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:
The best parallel for Turing completeness in human languages is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The NSM proposes that there is a limited set of basic semantic concepts which all human languages have, and which are not reducible to other concepts. They call these "semantic primes", because you combine them to get all other meanings, and because they can't be broken down. The list of primes, currently numbering 65, is a work in progress as new primes are proposed and evaluated, but after over 45 years of work on the theory the list has proven to be very reliable and new primes are only rarely proposed.

The NSM is a good guide therefore for judging whether a conlang is "complete" - whether it would be as capable for expressing human thought as any natural language. If a conlang has vocabulary items (they can be words, affixes, or phrases) for each of the semantic primes then I would judge it to be complete.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0

Title: "Turing-completeness" in conlangs


问:
Which sounds could a lipless humanoid produce?
In my world, I have a race of humanoids who speak a language called Gé̃kt, which is derived from various Eastern Iranian languages such as Khotanese, Ossetian, Yaghnobi and Bactrian with a dash of Persian (a Western Iranian language) thrown in for good measure. However, these humanoids lack lips and I have no idea how this traits would affect their speech.

For reference, here are Gé̃kt's constants and vowels.

Consonants: pʰ p p' b f v m w tʰ t t'd tsʰ ts dz s z n r rr l ṭʰ ṭ ḍ ṭsʰ ṣ ẓ ṇ ṛ tsʰ tṡ dż ṅ y kʰ k k' g x y ṅ h q qʷ m  t͡s t͡sʼ d͡z t͡ʃ t͡ʃ' d͡ʒ χ χʷ ʁ w j ɫ

Vowels: ι [i] ο [u] ε [e] α, ο [ə] ο [o]? α [a] ει, ι [iː] ο [uː] η [eː] ω [oː] α [aː] e æ o u ɨ ɛː ɔː

What sounds may they use to communicate?

答:
At first sight, it seems that it is impossible for the lipless humanoids to produce any sounds that involve the lips in their production, this concerns the following groups of sounds:

bilabial consonants: pʰ p p' b m w

labiodental consonants: f v

labialised consonants: qʷ χʷ

rounded vowels: o u ɔ

But: There is a known art, named ventriloquism, where replacement sounds for those sounds that require visible lip movement are used to produce understandable speech. Maybe the lipless humanoids can cope with this and even learn to produce the Gé̃kt's sounds using such techniques.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
What is the meaning of this Toki Pona sentence?
I found a sentence written in order to prove that Toki Pona is a complete language. As far as I know it is a foolish nominal sentence.

What is the English translation?

pona sona pi (wawa pi ma Lipija) poka toki lawa mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Atilanisi.

答: I don't know what the person who wrote that sentence intended, but pona sona or sona pona, the proper order, is usually translated as 'wisdom'. I also wouldn't use toki lawa to mean think. That's usually part of pilin (mi pilin e ni: = I think/feel this:). I would use toki lawa as demand/command, as in a way of saying somebody is speaking with authority, and expecting their order to be followed. jan lawa li toki lawa. li wile e ni: wile ona li kama pali. A boss/leader gives an order. He expects his wishes to be done. "Atilanisi is not even acceptable in toki pona either because "ti" is considered an 'illegal' syllable. If that is intended to say 'Atlantis' it would be something more like 'Alansi'. According to the transliteration rules, the most prominent consonants are used, replaced for similar sounds if neccesary (g becomes k, r becomes l or w, d becomes t, j becomes s), & the rest are dropped if deemed not necessary. Sometimes letter pairs are reversed to make a CV syllable as in the case of Israel (Isale). The 'el' becomes 'le'. You are also generally discouraged from using more syllables than the original word. As far as the meaning of the sentence, I would translate it as "The wisdom of (strength of Libya) beside much/many Orders/commands(?) of vice president of Atlantis."</p>


问:
Are there any Conlangs using Chinese characters?
The Chinese character system is one that is universal to many Chinese dialects. Two people can pronounce the same character in two different ways, but when writing to each other it is intelligible. </p>

<p>Have people used this opportunity to create a sort of conlang dialect of the language, and in doing so making up entirely new sound for the characters, and perhaps even making up new grammar too. I could image it even being a serious bastardizing of the characters too take on new meanings that would bring it closer to, say, a European language. Like how one uses the Latin alphabet to create a conlang. </p>

答: Outright Chinese characters? I am not aware of one (Though you might want to look up A Book from the Sky). Conlangs using Chinese-style characters? Certainly. Mark Rosenfelder, in Advanced Language Construction, draws examples from his own Uyseʔ and Wede:i. While the Grammar of Wede:i is available, only a little of its written system us described, and Uyseʔ is hardly online at all. This reflects more on the sheer amount of work to make an ideogram system presentable to the reader though.


答:
Toki pona is a minimalist language with a ~125 word vocabulary that can be written using a proposed system of either Chinese or Japanese characters, although it is officially written in the Latin alphabet.

On tokipona.net, click on "Word List" in the group of links at the top for the full list of words, or compress for ways to write it using different alphabets. 言良り良去私 (toki pona li pona tawa mi)='I like toki pona.', literally 'toki pona is good to me'.

Title: Are there any Conlangs using Chinese characters?

Body:
The Chinese character system is one that is universal to many Chinese dialects. Two people can pronounce the same character in two different ways, but when writing to each other it is intelligible. </p>

<p>Have people used this opportunity to create a sort of conlang dialect of the language, and in doing so making up entirely new sound for the characters, and perhaps even making up new grammar too. I could image it even being a serious bastardizing of the characters too take on new meanings that would bring it closer to, say, a European language. Like how one uses the Latin alphabet to create a conlang. </p>


问:
How does one write an easily decipherable language?
I'm writing a book about humans finding alien writing off-planet, which is why I want to know how—without referencing known human languages like the Rosetta Stone does—it may be deciphered.

Does it help to have children's books that teach aliens to read or spell, linguistic books with diagrams of alien phonology or morphology, or a Rosetta Stone with alien languages or dialects?

答:
It may be impossible.

All successful real-world language decipherments—Linear B, Egyptian, Hittite—have involved connections with other known languages. Linear B (Mycenaean) is closely related to Classical Greek, for example; Egyptian is related to Coptic and a bit more distantly to Hebrew and Arabic; Hittite is a distant relative to the whole Indo-European family.

Even if you only look at the writing system, figuring out Linear B involved connecting known place names like "Knossos" with words that were more common in inscriptions at Knossos than elsewhere. Ventris's biggest breakthrough came when he hypothesized that Kober's ??-C₄V₂-C₂V₂ might be k-no-so, which gave tentative values for C₂, C₄, and V₂, and extrapolated from there.

With an alien language, we have no idea what names they used for places. We don't have any loanwords or names transcribed in other languages to compare against. We don't know if they use anything resembling phonetics to communicate—or if their language is even fundamentally based on recursion like ours is.

But…

Maybe humans and Thulians have never made contact before, but the Borean language is known, and an ancient Borean imperial decree—translated into Thulian—is found in the excavations.

Maybe Thulian and Borean are part of a language family—that hints to the linguists that Thulian might use a stack-based syntax (or whatever other weirdly inhuman feature you like) just like Borean does.

Maybe there's some old Thulian technology stored in Area 51, taken from a crashed spaceship; it contains records of an early Thulian attempt to figure out human languages (maybe even a rudimentary grammar of English written in Thulian).

Maybe they can find a live Thulian, or, failing that, an artificial intelligence of some sort, which can give them real-time feedback—a native speaker is orders of magnitude more useful than any inscriptions can ever be.

Maybe Thulian is related to some obscure Earth language(!). There used to be contact between Earth and Thule, which stopped millennia ago, and Thulian shares a distant ancestor of Etruscan/Sumerian/Pirahã/your favorite real-world language isolate. (Though be prepared for a lot of strong linguistic opinions if you decide to weigh in on the Pirahã controversy!)

Maybe universal grammar (in whatever form you like) is universal even across planets, and Thulian still has recognizable levels of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

None of these on their own would make decipherment easy—but the more you add, the easier it gets. At some point, it becomes possible, and that's what matters for a story.

OwnerDisplayName: MoMoGoGo


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:
Conlangs and programming languages are different things.
Conlangs are languages designed for human communication. For human to human communication.

No programming language can be regarded as a language in that sense.

Riley Martine's example uses
python-like syntax. But at the same time it uses real English words to convey the meaning.
Computer is not able to understand the meaning of these words, it just runs code.

