问:
Finding inspiration for letter forms?
I believe I've mentioned before on here how I struggle to come up with forms for letters.

I've tried to solve this by looking at other systems. Despite the diversity in our world, I've found it surprisingly hard to find a multitude of systems to draw from.

The problem is: writing systems have different factors that can influence their design. Syllabraries tend to have more complex characters than alphabets, because they don't have to write as many of them to spell out a word. And besides, they need a wider diversity of symbols anyway. Logographic systems are no different. Also the medium makes a huge difference. The aesthetic of one script may not be too practical to replicate using a medium it wasn't intended for.

I've found this all divides up writing systems into multiple different categories based on design. This means that if you stick with a certain medium and type of writing system, you won't have much to go off of. Like, if you look at alphabets, all that really seems to be out there is Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Korean. And if you look at cursive scripts, you only really have two options: English cursive, and Arabic, which is technically an abjad. And of course if you want a logographic system, the only living logographic system (aka, the only one to see use in a world where literacy was normal writing was part of every day life) is Chinese. Beyond that, all you have to look at are long extinct logographic systems that were all made to be carved into stone. Or cuneiform, which used some rather odd tools and medium to write. How many systems do you know of that were written in clay, and were always stamped rather than drawn?

I can't come up with forms that really look overly different from the few alphabets currently in use. Worse yet, most of them are closely related to each other! It seems like every symbol possible has already been used in a writing system somewhere.

The only thing that has really helped me is I've noticed that most lower-case Latin letters are built from a limited number of shapes: a circle, loop, short line, long line, long line with a loop, and a dot. Sadly, I can't really come up with any practical letter forms that don't use these shapes. They're pretty simple and basic.

答:
The question basically provides the answer.

Consider the primary writing (and reading) conditions the conscript was hypothetically developed and employed in.
This obviously includes the affordances and constraints of medium and tool, but contents (accounting data, prose, correspondence, legal announcements, religious scripture etc.), environment (e.g. humidity, lighting, movement) and, of course, physiology of the writers and readers also play important roles.
This will not be constant over times and places, too, so you get natural iterations and bifurcations that may later remerge
(like how the printed bicameral roman script is a combination of uppercase letters made mostly for stone carving and lowercase letters evolved from pen/quill writing).

This way you get the directions of writing pages, blocks, lines, words and characters.
You get preferences for straight or curved, squared or circular, open or closed, flat or serifed, hanging or standing, leaning or upright, connected or separated, stacked or juxtaposed … strokes and shapes.

The frequency of use often determines the simplicity and distinctiveness of a glyph: the busiest ones tend to consist of the fewest basic shapes, often just a single one (like o).
Naturally developing alphabetical letters (and digraphs) also have a tendency to somehow resemble the phonetic features of their corresponding sounds.
This is true for roman lowercase letters for instance, though slightly different for other languages: while three bands (with ascender and descender) are available, vowels are restricted to the central band, sonorants are usually short as well, while fricatives and stops are longer (cf. sonority scale and length hierarchy of the syllable).
Most orthographies avoid pairing big or complex characters, but often use a simple and a complex one (e.g. ck); or they employ complex ligation with utterly different compound glyphs.
Word or syllable starts and ends may be marked stronger (or weaker), e.g. descending y and wider w as allographic variants of i and u at the end in English, which may also lead to canonically contextual, positional forms like roman long s or greek σ and a lot of letters in cursive arabic.
That means the possible positions of a letter shape its glyph and the possible glyphs of a letter influence its adoption for certain positions.

In other words, the goal should not be to invent something distinctively new but to design something plausible.

Title: Finding inspiration for letter forms?


问:
A Hypothetical Mediterranean Language Inspired by Both Greek and Latin
Here is the scenario:

In or before the Classical Period, a king from some Greek city-state--it doesn't matter which--first brought all the other Greek city-states together to become one unified nation.  Either he or his heir then declared that the whole of the Mediterranean belong to the Greeks.  First phase of the grand plan was to conquer the Mediterranean was to absorb the lands of their closest neighbors, the Roman Republic.  The Republic, weak from the Conflict of the Orders, embraced their Greek conquerors with minimal resistance.  In absorbing Greek and Roman lands together, Greek and Roman culture merged into one, and that includes language.

The inspiration behind this scenario is that both Greek and Roman cultures have such inspirations on modern Western culture that it's hard to decipher where Greek ended and Roman began.  But what if both cultures were merged into one new one?  If you mix Greek with Latin, what should I look out for in regards to grammar?

I ask this because many people are not convinced that Glosa, an auxlang already inspired by both Greek and Latin, won't be the natural answer to this question.

答:
The situation you describe, in which Classical Greece invades the Roman Republic, has two probable outcomes. (This is assuming a single language "merged into one" excludes the possibility of both languages coexisting. However, a language can also exert influence on another without supplanting it.)

If the Romans adopted (or were forced to adopt) their conquerors' language, which is what happened in other nations after Alexander the Great's conquests later in history, then the spoken language would become Greek. The influence of the Latin language in such a case would exist as a substrate, which could introduce Latin loan words and grammatical structures into Roman Greek.

If the Romans didn't choose (or weren't forced) to adopt Greek as their language and continued to speak Latin, then Latin would remain the spoken language, but would have Greek influence on vocabulary and grammar, as a superstrate or adstrate. As it is, Latin already has Greek influence on its vocabulary, with learned words like philosophia; but in the case of a Greek conquest, it would probably gain more mundane words as well.

A comparable case in history with regard to English could be the Norman invasion of England. Anglo-Norman and English were spoken alongside each other. Eventually, English was the only language spoken of the two in England, but not without considerable influence from Anglo-Norman. Looking at this case might give an idea of how a language could change followed by the invasion of another one.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
How do you model language changes with wave theory (areal developments)?
I'd like to hear from anyone who has built a dialect continuum, in which innovations spreading from different centres affect overlapping subsets of the range (see wave theory).  How do you model it?  How do you manage the results?

I suppose I'd start with a list of towns and a table determining how likely a town is to adopt an innovation from each of its neighbors.  The table can change over time as towns lose or gain influence, or new roads are made.

Then what? Maintain a separate grammar for each town?  Impractical.

With a list of sound shifts, you can easily generate a given town's version of a given lexeme as needed; but managing changes in syntax or morphology is, I'd think, not so easy.

答:
Yes, having a separate grammar for each town would be the way to go.

When modelling the spread of linguistic difference, do bear in mind geography, rather than just distance. Some regions can be very close in mountainous terrain but still have very different languages/dialects, whereas regions in flat plains (without major rivers) tend to be far more similar.

If you have a map with geographical features, use something like A* to calculate the distance between towns.

As regarding changes in grammar: if your grammar is expressed in the form of rewrite rules, you could allow them to change as well. A fairly radical change would be from

```<code>NP -> adj n
</code>```

to

```<code>NP -> n adj
</code>```

ie the adjective moves behind the noun it modifies. The resulting grammar would of course still be valid. However, you want to make such changes very rare and slow. Alternatively, annotate each rule with a probability, and then have both rules in parallel. Change would then be an increase/decrease in probability.

For language change in general you might be interested in Piotrowski's Law. (Unfortunately the only explanation I have found for it is in German). This models mathematically how change spreads throughout language.

Body:
Yes, having a separate grammar for each town would be the way to go.

When modelling the spread of linguistic difference, do bear in mind geography, rather than just distance. Some regions can be very close in mountainous terrain but still have very different languages/dialects, whereas regions in flat plains (without major rivers) tend to be far more similar.

If you have a map with geographical features, use something like A* to calculate the distance between towns.

As regarding changes in grammar: if your grammar is expressed in the form of rewrite rules, you could allow them to change as well. A fairly radical change would be from

NP -> adj n

to

NP -> n adj

ie the adjective moves behind the noun it modifies. The resulting grammar would of course still be valid. However, you want to make such changes very rare and slow. Alternatively, annotate each rule with a probability, and then have both rules in parallel. Change would then be an increase/decrease in probability.

For language change in general you might be interested in Piotrowski's Law. (Unfortunately the only explanation I have found for it is in German). This models mathematically how change spreads throughout language.


问:
Is there a middle-written language?

Real languages

I am aware of several types of writing systems.

The first one would be left to right and a prime example is English and also most of other languages, no matter if they use letters or other symbols.

Another type would be right to left, which can be seen in Hebrew writing:

As you can see, the text in the image selected by me for illustration, a digital user interface of a Hebrew keyboard, is right bound.

In the above image you can see Japanese text, which is traditionally read from top to bottom in either horizontal direction, in which I mean that both existed, not that you can read one text both from right to left and left to right after going top to bottom.

Constructed languages

Now I am wondering whether there is a constructed language that reads from the middle. I am pretty sure that there is no traditional language that does this, hence I am attending here.

Let me just create a concept here for you to understand. In such a language above rows would have the same meaning. In that case it is read horizontally, but from the middle, so that it does not matter if something appears on the left or right side.

Another example:

You might be able to understand what I mean by saying "middle-written", i.e. you always start in the middle.

Conclusion

I think that a language like this should be really interesting and maybe useful, thus I am curious whether or not a constructed language written quite like this exists.

