问:
Implications of secundative alignment
There are two different ways to handle ditransitive verbs like "give." For the purposes of this post, in the sentence "John gave Bill the ball," John is the donor (D), Bill is the recipient (R), and the ball is the theme (T).

Indirective

With indirective alignment, the theme is marked the same as the patient of a monotransitive verb and the recipient is marked differently (often with a dative case).

```<code>John-a   read the book-i  .
John-NOM read the book-ACC

John-a   gave the book-i   Bill-e.
John-NOM gave the book-ACC Bill-DAT.
"John gave the book to Bill."
</code>```

Secundative

With secundative (or daechtycatiative) alignment, the recipient is marked the same as the patient of a monotransitive verb and the theme is marked differently (often with an instrumental case).

```<code>John-a   read the book-i  .
John-NOM read the book-ACC.

John-a   gave Bill-i   the book-e.
John-NOM gave Bill-ACC the book-INST.
"John gave Bill with the book."
</code>```

What other grammatical features are likely to be affected by secundative alignment? What considerations do I need to make?

答:
So, here are some of the implications of choosing secundative alignment. They aren't really strict implications so much as Stuff You Might Consider Thinking About™. I think the effects of choosing secundative alignment are pretty local overall and won't have cascading effects on your grammar. In my opinion, the thorniest issue here is dealing with valence-changing operations on verbs.

What do secundative languages tend to look like in the real world?

How does secundative alignment manifest itself in morphology or syntax?

Valence-changing operations

Relative Clauses

Real World Secundative Languages.

If you want your language to be naturalistic, I suggest taking a look at WALS to see what kinds of combinations of features are typologically uncommon. If you are not trying to make a naturalistic language, knowing what natural languages tend to do is a good way to spend your "weirdness budget" wisely.

This map marks the strategy used for the verb to give. This analysis could be misleading because it's possible for the verb give to use a different strategy from other verbs, but I think this feature is the best fit for what you're after of the available WALS features.

Looking at the map, my assessment of the broad areal trends is that Eurasia is dominated by the indirect object construction. The secondary object construction seems to be common in North America and in New Guinea.

The WALS Chapter for this feature provides some examples of the different types of constructions as well as a note about what other features commonly co-occur with secondary object marking, excerpt below:

...head-marking languages with verb indexing of two core arguments tend
to show the secondary-object pattern...

How does secundative alignment manifest itself?

Basically, there are four ways your language can manifest secundative alignment.

word order

presence of dedicated adpositions

case markers

verbal agreement

I think most of the real world secundative languages are secundative because the recipient in the verb to give or other similar verbs gets indexed in the verb the same way that a prototypical direct object would.

This can occur in a language with no case marking. So, I give you the book might be something like

```<code>book.sg  give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj
</code>```

In this example, book bears no case marking but is clearly the theme.

The case marking strategy is covered in your example.

For word order, we can take an example from English.

```<code>I give you the book
</code>```

you is the recipient, but occupies the position directly after the verb. In English you have a choice between using a preposition like to or for instead. If no such option existed, this would be a pristine example of syntactic secundativeness.

Note that the language can be partially secundative.

For instance, the following is possible.

```<code>you.sg.DAT book.sg.ACC give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj
</code>```

In this example, the two non-agent arguments book and give receive indirect-object-style case marking, but the verb shows secundative alignment.

Valence changing operations

It is important to think about how the passive voice, if it exists, should behave.

Suppose we have a language with secundative alignment in its cases.

```<code>I.NOM you.OBJ book.INST give.PST
I gave you a book.
</code>```

If you were to passivize the verb, which argument would be promoted to the agent? Would (101), (102), or neither be acceptable?

```<code>(101) you.NOM  give.PSV.PST
(102) book.NOM give.PSV.PST
</code>```

Do you have an anti-applicative voice that deletes the recipient and promotes the theme to primary object? As far as I know, anti-applicative voices do not exist in the real world, but applicative voice does exist. It's possible to allow this promotion without an explicit voice for it.

```<code>I.NOM book.OBJ give.ANTIAPP.PST
</code>```

This situation gets murkier if the language is both ergative and secundative.

```<code>I.ERG you.ABS book.INST give.PST
I gave the book.
</code>```

In this case, the antipassive voice would delete the absolutive argument and promote the ergative argument.

```<code>I.ABS book.INST give.ANTIPSV.PST
I gave the book (to someone).
</code>```

Some ergative languages mark instruments and agents the same way.

```<code>I.ERG book.ERG you.ABS give.PST
</code>```

In this case, the antipassive voice could potentially target either argument.

```<code>I.ABS give.ANTIPSV.PST
</code>```

or

```<code>I give you the book
</code>```0

Relative clauses

Deciding how relative clauses in secundative languages should work might present some subtle issues.

Languages frequently have a limit on what kinds of arguments can be targeted by relative clauses.

You may want to choose to make only the agent and the primary object extractable, but not secondary objects.

Title: Implications of secundative alignment

Body:
So, here are some of the implications of choosing secundative alignment. They aren't really strict implications so much as Stuff You Might Consider Thinking About™. I think the effects of choosing secundative alignment are pretty local overall and won't have cascading effects on your grammar. In my opinion, the thorniest issue here is dealing with valence-changing operations on verbs.

What do secundative languages tend to look like in the real world?

How does secundative alignment manifest itself in morphology or syntax?

Valence-changing operations

Relative Clauses

Real World Secundative Languages.

If you want your language to be naturalistic, I suggest taking a look at WALS to see what kinds of combinations of features are typologically uncommon. If you are not trying to make a naturalistic language, knowing what natural languages tend to do is a good way to spend your "weirdness budget" wisely.

This map marks the strategy used for the verb to give. This analysis could be misleading because it's possible for the verb give to use a different strategy from other verbs, but I think this feature is the best fit for what you're after of the available WALS features.

Looking at the map, my assessment of the broad areal trends is that Eurasia is dominated by the indirect object construction. The secondary object construction seems to be common in North America and in New Guinea.

The WALS Chapter for this feature provides some examples of the different types of constructions as well as a note about what other features commonly co-occur with secondary object marking, excerpt below:

...head-marking languages with verb indexing of two core arguments tend
to show the secondary-object pattern...

How does secundative alignment manifest itself?

Basically, there are four ways your language can manifest secundative alignment.

word order

presence of dedicated adpositions

case markers

verbal agreement

I think most of the real world secundative languages are secundative because the recipient in the verb to give or other similar verbs gets indexed in the verb the same way that a prototypical direct object would.

This can occur in a language with no case marking. So, I give you the book might be something like

book.sg  give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj

In this example, book bears no case marking but is clearly the theme.

The case marking strategy is covered in your example.

For word order, we can take an example from English.

I give you the book

you is the recipient, but occupies the position directly after the verb. In English you have a choice between using a preposition like to or for instead. If no such option existed, this would be a pristine example of syntactic secundativeness.

Note that the language can be partially secundative.

For instance, the following is possible.

you.sg.DAT book.sg.ACC give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj

In this example, the two non-agent arguments book and give receive indirect-object-style case marking, but the verb shows secundative alignment.

Valence changing operations

It is important to think about how the passive voice, if it exists, should behave.

Suppose we have a language with secundative alignment in its cases.

I.NOM you.OBJ book.INST give.PST
I gave you a book.

If you were to passivize the verb, which argument would be promoted to the agent? Would (101), (102), or neither be acceptable?

(101) you.NOM  give.PSV.PST
(102) book.NOM give.PSV.PST

Do you have an anti-applicative voice that deletes the recipient and promotes the theme to primary object? As far as I know, anti-applicative voices do not exist in the real world, but applicative voice does exist. It's possible to allow this promotion without an explicit voice for it.

I.NOM book.OBJ give.ANTIAPP.PST

This situation gets murkier if the language is both ergative and secundative.

I.ERG you.ABS book.INST give.PST
I gave the book.

In this case, the antipassive voice would delete the absolutive argument and promote the ergative argument.

I.ABS book.INST give.ANTIPSV.PST
I gave the book (to someone).

Some ergative languages mark instruments and agents the same way.

I.ERG book.ERG you.ABS give.PST

In this case, the antipassive voice could potentially target either argument.

I.ABS give.ANTIPSV.PST

or

book.ABS give.ANTIPSV.PST

Relative clauses

Deciding how relative clauses in secundative languages should work might present some subtle issues.

Languages frequently have a limit on what kinds of arguments can be targeted by relative clauses.

You may want to choose to make only the agent and the primary object extractable, but not secondary objects.


问:
Syntactic word that carries no meaning - is there a name for that?
Is there a name for words that exist purely for syntactic reasons and carry no lexical meaning?

Reason:

Some forms of sentence in my language don't have verbs, but information such as tense and mood are indicated by affixes on the verb. So, in cases where you need to modify the verb, a meaningless verb fills in; the verb carries no meaning on its own, existing just to hold affixes.

Example:

Here is a sentence without a verb. No verb is used for just applying an adjective to a noun. Adjectives are applies directly to the noun.

Mopifa-di-mopi

Life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood is alive.

But (for example), past tense is marked by a suffix on the verb so it needs a verb to attach onto; ta "stands in" for the absent verb, giving -to (past tense) something to attach to.

Ta-to mopifa-di-mopi

(null)-(past) life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood was alive.

"Ta" is the word I'm talking about.

答:
This word is acting as a copula. It is entirely reasonable for the copula to be omitted in some contexts and not others. For example, Hungarian requires zero copula for third-person constructions in the present tense (the second item here is ungrammatical):

```<code>  Róbert öreg ∅.
  Robert old COP
  "Robert is old"