Simple Python example:

```<code>greetingString = "Hello"

print(greetingString)
</code>```

Computer just set string "Hello" to variable greetingString and prints it to the screen.

Computer does NOT understand the meaning of the word . For computer it's just a computer variable value, nothing else.

Body:
Conlangs and programming languages are different things.
Conlangs are languages designed for human communication. For human to human communication.

No programming language can be regarded as a language in that sense.

Riley Martine's example uses
python-like syntax. But at the same time it uses real English words to convey the meaning.
Computer is not able to understand the meaning of these words, it just runs code.

Simple Python example:

greetingString = "Hello"

print(greetingString)

Computer just set string "Hello" to variable greetingString and prints it to the screen.

Computer does NOT understand the meaning of the word . For computer it's just a computer variable value, nothing else.


答:
I'm trying to be Devil's Advocate here: In a way programming languages are constructed languages, but they are usually very specific and narrow in focus: one could view them as sublanguages aimed at expressing algorithms or annotating other information. An example for a human sublanguage would be the language of recipes. Words that have multiple meanings in English generally have only one specific meaning in a sublanguage. The syntactic structures are simplified, and often different from general English. Certain aspects of the range of human expressions are left out or limited (you might talk about emotions or feelings, but they would only relate to the food mentioned).

You could design a programming language that is suited to expressing recipes, and it could be used to drive a cooking robot. That programming language could also be read by humans, who would understand the meaning of it, and could translate it into other languages. In this sense 'programming language' is a bit of a red herring: it's just a formal representation of meaning. And (propositional) meaning can easily be expressed in predicate calculus or related formalisms. Is CD representation a conlang, or just an abstract representation of actions/states? It can certainly be transformed into any number of other languages (natural or constructed), and it can express a reasonable range of human activity.

Where do you draw the line? At what point does a constructed language cross the boundary between being simply a mark-up or programming language to being suitable for human communication? What is the essence that, say, HTML, is missing, but that toki pona, Klingon, or Esperanto have? Note: I'm not suggesting that HTML is a conlang, but it can be used to encode a specific kind of meaning, and XML can even encode semantic relationships. But they might not be very suitable for inter-human communication.

You could, though, envisage two people with no common language between them who use a programming language to work together on solving a problem. It would be tough, but should be possible.

In my view there is a continuum between 'fully formed' languages on the one hand, and restricted or sublanguages on the other. While it is difficult to formally represent the more complex languages (because they are so complex), the simpler end of the spectrum can be encoded in such a representation. Predicate calculus is one representation, and any programming language is another one. There is no hard boundary between the two, so in a way (even though nobody would really 'speak' in a programming language) the answer is: yes, programming languages can be categorised as conlangs.

Title: Can programming languages be categorized as conlangs?

Body:
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


问:
What makes lojban such a "logical" language?
The title says it all. While I have not studied it, I have repeatedly heard that lojban is an especially "logical" language, one that could even be a way to speak a "natural" language to the computer that it can understand.

What feature of lojban (or features) makes this so? Is it just that humans haven't gotten to it yet?

答:
What is meant by "logical language", is that the language's grammar is engineered so that any statement you make is syntactically unambiguous. Grammatically correct statements only parse one way.

In natural languages, and many constructed languages, the meaning of a statement can be interpreted to be a number of things, depending on context.

An example to given in the "Complete Lojban Language" book (CLL), is the term "Pretty Little Girls’ School". In English, there's no way to tell what this means. Does it mean a school for "pretty little girls", a pretty school for "little girls", or a small school that is pretty and for girls?

Lojban's grammar is such that the relationship between words is unambiguous. The meaning to words themselves doesn't matter all too much to the language's designers, just the relation between those words. As such, ambiguity is still possible, but usually in the form of semantic vagueness.

That said, it's not like there's only one way to say anything. According to the CLL, there are Forty ways to translate the English phrase "Pretty Little Girls' School" into Lojban. Among them, is melbi cmalu nixli ckule, which would be a direct translation of the English phrase, word-for-word, and refer a "school for girls who are beautifully small". Whatever "beautifully small" means.

But if you go through the list of possible interpretations, you'll notice that there are in fact some statements that evaluate to the same meaning, either because that's how the semantics work out, or because the two statements can be logically equivalent. (2 + 2 = 4 is equivalent to 2 × 2 = 4 and 2² = 4)

Ultimately, these properties are what make Lojban a tempting tool to use for communicating with AI, who are notoriously bad at working out vague context we use in everyday speech. And it's also why Lojban is called a "Logical Language".


答:
It is even almost impossible for human languages. For all successful decipherings of historical writing systems some kind of clue was needed in the form of a related extant language or dictionaries and/or bilingual documents with one already known language.

When a human group wants to leave something long-term decipherable, maybe they can prepare some teaching materials with rich illustrations to convey the gist of their language. Later readers may come up with some artificial pronunciation for their script not unlike Egyptological pronunciation.

Throwing in aliens makes it even more difficult: Even when the aliens follow the procedure outlined above, will humans be able to understand the graphical representations and pictures they use? Their body parts and their home environment may be very different from ours.

Title: How does one write an easily decipherable language?

Body:
I'm writing a book about humans finding alien writing off-planet, which is why I want to know how—without referencing known human languages like the Rosetta Stone does—it may be deciphered.

Does it help to have children's books that teach aliens to read or spell, linguistic books with diagrams of alien phonology or morphology, or a Rosetta Stone with alien languages or dialects?


答:
There have been serious attempts at this by NASA: the Pioneer Plaque and the Voyager Golden Record. The intention is for them to be received by aliens, who will be able to use them to find out about human culture (and then hopefully won't come over to subjugate us with their superior technology!)

They use lots of universal physical and mathematical quantities as references, and with the understanding that any sufficiently advanced society will be able to identify them. For example the molecular structure of hydrogen, and a diagram of the solar system.

So one key element for easy decipherability would be to have texts available describing something universally known across the universe.

Another would be to have a simple writing system. Hangul is based on the positions of the vocal tract, which would be an aid for deciphering. It is somewhat complicated by combining multiple symbols in blocks, similarly to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

A simple grammar like toki pona would help to quickly discover regularities in the language. There are separators between the verb and the object, and there is usually only one verb per sentence. Complex sentences are broken down into a sequence of multiple sentences. Even without understanding the words, it is easy to identify the syntactic structures.

Texts could be formulaic in structure. One clue that helped decipher German messages encoded with the Enigma machine was their fixed structure, and the fact that they always ended in the same phrase, "Heil Hitler" -- that served as a useful anchor point when trying to work out the code. If your alien texts also have a similar structure, then you could use that to identify greetings or other formulaic expressions.

The most difficult aspect would be the vocabulary, especially abstract words, or polysemous words (ie words with multiple meanings). For this simple texts, or even encyclopedias and (monolingual) dictionaries would provide a good entrance point.

Most human languages follow certain quantitative regularities, which we now know about. There has been some work on the Phaistos Disc which concluded that if it is a text in an unknown language, it is most likey to use a syllabic writing system, ie the symbols stand for syllables rather than letters. This can be derived from the frequency distribution of the symbols. Of course it might not be a text -- my pet hypothesis is that it is part of a board game :)

In short, there are a number of aspects you could take into account for this. With what we know about languages and their properties nowadays, it should be quite convincing for a space mission to have a linguist as part of their team who could work on deciphering any foreign languages without too many problems. Of course it would also depend how close the alien culture was to human cultures. Language is only part of the puzzle.


问:
How common are reflexive pronouns in natlangs?
I'm working on the pronoun system of one of my conlangs, and I can't find any resource that can tell me how commonly reflexive pronouns occur in natural languages.

Is a reflexive something I need to add to be naturalistic? And if it isn't is there a specific reason/way a lack of reflexive pronouns occurs?

答:
Generally speaking, you need a reflexive pronoun of some type if not having one causes ambiguity in who did what to whom. Assume English had no reflexives. "I tossed the ball to I" and "You tossed the ball to you" (assuming singular "you") are quite understandable as one person tossing the ball to themselves, thus no reflexive needed. "She tossed the ball to he", acceptable. But suppose you had "She tossed the ball to she", and it's been previously established there is more than one woman present. Did person A throw the ball to Person B, or did she toss the ball up in the air and caught it herself? There's no way to tell. An example like that is why German only has a distinctive reflexive in third person; first and second person don't have that same ambiguity.