答:
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written in any direction (LTR, RTL, TTB, BTT). On ornamental pieces and buildings, writing was frequently started at the center (e.g. the central temple gate) working outward in both directions. The best readable example I can show you is a replica of this writing style mimicked on the Memphis Zoo entrance:

You can derive the reading direction by checking in which directions the human and animal glyphs are looking.

Some of the hierglyphs are modern inventions for animals unknown to Ancient Egypt, but most of it checks out.

Title: Is there a middle-written language?


问:
How would one describe different tones on paper?
In my new language, I use tones, such as those in Mandarin and Cantonese, to diversify my words. When I try to make a dictionary, I do not know how to describe these tones. I have tried using parts different English words to describe what a tone sounds like, but that is not very efficient. Is there a simpler way to describe these tones?</p>

答:
I think vowel + shift in tone is key. If you'd just have different tones (as in notes) for vowels, that would conflict with expressions of pain, surprise, etc. In Asian Philology, when we talk about "tones", we actually mean a change in pitch for a vowel. Chinese has 4: Same, Up, Down and Down+Up. Thai for example has more.

Here's a grid of the most used tonal notation systems for Chinese:

The most common in use today is Pinyin


问:
Is there some more detailed information about Dritok available?
Dritok is a conlang by Dan Boozer without any voiced sounds. It is said to be based on chipmunk sounds.

While this language even has a wikipedia article, I was not able to discover some more detailed information about the language like full phoneme inventory or some information about the transcription system used or some glossed examples of it.

Are there some resources on Dritok available?

答: This website contains a video and links to some resources. The most important is this PDF, which explains gestures ("Dritok Gestural Syntax"), phonology and grammar.</p>


答:
In order to construct a realistic and suitable writing system, these are some things you should consider before you think about how you want it to look:

Could your needs be served by a writing system in existence realistically? For example, if you're creating a Slavic language, you could easily use the Cyrillic or Latin scripts (cf. Russian, Czech); there's no need to design a new script.

What do geographically or lexically similar languages use as their primary scripts? Finnish uses the Latin script as a result of Swedish influence, even though Swedish is not related to Finnish linguistically.

How does the language intersect with the culture of the people speaking it? Although Serbian and Croatian are technically the same language, they typically use different writing systems because Serbians tend to be Orthodox (Cyrillic-associated) and Croatians tend to be Catholic (Latin-associated). Conversely, Cantonese uses the same script as Mandarin despite not being the same language due to geographical and political similarities.

When did your language and its script split off from its ancestors, and how were they written? Despite Greek not being a Semitic language, it had a close proximity to the Phoenicians and thus borrowed their alphabet. But if your language came more recently, perhaps you should base it upon a more recent alphabet such as Greek itself, or even the Latin script (as with Lisu).

How strict is your language phonologically, and what semantic effect does changing vowels or consonants have? Arabic uses an abjad in part because the consonants provide the actual base meaning, while vowels change various minutiae, while Japanese (in part) can use a syllabary because it's very restrictive with syllable structure. On the other hand, Georgian uses a full alphabet because it has so many consonant clusters, which can't really be expressed concisely in a syllabary or abugida.

Then you can consider how you want it to look. You can give something a more cursive or angular appearance while still basing it off of something relevant. This also gives it more of a unique flavor even if you're using an existing system. This is something you could do for a Phoenician-based system that doesn't look like Phoenician (crude, but you get the point):

You should additionally think about the direction in which your script is supposed to be written - letter forms can change based on that. They tend to lean right in an LTR script and vice versa, and be either thin and tall or confined to a square for a vertical script (like traditional Mongolian/Uyghur and Chinese hànzì respectively). Also, vertical scripts don't often have completely open bottoms or tops of characters like LTR scripts might.

In a fantasy world, where you're relying less on historicity and looking more for inspiration, you kind of just need to look at different scripts applying the sort of aesthetic you want, then alter them and perhaps combine them together into a whole system. If you enjoy neat and somewhat simplistic scripts with varying letter heights, you could combine inspiration from Latin and Armenian. For loopy, natural-looking scripts, take a look at Georgian and Greek. There are tons of different writing systems across the world, and I guarantee you'll find inspiration somewhere if you look.

Title: Finding inspiration for letter forms?

Body:
I believe I've mentioned before on here how I struggle to come up with forms for letters.

I've tried to solve this by looking at other systems. Despite the diversity in our world, I've found it surprisingly hard to find a multitude of systems to draw from.

The problem is: writing systems have different factors that can influence their design. Syllabraries tend to have more complex characters than alphabets, because they don't have to write as many of them to spell out a word. And besides, they need a wider diversity of symbols anyway. Logographic systems are no different. Also the medium makes a huge difference. The aesthetic of one script may not be too practical to replicate using a medium it wasn't intended for.

I've found this all divides up writing systems into multiple different categories based on design. This means that if you stick with a certain medium and type of writing system, you won't have much to go off of. Like, if you look at alphabets, all that really seems to be out there is Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Korean. And if you look at cursive scripts, you only really have two options: English cursive, and Arabic, which is technically an abjad. And of course if you want a logographic system, the only living logographic system (aka, the only one to see use in a world where literacy was normal writing was part of every day life) is Chinese. Beyond that, all you have to look at are long extinct logographic systems that were all made to be carved into stone. Or cuneiform, which used some rather odd tools and medium to write. How many systems do you know of that were written in clay, and were always stamped rather than drawn?

I can't come up with forms that really look overly different from the few alphabets currently in use. Worse yet, most of them are closely related to each other! It seems like every symbol possible has already been used in a writing system somewhere.

The only thing that has really helped me is I've noticed that most lower-case Latin letters are built from a limited number of shapes: a circle, loop, short line, long line, long line with a loop, and a dot. Sadly, I can't really come up with any practical letter forms that don't use these shapes. They're pretty simple and basic.


问:
How do you call a "stillborn language"?
And by "stillborn", I mean a dead language that never really lived to begin with: a modernized version of an archaic language frozen in time, or an all-out archaic language (with archaic grammar and vocabulary), but with modernized pronunciations (and all the vowel shifts and consonant shifts applied). Like Classical Latin, which was probably never spoken in daily life (in contrast with Vulgar Latin).

Or just simply a language that is based off an actual natural language, but highly stylized and artificial, having had diglossia with its parent-language since the start, never having been an actual spoken language at any point in history.

答:
You're describing a couple different and not totally related things with different terminology used for each:

Classical Latin is an example of a literary language, a language used not really in speech but used to communicate through writing.

Modern Standard Arabic, one of those artificial languages based off of a natural one but not really being a spoken language. It's very frequently affected by diglossia, and not really used in natural settings. It's usually referred to as simply a standardized lanuage, and also qualifies as a literary language.

Hebrew as spoken in daily life in Israel would qualify as the first type you described, a modernized version of an old language that was resurrected after death. It would be referred to as a revived language.

Title: How do you call a "stillborn language"?


问:
Constructed languages or dialects for Time travellers
Time travel is a standard trope in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Since time travel disrupts the normal perception of time time travellers may develop some linguistic means to deal with this situation.

My question is: What are examples of either constructed languages for time travellers or constructed varieties of natural languages used by time travellers and how do they deal with aspects related to time travel?

答:
That's a tough one. All languages (previously) in existence are in essence linear, because they are phonetic representations of human experience. Even when describing the past or the future, language does so in a linear form. Also, any human language is itself subject to time, with one phoneme uttered after another. In addition, the grammars of some languages are very restrictive to allow expression of effect preceding cause, etc. For example, Indo-Germanic languages cannot have verbs without a subject and the subject must precede the verb. So looking at natural languages it is clear that some are better suited to express time paradoxes etc. than others.

Probably the best candidate languages to extend or base a conlang on would be those languages that do not change sentence structure for singular vs plural, present vs past or future, affirmative vs negative, certain vs conditional, etc. Japanese for example would be a good candidate. To change all of the aforementioned sentence parameters you would just use suffixes, e.g. -ta for past tense, -tachi for plural, -yo for conditional, etc. It could therefore easily be extended with suffixes to express time paradoxes, timelines, etc.

Another language that meets the conditions of unchanging sentence structure related to time & conditions would be Chinese (Literary Chinese to be exact, Modern Chinese would be a bit more problematic due to its compound phrases). This is a monosyllabic language where word meaning is based on tone. Chinese currently has 4 tones. You could add modulations to these tones to express time travel related conditions and effects. But unless you've been brought up in this language it would be extremely hard to learn (just learning to distinguish the current 4 tones in all circumstances is already a daunting task for a non-native speaker unless you're also musically inclined).

If you want to construct a conlang that is not based on any existing language, a good candidate would be a language that is based on harmonics (i.e. multiple frequencies uttered at the same time). Different harmonics could represent different time-related states. However, human vocal chords are not really up to the task of uttering complex harmonics.

There's probably many other ways to answer your question but here's my 2 cents :)


问:
Has any conlang ever replaced the use of a pidgin?
I've read that being a simple, yet more expressive, substitute for a pidgin language is one of the possible applications of Toki Pona.

In situations where people from multiple languages come together they need to be able to communicate with each other. Pidgins are introduced or developed in these situations, but there is a limited scope to what can be said in pidgins. Over time, pidgins creolise into full natural languages. I would like to know if a language like Toki Pona (or a similarly minimal conlang) has ever successfully replaced the use of a pidgin to allow more to be said, rather than letting the pidgin creolise naturally.

