问:
How do you remove the confusion in a conlang when creating and distinguishing nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles?
I am trying to implement a conlang and am confused how we as humans are able to distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, particles, etc. in a sentence. I get that word order is a factor, as well as the nebulous idea of context. But word order seems so flexible, I don't see what I need to do when creating a conlang in terms of how to structure nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles, to make sure you can understand the sentence. What are the key techniques or procedures to follow in designing this? So you can clearly tell what is a noun, verb, adjective, or particle. How do we even do this in regular natural languages? I don't understand. And I don't know how to search for this in Google to learn more about how we resolve the sentences meaning without having clear and unique patterns that clearly separate nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles from each other.

Some of examples on why it's confusing.

I see the big black oak tree.

The tree is the noun, and big black oak are modifiers on the noun sort of thing. So you could say they are adjectives or "features" of the tree.

I see the big.

But here big is the noun, like The Big, as in something big, in which you are invoking a lot of context in your listeners mind. Or

I see the black.

Here black is the noun, like all you see is darkness.

In these sentences, there is no change in the structure of the words, but they take on different roles in the sentences. That is, big can be an adjective or noun (or even a verb!) without adding a specific prefix or suffix to that base.

I can't come up with a science on why we are able to properly interpret these sentences. In my conlang, I am thinking that, in order to make it easier to interpret, I would have special endings on nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles. So you would have the equivalent of:

I see-ami the big-azi black-azi oak-azi tree-ali

In this sort of system, every verb would end in -ami, every adjective with -azi, and every noun with -ali. I keep on thinking I need such a system in order to make the sentences comprehensible. I would use this structure in addition to a strict word order to make it so sentences are comprehensible. So what I keep thinking I need, in summary, is:

Specific endings on nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles, to distinguish them easily.

Strict word order in sentences, so you can easily tell what is in the adjective place, in the noun place, in the verb place, etc.

But the problem is, this is not how natural languages work! Even in English which has a somewhat strict word order (even though you can be quite flexible with it if you want), like I demonstrated above, you don't have specific endings on words, and you don't have a super strict 100%-of-the-time word order. (English has some word endings like -ing and -ly and such, but these are not even consistent 100% of the time)

In addition, I am looking across a few languages, and nouns, verbs, and adjectives in each language might be allowed to all start or end with vowels or consonants, and might all have endings which are the same. That is, there isn't even a pattern which clearly separates nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles into separate categories based on the word's morphology! For example, let's use English. You have these words.

Bully. (Noun, "A mean sort of person", ends in -ly)

Clearly. (Adjective, ends in -ly)

Sully. (Verb, "to make dirty", ends in -ly)

Some rules are more strict, like I can't seem to find any adjectives that end in -ed, which is used for past-tense or state sort of verbs, created, acted, iced, etc. But this -ly ending can go on any type of word. Same with other endings, like -ing.

Bring. (Infinitive verb, ends in -ing)

Clearing. (present participle verb, ends in -ing)

Ring. (Noun, or verb, ends in -ing)

Amusing. (Adjective, ends in -ing)

All kinds of other examples exist (of prefixes and suffixes) where they are used across nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.. In many other languages too.

Other words, which I'm using in English but might come from other languages, are nouns which have all sorts of endings.

Man. (Noun, ends in consonant n)

Joy. (Noun, ends in consonant y)

Dao. (Noun, "the Way", ends in vowel o)

Glee. (Noun, ends in vowel e)

Rabbi. (Noun, ends in vowel i)

Then same for verbs:

Assign. (Verb, ends in consonant n)

Play. (Verb, ends in consonant y)

Echo. (Verb, ends in vowel o)

Free. (Verb, ends in vowel e)

Ski. (Verb, ends in vowel i)

And same for adjectives:

Green. (Adjective, ends in consonant n)

Happy. (Adjective, ends in consonant y)

Latino. (Adjective, ends in vowel o)

Eerie. (Adjective, ends in vowel e)

Pakistani. (Adjective, ends in vowel i)

So this basically shows, at least for English, there is no relation between the word ending and whether it is a noun, verb, adjective, etc.. So it makes me think in my conlang, I don't need to add the constraint of having nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles have different endings to make them distinguishable. Somehow we are able to tell the difference in sense of these words based on some other nebulous thing, like context or meaning/semantics during the flow of speech.

The question is, how do I use these facts when constructing a conlang? Can I pick any "base" word and attach any ending on any part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, particle)? And will the language still work? How can I tell if it will work and not be confusing? What do I do when developing the conlang to test if it is confusing or not how I have structured words?

Without having the conlang completed and working, (while it is being developed), as I try to generate example sentences, it seems like it would lead to pure confusion not having more rigid patterns in the words to distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles.

How should I be thinking about this to make some progress? I am stuck on the step of how to create words in different parts of speech, and place them in an order in sentences. I have created a pattern for how word "bases" are defined (i.e. they have to start and end with a consonant), but that is even limiting, I would like it if some can start or end with a vowel too...

How should I conceptualize the differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles, so I can generate words that flow together into a sentence but aren't confusing? It seems that adding specific word endings would remove the confusion, but what else will remove the confusion so I don't need to do that, and I can be like English in that words of various parts of speech can have any vowel/consonant start or end the word?

答:
Fundamentally, parts of speech are lexically determined. What this means is that in general, there is no way to find the part of speech of a word knowing only the word itself. You have to memorise it separately for each word.

A good way of seeing this is to observe that two languages may assign different parts of speech to exactly the same word when it is borrowed from one language to another. For instance, boil is a verb in English. But when it was loaned into the Papuan language Komnzo, it was borrowed as a member of the Komnzo class of ‘property nouns’ (Döhler 2018). There is nothing inherently ‘nouny’ or ‘verby’ about the form or function of this word; you simply have to memorise that boil is a verb in English and a property noun in Komnzo. And this can even happen within a language: the English word release, for instance, is both a noun and a verb.

So, if word classes cannot be reliably distinguished based on their form or their semantics¹, then what is the difference between different parts of speech? The answer is simple: parts of speech specify the environments in which words can be used. For instance, consider this sentence:

I saw the _____.

This sentence has a gap in it. You can make a grammatical sentence by filling this gap with nouns: I saw the dog, I saw the cat, I saw the chair, I saw the release, I saw the idea. (Note that, even though the last example doesn’t really make sense, it still counts as it is a grammatical sentence.) On the other hand, if you try this with a non-noun, the result is ungrammatical: *I saw the sit, *I saw the eat, *I saw the is. So we can use this example to give a definition of a noun: a word which makes a grammatical sentence when preceeded by I saw the.

