问:
Designing a mildly weird phonology
I want to design a mildly weird phonology with the following features

Not particularly difficult to pronounce for speakers of average European languages

Feeling somewhat unnatural or weird

The weirdness should be noticeable (like the OSV word order in Klingon is). It may include statistical effects (some phones are used more frequent than others thereby producing the effect of weirdness).

What techniques can I use to achieve this effect?

答:
You should start with consonants, I don't think you can make a vowel inventory as weird as a consonant inventory (maybe complex tones? creaky voice?). After that, it depends on your opinion of "particularly difficult" and "unnatural and weird".

 - Click consonants can be easy enough if you don't overdo it (more like Bantu languages/Damin and less like Khoisan languages, so only the simple ones).

 - Retroflex consonants are also not very European and sufficiently easy to pronounce, but maybe not noticeably weird.

 - Ejectives and implosives are similar, but much more noticeable.

 - Linguolabials sound and look weird (especially the trill) and are very easy to produce. Same goes for bilabial trill.

 - Prenasalization, unclosed plosives and similar modifications are non-European (I don't know much about their ease of pronunciation).

 - You could go with something like Kaybop and have manual percussives (Kaybop has clap [bimanual percussive] and facepalm [faciomanual percussive]), which is very unnatural (maybe a bidigital percussive?). These are weird no matter what you say. Also from Kaybop: Phonemic hats.

Klingon frequently uses velar and uvular voiceless sounds, which gives it its typical Klingonyness. You can also remove areas of the IPA (note that it is unadviced to just remove certain sounds), where you can choose randomly from removing all voiced, voiceless, labials, alveolars, velars, plosives, fricatives and so on, or make phonemes from any area noticeably more frequent.

Then there are phonotactics. Many European languages have consonant clusters, so a syllable structure like CV or CVC has an exotic feeling (just look at Austronesian languages like Hawai'i). Ithkuil on the other side is weird because it has so many consonants (and vowels) and very complex clusters.

This concludes my advices, but there are probably many more things fitting your description.

Title: Designing a mildly weird phonology


问:
21st century International Auxiliary Languages
What are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) created and promoted in the 21st century?

I am aware that many people think that Esperanto and Interlingua are in some sense "the last word" on International Auxiliary Languages and that other projects have no realistic chance in succeeding against the established ones. This does not prevent authors to invent new conlangs purposed as IALs, and I like to hear of recent projects fulfilling this criterion.

I am only interested in projects that are worked out to a certain degree, including a grammar, a sketch of derivational morphology, a substantial word list, and some sample texts. Mere conlang stubs don't qualify as answers.

The target group should be really international, conlangs designed for specific subgroups (like interslavic or intergermanic languages) don't count.

答: Lojban is an example. It hasn't been created in the 21st century, but it still has a very active community, and its grammar is specified thoroughly. Of course, it has weaknesses for IALs like a distinction between labial and rhotic consonant and a five-vowel system, but it is much less eurocentric than Esperanto and Interlingua.</p>

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


答:
The only legitimate examples from the Wikipedia article International auxiliary language are Nerrière's Globish (2004) and  Interslavic (2006). Both of these fail OP's criteria, since they are specific to one language branch. Other instances either predate 2000 (Kotava, Lingua Franca Nova), or were not intended as auxlangs (Lojban) or both (Toki Pona). To these, Wikipedia's list of constructed auxiliary languages adds Sambahasa (2007) and Lingwa de planeta (2010), both of which pass OP's criteria.

Ironically, the Interslavic wikipedia page says that "the language" dates from 1665—but what that actually means is the first Slavic-based auxlang, rather than Interslavic (initially Slovianski-N), which was created by Jan van Steenbergen in 2006.

(The Wikipedia page is also confusing in that it discusses the multiple variants of Slovianski and preceding and subsequent efforts together, rather than highlighting the lineage of the language now labelled Interslavic. But since work is ongoing to unify all those variants, that confusion is not surprising.)

Title: 21st century International Auxiliary Languages

Body:
What are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) created and promoted in the 21st century?

I am aware that many people think that Esperanto and Interlingua are in some sense "the last word" on International Auxiliary Languages and that other projects have no realistic chance in succeeding against the established ones. This does not prevent authors to invent new conlangs purposed as IALs, and I like to hear of recent projects fulfilling this criterion.

I am only interested in projects that are worked out to a certain degree, including a grammar, a sketch of derivational morphology, a substantial word list, and some sample texts. Mere conlang stubs don't qualify as answers.

The target group should be really international, conlangs designed for specific subgroups (like interslavic or intergermanic languages) don't count.


问:
What reasons would there be for not having a human conlang with only vowels?
All natlangs have both consonants and vowels, but it's not immediately obvious why a human language couldn't be made from only vowels.

Has anyone theorised about why natlangs always have consonants?

Have there been any attempts to create conlangs with only vowels, and were they considerably harder to learn than languages with both vowels and consonants?

答:
There are generally a lot fewer vowels than consonants in the phoneme inventory of human languages. That means, with fewer sounds you need to make the words a lot longer if you want to have a decent-sized vocabulary.

Also, vowel pronunciation is more varied. There aren't many different ways to pronounce /t/ or /k/, but any regional dialect will change vowels. Partly because there are no fixed places of articulation: vowels are distinguished by the opening of the jaw and the position of the tongue. Both of these are almost infinitely variable compared to closing your lips and releasing them (as you'd do for a /p/ or a /b/).

And finally, why would you disregard most potential sounds that the human vocal apparatus can produce? It's just not an efficient use of your anatomy. A bit like hopping on one leg instead of walking.

So the two main arguments against a vowel-only language are size of phoneme inventory and variability of vowel pronunciation.


答:
A vowel-only language is surely constructable (and I think, learnable, too), but I am afraid that it will be instable against evolutionary pressure.

Vowel sequences like /aua/ or /aia/ tend to develop into glides /awa/ and /aja/ giving raise to the first consonants in the language, and at the hiat between two vowel a third consonant, the glottal stop, may materialise.

Efficiency of the coding is also a concern, maybe tones can take over the role of consonants in creating more different syllables from the vowels.

Title: What reasons would there be for not having a human conlang with only vowels?

Body:
All natlangs have both consonants and vowels, but it's not immediately obvious why a human language couldn't be made from only vowels.

Has anyone theorised about why natlangs always have consonants?

Have there been any attempts to create conlangs with only vowels, and were they considerably harder to learn than languages with both vowels and consonants?


问:
What is the difference between an Isolating and an Analytic language?
These two terms appear to be used nearly interchangeably to refer to languages with little morphology. However at the same time I sometimes see them contrasted with each other, but cannot identify a pattern. </p>

答:
Isolating languages do not use inflectional morphology, i.e., using affixes or other manipulations of roots to create words--all words are seperate, and none contain multiple morphemes.  Vietnamese is an isolating language.

Here's an example: the word snowman.  It has two morphemes: snow- and -man, and therefore has a morpheme-to-word ratio of 2:1.  Or take Spanish corremos, we run, which has three corr-, -e-, and -mos, for the word, present tense, and person/number.  (Please correct me if I am wrong--I don't know Spanish), so its ratio is 3:1.
In an isolating language, this ratio approaches 1:1--words stand alone and cannot be separated (hence "isolating.")  So, these concepts--"snowman" and "we are running"--would take multiple words to express, as each one would contain only a single morpheme.  Isolating languages have no inflectional morphology and no derivational morphology.

However, analytical languages are a broader category; they have a low morpheme-to-word ratio as well, but--and here's the big but--they can have a derivational morphology.  This means that while "we are running" would still be multiple single-morpheme words like in an isolating language, the word "snowman" could be a two-morpheme word.

Thus, isolating languages are actually a subset of analytic languages.  Analytic languages cover languages with no inflectional morphology and a low morpheme-to-word ratio, while isolating languages have all that and no derivational morphology.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
What are the places where I can attach an indication of tense in relation to a conjugated verb action?

Info

My conlang uses verb conjugations only in the present tense. To indicate other tenses (preterite/past imperfect/subjunctive/future/etc) I use the combined phrase "sona," meaning "in (the) time (of)" and then adding a various suffix to indicate the specific tense("sonasato"="in time past"). This means I only have the present tense of conjugations per verb, not changing the actions of the subject per tense. (In English, you have "I eat" (present) and "I ate" (past), as one example. In my conlang, you use "In the time of past, I eat." (Past, but using a present conjugation.) What I'm wondering about are the places where I should put this simple tense indicator in a sentence. The conlang's sentence structure is like this (using an example from English as translation):
English:

The dog drank from a bowl of water.

The dog(determiner+noun)-> drinks (conjugated verb, "it drinks") from (preposition) a bowl (determiner+noun) of (preposition) water (noun).

In my conlang, you would say

Sepyew ("(it) drinks", conjugated form of "to drink" in present tense) eu bítõe (the dog) de è roum (from a bowl, this would be contracted into "dè roum" or "dèroum.") de aqua (of water.)