答: Yep. How reconstructed/engineered modern Hebrew replaced Yiddish and Judesmo. Both can be considered as pidgins, from German and from Spanish, with lithurgic Hebrew vocab. And modern Hebrew is definitely a conlang.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
Do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?
In order for me to ask a higher quality question, I need to know, do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?</p>

答:
No, a conlang does not need any of it. You can construct a language based on gestures (a sign language) or on whistles, or on other signals transporting information. You can construct a Pasigraphy, i.e., a written-only language.

But for a more conventional design that meets our intuition of language, you will probably use sounds and words, and letters to write the language. It is up to your creativity to come up with original sounds and letters, but there is definetely no need to do so. Many conlang designs rely on sounds (and complete phonologies) that occur in natural languages, and use usual letters (mostly Latin, but also Cyrillic or other existing writing systems like Runes) for writing. The words of a conlang are most often original but I even can imagine a conlang without original words: Draw existing words for natural languages in an eclectic way or create a conlang closely based on a natural language or a group of natural languages. The vocabulary of IALA Interlingua is hardly original.


答:
As has already been said, the answer is, generally no. However, I’d like to look into it a bit deeper:

Letters

Many (most?) constructed languages are written with the Latin script, i.e. what I’m using right now to write this answer. However, many conlangers find the base set of 26 characters it provides too restrictive, and will make use of things like diacritics (áèñħ…), special characters used in some languages or the IPA (ŋß…) or letters from other alphabets (εφϑ…). This is a choice, and by no means a necessity. Some conlangers, in particular those creating languages for a constructed world, also like to invent entire writing systems and consider the representation with the Latin script (“romanisation”) merely a tool for easy representation online. Again, this is optional, but depending on your goals might be a good idea. It would not make sense to create a new writing system for an auxiliary language though, for example.

Words

There’s three ways one might interpret this question:

Do I have to make my words sound different (from English / any other language)? Certainly not: auxiliary languages often take heavy inspiration from existing languages, as familiarity makes it easier to learn a language. Similarly, if you want to toy around with grammar but don’t really care about the actual outcome, you might as well just use placeholder words taken straight from English and focus on what you really care about.

Do I have to make words which mean different things than the words in English/any other language? Here I am inclined to say yes. If you simply copy an English dictionary and replace all the words by other sounding words, then you’ve created what is called a relex. Whether relexes are considered conlangs or not is up for debate, in my eyes they are ciphers. However, there’s layers upon layers to this - is a conlang still a relex if you copy the lexicon but use completely different grammar? Perhaps not, but it’s not as interesting as if you also made a custom lexicon. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that doing so takes away most of what makes a conlang unique.

Do I have to follow the idea of having sentences broken down into words? Absolutely not: it’s actually surprisingly hard (read: an unsolved problem) to define the concept of a word in a way that works for every language. Look into the (just as loosely defined) concept of polysynthesis if you’re intrigued.

Sounds

Language doesn’t have to rely on sound. There’s sign languages as a primary counterexample that also shows up “in real life”, and on top of that, graphical (written only), touch based and many other kinds of languages have been created.

But let’s assume you’re going to be making a spoken language. Two questions:

Do I have to make new sounds? Well… no. There’s only so many sounds our mouths can make and most of them already occur in some language (and those that don’t, e.g. smacking ones teeth together don’t occur for good reasons), so it’s rather hard to even make new sounds. But if you’re making a language meant for aliens/sapient animals/whatever nonhuman you can come up with, then maybe you might want to. But many conlangers don’t bother, as it is really hard.

Do I have to make a new sound system or can I just use the sounds of English/other language? Same point as with the words above: You don’t have to, and if your goal is to focus on other parts of the conlang you might as well ignore it, but if your goal is to make a good, interesting and unique conlang, then… yea you should.

Summary

In short, what you do and don’t do depends entirely on your design goals. If you wanna toy with a particular grammar concept, then focus on the essentials. If you wanna make the new big international auxlang then keep things familiar to the target audience. If you want to make a natural looking conlang, then go all in and be creative.

Title: Do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?

Body: In order for me to ask a higher quality question, I need to know, do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?</p>


问:
Does Esperanto have any words that mean more than one thing?
Looking at the "about Esperanto" page, I see this line:

While he realized that a common language would not end the cultural barrier, it would enable ordinary people, not politicians, to have cross national conversations. To this end, he created Esperanto, a language that would be easy for most people to learn, due to it's logical, regular design.

Speaking from experience, one of the difficult parts of learning a new language is keeping different meanings straight for words that have different meaning. It's a little hard to bear at times how many words mean many things.

Does Esperanto, with it's "logical, regular design", have any homographs?

答:
The selection of words in Esperanto tried to prevent:

homonyms, same sounding words: trajn/o = train, railroad, trejn/ist/o = trainer; but also poliso = (insurance) policy, politiko = policy, measure

word parts that could be mistaken as infixes; partly with artificial changes (kun - instead of kon* = with / in company, as many latin derived words start with kon (kongreso, kontraŭ)

synonyms, picking different words, if a word holds different meanings

false friends in other languages (tago = day - instead of deo*, dio = god, bona = good)

This makes Esperanto a more disambiguating language in some respects. It is not one hundred percent perfect, ŭato (= Watt) was (unsuccessfully) proposed to disambiguate from vato (= cotton wool). Or plumo = (1) pen (skribilo), (2) feather.

Homography should not happen in Esperanto: different pronunciations for the same spelling. However related are:

The rare letter/sound ĥ that often was reformed to k: ĥemio = kemio = chemistry; both forms valid.

The suffix -uj: franco = Frenchman, Francujo / Francio = France. This suffix was alienated as -ij* would be a phonetically too ambiguous combination for usage in Esperanto. However later in history an -i reform introduced a more "international" form, with its own problems.


问:
Are there human beatbox inspired conlangs?
Human beatbox is an art form producing percussion sounds with the mouth only. It uses techniques and sounds that are rare or entirely absent in natural languages.

Are the constructed languages that take inspiration by human beatbox sounds?

答: ANADEW: Nuxalk (also known as Bella Coola), a natural language of the Salishan family spoken at the west coast of Canada, has some beat-box elements: long strings of consonants without intervening vowels. Nuxalk features ejective consonants, too. </p>


答:
Yes -- after a fashion.

The main issue I have with your question lies in the specific terms used: words, letters & sounds.

So far, the answers have gotten around these things by pointing out whistle or sign languages. And I agree: technically speaking, in a sign language, there are no words and certainly no sounds.

The reason the answer is actually yes, I contend, is because I am sure what you actually mean by "words" is "discrete meaning carrying units of language" and by "sounds" & "letters" you probably mean "some way to convey said meaning through an interpersonal medium of communication".

When taken at the broader level, of course, language has to have "meaning carrying units" and it has to have "medium of communication". Else, language ceases to have meaning.

I would say that yes, ever invented language must have "words" (whether those words are spoken, signed, thought or written) as tokens of meaningful communication; and they must have "sounds" (whether spoken by mouth through the air or sent via radio waves between antennae) as a native & non-technological way of conveying meaning.

"Letters" indicate a specifically technological advancement to communication via language. An invented language's culture does not need to be that advanced. And even if it were, it would not need "its own" letters. It could borrow either someone else's writing system; for example the way Persian borrowed Arabic writing. Even though Persians had been writing for centuries already.


问:
Did a majority of followers of Ido indeed switch over to Occidental?
The Wikipedia article on Occidental/Interlingue says (in this version):

According to the Occidental magazine Cosmoglotta in 1928, a majority of Ido adherents took up Occidental in place of Ido.

Obviously, Cosmosglotta isn't an unbiased publication venue. Is there any independent evidence that this switching of language actually took place?

答: r/Ido has twenty times as many subscribers as r/Interlingue. While comparing reddit subscribers may not be the most scientific method, it's probably fair to assume this reflects their popularity in general. It's impossible to really know if most Ido-ists switched to Occidental back in the 1920s, but even if they did I think it's fair to say that later generations preferred Ido to Interlingue. Perhaps confusion with the more popular Interlingua is to blame.</p>


问:
Is Glosa more than just a relex of English?
Looking for information on the International Auxiliary languages Interglossa and Glosa again, I stumbled over these sample texts in Glosa. I am astonished, how slavishly Glosa copies the English syntax: While some elements of a noun phrase or a verb phrase may be slightly reordered, translation unit after translation unit are completely parallel in the English and Glosa texts, even for rather complicated English sentences. And the English preference for past participles also carries over to Glosa in a one-to-one fashion.

Has Glosa any syntax of its own (independent from English)? Are there any Glosa idioms setting it apart from a relex of English?

答:
While Glosa definitely does seem to take a lot of influence from English, it's grammar isn't quite so indistinguishable from English's as to be an obvious relex.

It avoids classic relex mistakes like including do-support, and while its tense-aspect system doesn't do anything too wild for English speakers, it uses a variety of particles rather than English's auxiliary-based periphrastic tenses. It's also noteworthy that it lacks plurals, a decidedly un-English-like feature. Both these features were likely inspired by Mandarin Chinese.

Glosa also has an article that is unspecified for definiteness, using u(n) for both "the" and "a(n)", which is a departure from its major influences -- English, which has distinct definite and indefinite articles; Mandarin Chinese, which doesn't have any such articles; and Esperanto, which possesses one explicitly definite article. However, this article's syntactic behavior does not seem notably different from the English or Esperanto articles, so it's not thinking too far outside the box there.

