问:
From known languages, what are the expected features of a Generation Ship Language?
Pandorum is a generation ship movie. Generation ships are a fairly big sub-genre of sci-fi where people live for many generations in a ship while travelling to a distant star.

The movie Pandorum did not use a conlang at all, despite the ships residents devolving into a tribe of "primitive" natives. What sort of features would we expect to find after 1000 years of travel in space, using real world island languages as a guide?

答:
Vocabulary Changes

New words

The vocabulary can be expected to contain a few new terms or simpler ways of describing certain things that might be seen a lot or might be new, such as new star systems, stellar formations, etc. The words for some of these terms might already exist but shorter terms and compound nouns might come into play to make everyday speech in the Generation Ship a bit simpler.

Lost words

In addition to new terms being added to the vocabulary, some terms may go out of use and become lost from the vocabulary; for example, certain things that might only be seen on a planet (like a tree for example, or a mountain). Terms for those might be lost because they would likely not be used very often if at all. Once the ship arrives and these concepts are explored again, new terms might develop, though they might be similar if the terms are created based on modifying and combining existing terms (tree might be "tall bush" and mountain might be "giant mound", for example).


答:
I'll assume here that the generation ship in question's mission is a resounding success: the inhabitants were not attacked by huge insectile aliens that enslaved them all; the Computer did not rise up and shut out its erstwhile masters, leaving them to fend as best they could in a decaying piece of technology. No, society not only survived but thrived and the people who set foot on their new homeworld have at their command all the accumulated knowledge and technology they brought with them.

In this scenario, there will, I think, actually be very little change in the language spoken on board the generation ship. Whatever interlanguage the first generation brings aboard (likely English) will be the language of general communication among all the inhabitants of the ship. Education will be carried out in English, though programmes will be in place to teach "ancestral" languages brought on board as well. And of course, the homes of firstgen folks will resound with their own native languages.

As subsequent generations are educated (in English), familiarity with other languages will fade. Since this project, while still Earthbound, brought together the best and brightest and well educated to begin with, their level of comfort with English will be high regardless of their cradle tongues. Because running a generation ship requires a huge commitment in education (sciences, mathematics) & experience (astrogation, complex technological subsystems), communications skills will be highly prized. Just as with Modern Standard American, the nature of life & culture aboard ship will tend to keep a fairly strict standard language in place. We're basically looking at a situation where everyone is highly literate and most likely cross-trained in several disciplines ánd certainly likely trained in one or more "traditional" crafts, artforms or skillsets.

This is not to say that jargon won't arise or that English will all of a sudden stop borrowing words from other languages! Far from it. By the time we get to journey's end, I'd speculate that lastgens will be quite able to understand the recorded speech and song of firstgens and that their languages will be not much different at all.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0

Title: From known languages, what are the expected features of a Generation Ship Language?

Body:
Pandorum is a generation ship movie. Generation ships are a fairly big sub-genre of sci-fi where people live for many generations in a ship while travelling to a distant star.

The movie Pandorum did not use a conlang at all, despite the ships residents devolving into a tribe of "primitive" natives. What sort of features would we expect to find after 1000 years of travel in space, using real world island languages as a guide?


答:
The idea that language would not change over 1000 years of travel in space is absolutely ludicrous. 1000 years ago was before Middle English existed. Massive amounts of language change can occur over such a long period of time. Even very conservative languages change significantly over such a long period of time. No language will remain unchanged after 1000 years. Based on natlangs, it's more likely than not that the language will not be mutually intelligible with its predecessor after 1000 years.

How exactly the language changes depends a lot on the details of the situation -- how multicultural is the ship? What is the lingua franca of the ship? How are other languages viewed relative to the lingua franca? If there is enough of a divide in where different languages are used (such as if everything for official purposes is in English but a great number of native, say, Spanish speakers speak Spanish with their families at home), you may end up with diglossia arising. If there are significant numbers of multilingual people on these ships, you can bet there will be a lot of borrowing from minority languages into the dominant language, at least in less formal contexts. As in real life, there may be stigma against using such borrowings.

Honestly, language change in this situation won't likely differ that much from language change anywhere else. A conlanger has a lot of freedom in how they want to deal with the diachronics in this situation. The only real difference is that you don't have any chance of outsiders suddenly arriving and bringing with them waves of loanwords. ...Well, at least, you probably don't.


答:
More or less, the generation ship language will be a natural evolution of the languages brought in by the first generation (their common language probably being something similar to L2 English).

Some things will be spacy: They need a new system of orientation in 3D space with lack of gravity or artificial gravity at work, directions like up, down, east, north, west, and south are no longer meaningful. They will also develop some slang with respect to parts of their space ship and forget all the vocabulary about geographical features on earth.

EDIT: The space ship is probably operating with an air pressure that is significantly lower than on earth, corresponding to an altitude of 1000 or 2000 m. In this case, the space ship language may acquire ejective consonants (For a correlation between altitude and ejective consonants, see Caleb Everett's work "Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065275 )

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


答:
My guesses would be that it evolves towards one of two extremes:

less morphology, fixed word order - this is what happened to English. Dropping cases and most inflections, but having a stricter word order to compensate for the loss of morphological markers.

more morphology, freer word order - not sure if that actually is realistic. It's harder to invent new inflections than to drop them, and unless there is a flourishing poetry scene (perhaps to battle boredom), there wouldn't be too much reason for making word order less strict.

Most languages seem to navigate a path between those extremes, but that would mean it'd just become a different language altogether.

Looking at some real-life examples is tricky, as Latin -> French/Spanish/... for example had lots of interference from other languages and external events. In general I would think the language becomes simpler. It's a closed community, so changes can spread quickly and are not a hindrance to understanding. The environment is fairly static, so you don't need complicated phrases to refer to things.

One aspect would be communicating with the ship's computer (assuming a natural language interface) or texts. But you could think that a 'priest' class develops which does that communication and preserves the 'old' language. A bit like the Vatican with Latin.

Word meanings would probably change, as there are many words but only a limited number of things that need to be named; words would probably be re-used, or acquire new additional meanings.

Some things that won't change are the underlying distributional laws of language. There will still be a number of high-frequency short words that make up most of the active vocabulary. Zipf's law will still apply. The relationship between phoneme inventory and average word length will also remain: fewer phonemes will result in longer words. Short words will be more polysemous than long ones. But overall language will adapt to it's purpose, communication, in the given environment. If there are no trees, then the word tree might suddenly refer to an antenna. Or grass might be used to mean "an area of metal flooring that is slippery when wet".


问:
Conlangs based on lesser known antique languages
The canon of classical languages studied in Europe comprises Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (and maybe classical Aramaic). Inspired by this answer mentioning a conlang based on Hittite, my follow-up question is: Are there conlangs based on other languages of the antiquity, like Sumerian, Elamite, Akkadian, Hurrian, or Ancient Egyptian?</p>

答: There's not much info about it online at the moment, but I have been developing Emezila, a conlang based on a mixture of Sumerian and Arabic. It can't really be described as an evolution of Sumerian, but it draws a lot from Sumerian vocabulary and a little from Sumerian grammar.</p>


答:
It's worth noting that widespread literacy, availability of written materials and public education are capable of greatly slowing down rates of change in the standard language. Additionally, if the generation ship's inside are designed with an ecology (as some SF ships are, like Bernard Werber's Le Papillon des étoiles or Léo's Centaurus), you can't reasonably expect a shrinking of vocabulary about nature. Basically, in a 1000 years I'd expect changes, of course, but I'm not sure we have the comparison levels to characterize just how much chances are likely to actually occur because the rates of change of standard languages over such long periods of time (presuming no "dark age" occurs somewhere along the line) are currently simply not really known.

Case in point: literary French and English from 300  years ago are still pretty comprehensible today (Voltaire's first play was presented that year, Dafoe' Robinson Crusoe is from 1719...). Go to three hundred years before that and you're firmly in Middle French/English, which are definitely rather different beasts.


答:
Others have mentioned that vocabulary for things not seen in space might vanish, and @HyperNeutrino mentioned that new terms might arise if the ship reaches a planet.

New terms might come into existence as metaphorical references to things that the colonists were familiar with on the ship. Just like we refer to "folders" and "files" on a computer or speak about "surfing" the "net" (using older terms to metaphorically refer to newer things that needed terms), generation ship colonists newly landed on a planet might refer to a land vehicle as a "shuttlecraft" or "capsule", call their political leader a "captain", or refer to the death penalty as "being thrown out of an airlock" (even if the actual means of execution becomes something else). Today we sometimes refer to uploading files as "posting" them. Our colonists might rediscover physical message boards but refer to posting notes on them as "uploading".