This, however, was the present tense. The past tense (The dog drank from a bowl of water) involves the "sonasato"(in the past tense)  in some form, but I don't know where the most logical place to place it would be. Ordinarily, that wouldn't present a problem.

Unfortunately, my conlang has no punctuation, that is to say, sentences are one long string of words. I've not considered how to handle this with dialogue, but otherwise it hasn't presented a problem until now.  Pauses for breath within conversation are natural, but I'm addressing this question from the written aspect of language. Because the sentences are fluid, I don't know how to handle the abrupt changes between tenses other than using the "sona" variants excessively. And the rules of the language mean that the tense is always expressed, per statement (not sentence, because of the punctuation) by either ignoring the sona rule (indicating the present tense) or by using it (to indicate some other tense.)

Question

Keeping that in mind, what would be the most logical place to place the tense indicator so that I can change it relatively easily between tenses in a language with no periods or commas (pauses), and where?

答:
Since it’s your conlang, you can put it wherever you think is best—but my inclination would be immediately adjacent to the verb it applies to. Your sentence structure seems to be VSO, so my initial inclination is to place it immediately after the verb.

For your sample sentence, Sepyew sonsato eu bítõe de è roum de aqua.

For the translation of a sentence like "The truck carried the food Joe ate", you would need two tense indicators, one for each verb: "it-carry past-tense the truck [he-eat past-tense Joe the food] sentence-as-object-indicator". If only one verb is in a non-present tense (The truck carries the food Joe ate), you apply the tense indicator to the verb that is in the non-present tense:"it-carry  the truck [he-eat past-tense Joe the food] sentence-as-object-indicator".


答:
The past tense marker you constructed, sonasato, is a rather long element. Applying the rule "short before long" this would indicate that you put it even after the objects, like

Sepyew eu bítõe dèroum de aqua sonasato

In this example it becomes the last element in the sentence.

Title: What are the places where I can attach an indication of tense in relation to a conjugated verb action?

Body:
Info

My conlang uses verb conjugations only in the present tense. To indicate other tenses (preterite/past imperfect/subjunctive/future/etc) I use the combined phrase "sona," meaning "in (the) time (of)" and then adding a various suffix to indicate the specific tense("sonasato"="in time past"). This means I only have the present tense of conjugations per verb, not changing the actions of the subject per tense. (In English, you have "I eat" (present) and "I ate" (past), as one example. In my conlang, you use "In the time of past, I eat." (Past, but using a present conjugation.) What I'm wondering about are the places where I should put this simple tense indicator in a sentence. The conlang's sentence structure is like this (using an example from English as translation):
English:

The dog drank from a bowl of water.

The dog(determiner+noun)-> drinks (conjugated verb, "it drinks") from (preposition) a bowl (determiner+noun) of (preposition) water (noun).

In my conlang, you would say

Sepyew ("(it) drinks", conjugated form of "to drink" in present tense) eu bítõe (the dog) de è roum (from a bowl, this would be contracted into "dè roum" or "dèroum.") de aqua (of water.)

This, however, was the present tense. The past tense (The dog drank from a bowl of water) involves the "sonasato"(in the past tense)  in some form, but I don't know where the most logical place to place it would be. Ordinarily, that wouldn't present a problem.

Unfortunately, my conlang has no punctuation, that is to say, sentences are one long string of words. I've not considered how to handle this with dialogue, but otherwise it hasn't presented a problem until now.  Pauses for breath within conversation are natural, but I'm addressing this question from the written aspect of language. Because the sentences are fluid, I don't know how to handle the abrupt changes between tenses other than using the "sona" variants excessively. And the rules of the language mean that the tense is always expressed, per statement (not sentence, because of the punctuation) by either ignoring the sona rule (indicating the present tense) or by using it (to indicate some other tense.)

Question

Keeping that in mind, what would be the most logical place to place the tense indicator so that I can change it relatively easily between tenses in a language with no periods or commas (pauses), and where?


答:
The most prominent positions in a sentence are the beginning and end, and so those positions are frequently used to indicate the information structure of a sentence. A word carrying grammatical markers is not very prominent, but there is actually a common position for unprominent words: second position, or Wackernagel's position, named after the linguist who identified the pattern.

In many languages, both with free word order and those with tighter syntaxes, the second position of a sentence is where grammatically important but non-emphasised words are found. Second position usually refers to it coming after a complete constituent (so it could be a word or a phrase), but in some languages it may mean it comes literally after the first word, even if that would split up a phrase.


问:
Examples of the combination of 2 independent symbolic scripts
I am looking for examples real or con, of two foreign symbolic scripts being made into a hybrid language/script.

In my case I wish to see about making a hybrid 15th century Aztec-Chinese Hybrid language. (I know its not realistic)

I was thinking that the influence of a Chinese Empire in exile in the Americas would influence Aztec to take on the simplification of their character to be more based on simple strokes like chinese.

I.e. Chinese began as pictographs that evolved into today's simple stroke based script, Would Aztecs combine Chinese symbols with their own, adapt theirs to be more chinese?

I doubt the influence of Aztecs would inspire Chinese to have more complicated and colorized pictographs

答:
Let's look at some real world situations of contact of writing systems

It happens that a few characters from another writing system are borrowed into an existing writing system. Examples include

Latin borrowing the letter Y and Z from Greek

Koptic: Basically a Greek alphabet with 6 character borrowed from Demotic Egyptian

Icelandic: Borrowing þ from Germanic runes

Sometimes, a writing system is just restyled after a foreign writing system, an example is the reformation of the Cyrillic script by Peter the Great.

Sometimes, several writing systems coexist and form a complex mixed writing system. This is the case in South Korea and Japan, where Chinese characters are mixed with either Hangul or Hiragana and Katakana.

You can pick from this list what you like most.


答: Probably the best technique is making the language weird by absence. Instead of giving the language weird phonemes, make it lack the most common phonemes. A language with 5 vowels but no /a/, /i/ or /u/. A language with several consonants, but no /p/, /t/, or /k/. Or totally without bilabials. Or with no stops.</p>

Title: Designing a mildly weird phonology

Body:
I want to design a mildly weird phonology with the following features

Not particularly difficult to pronounce for speakers of average European languages

Feeling somewhat unnatural or weird

The weirdness should be noticeable (like the OSV word order in Klingon is). It may include statistical effects (some phones are used more frequent than others thereby producing the effect of weirdness).

What techniques can I use to achieve this effect?


答:
Well, there is always Solresol, which has several isomorphic representations, and some of those could be considered vowel-only (depending on the instrument used).

For natlangs, there are whistled languages, with a very reduced consonant inventory. They could fit your criteria especially if you consider tones to be a feature of vowels, and look at the phonetic level - consonants are realized mostly by glides and occlusion (phonemically, consonants are copied from the spoken language & reduced).


问:
Which features make a language easier to learn?
Which features make a language easier to learn for children learning a constructed language as L1? Are children learning a language with these features able to learn the language faster than a natural, irregular language without some of these features?</p>

答:
Human beings first develop with a sense of Self and not being able to distinguish between "Self" and "The World". Things are seen as "Images" and "Objects", only later are abstract ideas understood. Human languages started off as SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) but later changed to different word orders.

With that being said, these features would make it easier to learn languages.

Common Phonemes (/m/, /k/, /i/, /a/, /j/, /p/, /u/, /w/)

No Consonant Clusters ( mk, mp, kp, pk)

Noun based (let verbs and adjectives derived from nouns)

Let any complex words have it's root from the simple (For Example:  "Hospital" could be "Health-House" or "Healing Place").

Just like human beings start of learning simple things, then complex, let all "big" words be form from compounds of smaller ones.

Remember language Universals. Frontal vowels (/i/) are usually used in words that represent smallness, sharpness, brightness, closeness, and hapiness. The sound /i/ uses the same muscles as when a human being smiles.

Back vowels (/u/) are usually used in words that represent bigness, depth, roundness, smoothness, darkness, dirtiness, far-distance, and gloominess.

Toki Pona has some of the features of what an easy language would look like. Good luck to inventing an easy/minimalist language. Cheers!


问:
Conlang where the initial consonants of words have meaning?
A lot of languages, both natural and constructed, mark things like part of speech, gender/noun class, tense, and what not with suffixes. But what about prefixes?

I think that would make more sense for a head-first language. But the issue with just adding vowels to the beginning of all words makes things look repetitive, and also adds an additional syllable.

An alternative would be to have the initial consonant instead be a prefix. Though this would mean that every root in the language would have to start with a vowel (unless the language was very liberal with initial consonant clusters).

I don't know of any language that does this. Its common for languages to have the rhyme of a word mean something, but I've never heard of the onset of the word meaning anything.

And yes, I'm aware of the 'consonant mutations' of the Celtic languages, but those are triggered by agreement. They can't indicate anything on their own, as far as I know.