You could definitely argue that Glosa's departures from English are pretty small, and that it's thus still quite relex-y in spirit. It's certainly closer to normal English grammatically than Interglossa, which is reportedly based on Simple English. So it really depends exactly how far you think a conlang must depart from English grammatically to "count" as not being a relex.


答:
You might want to explore the use of Gallifreyan in Doctor Who as he is a member of time-travelling people called the Gallifreyans. He always has a confused sense of time on his show.

It appears that this language uses a series of circles that represent different aspects of time.

Title: Constructed languages or dialects for Time travellers

Body:
Time travel is a standard trope in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Since time travel disrupts the normal perception of time time travellers may develop some linguistic means to deal with this situation.

My question is: What are examples of either constructed languages for time travellers or constructed varieties of natural languages used by time travellers and how do they deal with aspects related to time travel?


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:
A rough, non exact translation could be something like this:

The good folklore (the strength of Libya) near [probably "are part of"]
  many thoughts of second director/general/Vicepresident of Atlantis.

It's weird, I know. If there's any verb there, I can't see li anywhere. I think toki lawa ("talk of head/mind") means to think, but in the official book of Toki Pona, to think is also just toki.


问:
How could a conlang enforce subjective idealism in a constructed world
Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.

How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?

My guess is that its semantic primes should consist of:

qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as  the redness of an evening sky, pain of a headache, the taste of wine, etc.

A pronoun like *I* to refer to one's self

Verbs such as *think*, *believe*, *know*

Adverbs such as: *now*, *before*, *after*

Objects (e.g. chair, table, etc.), other personal pronouns (you, he, etc.), matter and all the other things that do not really exist (in the view of subjective idealism) would be defined as paraphrases.

Edit: Note that this is not a question on subjective idealism in reality, but about subjective idealism in a constructed world. Therefore arguments against subjective idealism in reality are irrelevant.

答:
Revised answer:

There is a maxim of geopoesy: who makes the world makes the rules.

In a secondary world, a world of your own devising, an invented language would not need to "enforce" subjective idealism at all.  Only one thing is required, and that is to "set the dial" of your subcreation to subjective idealism.

In that world, only the mind and mental constructs have true existence. The language a mind devises for itself to communicate (within itself) and assuming the mind that exists is a human mind, will arise to describe its experience.

I think your semantic primes would probably be sufficient to describe both the realia of the mind-being's existence: the 1s pronoun, the concrete verbs such as "think", "know" and "believe", the qualia of phantasms created within the mind. Because sunsets and wine do not exist.

If the world you subcreate is, in actuality, a typological copy of the primary world, where things outside the mind have actual existence, then you run into the exact same issues I dealt with when your question was about the primary world itself.

Such a language, I hold, would not be able to "enforce" subjective idealism in any meaningful way. It would not be able to overcome the steak and eggs problem.

Original response to unedited query (regarding subjective idealism within the primary world) retained for historical purposes:

Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.

How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?

A very interesting thought experiment! But I believe is simply not practicable.

I don't think a language of any kind will be able to enforce that kind of (quite silly) perspective of reality.

In order to pull it off, I think you would have to first, absolutely and positively convince yourself that Berkeley was a) on to something and b) that a) is The Something.

Now, reason and common sense inform us that things do actually exist. Things outside the mind, things outside of mental construct. I can sit my weary bones down on a chair and be thankful that chairs exist. They're not mental constructs.  They're articles of furniture made of wood and designed and built to be sat in. That's reason and common sense refuting Berkeley.

Now, I had a look at Mr Berkeley's picture in that article. He looks pretty well fed to me.  Not emaciated, not dehydrated. I'll just bet he enjoyed a good steak and eggs for breakfast!

A true subjective idealist would also have to be a practical breatharian, because food does not exist. It's an insubstantial construct of the mind.

For your language to really function, you too would have to become a breatharian. You know: immerse yourself in the culture! Let us know how far you get in the practical application of this kind of philosophical language!

Specific to your last point re objects: I think, since objects do not exist and are therefore irrelevant to the thought and being of the mind, you could probably get away with a language where all substantives (apart from the 1s) are reduced to a single pronominal stem.

Trees don't exist, so you wouldn't really need a word for "tree". I don't exist, so you don't need a word for "elemtilas". This post doesn't exist, so you don't need words for "stack exchange" or "invented language" or "post" or "forum".


答:
I assume that the inhabitants of your constructed world are humans (or at least have comparable minds to humans).

The is a famous hypothesis in lingusitics, called Linguisitc Relativity or Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that claims (to different degrees) that the language shapes the mind and the world view. Experimental studies only show weak effects, if any. We can assume that humans are able to develop every thought in any language.

On the other hand, authors have used this to some effect in fiction writing—in a constructed fictional world you have the licence to do so and to ignore hard science.

Title: How could a conlang enforce subjective idealism in a constructed world

Body:
Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.

How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?

My guess is that its semantic primes should consist of:

qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as  the redness of an evening sky, pain of a headache, the taste of wine, etc.

A pronoun like *I* to refer to one's self

Verbs such as *think*, *believe*, *know*

Adverbs such as: *now*, *before*, *after*

Objects (e.g. chair, table, etc.), other personal pronouns (you, he, etc.), matter and all the other things that do not really exist (in the view of subjective idealism) would be defined as paraphrases.

Edit: Note that this is not a question on subjective idealism in reality, but about subjective idealism in a constructed world. Therefore arguments against subjective idealism in reality are irrelevant.


问:
How do languages manage to make sense with a free word order?
Many of the world's natural languages, and some conlangs, have a free word order, so that the words can be put in any order with it still making sense.

If they can't use word order to indicate the structure, what strategies do they use instead? Have any conlangs used strategies not found in natlangs?

答:
The real answer is that languages don't actually have free word order. Rather, languages with 'free' word order use the rearrangements to signify additional meaning. Here, look at English:

Hey, what did you eat?

This is a plain question, indicated by shifting the 'what' from its underlying position to the front.

Wait, you ate what?!

From the perspective of a logician, this sentence should mean the same thing, right? But it doesn't. When you don't shift a wh-word, it doesn't remain a question, it's a statement of surprise and maybe a request for clarification. It's also stylistically informal, and wouldn't be used in a sentence. In other words, it's what linguists call a 'pragmatic shift'.

Every language with 'free' word order does something like this. Traditional grammar and logic tends to downplay or be unaware of word order and pragmatics, and so people who speak such languages tend to believe that words can be arranged in any which way you want. But underlyingly, every arrangement of word order carries a stylistic or pragmatic significance, and using the 'wrong' arrangement will make it sound off to a fluent speaker, even if they couldn't explain why.

Esperanto is an interesting example -- officially speaking, Esperanto has totally free word order. But in practice, Esperanto word orderings follow unspoken stylistic and pragmatic rules (typically lifted from Germanic and Slavic). So this would presumably occur with any fluently spoken language, conlang or not.


问:
Is Basic English a well-defined constructed language?
Wikipedia says that Basic English is an English-based controlled language, an international auxiliary language, and an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English.

The problem is: there is a fixed number of 850 basic words for beginners, but there is no definite list. Some lists have 1500 words, others have 2000 words, but one can always draw more words from the English language. For instance: how would you talk about a cucumber, an oak tree or a rhinoceros without some silly circumlocution or using the real English word?

So, is Basic English a well-defined constructed language that can exists on its own?

答:
The website describing Ogden's Basic English is here.
Wiktionary has the 850 word list here.

I would argue that Basic English is a (rather) well defined invented language.  Wikipedia lists it as a controlled natural language, which simply means that it is a natural language whose natural form and evolution have been suspended and its new form and evolution have been created by someone. In this case, Charles Ogden.

Classical Latin I have seen argued is a similar beast: a natural language that has some constructed or artificial tendencies, just not a single author.

The controlled language is, I would argue, the "fourth axial point of the Gnoli Triangle" --- the point where the art, science/engineering & practicality of invented languages become cotangent with the world of natural languages.

Basic English and its relatives might thus be seen as "conlang-natlang creoles". Where the creolisation process happens between two types of language rather than between two specific languages.

As for existing on its own, I think that is a rather different matter. If we were to replace the grammar with some kind of fundamental rule list and replace the English lexicon with unique, perhaps even levelled-Germanic words, we'd basically end up reinventing Esperanto.  Or Folksprak.  As such, yes, it could "exist on its own".

But Basic English is quite different among auxlangs, in that its essential function is that of a "bridge language".  It is designed to bring people who have no English at all across the gap and to a place where they can immerse themselves in the broader Anglophone world. Basic English is thus, in this key regard, self limiting in scope and usefulness.  It's great so long as the learner has extremely limited access to English speakers or English media.

As soon as that learner discovers the Internet or Anglophone aural culture (radio, television, movies) or English literature (broadly defined as anything written), they are going to discover the limitations imposed by Basic English. They'll have to leave it behind. In that sense, Basic English can't really have its own existence.

To build on your example: a Basic English speaker would simply have to step off the bridge and begin learning the "extended" lexicon of ordinary English!