There could be a wider cultural effect too that expands to include both linguistic and non-linguistic features. If colonists are used to a shipboard timekeeping system that is detached from astronomical phenomena, or that is based on astronomical phenomena only visible from elsewhere in the universe, they might continue using it after landing on a planet despite the presence of astronomical phenomena that could be used to construct a calendar. Consider how the Apollo astronauts on the Moon continued to use Earth-based timekeeping metrics even though they could have adopted some sort of "Moon time" based on the cycle of the Lunar day and/or the apparent rotation of Earth in the sky. This sort of phenomenon could cause holidays to "rotate" throughout the seasons of the new homeworld in a similar way that dates defined in Earth-based lunar calendars (e.g. Ramadan) can occur in any solar season. Perhaps the new colony world has a year that is half that of Earth, so Christmas now comes every other northern hemisphere winter, or the year is twice as long as Earth's, so the colonists celebrate Christmas at the beginning of winter and again at the beginning of summer.

See Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky for some examples of how this might look.


问:
Does Dovahzul have the same grammar rules as English, or are they different?
I have recently been reading this page about the Dragon Language, and I was curious about whether if it and the English language share grammer rules. They seem to have similar bases (organized alphabets with words that derive from it), but I am unsure since Dovahzul seems to be primitive.</p>

答:
There are a lot of rules that are exactly the same.  For instance, Dovahzul has the exact same parts of speech:

Nouns

Verbs

Adjectives

Adverbs

Articles

Conjunctions

Interjections

Prepositions

However, there are some rules that are different: for instance, in the Dragon Language, some words can be used either as an adjective, noun, verb, or adverb, such as the word Nahlot, which means officially "Silenced," but whose meaning can be expanded to mean "silent," "silently," or "silence."

So yes, it shares some rules with English, but no, its rules are not the same.  If you had any specific questions about specific rules, you'd have to ask those in separate questions.


问:
Are there any rules of thumb for number of "steps" between two points in a language's natural development?
Let's suppose that you want to create Conlang B. You want this conlang to be derived from Conlang A. Let's also suppose that you have some arbitrary period of time in between A and B. Are there any rules of thumb for how many steps—how many major grammar/vocabulary alterations, etc.—would generally manifest between A and B as a general guideline? Is it entirely up to the conlanger's prerogative, or can patterns from natural languages be found?</p>

答:
As there is no one simple rule of thumb (or generally applicable rule at all), over history these have been messed up. If it would be practically doable, many linguists would want to rename those periods (but many intermediate forms would be lost because of undecided diachronics).

I'd recommend:

Languages never written (fully reconstructed) usually span a long period of time (PIE spans 2000 years from 4500BCE to 2500BCE). If you'd follow the rule of "many sound changes", we'd be able to split PIE into 10 or more language segments because of sporadic sound changes everywhere.

Usually before a big separation of languages. Proto-Germanic separated into many languages quite fast (for a hypothetical one, at least). Middle Dutch was a nontrivial influence to both English and French, including my favourite words: bodge and feague.

In our sample of the PIE western world, we see a recurring theme: PIE > sub > old > middle > modern. English, Dutch, German fit this perfectly, and with some fiddling (Counting Latin and proto-Italic as one sub, for no other proto-Italic still exists and Latin was quite early (Proto-Germanic even hypothetically borrowed some words)) the Romance languages. This theme can be also applied to Russian, with some bashing and bodging even the Chinese languages, if I recall correctly.

Big spelling changes, not by a regulation's suggestions (or laws—think France) but by linguistic fashion changes.

When a language sees itself as 'newer' and 'better' than its predecessor.

Just to fit. Calling Old and Middle English 'Old English' collectively would be 'weird' as too many changes have occurred for it to be one language. So they drew a line where they thought it would be applicable.

I don't think it can be reduced to one single rule of thumb, like in jknappen's answer. Some sound changes affect many words, but don't split the language. For example: when -e's at the end of words became silent, many words changed pronunciation (many underused words have an -e, which are less common but more numerous). Such 'common exceptions' make it difficult to have one single rule.


问:
Consider an isolated, close-knit community; which characteristics is their language likely to have?
For the sake of concreteness, let's say my low-tech conculture is living in a few villages on a smallish island in the middle of the ocean (Pitcairn Islands comes to mind).

Basically, this would mean that no adult ever has to learn their language, and that everyone knows everyone else to some extent.

Can one make predictions as to how the language would more likely look? Such as:

Would it have a "large" phoneme inventory?

Would it tend to be heavily inflected or analytical?

Would there be a large number of irregular inflections?

Would there be a well-developed system of expressing consanguinity?

Lastly, would the size of the settlement(s) matter much? The difference between a single village or a dozen in regular contact, say.

答:
There are a lot of hypotheses and conjectures floating around the linguistic community regarding typological features (like phoneme inventories, inflecting or isolating type etc.) and size of the speech community.

However, almost none of these conjectures is currently backed up by real world data (and, on the other side, real world data are often unavailable to evaluate such conjectures).

The linguist David Nettle argues that language evolution is faster in small speech communities, but this is also not a generally accepted point of view.

And last, but not least: Never underestimate the influence of diachronics. Many linguistic features correlate very well with either the language family or with arealic features. So the starting language will have a long time influence on the language of the isolated group.


答:
Derek Bickerton and John McWhorter both have studied pidgins and creoles. A general observation is that communities that have to deal with other communities who don't speak their language, but still have to communicate resort to using pidgins, creoles which are simplified, grammatically speaking. McWhorter says English lost it's complex grammar when Vikings arrived and couldn't deal with the complexity.

On the other hand, island communities that don't have to deal with other people can tolerate arbitrarily complex grammar since children have a spectacular skill for acquiring their first language as compared to adults. So as an isolated language accumulates difficulties, there is no pressure to make them go away, they just get added to the pile of obligatory complexities.

Another feature of Island speakers in specific is they are more likely to use a "towards the shore/away from the shore" as a grammatical marker, ref "When "North" Isn't Actually North: Geocentric Direction Systems"

EDIT:
Large phoneme inventory. Chinese, a lingua franca has a small inventory and a small inventory of syllables. Rotokas has a small phonetic inventory. Someone would have to graph this to see if there is a weak relationship.

Inflections (really, any morphology), irregular forms (lexicalizations), culture-specific complexities-- I'd predict more of all of these for an isolated language. Proving it to satisfy skeptics would take a few academic papers. English's "2nd cousin twice removed" system, is complicated, but English is a lingua franca. Hard to say beyond generalities.

Title: Consider an isolated, close-knit community; which characteristics is their language likely to have?

Body:
For the sake of concreteness, let's say my low-tech conculture is living in a few villages on a smallish island in the middle of the ocean (Pitcairn Islands comes to mind).

Basically, this would mean that no adult ever has to learn their language, and that everyone knows everyone else to some extent.

Can one make predictions as to how the language would more likely look? Such as:

Would it have a "large" phoneme inventory?

Would it tend to be heavily inflected or analytical?

Would there be a large number of irregular inflections?

Would there be a well-developed system of expressing consanguinity?

Lastly, would the size of the settlement(s) matter much? The difference between a single village or a dozen in regular contact, say.


答:
The particular circumstances on a generation ship will work in several directions. Some accelerate language change, some slow it down.

Accelerating: Language is used to create identity. The first, most important and biggest tribe are the ship's crew and passengers (if such a distinction is made). They will start to set themselves apart through names for themselves versus the planet dwellers.

Within the ship, different sub-tribes like engineers, gardeners, educators etc. will create respectively continue to develop their own slang in order to set themselves apart from other groups. The urge to set themselves apart is greater because the ship packs many people in a comparatively small space, creating a need to draw virtual borders.

Accelerating: Groups with lots of spare time (which I suppose our space travelers will have) generally devote some of it to developing sophisticated tastes, fads and fashions, thus creating in-groups; their language evolution is interacting with these identity functions. Individuals who are unable or unwilling to speak "their slang" (and wear their hair cut, and posture ...) are marked as "not belonging to them". To a degree this happens in every generation of teenagers. But we can see that also on a larger scale in the development of the aristocratic French, or the fast-paced development of the politically correct speech in the United States.

Slowing down: There will be constant communication between all individuals of the ship through some kind of publications and messaging as well as personal conversation, given the necessary physical proximity and the need to cooperate during the mission (no group will be able to isolate themselves). This will ensure that there will continue to be a single lingua franca, fads and fashions not withstanding. Some people may learn and teach other languages for scientific, identity, hobby and nostalgic reasons, but they all will be competent in the main language. An important driver of the evolution of this language will be the slang of the youngsters, as always.