* Róbert öreg van.
  Robert old  COP
  "Robert is old."
</code>```

But uses the normal copula "lenni" (highly irregular) in the past tense:

```<code>  Róbert öreg volt.
  Robert old  COP.PST
  "Robert was old."
</code>```

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0

Body:
This word is acting as a copula. It is entirely reasonable for the copula to be omitted in some contexts and not others. For example, Hungarian requires zero copula for third-person constructions in the present tense (the second item here is ungrammatical):

  Róbert öreg ∅.
  Robert old COP
  "Robert is old"

* Róbert öreg van.
  Robert old  COP
  "Robert is old."

But uses the normal copula "lenni" (highly irregular) in the past tense:

  Róbert öreg volt.
  Robert old  COP.PST
  "Robert was old."


答:
I have heard the term "Proverb" used to describe the word "do" as it is sometimes used in English, and that seems to be something you're trying to achieve here.

Example:

Q. "Did he go to the store?"

A. "He did."

In this case, "did" is used to refer to "go" in the previous sentence, analogously to how a pronoun is used to refer to a noun. I hope this is what you're looking for? It's a bit more specific than function word

Title: Syntactic word that carries no meaning - is there a name for that?

Body:
Is there a name for words that exist purely for syntactic reasons and carry no lexical meaning?

Reason:

Some forms of sentence in my language don't have verbs, but information such as tense and mood are indicated by affixes on the verb. So, in cases where you need to modify the verb, a meaningless verb fills in; the verb carries no meaning on its own, existing just to hold affixes.

Example:

Here is a sentence without a verb. No verb is used for just applying an adjective to a noun. Adjectives are applies directly to the noun.

Mopifa-di-mopi

Life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood is alive.

But (for example), past tense is marked by a suffix on the verb so it needs a verb to attach onto; ta "stands in" for the absent verb, giving -to (past tense) something to attach to.

Ta-to mopifa-di-mopi

(null)-(past) life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood was alive.

"Ta" is the word I'm talking about.


问:
Dealing with core argument loss from syntactic applicativization
If a language limits its relative clause heads to core arguments of a verb such that item 1 below is ungrammatical, it may become necessary within discourse to use an applicative to promote an auxiliary argument into object position as in item 2:

```<code>1) *  1 see Bill with the telescope that is on the hill
      "I see Bill with the telescope that is on the hill."

2)    1 see-APP the telescope that COP on the hill
      "I see with the telescope that is on the hill."
</code>```

However, since this is getting done for syntactic reasons, it is not desirable to lose entirely the normal object. How can I reintroduce Bill to the sentence while maintaining the applicative construction that allows the telescope to be relativized?

答:
I don't think there are any attested languages that limit the role that relative clause heads can have in the matrix clause. The accessibility hierarchy is a theory explaining the capabilities of various languages to produce relative clauses where the head has specific roles in the relative clause.

If we take your example and exchange  the matrix and embedded clauses, you get the following examples. I'm changing the first example also to use a resumptive pronoun.

```<code>1a)  *The telescope that I see Bill with it is on the hill.

2a)   The telescope that I see-app is on the hill.
</code>```

If you want to reintroduce the demoted argument Bill, you can use an adposition or a case. Suppose you reuse the preposition towards for this purpose.

```<code>2b)   The telescope that I see-app towards Bill is on the hill.
</code>```

One interesting choice would be to use neither cases nor adpositions.

```<code>2c)    The telescope that I see-app Bill is on the hill.
</code>```

Since the embedded clause already has a subject and obliques can't be relativized, that forces the interpretation of Bill as an oblique.

Body:
I don't think there are any attested languages that limit the role that relative clause heads can have in the matrix clause. The accessibility hierarchy is a theory explaining the capabilities of various languages to produce relative clauses where the head has specific roles in the relative clause.

If we take your example and exchange  the matrix and embedded clauses, you get the following examples. I'm changing the first example also to use a resumptive pronoun.

1a)  *The telescope that I see Bill with it is on the hill.

2a)   The telescope that I see-app is on the hill.

If you want to reintroduce the demoted argument Bill, you can use an adposition or a case. Suppose you reuse the preposition towards for this purpose.

2b)   The telescope that I see-app towards Bill is on the hill.

One interesting choice would be to use neither cases nor adpositions.

2c)    The telescope that I see-app Bill is on the hill.

Since the embedded clause already has a subject and obliques can't be relativized, that forces the interpretation of Bill as an oblique.


问:
How much of Slovio is based on Esperanto?
According to Wikipedia,

Slovio (from the Slavic word "slovo") is a constructed language begun in 1999 by Mark Hučko. Hučko claims that the language should be relatively easy for non-Slavs to learn as well, as an alternative to languages such as Esperanto which are based more on Latin...

[...]

Slovio has a relatively simple grammar based on a mix of Esperanto grammar with Slavic elements. Just like in natural Slavic languages, new words can be formed with a variety of suffixes and prefixes.

I'm not familiar with Slovio or Esperanto at all. How much is Slovio based on Esperanto? Does Slovio just borrow some parts of Esperanto's grammar, or does it go to a further extent than that?

答:
In terms of the vocabulary, not much is based on Esperanto.

From the Slovio website:

Esperanto? While Esperanto is a simple language its main problem is the fact that it is made up of too many unrelated languages and thus, if you speak Esperanto, no-one will understand you only other Esperantists. On the other hand Slovio, since it is made up of only closely related Slavic languages, can be put to an immediate use. Using Slovio, you will be understood by some 400 million people, most of whom have never ever heard of Slovio, but who will understand you.

So, it looks like the only inspiration Slovio has taken from Esperanto is the grammar.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
Four vowels, with no /i/ sound. Is it possible?
My vowel phonemic inventory would be just /a/, /e/, /o/ and /u/ with no /i/ sound. Is this possible or not?</p>

答: For a constructed language, this is definitely possible. It is not a natural choice but not completely unseen in natural languages, according to PHOIBLE 92% of the sampled languages contain the vowel /i/.</p>


答:
This would be very unstable in a human language. For an example of what happens when this vowel is missing, let's look at English's Great Vowel Shift. One of the first things to change was /i:/ becoming /aj/, leaving it without /i/. Within less than a hundred years, /e:/ had migrated to take its place.

In your specific case, I would expect /e/ -> /i/, /a/ -> /e/, and /o/ -> /ɒ/ in fairly short order.

This is because vowels like to spread out on the vowel chart and become more distinct to improve understanding. Because of the limitations of your mouth making it difficult to have highly fronted low vowels, the general rule is that you will have more high vowels than mid or low vowels. Your vowel system violates this universal (with more mid vowels than high vowels).

Title: Four vowels, with no /i/ sound. Is it possible?

Body: My vowel phonemic inventory would be just /a/, /e/, /o/ and /u/ with no /i/ sound. Is this possible or not?</p>


问:
Name of a group of languages with has "less is more" property
Is there a name of a group of languages that try to remove instead of adding things?
Examples:

Newspeak: reduces words (e.g. bad will be ungood (prefix "un" meaning not), eliminate expression that are not "good" (more here

the Sij: according to author it has 10 word (or at least morpheme).

So in other words makes a language that (one or more):

is less complex

has less word

has less tenses

just "less" of something

I have only found term "Micro (artistic) language" in the wiki but it was deleted. Here is the last version that mention it. I am not sure if such term is even used.

答:
These languages could be called minimalist conlangs. This term has been applied to languages like Toki Pona quite regularly, as a Google search will bear out. The term has also been used to describe a number of languages on the CBB, such as Sint and Nomadic.

The same word can be applied to parts of a language, e.g. Davush on CBB refers to their Shiruitoan language as having a minimalist phonology.


问:
Has AI technology yet provide a language composed of multiple human languages yet?
I'm from South Florida and noticed that my Haitian neighbors speak a language called Creole. Then It got my fantasizing a possibility that is well within our reach of no more than a decade.

Using AI to create languages by mixing other languages.

Question

Does anyone know any specific technologies that provide practical languages yet?

答: Not really AI, but the vocabulary of the two logical languages Loglan and Lojban was created algorithmically from the vocabulary of pre-defined source languages. In this case, the phonemes of the words were picked by the algorithm which is different from the formation of a creole where whole words are picked by the human speakers.</p>


答:
The problem I can see with trying to do this is that you would first need to be able to encode the urlanguages in a way that a computer could understand. One could imagine giving it corpora from the urlanguages and having a machine learning algorithm produce a new corpus in some pidgin or creole, but it's not very useful unless the computer can then explain what the new texts mean.

The problem of encoding meaning is definitely unsolved - Google Translate has come a long way in the past decade, but it's still far off from a human translator.

So I think in the end, it depends on the criteria you want to use to evaluate it. Does a language whose syntax and vocabulary can only be inferred count?

Title: Has AI technology yet provide a language composed of multiple human languages yet?

Body:
I'm from South Florida and noticed that my Haitian neighbors speak a language called Creole. Then It got my fantasizing a possibility that is well within our reach of no more than a decade.

Using AI to create languages by mixing other languages.

Question

Does anyone know any specific technologies that provide practical languages yet?


问:
Official resource on simlish language
I know that Simlish language is not fully created. It is just a list of words and sentences.
Where can I find the full list (official source)?

P.S I wanna create this language as fully created conlang.

答:
According to the Font of All Knowledge, Simlish

worked best as a "language" made up of gibberish words that could not
  be translated, so that the dialogue's meanings would be left open to
  the imagination of the player.

and that William Wright, the Sims creator, intended it to be that way.

Here's a good Youtubeumentary on the topic. The voice actors, the audio director, they aver that it's gibberish. Meaning or emotion without form: while some words and phrases may have acquired "meanings", it doesn't seem like they've actually acquired "translations".

For example, if an English speaker says sulsul means "hello" while a French speaker says it means "bon jour", that doesn't mean hello = good day. All three are greetings, and I think that's rather Wright's point: sulsul has acquired universal meaning without actually acquiring a specific translation.

Title: Official resource on simlish language


问:
Is num-det-n-adj-rel a reasonable order for a noun phrase?
In English, noun phrases are det-num-adj-n-rel (e.g. "The five orange balls that John saw"). In Spanish, noun phrases are (mostly) det-num-n-adj-rel (e.g. "Las cinco pelotas naranjas las que Juan vió," lit. "The five balls orange that John saw"). Is num-det-n-adj-rel a reasonable order (e.g. "Five these balls orange that John saw").

My determiners are prefixes on the noun, so I can't put numbers between determiners and nouns. Do I have to put numbers after the noun in this case to be naturalistic? My language is primarily head-initial (SVO default word order, adverbs come after verbs, etc.)

答:
Reasonable: sure!

We do this in English, fronting the number for emphasis or for poetry. There's no reason why you couldn't do this as a matter of ordinary in your language.

Five the orange balls that Johnny saw  flew through air and bounced to jackadaw.


答:
It is reasonable, but I'm having trouble finding unambiguous precedent for it in natural languages.

This handout shows the frequency of different orders of demonstratives, adjectives, nouns, and numerals in a sample of 528 languages. Demonstratives and determiners are not identical, but there is considerable overlap.

The order Num-Dem-N-Adj is not attested.

More broadly speaking, demonstratives seem to show a clear tendency to be closer to the edge of the noun phrase.

From the handout,

The adjective and numeral tend to occur closer to the noun than the
  demonstrative when the demonstrative and the adjective or numeral (or
  both) occur on the same side of the noun.

Furthermore, in cases where the demonstrative is to the left of the noun, there seems to be a very strong tendency for it to be the leftmost thing.

That being said, a demonstrative is a very heavyweight thing and not always a determiner. Without knowing what kinds of things are determiners in your language, it is hard to tell how much, if at all, the handout applies.

Here are approaches you might want to consider.

Put demonstratives at the right edge of the noun phrase and other determiners directly before the noun.

Demonstratives show a strong but not overwhelming tendency to appear on the opposite side of the noun as the adposition. I think that, in general, demonstratives are not the heads of the noun phrases they appear in cross-linguistically. Since you mention that your language is head-initial, I am assuming that it is prepositional.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that your inventory of determiner prefixes marks definiteness and number only.