答: Many languages, like Japanese and Korean, have particles added to words to show which part of speech they are. While word order is still necessary for these languages to make sense, a conlang might have grammar where each word's part of speech is not defined by their place in the sentence, but what particles are attached to the words. A similar effect could be achieved by using different pitches or different word forms to define a word's part of speech. </p>

Title: How do languages manage to make sense with a free word order?

Body:
Many of the world's natural languages, and some conlangs, have a free word order, so that the words can be put in any order with it still making sense.

If they can't use word order to indicate the structure, what strategies do they use instead? Have any conlangs used strategies not found in natlangs?


答:
Ted Chang wrote "Story of Your Life" which was the basis for the movie Arrival. I thought both the book and the visual representation in the film were excellent examples of languages based on a travelers use of time. In this story understanding the language is to understand your life as a simultaneous event, and thus have access to all moments at once.

You may also want to consider Jargon specific to your vision of time travel. Do paradox occur, and if so what is the resultant outcome? Do parallel realities exist, are there different types? Can futures be erased or overwritten, if so, what do you call a future that no longer exists, or a person lost in one? Do you have some sort of McGuffin for the travelling part? Is the language the means of travel? Do bodies travel or only minds?

You might consider leveraging something like Hobo signs, notes left by other travelers, with help or warnings, that type of thing. Alternatively, Signals of fealty and place, such as a question and response or sing the local anthem to identify other travelers as friend or foe. Flushing out what you want them to communicate, as well as the mood or archetypes of the speakers, might help drive the sound and appearance of the language.


答:
Basically, your question is misstated.

In our own world, languages cannot enforce philosophies. You can be a Hegelian, a Tomist, a Berkelian, or a Marxist, in any given language, from Modern English to Ancient Farsi.

After all, all languages have this pesky word, "no", so that anything that can be affirmed can also be negated.

In a constructed world, everything is possible - negation of entropy, FTL travel, and all kinds of magic. So in your constructed world, language makes impossible for people to follow any other philosophy than subjective idealism. How language does this? It is better not to explain it, or only do it through applied phlebotinum - like SF writers do when describing FTL travel or the nature of mana.

I suggest this fiction, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luís Borges; it might be somewhat similar to - though somewhat more disquieting than - what you intend.


答:
Look into the way Sanskrit works, and the words they use when discussing Hindu doctrines. I read somewhere that the Sanskrit word for meat, "Mamsa", is a word containing the words for "Me" and "You", referencing that as you kill and eat an animal, you will become an animal in a future lifetime that who you killed will hunt and eat.

The theological/metaphysical statement is right there in a common statement - So the implications of subjective idealism would have to be used to describe phenomena from the most accurate perspective of the worldview.


问:
Famous a priori auxilary languages?
Most auxiliary languages I know of, especially Esperanto, are primarily a posteriori—that is, their vocabulary or grammar are derived from other existing languages, and most are fairly Eurocentric. While many might have a priori grammar, but not vocabulary, I have yet to see another language that is entirely a priori—not derived from other languages. Do any such languages exist? Note I am talking about languages designed to be an international auxiliary language.

答:
Short answer: I've never seen or read a description of what you're seeking.

Long answer: What you're seeking is a most unlikely beast, reason being...

Generally speaking, auxiliary languages seek being completely or nearly completely a posteriori for reasons of simple expedience. Common design goals of an auxiliary language are ease of learning and simplicity of use.  These goals are best met when vocabulary and grammar are familiar to the target audience.  This is why Interlingua and Esperanto are considered "easy" languages to learn and have gained considerable user communities, with Esperanto boasting a small community of native level speakers.

What you're describing, a completely a priori invented language is most usually the domain of the artistic language, the engineered language and the philosophical language. With the exception of the philosophical inventors, most glossopoets are not interested in propagandising their languages as auxiliary languages.  Occasionally a philosophical language inventor will propose his language as a means of general communication, but this is usually done from a position of ignorance as to how language works (accomplished auxiliary language proponents are usually quite well aware how language works in the wild!).

Auxiliary languages tend not to be classified as a priori simply because they impose layers of difficulty that run contrary to the usual design parameters of the genre. However, it can potentially be argued that a priori invented languages can become auxiliary languages after a fashion and if the appropriate stars align. For example, it may be that Klingon has seen some use as an ad hoc auxiliary language if, for example, two groups of Star Trek fans who do not share a language in common other than Klingon happen to meet at a SciFi convention.

Needless to say, even if there were an actual auxiliary language that is classified as purely a priori, it certainly isn't famous. Otherwise, we'd know about it!

Title: Famous a priori auxilary languages?


答:
We will have to go back some centuries in time to find a language like this. Since the success of Esperanto (and, to a lesser degree Interlingua, Glosa, and Toki Pona) it seems to be clear that an auxiliary language has to be naturalistic in some way to catch on. Nowadays, a priory languages (e.g., Loglan and its forks) are only designed with other purposes.

With this in mind, probably Solresol (1817) is the most famous a priory auxiliary language.

Title: Famous a priori auxilary languages?

Body: Most auxiliary languages I know of, especially Esperanto, are primarily a posteriori—that is, their vocabulary or grammar are derived from other existing languages, and most are fairly Eurocentric. While many might have a priori grammar, but not vocabulary, I have yet to see another language that is entirely a priori—not derived from other languages. Do any such languages exist? Note I am talking about languages designed to be an international auxiliary language.


答: If you think about it, many existing languages do, albeit in a limited manner. In Spanish, for example, all nouns and pronouns are gendered; either male or female. This enforces the idea that all people are either male or female—which is not true. Your world might have two groups of people and the second group can only be described as 'inferiors' in the language; there is no other word. </p>


问:
What verbs should be irregular in a naturalistic conlang?
I've read that the most commonly used verbs in a language are almost always irregular, and for the most part the irregular forms of verbs can be traced to an archaic form being preserved in the language, or to the influence of other languages.
When creating a naturalistic conlang, what verbs should be irregular? I'm already aware that 'to be' is almost always irregular, but are there any general patterns for which verbs are most often irregular in a natlang? (For example, are verbs involving movement more commonly irregular than not?)</p>

答: Well, the statement is demonstrably untrue. Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) doesn't have irregular verbs, because verbs aren't conjugated. Quechua doesn't have any. And languages like Inuktitut has no irregularity in verbs because of the way that the language assembles words based on a root+affixes.</p>


答:
The first class of verbs that is often highly irregular are the auxiliary verbs. This does not only comprise to be and to have but also the modal auxiliaries (like must, can, shall, and will). They are used very frequently and tend to erode phonetically, and they are also prone to suppletion (showing a mixture of different stems from originally different words).

A quick check (for my native language German) seems to confirm your intuition that verbs of motion are more often irregular than average. They are also used quite frequently. In Romance languages, the basic verb for to go (e.g., French aller or Italian andare) is very irregular and mixing several different stems ((vulgar) Latin ambulare/allare, vadere, ire).

Some verbs are irregular because they rhyme with an irregular verb, e.g., German schreiben, schrieb, geschrieben "to write", borrowed from Latin scribere, became irregular because of rhyming verbs like bleiben "to stay".

Title: What verbs should be irregular in a naturalistic conlang?

Body:
I've read that the most commonly used verbs in a language are almost always irregular, and for the most part the irregular forms of verbs can be traced to an archaic form being preserved in the language, or to the influence of other languages.
When creating a naturalistic conlang, what verbs should be irregular? I'm already aware that 'to be' is almost always irregular, but are there any general patterns for which verbs are most often irregular in a natlang? (For example, are verbs involving movement more commonly irregular than not?)</p>


问:
How much of Tolkien's "black language" exists?
What samples or knowledge do we have of the black speech created by Tolkien? Having read a decent amount of the legendarium (Silmarillion, LotR, Hobbit, Children of Hurin, and some of the Lost Tales) the only occurrence I am aware of is the inscription on the one ring.</p>

答:
Am reading through LotR now, and have just finished H, Lost Tales, R, FG, etc. so the memories are still pretty fresh.

The Ring verse is the longest bit of Black Speech, followed by Grishnákh's bit of invective towards Ugluk. Other than that, there's only a couple individual words (like snaga, slave and ghash, fire) to be found.

Tolkien himself wrote as much in a letter (No. 144) to a reader of page-proofs (presumably of LotR): ...[Black Speech] only occurs in the Ring inscription, and a sentence uttered by the Orcs of Barad-Dur and in the word Nazgúl.

A related query on the Black Speech.


问:
How much Dwarvish did Tolkien actually devise?
The Dwarvish language in Tolkien's legendarium is famous for being virtually unknown to non-Dwarves. Apart from a few phrases, like Gimli's battle-cry "Baruk Khazad! Khazad ai-menu!" (from memory; please forgive the lack of diacritics), almost nothing of their language is known to other Middle-Earth dwellers.

But what about us in the real world? Did Tolkien actually develop the language beyong those few phrases, in any of his wider notes on Middle-Earth and its languages? Or did he focus more on the Elvish languages, and create the in-universe conceit of Dwarvish secretiveness just so that he didn't have to develop yet another language?

答:
As per this (cited by "An Analysis of Dwarvish" in Arda Philology 1: Proceedings of the First International Conference, with a very nice glossary of the language, which can be found here):

Regarding Khuzdul, Tolkien stated that "this tongue has been sketched in some detail of structure, if with a very small vocabulary" (PM:300). It evidently came into being in the thirties.