Slowing down: The generation ship will probably communicate via radio with the planet they came from; but most communication will be internal, partly because after a while communication with the home planet will not be real-time any more. The generation ship will form an isolated, small community. Such communities, like the Amish in America or the German settlers in Romania, are known to preserve customs and language longer than the bigger communities thy split off of. We can assume that the ship receives entertainment from the home planet, like music, movies and written prose. Thus they will keep in touch with the language on the home planet; whether that ongoing contact is sufficient to keep the language on board from running its own course I don't know.


问:
Are there any examples of artificial creoles of natural languages?
I remember reading somewhere of a creole-ish artificial language of two (possibly more) natural languages. In the text (I do NOT remember where it was) only one creole (I'm using the term loosely here, without regards to native speakers) was mentioned, without any usage/examples.

Are there any examples of constructed languages that are specifically designed to be creoles (again, with a very loose usage of the term creole here) of natural languages?

答:
To name a few:

Da Mätz se Basa: High German.

Old Piscean: British English.

Kjā: Yoruba.

Cheyoon: Mandarin.

Al Mastizu: a creole of English, Spanish and Arabic.


答:
Certainly there are a few!

Modern Tocharian: Tocharian

Talarian: more Indo-Hittite

Ememir: Sumerian

Probably more lurking about the shadows...

Title: Conlangs based on lesser known antique languages

Body: The canon of classical languages studied in Europe comprises Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (and maybe classical Aramaic). Inspired by this answer mentioning a conlang based on Hittite, my follow-up question is: Are there conlangs based on other languages of the antiquity, like Sumerian, Elamite, Akkadian, Hurrian, or Ancient Egyptian?</p>


答: Additionally, Lang Belta, which is the constructed creole spoken on the science fiction television show The Expanse.

Title: Are there any examples of artificial creoles of natural languages?

Body:
I remember reading somewhere of a creole-ish artificial language of two (possibly more) natural languages. In the text (I do NOT remember where it was) only one creole (I'm using the term loosely here, without regards to native speakers) was mentioned, without any usage/examples.

Are there any examples of constructed languages that are specifically designed to be creoles (again, with a very loose usage of the term creole here) of natural languages?


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope I have made the general idea more clear.

答:
Make expressing something uncertain less concise

Let's say that, by "default" in the languge, all verbs are completely certain. For example, let's say your word for car is chicho, your word for red is hoeng, and your word for is is sherr[1].

Now the sentence chicho sherr hoeng translates as the car is red, but it carries more certainty than it would in English—the car is surely, indisputably, provably red, and for that not to be true would feel very unnatural. Finding that one's assertion was false would cause a feeling of discomfort and mild panic comparable to realizing one had skipped a sentence or phrase while delivering a speech.

Then, add an adverb hunnyokenung which lowers the certainty of a verb to something closer to English. Now the sentence is chicho sherr hunnyokenung hoeng. The clunkiness of the phrase reflects the fact that this construction is not used often (the elf children are taught "if you don't have anything sure to say, don't say it at all!").

A side note: literature in this language would not be able to express something surprising unless any statements that were later refuted were written using the hunnyokenung form, or else the author would risk angry letters from readers complaining about the improper assertion.

1 The phonetics of these words (though not the grammar) were taken from Mandarin.


问:
Has any nation ever employed a constructed language in the military as code talkers?
Esperanto was once used in the US army to realistically simulate the language situation when training.
Has any nation ever employed other constructed languages in the military as code talkers?

From Wikipedia article:

Code talkers are people in the 20th century who used obscure languages as a means of secret communication during wartime. The term is now usually associated with the United States service members during the world wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages. In particular, there were approximately 400–500 Native Americans in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages. Code talkers transmitted these messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formal or informally developed codes built upon their native languages. Their service improved the speed of encryption of communications at both ends in front line operations during World War II.

答:
The Israeli military uses a relexification of Hebrew called "NADBAR", according to Conlang Wikibooks†. A relexification of a language remains the grammar (by definition) and writing system (in practice) but gains new words. Your first (semi-)conlang was probably a relexification of English or another language.

Many languages used in the military are not immediately conlangs; rather, they fall into the dome of cryptology and cryptography. Quote:

Some use the terms cryptography and cryptology interchangeably in English, while others (including US military practice generally) use cryptography to refer specifically to the use and practice of cryptographic techniques and cryptology to refer to the combined study of cryptography and cryptanalysis.

The military also uses (forms of) signed languages. Here are some common signals:

Common army signals (link instead of image, for image is too big and distracting)

†Note: (from comment by b a):

According to Hebrew Wikipedia, "Contrary to the popular notion, the goal of Nadbar is not concealing information" (so not really cryptography) See the corresponding English Wikipedia page for its use in the US military.


答: More of a pidgin experiment than full fledged con-creole, but worth a mention anyway: Viossa. Being made by conlangers, it likely has somewhat more elaborate grammar than most pidgins though (such as a morphological passive marker and a lot more adpositions than you’d find in most. Source: am co-creator).</p>


问:
Soudwegian: A Swedish-German process similar to what happened to English and French?
The idea is that the Swedes retain a small bit of what is nowadays German territory that they conquered in the 17th century. This is now independent territory, Soudway, with a language of its own named Soudwegian.

Their vocabulary is basically German with a lot of phonetic changes, plus a huge amount of Swedish loans (and smaller but important contributions from Polish and French), while the grammar is very simplified, like Middle/Modern English as opposed to Old English.

Is that a realistic choice, or was the grammatic simplification that characterised the process between English/French unique—not something that we should expect from other similar fusions?

答:
Yes, that is a realistic choice in fictive works.

Abstractly

Nobody can be 100% sure of how realistic it is, and in conlanging—or even fictive worldbuilding in general—you may always be a bit unrealistic. Think about some fictive works or conlangs you know placed in another world; they make many assumptions that extraterrestrial life has two eyes, hair on their head, ~1m–2m tall, and their mouths have lips, teeth, an alveolar ridge, a glottis and a tongue. (Your idea takes place in our (but alternative) world, but the point of the example still stands.)

Linguistically

There could be many ways of forming such a language, of which the most realistic are (chiefly from Mark Rosenfelder's Advanced Language Construction):

A creole. A creole is, by definition, a pidgin which has native speakers. A pidgin is formed when two languages try to communicate, for reasons of trade or otherwise. If you read about Tok Pisin (etymologically "talk pidgin", a creole), you'll see a lot of simplified grammar (and, as you say, English is already quite simplified).

From Swedish, but developing independently from main Swedish. As a native English speaker born in Holland, informal English I use to talk to my family is very different from main English. For example, I'd say *How late is it? (from Dutch Hoe laat is het?) by accident. Also, lots of sound changes happen. Even though I don't merge /w/ and /ʍ/, many people I know that used to be able to can't anymore, and my rhotic in both Dutch and English is [ʁ], even though neither Dutch nor the Scottish dialect of English has it.

A combination of the two. After a period of isolation (independent development), the Swedes start talking more like the Germans (like creoles, but slightly different)—a combination of the two.

So, even though it might be somewhat unrealistic, within the dome of fiction it isn't unrealistic enough to stop you.


答:
Well, in an alternate history this is a perfectly plausible scenario.

Note that the the German contribution to the language should be Low German corresponding to the local dialects of Pommerania. It is cloaser to Swedish because the second sound shift characterising High German has not affected the Low German dialects. A good dose of loan words from High German can add some spice to Soudwegian.

In the time frame you are looking at, Polish or other Slavonic influence is already very low, don't overdo it.

You may look at languages like Plautdietsch or Afrikaans for more inspiration.

Title: Soudwegian: A Swedish-German process similar to what happened to English and French?

Body:
The idea is that the Swedes retain a small bit of what is nowadays German territory that they conquered in the 17th century. This is now independent territory, Soudway, with a language of its own named Soudwegian.

Their vocabulary is basically German with a lot of phonetic changes, plus a huge amount of Swedish loans (and smaller but important contributions from Polish and French), while the grammar is very simplified, like Middle/Modern English as opposed to Old English.

Is that a realistic choice, or was the grammatic simplification that characterised the process between English/French unique—not something that we should expect from other similar fusions?


答:
Short Answer

The language used on a generation ship would change very little over the course of the journey despite its 1,000 year duration.

Long Answer

Contrary to widespread conventional wisdom, language drift is very modest over long periods of time in the absence of specific environmental or language contact experiences the cause a language to change over time.