This definition can be made a lot more general though: a noun is simply a word which can follow a determiner. What is a determiner? Well, you could define it as something which can precede a noun, but that would be circular. Instead, simply note that there are a fixed set of 20 or so words which can occur in such a position: a, the, one, some, much, many and the like. A determiner is then just one of these words. Determiners are thus a ‘closed class’: a part of speech which has a fixed number of words, and into which no more words can be added. Note that each language has a slightly different set of closed classes, though there are similarities: articles, numbers, adpositions and adjectives, for instance, are often closed. (Komnzo unusually has verbs as a closed class, explaining why my example of boil above was loaned as a noun rather than a verb.)

But you can go further. English nouns can be used after a determiner — but there are several other environments in which nouns can occur. They can take the plural marker -s: dogs, cats, chairs, releases, ideas. They can also modify another noun: dog leash, cat collar, chair wood, release method, idea food. (The last few examples are a bit contrived, but illustrate the point well enough). So, you can use this to define nouns in English: English nouns are that word class which can be used after a determiner, take a plural marker, and modify another noun. Or, to put it another way, if you find a word which can occur in all these places — why then, that word must be a noun!

So, to answer your question ‘How should I conceptualize the differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles?’: conceptualize it in terms of morphosyntactic environments (the fancy name for what I’ve been talking about). A word class is distinguished by the environments it can occur in: if you know what word class a word occurs in, then you know in which environments you can use in, and vice versa.

I will use one final example to illustrate the point. Consider the well-known example sentence:

The gostak distims the doshes.

From this sentence, I can tell that gostak and dosh are nouns, while distim is a verb — even though I may never have seen these words before. Why? Just look at the environments:

Gostak occurs in the environment ‘the ____’. Thus we know it is a noun.

Dosh occurs in the environment ‘the ____’, and also takes the suffix -s. Thus it must be a noun.

For distim, we can look at the position of the word in the sentence. It occurs between two noun phrases; this is obviously sufficient to make up a complete sentence. Any word with this property in English must be a verb.

(Further reading: François’s analysis of Hiw word classes is a particularly illuminating example of these ideas. I highly recommend reading through this paper for a detailed discussion of how word classes can be defined with reference to syntactic environments.)

¹ Well, this is a slight lie. There are clearly semantic distinctions between word classes such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. Also, I vaguely remember that there are some languages in which some parts of speech do have phonological correlates, though I can’t remember their names. My point is that neither of these are particularly reliable ways to determine parts of speech, which should ideally be defined using only morphosyntactic criteria.


问:
Has anybody created an Arabic inspired shorthand for english?
I'm thinking of a system where all fricatives look similar to each other, all plosives look similar, etc; the same base shape could be used for similar sounds using the dots placed above/below letters (see I'jām) to distinguish between voiced/unvoiced. For example ز and ژ could both be fricatives but one voiced & one unvoiced with the number of i'jām dots indicating voiced & unvoiced. As an example 1 dot (خ) could be unvoiced, & 2 dots (ت) could be voiced , 3 dots (ش/چ) could be digraphs(?) like sh/ch/th etc;. Their placement above or below could even mean something (پ/ث)? vowels could be diacritics like how Arabic harakat are used. I'm not really talking about adapting Arabic itself to write english. Plenty of those have been done, some good, some bad. I'm talking about a script inspired by Arabic, but that is really suited to write English because it is designed for English. Dots & vowels could even be omitted to further speed up writing if the dots/vowels could easily be inferred from context as in (Rasm). To use an example that can be typed: 'تُن' could be 'dot', but without diacritics could be 'date' depending on context & with i'jām reversed it could be represent 't-d'. 'O' wouldn't have to be  ُ  (damma), I'm just using that as an example. I like the look of connected letters but disconnected could be used too. It could be designed to be written in either direction by rotating certain letters to face in the direction of writing as was done with Egyptian hieroglyphs. It would be easier to learn because similar sounds would look similar which is rarely the case in Arabic. Has anybody created something like this or could it be created? The table is here

答:
Do these count?

Anglo-Arabic

Anglo-Arabic, created by Pangus Ho, is a fully phonetic writing system that can be used to write English. It borrows the shape of Arabic letters so that it looks like Arabic at a glance, however few of the letters have the same sound as they do in Arabic. For example the letter "nūn", which is used to symbolize the sound /n/ in Arabic, is pronounced /t/ in Anglo-Arabic. The main objective is to make similar consonants have similar letter shapes. Consonants, long vowels, and diphthongs are represented by letters, while short vowels are represented by diacritics.

Angrezi (انگریزی)

Angrezi is a method of writing English using the Arabic script devised by Adnaan Mahmood. It is designed so that each sound of English is represented by one letter, and to be a standardised way for transcribing English in the Arabic script. Adnaan also thought that if the large population of English speaking Muslims want to write English in the Arabic script they could do so by using this version of the alphabet which includes vowels for easy reading and comprehension.

The name of the alphabet comes from the Urdu name for English, انگریزی (angrezi).

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
What are language concepts that could be considered to be based on human anatomy?
I'm in the early stages of creating an alien language for a personal writing project. I'm trying to avoid the aliens' language having properties that human languages do that are somehow linked to our anatomy. One of the most obvious examples of such a feature is a numerical system with base ten due to the number of digits.

What are language concepts that are linked to our anatomy in comparable ways that I should find alternatives for when creating a language for aliens who are not humanoid? Any references for links between our anatomy and such language concepts or features are much appreciated.

答:
Just a couple of sci-fi examples:

Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye has a race with two small manipulating arms on one side, and a large "gripping hand" arm on the other. Even the humans pick up the phrase "on the gripping hand" to mean a third alternative to two possibilities.

One of Spider Robinson's Callahan's Place stories has an alien species with trilateral symmetry. Having full 360-degree vision eliminates many ideas about distrust- "Blind-sided", "Stabbed in the back", etc.

And, going the other direction, L.Neil Smith's Converse and Conflict" has a scene where a human is explaining to an alien how Cold-War-ish Earth politics is causing friction among the multi-national human crew, and the alien observes that, if war breaks out on Earth, the captain

"...will have a headache on his hands. Can you really say that? What an amazing language!"

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
Alternate direction systems for spatial reference
What are some alternative direction systems besides egocentric direction systems (left, right, &c)?

Some natural languages use {north, south, east, west} like Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal (Maya) (source for Tzeltal). The situation in Tzeltal is probably more complex, since there's references to an uphill/downhill distinction too, but I'm having trouble locating a free resource for it.

Ithkuil uses the position of the sunrise and sunset. It does not appear to use the current position of the sun.

答:
All answers so far assume a system of orthogonal directions, each having an "anti direction". I suspect this predisposition is connected to our left-right symmetric bodies with natural forwards and backwards, as well as ups and downs. Languages constructed for aliens need not conform to this!

Take a starfish, for instance. If they have five distinct arms, that would give five directions in their plane, along with up and down.

For radially symmetric, disk-shaped creatures (or for communicating between radially symmetric spaceships or other vehicles) the only meaningful purely self-relative directions would likely be relative up and relative down (along with hither and away). For a creature shaped like a jellyfish, without any visual clues to other fixed directions, this could be combined with cardinal up and down.