I'm not saying that all conlangs have to be like natlangs, but in my experience, there's some things that languages do where there's a very good practical reason why they do them. If you come up with something that no natlang does, there may be a good reason for that. Humans for example seem to favor placing the subject of the sentence at the beginning. If you say try to place the verb first, you end up with a lot of weird problems. Of course, there are verb-initial languages, but they're rare and tend to feature very exotic grammars (Tagalog comes to mind).

答:
In the conlang "Ro", each letter represents a specific thing. The first letter is a clue to the meaning of the rest of the word.

For example,

gebrac means an inch, and the first syllable "ge" means measurement.

radac means boy, and the first syllable "ra" means person.

The initial consonant can therefore change the meaning since each letter has a meaning.

rebec means think,
ribec means remember, but
zibec means repeat.


问:
International Auxiliary Language created by a Japanese person
I remember some facts about an international auxiliary language (IAL) created by a Japanese person, but unfortunately I both forgot the name of the inventor and the name of the IAL. Can someone help me out?

Features that I can remember:

Created by a Japanese around the turn of 19th to the 20th century

Based on European languages (mostly latinate vocabulary)

Having a schematic and simplified inflection

When the author became aware of Esperanto he dumped his own IAL project and became one of the first Japanese Esperantists

I want to know the name of the author and (if available) the name of the language. Additional information is always welcome!

答: The only auxlang I've heard of being made by a Japanese person is Noxilo, but that's a modern invention. To my knowledge, the original creator is still alive. Noxilo is just a word-for-word cipher of Japanese btw. Even the phoneme inventory and orthography is clearly Japanese.</p>


问:
What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language?
This question is different than the previous one titled “Which features make a language easier to learn?” in that I'm not interested in making it easy for L1 learners. For them learning the language spoken by their society is an inevitability.

Specifically, I'm interested in making a language that is objectively as easy to learn as possible for people learning it as a second language. And these features should help people regardless of what language they speak natively.

It seems intuitive that there would exist features that would help to create that.

For example, take French or German and remove the genders. This seems like it should make the languages easier to learn without losing any communicative power. Another example would be phonology. If English were to remove the 'th' sound it would be easier for speakers of other languages to learn.

I also realize that it may be the case that there just isn’t enough research on this topic to know definitively what features are best for this.

答:
It depends very much who your target audience is.

It is easier to learn languages that are similar to your own; as a German speaker, learning English is not that hard, apart from the grammatical features (aspect, for example) that don't really have a German equivalent. It's mainly a matter of learning the huge vocabulary with all its not-quite-but-almost synonyms.

Same with Esperanto. Grammar is easy, and most of the vocab is not too hard either. Here it's the particles which are the tricky bit.

I'm currently learning Dutch and Swedish, which are both similar to German, in some respects. No big deal. But both Arabic and Korean are a lot harder, and I gave up on Russian. These languages are very different from German, and thus harder for me to learn (the different alphabet is not the issue).

Klingon is hard for me to learn, because it has a different sentence structure (OVS, as opposed to SVO). If my native language had OVS as well, for example Apalaí or Hixkaryana, I think I would find Klingon much easier. Especially since Apalaí is also agglutinative, like Klingon.

There is a list of languages ordered by difficulty (from the Foreign Service Institute). The 'easy' languages are all Indo-European, and the hard ones are Asian/Semitic. You can imagine that the same list produced by a Chinese or Japanese institution would look very different.

Languages have no 'absolute' difficulty, but only relative. So to answer your question, you can make a language easier to learn for people if you make it more similar to their L1. Which, I guess, is the reason why there is no universal 'easy' language that we all speak...


问:
Slang in Esperanto
Esperanto has a literature (both original and translated) including criminal stories. Criminals are often portrayed as speaking some slang, so my question is:

How does criminal slang looks like in Esperanto?

答:
La sociolekta triopo

Manuel Halvelik created three sociolects for Esperanto, Arcaicam Esperantom (1969), an archaic pre-form of Esperanto, Popido (1973), a constructed dialect of Esperanto, and Gavaro (2006), an argot of Esperanto. Arcaicam Esperantom and Popido are used in the Esperanto literature, but I don't know a work using Gavaro (what is not surprising, looking at the publication date of Gavaro).

An interesting feature of Gavaro are the numerals, they are taken from Volapük and are obscure to Esperanto speakers: 1 bwal, 2 twel, 3 kwil, 4 fwol, 5 lwel, 6 mwel, 7 vwel, 8 zwul, 9 ĵwel, 10 dweg, 100 twum, 1000 mlat.

Title: Slang in Esperanto


答:
I agree with everything Oliver Mason said.

EDIT: After some more thought...for easiness that is only easy when in the presence of a first language, the question has the answer, which is: languages most similar to your first language. Otherwise, an easy language is an easy language.

I'd add that there is something to be said for:

Small languages, which have most content word classes are closed. In English, only function word classes, like prepositions are closed. When people are working from a small known set of words (or morphemes), sometime the lexemes they create are transparent and their meaning can be guessed. This reduces the burden of memorizing 7000-12000 words (or lexemes-- depending on the linguist, word count accounting can vary).

Smallness also applies to grammar- the fewer rules, the easier to learn, albeit at a cost of expressiveness.

Examples would be toki pona and Esperanto before the community began bulk importing of loan words from French, et al.

Creole-like.
Creole languages tend to have certain predictable features that in part are explainable because they were spoken by communities that can't be bothered to learn the complex parts of the six languages in the community. Languages like this are more likely to be SVO, analytic, simplified and smaller, etc.

Title: What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language?

Body:
This question is different than the previous one titled “Which features make a language easier to learn?” in that I'm not interested in making it easy for L1 learners. For them learning the language spoken by their society is an inevitability.

Specifically, I'm interested in making a language that is objectively as easy to learn as possible for people learning it as a second language. And these features should help people regardless of what language they speak natively.

It seems intuitive that there would exist features that would help to create that.

For example, take French or German and remove the genders. This seems like it should make the languages easier to learn without losing any communicative power. Another example would be phonology. If English were to remove the 'th' sound it would be easier for speakers of other languages to learn.

I also realize that it may be the case that there just isn’t enough research on this topic to know definitively what features are best for this.


问:
I'm constructing a language with some rather hard-to-produce symbols. Computer or paper?
My constructed language has 26 English letters and 30 special characters (plus four different accent marks.) The characters are slightly abstract. The closest I've gotten to producing them is with LaTeX/MathJax (Which offers a  wide enough range to produce most of them.) As I go along building vocab/conjugation lists, I've hit a roadblock where I want to write a word down, but it has a symbol in it that I can't reproduce well on whatever sticky note app (or Word!) that I'm using.

Is there any good platform for me to be able to build these lists on, or do I have to do it on paper?

答:
You may want to look into getting Fontlab or Fontographer. You can design your fonts in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator and import them into the font software. From there, create ligatures that can do this.

The good thing about ligatures is that in a search, you can search for the individual letters. For instance, if you use "æ" for "ae" then you search for "ae" and not the ligature.

Sure, there's a learning curve, but it may be better in the long run. Not only will you have your ligatures, but you'll have a font for any texts you create. You can also export to a woff font for web use.


答:
Measuring Easiness

I agree with Oliver that we measure language difficulty based on how hard it is to learn from a given native language. However, I still believe that we can come up with language features that make a language easy to learn in general. To measure this, you would want to take the number of hours it takes to achieve a certain level of proficiency in a target language from 50 source languages (the languages with the most speakers). After this come up with an average by weighting the numbers based on number of speakers. A language with an average of 456 hours would be easier to learn for the average person than a language with an average of 678 hours. This is of course not a method of deriving 'absolute' difficulty but it's good enough for what I want. Now, actually running this experiment would take a lot of time but for now it's good as a thought experiment to figure out what the goal is.

Phonology

Trying to get the sounds right in a new language can be very time consuming. To counteract this an easy language should use phonemes that are common amongst the world's most spoken languages. As Richard noted in the comments the language Toki Pona has a very simple phonology that would be perfect for this. Toki Pona has nine consonants p, t, k, s, m, n, l, j, w and five vowels a, e, i, o, u. Not only are these very common phonemes but there is also the added benefit that there are no voiced/voiceless pairs. The reason this is useful is because it helps people whose language contains only one of the voiced or voiceless forms of a consonant. As an example, Arabic has no 'p' sound and therefore when they see the world 'pala' in a theoretical easy language they might pronounce it as 'bala'. Since there is no 'b' sound people will recognize that they are saying 'pala'.

Vocabulary

Having a vocabulary that everyone would recognize would be useful but it's unfortunately not possible. The best attempts at creating such a vocabulary would only be useful for around 15 percent of the world's population. Add to this the fact that phonology is more important, and using the simplified phonology, you would not even be able to mimic a lot of the vocabulary from a natural language. However, there are still some things that would help make a language's vocabulary easier to learn: avoiding homonyms, making common words short, constructing words to be easy to pronounce (ex. avoiding complex consonant clusters).