```<code>DEF.PLUR-book red
The red books

DEF.PLUR-book red that
Those red books

5 DEF.PLUR-book red that
Those five red books
</code>```

Repeat the determiner on the number

As far as I know, this is also unattested, but it does solve the problem of the determiner not appearing early enough in the noun/determiner phrase.

```<code>PROX.DEF.PLUR-5 PROX.DEF.PLUR-book
These five books

ANY-5 ANY-book
Any five books
</code>```

Make numbers occupy the determiner slot

This works well if your set of determiners is small, but doesn't work very well if it contains demonstratives.

```<code>INDEF.PLUR book
Some books

5 book
Some 5 books / the 5 books / 5 books
</code>```

Make the determiner a clitic that attaches to first word in the noun phrase

This doesn't work if your language is fusional and it doesn't make sense to split the prefix from the base noun.

```<code> DEF.PLUR book
 the books

 DEF.PLUR-5 book
 five books
</code>```

Title: Is num-det-n-adj-rel a reasonable order for a noun phrase?

Body:
In English, noun phrases are det-num-adj-n-rel (e.g. "The five orange balls that John saw"). In Spanish, noun phrases are (mostly) det-num-n-adj-rel (e.g. "Las cinco pelotas naranjas las que Juan vió," lit. "The five balls orange that John saw"). Is num-det-n-adj-rel a reasonable order (e.g. "Five these balls orange that John saw").

My determiners are prefixes on the noun, so I can't put numbers between determiners and nouns. Do I have to put numbers after the noun in this case to be naturalistic? My language is primarily head-initial (SVO default word order, adverbs come after verbs, etc.)

Body:
It is reasonable, but I'm having trouble finding unambiguous precedent for it in natural languages.

This handout shows the frequency of different orders of demonstratives, adjectives, nouns, and numerals in a sample of 528 languages. Demonstratives and determiners are not identical, but there is considerable overlap.

The order Num-Dem-N-Adj is not attested.

More broadly speaking, demonstratives seem to show a clear tendency to be closer to the edge of the noun phrase.

From the handout,

The adjective and numeral tend to occur closer to the noun than the
  demonstrative when the demonstrative and the adjective or numeral (or
  both) occur on the same side of the noun.

Furthermore, in cases where the demonstrative is to the left of the noun, there seems to be a very strong tendency for it to be the leftmost thing.

That being said, a demonstrative is a very heavyweight thing and not always a determiner. Without knowing what kinds of things are determiners in your language, it is hard to tell how much, if at all, the handout applies.

Here are approaches you might want to consider.

Put demonstratives at the right edge of the noun phrase and other determiners directly before the noun.

Demonstratives show a strong but not overwhelming tendency to appear on the opposite side of the noun as the adposition. I think that, in general, demonstratives are not the heads of the noun phrases they appear in cross-linguistically. Since you mention that your language is head-initial, I am assuming that it is prepositional.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that your inventory of determiner prefixes marks definiteness and number only.

DEF.PLUR-book red
The red books

DEF.PLUR-book red that
Those red books

5 DEF.PLUR-book red that
Those five red books

Repeat the determiner on the number

As far as I know, this is also unattested, but it does solve the problem of the determiner not appearing early enough in the noun/determiner phrase.

PROX.DEF.PLUR-5 PROX.DEF.PLUR-book
These five books

ANY-5 ANY-book
Any five books

Make numbers occupy the determiner slot

This works well if your set of determiners is small, but doesn't work very well if it contains demonstratives.

INDEF.PLUR book
Some books

5 book
Some 5 books / the 5 books / 5 books

Make the determiner a clitic that attaches to first word in the noun phrase

This doesn't work if your language is fusional and it doesn't make sense to split the prefix from the base noun.

 DEF.PLUR book
 the books

 DEF.PLUR-5 book
 five books


问:
Is it reasonable for numerals to behave like verbs?
I am aware that adjectives can pattern like verbs in some natural languages. Is it reasonable for numerals to do the same? Thus

```<code>Some balls four.
There are four balls.

Fouring the balls were orange.
The four balls were orange.
</code>```

Of course, my conlang has more interesting verbal forms than we have in English. Is something like this attested in a natural language?

答:
One clear-cut example of a language that treats many things like predicates, numerals included, is Khoekhoe.

Khoekhoe marks many kinds of predicates the same way, including numerals. The paper argues that all three of the open word classes (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in Khoekhoe can be analyzed as primarily predicates and non-predicative usage requires more morphology, specifically person-number-gender (PNG) affixes. Nominalizing stuff with a PNG clitic is extremely productive in Khoekhoe.

Here is an excerpt from page 3 of 21 from Predication and NP Structure in an
Omnipredicative Language: The Case of
Khoekhoe by Michael Hahn.

Khoekhoe is an SOV language. The V slot may be occupied by a word from
  any of the three open word classes: a verb (1a), an adjective (1b), or
  a noun (1cd). Both commons nouns (1c) and proper nouns (1d) can be
  used. Even deictic elements (1e-f), numerals (1g), and possessives
  (1h) can act as predicates. While the choice of the TAM marker depends
  on the predicate, the syntactic behaviour of the different predicates
  is entirely parallel:

Here are some examples from the paper.

```<code>1a) saa=ts  ge   ra  |khii
    you=2ms DECL TAM come
    You (m) are coming.

1b) om=s      ge    (a)  kai
    house=3fs DECL  TAM  big
    The house is big.

1c) saa=ts    ge    (a)  gao-ao
    you=2ms   DECL  TAM  king
    You are a king.

1d) saa=ts    ge    (a)  Petru
    you=2ms   DECL  TAM  Peter.
    You are Peter.

1e) om=s      ge    (a)  nee.
    house=3fs DECL  TAM  this
    The house is this one.

1f) tii=ta    ge    (a)   saa
    I=1sg     DECL  TAM   you
    I am you.

1g) tara=di   ge    a  !nona
    women=3fp DECL TAM three
    The women are three.

1h) om=s      ge    a   tii
    house=3fs DECL TAM  mine
    The house is mine.
</code>```

Body:
One clear-cut example of a language that treats many things like predicates, numerals included, is Khoekhoe.

Khoekhoe marks many kinds of predicates the same way, including numerals. The paper argues that all three of the open word classes (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in Khoekhoe can be analyzed as primarily predicates and non-predicative usage requires more morphology, specifically person-number-gender (PNG) affixes. Nominalizing stuff with a PNG clitic is extremely productive in Khoekhoe.

Here is an excerpt from page 3 of 21 from Predication and NP Structure in an
Omnipredicative Language: The Case of
Khoekhoe by Michael Hahn.

Khoekhoe is an SOV language. The V slot may be occupied by a word from
  any of the three open word classes: a verb (1a), an adjective (1b), or
  a noun (1cd). Both commons nouns (1c) and proper nouns (1d) can be
  used. Even deictic elements (1e-f), numerals (1g), and possessives
  (1h) can act as predicates. While the choice of the TAM marker depends
  on the predicate, the syntactic behaviour of the different predicates
  is entirely parallel:

Here are some examples from the paper.

1a) saa=ts  ge   ra  |khii
    you=2ms DECL TAM come
    You (m) are coming.

1b) om=s      ge    (a)  kai
    house=3fs DECL  TAM  big
    The house is big.

1c) saa=ts    ge    (a)  gao-ao
    you=2ms   DECL  TAM  king
    You are a king.

1d) saa=ts    ge    (a)  Petru
    you=2ms   DECL  TAM  Peter.
    You are Peter.

1e) om=s      ge    (a)  nee.
    house=3fs DECL  TAM  this
    The house is this one.

1f) tii=ta    ge    (a)   saa
    I=1sg     DECL  TAM   you
    I am you.

1g) tara=di   ge    a  !nona
    women=3fp DECL TAM three
    The women are three.

1h) om=s      ge    a   tii
    house=3fs DECL TAM  mine
    The house is mine.


问:
How typologically unusual is using postpositions in an otherwise head-initial language?
My conlang is predominately head-initial (SVO, n-adj, mostly suffixing), but has postpositions because I'd though that the noun was the head of an adpositional phrase. Wikipedia, however, says that the adposition is the head.

So how unlikely is a language with postpositions that is otherwise head-initial?

答: Are you aware of the World Atlas of Linugistic Structures (WALS)? Combining three chapters of WALS into this combined view I found 21 languages in the sample with the combination NA/SVO/Postpositions. Among the languages are Guarani and Ewe. On the other hand, NA/SVO/Prepositions has 229 languages in the sample, showing a strong typological tendency for consistence.</p>


答:
Such languages are uncommon but not unattested. However, they are more common than prepositional SOV languages and are present in a number of unrelated families around the world.

This WALS map shows us that in general, the order of object and verb and adposition and noun phrase is very highly correlated. In the map, postpositional VO languages are the group with the third highest number of total languages, but they are less than a tenth as common as the most frequent types.