Star or disk shaped creatures could of course point, either by turning their up or down towards something (which would be two different prepositions!), or by deforming themselves, shining a light etc. They could also use auxiliary phrases as "towards Alice" or "the way we came".

A more sophisticated option would also be to talk of the direction perpendicular to cardinal up AND to relative up, maybe like a cross product in mathematics? This would be sort of akin to our left and right, if the creature moves in its relative up direction, that is.


问:
What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?
What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?

I'm curious as to if there are any full existing conlangs that allow you to do arithmetic or mathematical manipulations from a conlang perspective.

The closest that I've found for this is this set of short clips on YouTube, Inventing a Number System. But I'm curious as to if there might be more examples, especially examples that have a mathematical grammar of some sort.

(Note: I do apologize if this post is a bit fuzzy, as the idea is still kind of fuzzy in my mind. This is also my first post to this forum. I can revise the post if needed.)

Thanks.

答:
There's a language based on stack-based programming languages (like Forth) that eliminates syntactic ambiguity called Fith. The name is a deliberate pun on Forth.

FrathWiki

2019 Smiley award page

Fith grammar (archived)

Basically, when parsing the language you have a stack of objects that you have to keep track of, as well as some global state like the default number that can be explicitly changed.

The idea of layering a human language on top of a Forth-like grammar is flexible enough that you could extend Fith or make radically different design decisions without losing some of its nice properties.


答:
Slightly tangential, but Richard Feynman invented his own mathematical notation (mostly trigonometric functions), as mentioned in his autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!":

While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didn't like the symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, "sin f" looked like s times i times n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square root sign. Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left -to-right reflected so that it started with the  horizontal line with the value underneath, and then the sigma.

He stopped using his notation when he inadvertently slipped into it when discussing some math with his friend, because he realized the need for a common (even if inferior) notation.

Body:
What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?

I'm curious as to if there are any full existing conlangs that allow you to do arithmetic or mathematical manipulations from a conlang perspective.

The closest that I've found for this is this set of short clips on YouTube, Inventing a Number System. But I'm curious as to if there might be more examples, especially examples that have a mathematical grammar of some sort.

(Note: I do apologize if this post is a bit fuzzy, as the idea is still kind of fuzzy in my mind. This is also my first post to this forum. I can revise the post if needed.)

Thanks.


问:
A biphonic language
How could a language evolve such that the vowels are biphonic (like in throat singing)?

Note: Biphonicity is when two notes/tones are sung simultaneously.

There are languages that are whistled or toned, so I'd imagine it'd be possible, just how?

Perhaps, the language developes an unwieldy tone system that begins to overlap itself, creating vowels with two separate tones being used simultaneously?

答:
I'll take a stab at the "evolve" part. Throat singing might be a possibility, so we could look at the environment surrounding that.

"The popularity of throat singing among Tuvans seems to have arisen as a result of geographic location and culture. The open landscape of Tuva allows for the sounds to carry a great distance. Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing in these areas mark khoomei as an integral part in the ancient pastoral animism still practiced today."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan_throat_singing)

So in the context of conlanging,  a landscape with sparse vegetation (or other... I'm not very familiar with geography) and perhaps combined with animist beliefs might explain the development of a polyphonic language, which would include not only specially spoken vowels, but also perhaps the use of false vocal folds and other throat singing techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_singing).

In addition, you mention the possibility of such a language being doubly tonal. In that regard, a humid area might be conducive to a tonal language, though the Tuvan language is considered a pitch accent language rather than tonal. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan_language). Alternatively, tone can arise from contact with other tonal languages.

Title: A biphonic language


问:
How could the future "Kesh" language from the book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K. Le Guin develop from modern languages?
In the book Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, the author created the future Kesh language and Aiha alphabet. Does anyone with an anthropological or etymological background and experience with this book have any idea how modern languages would evolve into this? Could it just be English + 5000 years, or does it seem like there's other languages that got mixed in?

From the back of the book it is stated that their written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable which is quite a shift from modern English, but it seems like they may be many thousands of years in the future which would allow for such drastic changes. Some words such as "kailikú" for "quail" have the similar hard /k/ and "sleep" is translated to "lahe" which seems to be pronounced similarly to "lay". These seem to be fairly rare and most words have no obvious connection or similar pronunciations.

答:
5000 years is a really long time for linguistic evolution, and after such a long time little resemblance between the original and the final outcome is left. So almost anything is a plausible outcome.

The feature "written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable" has a nice scientific name alloglottography and it was quite common in the Ancient Near East. I wonder how it can survive in a society Ursula LeGuinn describes for the Kesh people because it is definitely harder to maintain than the knowledge of a simple alphabetic writing of the spoken vernacular.

The alphabet looks like a new invention but it shows some superficial similarities to Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and may have evolved from them. Or it was just reinvented at some point of time after a period of illiteracy.


问:
Is Russian a constructed language?
It is regulated directively by authorities even more strictly than programming languages!

E.g. During the reform of 1918 they just forbade letter Ъ аnd removed all those letters! In some cases letter Ъ was still needed, and they were replacing it by apostrophe during some period.

I think you would have been repressed if you had written something in the old Russian orthography...

答:
No, this is language reform.

In 1928, the Turkish government replaced the entire alphabet in use with a modified Roman alphabet, abandoning the previous Arabic-based alphabet. Vocabulary reforms (mostly purism) were also introduced at this time.

In the late 19th century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda introduced reforms (simplifications, neologisms) in the Hebrew language to make it suitable for modern use.

The government of the People's Republic of China introduced Simplified Chinese characters starting in the 1950's with a goal of improving literacy.

None of these activities are normally considered conlanging.

Title: Is Russian a constructed language?


答:
First of all, a language reform can be controversial, not widely accepted and even authoritarian in its implementation and even stupid - it still doesn't make the language constructed.

Second, the roots of the reform we are talking here can be found in proposals of Russian linguistic society that precedes revolution for more than a decade. It was a common understanding in linguistic circles that this way or another Russian spelling should me modernised. For God sake, up to that moment students and pupils were memorising by heart usage of "ѣ" because for them there were no logic behind it at all.

Third, even if we will consider this particular spelling reform as inefficient or redundant (which it wasn't) - there was no attempts to regulate by it how people are actually talking and which grammar rules they are using. It remained exactly the same language it was before the revolution.

This is not a constructed language by the very definition of a constructed language.

Also you are very wrong about how transition of Turkish to the Latin alphabet was generally approved. It wasn't and some people were quite opposed to it.
Ironically, the example provided by you is closer (but it's still not) to a constructed language in that sense that Osmanic and modern Turkish differs way more than pre- and post-Revolution Russian.

Title: Is Russian a constructed language?