Writing System

It has been proven that phonetic writing systems are easier to learn than logographic systems. Between phonetic writing systems (alphabet, abugida, abjad) it's less clear what the easier to learn system is. However, it doesn't really matter due to the overwhelming adoption of the Latin script world wide (70% of the world's population use it). Even in places where the native language does not use the Latin script people will still have significant exposure to it. Because of this an easy to learn language should use the Latin script. The words should also be completely phonetic in their spelling. This allows learners to read, pronounce, and spell any word without having to memorize a bunch of spelling rules and exceptions.

Regularity

This one is self explanatory. A language that has regular grammar and no exceptions to its grammar rules is easier to learn. This should apply to all forms of grammar (inflections, word order, usages). As an example, if English were to always use -ed to make verbs past tense it would be easier to learn (swimmed, eated, falled).

Lack of Unnecessary Features

Just as biological evolution has left human bodies with a large amount of inefficiencies, language evolution has left natural languages with a large amount of inefficiencies. It would take a long time to go through these as there are many, so I'll just use the gender example from the question. As jknappen said in the comments grammatical genders do have a small amount of communicative power in that they can, on occasion, avoid ambiguity of two things. However, this only happens when there are two things potentially being referred to, when it's not clear based on context which thing is being referred to, and when the two things are different genders. Example from Wikipedia: "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain" vs "ein Blumenbeet im Garten, das ich pflege". This is very rare and not useful enough to merit spending a significant amount of time learning genders.


问:
What language uses the most amount of phonemes?
I'm constructing an auxlang/artlang (temporarily named Syn).

The Syn is (being) designed to interface with any known human language, with a wildly uniform set of simplistic, unambiguous symbols.

I have almost finished the phonetic alphabet component and have been trying to transliterate several languages into this while translating some that I know now on the side. However, since I'm not a native speaker of any of the transliterations and google translate is becoming not much of a help, I can't pinpoint the exact phonetic equivalent of some words. Now I'm running out of practice scripts from different spoken languages to accurately transliterate. Hence, I think I'm gonna need another language similar to what I'm making.

Are there any languages, written or spoken, natural or constructed, that occupy majority of the entire phonetic alphabet, with as little diacritics, as few ambiguous strokes, and as strict 1-to-1 symbol-phoneme as possible?

答:
You're gonna have a hard time with "majority of the entire IPA". Non-pulmonic consonants are rare, and some consonants are hard to contrast (e.g. /β/ vs. /v/), while vowels are often highly allophonic. Natural languages tend to have fewer IPA places and distinction via aspiration, labialization, etc.

My best answer to your question would be Ithkuil (constructed, almost unspeakable language). It has 58 phonemes, with unusually many vowels (13). This allows it to have mostly single phonemes for morphemes. Ithkuil's Roman transliteration is a bit strange, as some phonemes use diacritics and others have digraphs, but it also has its own script (morpho-phonemic with alphabetic characters).