You can get rid of the reflexive entirely if your verb system, to use one possibility, allows a given verb to indicate if it takes a direct or indirect object, or if it does not. Let's say that English verbs used the affix a- to indicate the verb is ditransitive (it has both a direct and indirect object) and no affix to indicate purely transitive (it only has a direct object).

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She a-threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.

Under a system like that, English wouldn't need a reflexive pronoun because the verb would make it clear whether the subject was performing the action on themselves, or using themselves as the indirect object, or whether something else was the recipient of the action. One could argue the affix a- is similar to the single Icelandic reflexive pronoun that's used for everything.

In Inuktitut, verbs that are are equivalent to English intransitive verbs use one suffix attached to them to indicate the subject:

pisuk to walk

pisuktunga I am walking

pisuktutit You (singular) are walking

pisuktuq He/She/It is walking

Specific verbs, equivalent to transitive verbs, use a different set of suffixes that indicate both subject and object:

qukiq to shoot something

qukiqtagit I shoot you

qukiqtara I shoot him/her/it

qukiqtarma You shoot me

qukiqtait You shoot him/her/it

qukiqtaanga He/she/it shoot me

qukiqtaatit He/she/it shoot you

qukiqtanga He/she/it shoot that other he/she/it

Here's where the reflexives come in: if you don't use the second set of suffixes, but instead use the first set, then the verb becomes a reflexive: the subject did something to themselves.

qukiqtunga I shoot myself

qukiqtutit You shoot yourself

qukiqtuq He/She/It shoot themself

Attaching the suffix that goes on intransitive verbs onto a transitive verb turns that verb into a reflexive.

So, if your verb conjugation allows that sort of thing, then you can get away with not using reflexive pronouns. The verb indicates it.

On the other hand, if your verb doesn't allow you to do that, then you need reflexives in order to remove the ambiguity when you get into situations where it's not clear who is doing what to whom.

Another way: go back to that first English example I used. Suppose English had multiple third person singular pronouns, such that you didn't just have "she", but "she-1", "she-2", and perhaps more. Then what does the example look like?

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-2." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-1." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.

No ambiguity. The context makes it clear that Mary is she-1 (Mary had the ball, she-1 threw the ball, therefore Mary is she-1, so Susan is she-2).

A third option is context. You might have a language where you do need to gather more information in order to determine what's going on.

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan threw it back." - Mary obviously threw the ball to Susan.

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan then asked for the ball." - Mary apparently didn't throw the ball to Susan, since Susan asked for it after it had been thrown and caught.

So, three possible ways to get away without reflexive pronouns. So it's not a matter of how common or uncommon it is, but does the grammar of the language allow you to get away without them, or is it necessary because there's no other way of providing the same information?


问:
What decides where is the break between syllables?
I'm getting started with creating a language and I run into trouble when I started using rules I devised for protolanguage (e.g. only open syllables).

However I run into trouble when I tried to apply it to string [epse] which I'd syllabilized as [ep.se] rather than [e.pse]. I'm assuming I did something wrong with sonority hierarchy but I failed to find resources about what exactly.

EDIT: I would prefer generic rules for syllabication but for the Y problem - the rules I set so far is (C)CV syllable where:

If there are two consonants exactly one of them is a fricative (s, x or ʂ)

Fricative must follow plosives, nasals and trills but must precede lateral approximants (l)

答:
Syllables are inherent to the spoken language and a native of that language will take a certain grouping of letters and turn it into a set of syllables according to that language’s rules.

In German, hyphenation generally follows syllables boundaries. About a decade ago, an article in a newspaper talked about the Chinese city of Shenyang but hyphenated it Sheny-ang. From a German point of view that could have been an acceptable syllable grouping if y is considered a vowel as ya (or ia) is not an acceptable diphthong, but Shen-yang (y as a half-vowel) would also have worked. For Chinese, only Shen-yang is possible because of the very restricted set of syllables. In Japanese, Shen-yan(g) or She-nyan(g) (strictly speaking, Japanese doesn’t have an ng sound unless k or g follow) would be possible with a y in the spelling; She-ni-an(g) or Shen-i-an(g) would strictly require an i in there.

As you maybe see, what will be seen depends on the language, and only what is possible will be produced. Another example is Japanese again, which only has open syllables or those ending in n. So when a Japanese tries to pronounce startling, that tends to end up somewhere near sutartolingu, a five-syllable (seven-mora) word. Thus, a speaker of your conlang will not even consider ep-se a possibility but will default to e-pse, if that is all the language does.

For the record, some languages with loose syllable rules still tend to end up with ambiguity. For example, the Finnish place Yli-Ii will have to have a hyphen to signify the short-long sequence. The German word Bakterien has an unusual syllable boundary between i and e (Bak-te-ri-en) while ie usually just signifies a long /i/ sound. Those things will need to be learnt at school, there is no way to predict.


问:
Is there a Semitic zonal language?
I am familiar with zonal languages that attempt to smooth out and simplify the differences between languages within a family, such as Slovio for the Slavic languages and Folkspraak for the Germanic languages. Is there an existing zonal language or language project for the Semitic language family?</p>

答:
This was not easy to find!

A bit of jazz Semitic auxlanging going on here.

Ayvarith seems to be an invented language based on Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic.

Title: Is there a Semitic zonal language?


问:
Are suffixes in Ido agglutinative?
I was thinking what is the correct way to say "Little princess" in Ido.

(EN) Little princess - Little (indicates the "size") Princess (descendant of some royal crown and that descendant is female).

(ES) Princesita - Princes (root), -it- (suffix for "litte"), -a (indicates female gender).

We should translate as in english like "Mikra princino"? or in the Spanish way like "Princetino"?

If Ido suffixes are agglutinative, is there a particular order? "-et" suffix for little "-in" for female... we could get "Princineto".

答:
After a research, I finally found this example which explains this.

si quieres decir una perra (adulta) pequeña, el orden adecuado es entonces perra+pequeña = hundineto. El orden contrario es poco natural y hace dudar al que oye la palabra hundetino = perrito hembra

So the valid ones for Little princess are:
1. Mikra princino = "Little" + "female descendant of some royal crown"
2. Princineto = A female descendant of some royal crown who is little.

"Princetino" would be like:
A little descendant of some royal crown who is female.

Title: Are suffixes in Ido agglutinative?


问:
Is there any evidence that learning a zonal Slavic conlang can help conversing with native speakers of Slavic languages
The relatively high degree of mutual intercomprehensibility of the Slavic languages has fascinated a lot of people for a long time. It was also a motivation in the design of zonal constructed languages based on Slavic languages (e.g., Slovio and Interslavic).

Are there studies or experiments showing that learning a zonal Slavic-based conlang enables communication with native speakers of Slavic languages at least to some degree?

答:
Yes, they show. Slovio is not a zonal conlang, it is supposed to be a kind of Slavic Esperanto. It took place 20 years ago, but nowadays noone wants to use it.

Nevertheless, Interslavic is comprehensible for all Slavic people. Speaker of Interslavic went abroad to different Slavic countries and expressed their idea using Interslavic instead of native languages or English. And it worked. People understand the meaning, though the language can sound strange or event funny to them. And if it does, Interslavic is a viable project and succeeds in its challenge.


答: "Omnilingual" was mentioned in comments, and there's your answer; assuming you have two technologically and scientifically advanced cultures, there are universal constants that can be used as a basis that historical examples on Earth didn't have, and thus we can't use to decipher old languages. The story used the discovery of the Martian periodic table as the clue that allowed the breakthrough because there is only one periodic table; chemistry and atoms are the same everywhere. To use an example inspired by that story, if you see something like "frazzlump + frazzlump + bork = blarg", and "frazzlump" is the first entry in the table and "bork" is the eighth, you know "blarg" probably means "water".</p>


问:
Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?
Exactly what it says on the can - I'm looking for a word in tlhingan-Hol (Klingon) for "skull".

Fallback: In case there isn't a canon word, I'm defaulting to using "head bone" as a replacement. I know from TKD that nach is "head" and Hom is "bone". Is this combination nach Hom correct? e.g. is jaghpu'ma' nach HomDu' a reasonable translation for "our enemies' skulls"?

答:
Indeed, there doesn't seem to be any canon word for "skull" in Klingon, so a compound should be fine.

Note, however, that some compounds are constructed without separation between their parts (see for example Wiktionary's list of Klingon compound words) with no apparent rule as to why, so "skull" could conceivably be nachHom.

BUT, since -Hom is also the diminutive suffix, nachHom would primarily mean "little skull", making nach Hom is the less ambiguous translation.

Title: Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?


答:
I'm going to assume that the aliens' language is intentionally easy to decipher and that they are actively trying to allow other species to piece together the meaning of what they produce. I'm also going to assume that these are written or written-ish artifacts and what they look like might differ from how the aliens actually communicate in person.

I don't think the semantic content of individual signs is going to be obvious or easy to infer, but you can keep their overall number low.

One can have conventions in the orthography that make the grammatical structure really obvious.

One can have no irregular inflection and encode the parse tree directly in the orthography.