Body:
It is regulated directively by authorities even more strictly than programming languages!

E.g. During the reform of 1918 they just forbade letter Ъ аnd removed all those letters! In some cases letter Ъ was still needed, and they were replacing it by apostrophe during some period.

I think you would have been repressed if you had written something in the old Russian orthography...


问:
How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?
I'm trying to design a conscript for my conlang Atili and would like to create punctuation in order to deliminate sentences and transcribe limited prosody. However, I don't just want to create new symbols for the full stop, comma, colon, semicolon, etc. I am especially cautious of non-terminating punctuation and how it can be used differently from in English.

I'm aware of distinctions like the Oxford comma and Spanish inverted punctuation, so I know that punctuation is not universal. How do other languages use punctuation differently from English?

答:
Armenian is one of examples of modern language that has its own punctuation which differs quite noticeably from the Western one, which is nowadays widely adopted (of course, with variations).

Here's are some noticeable differences:

Armenian question mark (՞) is placed on the stressed vowel of the word in question rather than at the end of the sentence, for instance: "Ինչպե՞ս ես:"

Armenian exclamation mark follows the same pattern.

There's a separate punctuation mark used to indicate a pause that is longer than that of a comma, but shorter than that of a colon.

Title: How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?


答:
Punctuation is not universal. Chinese and Japanese didn't used to have punctuation, nor apparently did Latin and Ancient Greek. So I'd say that's the first thing to consider: your proto-script needn't have had any punctuation at all. But over time, scribes found that it was a pain in the backside to write long continuous strings and just figure out by context where sentences end and begin. How they choose to delimit those sentences* is up to them.

Maybe writers split up sentences using a vertical bar or a slash, or a middle dot like the interpunct used in Japanese and Chinese, or some other kooky character. Maybe sentences are grouped using something similar to brackets at the start and end. Or maybe ancient authors actually drew a circle or line around each sentence to delimit it from the next (it never had to be practical!) Future authors realised that, if all they wanted to do was tell where one sentence ended and another began, all they had to do is draw a circle around every other sentence.

(So you might have a paragraph like this.) Where every other sentence is uncircled. (And the next sentence is circled again.) Imagine that these brackets are circles.

Punctuation within sentences is, again, up to you. It's perfectly possible that your script's writers never decided that they needed to split up clauses using commas, separate lists using colons, or mark speech using quotation marks etc. Maybe they mark speech separately with an underline, or a dotted line. Or maybe they write using different coloured inks depending on type of sentence being written.

Maybe, instead of little marks, your proto-script could have fully-fledged characters without any spoken value, but which are used to delimit clauses in the same way as commas are. Of course, over time these might have reduced and transformed into a small, easy to write character - in much the same way that Simplified Chinese emerged over time because some scholars somewhere were too lazy to write out 麗 every time, and went with 丽 instead.

The point is: free yourself from all constraints about how your writing should be written. Start with a blank canvas if you like, and add in features as you see fit. Think about your proto-script and how the first scribes might have written things down - then think about how later writers would have abbreviated those forms and made them shorter, simpler and easier. As Artifexian says: Iterate, Iterate, Iterate. Write down random scribbles and see how they pair with your script.

These are just a few random ideas. I hope some of them help.

* I don't know how your language works, but you might not even need to separate sentences. Maybe just clauses, paragraphs, or "logical ideas".

Title: How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?

Body:
I'm trying to design a conscript for my conlang Atili and would like to create punctuation in order to deliminate sentences and transcribe limited prosody. However, I don't just want to create new symbols for the full stop, comma, colon, semicolon, etc. I am especially cautious of non-terminating punctuation and how it can be used differently from in English.

I'm aware of distinctions like the Oxford comma and Spanish inverted punctuation, so I know that punctuation is not universal. How do other languages use punctuation differently from English?


问:
Strategies for dealing with limited/simple phonologies
What problems arise when creating a language with an extremely simple phonology and what are some good strategies for dealing with them?

I'm calling this type of phonology extremely simple for the purposes of this question, but limited or rigid might be a better fit. I'm also not sure whether "phonology" is the right term here or if something like "phonological inventory" would be better. Using "phonemes" or "phonemic inventory" is close, but does not cover phonotactics and suprasegmental features.

An extremely simple phonology is one that does not allow the speaker to pack many bits of information in each syllable/mora/unit of speech time. Prototypical extremely simple phonologies have some or all of the following features:

Few segmental contrasts

Restrictive phonotactics

Limited or no phonemic use of gemination or vowel length

Limited or no phonemic use of tone

Phrased another way, a simple phonology in the sense of the question is what you would get if you started with an inventory like Hawaiian's, Rotokas', or Pirahã's and removed contrastive vowel length or contrastive tone.

Conlangs like Toki Pona have extremely simple phonologies.

What are some common problems that appear in languages with phonologies like this?
What are some strategies for dealing with them?
One example of a possible "problem" might be a large number of homophones.

答:
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to give a complete answer, just adding on.

I've encountered this exact problem with a project I'm working on. If the number of possible sounds per syllable is limited, then limiting syllables is going to be one of the main challenges. Some approaches to limit syllables are:

Assign a separate meaning to every possible syllable that could be pronounced. It's best if the meanings are as distant as possible from each other.

Avoid synonyms, similar to the previous point, where multiple different sounds map to the same meaning.

Allow for things like optional contractions, that shorten the spelling or pronunciation.

Use strict word order rules, as opposed to grammatical particles/prefixes/suffixes, when possible. If a subject is always at the beginning of a sentence, it won't need to be marked as a subject, for example.

When deriving new words by combining existing ones, use very small fragments of root words as opposed to the whole thing. For example, instead of sand + castle --> sandcastle, do sand + castle --> sandle/sastle.

In addition to assigning meaning to syllables, an extreme approach would be to go down to the letter level, approximate meanings for each letter. This can help in the compound word scenario with picking important letters out of a root as opposed to the whole word.


答:
It's quite correct that punctuation only really became at thing after the printing-press. So it's be perfectly natural to go without it in many fictional settings. Even so, even though it was anachronistic, I worked on this question for my own last conscript because I enjoyed it.

I read what I could to find all the "functions" performed by every punctuation mark I could find. Then I picked which functions I wanted for my language.

I added one: a sentence-opener mark, in place of capital letters. For the river-inspired conscript in question, this mountain mark's slight angling helps orient the reader to the "river's" direction, too.

I remixed some: splitting the functions of semi-colon; combining em-dash, colon, and quotation under the function "hard parenthetical"; ending sentences/rivers with the "hard parenthetical" "cataratct" is an exclamation.

I left one out: questions are indicated by a clitic already, so there's no question mark.

In my opinion, my punctuation system relexes even less because many punctuation functions are done by how you write the thoughts with respect to each other, like rivers' tributaries. Information encoded by the angles of clauses isn't exactly punctuation, but perhaps it will suggest more possibilities for using text without relexing.