One of the best historical comparisons is the Icelandic language. It is almost unique in experiencing very little language contact or mass migration for a very long period of time. (In contrast, for example, Old English arose from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a linguistically Celtic and Latin speaking island, and Middle English arose as the main modification in the wake of England's conquest by a French speaking Normal elite and England was extremely involved in contacting other civilizations globally as part of its diplomatic, trade and cultural interactions with Europe and as a result of its global empire.)

Iceland was an uninhabited island (hence not subject to any substrate influences unlike many other colonists) settled in the historic era by colonists who spoke a single shared language fairly close to "Old Norse" (the proto-language of the Germanic languages), who had a total population similar to that of a generation ship.

Somewhat more subtly, Iceland's colonists were looking for economic opportunities, rather than constituting a cultural minority fleeing persecution in their homeland the way, for example, that the Puritan colonists of New England were, so they were not motivated at the outset to intentionally set out to put linguistic and cultural distance between themselves and the speakers of their original mother tongue the way that early Americans deliberately attempted to distinguish themselves linguistically from England to assert a distinct cultural identity. The Iceland situation of a group of people not committed ideologically to putting cultural distance between themselves and their ancestor population would likely also be true of the people on a generation ship.

The descendants of the original colonists of Iceland remained in constant communication with each other ever after, just as generation ship residents would, although this did break up from a single community into about a dozen or so chiefdoms that were substantially autonomous from each other and had distinct identities although they did retain a very thin form of island-wide weak government. So, tribal divisions, per se, do not distinguish a generation ship from Iceland.

And, Iceland received almost no significant waves of migration prior to the recent past, so it has never had a large community of outside language learners to influence its linguistic development (just as would be the case in a generation ship).

While Iceland wasn't as isolated from other people as generation ship would be, for a period of time roughly equal to the length of a generation ship journey prior to the introduction of telecommunications, Iceland was very isolated from the rest of the world, and the vast majority of what little contact it did have with the rest of the world from visiting ships was with people who spoke the closest linguistic relative of their language in the world. So, it did not have any languages from which to borrow words, and it was not subject to any areal effects from neighboring languages in a significant way (apart from Danish rule whose effect is noted below).

Icelandic is by far the most linguistically static of the Germanic languages, with the only significant change being a change in pronunciation that arose during a several century period of Danish rule, a country that speaks a closely related by different language derived from Old Norse. A generation ship would not experience this outside influence and would not need to develop a new written language as Iceland did.

As Wikipedia explains (at the link above):

The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD.
Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved
orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland
from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise
the historical works and the eddaic poems.

The language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old
Norse. The Dano-Norwegian, then later Danish rule of Iceland from 1536
to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic (in contrary
to the Norwegian language), which remained in daily use among the
general population. Though more archaic than the other living Germanic
languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th
to the 16th century, especially in vowels (in particular, á, æ, au,
and y/ý).

The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard
established in the 19th century, primarily by the Danish linguist
Rasmus Rask. It is based strongly on an orthography laid out in the
early 12th century by a mysterious document referred to as The First
Grammatical Treatise by an anonymous author, who has later been
referred to as the First Grammarian. The later Rasmus Rask standard
was a re-creation of the old treatise, with some changes to fit
concurrent Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of k rather
than c. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used
much in later centuries. Rask's standard constituted a major change in
practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of
je and the removal of z from the Icelandic alphabet in 1973.

Apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not
changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts
were written on vellum. Modern speakers can understand the
original sagas and Eddas which were written about eight hundred years
ago. The sagas are usually read with updated modern spelling and
footnotes but otherwise intact (as with modern English readers of
Shakespeare). With some effort, many Icelanders can also understand
the original manuscripts.

Also, usually new vocabulary is developed in response to new topics of conversation. Since the environment would change less and there would be fewer new things on a generation ship than in Iceland over the same time period (in part, due to a generation ship's lack of trade with the outside world that Iceland had) one would expect there to be less innovation in vocabulary on a generation ship than there was in Iceland. Still, as noted by @Hyperneutrino one might expect words that residents of a generation ship have no reason to use to be lost early on from popular speech (although presumably written sources would still preserve the old words for those so inclined, as a generation ship's residents would not be illiterate and written languages stabilize spelling and prevent old words from dying completely), and there would be a few new words developed over time.

Another clue with which I have first hand experience, which corroborates the example of Iceland, is the development of motherland languages in immigrant communities. For example, the dialect of Korean spoken in Korean immigrant communities in the U.S. that formed shortly after the Korean War is much more similar to the dialect spoken at the time of migration than the dialect of Korean currently spoken in South Korea, notwithstanding the fact that there have been many visits to South Korea and there has been access to modern Korean television and music in that time period in the U.S. Small, relatively isolated communities are simply much less linguistically innovative than large communities that are strongly connected to neighboring communities that speak different languages.

In summary then, it is likely that the language of a generation ship would be extremely static over a period of approximately 1,000 years, because generally speaking it would be in conditions very similar to those of Iceland which historically has had an extremely static language over a similar time period under similar conditions. And, several of the factors that are know to have led to the modest changes between Old Icelandic and Modern Iceland over that time period would be absent on a generation ship.


答: There is Lingua Franca Nova, which was named after the original Lingua Franca (yes, there really was once a language called Lingua Franca, it was used by traders in the Mediterranean I believe). But all he had to go off of was the languages it drew its (initial) vocabulary from, knowledge of how creoles develop, and two sentences in the original Lingua Franca which he had no translation to at the time. Lingua Franca Nova is so close to the original, that many think he actually replicated the original Lingua Franca, unaware that he had little to no knowledge of it at the time.</p>


问:
What are the benefits of inventing irregular verbs in one’s conlang?
Many natlangs have irregular verbs that do not follow the same patterns as the majority of verbs, often as a product of old verb patterns that are no longer used. Some of the benefits of not having irregular verbs are an easier to learn and interpret conlang, but are there benefits, such as giving a sense that the language has changed over time?</p>

答:
A benefit to having irregular verbs in your conlang is shortening common words. If common words like "to be" and "to walk" were 4-5 syllables in some conjugations, your speakers might consider it a hassle to say those gigantic words all the time, whereas less regular, but shorter forms of the conjugations might be easier to say.

Though really, it depends on what you want in your conlang. If you're going for naturalism, some irregularities are a must, but if you're going for an auxlang, avoiding irregular conjugations (or possibly even conjugations altogether) would be ideal.


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

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

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

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

What are the notations commonly used by constructed sign languages?

Which sign languages use them?

答:
There are very few constructed sign languages. On the subreddit, we sometimes get questions about whether anyone has made any, which usually don’t get many replies. This one here has some examples given, and also links a website which has basically the answer to your actual question:

SLIPA is an attempt by David Peterson to fill the lack of sign language transcription systems. However, due to it being ASCII-compliant, it ends up rather unweildy and I’ve never seen it employed in actuality. Nevertheless, the website provides important information that could be useful for you to derive your own system tailored to your language, and to use as a reference for comparing your own notation to.


答:
It depends. There are two extreme possibilities. I would expect the real situation to be somewhere in between.

One extreme happens when the population of the generation ship just speaks a random language, or several. And when it either does not bring a large library or somehow manages to lose or forget it (e.g. due to religious extremism).

In this case there will be natural language change. Here are some things that fuel language change:

The desire of a younger generation to assert their identity linguistically gives rise to youth language. As they grow older, part of their youth language becomes standard.

Unstressed syllables are pronounced less and less carefully, giving rise to phonetic changes. E.g., several distinctive vowels may merge into a single neutral vowel when unstressed. Vowels or consonants may even get lost.

The desire to express ourselves drastically in certain situation gives rise to new rules of grammar. E.g., this is how the future tense and the progressive aspect in English arose. (Neither existed in Proto-Germanic.)

As a word or expression is used increasingly in a specific sense, sometimes it is no longer appropriate to use it in its original sense. This drift of meaning then creates a gap that will likely be filled by a new word or expression or by initiating a similar process for another, existing one.

All of these factors exist on a generation ship. As ohwilleke pointed out, two other factors - changing environment and contact with other languages (which also evolve) do not exist on a generation ship. (At least in the long run. Of course the first few generations will adapt their vocabulary and probably even grammar to the unique situation. E.g., some Australian languages use compass directions or geographical directions w.r.t. a specific valley instead of left and right. Something equivalent would make even more sense on a generation ship.) Therefore we can expect this language change to be really slow. Ohwilleke's example of Iceland gives us an idea of what to expect. If the ship's population starts with English, then after 1000 years they have a good chance to understand today's English to some extent. (To a greater extent if they continue reading books in today's English.)