```<code>( and ( possible ( ( not have ) ( and [ Change Word ] ( not ( can predict ) ) ) ) )
    ( possible ( ( encode directly ) [ Tree Meaning ] ( in [ System Writing ] ) ) ) )
</code>```

The example above consistently marks non-predicates with Capitalization and uses brackets to mark compounds where the meaning of the whole compound is pragmatically inferable from the meaning of its constituents but not directly implied by them.

Another idea is to make the thing that humans discover a computer or some other kind of interactive piece of alien technology.

It would be easy for humans to test their hypotheses about how the aliens' language worked if the computer was capable of answering questions formulated in the language or if the program would attempt to correct mistakes and either show the corrected response or prompt the user to pick a corrected response before answering.

Body:
I'm going to assume that the aliens' language is intentionally easy to decipher and that they are actively trying to allow other species to piece together the meaning of what they produce. I'm also going to assume that these are written or written-ish artifacts and what they look like might differ from how the aliens actually communicate in person.

I don't think the semantic content of individual signs is going to be obvious or easy to infer, but you can keep their overall number low.

One can have conventions in the orthography that make the grammatical structure really obvious.

One can have no irregular inflection and encode the parse tree directly in the orthography.

( and ( possible ( ( not have ) ( and [ Change Word ] ( not ( can predict ) ) ) ) )
    ( possible ( ( encode directly ) [ Tree Meaning ] ( in [ System Writing ] ) ) ) )

The example above consistently marks non-predicates with Capitalization and uses brackets to mark compounds where the meaning of the whole compound is pragmatically inferable from the meaning of its constituents but not directly implied by them.

Another idea is to make the thing that humans discover a computer or some other kind of interactive piece of alien technology.

It would be easy for humans to test their hypotheses about how the aliens' language worked if the computer was capable of answering questions formulated in the language or if the program would attempt to correct mistakes and either show the corrected response or prompt the user to pick a corrected response before answering.


问:
Is the Voynich manuscript written in a natural or constructed language?
The Voynich manuscript is dated to the early 15th century.

It is a medieval handwritten book of almost 250 pages, and even today the text cannot be understood. It has become quite famous, and it is recognised as one of the main unsolved problems in the history of cryptography.

Can we tell whether it is written in a natural or constructed language?

答:
Hope springs eternal. This article points to one recent lead in computational linguistics. original article here

I've read that some work has been done on the script, indicating that there are patterns, even if we don't know what they are referring to.

I have a copy of V.M. (a book èvery glossopoet should have!). I'm frankly of the opinion that, considering the size of the book and the cost of the materials in it and the cost in time to produce the work, it can't just be 240some pages of random nonsense. It's too expensive and would be an incredible, inconceivable waste of resources if it were just a meaningless & private toy of some overly rich maker.

Each page of vellum requires a relatively labour intensive process to make. Inks have to be made. Each page has to be hand written and hand drawn. Some pages are really large fold-outs.  Almost every page is decorated in some way. That's a lot of work for it be nothing at all but a pretty conversation piece!


问:
International Language
I was reading International Auxiliary Language, but I don't like their setups.

Because, mostly, they use Latin alphabets!

And that, my friends, cause confusions!

No matter what the letter was intended to be pronounced, EVERY country (especially those use uses Latin alphabets such as English, German, French, Spanish, etc.) WILL pronounce it in their own way!

'J' is pronounced 'h' in Spanish, 'z' in French, 'y' in German.

Many country also have different pronunciation for 'H' and 'R'.

Other than that, many countries are even "incapable of" pronouncing letters such as 'RR' in Spanish or 'Ü' in German!

Due to those drawbacks, the invented language bound to be less efficient than it was intended to be!

So, I was thinking, is there a way to overcome such drawbacks!?

First of all, the most obvious approach is to find a set of alphabets that "Nobody had in common"! At least, find those letters that are used by "only one country"! Such as some letters in Greek alphabets (As far as I know, Greek are the only country that use Greek alphabets).

Second, I think it's better to divide that alphabets into 2 group. First group are those letters that "every people in every country know how to pronounce". I think it's good to base it on Japanese, because Japanese has the least amount of pronunciations as far as I know. I believe they are the easiest language to learn pronunciation-wise.

This group of letters build up the "basic and conceptual words", where all other words are the "combination product" of these words. You can think it as the "building block" of the words.

Thus, I think it's better to make the words "a word a syllable" such as Chinese. And 1-syllable words made from the "Basic letters" are the "building block" of the words. More complicated words are the combination of these "basic conceptual words". Such as "Refrigerator" are actually "Electronic Ice Box" in Chinese.

I also think it's better to make the letters "phonetic"! 'A' is always pronounced 'a' NO MATTER WHAT! Unlike English, 'A' has 2 million ways of pronunciation!

The second group of letters are those pronunciations that "All the countries in the world that COULD EVER MADE! I know this might sounds like far fetching, but the idea is "Easy for everybody to learn such language. And for those who are familiar with the language, it will be easy for them to learn EVERY LANGUAGE"!

You can think it as "The first group letters are the intersection of the pronunciations of every language, and the second group are the union of the pronunciations of every language".

And the second group of letters are only used for those more advanced, probably grammatical, concepts. Which is "Unnecessary for basic conversations but critical for literature".

So, my question is:

Are such ideas feasible? What's the ups-and-downs, pros-and-cons of my ideas? Did I miss something? What else should I pay special attention to?

答:
You seem to be confusing sounds with their representation in writing; similarly, countries and languages are not equivalent either.

There is an inventory of sounds that are used in human languages; though most languages only use a small portion of it. If you are aiming for an international language, you should probably select those sounds that are common to most or all languages. I believe that toki pona comes close to that.

Representing these sounds in writing is a completely different matter. Because different languages use the same letter to represent different sounds, your best bet might be to make up a completely new alphabet; then you don't have any pre-conceived notions of pronunciation to struggle with. On the flip side, everybody then has to learn the letters and how to pronounce them, which makes your language harder to learn.

In your question you also touch on morphology: that is a whole different field, which you should probably put in a separate question.

So, to summarise:

each language has an inventory of sounds it uses, these are called phonemes.

phonemes are represented in writing by letters; this is not a 1:1 mapping, and also
depends on accents and dialectal variation.

Letters can have diacritics (such as the dots on top of the ü) — these usually make them separate letters from the base form.

the letter-phoneme mapping is arbitrary; there is nothing inherent in the letter that determines how it should be pronounced.

In general I would recommend that you read up on some of the concepts of linguistics, as that would make it easier for you to express what exactly you want to achieve.

Title: International Language


问:
How would I make an efficient, written, language while still providing the least ambiguity that is reasonable?
I plan on having some ambiguity for stuff like wordplay (and to make the language feel natural). By efficient, I mean the language takes up little space on the document it is conveying information on.

The idea is the language would be "alien" or "magical" as I am planning on using this language I am making in my game for magical symbols. I plan on eventually adding a spoken equivalent of it later, but I am not concerned about that now. It is also going to be part of the lore of my game, so the naturalness of the language helps a lot (so it can have a history to it).

The wordplay can be used to have magical mishaps from using a similar, but wrong word. The last thing I plan on adding is since it is a magic based language, I only need to have one symbol per word.

The idea behind the grammatical structure would convey:
Subject, Verb, Action. I would then use adjectives to modify the meaning of the subject, action, or verb. However, I don't know if I am going to include articles in the languages, but that depends on how I make the characters for the subjects, verbs, and actions.

This is not meant to be a romance language as its purpose is for use in spells and potion recipes.

I guess what I am asking for is how to make the language use grammar and structure that can be read and written efficiently. How would I make grammar and language structure that can be read and written efficiently?