I could have relexed even less, I feel, because there are more nuances and "functions" languages could express by punctuation, though I don't know a language that does. Cantonese has grammar particles doing interesting tasks. English uses prosody for many expressions, and we write this with italics and such. I am sure other languages have features like these. Grammatical nuances like these could be done by punctuation in writing. It depends on what the bare sounds themselves leave ambiguous.

Setting other languages aside, have you found some ambiguous sentences in your conlang? Every language's rules leaves ambiguity somewhere; you just choose where. Perhaps your language has ambiguity in novel places, and so in the less expressive writing media would need a novel mark.

You could also have not-exactly-punctuation symbols. Consider where you might have a culturally important mark like $, or a short-hand mark like &. Culturally important information, short-hand: other common marks are surely potential hiding categories of punctuation job in front of your face :) In my conlang, the first time you mention the name of a god in a conversation or chapter or whatever, you have to use a respectful prefix reserved for this purpose. That "piety function" could have been done by a punctuation instead of morphologically. Some cultural quirk like that in your setting could have a punctuation mark in print :)

Hope one of these ideas helps!

Title: How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?


问:
Lemmata in a prefixing language
I'm developing a heavily prefixing language, and I'm trying to work out a lemma/citation form for my verbs. However, nearly all forms of the verb have a prefix. For example, the verb "to go" has the stem m(a), but the standard infinitive is um, the first-person singular standing conjugation is irim, and the participle is ënda.

Obviously, the latter is wholly unsuitable as a lemma because it has a tendency to set off a number of phonological processes that can cause the stem to get lost, I don't really want to list words under any of these forms in my dictionary, because if I do, I'll end up with all of my verbs listed in the lexicon under "u," "i," or "e."

答:
You could just list them under the stem in that case. If you can easily reconstruct the infinitive by a simple rule, then that would be the easiest way. There is no law that states that you always have to put the infinitive as the main dictionary entry. It's only common practice in most Western languages because it suits the way they work.

Another possibility would be to look at how other languages deal with this issue. For example, Indonesian verbs also tend to have prefixes; I'm not sure what they do in the dictionary. In Arabic, I believe the root is in the dictionary, ie the three core consonants from which the other forms are derived.

Just do whatever works for you: it's your language after all!

Title: Lemmata in a prefixing language


答:
It's possible to use the infinitive as the citation form / lemma in your dictionary, but have collation rules specific to your language.

For example, if um is the infinitive, you can have it sorted under the m section in your dictionary.

Collation in Tibetan works this way and prefixes don't influence the collation order, but there's the further complication that Tibetan orthography is non-phonemic and the prefixes aren't pronounced anymore. Here's another source describing collation in Tibetan and there's a NativLang video on YouTube that covers Tibetan historical spelling generally.

You can also pick an inflected form arbitrarily, like the first person standing form, maybe, and use that as the head entry. You can then add entries for common forms like the infinitive and participle and have a cross-reference for the first person standing form. Latin entries on Wiktionary, for example, use the first-person present singular as the citation form.

Title: Lemmata in a prefixing language

Body:
I'm developing a heavily prefixing language, and I'm trying to work out a lemma/citation form for my verbs. However, nearly all forms of the verb have a prefix. For example, the verb "to go" has the stem m(a), but the standard infinitive is um, the first-person singular standing conjugation is irim, and the participle is ënda.

Obviously, the latter is wholly unsuitable as a lemma because it has a tendency to set off a number of phonological processes that can cause the stem to get lost, I don't really want to list words under any of these forms in my dictionary, because if I do, I'll end up with all of my verbs listed in the lexicon under "u," "i," or "e."


问:
Maximizing the distinction between affirmative and negative sentences
What are some strategies for making affirmative and negative sentences as distinct as possible?

The motivation for this question is an annoying pair of words in English: can and can't. They frequently sound very similar in rapid speech.

There's also one attested language, Wyandot, described here, that appears to lack dedicated negative morphemes and instead has an irrealis morpheme and a contrastive morpheme that can convey negation in certain contexts but don't have to.

If you wanted to do the opposite and maximize the contrast between affirmative and negative sentences, what are some strategies for doing so?

答: One strategy that comes immediately into my mind is the use of multiple negative markers like in French ne ... pas, if you miss one of them, you will catch another one. Multiple negation being equivalent to single negation is a frequent feature of natural languages, but it is often optional to use more than one marker of negativity.


答:
Looking a bit further down that WALS page you linked, I come across the Noni language, which allows as many as three negative markers in the same sentence:

```<code><i><b>kɛ́</b>  bɔ́ <b>yà</b>  nǔ  géé  kfun <b>kɛ</b>.</i>
<b>NEG</b> 3p <b>NEG</b> FUT FUT₁ hit  <b>NEG</b>
</code>```

They will not hit (later today).

It seems to me that you can’t get much more distinct than this! (Though there is such a thing as having too much marking: all examples of triple negative marking on WALS, including Noni, have at least one marker optional.)

Title: Maximizing the distinction between affirmative and negative sentences

Body:
What are some strategies for making affirmative and negative sentences as distinct as possible?

The motivation for this question is an annoying pair of words in English: can and can't. They frequently sound very similar in rapid speech.

There's also one attested language, Wyandot, described here, that appears to lack dedicated negative morphemes and instead has an irrealis morpheme and a contrastive morpheme that can convey negation in certain contexts but don't have to.

If you wanted to do the opposite and maximize the contrast between affirmative and negative sentences, what are some strategies for doing so?

Body:
Looking a bit further down that WALS page you linked, I come across the Noni language, which allows as many as three negative markers in the same sentence:

kɛ́  bɔ́ yà  nǔ  géé  kfun kɛ.
NEG 3p NEG FUT FUT₁ hit  NEG

They will not hit (later today).

It seems to me that you can’t get much more distinct than this! (Though there is such a thing as having too much marking: all examples of triple negative marking on WALS, including Noni, have at least one marker optional.)


答:
To maximize, it seems like at least you'd want to associate negation with:

independent words

conjugation/declension

your loudest phonemes

distinct word order

distinct prosody

You could have a number of independent markers/words as mentioned above.

Turkish has verbs which always negate, and Turkish verbs usually end the thought: e.g., 'değil' for "is not [noun or adjective]"; 'yok' for 'there is not [something].' For negating verbs, it has an infix as part of the conjugation. Reflecting back your point about 'can't,' as a non-native speaker, I can miss this negative infix sometimes. This, even though it is higher on the sonority hierarchy (easier to hear) than the plosive T you point out in 'can't.' (It uses M and a variable vowel.)

So, if you wanted to change a conjugation to express "not," say, instead of a T or even an M, you could try using the loudest sounds in your set (usually wide-mouthed vowels?), ha ha.

You could change word order for negated sentences. We do that for questions. I have noticed. Have you noticed? [rhetorical ;) ]

Also, you could reserve a certain, unusual tone, pitch, stress pattern, etc., for negating, like how it's pretty easy to hear the lilt we put at the end of a question? Not that this is exclusive of the other options, but imagine to say, "You can't have a muffin," you deepen your voice as much as you can and borderline-sing, "You can have a muffin." If people associated deep voice with negation like we associate that rising tone with questions, that'd be pretty hard to miss.


答:
Here are two solutions to this problem that haven't been mentioned yet

suppletive negative forms

a large collection of negative polarity items

One famous example of a suppletive negative form is 有 vs 没(有) in Mandarin. Also, sign languages frequently feature many suppletive negative forms. Sign language existentials are especially prone to having suppletive/irregular negative forms. Suppletive negative forms have the advantage that the corresponding positive word form does not even appear in a negative sentence.

Negative polarity items are words that are only licensed in negative contexts, such as certain uses of yet, even, or anyone in English.

A language could have only a few words that are intrinsically negative, but many more that reliably indicate the presence of negation but don't carry a negative meaning themselves.

The language could also have many positive polarity items too; the idea being that the presence of a positive polarity item reliably indicates the absence of negation ... so by hearing one you know you're in an affirmative sentence.


答:
Use double negative, such as in Slavic languages (note that the Romance variant is weaker) - this is actually a misnomer, it is a negative concord where in a negative sentence, everything that depends on the negated verb and can be negated has to be negated. This is usually limited to certain pronouns and adverbs, though.

For example, Slovak for nobody ever helped anyone would be