问:
What are the reasons behind ROILA's phonology?
ROILA (RObot Interaction LAnguage), a constructed language for communication between robots and between robots and humans, comes with a 5 vowel system. the vowels are written a e i o u but their sound are not according to cardinal vowels (which one would expect from natural languages) but:

```<code>a   æ   AE  fast
e   ɛ   EH  red
i   ɪ   IH  big
o   ɔ   AO  frost
u   ʌ   AH  but
</code>```

(Columns are: spelling, IPA, ARPABET, example word)

What are the reasons behind that choice?

答:
The process of creating the phonology is described at length in Omar Mubin's PhD thesis "ROILA: RObot Interaction LAnguage" (available from the publications page). It seems to have happened in three stages.

He determined which phonemes are most common in a number of natural and artificial languages (pp. 17-19). The most common vowels were /i, u, o, a, e/ (in IPA).

The final set of phonemes he chose included the vowels a, e, i, o and u. He doesn't indicate that the vowels were given in IPA, and indeed he later gives them the IPA values /ae (sic), ɛ, ɪ, ɑ, ʌ/ (pp. 22-23).

AA /ɑ/ was later altered to AO /ɔ/ in order to avoid confusion with AE /æ/ (p. 35-36).

The only explanation I can give for the incongruity between stage 1 and stage 2 is that he (mistakenly?) put the five vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ into his orthography, but changed their phonetic values to the English orthographic "short" vowels, which are /æ, ɛ, ɪ, ɑ, ʌ/ in American English.

The fact that he had to avoid confusion between /æ/ and /ɑ/ (in step 3), but doesn't consider any confusion between /æ/ and /ɛ/ or between /ɔ/ and /ʌ/ seems very English-centric, but which would be very strange from the perspective of Dutch, which doesn't distinguish either pair of phonemes (considering the fact he was doing his research in Holland).

Unsurprisingly, "American English speakers significantly outperformed other speakers in our setup" (p. 34). They also mention problems with Dutch accents and different regional English accents (p. 86 of this document).


问:
Adding entire musical concepts to expand vocabulary
I want my language, Syn, to be as precise, efficient, unambiguous, and aesthetic as humanely possible. To do that, I think even the texture, dynamics, rhythm, and the likes should be accounted for.

As far as I know, only Mandarin incorporates changes in intonation corresponding with a different meaning of the same spoken word, but even that can be hard to notice for non-speakers.

Are there any other languages that incorporte musical concepts?

If there are, how did people manage to use those concepts?

If there are none yet, will such a language possess an added difficulty when speaking it?

I imagine that the native speakers of Syn would be naturally adept in tone recognition, and every conversation would seem like an a capella get-together.

答:
There is a precedent for the use of a musical tone scale in constructed languages: Solresol, a philosophical language constructed in the 19th century. Some natural languages also have a whistled mode, most notably El Silbo and Pirahã.

I am not aware of a language—neither natural nor constructed—that incorporates the concept of rhythm or other musical concepts.


问:
How to conjugate "fhtagn" in R'lyehian?
The accepted translation of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu fhtagn" seems to be "Cthulhu dreams".

How would one conjugate "fhtagn" to get the word derivations "dream", "dreamer", "dreaming".

This answer had a helpful link for translations, but not much in the way of deriving conjugates.

答: Lovecraft probably didn't think about grammar, and we certainly don't have enough material to reconstruct one. Could also be like Sindarin, where Tolkien wrote much, but never released any specification of the language. Quote from the threat you linked: "To my knowledge, we only have the transcription in the Latin alphabet" (comment from Sparksbet).</p>

Title: How to conjugate "fhtagn" in R'lyehian?


问:
What are some real world data on the numbers of speakers of constructed languages?
What are some real world data (e.g., from census data, membership data, visitors of conlang related events, other estimates) on active speakers of constructed languages?</p>

答:
There is some basic data at Ethnologue for Esperanto.

The Font of All Knowledge lists some statistics for other invented languages (Hungarian & Russian census data).

Not much, but a (small) start.


答:
The Yllurian Spell Singing Language  incorporates as part of its magical effect the use of ordinary lexicon & grammar with musical pitch & rhythm.

As a ritual language, for any given spell to be effective, not only must the text be written and sung, but the tones & rhythms must be notated as well. The text may be sung or the notes may be played upon a flute constructed to conform to the particular mode of the music.

You can read a little about the Spell Singing Language here.

Title: Adding entire musical concepts to expand vocabulary

Body:
I want my language, Syn, to be as precise, efficient, unambiguous, and aesthetic as humanely possible. To do that, I think even the texture, dynamics, rhythm, and the likes should be accounted for.

As far as I know, only Mandarin incorporates changes in intonation corresponding with a different meaning of the same spoken word, but even that can be hard to notice for non-speakers.

Are there any other languages that incorporte musical concepts?

If there are, how did people manage to use those concepts?

If there are none yet, will such a language possess an added difficulty when speaking it?

I imagine that the native speakers of Syn would be naturally adept in tone recognition, and every conversation would seem like an a capella get-together.


问:
In what ways are grammatical genders useful?
In a previous question about making a language easy to learn as a second language I suggested that grammatical genders have very little usefulness. A couple of people, however, suggested that grammatical genders have more usefulness than I think. Because of this I am interested in hearing about any potential uses for grammatical genders.

Usefulness can be identified by looking at what happens when the grammatical gender is removed. If the speaker needs to communicate the lost information through other means then the grammatical gender is deemed useful.

答:
The generic term for genders is "word classes". In some languages male/female isn't the main way to divide up the world.

Word classes are useful for co-ordination. If a language lacks gender, (or animacy, what have you), then you need some other way to know what adjective goes with what noun, which antecedent a pronoun refers to and so on. A language with lousy coordination might be English, with things like "He saw him hit him with it."

They make languages hard for language learners because the semantic relationship between the word classes overtime becomes increasingly arbitrary and creates a lexical burden for language learners, i.e. you just have to memorize the word class for each word. Also, gender marker is obligatory, so you have a high entry cost-- you can't say anything until you work out the genders of the relevant words.


答:
For any particular language maybe 1-2 to dozens. The best way to find out would be to collect as many writing samples as possible that have been posted to the internet. Pick some arbitrary cut off for what counts as "speaking" the language for length. When I did this for toki pona, there were maybe a few hundred people who could write at least a few paragraphs.

Na'vi and Klingon probably have at least a handful to few dozen each. I don't know of any corpus gathering projects for those languages.

The number of people who have purchases learning materials, such as the Klingon dictionary, is thousands of times higher than the number of people who invested the time to learn the language. I look forward so seeing more stats out of Duolingo for the Game of Thrones Languages and Klingon.

As for the acid test of fluency- natives who learned the language from their parents, maybe one or two. (Excluding Esperanto natives- there are a lot of those)

Title: What are some real world data on the numbers of speakers of constructed languages?

Body: What are some real world data (e.g., from census data, membership data, visitors of conlang related events, other estimates) on active speakers of constructed languages?</p>


答:
Grammatical gender, along with noun classes, are often used in word derivation. Of course, the more categories you have, the more productive this can be.

They also allow a larger number of 3rd person pronouns, allowing for multiple 3rd persons (or objects) to be referred to simply with pronouns without as much confusion arising as to which pronoun refers to who. Though this is more useful in systems where everything has gender. In English for example, this is only useful in about 20% of cases, because only people can be referred to as he and she (everything else just gets 'it', except for maybe pets). In French however, where every noun is referred to as either he or she, this helps out about 80% of the time.

And as people have mentioned, gender agreement can help tie nouns and adjectives together, allowing you to put them in any order. Though any form or noun-adjective agreement can accomplish this. Case agreement, for instance, is much more effective at this.

Title: In what ways are grammatical genders useful?

Body:
In a previous question about making a language easy to learn as a second language I suggested that grammatical genders have very little usefulness. A couple of people, however, suggested that grammatical genders have more usefulness than I think. Because of this I am interested in hearing about any potential uses for grammatical genders.

Usefulness can be identified by looking at what happens when the grammatical gender is removed. If the speaker needs to communicate the lost information through other means then the grammatical gender is deemed useful.


问:
Is there any easy way to find out how multiple unrelated languages express the same concept?
As any linguist (and anyone who knows unrelated languages, probably), not all languages express things the same way. Worse yet, its not possible to express everything logically, so all languages are forced to rely on something arbitrary to express certain concepts.

I try to find out how other languages do things, but I rarely meet with any success. Most dictionaries I find online assume you already know the language, which of course makes sample sentences useless.

It seems like the only way to find out how a language does anything is to know it. This means that as a conlanger, its nigh impossible to make a conlang that doesn't in some way resemble the languages you know. This can obviously be quite a problem if you're monolingual, as most Americans are. I'm not monolingual, but even I have a problem avoiding Euro-centrism since the only other language I know well is German. Yeah, German does some things differently, but its not that different from English since the two are closely related. They tend to overlap more often than not.

Is there any convenient way to get information on specific things in languages without just having to learn half a dozen unrelated languages?

答:
Unfortunately not.

There are a few concepts (like colour terms or kinship terms) that are regularly studied in linguistic typology and where one can find a lot of publications including high-level overviews including a lot of unrelated languages.

For the most concepts, there is nothing comparable available. Maybe one can find studies (e.g., from translatology) comparing a certain concept in a pair of languages or a small group of languages, but those languages tend to be the well-known big ones (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese).


问:
Is there a practical lower limit to the number of morphemes required in a language?
Many conlangers have tried (and occasionally succeeded in) creating oligomorphemic¹ languages. What are the most minimalistic successful attempts?
From this, can we extrapolate a lower bound?

¹also called oligosynthetic, a bit of a misnomer in my opinion

答:
Outside of Toki Pona, there haven't been any "majorly" successful attempts at making an oligomorphemic language — as far as I know. While derivational and inflectional morphology could be done away with (and its information load transferred to syntax I guess), the question is how many semantic morphemes is too few before a language becomes incomprehensibly vague.

I'm guessing the theoretical lowest lower limit is the set of 63 semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see also Goddard's Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 2010). Wierzbicka and Goddard propose that you could theoretically explain almost all necessary concepts by building up from this set of primes, and lacking ways to express some of them will leave you incapable of expressing at least a subset of all possible topics.


问:
What is an overview of sound changes?
One of my works-in-progress is a language called Proto-Oreadin.  As the name suggests, it is a proto-language, which eventually I am hoping to expand into a family of languages.  Currently I have a completed phonology, most of the grammar, and I'm beginning the lexicon.  My plan to create these daughter languages is by using the zompist.com sound change applier app to evolve the words of my language into multiple daughter languages, and then apply semantic shifts, borrowings, and other pieces of worldbuilding context—but that's a separate issue.