答:
First a in this form brand new fact from natural languages: All natural languages are of approximately the same efficiency despite their quite noticeable differences (some languages are spoken at a rather fast pace in syllables per second, but than the information content of a syllable is lower than in other languages that are spoken more slowly). The reference is Christophe Coupé, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu, and François Pellegrino, Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche and they give a value of 39 ± 5 bit/s.

So you can expect that a naturalistic constructed language will fall in about the same range; maybe somewhat less efficient, because it is difficult to get things just right by construction that have been optimised by language evolution over a long time.

For completely symbolic languages, look up the term pasigraphy and take a glimpse on some systems that have already been invented.


问:
Is mathematics considered a constructed language?
Mathematics consists of various names, relationships, etc. that have been consciously constructed and developed over time. On the other hand its a "formal" language whose scope is extremely specialized compared to a regular language. How else does mathematics compare/contrast with constructed languages?</p>

答:
I think Programming and Mathematics fail to meet the standard because, despite being more precise, they are ultimately nowhere near as expressive as a language like English.

Per request I will expand on my answer. Take, for example, the English sentence "Jane missed the bus this morning and couldn't get to the office in time her interview, needless to say, she was not selected for the position." There is no way to express that in any programming language that I know of.

```<code>var Jane = {Name:"Jane", Employment:"Unemployed", Bus:data.Buses[4]};
data.Buses[4].Depart("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
Jane.ArriveAt(data.Buses[4], "2019-10-05 07:45:00");
</code>```

I won't go on trying the futile exercise of typing out a description of events in Javascript. Note that without knowing English the code makes no sense. Anything in code that isn't a keyword like "if" or "foreach" or "function" isn't part of the language and so you can only describe procedures for moving bits around, one way to illustrate this is to convert my Javascript to do the same thing, but with different variable names - the program will be exactly the same as far as the language specification goes and the resulting executable.

```<code>var x = {a:"", b:"Unemployed", c:y.z[4]};
y.z[4].dp("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
x.w(y.z[4], "2019-10-05 07:30:00");
</code>```

If those two paragraphs mean the exact same thing as far as the language is concerned, you've completely failed to communicate anything useful. Computer scientists working on artificial intelligence are working to make systems where "bus" is a keyword, there is an idea of "bus" in the language. Until that technology is fully realized, we will be stuck with programming languages that are limited to describing things a computer can understand, a much lesser standard than what a human can. This is what I mean by less expressive.

Body:
I think Programming and Mathematics fail to meet the standard because, despite being more precise, they are ultimately nowhere near as expressive as a language like English.

Per request I will expand on my answer. Take, for example, the English sentence "Jane missed the bus this morning and couldn't get to the office in time her interview, needless to say, she was not selected for the position." There is no way to express that in any programming language that I know of.

var Jane = {Name:"Jane", Employment:"Unemployed", Bus:data.Buses[4]};
data.Buses[4].Depart("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
Jane.ArriveAt(data.Buses[4], "2019-10-05 07:45:00");

I won't go on trying the futile exercise of typing out a description of events in Javascript. Note that without knowing English the code makes no sense. Anything in code that isn't a keyword like "if" or "foreach" or "function" isn't part of the language and so you can only describe procedures for moving bits around, one way to illustrate this is to convert my Javascript to do the same thing, but with different variable names - the program will be exactly the same as far as the language specification goes and the resulting executable.

var x = {a:"", b:"Unemployed", c:y.z[4]};
y.z[4].dp("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
x.w(y.z[4], "2019-10-05 07:30:00");

If those two paragraphs mean the exact same thing as far as the language is concerned, you've completely failed to communicate anything useful. Computer scientists working on artificial intelligence are working to make systems where "bus" is a keyword, there is an idea of "bus" in the language. Until that technology is fully realized, we will be stuck with programming languages that are limited to describing things a computer can understand, a much lesser standard than what a human can. This is what I mean by less expressive.


问:
Are there any free online conlang creation tools?
I was wondering if anyone knows of any conlang creation websites that are free to use.

I know this sounds silly but I have little experience to go on as for creating a custom language.

答:
There are some syntax "toys" online, eg http://www.zompist.com/gtg.html. This will help you write a (formal) grammar of your language, but you will need a good understanding of Generative Linguistics to use that.

Otherwise, what else do you need instead of pen and paper? Maybe a spreadsheet to enter vocabulary? There are so many choices to be made on so many levels that it is not really possible to automate much of it. It's not as if you would enter a few characteristics into a form, press a button, and out comes a conlang :)


答:
We all had little experience to go on when we first started making languages!

I'd actually recommend that you NOT make use of a conlang recipe resource.  What you end up doing is little more than making an invented language like how the recipe writer makes an invented language.

This just defeats the purpose of the art of glossopoesy.

Instead, I'd suggest you take what experience you've got, little as it may be, and just do the hard work of language invention.  Sit down with pencil and paper and doodle words and phrases thereon.  Come up with some basic rules (for word order, for syllable structure, for grammar).  Get yourself hooked up with a good language invention community (Conlang-L for example) and begin the learning process.

Title: Are there any free online conlang creation tools?

Body:
I was wondering if anyone knows of any conlang creation websites that are free to use.

I know this sounds silly but I have little experience to go on as for creating a custom language.


答:
This may be a stretch and probably not what you’re looking for, but:

Essentially, that’s what Japanese did. Japanese and Chinese have nothing in common, yet when the Chinese writing system made it to Japan over 1000 years ago it was the only one they had. Initially, it was used only to write Chinese, but then it was developed into a system suitable to write Japanese via many intermediate steps and multiple parallel paths. Now, centuries later, Japanese has:

some characters that are identical to (traditional) Chinese ones with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 大 (large) or 中 (centre)

some characters whose written forms have been simplified from traditional Chinese but with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 国 (state) 売 (to sell)

two sets of characters that are radically simplified/modified from their traditional forms and used only for their phonetic value (katakana and hiragana)

some characters whose written forms are as in traditional Chinese but whose meanings have departed. The best example I could find was 豚 which means pig in Japanese but piglet in Chinese.

(Of course, some characters’ meanings departed in Chinese while they are still used in their original sense in Japanese like 湯 (hot water in Japanese and old Chinese; soup in modern Chinese; they shouldn’t be listed in a separate bullet point because they generally fit the first)

compound words composed of more than one character with a meaning akin to the Chinese one

compound words composed of more than one character with a completely different meaning (手紙 which in Japanese means letter (the one you send) but in Chinese is toilet paper)

entirely newly created written compounds, often spelt with hiragana and kanji to better reproduce Japanese grammar

new characters created by combining individual parts, e.g. 働 (to work) made from the individual symbols 人 (man, person) and 動 (to move); the former regularly becomes a ‘pole with a steep hat’ in compounds such as 休

As Japanese and Chinese are linguistically so different (Chinese can have closed syllables, it has tones, the vowel registers differ and more), the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters obviously differs substantially from their original at the time of borrowing. In general, most characters can be pronounced in two or more ways depending on their surrounding. These pronunciations are grouped into kun (have nothing to do with the Chinese original pronunciation; this is a Japanese word with a similar or identical meaning) and on (more or less loosely modelled on the Chinese pronunciation when the character was borrowed which may have happened more than once). However, even on pronunciations can be considered a simplification at best; a bastardisation of th original pronunciation may be more accurate.

Differences notwithstanding, I know one Chinese who claims to be able to get the basic gist of written Japanese and with some crude knowledge of Japanese I was able to grasp the meanings of some things written in Chinese on Taiwan recently. So a certain degree of intelligibility seems to be conserved.


答: There is the Vulgar fantasy language generator, which allows a small language to be generated for free, but requires a subscription for more substantial languages or advanced controls.</p>


问:
What setting for the dropoff rate in a language generator will produce a natural English phoneme distribution?
In creating an ancestral lang for a hard-fantasy world that is based on the language of your home, you first have to understand that language.  And for an impatient worldbuilder like me, the Vulgar Language Generator seems the best place to go.  Click the "English" choice, and you automatically get the following consonant clusters:

Word initial:  b bɹ d dj ʤ f fj fɹ h j k kj kw kɹ l m n nj p pl pɹ s sm sp st t tɹ ʧ v w ð g gɹ ɹ ʃ ʍ θ θɹ

Mid-word:  b bl d f ft fɹ h k l ldɹ lm ls lw lɹ m mb ms mθ n nd ndɹ nl ns nt ntɹ nɹ p pl s st sʧ t ts tw ʧ v w z zn ð ŋgl g ɹ θ

Word final:  b d dz ʤ f ft k ks kst kt l ld lf lp lt lvz m md mz n nd ndz nst nt nʧ nz p ps pt s skt st t ts ʧ v vd z ð ŋ ŋk ŋz g ɹ ʃ θ

Vowels:  aɪ aʊ eɪ i iə iː oː u uː æ ɑː ɒ ɔ ɔɪ ɔː ə əʊ ɛ ɛː ɜː ɪ ɪə ʊə ʌ ʊ

And there are some things in English that came naturally before knowing about it, like affixes, sound-verb-object and adjective before noun.