```<code>
nikdo     nikdy  nikomu     nepomohol
nobody    never  nobody-DAT help-PAST-3P-NEG
</code>```

It helps most of those negated pronouns and adverbs (and verbs) begin with ne- or ni-.

Body:
Use double negative, such as in Slavic languages (note that the Romance variant is weaker) - this is actually a misnomer, it is a negative concord where in a negative sentence, everything that depends on the negated verb and can be negated has to be negated. This is usually limited to certain pronouns and adverbs, though.

For example, Slovak for nobody ever helped anyone would be

nikdo     nikdy  nikomu     nepomohol
nobody    never  nobody-DAT help-PAST-3P-NEG

It helps most of those negated pronouns and adverbs (and verbs) begin with ne- or ni-.


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

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

[...]

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

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

答: Slovio isn't intended to be an IAL right? The fact that Esperanto is derived from many languages, is why it is suitable as an IAL. Otherwise It's just another Interslavic. That's what Esperanto was originally intended to be, but Zamenhof realized that it could be beneficial to the rest of the world, so he reworked to it into a suitable IAL.</p>


答:
This can be accomplished in English, although it's usually looked down upon by grammarians as low class speech:

I ain't done nothing to noone / I didn't do nothing to nobody.

Although some people might feel smug pointing out that double negative theoretically cancels itself, in practical terms, if someone heard that sentence there ain't no way they'd confuse it for anything other than the speaker being very emphatic in saying "no". As I just did, when I used "ain't no way" instead of the more "proper" "isn't a way" or something similar.

So for your conlang, simply load it down with multiple negative terms or forms as it reduces the possibility of confusion of intent. To use my example again:

I didn't do something to anyone: single negative term.

Miss the contraction on did (or miss the word not if you didn't contract) and the sentence reverses in meaning.

I ain't done something to anyone: single negative term

Now the negative term is very distinct from the positive, lessening the possibility of confusion.

I ain't done nothing to anyone: two negative terms.

Harder now to extract a positive statement from that (aside from the aforementioned snooty-nosed linguistic logisticians).

I ain't done nothing to noone: three negative terms.

Again, the grammarians may have a seizure seeing that sentence, but there is no way to mistake the intent of what is being stated.


答:
If you want to go extreme, you could use different roots for negative and positive verbs.

I don't know if this is done in any natural language, but it wouldn't be too strange if you consider how Engish treats adjectives: 'more large' is typically expressed by 'larger', while 'less large' is expressed by 'smaller'. Many, if not most, common adjectives have antonyms with completely different roots! You can of course also have a negative affix (circumfix and/or transfix for maximal contrast!) to use with verbs without a proper "verb antonym", much like un- and non- are used to form English antonyms, even ad hoc ones like "non-blue" or "unpunishable".

Eglish has a few pairs like "end"/"continue", "sink"/"float" etc, but you could easily imagine there being antonyms for nearly any verb. This would drastically reduce the need for negations, and a speaker of such a language might find English use of negations for verbs as silly as we'd find "The non-ugly car is rather un-cheap, and too non-small to fit in my non-unlimited yard".

This can of course be combined with other mechanisms, but I think it goes a long way by itself as well.


问:
How many different interjections like 'aha,' 'oh' would you make up for a conlang?
I wonder if other people have thoughts and experience on this topic from the conlanging perspective. Have people with lots of translation experience found the  distinction between (for example) 'aha' and 'oh' worth translating into a conlang? What interjections are worth "translating" into parallel words?

I could get foreign language dictionaries and check for how many are listed there.

Thanks for considering.

答:
This is as much a question of invented culture as it is invented language. Strictly speaking, one can devise as few or as many such interjections as one likes. Likewise, the breadth and depth of meanings, overlaps and distinctions are similarly up to the inventor.

I'd argue that if the speakers of the invented language sense the need to distinguish "aha" from "oh", then the discoverer of their language ought to take note! Likewise, if they divide the semantic space of "aha" into three distinct areas, or if they don't distinguish "aha" from "oh", then that should also be noted.

As for the question of which are worth making words for: that's more a matter of pragmatism. Most language inventors engage with the art out of inner joy and as an expression of fundamental creativity and generativity. Making words is almost never a problem for most language inventors! If she should discover that the speakers of the invented language have a little used interjection, a word will surely present itself!


问:
How much Dothraki was created prior to "Game of Thrones"?
Reading A Song of Ice and Fire and watching Game of Thrones are two different experiences. One difference that pops out to me is the language that the Dothraki speak, known by the same name.

Naturally the show seems to include much more of the language than the books do, as you need to have actors speak aloud for the audience to interact, where as in writing you can have the audience see the thoughts of the character.

This has me wondering how much of the language George R. R. Martin had developed prior to the production of Game of Thrones and/or how much was created for/by the show?

答:
The majority of Dothraki was indeed created for the show.

George has stated the he is not quite a linguist in that sense (comparing himself against Tolkien).

I don't have a whole imaginary language in my desk here, the way Tolkien did.

Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail. I, alas, am only a hardworking SF and fantasy novel, and I don't have his gift for languages. That is to say, I have not actually created a Valyrian language. The best I could do was try to sketch in each of the chief tongues of my imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spelling.

 So Spake Martin, YET MORE QUESTIONS, July 22, 2001

He mostly just makes words as needed.