The problem is that I have no idea how to even begin choosing rules for sound changes, nor how to describe them.  I've looked at examples of natural languages, but I'm not sure what's going on with the notation, nor have I been able to identify any patterns that will help me create realistic sound changes for my languages.

How are sound changes notated?

What are the general categories of sound changes?

答: Stolen from this answer by sumelic on linguistics: There is searchable version of the Index Diachronica that allows to search for some sounds and explore postulated and observed changes of that sound. The notation used is the same as in @Doorknob's answer above.

Title: What is an overview of sound changes?


问:
Grammatical cases occurring only in conlangs
What are examples of grammatical cases that are not attested in natural languages, but occur in some conlang?

To qualify here, the conlang should have at least some bit of flesh (e.g., a few consistent texts, either original or translated). Pure sketches of potential cases aren't interesting to me.

The Respective or Dedative case in Quenya, also called Short Locative, is too speculative to be counted here; its attestation is very weak in the available material from J. R. R. Tolkien.

答: I think the best conlang to look for such cases is Ithkuil. http://ithkuil.net/04_case.html contains a list of all cases. My [short] research suggests that some of them (e.g. navigative for "noun relative to whose vector, arc, or trajectory of motion an event takes place" or allapsive for "amount of time that expected to pass between the contextual present and the time of a future event") aren't attested in any other well-known language. I may be wrong, but it seems plausible regarding Ithkuil's goal of expressing extensive detail.</p>


问:
Why are compound words in Volapuk hard to parse while compound words in Esperanto are not?
Of all the criticisms you see of Volapuk, one the most pervasive is that it can be difficult to parse some of the longer compound words. Which is pretty obvious. With all words being CVCVCVCV... and prefixes being (C)V and suffixes V(C), it stands to reason it could be hard to figure out where the root word is amongst the long list of affixes.

But why doesn't Esperanto have this problem? Is it just because the roots are easy to recognize (if you're already familiar with a western European language)? Or is it that Esperanto has somehow managed to avoid the need to form words with long chains of affixes. If so, why was making long-winded compound words necessary in Volapuk but its hard to find a reason to in Esperanto?

Note that I don't know Volapuk, and I only know the utmost basics of Esperanto. I've never actually used the language at any point in time. But I've seen more examples of affix-heavy words from Volapuk than I have from Esperanto (the only Esperanto example I even know of is 'malsanulejo').

答:
Esperanto phonotactics was never as restrictive as Volapük's. Its prefixes (including prepositional prefixes) are mostly not CV but CCV or VC, and its stems often enough begin or end with consonant clusters. So morphological boundaries are often easy to tell.

Moreover Esperanto initially avoided stem endings for multisyllabic stems that might be ambiguous with suffixes. Hence banquet becomes bankedo, not banketo, for fear of ambiguity with bank-eto "little bank".

Esperanto initially did pursue agglutinativity aggressively, and I'm not sure that it was less enthusiastic about doing so than Volapük. But malsanulejo is indeed exceptional for Esperanto.


问:
Can a conlang be used for machine-machine communication?
On Wikipedia page we can read that constructed language is devised for human or human-like communication. Given the fact, that there are already some constructed language examples for human-computer communication such as Lojban, can constructed language be created by humans for machine-machine communication? Or it won't be a constructed language anymore?

One example could include a Droidspeak code (the fictional language spoken by droids).

答: There is a constructed language, ROILA (RObot Interaction LAnguage) designed for human–robot interaction. I see no conceptual problem in using this language for robot–robot interaction as well and I can imagine the use of such a language instead of electronic impulses as a requirement for some challenges in robotics like football playing teams of robots.</p>


问:
Should Auxlangs have metaphors?
Auxlangs are meant to be easily learnt/understood by the entire populace of the world, no matter their native language. So, they are constructed to be unambiguous and it's reference should have a one-to-one mapping to worldly objects/concepts.

Doesn't having metaphors undermine the whole point of Auxlangs? I mean a metaphoric phrase can have different meaning in different contexts, which leads to ambiguity.

答:
Metaphors are based on shared cultural understanding. Here is one often quoted example of a metaphor from Shakespeare's As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
  And all the men and women merely players;
  They have their exits and their entrances ...

Understanding this metaphor relies on the concept of 'theatre' being shared among the speakers. If you assume the word for 'stage' exists in your language, then that might indicate that this would be the case. So it depends on the reach of your language. In most cultures that regard themselves as 'civilised' you would probably find that something like theatre and plays exists, so this particular metaphor should be fine.

However, some metaphors can be so specific that even native speakers cannot understand them: He kicked the issue into touch. Unless you know about rugby, you are likely to not have a clue what the speaker is on about.

As you cannot really regulate the content of your language, but only vocabulary and syntax, you cannot stop speakers from using metaphors. It is the responsibility of the speaker to make sure they are understood by their target audience, so avoiding metaphors or culture-specific expressions/assumptions is generally a good idea, but it has to come from the speaker, not the designer. And the speaker will probably realise that very quickly when they fail to make themselves understood.

A conlang/auxlang is only a tool -- you cannot control how people use it.

Title: Should Auxlangs have metaphors?


答:
Theoretically you can eliminate metaphor, yes, but you are working against human nature itself.

Certain metaphors are exceedingly common and embedded in the very grammar of many languages (although their exact expression may vary), so in that regard, avoiding metaphor is extremely difficult because it's somewhat an inherent part of the human psyche. Either you will subconsciously integrate some of it, or your users will inevitably create some. Grammaticalization typically originates directly in widespread metaphor.

Your etymologies and extended meanings (because even in an auxlang, creating a root for every meaning is downright exhausting: there's a reason most auxlangs borrow at least part of their vocabulary!) are usually going to be metaphorical in some ways, whether from real languages or from otehr roots. Indeed, "metaphor" is an example: etymologically, the meaning is "carry over, transfer".

Examples

Up is good, down is bad, quality is possession (hence the use of "have" for qualities and actions), individuals are samples ("a human has two eyes" is metaphor: you don't mean a specific human!).

Time is a major source of metaphor in this regard. Time usually moves from back to front. Movement is the key word: verbs of movements are extremely common expressors of time relations!

The body is space: using body parts to generate locatives is also a very common feature cross-linguistically, found in languages as distinct as Hebrew, Nahuatl and Swahili. The fact that virtually all languages in the world use body-relative directional (in front of, behind)... except for the aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr, well known for using only absolute directions.

Fabrication is causation: the use of verbs meaning "make, create, fabricate" as causative auxiliary is a common metaphoric transfer of the idea of creating an object to "creating" an action in something else.

Title: Should Auxlangs have metaphors?

Body:
Auxlangs are meant to be easily learnt/understood by the entire populace of the world, no matter their native language. So, they are constructed to be unambiguous and it's reference should have a one-to-one mapping to worldly objects/concepts.

Doesn't having metaphors undermine the whole point of Auxlangs? I mean a metaphoric phrase can have different meaning in different contexts, which leads to ambiguity.


问:
How developed is the Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time series?
Robert Jordan's fantasy novel series The Wheel of Time includes a lot of short quotes in the Old Tongue, a fictional ancient language from a previous Age. Translations are provided for these, either in the text itself or in the glossary at the back of each book, but we never see more than a few sentences at a time.

How much was this language actually developed by Jordan?

Did he create an entire fictional language, as Tolkien did for his Middle-Earth books? Or did he just create some plausible-sounding fictional words and put them together to form the quotes he needed? Would it be possible, either from the text of the books themselves or from his unpublished notes, to actually learn the language properly to any extent?

答:
From here on Theoryland:

Is there a complete language of the Old Tongue, and if so how long did it take you to develop it?

ROBERT JORDAN
  There are basic 880 some words—maybe 900. I got a list of what is considered basic English—which are the 800 odd words of a basic English vocabulary. Removed the words that were of no use in the context of my world. Came up with words in the Old Tongue in each of those English words and then added those words that did have a specific context in my world.

Elsewhere on that page is an interview where he said this:

What language is the Old Tongue based on? Gaelic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and some additions of my own—bridging material, if you will. Grammar and syntax are a blending of English, German and Chinese, with some influences from a set of African languages, read about long ago and all but the oddities of structure long since forgotten. There are inverted constructions, for example (as in Mordero dagain pas duente cuebiyar!—literally, "Death fear none holds my heart!") and places where the article is omitted, especially where the word is a title or has gained enough importance to now incorporate the article; the absence of article indicates that it is the important or special meaning of the word that is intended. Though even then, it is not a hard and fast rule; the same inconsistencies of English are incorporated here. I am attempting to create a language which has grown, not one which was made.

It seems to be a complete enough language in terms of grammar and authentic enough for Jordan to use, though lacking in vocabulary.  From these quotes I get the feeling that he created the language well enough at one point that he didn't have to spend hours conlanging to be able to put a few sentences into his novels.

In the Wheel of Time Companion there was an English-Old Tongue dictionary, which is uploaded on Tor.com here.  At the beginning on the website (not sure if this is also in the book as I don't have it on me) this is written:

While it is reminiscent of Tolkien’s ground-up creation of Elvish languages for The Lord of the Rings, The Old Tongue differs in that Jordan took a top-down approach, creating a dictionary of terms from which some basic suffixes, roots, and usage rules emerged.

I didn't bother scrolling all the way down or counting the words, but it doesn't seem to have much grammar aside from the suffixes and stuff.  Although we don't have access to this, Jordan seems to be implying that the grammar does exist.  All I could find was this on the Tar Valon library.


答: If an auxlang did not have metaphors, it would soon acquire them if the auxlang in question were used as the world's second language. I doubt that there exists any community of sapient life forms that could not make comparisons between things, beings, and forces that happen to be dissimilar. </p>

Title: Should Auxlangs have metaphors?


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

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

答:
I tried to find conlangs based on such sounds but could not find any. However, the closest human phonemes to such sounds are clicks and many conlangs use them. I don't know any well-known conlangs that use clicks, but HyPry and Gdili were two that I could find.

You could try making one yourself, but given that Beatbox sounds are fairly limited and sometimes hard to distinguish, I doubt you would be able to make an effective language from it without adding in typical consonants and vowels.


问:
Organizing a lexicon in a logographic writing system
A little background before my question: I am an amateur in mid-development of a logographic writing system, not necessarily a whole language with phonetics. As I develop, I don't so much care about grammar, at least not yet. The language is heavily context-based, it requires you to have foreknowledge of the concepts it conveys, and ideas portrayed in the writing system are to be implied by the reader. It's memory-intensive, so you can't quite analyze it like, say, English, and determine its meaning through some roots or affixes.
In a nutshell, virtually no grammar. No specific way to order your ideas, just implied context.