However, there are some things about English that I know nothing about, like its dropoff rate.  Vulgar defined dropoff rate as follows:

Phonemes are ranked by frequency from left (most frequent) to right (least frequent). Medium makes the frequencies slightly more even than fast. When using equiprobable, phonemes can be custom weighted by writing =multiplier, eg: p=10 makes p ten times more common than a phoneme without a weighting.

Vulgar gives us choices for our phonemes:  "fast", "medium" or "equiprobable" for dropoff rate and "naturalistic ranking", "natural with randomness", "alphabetical" or "previous" for how to arrange the phonemes.  Which of these choices matches English in real life?

答:
Note that by synthesising vocabulary using a tool like Vulgar Lang, you will not even approximate English even when using the same distributional laws for phonemes. You will get a lot of words that could be English, but are just unused, you get known words but with other meanings, and you don't get morphology or syntax at all.

Of course, "naturalistic ranking" is the best approximation, all other rankings lead to feelable statistical distortions given your conlang an engeneered touch.

As an alternative I suggest looking at the questions and answers under diachronics: Start with real life English and apply systematic changes to the sounds and the grammar. For an example using projection of current trends into the future, you can look at Futurese.


答:
If you're wed to the idea of using Vulgar to make English nonsense words, the best idea would likely be to manually set the dropoff rate using "equiprobable" and custom weights, as it's unlikely that any of the default options precisely match English text. If you can find out what the rate of occurrence of different English phonemes is, putting them in manually in this way would almost definitely be more accurate than relying on the defaults.

I don't have any resources that list explicit measures for the rates of occurrences of various English phonemes on hand, but they likely exist; I'll certainly edit some into this answer if I find any.

Title: What setting for the dropoff rate in a language generator will produce a natural English phoneme distribution?

Body:
In creating an ancestral lang for a hard-fantasy world that is based on the language of your home, you first have to understand that language.  And for an impatient worldbuilder like me, the Vulgar Language Generator seems the best place to go.  Click the "English" choice, and you automatically get the following consonant clusters:

Word initial:  b bɹ d dj ʤ f fj fɹ h j k kj kw kɹ l m n nj p pl pɹ s sm sp st t tɹ ʧ v w ð g gɹ ɹ ʃ ʍ θ θɹ

Mid-word:  b bl d f ft fɹ h k l ldɹ lm ls lw lɹ m mb ms mθ n nd ndɹ nl ns nt ntɹ nɹ p pl s st sʧ t ts tw ʧ v w z zn ð ŋgl g ɹ θ

Word final:  b d dz ʤ f ft k ks kst kt l ld lf lp lt lvz m md mz n nd ndz nst nt nʧ nz p ps pt s skt st t ts ʧ v vd z ð ŋ ŋk ŋz g ɹ ʃ θ

Vowels:  aɪ aʊ eɪ i iə iː oː u uː æ ɑː ɒ ɔ ɔɪ ɔː ə əʊ ɛ ɛː ɜː ɪ ɪə ʊə ʌ ʊ

And there are some things in English that came naturally before knowing about it, like affixes, sound-verb-object and adjective before noun.

However, there are some things about English that I know nothing about, like its dropoff rate.  Vulgar defined dropoff rate as follows:

Phonemes are ranked by frequency from left (most frequent) to right (least frequent). Medium makes the frequencies slightly more even than fast. When using equiprobable, phonemes can be custom weighted by writing =multiplier, eg: p=10 makes p ten times more common than a phoneme without a weighting.

Vulgar gives us choices for our phonemes:  "fast", "medium" or "equiprobable" for dropoff rate and "naturalistic ranking", "natural with randomness", "alphabetical" or "previous" for how to arrange the phonemes.  Which of these choices matches English in real life?


问:
Is Schleyer's first sketch of Volapük available as a reprint?
Johann Martin Schleyer published the first sketch of Volapük in 1879 in a rather obscure catholic newsletter named Die Sionsharfe. This newsletter isn't easily accessible, as far as I know. Is this first sketch available as a reprint in some more accessible work?

答:
To my big surprise the relevant issue of Sionsharfe is now digitised and freely available from Digitale Bibliothek München. The first sketch of Volapük at this moment still named only Weltsprache or Allsprache, the word Volapük itself can be found a few month later, occurs in Nr. 35, Vol. IV (1879) Beilage as a supplement.

What a fascinating document!

Following issues of Sionsharfe also contain shorter or longer fragments of Volapük, unfortunately the digisat ends with Nr 48 (1880), there are four more years missing.


问:
How could a syllabary be adapted for a language with a complex syllable structure?
By definition, a syllabary has separate glyphs for each possible syllable (and usually unrelated or at least not systematically related ones for similar syllables, unlike alphasyllabaries). This obviously clashes in practicality with having complex syllable structure, leading to a large amount of possible syllables and therefore a large amount of symbols. How can this conflict be dealt with? </p>

答:
The best solution to this is to not make your writing system syllabic if your language does not support the syllabic structure by having a low number of syllables.

I guess that one of the most commonly cited examples of a syllabic writing system is the Japanese katakana/hiragana system. Japanese phonology fits these systems very well because syllables are basically (C(y))V with the principal exception of syllabic n and the secondary one of ‘double consonants’ (まって — matte). Therefore, Japanese needs only around 50 distinct symbols for its syllabary. It made perfect sense to simplify complex Chinese characters to a reduced form carrying just a phonetic information.

On the other hand, languages such as German or English would be terrible choices for inventing a syllabary. Their syllable structures have very little constraints at all; basically anything is possible. Coming up with a syllabary would require many hundreds if not thousands of characters — to the point where it would be simpler and more consistent to create an ideographic writing system instead.

Take for example to write. In a syllabary, the symbol for write in I write would be the same as in right (there) or you are right. But then if you take I wrote, the wrote would be something completely different (yet with the same symbol as rote memorisation, I think?). I have written would use two symbols, neither of which has anything to do with the previous ones.

In an alphabetic or alphasyllabic system, there would at least be some visual resemblence between all those forms allowing for recognition. That’s also why English benefits from its extremely irregular (based on phonetics) spelling: meanings can be recognised based on writing and words with similar meanings are written similarly. Their common root is retained in a common spelling which is not possible in a pure syllabary.

A language’s writing system will either have been developed by the language itself or have been copied and adapted from geographically close languages. Of course, it would be possible for a Germanic-type language with a highly variable syllable structure to adapt a syllabic writing system initially — but it is very highly likely that it will soon be improved in numerous ways until an actually working alternative has been found.

Instead of thinking how you can bring the two ends together, I would propose you think of which writing system actually makes sense for your language.


问:
Simplified Version of IPA?
In IPA, the sounds of many symbols are so close that they are indistinguishable to me! For example, [bʊk], [ɓʊk], or [βʊk]. Even though they do have some minor differences, but all a listener like me hears is "book".

So is there any "Simplified IPA" where they contain all possible pronunciations but yet omit all those phonetically indistinguishable symbols?

答: The reason that all the different characters for “the same sound” exist is because they’re not the same sound, and trained linguists/linguistic researchers can hear the difference. Any “simplified IPA” wouldn’t be a true “IPA”, and would not be able to accurately represent the difference in sounds; you would end up with the present situation where the spelling of words in a language not suited for the alphabet being used does not accurately reflect the actual pronunciation of the word (for example, Spanish vaca, cow, which some people hear as though it should be spelled baka, because neither b nor v in the Latin alphabet is an accurate representation of the sound used).

Title: Simplified Version of IPA?


答:
If you're notating a language that uses [β] or [ɓ] but does not distinguish it from [b], that is, if there are no words such that changing one of these consonants to the other changes the meaning of the word (perhaps because [β] occurs only between vowels and [b] elsewhere), then for most purposes you write them all as /b/; so that is a “simplified IPA”.  This is called broad transcription, written with slashes to distinguish it from narrow transcription using brackets.  A famous example: English /p/ includes both [p] and [pʰ], which are distinguished in many languages including Zulu, Hindustani, Mandarin.