"DO YOU HAVE THE LANGUAGES ALL PLANNED OUT?"

No he'll make up a word here and there but he does NOT have the whole language written.

 So Spake Martin, BOSKONE (BOSTON, MA), February 14,2003

Even going as far to say that now he will have refer to the creator of the language for the show in his future writing.

Of course, he then added that with HBO having created Dothraki through the work of David J. Peterson, he feels like now if he wants to have Dothraki (and Valyrian as well) he'll have to refer to Peterson's work to get it "right", or ask Peterson himself how to say something in Dothraki.

 So Spake Martin, STOCKHOLM AND ARCHIPELACON REPORT, June 28, 2015

The show selected David J. Peterson, an expert language creator from the Language Creation Society to create Dothraki for Game of Thrones

Peterson drew inspiration from George R.R. Martin’s description of the language, as well as from such languages as Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili. However, the Dothraki language is no mere hodgepodge, babble or pidgin. It has its own unique sound, an extensive vocabulary of more than 1,800 words and a complex grammatical structure.

Which as of September 21, 2011 has over 3,000 words

Also, for the curious, Dothraki is now up to 3,163 words: More words than Mr. Padre Tony Gwynn has hits, but still a ways to go to catch Pete Rose (and my guess is Dothraki will have double his number before he gets even a sniff of the Hall of Fame).


答:
Much of by is based upon anatomy. Mostly that of Phonetics, and, by extension, phonological change and glottochronology. If you look at the IPA, the various phonemes are based upon point of articulation and such. Dental, Bilabial, Palatal, Glottal, etc. So I would recommend looking at the structure of the mouth of the aliens in question, and looking at the IPA in order to see what sounds would be possible with them and which would be impossible. For example, if they have no teeth, they would not be capable of dental consonants.

This by extension can effect the way in which their sounds change, based upon what sounds are easier for them in any given situation.

The amount of digits can also effect what the most common radix would be for the languages, for example, in Humans the most common radix is 10 due to us having ten fingers. But, it is still not the only one used. Look at:

Mesopotamian: Base-60

Mayan Languages: Base-20

Pamaen: Base-8

Yam Languages: Base-6

Chumashan: Base-4

And so on. But more languages use Base-10 than any other base, due to the ease of counting in Base-10 compared to other bases, due to our ten fingers.

Note: If you want better bases, it is easier to divide and multiply numbers in Bases with a greater amount of factors. This is the main reason behind the Duodecimal Movement, due to 12 being a superior highly composite number, with four non-trivial factors (2,3,4,6) compared to Base-10's two non-trivial factors (2,5). You can find multiple bases and their mathematical properties on wikipedia

Title: What are language concepts that could be considered to be based on human anatomy?

Body:
I'm in the early stages of creating an alien language for a personal writing project. I'm trying to avoid the aliens' language having properties that human languages do that are somehow linked to our anatomy. One of the most obvious examples of such a feature is a numerical system with base ten due to the number of digits.

What are language concepts that are linked to our anatomy in comparable ways that I should find alternatives for when creating a language for aliens who are not humanoid? Any references for links between our anatomy and such language concepts or features are much appreciated.


问:
Is there any general rule for constructing a word? Example: "q" or "w" should not end a word, something like this
I am developing 4 conlangs (sparish, old sparish, elvian and barrish (need a new name)) for a story which is used by humans of Spar, Northern Sparian, Elves/Aspian, Barrians of south respectively. I have no knowledge about developing language whatsoever, I have learnt some few things from youtube and google(youtube was much helpful). I have the constants and vowels that I want to use in my language, but I am facing trouble with the letters.

The sound of "q". I don't understand how to pronounce any words that have "q" in it. According to IPA pulmonic consonant chart (with audio), it sounds like /ka/. So how should I pronounce a word like "qakt"

Are there any kind of rules for word building? Like a word should never end with certain letters, or shouldn't start with certain letters.

I want these languages to sound and feel as natural as possible. I am asking because some of my created words exist in one language or the other, and I want them to be as distinct as possible.

Moreover, I want sparish to have a word like "re(letter)". This letter helps them to in poetry, its intonation depends upon the letter that is placed inside the bracket, but it does not feel write when you pronounce it. Can anyone help me with it too?

How to Create a Language

How to Create a Made Up Word

Conlang Case Study

How to Make a Language

Artifexian (channel)

How to Create a Language

答:
Yes, there are various rules to the structure of words, this is a mix of syllable structure and phonotactic rules. These, however, are not universal, but rather, are language-specific, as mentioned above.

For example, in Japanese, it is a Open Syllable language, but it can have -n or -m serve as a Coda. But no other consonant can act as such.

無限 (Mu-gen)

月讀 (Tsu-ku-yo-mi)

This is quite universal in structure in Japanese, CV or V, and CVC2 only when C2 is -n or -m.

You can simply set these rules, but it is more complicated if developed naturalistically, where it is based around specific phonological changes that lead to this consistent rule emerging.


问:
Naturalness of different universal quantifiers based on the size of the domain you're quantifying over
English has a few determiners and determiner-like things that express universal quantification including all and every.

How naturalistic is it to have different sets of quantifiers based on features of the domain such as its number (and possibly other features like animacy or remoteness).

The noun governed by the determiner can be either singular or plural with little change in meaning.

```<code>Every rose has thorns.
</code>```
```<code>All natural numbers are odd or even.
</code>```

These sentences have the same meaning as All roses have thorns and Every natural number is odd or even.

In some languages, such as French, have something that can be analyzed as a determiner inflecting for gender and number of the noun: tous/toute/tous/toutes which means all. Although French also has chaque, analogous to the English every and each. The distribution is similar to English, but I can't provide any examples that I can independently verify because I'm not a native French speaker.

Anyway, I'm wondering about the naturalness of having different determiners depending on the number of the domain rather than the thing directly governed by the quantifier.

For instance, suppose we had every(0) every(1) every(2) every(paucal) every(plural)

every(2), every(paucal) and every(plural) are all(paucal) fairly natural.

every(2) seems to map onto English both more or less directly, although both cannot be used with a singular noun.

```<code>every(paucal) continent has a name starting with a vowel or a glide.
</code>```
```<code>every(plural) electron is small.
</code>```

However, a construction like all(0) does have uses that aren't jokes and aren't related to logic or math.