Ideas are distinguished by category: nouns, verbs, adjectives. (That should be used as a dominant identifier for the question yet to be asked)

Okay, that'll probably do it for background. My question is this: Is there an advantageous method to sort and organize characters of a logographic system, specifically for dictionary look-up? (Given the properties I mentioned above.)

My current method is just sorting by the kinds of ideas. Ex.: In the verb category, I may sort verbs whether they describe positional things, e.g., to be underneath, or motional things, e.g., to run, etc. For nouns, a similar system may be employed (haven't reached this point yet), as well as for adjectives.

However, I imagine that such an approach would/could create confusion. (Is an ice cream cake a cake or an ice cream? Why?)

Certainly, there must be other options I'm not seeing. This question, for example, seems to brush the idea just a smidgen, but it is centered largely on computer programs for organization. For this, I should specify that I am working entirely on-paper. Computerization is not an option quite yet. I am strictly searching for methods for organizing a kind of lexicon, entries similar to those arrayed in an English dictionary.

答:
Having a dictionary ordered by theme or idea is a good thing and it can carry you a long way in the design of your writing system.

For a more systematic approach, you need a way to order your logograms. Chinese sorting may be an inspiration for you. They identify a "radical" in each character, and than order by radical + number and order of additional strokes. The approach has the advantage that simpler characters (with fewer strokes, and probably more frequent usage) come before more complex ones.


问:
What's the purpose of vowels and consonants?
Other than making words easier to pronounce, is there any purpose to having the letters divided like this? Should they or a similar concept be added to a constructed language?</p>

答:
This is somewhat similar to "what's the purpose of odd and even numbers".

Looking at the sounds produced in human languages we can distinguish two different ways of articulation, one where sound waves are produced by the glottis, modulated in the vocal tract through opening of the jaw (open/closed) and position of the tongue (front/back), but otherwise pass through unrestricted.

The other type of sound does not depend on the glottis (whose action is optional), and an airflow is generated coming from the lungs, passing through the vocal tract; but this time, there are constrictions at various places of articulation, which modulate the frequency spectrum of the resulting sounds to produce significant differences. Depending on whether the glottis is active, these sounds can be classified as voiced or unvoiced.

The former are called vowels: they are always voiced, and are defined through the positions of jaw and tongue. The latter are consonants, and are defined through the place of the constriction (glottal, dental, labial, ...), the nature
of the constriction (fricatives, stops) and whether they are voiced or unvoiced.

As it happens, you kind of need both kinds of sounds in a language to make it pronounceable. Just like you need odd and even numbers to do maths.

You can see this in syllables: a syllable has to have a vowel as its central element, and is surrounded by consonants. You can have different syllable structures: CV, VC, CVC, etc., and depending on language some structures are more common than others. But this is more of an emergent feature than some deliberate decision.


答:
The purpose of vowels and consonants it to make up syllables. We just call the most prominent part of the syllable "vowel" and the the other sounds grouped around that core "consonants". Some sounds can be on both sides: There are languages where the liquids (l, m, n, r) can act as vowels, and some short vowels (i, u) can act as consonants usually named "glides" and given separate IPA symbols /j, w/.

For spoken languages produced the usual way, having vowels and consonants is a natural thing. But there are even natural languages without vowels and consonants: The sign languages around the world don't have an equivalent to this distinction.

Title: What's the purpose of vowels and consonants?

Body: Other than making words easier to pronounce, is there any purpose to having the letters divided like this? Should they or a similar concept be added to a constructed language?</p>


问:
Is there a specific term for a substitution cipher language?
A really simple but effective method to create an unintelligble language from a given language is applying a substitution cipher to the vocabulary. In order to be pronouncable, vowels should be substituted with vowels, and consonants with other consonant of comparable sonority.

It is of course a special case of a relexification, but is there a specific term for this?

答: "code" or "coded language". Probably mostly used in conjunction with sign languages, where the signs replace the (spoken) words (e.g. Signing Exact English as opposed to "natural" signed languages), but also for "encoded" spoken languages (either by relexification or phoneme substitution).</p>


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

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

答:
Basic English is minimal in that it limits the number of words in the language (though not as extremely as Toki Pona). It was intended to be an international auxiliary language (although it never really caught on).

The language was used in 1945 in order to quickly teach Chinese sailors to understand naval orders. This was reported at the time in a Time magazine article (paywall beyond first two paragraphs; the reference to the article comes from Wikipedia).


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

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

答:
The answer is a definite Yes, there are.

The example that comes immediately to my mind is Bliss symbolics (also known as Semantography) by Charles Bliss from 1942–1949. As an additional bonus, it is still used and developped further, and may even be included into Unicode at some date.

EDIT: The term to look for is pasigraphy. There were lots of pasigraphies (Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen, gives the number 60) mainly in the 19th century, but the most successful ones were created in the 20th century. There were both philosophical pasigraphies (often using digits or abstract symbols) and naturalistic ones (starting from pictograms).

Title: Are there any "unspeakable" languages?


问:
What is the word “li” in Toki pona, grammatically?
In Toki pona, words are never inflected, and many words can act as a noun, verb or adjective in different contexts. The word "li" usually separates the subject from a predicate, and “e” goes before the object (in SVO order). With soweli (animal), moku (eat, food) and kili (fruit), one can say:

soweli li moku e kili

The animal eats the fruit.

This is the usage listed in the dictionary section of the official book, Toki Pona: the Language of Good:

li. PARTICLE (between any subject except mi alone or sina alone and its verb; also to introduce a new verb for the same subject)

But there is another usage, as seen in phrase:

soweli li ijo

Animals are things (ijo means thing).

It seems that this usage increases the ambiguity, because

soweli li moku

can mean both ”The animal is eating” (with moku as an intransitive verb), or ”animals are food”.

What role does the li actually have in this phrase?

答:
The syntactical li structure was inspired by Toki Pisin ...

and in an online Tok Pisin grammar I found :

[...] Tok Pisin has its own grammatical rules.

First of all, look at the following sentences:

Mi wok. 'I worked.'
Yu wok.  'You worked.'
Em i wok.  'He/she worked.'
Tom i wok.  'Tom worked.'

Note that the last two sentences have the little word i before the verb. (Remember that in Tok Pisin, i is pronounced something like "ee".) This little word is called a "predicate marker", and it must occur in a sentence when subject is em or a noun (like "Tom" or "the bicycle"). This rule is certainly different from anything found in English.

http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/tokpisin.html

So I presume that 'li' is also a "predicate marker" ...


答:
Take a look at Computer Languages

Programming Languages and any computer language made to be understandable by humans is based on an already existent language (mostly english). Just to make things easy. But computers do not understand human languages, at least not directly. Machines still "communicate" and interpret information, but they do it in a language we don't understand.

Another thing you should consider, is Braille, since it's a writing system, but not a Spoken Language, as you say.

Title: Are there any "unspeakable" languages?

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

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


问:
What is the meaning of ANADEW?
The acronym ANADEW is quite popular among conlang enthusiats, but what does it mean?

For an answer, I'd like to see not only an expansion of the acronym, but also some good usage examples.

答:
ANADEW means "a natlang already did it even worse" or "a natlang already did it, except worse". In essence you thought of a strange feature for your conlang, but there is actually a natlang that has that (or a very similar) feature and did it worse than it is in your conlang.

If, for example, Pythagoras had made a click conlang (which somehow survived one or two millenia) with simple and easy clicks, then the "discovery" of the Khoisan languages with very complex click systems (worse for Europeans) would have made an ANADEW case.

I don't think that's the best possible example, you can find a few more at https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/6yxo6k/anadew_game/ .

Title: What is the meaning of ANADEW?


问:
How many active Klingon speakers are there?
I am well-aware of the fact that some people use Klingon in conversions at special conventions and events.

Is there an estimate about the number of Klingon speakers and how many of them are there?

答:
According to Wikipedia, about 20 or 30 fluent speakers

Another more interesting article, a bit more scholarly, mentions a wide variety of numbers per study.


答:
I have never heard of a "substitution cypher language."

One might adduce Pig Latin or Double Dutch as examples of such a thing, but these are not conlangs.   They are typically called "language games."  A substitution cypher is not a language--it's a way of disguising one or more languages.

To qualify as a conlang, a constructed communication system has to have its own grammar and its own way of mapping meanings onto words.

Title: Is there a specific term for a substitution cipher language?

Body:
A really simple but effective method to create an unintelligble language from a given language is applying a substitution cipher to the vocabulary. In order to be pronouncable, vowels should be substituted with vowels, and consonants with other consonant of comparable sonority.

It is of course a special case of a relexification, but is there a specific term for this?


答:
Most of what are generally considered languages, whether natural or constructed, are in fact two languages, one written and one spoken. We usually learn the two together, and thus learn the mapping between them. These can vary in how obvious they are. At one extreme are languages that use a very standard mapping. It is virtually impossible to be able to read the Roman alphabet - in English or French, say, and to be able to speak Portuguese, but not to be able to read Portuguese, as a friend of mine found out. She had these skills but had never learnt to read Portuguese. Her mum was shocked to find her reading a book in Portuguese and asked where she learnt to do that. She had not learnt - she could just do it.

The next step is English or Gaelic (and not many other languages) where the mapping is so poor that it is possible to be fluent in the spoken language, and not to be able to read the language, even though you can read another language in the same alphabet. 100 years ago there was a famous disaster involving a ship called the Iolaire. Virtually everyone on board, and the bereaved relatives, had Gaelic as a first language, but they could not read Gaelic and so had no idea the ship's name was Gaelic - they pronounced it as an English person would and had no idea what the name meant.

Next come languages like Chinese, which is in fact several spoken languages, with one written language. The symbol 米 means rice. How you pronounce it varies according to whether you speak Mandarin or Cantonese, or even Japanese which sometimes uses Chinese symbols (Kanji). Thus you can learn written Mandarin (you now know one word) with no clue as to how to pronounce it.

We use some logograms in English. Some, such as ☏, are pictographic in origin, and so have no inherent pronunciation - we just translate them to English as we read them. Others, such as &, are alphabetic in origin. This one is a fancy way to write et, which is Latin or French for "and". We ignore this and just pronounce it "and". Of course other people, such as the Germans, will pronounce these symbols differently.

You could always learn a natural or constructed language from a book that had no pronunciation guide, if it was written in Cyrillic, using Chinese characters, or using its own made-up logograms. But of course, you could find out how to pronounce it.