Since, realistically, a generation ship to Alpha Centauri would be travelling for many thousands of years, without further stabilising factors we can expect that they would arrive speaking a language that is at most vaguely similar to the one they started with. I would not expect this language to have unusual features compared to languages currently spoken on Earth. There might, however, be some grammatical structures related to the special situation on the ship. And there might also be a large number of irregularities, as is often the case for languages of small speaker communities.

A generation ship will probably bring a large library. However, if the population had unrestricted access to it, this might lead to a society that basically lives in the past and will be unable to settle a new planet. But in any case I would expect that some people on board continue to learn Earth languages so they can understand part of that library. Depending on the precise circumstances, this could be a stabilising factor or even fuel language change due to different Earth languages being fashionable at different times.

A civilisation that wants to control the language spoken by the settlers of a distant planet will have to turn linguistics from a descriptive science into a field of engineering. They may be able to create a language that is a lot more stable than any naturally occurring language. This doesn't mean there is no change at all, but it means that significant change is normally cyclic.

Language change is already largely cyclic in terms of high-level features of languages. E.g., if a language does not have a past tense, then a composite tense like present perfect will likely come up to fill this gap. The auxiliaries will then merge with the verbs that carry the meaning, becoming suffixes or prefixes. They will slowly lose stress, become unrecognisable as auxiliaries, become indistinguishable from each other and finally will disappear, so that the language again doesn't have a past tense.

For an isolated speaker community, it might be possible to come up with a language A such that after one such cycle a language B results that is mutually intelligible with A to a strong degree. Now the speakers of B will likely read a lot of the literary output of the speakers of A, leading to further stabilisation.

Extending this idea, we one might come up with a family of languages that could in principle have cyclically evolved out of each other. Say half a dozen such languages. By providing an extensive and stimulating library in all of these languages, it could be possible to make language evolution essentially cyclic throughout the flight, so that at the end everyone will be speaking a variation of one of the library languages (possibly an intermediate stage). But it also seems likely that this would lead to a multilingual situation (with several library languages spoken simultaneously), so that one would also have to consider contact effects between these languages. And, perhaps more importantly, to conscious efforts to create linguistic innovations that are not represented in the library.

Note: I arrived at these last thoughts from a different angle. In the extreme case, success of an international language such as Esperanto would mean that everybody in the world speaks Esperanto and only Esperanto. But this is not a stable situation, at least not with an essentially random language such as Esperanto. So I thought about whether there can be a language that would remain the only language spoken on Earth once it managed to get to that point.


答:
I recently read an interesting essay – wish I could remember where – saying that the more insular a language community is, i.e. the less likely someone is to converse in that language with a stranger, the less it uses syntactic complexities such as relative clauses, because you don't need to clarify your context if your interlocutor already shares most of your context.

If that's true, the effect is likely to show if the ship's population stays within a small multiple of the Dunbar limit.  Such simplification might in turn allow word order to become more free, I think.


答:
A generation ship is a small society that is technologically advanced but stagnant. It's a society that depends on ancient wisdom to survive. Their material and intellectual resources are very limited compared to the civilization they came from, so the rate of scientific and technological advancement will be slow. Most of their efforts in those fields must go into maintaining a sufficient understanding of the ship and the science behind it to keep the systems operational.

For similar reasons, most of the entertainment the people consume will be from the civilization of their origin. Some new entertainment will be produced, but in limited quantity and with lower production values.

Because of limited resources, I would expect that everyone on board would be bilingual. There would be an everyday language that would drift and evolve, as others have already discussed. There would also be the ancient language of entertainment, higher education, and operations manuals that would remain static by necessity.

Bilingual people tend to mix the languages when talking with each other. This would make the evolution of the everyday language different from what we have seen on Earth. Because the original language would still be in active use, the everyday language would sometimes drift away from it and sometimes be influenced by it.


答:
It’s relatively hard to say. First, some general numbers:

Over 1000 years, Old High German split into the various southern German dialects, including Swiss German and Standard German. While differences are very noticable, many developments were parallel and speakers usually don’t take long to get accustomed to the differences. A similar time depth can be claimed for English vs Scots. Old High German itself is not readily intelligible to the modern speaker, but many words are recognizable.

2000 years ago, we had Latin and Proto-Germanic, the ancestors of the Romance and Germanic branches of Indo-European. While the modern languages all show clear similarities in most regards of the language, they are as a general rule not mutually intelligible and speakers need to invest a lot of time to learn another of those languages - but still much less than with an unrelated language. Proto-Germanic and Latin are both quite different than the modern languages, showing vast differences in morphology and syntax, as well as having undergone many sound changes since. Nevertheless, with some knowledge on etymology, words can readily be recognized for what they are in a written text.

About 4000-6000 years ago, we have PIE. At this point, the language is no longer immediately recognizable as being related to a modern European language. The grammar is very different - just as an example, PIE verbs inflect for three persons and three numbers, but not directly for tense or aspect, which are instead marked with various more-or-less productive derivational affixes. The phonology would also look very out of place in modern day Europe. And for most roots, even if they didn’t change much phonologically, there was probably a semantic shift somewhere between PIE and English. The average English speaker will understand exactly zero words in a passage in Serbian or Punjabi.

But there’s another side to this as well. General tendencies are fine, but what about individual languages? If you compare Italian and French to Latin, then it’s plainly obvious that French has changed more, at least with regards to phonology and morphology. Similarly, comparing English to Icelandic, the latter is clearly more conservative (though no where near as much as some people might make you believe). To me, French and English look like they are 500+ years further in the future than their contemporary siblings — in reality of course they just underwent some more drastical sound changes that in turn messed with their morphology, which in turn forced changes to the syntax. People try to ascribe those changes to various factors, usually external ones such as a large number of foreign learners, but most of this is not grounded in actual science and just speculation.

As such, no definitive answer can be given. I find the time depths I gave above to be good rules of thumb, but single languages may deviate from those quite a bit. To achieve such results, it’s important to apply changes not only to the phonology, but to all parts of the language — especially the lexicon.

Title: Are there any rules of thumb for number of "steps" between two points in a language's natural development?

Body: Let's suppose that you want to create Conlang B. You want this conlang to be derived from Conlang A. Let's also suppose that you have some arbitrary period of time in between A and B. Are there any rules of thumb for how many steps—how many major grammar/vocabulary alterations, etc.—would generally manifest between A and B as a general guideline? Is it entirely up to the conlanger's prerogative, or can patterns from natural languages be found?</p>


问:
How does Láadan aim to express the views of women more than natural Western languages?
Láadan was created, according to Wikipedia, to try an experiment in seeing if a constructed language designed specifically for women could better express the views of women better than natural Western languages:

Láadan is a feminist constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women.

How does the language aim to express this difference? What differences make it better for women to express their views than in natural Western languages?

What steps are the creators of Láadan taking to make sure that women can express themselves better in Láadan than in natural Western languages, that it will be different from those natural languages?

答:
I am not an expert on Láadan but I was also researching it in the context of feminist communication.  This is what I found based on that research.

The idea behind creating Láadan as a "feminist" language was to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to see if natural languages were biased toward expressing male communication, but the language's creator, Suzette Haden Elgin, was unable to prove or disprove the hypotheses she set out to study because of low adoption of the language.  As far as I can tell, even Elgin remains uncertain on the effect of these approaches to facilitating feminine communication.

The distinctive characteristics that strike me are

It is a tonal language - This seems to have been very deliberate in the development of Láadan. Does this facilitate feminine thought with particularly more clarity than non-tonal languages?  I am not sure, and I couldn't find any reputable research indicating whether or not that is the case, but I suspect that when the language was being developed by Elgin she did not make it a tonal language by accident.  Since her hypotheses about the implications of Láadan on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis remain unconfirmed, we probably don't know for sure.

The language has emotional context markers.  This is presumably meant to aid in the expression of subtle emotional context to avoid ambiguity that leaves a dialogue open to interpretation and reliant on context clues.

-d anger marker

-th pain marker

-li love marker

-lan celebration marker

-da joke marker

-di education marker

-ya fear marker

The language has many affection words, for example, of love.  Like the other aspects, whether this is truly a facet that favors female communication over male based on empirical evidence is unclear to me, but it certainly satisfies many widely accepted assumptions about differences in male and female thought.  However, it should be noted that many of these assumptions are widely challenged today.  Perhaps men desire more nuanced emotional communication as well but suppress this impulse for cultural reasons.

a love for inanimates

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

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

ab love for one liked but not respected

ad love for one respected but not liked

éme love for one neither liked nor respected

am love for one related by blood

ashon love for one not related by blood, but kin of the heart

aye love that is unwelcome and a burden

azh love for one sexually desired now

oham love for that which is holy

sham love for the child of one’s body

These text examples were taken from this online PDF resource.