```<code> Postposition / OV    472
 Preposition  / VO    454
 Postposition / VO     41
</code>```

There are some parts of the world such as West Africa where there are many SVO languages with postpositions. There seems to be a cluster of them around Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. I think the languages in question are proven or suspected to be Niger-Congo languages. The westernmost group of these languages has both VO and OV languages as well as some intermediate types like SOVX languages and postpositional VO languages.

Another example of a postpositional VO language is Finnish. I think Proto-Uralic is generally reconstructed as having verb-final word order. However, many of the modern groups of Uralic languages have SVO word order.

There are a few cases of languages with verb-initial word orders with postpositions. One such example is Yagua. Yagua is an interesting case because the verbs are very highly inflected, but the nouns are not.

Title: How typologically unusual is using postpositions in an otherwise head-initial language?

Body:
My conlang is predominately head-initial (SVO, n-adj, mostly suffixing), but has postpositions because I'd though that the noun was the head of an adpositional phrase. Wikipedia, however, says that the adposition is the head.

So how unlikely is a language with postpositions that is otherwise head-initial?

Body:
Such languages are uncommon but not unattested. However, they are more common than prepositional SOV languages and are present in a number of unrelated families around the world.

This WALS map shows us that in general, the order of object and verb and adposition and noun phrase is very highly correlated. In the map, postpositional VO languages are the group with the third highest number of total languages, but they are less than a tenth as common as the most frequent types.

 Postposition / OV    472
 Preposition  / VO    454
 Postposition / VO     41

There are some parts of the world such as West Africa where there are many SVO languages with postpositions. There seems to be a cluster of them around Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. I think the languages in question are proven or suspected to be Niger-Congo languages. The westernmost group of these languages has both VO and OV languages as well as some intermediate types like SOVX languages and postpositional VO languages.

Another example of a postpositional VO language is Finnish. I think Proto-Uralic is generally reconstructed as having verb-final word order. However, many of the modern groups of Uralic languages have SVO word order.

There are a few cases of languages with verb-initial word orders with postpositions. One such example is Yagua. Yagua is an interesting case because the verbs are very highly inflected, but the nouns are not.


问:
Is there a structured toki pona dictionary/thesaurus?
I'm currently working on an NLP project using toki pona, analysing and generating sentences. I was wondering if there was a structured dictionary available for it, or whether people have attempted to create one.

Let me explain what I mean by "structured dictionary":

There are only 120-odd words in toki pona. The word jan refers to a person. Compounds are used to be more specific, ie jan pona is "friend", jan utala is "fighter", jan alasa is "hunter", etc. This is reminiscent of expressing the meaning of nouns through semantic primitives, a bit like Wilks (1975). So the set of words described by jan would be {"person", "friend", "fighter", "hunter", ...}. There are subsets which are more specific, so jan utala is {"fighter", "soldier", "mercenary", ...}. jan utala pi ma would be {"soldier", "private", "general", ...}

You can envisage it as a tree structure, where the leaves are the word meanings, and the roots (as there would be multiple trees: one for each 'top' primitive) encompasses all of them. As you wander down the tree, the path is an ever longer chain of toki pona words, and the set of meanings covered by those words becomes smaller and smaller.

Another example would be ilo, "tool". ilo toki is a tool for communication: {"telephone", "telegraph", "vhf radio", "loud hailer", ...}; ilo toki uta suli (tool talk mouth big) could be a loud hailer. Another sub-tree would capture wireless communication devices, perhaps ilo toki pi kon.

I know this somewhat goes against the toki pona philosophy of being a simple and small language, but it seems to me to more or less accidentally provide a useful set of semantic primitives that can be used to describe word meanings in general. So before I embark on creating such a structure, has anyone already attempted something similar? Surely there must be dictionaries of mulit-word toki pona expressions? I haven't been able to find a good one yet.

Wilks, Y (1975) An Intelligent Analyzer and Understander of English, Communications of the ACM 18(5):264-274

答:
Proving a negative is always difficult, but as far as I can tell there is no obvious candidate for what you're looking for and if you made one yourself it would presumably fill an empty niche in the Toki Pona universe. At least I haven't found any sites written in English yet that seem to fit the bill.

The closest thing I can find to what you are looking for is a Toki Pona corpus search tool, which seems like it would be useful for tracking down examples of usage and might help you find compounds containing a particular word that have already been coined.

Also, I have yet to find two simpler things that would be good stepping stones for a hierarchically organized Toki Pona dictionary.

A non-minimal dictionary

Toki Pona-English parallel texts

All of the Toki Pona dictionaries I have found so far define just the basic vocabulary and do not provide entries for any multi-morpheme lexemes, even famous ones like jan utala.

Many of the dictionaries out there are more or less copies of the official dictionary, such as this one. Other dictionaries like this Wiktionary appendix do not provide definitions for whole Toki Pona expressions at a time.

Toki Pona-English parallel texts would help distinguish lexeme boundaries within complex phrases, since the presence or absence of pi is not a completely reliable cue as to whether a "real lexeme boundary" was intended.


问:
Should I include morphology in my proto language?
Most, if not all natural languages have some form of morphology, such as noun case or poly-personal agreement. However, these features are usually evolved from prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and require time for them to appear. This was my original route for creating languages, to create proto languages without morphology and then to evolve them later on. I then started researching proto-indo-european and proto-afroasiatic, and I found out they had morphology such as noun cases, even though they were supposedly the original languages for their regions.

The main question is: Would it be naturalistic to insert morphology into proto-language(s)?

答:
I am not at all certain why you would assume that protolanguages must have no morphology. PIE is just a language like any other before or since. If we review the relevant article, the Font of All Knowledge explains that morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

Whether your language has affixes, adpositions, or some other means of distinguishing roles all of that falls under morphology. Thus, I'd argue that it is "naturalistic" to insert morphology into your protolanguage. After all, it's already there! Else, your daughter languages most likely wouldn't have the concept at all. (And that kind of speculative invented language would be very interesting indeed!)

Standard examples, consider Latin & English:

john bit the dog

the dog bit john

the dog bit john

john bit the dog

johannem momordit canis

canem momordit johannes

canis momordit johannem

johannes momordit canem

Morphology tells us how the words are related to each other. Just because English got rid of almost all of its endings doesn't mean we did away with morphology! We just tucked it away somewhere else, in this case, word order. This is why Latin can put the agent or the patient before the verb, but English, except in unusual circumstances, can not. We expect that whatever noun comes before the verb is the agent, be it the dog or be it John.

Morphology has even been proposed for Nostratic, the protolanguage from which PIE descended.


答:
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Afroasiatic (PAA) are just the earliest ancestors we can reconstruct with reasonable certainty for their respective language families. That does not at all mean that they were the first languages of their regions or the earliest languages that existed.

They didn’t materialize out of thin air. They, too, had ancestors and were influenced by neighbouring languages that didn’t leave any other trace. Humans probably had been speaking for (at least) hundreds of thousands of years at the time of PIE (possibly somewhere between 4500 BCE and 2500 BCE) or PAA (possibly somewhere between 16000 BCE and 10000 BCE) and there are proposed larger families and attempts at reconstructing proto-languages that would group language families like Indo-European and Afroasiatic together (e.g. Nostratic), though they are controversial.

Unless time-travel gets invented, we will never know how exactly the first language(s) came to be and what they were like, if they were immediately fully-formed or if they lacked features we now consider universal (possibly subordinate clauses?). Maybe they weren’t even fully oral but rather gestural with accompanying sounds.

That does not mean, however, that your proto-language cannot be the first language of its world. If that’s what you want to create, it’s up to you to speculate what a language like that could be like. The origin of language is so uncertain that anything plausible can be counted as naturalistic.

If you just want to create a naturalistic proto-language for a family of languages, that isn’t the(/a) first language to exist, there really isn’t any difference to creating any other naturalistic conlang.

Title: Should I include morphology in my proto language?

Body:
Most, if not all natural languages have some form of morphology, such as noun case or poly-personal agreement. However, these features are usually evolved from prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and require time for them to appear. This was my original route for creating languages, to create proto languages without morphology and then to evolve them later on. I then started researching proto-indo-european and proto-afroasiatic, and I found out they had morphology such as noun cases, even though they were supposedly the original languages for their regions.

The main question is: Would it be naturalistic to insert morphology into proto-language(s)?


问:
What is reduplication used for in natural languages?
According to WALS Feature 27A, 278/368 languages surveyed have productive full and partial reduplication. Chapter 27 gives the following example of partial reduplication in Pangasinan:

```<code>báley "town" -> balbáley "towns"
</code>```

And this example of full reduplication from Sahaptian:

```<code>té:mul "hail" -> temulté:mul "sleet"
</code>```

But what is reduplication often used to express?

答:
WALS Chapter 27 describes a number of functions for reduplication. All examples below come from chapter 27 unless otherwise noted.

On nouns

Pangasinan uses reduplication to mark plurals:

```<code>báley "town"
balbáley "towns"
</code>```

Ilocano uses reduplication on nouns to mark a distributive plural:

```<code>sábong "flower"
sabsábong "various flowers"
</code>```

Ilocano also uses reduplication to turn nouns into reciprocal verbs:

```<code>bales "revenge"
balembales "to avenge each other"
</code>```

Chukchi uses reduplication to mark the absolutive case:

```<code>jokwat "eider duck"
jokwajow "eider duck (ABS)"
</code>```

Kayardild uses reduplication to turn nouns into adjectives:

```<code>kandu "blood"
kandukandu "red"
</code>```

Yawelmani uses reduplication to mark associatives:

```<code>k'ɔhis  "buttocks"
k'ɔk'ɔhis  "one with large buttocks"
</code>```

On verbs

Luiseño uses reduplication to mark the number of an inherent object:

```<code>lawi "to make a hole"
lawlawi "to make two holes"
lawaláwi "to make more than two holes"
</code>```

Mountain Arapesh uses reduplication to mark carelessness on the part of the subject or agent:

```<code>su "to touch"
susu "to touch all over"
</code>```

Luiseño also uses reduplication to turn a verb into an adjective:

```<code>lepi "to tan, soften"
lepélpiš "pliable"
</code>```

Ancient Greek used reduplication to mark the perfect aspect (Ancient Greek Press Book Chapter 42):

```<code>γράφ "write"
γέγραφ "have written"
</code>```

Tigak uses reduplication to turn a verb into a person who regularly performs that action:

```<code>sábong "flower"
sabsábong "various flowers"
</code>```0

On Adjectives

Turkish uses reduplication to mark intensity:

```<code>sábong "flower"
sabsábong "various flowers"
</code>```1

Automatic Reduplication

Additionally, automatic reduplication is possible, where an affix requires reduplication of the root with no additional meaning. Chapter 27 gives this example from Ilocano:

```<code>sábong "flower"
sabsábong "various flowers"
</code>```2

Body:
WALS Chapter 27 describes a number of functions for reduplication. All examples below come from chapter 27 unless otherwise noted.

On nouns

Pangasinan uses reduplication to mark plurals:

báley "town"
balbáley "towns"

Ilocano uses reduplication on nouns to mark a distributive plural:

sábong "flower"
sabsábong "various flowers"

Ilocano also uses reduplication to turn nouns into reciprocal verbs:

bales "revenge"
balembales "to avenge each other"

Chukchi uses reduplication to mark the absolutive case:

jokwat "eider duck"
jokwajow "eider duck (ABS)"

Kayardild uses reduplication to turn nouns into adjectives:

kandu "blood"
kandukandu "red"

Yawelmani uses reduplication to mark associatives:

k'ɔhis  "buttocks"
k'ɔk'ɔhis  "one with large buttocks"

On verbs

Luiseño uses reduplication to mark the number of an inherent object:

lawi "to make a hole"
lawlawi "to make two holes"
lawaláwi "to make more than two holes"

Mountain Arapesh uses reduplication to mark carelessness on the part of the subject or agent:

su "to touch"
susu "to touch all over"

Luiseño also uses reduplication to turn a verb into an adjective:

lepi "to tan, soften"
lepélpiš "pliable"

Ancient Greek used reduplication to mark the perfect aspect (Ancient Greek Press Book Chapter 42):

γράφ "write"
γέγραφ "have written"

Tigak uses reduplication to turn a verb into a person who regularly performs that action:

giak "send"
gigiak "messenger"

On Adjectives

Turkish uses reduplication to mark intensity:

beyaz "white"
bembeyaz "very white"

Automatic Reduplication

Additionally, automatic reduplication is possible, where an affix requires reduplication of the root with no additional meaning. Chapter 27 gives this example from Ilocano:

singpet "behave" + agin-
aginsisingpet "pretend to behave"


问:
Usage of different plural systems in the same language
Let's assume a language once had an extensive plural system, indicating singular/dual/paucal/plural distinctions on nouns, pronouns, verbs, et cetera. Over time, as has happened in real languages, this was simplified to a simpler singular/plural system except in personal pronouns, which retained the original distinctions. In other words, the language would distinguish only between "woman" (one woman) and "women" (more than one woman), but when you used a pronoun, you'd have "she" (one woman), "she2" (two women"), "she+" (a few women), and "she++" (many women).

Your conversations would thus look like the following:

"That woman came out of the store. She is carrying a bag."

"Those women came out of the store. She2 are carrying bags." (Two women came out)

"Those women came out of the store. She+ are carrying bags." (More than two women came out)

"Those women came out of the store. She++ are carrying bags." (Many women came out)

A similar situation situation would occur with all personal pronouns.

So, the question: while this sort of thing is obviously possible, since I just described it, is this a feature which has been documented in a natural language? I'm not just restricting it the way I've done, but the general situation where the grammar of the language has simplified down the grammatical number, perhaps even to not having a singular/plural distinction at all, except for retaining a more elaborate grammatical number system in one single common grammatical element.

答:
A similar system to the one you describe is attested in Fijian. Fijian has a single-dual-paucal-plural distinction in its pronouns only. However, almost every sentence must contain a subject pronoun. I'm not sure about the status of imperatives in Fijian. Fijian also has VOS word order, where S is a lexical subject.

Independent nouns themselves are not marked for number and the articles that introduce them are also not marked for number.

```<code>era la'o [a gone]
3PL go   DET child
The children are going
</code>```

In other examples, a gone is glossed as the child. From this we can infer that the subject pronoun (or part of the verb phrase, depending on how you analyze it), is usually the only place in the clause where number is overtly marked. Pronouns can surface in other positions as well, and pronominal number contrasts are not neutralized when the pronoun isn't the subject.

As an interesting wrinkle, pronouns have a separate form that's used when they are the head of a noun phrase, including a subject noun phrase.

```<code>era sa  la'o [o   ira]
3PL ASP go   ART  3PL
"They are going"
</code>```

But, pronouns can occur after the verb without being introduced by an article or a preposition if they are objects.

```<code>  o   aa   biu-ti  ira
2SG PAST leave-TR  3PL
"You left them"
</code>```

More generally, it is somewhat common for pronouns or a subset of the pronouns to have a different number system than independent nouns. Proto-Germanic is reconstructed with dual number in first and second person pronouns and their corresponding verbal forms, but without the dual in the third person or in nouns.

Body:
A similar system to the one you describe is attested in Fijian. Fijian has a single-dual-paucal-plural distinction in its pronouns only. However, almost every sentence must contain a subject pronoun. I'm not sure about the status of imperatives in Fijian. Fijian also has VOS word order, where S is a lexical subject.

Independent nouns themselves are not marked for number and the articles that introduce them are also not marked for number.

era la'o [a gone]
3PL go   DET child
The children are going

In other examples, a gone is glossed as the child. From this we can infer that the subject pronoun (or part of the verb phrase, depending on how you analyze it), is usually the only place in the clause where number is overtly marked. Pronouns can surface in other positions as well, and pronominal number contrasts are not neutralized when the pronoun isn't the subject.

As an interesting wrinkle, pronouns have a separate form that's used when they are the head of a noun phrase, including a subject noun phrase.

era sa  la'o [o   ira]
3PL ASP go   ART  3PL
"They are going"

But, pronouns can occur after the verb without being introduced by an article or a preposition if they are objects.

  o   aa   biu-ti  ira
2SG PAST leave-TR  3PL
"You left them"

More generally, it is somewhat common for pronouns or a subset of the pronouns to have a different number system than independent nouns. Proto-Germanic is reconstructed with dual number in first and second person pronouns and their corresponding verbal forms, but without the dual in the third person or in nouns.


问:
Are there conlangs using constructed sounds?
Usually, constructed languages of all kind (naturalistic or not) draw their sounds from existing natural languages.

Are there conlangs with constructed sounds, i.e., sounds that do not occur in natural languages (or are at least very rare in natural languages)?

答:
In Ithkuil, a geminate /h/ can be produced as a bidental fricative, a sound which is only attested in a single dialect of a single natural language.

hh

The geminated version of Ithkuil h is pronounced in either of two ways: (1) as a “bi-dental” fricative, in that the jaw is completely closed and the upper and lower teeth are in near-contact along their entire length; the resulting sound is somewhat similar in timbre to both a voiceless interdental fricative (as in English thin) as well as the English f-sound, however there is absolutely no contact by the tongue with the teeth or gums when pronouncing this sound; no IPA equivalent; or (2) as the voiceless pharyngeal fricative found in Arabic (spelled ح)and in various Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages. This second allophone should not be employed if the resulting pharyngealization distorts the timbre of the adjacent vowels to the extent that their place of articulation changes (e.g., the vowel û being made to sound like ô).


答:
Also attested in English, just not to the extent of your example.

Dual number existed in nouns & pronouns and was lost in nouns by Primitive Germanic times. Its use continued into West Germanic & Old English first & second person pronouns:

```<code>      s      d       pl
1     ic     wit     we
2     þu     yit     ye
</code>```

Title: Usage of different plural systems in the same language

Body:
Let's assume a language once had an extensive plural system, indicating singular/dual/paucal/plural distinctions on nouns, pronouns, verbs, et cetera. Over time, as has happened in real languages, this was simplified to a simpler singular/plural system except in personal pronouns, which retained the original distinctions. In other words, the language would distinguish only between "woman" (one woman) and "women" (more than one woman), but when you used a pronoun, you'd have "she" (one woman), "she2" (two women"), "she+" (a few women), and "she++" (many women).

Your conversations would thus look like the following:

"That woman came out of the store. She is carrying a bag."

"Those women came out of the store. She2 are carrying bags." (Two women came out)

"Those women came out of the store. She+ are carrying bags." (More than two women came out)

"Those women came out of the store. She++ are carrying bags." (Many women came out)

A similar situation situation would occur with all personal pronouns.

So, the question: while this sort of thing is obviously possible, since I just described it, is this a feature which has been documented in a natural language? I'm not just restricting it the way I've done, but the general situation where the grammar of the language has simplified down the grammatical number, perhaps even to not having a singular/plural distinction at all, except for retaining a more elaborate grammatical number system in one single common grammatical element.

Body:
Also attested in English, just not to the extent of your example.

Dual number existed in nouns & pronouns and was lost in nouns by Primitive Germanic times. Its use continued into West Germanic & Old English first & second person pronouns:

      s      d       pl
1     ic     wit     we
2     þu     yit     ye


答:
This is something different from my first answer: Mixing syntax

There is a project named Galactical Dependencies where the authors started with dependency treebanks of some known languages and than created new artificial languages at a large scale by altering the typological features of the original language using features from other languages. This leads to new "languages" with a different syntax. Incidentally, the main motivation of that project was the lack of available treebanks for typologically interesting languages and so they created them artificially.

I am not aware of any conlanger tapping that ressource yet.


问:
How to make names in a conlang?
So, draconic in the setting is used to name places, people, and communication in general. I skipped through most of the phonotactics as I'm using the Hungarian template. So as I filled out entries in my Swadesh list, I ran a small experiment:

arán (sun) + kile (feather) = Oh, f@ck me! How am I supposed to combine two words, this incompatible, into a pair of names?

More precisely, I had a name, Amrar (pronounce: Ámrár), created before through a different method and without having a whole conlang in mind. Compared to Aránkile (which I  modified into Áranki/Árenkil, a male and a female form) its soft m, loud and clear á, and grizzly r does a good job of giving off the vibes you'd expect from a golden dragon, regal, powerful, intimidating but still kind. This worked when I was going for vibes, even if it had no meaning or roots in a language at the end. However, I feel like I'm writing myself into a corner with this vocabulary.

I don't want my language to sound like it was generated on vulgarlang.com. I have to maintain my control over the "loudness" curve of each word, their length and which phoneme I use, based on their place of articulation. What should I do to balance the "sounds like an orc/elf/typical politician" with the "names have a meaning"?

答:
Note that you as the conlang designer control both ends of the chain: The final wordform and the etymology. So you can play with both parts until the result meets your wishes.

So you can start with the wordform Amrar and search for an etymology, splitting it up as Am-rar and find some meanings for Am and rar, say am is short for amon "hill, mountain" and rar is "roar, load noise", making your mighty dragon a "moutain-roar(er)". Tolkien used this approach a lot. The backside of this approach is that the conlang becomes difficult to maintain.

EDIT: Going the other way, starting with arán and kile, you can vary the order of the two stems, Maybe Kilarán sounds better than Aránkil?  It is your decision. You can also throw in some sounds between the two stems, say Aránskil with an inserted s, you can insert a vowel, say a, to yield Aranakil, you can assimilate the n to the k giving Arángkil.

Starting with roots from your conlang, there are still a lot of creative possibilites to combine them in compounds: Inserting a Fugenelement (example from German Herz-ens-sache "affair of the heart", from Herz "heart" and Sache "thing, affair", ens being the Fugenelement without meaning), applying some assimilations or dissimilations, dropping syllables from long words (syncope), ...).

OwnerDisplayName: Mephistopheles

Title: How to make names in a conlang?


问:
How to say, 'Haters gonna Hate' in Toki Pona
The closest I could find was

jan ike | awen pali e ona | pilin ike tawa

  enemy | continue | hate

But I've not figured out if that the right way to combine those phrases

答:
I'd say something like

jan pi lawa ike li wile e ijo ike tawa sina lon tenpo ale

Which means: "People of bad heads want bad things for you, always".

You could also use:

jan pi toki ike li wile e ijo ike tawa sina lon tenpo ale

Which means: "People of bad talking want bad things for you, always".


答:
The consensus answer (thanks Oliver Mason) for how to translate Haters gonna hate into Toki Pona is the following:

```<code> tenpo ale la jan ike li ike
</code>```

Tenpo ale la translates as at all times and captures the sense of inevitability in haters gonna hate in English. It also serves to rule out other possible readings such as the tautological bad people are bad. Here ike is used as "commit evil acts", one of which is presumably hating.

I interpret Haters gonna hate as a phrase for dismissing all criticism as inevitable or unfounded regardless of its content.

I don't think hate in this context literally refers to feeling hatred/enmity, but to hating on, which is not quite the same thing and covers things like insults and ridicule.

I think we strip out a lot of the detail of haters gonna hate and get something reasonable.

```<code>jan    ike    li   ike
person bad    PRED bad
bad    people are  bad
</code>```

Since jan ike is so much broader than bad person in English, I think this does a good job of conveying the intent of the expression. People predisposed to ridicule or insult you are going to ridicule or insult you regardless of what you do.

The right way to combine the phrases you gave above would be

```<code>jan ike li awen pali e pilin ike tawa.
</code>```

However, there are a few constructions in there I'm not sure about

```<code>li   awen  pali
PRED keep    do
</code>```

I don't know whether you can use awen like this as an auxiliary verb of sorts to mark habitual or progressive aspect, as you seem to be doing here.

```<code>pilin   ike  tawa
feeling bad  towards
</code>```

I don't know whether you can use an objectless preposition attributively like this. My guess is yes since prepositions besides e (if analyzed as a preposition) do not form a distinct word class in Toki Pona. I'm having trouble finding an explicit citation for the non-existence of prepositions as a distinct word class, this is the closest I can find.

Title: How to say, 'Haters gonna Hate' in Toki Pona

Body:
The closest I could find was

jan ike | awen pali e ona | pilin ike tawa

  enemy | continue | hate

But I've not figured out if that the right way to combine those phrases

Body:
The consensus answer (thanks Oliver Mason) for how to translate Haters gonna hate into Toki Pona is the following:

 tenpo ale la jan ike li ike

Tenpo ale la translates as at all times and captures the sense of inevitability in haters gonna hate in English. It also serves to rule out other possible readings such as the tautological bad people are bad. Here ike is used as "commit evil acts", one of which is presumably hating.

I interpret Haters gonna hate as a phrase for dismissing all criticism as inevitable or unfounded regardless of its content.

I don't think hate in this context literally refers to feeling hatred/enmity, but to hating on, which is not quite the same thing and covers things like insults and ridicule.

I think we strip out a lot of the detail of haters gonna hate and get something reasonable.

jan    ike    li   ike
person bad    PRED bad
bad    people are  bad

Since jan ike is so much broader than bad person in English, I think this does a good job of conveying the intent of the expression. People predisposed to ridicule or insult you are going to ridicule or insult you regardless of what you do.

The right way to combine the phrases you gave above would be

jan ike li awen pali e pilin ike tawa.

However, there are a few constructions in there I'm not sure about

li   awen  pali
PRED keep    do

I don't know whether you can use awen like this as an auxiliary verb of sorts to mark habitual or progressive aspect, as you seem to be doing here.

pilin   ike  tawa
feeling bad  towards

I don't know whether you can use an objectless preposition attributively like this. My guess is yes since prepositions besides e (if analyzed as a preposition) do not form a distinct word class in Toki Pona. I'm having trouble finding an explicit citation for the non-existence of prepositions as a distinct word class, this is the closest I can find.


问:
How long do I need to influence language development?
Taja is a language with Verb-Subject-Object word order. However, emperor Kai wants to always be the first, so, he wants all sentences where he is the subject to have a Subject-Verb-Object word order.

Obviously, people at the court follow this rule. Farmers in a remote region probably not that much. If Kai dies a few years later and his successor goes "Stop this stupid word-order thing" this would be forgotten quickly.

If, however, Kai lives long enough (or his successor also likes it this way), other nobles would start to require their servants to put them first as well, eventually even remote regions would pick it up. Finally, it becomes part of the language.

How long does this need to stay in effect until language development integrates it into the language? Such that even after replacing monarchy with democracy, the "Subject-Verb-Object" word order is still used when the subject is a person, and the speaker wants to express his/her respect?

Update:

Let me answer the questions in the comments.

First of all, Kai is not planning to systematically change the language. He is just pleasing his ego. So while he will punish people who do not do it (if he notices), he is not going to start a large-scale education program.

If the emperor is the object of the sentence, the sentence stays as it is. So "peasants must pay taxes to the emperor" stays unchanged.

What is the equivalent Earth date for technology?

agricultural, probably medieval.

How physically and demographically large is the country?

An entire continent. Think about the Roman Empire.

How much trade is there with other countries?

I haven't given this one any thought. I guess less trade helps, so, let' say very little.

How strong is/are the religious influences (a big deal with language)?

weak to medium

How effective is the collection of taxes and the dispensation of justice?

Things are quite organized, however, this is a personal spleen of Kai. A judge (or policemen) in a remote province is very unlikely to sentence/imprison someone for not following this.

答:
Assuming emperor Kai puts a strong pressure on his subjects, having the change permanent would be a matter of one or two generations. Once one generation is brainwashed and use naturally the new form, and that there is no backward trend (emperor Kai's death penalty may be a strong incentive to avoid such trend), consider that adoption should stay.

This however assumes that language is mostly spoken and not written (or you need to change writings as well), that teachers are supportive of Kai and teach the new proper way of speaking to all, etc.

OwnerDisplayName: Alex

OwnerDisplayName: Uriel


答:
Control the schools and the culture

Education and culture are critically important to  language development. Children of immigrants generally speak the local language, including the local dialect and slang, even if their parents struggle with it. If you can control the schools and the culture, you can force a new speaking style. It's tough to know exactly what this would look like without knowing the technology level of your world, but since you want a timeframe, let's say 50 years. That works out to one or two generations (one generation in the modern world is between 19 and 31 years).

Education

Require that "Modern Taja" be used in all schools and forbid the use of "Traditional Taja" in education. Send all teachers to mandatory continuing education classes about how Taja is to be written and spoken. Rewrite all educational materials. Emphasize the importance of education and build schools in areas with poor literacy rates.

Culture

It sounds like not everybody in your world attends formal education, even with the expanded schools. The king should sponsor great cultural initiatives, including theaters in the cities, the publishing of books, and traveling theater groups that venture deep into the country. In every instance, emphasize Modern Taja and either don't use Traditional Taja or only have the dumb country rube characters use it.

Several studies (example) emphasize the importance of what a child's friends and parents speak in determining how the child speaks. If Modern Taja is all that someone has seen in school and culture for her entire life and it's primarily what her parents have seen for their entire lives, Traditional Taja will sound really weird.

Title: How long do I need to influence language development?

Body:
Taja is a language with Verb-Subject-Object word order. However, emperor Kai wants to always be the first, so, he wants all sentences where he is the subject to have a Subject-Verb-Object word order.

Obviously, people at the court follow this rule. Farmers in a remote region probably not that much. If Kai dies a few years later and his successor goes "Stop this stupid word-order thing" this would be forgotten quickly.

If, however, Kai lives long enough (or his successor also likes it this way), other nobles would start to require their servants to put them first as well, eventually even remote regions would pick it up. Finally, it becomes part of the language.

How long does this need to stay in effect until language development integrates it into the language? Such that even after replacing monarchy with democracy, the "Subject-Verb-Object" word order is still used when the subject is a person, and the speaker wants to express his/her respect?

Update:

Let me answer the questions in the comments.

First of all, Kai is not planning to systematically change the language. He is just pleasing his ego. So while he will punish people who do not do it (if he notices), he is not going to start a large-scale education program.

If the emperor is the object of the sentence, the sentence stays as it is. So "peasants must pay taxes to the emperor" stays unchanged.

What is the equivalent Earth date for technology?

agricultural, probably medieval.

How physically and demographically large is the country?

An entire continent. Think about the Roman Empire.

How much trade is there with other countries?

I haven't given this one any thought. I guess less trade helps, so, let' say very little.

How strong is/are the religious influences (a big deal with language)?

weak to medium

How effective is the collection of taxes and the dispensation of justice?

Things are quite organized, however, this is a personal spleen of Kai. A judge (or policemen) in a remote province is very unlikely to sentence/imprison someone for not following this.