Next, a language could be constructed without a vocal form. I am not aware that this has occurred. The problem here is that there is no way stop someone inventing a vocal form for each symbol. This is a bit like learning Old English or Ancient Greek. We do not know exactly how they were pronounced, and so we use what is basically a modern guess.

The only examples I can think of where there is no vocal form is the sign languages used by deaf communities. They are genuine languages, unlike signed English, and usually have no accepted spoken or written form.

Title: Are there any "unspeakable" languages?


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

答:
Both the Brahmic scripts and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics have a grapheme for "suppress this sign's inherent vowel".

This could get tedious with big clusters; also, if you're starting with a pure syllabary, you have to decide which vowel to suppress!


问:
How can I explain the origin of the dual number in my Slavic-influenced East Nordic conlang?
The language I am creating is derived from East Norse and heavily influenced by Slavic. It has a quite complex grammatical structure - for example, it has not only taken over the two additional cases from Russian but also developed several own ones.

One unique aspect is the dual noun form, which is avaliable for describing things that usually occur in complementary pairs. There are dual-only nouns for things that only occur in the described pairs (such as a romantic couple) and dual forms of ordinary nouns in “natural” couple forms (a pair of shoes, the poles of a magnet, my eyes - not two houses or a couple of road signs). Some features are either identic to either singular and plural. A part of the pronouns - most notably all second-person pronouns - are however unique (somewhat similar to the dialect of Bavarian spoken in Munich).

I am wondering how I can “trace back” such a development. According to my knowledge, (correct me if I am blatantly wrong) neither East Norse nor Old East Slavic had the aforementioned features, and just “inventing it by accident somewhere around 1100” would sound like a too handwaved explanation.

答:
Both Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic had the dual grammatical number. So you could just say that your conlang retained it the whole time. Alternatively you could say that it lost it and then subsequently borrowed it again from one of the Slavic languages which retained it.

If you were after a specific source, Old Church Slavonic could be ideal because it could have a wider influence than other Slavic languages through its religious prestige status. If the religious traditions of the Slavonic Orthodox churches were very highly valued by your conlang's speakers then that would help to explain why the dual number was retained by them even though the other languages of the region had lost it.


答:
I think taking the dual retained in old Indo-European languages is a good idea. However, if your language is settled in Skandinavia, you could attribute it to contact with an Uralic language.

While the dual was lost in some (e.g. Finnish), dual pronouns are present in Sami languages that go pretty far south and have been in that region for a long time. After that, extending the usage of the dual to nouns would be a far easier natural development.

Additionally, that contact could explain the cases your language developed, as Uralic languages all have complex case systems (depends on exactly which cases you have though).

Title: How can I explain the origin of the dual number in my Slavic-influenced East Nordic conlang?

Body:
The language I am creating is derived from East Norse and heavily influenced by Slavic. It has a quite complex grammatical structure - for example, it has not only taken over the two additional cases from Russian but also developed several own ones.

One unique aspect is the dual noun form, which is avaliable for describing things that usually occur in complementary pairs. There are dual-only nouns for things that only occur in the described pairs (such as a romantic couple) and dual forms of ordinary nouns in “natural” couple forms (a pair of shoes, the poles of a magnet, my eyes - not two houses or a couple of road signs). Some features are either identic to either singular and plural. A part of the pronouns - most notably all second-person pronouns - are however unique (somewhat similar to the dialect of Bavarian spoken in Munich).

I am wondering how I can “trace back” such a development. According to my knowledge, (correct me if I am blatantly wrong) neither East Norse nor Old East Slavic had the aforementioned features, and just “inventing it by accident somewhere around 1100” would sound like a too handwaved explanation.


问:
Is there any concept of "isomorphic" constructed languages?
What I'm thinking is: if two conlangs have the same syntactical structure and can be translated by simply exchanging words while maintaining the same (or very similar) structure, is there are specific term for this scenario, and are there any examples for this? I'd imagine Lojban and Loglan would probably fit in this category as Lojban is, after all, a child project of Loglan. Are there any other examples of conlangs designed with identical (or very similar) syntactic features, and is there a name for this relationship?</p>

答:
For a lower-level kind of isomorphism: I have read a story in which an alien speaks a synthetic language, suited to its own vocal tract, into a machine that converts its speech phoneme-for-phoneme into a human language.

It could be a scene in Poul Anderson's A Circus of Hells, or not.


答: I think we could use some terms from physics here. Let's say a relex is isochor (alternative: isomek from Ancient Greek mêkos "length") if it preserves length of words, and isotonic (alternative: isoson/isosonor/isosonic, a Latin-Greek mix) if it preserves sonority patterns. Your substitution cipher would then be an isochor-isotonic relexification.</p>


问:
Is there a middle-written language?

Real languages

I am aware of several types of writing systems.

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

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

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

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

Constructed languages

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

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

Another example:

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

Conclusion

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

答:
Since most text is by its nature sequential, then if you start in tthe middle you will have to go in some direction from there, hence the various suggestions of spirals, top to bottom, boustrophedon, etc. But all of these methods have a direction, even if that direction changes as you go along. Even in normal writing you could start in the middle, just by leaving the first half of the first line blank.

The only way I can see to avoid this directionality is to set off in two directions at once. You could print something along with its mirror image, but in practice you would read one bit or the other. You could divide the information, for example by printing the vowels on the left, right to left, and the consonants on the right, left to right, but this would be hard to read.

But there is one other possibility which might count: how about a parallel text. You could print the Koran (Q'uran) in Arabic on the left, with a line-by line translation in English on the right, or, similarly with the Hebrew Bible. I can't find any on the internet, but there must be one somewhere? Anyone interested in the translation per se would have to look at both sides to see how something was translated.

Title: Is there a middle-written language?


问:
What are sounds that I have to include in my phonology for it to be naturalistic?
Additionally, are there any such things as hierarchies, where if I want to include one sound, I should also include another?</p>

答: In general, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, and /a/ are phonemes found in almost all natlangs (but certainly not all).</p>


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

答:
You can use standard musical notation to describe the tones of your conlang. Level tones are just represented by different notes, and tonal glides can be represented by groups of notes joined with a slur. The notes can also hint the duration of a syllable.

An alternative to that are Tone Letters introduced by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao providing a nice visual cue to tone levels and contour tones.

These means are for the explanation of the tones to the aspiring learner of your conlang, their representation in a writing system is another thing worth a separate question.


问:
Can features in the physical environment meaningfully affect the development of a local language's phonology?
Imagine that I'm creating phonemic inventories for multiple conlangs, each of which is spoken by a people settled within (or roaming about) a very different physical environment from the others. Assuming that these different civilizations developed their languages completely apart from one another and haven't simply drifted apart from one original root language, is there any consensus that certain phonemes work better or worse in different environments?

For instance, do certain phonemes perform better or worse:

over choppy waters being sailed by a seafaring people?

through a jungle or heavily wooded area populated by a tree-dwelling people?

in a mountainous area frequently traversed by various groups settling near or even on the mountains?

carrying over a vast inland plain or a placid lake?

cutting through the ambient noise of a swamp or jungle (or even a city)?

These are just examples. I'm not specifically asking about any of those scenarios. I just want to make sure that any language I create would be as plausible as possible, down to the very last detail I can think of. Any reliable resources on the subject would be great, but as a complete novice, I haven't been entirely sure what to search for and have come up short on my attempts so far.

答: If you're looking for parallels in animal communication, there's plenty of good evidence that environment shapes the kinds of sounds used. For instance, Henry & Lucas (2010) showed that birds in forest habitats (more absorption) were more sensitive to frequency changes (FM), as modulated narrowband sounds (essentially, vowels) are more reliably transmitted in that cluttered environment. Birds living in open habitats had more temporal resolution, and tended to use more amplitude modulation. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2009.01674.x</p>


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

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

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

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

答:
I have never tried to do it, but I think the approach you call "impractical" is the way to go. You need to maintain a grammar and a vocabulary for each town and for each period (say, a snapshot every 50 or 100 years) to keep consistency.

The good news that can save a lot of time is, that you probably don't need complete reference grammars for each step in the evolution: Start with a good grammar of the oldest stage of your language continuum and than write the grammars of the evolving dialects/languages in terms of differences to the old grammar.

Only when accumulated differences become too large to be handled well, write a full grammar again.


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

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

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

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

答:
The term homonym is usually used for words that are spelt the same and pronounced the same, and i think this is what is intended here. Homographs are spelt the same but pronounced differently and homophones are pronounced the same but spelt differently. Both of these shouldn't occur in Esperanto as there is an agreed pronunciation for each. However, to answer the question about homographs, which is clearly a part of the answer:

Various homonyms have been suggested already.

It is a feature of Esperanto, due to the origin of its lexis, that a lot of people know some of the words from their first language and there is always a temptation to pronounce these in the way more similar to that language. That means that wherever there are homonyms they may end up as homographs. To take vato as an example, people may pronounce this as in their first language, even if they are meant to pronounce it the same as the word meaning "cotton wool*.


答: Vietnamese is a tonal language that is written with a Latin character set, using accents and other "punctuation" to indicate the tones.  Take a look at it because at the Wikipedia entry on the Vietnamese alphabet for some ideas about how it is implemented.</p>

Title: How would one describe different tones on paper?

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


问:
How is ANADEW pronounced?
How is the acronym ANADEW pronounced among conlang enthusiasts. I have seen it only in print so far and I want to know whether the letters are spelled out or whether it is pronounced as if it were an English word.</p>

答: As a native speaker of American English from the middle of the North American continent, I have always pronounced it as /ˈænədu/, like Xanadu (the movie), but with out the leading /z/. Visit https://tophonetics.com for a close approximation (capitalization ignored, British and American options generate the same audio).</p>

Title: How is ANADEW pronounced?