Here PM refers to the Peoples of Middle Earth. The complete corpus of the language is described on the same site as being

a few names, like Khazad-dûm and Zirak-zigil, the inscription on Balin's tomb, and a battle cry: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! "Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!"

A petty-dwarf, Mîm, is also named, in The Children of Hurin, though that is the only reference there. The names also include Chamber of Mazarbul [records].

(A complete glossary is given on the website; it is too long to copy here.) It also mentions Appendix D, E, and F in the Lord of the Rings (F primarily containing history, of course) and the Appendix in the Silmarillion also apparently contains a reference to Khuzdul:

At least one Khuzdul word made its way into Sindarin: kheled "glass", that appears in Grey-elven as heledh (see the Silmarillion Appendix, entry khelek-)

This appears to be all we know of Khuzdul. In spite of this, extensive analysis has been made, with a not insignificant amount of it guesswork. See "An Analysis of Dwarvish" for one example (provides a theory of language structure).

Of course, Tolkien did state that it was "sketched", but the question is where it was - there's a chance it may be unpublished:

Yes, there is some unpublished material concerning Khuzdul. However, it’s only a small amount, and as I recall, it consists mostly of phonological discussion, though inevitably there is in conjunction with this some discussion of the grammatical significance of various root modifications. But don’t expect anything like Etymologies or the "Early Qenya Grammar" for Khuzdul.


问:
Finding inspiration for letter forms?
I believe I've mentioned before on here how I struggle to come up with forms for letters.

I've tried to solve this by looking at other systems. Despite the diversity in our world, I've found it surprisingly hard to find a multitude of systems to draw from.

The problem is: writing systems have different factors that can influence their design. Syllabraries tend to have more complex characters than alphabets, because they don't have to write as many of them to spell out a word. And besides, they need a wider diversity of symbols anyway. Logographic systems are no different. Also the medium makes a huge difference. The aesthetic of one script may not be too practical to replicate using a medium it wasn't intended for.

I've found this all divides up writing systems into multiple different categories based on design. This means that if you stick with a certain medium and type of writing system, you won't have much to go off of. Like, if you look at alphabets, all that really seems to be out there is Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Korean. And if you look at cursive scripts, you only really have two options: English cursive, and Arabic, which is technically an abjad. And of course if you want a logographic system, the only living logographic system (aka, the only one to see use in a world where literacy was normal writing was part of every day life) is Chinese. Beyond that, all you have to look at are long extinct logographic systems that were all made to be carved into stone. Or cuneiform, which used some rather odd tools and medium to write. How many systems do you know of that were written in clay, and were always stamped rather than drawn?

I can't come up with forms that really look overly different from the few alphabets currently in use. Worse yet, most of them are closely related to each other! It seems like every symbol possible has already been used in a writing system somewhere.

The only thing that has really helped me is I've noticed that most lower-case Latin letters are built from a limited number of shapes: a circle, loop, short line, long line, long line with a loop, and a dot. Sadly, I can't really come up with any practical letter forms that don't use these shapes. They're pretty simple and basic.

答:
My reply is going to look a lot sillier in comparison, but I suggest taking inspiration from the shapes of a large collection of items. I've seen conlangs use alphabets inspired by mushrooms and flowers, but you could try constellations, animals, fruits, street signs, soda brand logos, anything to get you inspired. Here's my silly attempt using emojis for example.

Once you've drawn say 50 symbols, you can start filtering out the ones that look too different or those which just wouldn't be natural to write using a pen, brush, quill or whatever your fictional society uses. Try writing words using these symbols and you'll see which ones are too tricky to write and need simplifying, and which ones are too close to tell apart.

Title: Finding inspiration for letter forms?


答:
You may be interested in E-Prime.

E-Prime is a version of English that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. This makes many objective statements like "Roses are red" impossible. Instead a person is required to use more subjective constructions like "Roses appear red to me".


问:
What symbols should I use for phonemes when I have many vowels?
Most conlang examples I find in tutorials use a small set of vowels, but the one I'm working on has 13 and I'm having trouble finding the simplest transliteration to work with. Here are the IPA symbols:

```<code>Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]      | [u]
[y]      |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]
[ø]      |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯]     |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]      | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |
</code>```

My keyboard only allows me to type àâäùûüèêëéìîï but not œɛɑø or the diacritics used in the IPA for nasal vowels and diphthongs.

(EDIT: Note that my question really is all about the transliteration I'll be using for practical typing. Sure, I can just use fancy unicode symbols for my actual writing system in the end if I want to, but copypasting symbols isn't very practical for writing long texts.)

The language uses a (very simplified) subset of Quebec French for sound inventory, but I wanted to avoid using too many digraphs or diacritics which French relies on heavily. I know I can always come up with a custom font and writing system later on which brings in more glyphs for vowels, but I need something practical to use during conception.

I'd be interested if you have a generic answer as to what your own process is when you have a similar problem or a specific suggestion in my case.

My incomplete solution for now is this (updated to include jknappen's suggestion which I like for the German-style umlaut). I could add a macro to my text editor to allow for tildes, but I still need to figure out how I want to distinguish [œ] and [e] or [a] and [ɑ].

```<code>Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]  /i/ | [u]  /u/
[y]  /ü/ |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]  /o/
[ø]  /ö/ |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] /ä/ |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]  /a/ | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |
</code>```

答: One possibility is to use German-style umlauts, i.e., ü for /y/, ö for /ø/, and ä for /æ/; you can keep the symbol œ for /œ/. I'd recommend against having both ae and œ in the writing system because of confusability. The choice of tilde for nasalisation is a good one, IMO. The most problematic case are the two different kinds of a-sounds, but there are some African languages just going with a and ɑ (and there is also an uppercase letter for the ɑ in Unicode, it is named Latin Alpha). All the symbols are readily available in Unicode and should not pose insurmountable difficulties in text processing.


问:
Are there any "unspeakable" languages?
Sorry, my title is slightly misleading; what I'm after is more like a written language that doesn't have its roots in spoken language, and has no definitive translation into speech, but is none-the-less concise and clearly understandable. Tall order, I know - perhaps something similar would be cave-paintings: they seem to have a strong meaning that one could imagine was clear to people at the time, and which may convey a narrative of some sort; but the actual recital might have many variations. Or a more modern example: when you see a red circle around a drawing of a cigarette, with a red line across, you know it means that you are not allowed to smoke (so the meaning is clear and concise) - but the equivalent wording depends on the viewer, and could include phrases like "Don't smoke", "No smoking", or many others,

It seems achievable, at least, that one could construct such a language, which might even be universally understandable; but has it already been done in the form of a full language?

答: Yes, there are. There is a language called Silbo that is whistled and not spoken. There are around 70 whistled languages in the world. They're mostly for conveying words long distances. </p>

Title: Are there any "unspeakable" languages?


问:
What are some strategies for setting verbs apart from other words without knowing it's a verb
In languages with conjugated verbs there is usually a similar structure across verbs that makes them easy to recognize even if you do not know the word. For example in German, all verbs after the pronoun 'Sie' end with 'en' which makes them easy to recognize. This is compounded by the fact that verbs are in second position, making the verb in a sentence very easy to pick out.

In my language verbs are not conjugated, nor do they have tense. The way the language is structured, there can be multiple verbs per sentence, and it would make the language easier to parse if verbs could be picked out easily. I also worry that similar sounding nouns will become easy to confuse with verbs as I grow my dictionary, which would be nice to avoid completely.

I considered making all verbs have a particular ending, but this quickly gets repetitive and breaks up sentence flow since the sound will be made several times in one sentence.

What strategies can I adopt to make the verbs recognizable as verbs even if the reader/listener does not already know the specific verb being used?

答:
In Lojban, cmevla (proper nouns, like .alis.) are the only words ending in a consonant. Depending on how big your vowel inventory is, you could make all verbs end in a vowel and everything else end in a consonant. That way, they are easy to pick out and still provide much variety.

To generalize that, you could just take the last sound of a verb from any distinct group of sounds, like nasals, fricatives or labiliased consonants ("labialiseds"?). One could also use that to make word correspondences, e.g. nominalization changing the verb's final sound to the corresponding nasal.

You also mentioned position in the sentence. Having the verb in a specific position (first, last, second, etc.) is a good way to distinguish them, but depending on your language, dependent clauses could get difficult.

Of course, coupling position in sentence with a specific ending sound provides a nice way to recognize sentence borders. There, one could again use the ending sound kind to modify the verb to signify a dependent clause.


答:
What you want to avoid the most is to have too many rhyming words. A rhyme occurs when the last vowel and any consonants following it are the same.

You could end all verbs using the same consonant or consonant cluster. This would also give you an easy way to form verbs from nouns and nouns or adjectives from verbs: just add a suffix.

Instead of just ending all verbs with one ending, you could also have a small set of possible endings - which could carry some meaning too. Or you could simply forbid all consonant clusters in your language except when a word is formed by adding to a previous verb.

Example:

Say our language uses -ct for intransitive verbs and -st for verbs that imply causality - the subject causes something to the object.

The noun vis means life, the verb visect means to live and the adjective visecti means alive.
By extension, avisecti means dead and avisectist means to cause death.

Title: What are some strategies for setting verbs apart from other words without knowing it's a verb

Body:
In languages with conjugated verbs there is usually a similar structure across verbs that makes them easy to recognize even if you do not know the word. For example in German, all verbs after the pronoun 'Sie' end with 'en' which makes them easy to recognize. This is compounded by the fact that verbs are in second position, making the verb in a sentence very easy to pick out.