问:
Is the concept of “spatial aspect” attested in any natural language?
As described here, Aspect refers to the grammatical marking of the relation between topic and eventuality time, that is, it marking in what way the time an action actually occurs relates to the time currently being talked about. So in the sentence “Before returning home, he had gone shopping”, the topic time would be the moment of arriving home, and the eventuality time the time of going shopping, and the English past perfect marks that the latter happened before the former.

A logical extension of this system then would be to not only mark for differences in topic and eventuality time, but also topic and eventuality space. In the above sentence, the topic space (or location) would be the home, while the location of the shopping would be the eventuality space. The sentence might then mark for the fact that the shopping center is far away from the home, as opposed to (for example), inside the home. Further distinctions could be made with regards to motion: shopping is fairly stationary, but in “To get home, he had to drive on the highway”, there is clear motion towards the topic space and this too might be marked.

So I am curious, does anything along these lines exist in natural languages? The closest thing I was able to find were cis- and translocative markers in some languages, but the examples don’t really make it clear that this is used in a mandatory inflectional manner the same way temporal aspect is in many language.

答:
I don't know of any languages where spatial marking is thoroughly compulsory in the same way aspect often is, however I do know of some potentially interesting cases of spatial marking. A lot of Papuan languages have grammaticalised systems for showing directionality and location. They are usually described as being relative to the speaker, but in at least some cases I have found them described as being relative to either the speaker or the village, or some other not wholly speaker-focussed system. The Nimboran languages in particular have highly complex systems e.g. Wilden(1976) describes Kemtuk as having the following system: https://i.stack.imgur.com/giiWp.png, but says that it is optional.  Anceaux (1965) describes 16 different spatial categories in Nimboran proper, but in a rather unhelpful manner. He notes that the unmarked position category, when the speaker is involved has a specific meaning of "near the speaker", but that it is also always used when the speakers position is indefinite or irrelevant, such as in stories or general statements. In at least some languages I have looked at, these markers were compulsory with motion verbs.

A somewhat different system involving location relative to other events is described by Huisman (1973) who reports that Angaataha has a class of medial verbs which are inflected for whether they occur in the same place or in a different place as the following conjunct.

As far as I can tell, none of this completely satisfies your request, but it shows that at least some things are definitely attested, and distinguish other, or more fine categories than what you've found yourself.


答:
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about languages spoken by a small community in isolated islands are the Polynesian languages, like Maori, Hawai'i and Rapa Nui. They have simple phonetic inventories and little to no inflexion, but have a huge array of particles that denote aspect, mood, tense, emotion, etc.

However, at the same time we can look at Papua New Guinea, where there are hundreds of languages spoken by isolated communities. PNG is a bit "problematic", though, because there are so many types of languages there, from analytical to polysynthetic, from small to very large phonemic inventories. It's kind of a linguistic hotspot, really.

My advice for you is to check out Polynesian languages but also take a look at some PNG cultures. They can offer some insight you won't get anywhere else.

Good luck.


问:
How to keep track of a language?
At the moment I have my fictional language written down in a notebook, but as the vocabulary increases its becoming harder and harder to find words.

I am adding new words all the time, so writing them in alphabetical order doesn't last long.

How can I keep a track of this language and still be able to find the words I need?

Edit: I have seen this question has been marked as a possible duplicate, but it is different as I am also open to paper-and-pencil methods.

答:
One way, while working on paper is to divide things into multiple sheets, making sure to have plenty of extra space at the bottom of dictionary sheets, or alternatively grouping things via e.g. semantic field to not run into the alphabetisation issue to quite the same extent (though this can have the issue that the semantic field of some items might not be easily determineable).

You can also use a computer program to manage your vocabulary, which offers the benefits of easy searchability and ordering. A simple spreadsheet program of your choosing is enough to work in a lot of cases, and otherwise there is the possibility of using actual vocabulary management programs. There are several free ones availible, both conlang-specific ones such as Polyglot (which also has a bunch of other functionality for organising a bunch of other conlanging-related stuff) or one developed for natlangs but still useful for conlangs, such as SIL FieldWorks (which is quite powerful but has a bit of a learning curve).

Title: How to keep track of a language?


问:
How do Romance-based naturalistic conlangs deal with the different principal parts of a verb?
The Latin verb has four principal parts (e.g., ducere, duco, duxi, ductum) that are sufficient and necessary to create all inflected forms and derived words from it. As far as I know, no naturalistic conlang attempts to preserve the French passé simple and related tempora in other Romance languages; so we can drop this one. Usually, the differences between infinitives and present tense forms are also levelled out by dropping most of the Romance verbal inflections.

This leaves us with two principal parts, one for the infinitive, present tense and past tense, and one for the past participle (or at least for derivations from the past participle, in case that the participle is somehow regularised).

I remember that Edgar de Wahl even went further in his design of Occidental-Interlingue using a device called de Wahl's rule (the description in the Wikipedia differs somewhat from my presentation) in deriving also the infinitive and the present tense stem from the past particple, so his word for "to lead" is ducter. He isn't 100% consequent, but this adds a lot of regularity to his design.

How do other Romance-based conlangs deal with the principal parts?

答:
While international auxiliary conlangs based on Romance languages, such as the ones you're thinking of, typically get rid of most of the verbal conjugation, there are in fact naturalistic Romance-based conlangs that retain a multiplicity of verbal forms on par with French or Italian.

There is no reason why the evolution of the actual Romance languages can't be imitated by a conlanger if they so wish.

An example would be the Siezan language (created by a French conlanger that goes under the pseudonym "Legion" on the Internet), meant to represent what French would be if it were a bit more similar to the other major Romance languages. If you look at the section on verbs, you can find examples such as devre 'must, to have to' having dúi as its "indicative perfective" (or passé simple if you will), which correspond to the Latin principal parts debere and debui respectively. (You can compare this to the retention of Latin quaero ~ quaesivi in Spanish: quiero ~ quise.)

(Latin > Siezan)

debere > devre

debui > dúi

debuisti > dús

debuit > dú

debuimus > dumos

debuistis > dustes

debuerunt > duront

Note that, just as in the real Romance languages, new principal parts can also be formed elsewhere. The future form of Siezan falir 'to fail' has the irregular stem fodr- (fodré, fodrás, fodrá...) instead of the expected falir- (faliré, falirás, falirá...).


答:
To add to Gufferdk's answer, Mark Rosenfelder in The Language Construction Kit (online version) mentions the use of index cards (as professional dictionary makers used to do in the past) as well as a technique with two-columned pages:

You can keep a dictionary in alphabetical order by maintaining two columns and just writing in one. New words get placed in the second column. When it starts to get unreadable, it’s time to make a new edition. Index cards work too, with less rewriting.

If you don't mind sharing your lexicon with the entire world, there are also free online services such as ConWorkShop or Anthologica where you can manage your own dictionaries.

Title: How to keep track of a language?

Body:
At the moment I have my fictional language written down in a notebook, but as the vocabulary increases its becoming harder and harder to find words.

I am adding new words all the time, so writing them in alphabetical order doesn't last long.

How can I keep a track of this language and still be able to find the words I need?

Edit: I have seen this question has been marked as a possible duplicate, but it is different as I am also open to paper-and-pencil methods.


答: I would suggest recording them in an Access Database or something of the like.  You can make a table for each part of speech.</p>

Title: How to keep track of a language?


答:
One of the easiest ways is a simple document in your favorite word processor:

hawarççomtar, [hawarçç- +omtar] n.C. dancer

hawarrôs, [*wel-] n.N. the will, desire; attachment

hawartomar, [wartam < *wert-] n.N. spiritual awakening, spiritual awareness

hawatam, [*wed-] D vb. sing

hawatar, [*wed-] n.N. poison, medicine; saga

hawatôs, [hawatam] n.N. song

hawecam, [*aug-] D vb. add; grow (mid)

hawehham, [*aukwh-] A vb. cook something (w. acc.); cook for someone (w. dat.)

Whatever etymological or grammatical information you feel like adding can be easily inserted. It's easy to insert new words or simply add them to the end of the list and have the software sort the whole thing alphabetically.

One great advantage of doing it this way is that it's a trivial matter of formatting for print should you ever desire to have a printed copy of your dictionary or grammar book.

Title: How to keep track of a language?


问:
What similarities does The Black Speech in Tolkien have to Hurrian?
I've just come across this quote from Wikipedia:

Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski claimed a strong similarity to Hurrian, which had recently been partially deciphered at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.

How similar are they, actually? What similarities do they have? Grammatical structure? Vocabulary? Is it even possible to tell, seeing how few examples of the Black Speech we have?

