buffalo... sentence, if there are no suffixes to distinguish in the common case. I am just not sure if I need to fix the word order or something like that.

It seems hard because:

The tree-y tree treeified treeily.

The [adjective] [noun] [verbed] [adverb]

If tree was written/pronounced dip ("deep"), then:

dip dip dip dip.

That could mean anything. So it seems like you need in certain context to add the suffixes, but I'm not sure what the possibilities are. The suffix system might have it be:

dipu dipa dipu dipi.

Which would make more sense, but then we are at 2-syllable words for everything again.

What I'm considering doing is the following. Making each "base" mean the most common frame of reference (noun vs. verb vs. adjective), and then the suffixes turn it into the other forms. So the most common reference for a "tree" (base), would be the tree as a noun, not treeify (verb). Then there is "walk" which is most commonly considered an action, but could also be a noun, so the default base means the verb, not the noun in that case. But some cases are in between like "calm" (to calm or the calm?), so those perhaps always distinguish with the suffixes -i or -u. But maybe you are allowed to add the extra information to specify if desired or to disambiguate, but otherwise you can use the base form to mean the most common form of the concept.


问:
Two different symbols representinɡ a phoneme
How would I represent multiple transliterations for one phoneme in a chart?

I was thinking something like this:
⟨k~q⟩ /k/

It might work, though it doesn't make the most sense, and I would prefer to use the more common method [if there is one.]

答:
I would use a comma: ⟨k⟩, ⟨q⟩.

The tilde is a reasonable option, since it means "alternates with depending on context" (i.e. /k~q/ is a phoneme where [k] alternates with [q]), but I also associate it very strongly with phonology; when first seeing ⟨k~q⟩ /k/ I mentally transposed the brackets and thought the glyph ⟨k⟩ meant the phoneme /k~q/.


答:
Apart from adding syllables, you could use word order in combination with with prosody (tone, emphasis, pausing...) and other pronunciation differences.

Some brainstorming examples for you to remix:

nasalize the vowel for an adjective; one tone (even without being a tonal language, like English uses tone for questions, sarcasm, emphasis, etc.) marks nouns; do neither for verbs

mark a verb by saying its first consonant distinctly: hold it for nasals, eject it for stops; do the same with the final consonant for nouns; mark an adjective by stressing it

words are nouns by default; the final word in an utterance is always the verb; a word with a short pause {before, after, within} it is an adjective

the noun is tun (unvoiced, unaspirated), the verb is dun (voiced, unaspirated), the adjective is tʰun (unvoiced, aspirated)

let one vowel never appear in nouns; make all adjectives verbs

In my own work I have "bases" like you had in mind. I know nouns come after declension particles and verbs come after conjugation particles. The only morphological change in the language is to mark an adjective: say the first vowel twice.


答:
The usual way to approach making a family of related languages is to first make a proto-language (or adopt an existing or reconstructed natural language for this purpose), then simulating natural evolution of both phonology, morphology and semantics in multiple different directions. While the creation of the protolang cannot really be parallellised (though one can deliberately introduce features that one would like to play around with in the following process, or that one can easily see multiple outcomes for), the process of evolving the descendants of the protolanguage can definitely be parallellised, and whether or not to do so is simply a matter of taste (though some things necessarily require some amount of parallel work, such as making a dialect continuum).

There are alternative methods to the derivation-from-protolang method, however they tend to either be much more cumbersome (e.g. trying to reconstruct a protolanguage from two or more seperate conlangs) and/or produce results that do not show the same regularity of correspondence that is indicative of genetic relation in natural languages (e.g. trying to just make two seperate but similar conlangs).

Title: I want to create a family of languages. Should I do one first or should I concentrate on all of them?