OwnerDisplayName: Andrew Brēza


问:
How can I name my days of the week?
In my conworld, months are divided into twelve-day weeks. That seems a bit too long (since I recall that people complained that the ten-day weeks of the French Republican calendar were too long), so I've divided my week into two halves, so I don't want the names for the days to have numbers, in order to avoid silliness like "first firstday" or "second thirdday." I know that English days of the week are named after Norse gods, but since my months are named after gods, I want to avoid that, too.

What are other attested etymologies for names of days of the week, in either traditional calendars or the modern Gregorian one?

答:
While in English (and German) the days are named after (North-)Germanic gods or the sun and the moon, the months are also name after gods (and emperors), albeit from a different set (Roman), with some numerical ones thrown in (September/October/November/December); so there is no need to be consistent.

In Irish it's similar: some names have been taken from Latin, others have been added in with cultural/religious significance.

I was just looking at another language which is from a different family (Hawai'ian), but I guess they no longer have the weekdays they had before they had contact with Western powers: their days are literally "Night-one" (Po'akahi) to "Night-six" (Po'aono), plus Sunday being "Pray Day" (La pule). The month names are just localised versions of the English ones ("Ianuali", "Pepeluali", etc). Indonesian weekday names also seem to be derived from the names of (arabic) numerals.

You could choose anything where you've got a set: celebrities/rulers, planets, plants, animals, whatever. I don't think anyone would look at it and think it weird to have a "fox-day", or an "oak-day". Add a regular prefix or suffix to the word that means something like "day", and it should look alright.

And if you have two half-weeks, why not have an animal half followed by a tree-half?

Title: How can I name my days of the week?


答:
Following all the restrictions given in the question, I propose using letters of the writing system as names for days of the week.

If your society is literate and the number of symbols in the writing system is relatively small, the canonical order of letters is going to be very well known.

I don't know of any natural languages that actually do this, although the heavenly stems were historically used to label days of the week based on which sacrifices and rituals were supposed to be performed when. So, the heavenly stems form a small closed system with additional meaning besides designating a day of the week.

Tying the symbols-as-days-of-week to a religion, current or historical, is probably a good way to make the system plausible in your conworld.

So, you specifically mentioned not wanting to name days after numbers, but some very widely spoken languages do exactly this.

I think you can make the 12-day week in two halves thing make sense by having a duodecimal number system with six as a sub-base. In a system like this, some or all the numbers in the 7 to 12 range would be derived from the words for 1 to 6.

In Mandarin Chinese, the days of the week are simply numbered, with Sunday being an exception to the pattern.

星期一 (week 1) means Monday.

星期二 (week 2) means Tuesday.

星期日 (week sun) or 星期天 (week sky) means Sunday.

In addition, some number systems have a sub-base.

For instance, here is a numeral system developed for an Inuit language with a vigesimal number system by speakers of the language. The number system has a sub-base of 5, which is reflected in the forms of the numerals.

Here is the table in the article reproduced below. The system is not completely regular, but many numbers in the 1-20 range, particularly those congruent to 2 or 3 mod 5 are transparently derived from a small multiple of 5 followed by the word for 2 or 3. Some numerals have irregular forms or are represented subtractively like 9, 14, 19.

```<code>0         1                2                   3                    4
-         atausiq          malġuk              piŋasut              sisamat

5         6                7                   8                    9
tallimat  itchaksrat       tallimat malġuk     tallimat piŋasut     quliŋuġutaiḷaq

10        11               12                  13                   14
qulit     qulit atausiq    qulit malġuk        qulit piŋasut        akimiaġutaiḷaq

15        16               17                  18                   19
akimiaq   akimiaq atausiq  akimiaq malġuk      akimiaq piŋasut      iñuiññaŋŋutaiḷaq

20
iñuiññaq
</code>```

Title: How can I name my days of the week?

Body:
In my conworld, months are divided into twelve-day weeks. That seems a bit too long (since I recall that people complained that the ten-day weeks of the French Republican calendar were too long), so I've divided my week into two halves, so I don't want the names for the days to have numbers, in order to avoid silliness like "first firstday" or "second thirdday." I know that English days of the week are named after Norse gods, but since my months are named after gods, I want to avoid that, too.

What are other attested etymologies for names of days of the week, in either traditional calendars or the modern Gregorian one?

Body:
Following all the restrictions given in the question, I propose using letters of the writing system as names for days of the week.

If your society is literate and the number of symbols in the writing system is relatively small, the canonical order of letters is going to be very well known.

I don't know of any natural languages that actually do this, although the heavenly stems were historically used to label days of the week based on which sacrifices and rituals were supposed to be performed when. So, the heavenly stems form a small closed system with additional meaning besides designating a day of the week.

Tying the symbols-as-days-of-week to a religion, current or historical, is probably a good way to make the system plausible in your conworld.

So, you specifically mentioned not wanting to name days after numbers, but some very widely spoken languages do exactly this.

I think you can make the 12-day week in two halves thing make sense by having a duodecimal number system with six as a sub-base. In a system like this, some or all the numbers in the 7 to 12 range would be derived from the words for 1 to 6.

In Mandarin Chinese, the days of the week are simply numbered, with Sunday being an exception to the pattern.

星期一 (week 1) means Monday.

星期二 (week 2) means Tuesday.

星期日 (week sun) or 星期天 (week sky) means Sunday.

In addition, some number systems have a sub-base.

For instance, here is a numeral system developed for an Inuit language with a vigesimal number system by speakers of the language. The number system has a sub-base of 5, which is reflected in the forms of the numerals.

Here is the table in the article reproduced below. The system is not completely regular, but many numbers in the 1-20 range, particularly those congruent to 2 or 3 mod 5 are transparently derived from a small multiple of 5 followed by the word for 2 or 3. Some numerals have irregular forms or are represented subtractively like 9, 14, 19.

0         1                2                   3                    4
-         atausiq          malġuk              piŋasut              sisamat

5         6                7                   8                    9
tallimat  itchaksrat       tallimat malġuk     tallimat piŋasut     quliŋuġutaiḷaq

10        11               12                  13                   14
qulit     qulit atausiq    qulit malġuk        qulit piŋasut        akimiaġutaiḷaq

15        16               17                  18                   19
akimiaq   akimiaq atausiq  akimiaq malġuk      akimiaq piŋasut      iñuiññaŋŋutaiḷaq

20
iñuiññaq


答:
The modern weekdays are actually not named directly after gods, but after planets. This system started with the Babylonians, who named each day (*) after one of the seven classical planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, and the Sun. This system was borrowed by the Egyptians, then the Greeks, then the Romans, then various Germanic peoples, using local equivalents to the Babylonian names each time, which is why we now have "Sunday" and "Monday" (from "sun" and "moon") and "Saturday" (from Saturn, who had no Germanic equivalent) alongside an eclectic assortment of Germanic deities.

If astrology is important in your conculture, a similar system would make sense. You could name the days of the week after planets, constellations, important stars, or any heavenly objects that are important to these people.

(*) Strictly speaking, they assigned each hour to a planet, then named each day after the planet that governed its first hour. Cassius Dio has a more elaborate explanation.

Title: How can I name my days of the week?


问:
How can I talk about weather without expletives?
In English, it is necessary to use a syntactic expletive ("it") when talking about weather:

```<code>It   is     sun-ny.
EXPL COP.3S sun-ADJ
</code>```

Pro-drop languages can easily avoid the explicit expletive by excluding it (Spanish):

```<code>Hac-e sol.
do-3S sun
</code>```

But in this Spanish example, there's still an implicit expletive subject. How can I completely avoid using expletive subject when talking about the weather?

答:
Hungarian avoids expletive subject when talking about weather by using an appropriate non-expletive subject. To say that it's sunny in Hungarian, you say

```<code>Süt     a   nap.
bake.3S the sun
"The sun is baking."
</code>```

To say that it's raining, you say:

```<code>Es-ik   az  es-ő.
fall-3S the fall-N
"The rain is falling"
</code>```

In this sentence, eső is used as the word for rain, but is in fact transparently derived from the verb esni, to fall, thus the sentence could actually be translated as "The falling thing is falling!"

Of note, however, this latter example can be shortened to just esik, "it falls," though the implicit subject here is az eső, "the rain," and could therefore still be considered non-expletive.

Body:
Hungarian avoids expletive subject when talking about weather by using an appropriate non-expletive subject. To say that it's sunny in Hungarian, you say

Süt     a   nap.
bake.3S the sun
"The sun is baking."

To say that it's raining, you say:

Es-ik   az  es-ő.
fall-3S the fall-N
"The rain is falling"

In this sentence, eső is used as the word for rain, but is in fact transparently derived from the verb esni, to fall, thus the sentence could actually be translated as "The falling thing is falling!"

Of note, however, this latter example can be shortened to just esik, "it falls," though the implicit subject here is az eső, "the rain," and could therefore still be considered non-expletive.


问:
What to do when my conlang has a word that means something in one of my languages?
This is a bit subjective problem. As a Hungarian who knows English, I have the high ground when it comes to making up words, as I can mush the English and Hungarian words together with some outliers (usually Japanese-sounding words) and things I make up. However, first, let's take a look at a composite I created with my WIP Swadesh list:

rén+kile = red feather = rékile/régile

Red Feather is a rare genetic mutation among tengu (based-off of Japanese mythology;  anthro birds, six-limbed variant). Those who are born with this mutation have striking red plumage, yellow/golden beak and eyes, along with an unusual pointy crest, similar to that of a cockatiel. Rékile is often translated to phoenix in Common (British English). While the resemblance is hard to deny, rékile tengu don't set themselves on fire, nor revert into younger forms.

Now, régi means old in Hungarian. And Ré is Hungarian for Ra, who just happened to be a god with a bird's head and is associated with the Sun (which is a deadly laser). Rékile is still passable, but some words are so reified in my mind that even lookalikes carry unwanted connotations.

who? (“?” not) = námó (I keep hearing nani)

what? (“?” not) = názá (Názáreti Jézus)

dog = gadór (csador Oh no! or csahol I'd prefer to go with that one)

I know it sounds and is dumb, but I can't concentrate when I look at my language and I can still see the anime references and Hungarian words in my mind. I don't want to throw out Hungarian entirely, but I'm still afraid people will pick up these accidental collisions of my languages. How can I minimize the number of those collisions?

答:
These sorts of coincidences are somewhat inevitable. Just try to accept that there's a limited number of ways to arrange sounds in your language, and some will sound similar to words in other languages.

When I was trying to learn Hungarian, I came across a number of words that reminded me of words I knew in English and other languages. Some examples:

 repülőter "airport" /  re-polluter

 csillag"star" /  ceiling

 és "and" /  es "it is"

 a nap "the sun" /  a nap

 a bolt "the store" /  a bolt

 öt "five" /  otto "eight"

I also had a recent case on the CBB where I posted my conlang Atili's word for "citrus" zilu, and immediately got asked if I borrowed that word from Kankonian (another conlang) tzelua "citrus." I hadn't. CBB thread

Then there is the fairly well-known case of the Mandarin filler phrase 那個 / 那个 nèige, which sounds to many English speakers like a racial slur. See this posting on the Chinese language stack for more details: Very frequently used word in Mandarin that sounds like "nica" or "nigah"


答:
There's also the brilliant masterpiece kay(f)bop(t), which features

the dextral lateral click (a click made on the right side of the mouth)

the sinistral lateral click (a click made on the left side of the mouth)

the manual stop (a clap, which may only occur in morphemes pertaining to penguins)

the faciomanual click (a facepalm, which may only occur in function words)

(note that these aren't actually official names but come from the Conlang Critic video on kay(f)bop(t))

These are already stretching it, so I don't think kay(f)bop(t)'s phonemic hats could be counted as "sounds" per se.

(And yes, this is a joke language, but I couldn't resist a chance to mention it.)

Title: Are there conlangs using constructed sounds?

Body:
Usually, constructed languages of all kind (naturalistic or not) draw their sounds from existing natural languages.

Are there conlangs with constructed sounds, i.e., sounds that do not occur in natural languages (or are at least very rare in natural languages)?


答:
There are also language with impersonal verb conjugation, and of course, nothing prevents a verb from being used only in the impersonal. Nahuatl has an impersonal voice, but because it's only used with verbs that normally have animate subjects, its weather verbs function much like Spanish's, ironically enough.

In my own conlang Mfalen, weather verbs function as descriptors, so one says the equivalent of "X is raining" (i.e. It's raining on/in X) the same way one says "X is cold" or "X is windy" (or indeed, "X is red").

Title: How can I talk about weather without expletives?

Body:
In English, it is necessary to use a syntactic expletive ("it") when talking about weather:

```<code>It   is     sun-ny.
EXPL COP.3S sun-ADJ
</code>```

Pro-drop languages can easily avoid the explicit expletive by excluding it (Spanish):

```<code>Hac-e sol.
do-3S sun
</code>```

But in this Spanish example, there's still an implicit expletive subject. How can I completely avoid using expletive subject when talking about the weather?


答:
Here are some ideas haven't been listed yet

Allow nouns denoting weather phenomena to form clauses by themselves

Use an existential construction

Make the subject a location

Use an all-purpose weather verb

Weather noun clauses

If a normal transitive clause looks something like the following, then a weather clause can just be a noun by itself.

```<code>student-NOM book-ACC read-past-3sg
the student read the book
</code>```

Here, the noun appears in the nominative case, which tends to be unmarked cross-linguistically.

```<code>rain-NOM
It's raining/was raining/will rain
</code>```

This way, it can be modified with adjectives just as it normally would be.

```<code>many/much rain-NOM
It's raining a lot/It's pouring/It was raining a lot/...
</code>```

Use an existential construction

Ceqli, or at least an old version of Ceqli from years ago, uses an existential construction.

```<code>baran hay
rain  exist
</code>```

Make the subject a location

I think this is similar to Circeus' example, but I can't tell whether it's identical or not. If it's identical, I'll remove it.

Locative subjects are perhaps uncommon or unattested cross-linguistically, but in principle nothing stops you from making the weather verbs intransitive verbs whose subject is the location where the weather is happening.

```<code>Here-NOM rain-past-3sg
It was raining here.

Spain-NOM principally plain-LOC rain-pres-3sg.
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Lit: Spain rains mainly at the plain.
</code>```

So the few references I can find to locative subjects are mainly things like this, which describe locations moving to or appearing in the first position in a clause rather than verbs whose subject position has a locative flavor.

All-purpose weather verb

Have a verb that means to be the weather, and use it with the name of the weather phenomenon.

```<code>Rain-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's raining.

Snow-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's snowing.

Cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's cloudy.

Cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg-NEG
It's not cloudy.
</code>```

This has the advantage of making questions about the weather resemble their declarative counterparts.

```<code>what-NOM weather-pres-3sg
How is the weather?

how-much cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg
How cloudy is it?
</code>```

Body:
Here are some ideas haven't been listed yet

Allow nouns denoting weather phenomena to form clauses by themselves

Use an existential construction

Make the subject a location

Use an all-purpose weather verb

Weather noun clauses

If a normal transitive clause looks something like the following, then a weather clause can just be a noun by itself.

student-NOM book-ACC read-past-3sg
the student read the book

Here, the noun appears in the nominative case, which tends to be unmarked cross-linguistically.

rain-NOM
It's raining/was raining/will rain

This way, it can be modified with adjectives just as it normally would be.

many/much rain-NOM
It's raining a lot/It's pouring/It was raining a lot/...

Use an existential construction

Ceqli, or at least an old version of Ceqli from years ago, uses an existential construction.

baran hay
rain  exist

Make the subject a location

I think this is similar to Circeus' example, but I can't tell whether it's identical or not. If it's identical, I'll remove it.

Locative subjects are perhaps uncommon or unattested cross-linguistically, but in principle nothing stops you from making the weather verbs intransitive verbs whose subject is the location where the weather is happening.

Here-NOM rain-past-3sg
It was raining here.

Spain-NOM principally plain-LOC rain-pres-3sg.
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Lit: Spain rains mainly at the plain.

So the few references I can find to locative subjects are mainly things like this, which describe locations moving to or appearing in the first position in a clause rather than verbs whose subject position has a locative flavor.

All-purpose weather verb

Have a verb that means to be the weather, and use it with the name of the weather phenomenon.

Rain-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's raining.

Snow-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's snowing.

Cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's cloudy.

Cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg-NEG
It's not cloudy.

This has the advantage of making questions about the weather resemble their declarative counterparts.

what-NOM weather-pres-3sg
How is the weather?

how-much cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg
How cloudy is it?


问:
Is there an open-source set of topics and vocabulary for making a language tutorial?
Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and grammar by topic. Instead of stealing from Berlitz or Duolingo, I'd like to steal from people who give me permission to do so.

An example of what I have in mind, I'd like a set of topics and vocabulary like the following:

Lesson 1: Greetings

Hello

How are you?

Fine.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

Lesson 2: Classroom objects

pencil

notebook

textbook

paper

Lesson 3: Simple sentences

I

You

a

have

I have a pencil.

You have a textbook.

Of course, given a standard template, I'm willing to adjust according to the needs of my grammar, but a starting point could help a lot.

答:
One place to start is the Universal Language Dictionary. ULD Version 2.7 is listed on the Frath Wiki. ULD Version 3 is available in Google Sheet form.

The Universal Language Dictionary is a list of concepts that can be represented as a word in a conlang. Each concept belongs to a category such as "Function words", "Clothing", and "Foodstuffs". Each concept also has a level between 0 and 3.

To design your course, you can sort these by level, and then sort each level by categories as you wish. Level 0 has only 30 words and it make sense to do them in this order:

Function Word

Adpositions

Numerals

Degree

The other categories have dozens of categories and 100-1000 words in them, so they take more work to sort, but at least it's a start.

You'll probably want to deviate from this pattern some. I'd want to introduce some nouns and greetings before I get into function terms. I'd also introduce food items as soon as I introduce the word eat.

You'll need to introduce some terms that aren't on the list, and of course other grammar. There's no word for "the" or "a" on the list because those are not considered universal.

Some background information can be found here. This includes the relevant license for version 2.7 of the ULD:

Copyright 1992-1995 by Richard K. Harrison.  All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for unrestricted use of these files by any individual for his/her own pleasure, private research, personal communication, etc.  Use of these files by any government agency, business entity, educational institution, or any other organization requires permission.

I would guess that other versions of it have similar permissions, but I can't guarantee it.


答:
The Fundamento de Esperanto was published in 1905, so as far as I know it's in the public domain everywhere. It's one of the foundational documents of Esperanto, containing a short grammar description, a dictionary of thousands of words, and crucially a book of exercises (called the ekzercaro).

The ekzercaro fits what you're asking for. It is divided into sections, and every section after section 4 contains sample sentences and new vocabulary items. For example, this is one of the sentences in section 5:

Leono estas besto.

And these are the English definitions of the terms introduced in that sentence.

leono lion

esti be

as ending of the present tense in verbs

besto beast

Some of the designs of this course may or may not be suitable for your needs. For one thing, the ekzerzaro does not aim to have a very complete vocabulary because it is assumed that you will check the dictionary for other words you used. That means that the exercises do not teach you the word for "cat" even though they teach the word for lion very quickly.

Some sections are paragraphs to read. My favorite thing about this exercise book is that it contains a short story about a fairy interspersed throughout it. Section 27 is a discussion of Esperanto grammar written in Esperanto, which will probably have to be completely rewritten for your language.

You'll have to make adaptations depending on your language and culture. If you use these exercises to teach contemporary American English, you'll have to adapt to the ways the world has changed in the last century. For example, early on, there is is a sentence about hitting a student, and I am thankful that that is not a typical part of my country's culture anymore.

Title: Is there an open-source set of topics and vocabulary for making a language tutorial?

Body:
Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and grammar by topic. Instead of stealing from Berlitz or Duolingo, I'd like to steal from people who give me permission to do so.

An example of what I have in mind, I'd like a set of topics and vocabulary like the following:

Lesson 1: Greetings

Hello

How are you?

Fine.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

Lesson 2: Classroom objects

pencil

notebook

textbook

paper

Lesson 3: Simple sentences

I

You

a

have

I have a pencil.

You have a textbook.

Of course, given a standard template, I'm willing to adjust according to the needs of my grammar, but a starting point could help a lot.


答:
In russian:

The sun is shining — Солнц-е свет-ит. (Sun lights)

It is raining — Ид-ет дождь-ø. ("Goes rain"≈"The rain is going"