答:
Well, The Font of All Knowledge (a.k.a. Wikipedia) tells us several things:

There is not much similarity as far as phonology, as Hurrian seems to lack consonant voicing distinction (except in certain circumstances). BS clearly has this distinction.

There's not enough BS to determine much by way of grammar, but Hurrian seems to be extremely agglutinative; BS doesn't appear to be at all.

Hurrian seems to have more vowels.

BS has more consonant clusters.

Upon reading this analysis of Black Speech, I think it is clear that Professor Tolkien must have taken some words & grammatical forms into BS from Hurrian. For example:

-at < Hurrian -ed- formant of jussive/intended future in verbal form formant of future in verbs

-ûk < “All”, “completeness”; Hurrian -ok, formant with a meaning “fully, truthfully, really” in a verbal form.

Hurrian texts were known since discoveries in the 1910s & 1930s. A grammar wasn't published until 1941. Based on the Analysis, I think it very likely that Prof. Tolkien gained inspiration from the Hurrian direction. I'm not sure I'd agree with "strong similarity" based on the extreme paucity of BS evidence. More evidence, a lost grammar, those would be more convincing one way or the other.


答:
With pen and paper: Use index cards

You need two sets of index cards, one ordered alphabetically in the conlang, the other ordered alphabetically in your native language.

You can use index cards of different colour to retrieve, e.g., roots or basic words.

The index cards take up some space, but 10k of them are still managable.

Title: How to keep track of a language?


答: I use multiple sources for Lortho. For the most part, my notes are all kept on Google Docs and its lexicon is stored in Google Spreadsheets. For the display portion of the language I use three different websites: Linguifex, FrathWiki, and ConWorkShop. In addition, I created a challenge on Twitter and Instagram called Lextreme2018 which keeps track of all my new lexemes for the year and the progress of Lortho's script. As I add a new word with the challenge, I also make it a point to add the new word in both the Google Spreadsheet as well as on ConWorkShop. That way I have my dictionary stored in two separate places should one decide to go belly-up.</p>

Title: How to keep track of a language?


答:
By definition, aspect is defined in relation to the action's temporality. As such, no there is no language, natural or otherwise with "spatial aspect".

However, countless languages do incorporate spatiality in verbs, whether that be in morphology or, less commonly, in the verbal paradigm. Germanic languages particles come to mind, but Nuučaan̓uł has affixes meaning, among others "at the ear", "at the side of a vessel" and "on the beach" (Advanced Language Construction, 179-180). Quechua does have (as I understand it) a mandatory directional -mu for verbs of movement. If absent, it explicitly excludes movement toward the speaker.

For sure nothing prevents you from making spatiality the main category affecting verbal forms.

Title: Is the concept of “spatial aspect” attested in any natural language?

Body:
As described here, Aspect refers to the grammatical marking of the relation between topic and eventuality time, that is, it marking in what way the time an action actually occurs relates to the time currently being talked about. So in the sentence “Before returning home, he had gone shopping”, the topic time would be the moment of arriving home, and the eventuality time the time of going shopping, and the English past perfect marks that the latter happened before the former.

A logical extension of this system then would be to not only mark for differences in topic and eventuality time, but also topic and eventuality space. In the above sentence, the topic space (or location) would be the home, while the location of the shopping would be the eventuality space. The sentence might then mark for the fact that the shopping center is far away from the home, as opposed to (for example), inside the home. Further distinctions could be made with regards to motion: shopping is fairly stationary, but in “To get home, he had to drive on the highway”, there is clear motion towards the topic space and this too might be marked.

So I am curious, does anything along these lines exist in natural languages? The closest thing I was able to find were cis- and translocative markers in some languages, but the examples don’t really make it clear that this is used in a mandatory inflectional manner the same way temporal aspect is in many language.


问:
Do toki pona speakers, in practice, permit compounding more than three words?
In toki pona, compounding multiple words together is possible. For example:

tomo: room/box/structure/home

  telo: water/fluid

  tomo telo: bathroom

It also allows compounding three words together:

tomo pi telo nasa: a bar

  kiwen mun laso: blue moon rocks

This is where the official grammar stops, and the official stance is that larger statements are ungrammatical. However, I am wondering if it is common in practice for people to compound more than three words.

Suppose I wanted to say “the broken yellow dome hut.” The official grammar would have me say something in a full sentence:

tomo sike pakala li jelo.

However, despite the rules of grammar, do people ever say:

tomo sike pakala jelo.

Or include other compounds of many words with pi?

(Note: I am not asking whether this is grammatical according to official rules. I am asking whether colloquial toki pona permits this.)

答:
Some of the coffee circumlocutions are rather long like "telo wawa pimejo seli", but in practice you can find shorter ones sufficient in the context

There is even a Reddit about the question: Toki Pona coffee.


问:
Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
Are there known cases of borrowing of words from a constructed language into a natural language?

Words constructed arbitrarily in a natural language don't count here. For example, the Estonian word relv "weapon, firearm" coined in the 20th century (probably influenced by English revolver) wouldn't count.

答:
The verb "to grok", having been coined by Robert Heinlein for his Novel Stranger in a Strange Land has gained significant popularity and is used with the same meaning as in the original language.

I am however not sure whether this meets the criteria of coming from a constructed language: To my knowledge the martians' language is clearly stated to be a full fledged language inside universe of the book, but "to grok" is one of the few (if not only) word to be given explicitly and there does not seem to be a full-fledged grammar or lexicon anywhere.

See also [1]; [2]


答:
Danish has borrowed the word Volapük (spelt volapyk in Danish) from the conlang of the same name, however unlike in the source where it means "world language", in Danish is has come to have the meaning "nonsense, unintellegible garbage", as in
Det er det rene volapyk! "It's all Greek to me (lit. it is the pure volapük)".

Title: Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages

Body:
Are there known cases of borrowing of words from a constructed language into a natural language?

Words constructed arbitrarily in a natural language don't count here. For example, the Estonian word relv "weapon, firearm" coined in the 20th century (probably influenced by English revolver) wouldn't count.


答: At the risk of sounding too obvious, the word Esperanto has been borrowed into many natural languages, with the meaning of "universal neutral way of communication". See e.g. phrases like "mathematics is the Esperanto of natural sciences" etc.


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:
In the novel "Autonomy", when robots speak to each other, they author expressed it in a source code-like English, with a few things you'd see in coded implementations, like mentions of files, message headers and acknowledgements, and so on. Obviously this wasn't a full implementation. If a hobbyist did do a working implementation, I figure it would be a conlang.

In Star Wars, the droids are supposed to speak a language. The attested text can't possibly be anything like a conlang, except maybe as a language of just "oh!", "ah!" "ha-ha!" and other emotive exclamations. If someone hobbyist tried to make a droid language, it would be a nice feature if it could both work as a natural language and a programming language.

People have speculated that Lojban could serve as a programming language, as things like Prolog are programs made out of logical statements. I haven't heard of anyone doing so. Lojban syntax is describe with the same tools as are used for writing compilers, YACC.

Obviously, since this website doesn't need to reproduce Stack Overflow, things that are only programming languages and don't have a way to be used as a natural language (except maybe in jest?) are not only not conlangs, but off topic.


问:
Are Esperanto's part of speech endings actually beneficial?
I was wondering if they really serve any practical advantage.

For one, what they mean depends on what the innate part of speech of the root is, which isn't marked except through the part of speech endings. For instance, attaching the verbal suffix -i to an adjective gives a different meaning than attaching it to a noun.

Further more, Lingua Franca Nova has a rather novel method of marking mart of speech: its own derivational morphology. Unlike Esperanto's affixes, LFN's affixes often transform a specific part of speech into another (or sometimes just leaves it the same). In this say, suffixes that derive nouns are automatically mark the noun for part of speech without the need of an additional affix that serves no other purpose.

But of course, I'm not exactly fluent in the language myself, so I'd like an opinion from people who do actually know and use this language. Are the part of speech endings really useful or are they just a convoluted way to derive new words?

答:
POS markers are markers, same as syntactic position, both derived morphology and otherwise.

In a noisy environment it may be helpful to mark things more than once, so if someone couldn't figure out the POS from context, the roots normal POS class, or syntax, they can infer it from the POS suffix.

This guy has some additional criticism of the POS markers.

I've no familiarity with LNF, so I wouldn't know how that differs or not.