Body: I want to create a whole family of related languages like a natural language family, like Semitic,  Italic and Germanic languages. In what ways can this be done? What are the requirements, drawbacks and benefits of each?</p>


问:
Can a lone superorganism develop an internal language?
I'm imagining a hypothetical lone organism on a planet. Something like Avatar, the movie's Eywa. I am envisioning it as a massive organism covering the entire surface of the planet but biologically one single coherent entity. It was always the only living thing in the planet. Language, to what I understand is a means of communication, be it chemical signalling between two rather un-intelligent, or sign language communication between chimpanzees or advanced vocalisation in case of humans - there are multiple entities in involved. This raises few questions, what would the alien's intellect, whatever it would mean for it be like ? From what I have searched from the internet, having a language is not a compulsion for having rational thought, so if presence of other entities is a roadblock, in having the urge to 'communicate' and thus develop a language, then communication can be entirely circumvented because there is only one organism here, still there could be rational thought. But even that would be a dubious scenario, would this 'internal language' be like human internal monologue ? There would also be important considerations involved here, being a lone entity will there be a concept of linguistic/ psychological 'I' and 'You' ? Will there be a concept of 'motive' ? What I'm asking it here and not elsewhere is because I'm more interested in investigating the evolution of linguistic artifacts in such a setting rather than psychological ones and I'm looking for answers discussing the questions I have come up with.</p>

答:
Reminds me of the movie Arrival. At this point we can only speculate, so it’s tough to say. Perhaps as research on Cephalopoda and mycelium network communication grows, we can better answer this question.

Personally, I consider dreaming to be Homo sapiens innate form of communication. Also when the majority of us are taught our primary language during adolescence, our brain’s language centers are structurally changed.
However if we are to talk about a single entity then one may reason that Nature falls under that category. As a spiritual naturalist, I almost certainly believe that Nature does communicate but in a “language” that is nothing alike humanity’s concept of it. More… idk - body-language like. Energy, kinetic motion, is the common denominator at the root of my unsubstantiated viewpoint.


问:
How to decide if you should create complex words, or multiple words?
I am thinking of examples like these (in English and Vietnamese from Google Translate):

creationism: thuyết sáng tạo

create: tạo

creatable

creatively

When do you make it one word, and when do you make it many words? Is it the particular language style (agglutinative vs. isolating, etc.)? What about when you combine those words with other words:

creationist people

It seems to me that "concepts" broadly defined don't always map to one word. Only a few concepts map to one word, and it depends on the language. Concepts can be many words, and somehow by saying when to make it one word vs. many words, we can aid in the memorization process of mapping new concepts to sequences of (fuzzily-defined) "words".

In my conlang, I am thinking (initially) about making it so you can do like English and create a single word for "creationism" by combining:

bam: create

yan: -tion

yog: -ism

And maybe connect them with an -e-, like:

bameyaneyoga

But then why not make "creationism team" one word too:

bameyaneyogetima

In fact, why not make all noun phrases one word? Are there languages like this?

Or the reverse, why not make all noun phrases be composed of separate words/atoms?

bam yan yog tima

Side note: Is there any research outlining the mental toll either approach takes, or the benefits it provides to learning, memorization, or speaking?

I am having a hard time deciding, from a purity standpoint, what would be better for a minimal language, something like English where we have a mixture of separate words and complex-multi-part-words, or something like Vietnamese (or something even more atomic) where everything is composed of individual words (even all just one syllable each).

My question is, what factors should be weighed when making this decision on how to structure more complex concepts?

答:
This is mostly about the 'look and feel' of your language.

Some languages (eg Japanese) are 'analytic', where you have many different words/particles to express grammatical relationships. So you will have texts containing lots of short words. Other languages (eg Finnish) are 'synthetic', ie you express grammatical relationships by adding affixes to the word stem. Here you get fewer but longer words in your texts. This applies to a certain degree to all languages.

It is the same with compound nouns. In English you can say bottle of beer, using of to express the relation between beer and bottle, whereas in German you simply say Bierflasche, where the ordering of the morphemes within the word determines their relationship. So in English you have on average shorter words, in German longer.

As for cognitive effort: I have not seen any research, but I would assume the difference must be negligible, otherwise on type of language would have died out in favour of the other -- either you learn more words, or you learn rules that form more words (and the frequent ones you'd memorise anyway).

So think about how you want your texts to look like: few long words -- favour complex and compound words; many shorter words -- use particles to bind the items together. Also, you could bake in some cultural associations: many Asian languages are analytic, so having short words might evoke associations with Asian cultures with your target audience. This is something to bear in mind when using your conlang.

As an aside: depending on how you define "word", this is one of the reasons for the eskimo-words-for-snow myth: as far as I know, Inuit is very synthetic, so phrases ("the snow that falls in the morning and is powder dry") would be expressed in a single "word", where English uses a whole phrase instead. And thus it appears that there are many words meaning "snow", when it's really only "many phrases that describe different kinds of snow".