In my language verbs are not conjugated, nor do they have tense. The way the language is structured, there can be multiple verbs per sentence, and it would make the language easier to parse if verbs could be picked out easily. I also worry that similar sounding nouns will become easy to confuse with verbs as I grow my dictionary, which would be nice to avoid completely.

I considered making all verbs have a particular ending, but this quickly gets repetitive and breaks up sentence flow since the sound will be made several times in one sentence.

What strategies can I adopt to make the verbs recognizable as verbs even if the reader/listener does not already know the specific verb being used?


答:
On my computer I have a custom keyboard setup that allows me to enter all sorts of combining diacritics. This allows you to make combinations that are usually not present, including multiple diacritics on the same letter. The only downside to this is that they do not render well in some fonts. I'll give some examples of what I can do with my keyboard setup.

umlaut with a: ä

circumflex with e: ê

macron over u: ū

acute and under ring with o: ó̥

caron above and below i: ǐ̬

There are a lot of options, see the wikipedia page I linked above for all of the different options. To type them you just need to press ctrl-alt with whatever you assign the key to.

Title: What symbols should I use for phonemes when I have many vowels?

Body:
Most conlang examples I find in tutorials use a small set of vowels, but the one I'm working on has 13 and I'm having trouble finding the simplest transliteration to work with. Here are the IPA symbols:

```<code>Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]      | [u]
[y]      |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]
[ø]      |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯]     |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]      | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |
</code>```

My keyboard only allows me to type àâäùûüèêëéìîï but not œɛɑø or the diacritics used in the IPA for nasal vowels and diphthongs.

(EDIT: Note that my question really is all about the transliteration I'll be using for practical typing. Sure, I can just use fancy unicode symbols for my actual writing system in the end if I want to, but copypasting symbols isn't very practical for writing long texts.)

The language uses a (very simplified) subset of Quebec French for sound inventory, but I wanted to avoid using too many digraphs or diacritics which French relies on heavily. I know I can always come up with a custom font and writing system later on which brings in more glyphs for vowels, but I need something practical to use during conception.

I'd be interested if you have a generic answer as to what your own process is when you have a similar problem or a specific suggestion in my case.

My incomplete solution for now is this (updated to include jknappen's suggestion which I like for the German-style umlaut). I could add a macro to my text editor to allow for tildes, but I still need to figure out how I want to distinguish [œ] and [e] or [a] and [ɑ].

```<code>Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]  /i/ | [u]  /u/
[y]  /ü/ |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]  /o/
[ø]  /ö/ |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] /ä/ |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]  /a/ | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |
</code>```


问:
How to say right and left in Toki Pona?
As we know, Toki Pona is a quite minimal language and it sometimes not easy to come up with a word we use everyday in English. The problem is that I cannot think of a non-culture-specific and easily understandable way of saying right and left.

How to say right (and left) in Toki Pona as those words are not a part of the official dictionary?

答:
I agree with thrig that you would need to create something to handle this case. toki pona doesn't normally differentiate between specific sides, and this is one of those cases - there are no ways to describe "left" and "right" natively.

However, I'm not sure thrig's examples necessarily do the job the way it needs to be done - poka wawa could work, but it implies something about strength, when that's not often what people mean by dominant and non-dominant side. And meli/mije are not used to describe strength in this way.

Instead, I would suggest using:

poka lawa: your leading side.

poka kama: your following side.

No matter what, though, if you use this you're going to have to indicate that you're setting it up as such in advance. You can still do this in toki pona itself: mi toki e ni: poka wan li poka lawa. poka tu li poka kama. This sets up that you're saying one side is your poka lawa and the other side is your poka kama.

Title: How to say right and left in Toki Pona?


答:
There are several options; the most obvious ones I can think of are:

Position: In Hawai'an (and Klingon), the verb is at the initial position of the clause. If there are multiple clauses in a complex sentence, you will need to mark the clause boundaries in some way, eg through punctuation or use of specific conjunctions. So you can put anything in that place, and it will be interpreted as a verb: 'Ono means "delicious" as an adjective, in 'Ono ka hua moa it is used as a verb to mean "the egg is delicious". That also might solve problems when you later grow your lexicon.

Markers: In toki pona, the verb is always in second position in a clause, and is separated from the subject (which is in first position) through the particle li. So the sentence waso li lape can be parsed as waso - subject, lape - verb, even if you have no clue what the words actually mean ("bird" and "to sleep" respectively) Note: the personal pronouns mi ans sina are an exception to this rule, as they are not followed by li. Lape can also be a noun ("the sleep"). Transitive verbs are separated by e from the object, which again helps identifying the sentence structure.

Morphology: if you want to avoid repetitive sounds, you can nominate different verb endings (or prefixes) to either introduce variation for variation's sake, or to indicate other features (number, tense, aspect, modality, ...) While Esperanto uses a limited set of verb endings indicating (mostly) tense, it does not sound repetitive. If your verbs are not marked for grammatical features, morphology obviously is not an option.


答:
The more used a verb is, the more likely it is to resist evolution. So the most popular verbs are likely to be the most odd. This is common with auxiliaries.

Sometimes, irregular verbs form when two verbs becomes a single one. For example, a verb might have a polite and an informal variants which have different roots, but the informal one eventually falls out of use except for in the first person singular. Or the formal variant might become the past tense of the informal one.

I doubt this is very naturalistic, but if you're looking for inspiration to guide your choice of irregular verbs, you could also think of the activities which were more common during the evolution of the language. A conlang spoken by a prosperous society might have more irregular verbs related to possession, social interactions and art - while a conlang spoken by nomads living in a land with cataclysmic climate would have more irregular verbs about natural phenomenons and actions that everyone has to perform in order to guarantee their survival.

Note that verbs can have varying degrees of regularity. English has a pretty clean system, with a few boldly irregular verbs, a decent list of somewhat irregular verbs and a lot of very regular verbs.

Meanwhile, French verbs tend to be split across different groups based on their ending. There's -er, -ir, -oir and -re. Verbs within one group tend to have similar conjugations. Still, there is so much irregularity in French verbs that students often refer to verb conjugation volumes that have the full conjugation of about 100 model verbs. At the end of those volumes is a list of all French verbs with the page number of the most similar model verb.

EDIT: scrolling through the list of model verbs in a Bescherelles conjugation volume, those are the verbs which seem less regular to me (native French speaker):

to be - être (also an auxiliary)

to have - avoir (also an auxiliary)

to go - aller (sometimes used as an auxiliary)

to die - mourrir

to know - savoir

must - falloir (it's a whole verb in French)

can - pouvoir (it's a whole verb in French)

to have a duty [to do something] - devoir (mostly used as an auxiliary)

to be of value - valoir

to want - vouloir

to rain - pleuvoir

to drink - boire

to do / to make - faire (not an auxiliary in French)


答:
1. Erosion

I like the emoji suggestion above, but I have a similar suggestion, and that's to start with simple line pictures of the things represented.  In other words, follow the same kind of evolution that produced today's "Roman" alphabet.  It's been known to happen that way, independently, more than twice (proto-Canaanite, Linear A, and Mayan).

Take simple little line drawings and then erode them until you have just a few manageable strokes per letter (or syllable, or whatever).

2. Cloud, Stars, Light, and Shadow

Another source of inspiration is to watch the clouds for useful patterns, or connect the dots of particular stars, or look at interesting light patterns filtering through curtains at night (for example), or watch the interplay of light and shadow under trees (for another example).  Sometimes you'll get a GREAT and unexpected source of inspiration.

Title: Finding inspiration for letter forms?


问:
How to develop a detailed, realistic a posteriori conlang?

Background

To begin, I’ve been conlanging ‘properly’ for around two to two and a half years now and have been into it for far, far longer. However, I have yet to create a conlang that is truly in-depth, detailed, and realistic. I soon want to begin that process. I am confident in my knowledge of linguistics and have at least a basic knowledge of most areas and a more in-depth knowledge of others (none the less, I am still an amateur of linguistics, of course).

The current situation

At the moment, I am in the very early stages of planning – I’ve yet to decide on the final concept which I am going to develop. My ideas currently on the shortlist are:

A Celtic language spoken on a (fictional) island nation off the north-western coast of Ireland with North-Germanic influence due to interactions and mixing with the Norse people throughout history.

A Turkic language spoken in a (fictional) nation in the Southern Caucasus with influence from Georgen, especially on the phonology and vocabulary side.

A Uralic language spoken in Eastern Finland and the Karelia/Murmansk regions with Slavic influence.

Of these ideas, I am currently most drawn towards the first bullet-point, however, choosing the scenario of the conlang is not the crux of the issue. That is the issue of creating an in-depth and realistic, believable a posteriori conlang. I want to create a language that has detailed and believable phonology and grammar.

My questions to you

What is your advice on creating a good a posteriori conlang in general?

How do I effectively develop a conlang with as much detail and depth as possible?

Thank you very much for any help or guidance.