答:
For those unfamiliar with Esperanto POS suffixes,

```<code>-o noun
-i verb (infinitive)
-a adjective
-e adverb
</code>```

For example:

```<code>sano - health
sani - to be healthy
sana - healthy
sane - healthily
</code>```

Since Esperanto has free word order, having POS markers allows the differentiation between the following phrases:

```<code>ĝoje knabino ludas - a girl plays happily
ĝoja knabino ludas - a happy girl plays
</code>```

Esperanto and LFN have a very similar affix system, however unlike LFN, Esperanto root words have no innate part of speech, so there is no way of "adding" a verbal suffix to a noun or an adjective. Rather, you would be changing the nominal/adjectival suffix to the verbal one and forming the verb based on the root word. Knowing the POS of any given word makes understanding unfamiliar words a lot easier, which is very advantageous for an auxiliary language.

With that being said, in EO poetry, nouns often drop their -o ending for aesthetic reasons.

Berlino sen vi estas urb' (urbo) sen harmoni' (harmonio)

  Estas trista, trista, amasloĝej' (amasloĝejo)

Between EO and LFN's, there is no "better" affix system. They are just two different ways of doing the same thing.

Title: Are Esperanto's part of speech endings actually beneficial?

Body:
I was wondering if they really serve any practical advantage.

For one, what they mean depends on what the innate part of speech of the root is, which isn't marked except through the part of speech endings. For instance, attaching the verbal suffix -i to an adjective gives a different meaning than attaching it to a noun.

Further more, Lingua Franca Nova has a rather novel method of marking mart of speech: its own derivational morphology. Unlike Esperanto's affixes, LFN's affixes often transform a specific part of speech into another (or sometimes just leaves it the same). In this say, suffixes that derive nouns are automatically mark the noun for part of speech without the need of an additional affix that serves no other purpose.

But of course, I'm not exactly fluent in the language myself, so I'd like an opinion from people who do actually know and use this language. Are the part of speech endings really useful or are they just a convoluted way to derive new words?

Body:
For those unfamiliar with Esperanto POS suffixes,

-o noun
-i verb (infinitive)
-a adjective
-e adverb

For example:

sano - health
sani - to be healthy
sana - healthy
sane - healthily

Since Esperanto has free word order, having POS markers allows the differentiation between the following phrases:

ĝoje knabino ludas - a girl plays happily
ĝoja knabino ludas - a happy girl plays

Esperanto and LFN have a very similar affix system, however unlike LFN, Esperanto root words have no innate part of speech, so there is no way of "adding" a verbal suffix to a noun or an adjective. Rather, you would be changing the nominal/adjectival suffix to the verbal one and forming the verb based on the root word. Knowing the POS of any given word makes understanding unfamiliar words a lot easier, which is very advantageous for an auxiliary language.

With that being said, in EO poetry, nouns often drop their -o ending for aesthetic reasons.

Berlino sen vi estas urb' (urbo) sen harmoni' (harmonio)

  Estas trista, trista, amasloĝej' (amasloĝejo)

Between EO and LFN's, there is no "better" affix system. They are just two different ways of doing the same thing.


问:
How do I do interlinear glosses for a conlang?
Already, in the meta there are discussions about if people should gloss their sample text. I find their argument persuasive that foreign text without a gloss is useless without several thousand hours of study of the language in question.

The professional linguists are using the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

Should we expect Leipzig Glossing Rules to work for all invented languages?

How does one handle grammar that may not match up with the "standard abbreviations"? Lojban comes to mind, since they as a community reject that grammatical classes in Lojban have any counterpart in natural languages.

Conlang audiences are just as likely to be an amateur audience, unlike the readers of linguistics academic journal. Is there a better way to gloss for a popular audience?

答:
Since

It's really hard to conceive of a human language whose grammar and syntax are truly outside the bound of what exists in natural language (despite Lojban fanboy statements to the contrary) to the point that the Leipzig rules can't be used for it.

The Leipzig rules already are already designed to handle human languages, and human languages can get pretty ridiculous already.

I don't see what's the problem. You don't have to go the strict way either, you can be as specific or as generic as your example needs to be, but the Leipzig rules are always a good place to start.

Besides, people are more likely to argue about the terminology (i.e. which abbreviation you're using, again as in your own Lojban example) or what words to use to gloss something than about the application of Leipzig proper.


答:
Should we expect Leipzig Glossing Rules to work for all invented languages?

No, not all of them, but the set of languages for which they will not work is exceedingly restricted. Basically, just ask yourself "can my language be written in a primarily linear format?" If so, the Leipzig Glossing Rules are for you. If it is carried by sound, you can gloss it. That right there covers very nearly every language that has been asked about on this site so far. If it's a manual sign language, there's still an exceedingly good chance that you can gloss it. If it's a fully-2D non-linear writing system, the alterations you will have to make to the conventions to make it work then become sufficiently large that it would no longer make sense to call the result "Leipzig glossing". But those aren't exactly common.

How does one handle grammar that may not match up with the "standard abbreviations"? Lojban comes to mind, since they as a community reject that grammatical classes in Lojban have any counterpart in natural languages.

Exactly the same way the professionals do: by providing a glossary of your non-standard abbreviations.

Conlang audiences are just as likely to be an amateur audience, unlike the readers of linguistics academic journal. Is there a better way to gloss for a popular audience?

That depends on what you are trying to communicate to that popular audience. In some cases, a full gloss may not be needed, even for a professional audience. A simple set of parallel translations demonstrating the effect of a straightforward morphological or syntactic alternation, for example, may be sufficient for its purpose. But in the general case... I don't think so. Leipzig glosses are intended to be easy to understand, and they succeed at that about as well as it is possible to do in most cases.

Title: How do I do interlinear glosses for a conlang?

Body:
Already, in the meta there are discussions about if people should gloss their sample text. I find their argument persuasive that foreign text without a gloss is useless without several thousand hours of study of the language in question.

The professional linguists are using the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

Should we expect Leipzig Glossing Rules to work for all invented languages?

How does one handle grammar that may not match up with the "standard abbreviations"? Lojban comes to mind, since they as a community reject that grammatical classes in Lojban have any counterpart in natural languages.

Conlang audiences are just as likely to be an amateur audience, unlike the readers of linguistics academic journal. Is there a better way to gloss for a popular audience?


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

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

For now, everything I thought about:

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

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

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

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

Any more ideas?

答:
A language communicates ideas. If the set of ideas communicable by your language is large enough that it is adequate for any situation in your game, then it's good enough. No language is able to communicate all possible human thoughts; some conlangs (e.g. Ithkuil) try to expand the set of ideas that it can convey, but it is still not totally encapsulating.

Another thing to think about is conflation. For example, Toki Pona may be effective at communicating a wide range of ideas, but it often conflates or simplifies concepts (the lack of words for specific numbers being an obvious example of this).

Title: "Turing-completeness" in conlangs


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

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

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

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

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

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

答:
Honestly, what order you build your vocabulary in doesn't much matter, as long as it remains internally consistent when it comes to your conlang's semantic and morphosyntactic rules (and frankly, even those can be retconned).

Thus, different conlangers will build their vocabulary in different orders, and it really doesn't much matter which words you choose to coin first. I personally most often coin new words as I need them for translations (similarly, I flesh out my grammar as I encounter grammatical concepts I can't translate well in translations). I'll either find quotes to translate on my own, participate in conlanging challenges on /r/conlangs, or work on something like the Conlanging Syntax Test or, yes, perhaps a Swadesh List (or one of the improved alternatives, such as the Leipzig-Jakarta list -- there are a great number of such "concept lists" collected at CLLD-Concepticon).

Yes, these choices are incredibly arbitrary, but frankly, there isn't any way of choosing what words to coin first that isn't arbitrary. So just pick something arbitrarily and get started!


问:
Are there any resources to learn Solresol available in English?
I've been interested in learning Solresol, as the idea of it intrigues me. But I haven't been able to find anything in English to learn it from (the original works on the language are in French, which I don't know).

I checked out sidosi.org, and it shows a couple of links to an English translation of the original grammar of Solresol, but one redirects back to the sidosi.org homepage, and one leads to a message saying the site has been retired from service. Other resources are also linked, and also turn out to be missing.

So are there any resources (preferably online) to learn Solresol from English?

答:
Sorry I missed this question. Many of the main links on Sidosi's Resources page are unreliable, but you can view the archived copies by expanding the info box for a resource (click the + to the left of the title), or clicking the "Show/Hide All" link near the top of the page.

Alternatively, there is a beta Resources page that hasn't been widely publicized yet, and it presents the resources in a much better format than before, with no broken links. It's only considered beta because this new version was coded from scratch, and there are a ton of new resources due to be added.

There are still many original French documents that haven't been translated to English (Sudre's book, for example), so the Solresol community as a whole shares in your struggle for English resources. Basically, there still aren't any good English resources for learning Solresol, but hopefully the ones that are available help.