No language makes phonemic distinctions between all pairs of phones represented by distinct symbols in IPA; but every symbol exists because some language contrasts it with others.

Title: Simplified Version of IPA?

Body:
In IPA, the sounds of many symbols are so close that they are indistinguishable to me! For example, [bʊk], [ɓʊk], or [βʊk]. Even though they do have some minor differences, but all a listener like me hears is "book".

So is there any "Simplified IPA" where they contain all possible pronunciations but yet omit all those phonetically indistinguishable symbols?


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

Take this phrase in English for example:

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

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

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

答:
Here are some solutions, roughly in descending order of naturalness.

distance-specific determiners or inflections

topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic

switch-reference on nonfinite verbs

pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.

1 distance-specific determiners or inflections

You can solve this problem in a reasonably natural way using demonstratives or distance-specific determiners. This is similar to proximate and obviative pronouns, but not identical.

For instance, suppose all non-vocative uses of names require some kind of definite determiner. And suppose there are proximal and distal determiners ("this" and "that"). I'm also assuming that these determiners can form NPs without an accompanying noun, like in English.

then you could say something to the effect of

```<code>this Adam sent essay to that James to help that with that's writing.
</code>```

There's a lot of variation in existing natural languages when it comes to contrasts in demonstratives. Some languages surface distinctions such as visibility (e.g. Malagasy) or audibility (e.g. Khaling, a Sino-Tibetan language from Nepal) or altitude/elevation.

2 topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic

The reflexive pronoun solution described above normally tracks co-reference with the syntactic subject of the matrix clause.

If that solution is not flexible enough, you can track co-reference with the topic instead and explicitly mark the topic in some way.

For example, suppose James is the topic and TOP is the pronoun that refers to the topic. Let the postposition/clitic は mark the topic of a clause.

```<code>to James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.
</code>```

Or you could do something like the following if you want は to obscure the role of the topicalized noun.

```<code>James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.
</code>```

As far as I know, no topic prominent natural languages actually do this.

3 switch reference on non-finite verbs

Switch reference marks whether the subject of a clause is the same as the previous clause or not. Suppose each verb is marked SS for same subject or DS for different subject. I'll assume utterance-initial words are marked with DS.

This requires some care in defining what exactly "previous clause" means.

```<code>Adam sent.DS essay to James to help.SS him with his writing.DS .
</code>```

so in this sentence, sent.DS marks that sent is in an utterance-initial clause. help receives a same subject marker because help and sent have the same subject, sort of, and writing has a DS marker because James is writing, not Adam.

Getting the details right on how exactly you want pervasive switch-reference to work might be a bit tricky.

4 pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.

Suppose you have some forms consisting some constant + ona, which can refer back to a noun beginning with that particular consonant sound (or ona itself if the word begins with a vowel). Then you can do something like:

```<code>Adam sent essay to James to help JONA with JONA's writing.
</code>```

the choice of JONA over ONA means that James is the one whose writing we're attempting to improve.

Body:
Here are some solutions, roughly in descending order of naturalness.

distance-specific determiners or inflections

topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic

switch-reference on nonfinite verbs

pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.

1 distance-specific determiners or inflections

You can solve this problem in a reasonably natural way using demonstratives or distance-specific determiners. This is similar to proximate and obviative pronouns, but not identical.

For instance, suppose all non-vocative uses of names require some kind of definite determiner. And suppose there are proximal and distal determiners ("this" and "that"). I'm also assuming that these determiners can form NPs without an accompanying noun, like in English.

then you could say something to the effect of

this Adam sent essay to that James to help that with that's writing.

There's a lot of variation in existing natural languages when it comes to contrasts in demonstratives. Some languages surface distinctions such as visibility (e.g. Malagasy) or audibility (e.g. Khaling, a Sino-Tibetan language from Nepal) or altitude/elevation.

2 topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic

The reflexive pronoun solution described above normally tracks co-reference with the syntactic subject of the matrix clause.

If that solution is not flexible enough, you can track co-reference with the topic instead and explicitly mark the topic in some way.

For example, suppose James is the topic and TOP is the pronoun that refers to the topic. Let the postposition/clitic は mark the topic of a clause.

to James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.

Or you could do something like the following if you want は to obscure the role of the topicalized noun.

James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.

As far as I know, no topic prominent natural languages actually do this.

3 switch reference on non-finite verbs

Switch reference marks whether the subject of a clause is the same as the previous clause or not. Suppose each verb is marked SS for same subject or DS for different subject. I'll assume utterance-initial words are marked with DS.

This requires some care in defining what exactly "previous clause" means.

Adam sent.DS essay to James to help.SS him with his writing.DS .

so in this sentence, sent.DS marks that sent is in an utterance-initial clause. help receives a same subject marker because help and sent have the same subject, sort of, and writing has a DS marker because James is writing, not Adam.

Getting the details right on how exactly you want pervasive switch-reference to work might be a bit tricky.

4 pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.

Suppose you have some forms consisting some constant + ona, which can refer back to a noun beginning with that particular consonant sound (or ona itself if the word begins with a vowel). Then you can do something like:

Adam sent essay to James to help JONA with JONA's writing.

the choice of JONA over ONA means that James is the one whose writing we're attempting to improve.


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

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

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

答:
Here are some possible solutions to this problem that haven't been listed already.

mark case with tone or another suprasegmental feature

case disfixes

have a large class of indeclinable nouns

achieve free word order via noun classes and agreement

1 Case Tone

Maasai marks case with tone. It's predominantly VSO, but frequently uses VOS order if the object is more topical.

2 Case disfixes

Some languages like Alabama (Muskogean, North America) delete phonemes in a root to indicate pluractionality (plural subject/plural object/multiple repetitions), basically verbal number. You can repurpose this feature for case.

Here's a strawman example in a 3-case language (direct, oblique, and genitive).

```<code>direct case: unmarked
oblique case: delete the final phoneme
genitive case: delete the final 2 phonemes
</code>```