答:
So, you are going to create an altlang (a naturalistic language living in an alternate history of the the world). First, define your starting point (easiest for the first scenario: Old Irish or proto-Goidelic is a suitable starting point for this one). Look at the real world descendants from that starting points (Middle Irish and Modern Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelish) and what changes happened to them. You can create variation by retaining some archaic features, applying changes from different descendants, or applying changes in different temporal order to create a new artificial Goidelic language. You may also throw in some original changes not occurring in the known Goidelic languages. Keep a timeline of those changes—the changes will apply to loan words as well!

Than decide on the influence of the other language: Are there only borrowings of words, shall it influence syntax (e.g., the order of noun and genitive or noun and adjective, shall the basic word order change?), are there new phonemes added to the phonology?

Decide, when the influence happens, does it happen only once, are there several waves of influence. Note that the other language changes over time, too. Your conlang may preserve archaic words from the donor language that have fallen out of use or have undergone sound shifts there.

Put everything together and enjoy the result!


答:
Have you looked at Brithenig or Wenedyk?  These were generated by applying to Latin the sound shifts that affected Welsh and Polish (respectively) over the same period.  You could start with early Irish and apply Scandinavian sound changes.

Of course there would also be lexical and syntactic borrowings; those are less systematic by nature, and so can be governed more by your taste. Do you know the concept of Sprachbund?

On another hand, aren't there natlangs with at least some of the features you want?  Scandinavians ruled parts of Ireland; Russia rules over some Uralic peoples; there are Turkic languages adjacent to Georgia — I would expect some influence.

Title: How to develop a detailed, realistic a posteriori conlang?

Body:
Background

To begin, I’ve been conlanging ‘properly’ for around two to two and a half years now and have been into it for far, far longer. However, I have yet to create a conlang that is truly in-depth, detailed, and realistic. I soon want to begin that process. I am confident in my knowledge of linguistics and have at least a basic knowledge of most areas and a more in-depth knowledge of others (none the less, I am still an amateur of linguistics, of course).

The current situation

At the moment, I am in the very early stages of planning – I’ve yet to decide on the final concept which I am going to develop. My ideas currently on the shortlist are:

A Celtic language spoken on a (fictional) island nation off the north-western coast of Ireland with North-Germanic influence due to interactions and mixing with the Norse people throughout history.

A Turkic language spoken in a (fictional) nation in the Southern Caucasus with influence from Georgen, especially on the phonology and vocabulary side.

A Uralic language spoken in Eastern Finland and the Karelia/Murmansk regions with Slavic influence.

Of these ideas, I am currently most drawn towards the first bullet-point, however, choosing the scenario of the conlang is not the crux of the issue. That is the issue of creating an in-depth and realistic, believable a posteriori conlang. I want to create a language that has detailed and believable phonology and grammar.

My questions to you

What is your advice on creating a good a posteriori conlang in general?

How do I effectively develop a conlang with as much detail and depth as possible?

Thank you very much for any help or guidance.


问:
Are Interslavic and Neoslavonic the same conlang?
I read that Interslavic and Neoslavonic merged into a single language.

All three projects collaborated closely with each other from that time, and in 2011 Medžuslovjanski („Interslavic”) was chosen as a common name. Fruits of this cooperation were, among other things, a common dictionary, a common news portal and a common wiki.

I wonder why there are two websites:

Interslavic – Medžuslovjansky – Меджусловјанскы,

interslavic language tutorial with the domain name "neoslavonic.org".

Is there any difference in the grammar? If so, which one is the most popular?

答:
A few years ago (about 2) these two projects united into the single one called Interslavic (2-nd version). So, since then it's a common project with unified grammar.

Before it they were slightly different.


问:
Language with nominal TAM and no verbs: Ergative or tripartite?
I'm working on a language with nominal tense–aspect–mood (TAM), i.e. inflecting nouns instead of verbs. So, a sentence like "the woman sees the man", could be roughly translated to something like "the womans see the man".

This type of sentence shows an ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment: the subject of a transitive sentence is marked (ergative case), while the direct object is unmarked (absolutive case).

I also like the idea of removing verbs as a class (since tense, aspect and mood can be expressed by the subject) and "reclassify" those words as nouns. So "the womans see the man" could actually mean something like "the woman makes sight of the man", in the sense of "making eye contact". In other words, having ungrammaticalized verbs.

Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

So my question is: does the language need a marking for the direct object (accusative case), having then a tripartite alignment? Or can I simply get away with only TAM marking (absolutive case) and no markings for verbs or direct objects?

I have the feeling that I'm forgetting something. I think that the idea of "not having verbs" makes sense to me, since many languages like English, French or Spanish actually lack of inflections and employ only word order, but I might be wrong.

What do you think? Thanks!

答:
In your example:

Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be
  "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man"
  are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

...sight is a verb.

In order to have a verbless phrase, you'd want something like "the man within the woman's sight", making it clear you're using the noun "sight" and not the verb "sight".

However, and I've seen this pointed out, if you end up needing particular constructions in order to indicate actions, all you're doing is making an overly complicated verb.


问:
Conlangs based on Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?
Have there been any attempts to create a language based on Proto-Indo-European (PIE)? </p>

<p>Of course PIE has had an effect on other languages, and through them ended up in many a posteriori conlangs as well. What I mean is whether there have been any attempts to create a usable language based on what we know of PIE and filling in the blanks with conlangery. </p>

答: Academia Prisca published Modern Indo-European as a revival of a late stage of the Indo-European language (Northwest Indo-European, billed as the ancestor of Italo-Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic). Resources published for learning include a grammar, syntax, conjugator, vocabulary, lessons and texts. Since it is meant as a modern revival, it introduces neologisms (such as read and write), but as far as I can tell, the entire lexicon is derived from cognate languages.


问:
Would these features be naturalistic in this scenario?

Background

I am planning a naturalistic Goidelic language which shall have quite an influence from Old Norse – probably at least 1/4 or 1/3 of the vocabulary to be of North Germanic origin, as well as a mostly undecided, but lesser influence on the phonology and grammar. Despite the North Germanic influence, I would still like to retain a ‘broad-slender’ vowel system, lenition, eclipsis, and (possibly) prothesis.

Also, although I intend for the Old Norse influence to be less focused on grammar, I came up with the idea of, instead of deriving from the Old Irish definite article in and having it work similarly to the other Goidelic languages, I could derive from the Old Norse clitic article -inn and instead use this style of clitic article.

Questions

Would the retention of broad-slender vowels and consonant mutations be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?

Would the replacement of the Goidelic definite article with an Old Norse-style clitic definite article be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?

As an extension to this question – would it be realistic to retain the different Old Norse articles for the different genders (-inn for masculine nom., -in for feminine nom., and -it for neuter nom.) as well as the different cases (for example, -innar for feminine genitive singular) or to just keep one or two articles (such as to just derive from -inn for all the definite articles in my language), regardless of the gender or case?

Thank you in advance.

答:
Yes, the whole thing looks naturalistic.

ad 1) When you assimilate the Old Norse words to a Goidelic phonetic system, lenitions and broad/slender distinctions come in very naturally. It will be more difficult when you insist on some Old Norse sounds sticking out of the Goidelic system; they can form exceptions to the lenition rules or evolve specific lenitions of their own.

ad 2) Retaining the Old Norse suffixed article is definitely an option, and simplifying it to only one form (independent of gender, case, and number) looks most natuaral to me, but keeping the inflected forms is also covered by your artistic license as a conlang author. Or you may inflect the definite forms according to Goidelic inflectional rules.


问:
Are there constructed languages with a tense system inspired by Theory of Relativity?
For readers who aren't familiar with the Theory of Relativity, here is a sketch of how the Special Theory of Relativity structures space and time:

There is a point "here and now" where the observer is located

There is an "absolute past" meaning the region of space and time wherefrom light signals can reach the point "here and now". This region is also termed backward light-cone

There is an "absolute future" meaning the region of space and time whereto the observer can send light signals. This region is also called foreward light-cone

There is a "disconnected" region that can neither be reached by light signals nor send light signals to the observer.

While present, past, and future are commonly found in natlangs and conlangs of all flavours, the disconnected region is a new feature brought in by the Special Theory of Relativity. Are there conlangs with a tempus system including such a region?

EDIT: In real life, the disconnected region is not determined by the speed of light but by the availability of direct communication channels. Thus a sentence like My husband is in his working office now is about the disconnected region (assume no smart phone stalking to verify the sentence).

答:
I think you are looking for the constructed language called Lojban

According to an earlier reference to its grammar,

Technical note for readers conversant with relativity theory: The Lojban time tenses reflect time as seen by the speaker, who is assumed to be a ``point-like observer'' in the relativistic sense: they do not say anything about physical relationships of relativistic interval, still less about implicit causality. The nature of tense is not only subjective but also observer-based.

Here is a specific reference to its use of a "relativistic tense"

There's been a proposal to have words expressing relativistic tenses that are different > from usual past, current and future used in most historical natural languages.

How this 4th tense would work? Consider we are 3 light years away from a star that explodes. And in 3 years we see the explosion. So what? How do we use this 4th tense?

It would be a tag with a modifier ue'ei.

ue'ei = [MOhI] 4th relativistic tense modifier

There's also an interesting set of charts describing in detail the use of relativity theory in Lojban on the current lojban language site.

Lastly, in the Lojban Reference Grammar site, there is this little intriguing tidbit on Lojban tense usage.

In Lojban, the concept of tense extends to every selbri, not merely the verb-like ones. In addition, tense structures provide information about location in space as well as in time. All tense information is optional in Lojban