Suppose chopal means house.

```<code>house                 chopal
to/from/&c the house  chopa
the house's           chop
</code>```

3 have a large class of indeclinable nouns

You can have a fair number of nouns that don't decline at all before the declension system breaks down completely.

Indeclinable nouns can end in whatever you want them to.

This might work well if your language has optional prepositions or postpositions with the same meaning as certain cases so that the role of an indeclinable noun can be clarified if necessary.

4. noun classes and agreement

Some languages such as Swahili have many noun classes and require verbs to agree with their arguments. Many Bantu languages like Swahili have agreement with direct objects as well, but don't require its usage in all situations.

You can also achieve the same effect with obligatory clitic doubling, such as in Macedonian. The idea is that you must have a pronoun referring to various verb arguments (such as the direct object) even when a full noun phrase is present. Clitic doubling is more effective at disambiguating sentences if you have more noun classes or more grammatical numbers.

Body:
Here are some possible solutions to this problem that haven't been listed already.

mark case with tone or another suprasegmental feature

case disfixes

have a large class of indeclinable nouns

achieve free word order via noun classes and agreement

1 Case Tone

Maasai marks case with tone. It's predominantly VSO, but frequently uses VOS order if the object is more topical.

2 Case disfixes

Some languages like Alabama (Muskogean, North America) delete phonemes in a root to indicate pluractionality (plural subject/plural object/multiple repetitions), basically verbal number. You can repurpose this feature for case.

Here's a strawman example in a 3-case language (direct, oblique, and genitive).

direct case: unmarked
oblique case: delete the final phoneme
genitive case: delete the final 2 phonemes

Suppose chopal means house.

house                 chopal
to/from/&c the house  chopa
the house's           chop

3 have a large class of indeclinable nouns

You can have a fair number of nouns that don't decline at all before the declension system breaks down completely.

Indeclinable nouns can end in whatever you want them to.

This might work well if your language has optional prepositions or postpositions with the same meaning as certain cases so that the role of an indeclinable noun can be clarified if necessary.

4. noun classes and agreement

Some languages such as Swahili have many noun classes and require verbs to agree with their arguments. Many Bantu languages like Swahili have agreement with direct objects as well, but don't require its usage in all situations.

You can also achieve the same effect with obligatory clitic doubling, such as in Macedonian. The idea is that you must have a pronoun referring to various verb arguments (such as the direct object) even when a full noun phrase is present. Clitic doubling is more effective at disambiguating sentences if you have more noun classes or more grammatical numbers.


问:
Are there languages with five conjugations? If not, how would one construct one?
Most languages I am familiar with have six different person/number combinations for verbs:

Singular

1st (I)

2nd (you)

3rd (he/she/it)

*Plural

1st (we)

2nd (you (all))

3rd (they)

Obviously, verb conjugation is more complicated than just these combinations (other features include tenses, aspects, mood (eg imperative), and gerunds), but for now, just focus on person/number. Is there some way to collapse these six combinations into five? On a related note, are there any natural languages with five conjugations?

Also, I need exactly five conjugations. Are there normal languages with only five conjugations? If there aren't, what would be the most realistic way to implement this?

答:
If you have two features (number/person), it seems tricky to have five options (or any other odd number for that matter). However, there is an easy way: simply collapse singular and plural for one of the persons.

There is actually a real example in English (and several other languages): the pluralis majestatis ("Royal We"). Simply discard the first person singular and use the first person plural instead.

We are not sure what other languages use this, but we have definitely heard it in English and German. It would not be surprising to us if it occurred in other languages as well.

Sounds a bit odd, but would be an easy option.


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

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

答:
Here are some ideas, which when taken together would give a good idea whether a language has a strong functional speech community.

If a conlang has thousands of fluent first language (L1) speakers, that would be clear evidence, but even Esperanto, the most spoken conlang, has only up to 1000 Esperanto speaking families. Ideally those L1 speakers are able to meet and speak with each other regularly.

Even if the speakers are second language speakers, if there are so many speakers that distinct dialects have formed (without that being part of the design from the beginning) then that evidence of language change is evidence itself of healthy speech communities.

If there is friction between speakers of the language and the language's academy or regulators then that shows the language is starting to take on a life of its own. If the language regulators have ever had to make concessions to the speakers, then that shows the speech community is healthy.


答: Modern High German is like that: The verb endings for the 1pl and 3pl are always the same (e.g., wir sind, sie sind; wir haben, sie haben). Some dialects of German are going even further having the same endings for all plural forms.

Title: Are there languages with five conjugations? If not, how would one construct one?

Body:
Most languages I am familiar with have six different person/number combinations for verbs:

Singular

1st (I)

2nd (you)

3rd (he/she/it)

*Plural

1st (we)

2nd (you (all))

3rd (they)

Obviously, verb conjugation is more complicated than just these combinations (other features include tenses, aspects, mood (eg imperative), and gerunds), but for now, just focus on person/number. Is there some way to collapse these six combinations into five? On a related note, are there any natural languages with five conjugations?

Also, I need exactly five conjugations. Are there normal languages with only five conjugations? If there aren't, what would be the most realistic way to implement this?


答:
Existing Other Person Conjugations

The wikipedia page on Grammatical Person, has this to say (emphasis mine):

Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts: proximate for a more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third person. The obviative is sometimes called the fourth person.

The term fourth person is also sometimes used for the category of indefinite or generic referents, which work like one in English phrases such as "one should be prepared" or people in people say that..., when the grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms. The so-called "zero person" in Finnish and related languages, in addition to passive voice may serve to leave the subject-referent open. Zero person subjects are sometimes translated as "one," but the problem with that is that English language constructions involving one, e.g. "One hopes that will not happen," are rare[citation needed] and could be considered expressive of an overly academic tone to the majority of people, while Finnish sentences like "Ei saa koskettaa" ("Not allowed to touch") are recognizable to and used by young children in both languages.

I think the grammatical persons of a language would be based on how the speakers of that language interact.

I would personally collapse singular and plural, and then think about what other possible persons there could be, adding fourth and fifth person conjugations as is fitting, but you could also remove a person.

No First Person

For example, you could have a heavy emphasis on an ego-less society, which would do away with the first-person. Pravic would refer to the "I" or "me" in the third person, as "The speaker".

Class-Based Person

Or you could have a language with a strong sense of caste or class, where there are separate second-person conjugations for people in higher, lower, or the same class.


答:
In my opinion, the obvious first step is having a base form (be it nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive or intransitive) with a null ending so that the root form with all its final sound variety actually shows up and can be identified.

Second, instead of attempting to find a declension pattern for each possible final sound, group them together. For example, you might have one (or many) declension groups that include words ending in consonant clusters; their feature may be that the ending tacked on always begins with a vowel to ensure a pronounceable syllable. On the other hand, you might decide to group together words ending in Vs, Vz, Vd and Vt (V = vowel sound) and have all their declension patterns be Vt + ending. These strategies reduce the potentially very high number of patterns to a more managable set – and are likely to have happened in natural languages anyway.

Finally, I would like to point out that Finnish and German are each rather close to what you have in mind. While native Finnish words can only /t, s, n, r, l/ or a vowel, loan words from other languages do not necessarily abide by this rule and newer loans have resisted change to fit Finnish phonotactics somewhat. In declensed forms, an /i/ is added between stem and ending to turn it into a fully allowed syllable. In German (subject to terminal devoicing) there aren’t any restrictions on final sounds that I am aware of. Indeed, declension is usually very simple being made up only of a sometimes optional filler-e plus a case-marking consonant so declension is not as complex as found in other languages.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I: -itiv

You: -aziv

He/She/It: -omiv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

答:
If this is a language, then it should be possible to express more than just three words. You would need to be able to say, for instance, "the dog bites the cat." Imagine that we derive dog from sazar, bite from kitiv, and cat from lomon by reversing the consonants. Using only the grammatical information from your post and making some assumptions about syntax, we could form this sentence as razas vitikomivik nomol.

Is this possible? If so, then this is a working language. However, once we define razas to mean "dog," then we already have more than three words. Razas isn't an inflected or declined form of sazar; it's a new word formed by derivation. Even meanings related to the original word are a form of derivation (so making razas mean "fire-creature" and using it for all animals still won't help). Once you create new words by derivation, the language has more than three words. In the language you described, every word is originally derived from three roots or base-words.

As you describe it, the language is entirely possible. There's an infinite number of morphemes in the three roots, if you allow for very long words and a lot of repetition. You have 96 syllables, so to use your possible syllables most efficiently, the 96 most common morphemes/words could have a syllable structure like az or iv, your 962 next most common morphemes like azaz or aziv, and your 963 next most common like azazaz or azivaz, etc. But your vocabulary has to be limited to make sure that your longer morphemes (e.g. aziv) not be confused with combinations of shorter ones (e.g. az + iv) allowed for by your agglutinative morphology when they're not intended to be the same morpheme.


答:
If you really mean "morphemes" or "phonemes", then yes, of course you could design your language this way. One straightforward example is the Morse code, composed of three symbols - dot, dash, pause. If you e.g. represent the dot and dash vocally as two different sounds (different duration, different pitch or whatever, or even the traditional dit and dah), you can plausibly claim your language has only two phonemes (Though I would call it only a code of the main language it is used to encode, since it lacks its own grammar and vocabulary. But then, there are Q-codes, so nothing is absolute.).

If you want to use three syllables, it would be even easier - after all, Solresol manages with just seven, and Marr's theory claims all (European?) the languages originate from just four syllables (but that is very much a pseudoscience, most famously debunked by no one else than J. Stalin)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I: -itiv

You: -aziv

He/She/It: -omiv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


答:
There is of course Esperanto, conflating 2nd person singular and plural (let's ignore ci), very much the same as in English. Although, since the verb does not change (by person/number), I would not call this a conjugation.

There are other ways how to achieve exactly five conjugations. E. g. in pre-1953 Slovak in the past tense (that is also used for the conditional), the singular distinguished three genders (masculine, feminine, neutrum), but the verb form stays the same for each person. While in plural, only two different forms are present - masculine animate and "everything else". 3+2=5.

Example:

Singular:

masculine: 1st person chodil som, 2nd person chodil si, 3rd person chodil

feminine: 1st person chodila som, 2nd person chodila si, 3rd person chodila

neutrum: 1st person chodilo som, 2nd person chodilo si, 3rd person chodilo

Plural:

masculine animate: 1st person chodili sme, 2nd person chodili ste, 3rd person chodili

other: 1st person chodily sme, 2nd person chodily ste, 3rd person chodily

(som/si/sme/ste is an auxilliary verb).

Contemporary Czech has also exactly 5 conjugations in the past tense, but distributed differently (singular masculine, singular feminine+plural neutrum, singular neutrum, plural masculine animate, plural masculine inanimate+feminine)