A construction like the following seems reasonable and fairly easy to interpret.

```<code>I have done all(0) of my homework.
</code>```

答:
This is not inherently unnatural. As you point out, English "both" (and reasonable translations such as Spanish "ambos") easily fit the role of every(2) (I would argue that whether the noun is marked as singular or plural isn't particularly interesting here).

every(1) can be reasonably analyzed as a definiteness marking and is encompassed in most Indo-European languages by the definite article ("the", "el", "i", το), as shown by the sentence "The sun is shining." (This sentence can be used without explicitly introducing the sun into the conversation specifically because there is only one reasonable referent.)

In particular, I could see one set of forms evolving from the definite articles in a language with heavy number marking (i.e. "the (singular)" becomes each(1), "the (dual)" becomes each(2), etc.).

What I would be very surprised to see in a natural language is a fully consistent system of these, where each(), every(), and all() all cover the same numeric distinctions in the vein of the Esperanto correlatives.

I would also be surprised to see more than a couple of these in any language that does not make at least as many number  distinctions elsewhere.


问:
Syllabic restriction/word boundaries set by IPA? Or it is decided by language creator
When creating syllables we basically require an onset, nucleus, and a coda. Now, usually, all language have an onset, and the coda is fairly optional. Before creating a phonetic system, we first decide the word order, and rules about what sounds are allowed in the onset, nucleus and coda positions.

My question is focused on the 2nd part. For example, in English, the sound [ŋ] isn’t allowed to begin a word, but it can begin a syllable; and in Dothraki, the consonants [ɡ], [q], and [w] can’t end a word.

So these restrictions, do they arrive because of some IPA rule? Or is it the developer that creates these rules?

答:
The phonotactics of a language, what you have described, is the silent partner of phonology. The analogy I like to use is that a language's phonology is its periodic table (with individual phonemes as individual elements), while its phonotactics are the entire rest of its chemistry. Higher level stuff, like morphology, semantics, pragmatics, are things like biology, psychology, sociology.

Just like every language has its own phonology, every language has its own phonotactics.  There are languages that can put /ŋ/ in onset (for example, Vietnamese) or /h/ in coda (Arabic). There are languages that can't make /s/ clusters, or any clusters for that matter (Hawaiian).

The IPA is the "Grand Unified Periodic Table of Linguistics"; it's stated purpose is to label every sound used in a human language, and does not restrict their arrangement in anyway. There is no "Grand Unified Chemistry of Linguistics"; phonotactic laws are usually described in plain language, although there is a notation to succinctly describe allophonic variation (that is, how phonemes are realized as phones in different environments) and phonemic evolution (how a language's phonemes evolve over time).


问:
Do we know languages which think about subordinate conjunctions (like 'as,' 'even,' 'while') differently than English does?
for my conlang, I am trying to think of how to do the subordinating conjunction 'as,' 'even,' 'while' (and related: 'even though,' etc.).

In the languages that I know well enough to use these words (English, Spanish, and Turkish), they are separate words. I wonder, do we know languages which use other constructions for 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' other than with a separate word linking two clauses?

Example:
We ate as we ran.

I have covered quite a lot of grammar so far with systems of agglutinating clitics and affixes, so I'm trying to get my mind around how 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' could be handled without separate words. I guess I could just have like a "simultaneity clitic" for 'while' like I have a "conditional clitic" for 'would'...?

This has been difficult for me to conceptualize quietly in my head, so I really appreciate input and discussion :)

答:
In Inuit languages, there are no separate subordinating conjunctions. In Inuktitut, you identify the subordinate clause by an affix that indicates a conjunction.

For example, take the sentence "While Mary was eating, John was walking." In some Inuktitut dialects, you'd only indicate time tense for the superordinate phrase ("John was walking"), while the subordinate verb wouldn't have a tense marker, but instead use the conjunctive affix -tillu- (with the appropriate person marker)

Mary niri-tillugu John pisu-lauq-tuq (Mary eat-CONJ.3s John walk-Past-Part.3s)

It obviously gets a lot more complicated, but that gives one example of how to do it. If English had a similar setup, you might see something like this:

Mary eat John walked.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to relate them serially (Mary ate then John walked), you might see this sort of construction:

Mary ate John walked.

And you'd obviously reverse them for the other sequence, so "John walked Mary ate."

Obviously it would have to get more sophisticated, but you get the idea.


问:
Are there any grammatical aspects which do not have parallels in natural languages?
In Describing Morphosyntax, Payne uses a number of diagrams for visually explaining aspects and what they say about actions relative to time.

Payne outlines the following, all of which occur in natural languages.

Perfective

[-----] He wrote a letter.

Imperfective

<-----> He writes letters.

Perfect

-----|x He has come from Aqaba.

Pluperfect

---|DC---(now) I had entered a congested zone.

Completive

>-----| She finished working.

Inceptive

[-----> She began working.

Continuative/progressive

>-----> He is writing letters

Punctual

x He sneezed.

Iterative

>-x-x-x-> He is coughing.

Habitual

<-----> He drinks.

Are there other Aspects that do not appear in natural languages which have been invented for conlangs, and could they be represented with a similar visual diagram?

答:
Well, y'know, ANADEW and all that, but...

As far as I know, there is no natural language with a grammaticalized antiperfect aspect--i.e., an aspect where the time of the action is after the reference point, rather than before.

Present Perfect: "He has come."
Past Perfect (pluperfect): "He had come."
Future Perfect: "He will have come."

In each case, the event occurs before the reference time defined by the tense. In the case of future perfect, this may or may not be before the present.

An antiperfect flips that around

Present Antiperfect: "He is going to come." / "He is about to come."
 (approximately)
Past Antiperfect: "He was going to come." / "He was about to come."
 (approximately)
Future Antiperfect: "He will be going to come." / "He will be about to come." (approximately)

The various English paraphrases all have some extraneous additional implications (e.g., "He was going to come" implies that he didn't actually, "about to" implies that the action is nearby) that are not inherent to the antiperfect aspect, if it were grammaticalized. The important thing is that the action occurs after the reference time, but not necessarily after the present. Thus, just like a future perfect action could have occurred in the past, a past antiperfect could occur in the future.


问:
Has anyone made image based languages?
This is my first visit here. I have been writing machine/computer languages for about 8 years now. I am completely self taught and use my own tools. I have many languages that I have completed that work wonderfully.

I have a program that I use with each language that translates in real time. Everything works nicely. My languages are around 56k words each. I use a combination of Excel and various custom tools to generate the languages.Language creation is not a easy process, but it is fun.It takes me about 4 hours to create one from scratch. I believe what I am creating is more like machine languages? I am certainly not knowledgeable about how to properly create languages as most on here. Its just a fun obsession.

Lately I have been into creating image languages. Languages based on images. I was curious if anyone has ever made a image language? How did you do it? Did you create your own custom font to go along with your language? Did you program a translation tool or app? What have you experimented with?

This is kinda the package I build with my languages. I even experimented with a meme language. A silly language using 500 of the most popular internet memes in .jpg format. With a tool to translate to and from English. It would be cool if others are doing stuff like this.

答:
This is only an answer to the first part of the question

I was curious if anyone has ever made a image language?

Yes, there are such languages. They are called pasigraphy or logographic writing system, and the most successful among them is Bliss symbolics (also known as Semantography) by Charles K. Bliss.

I am not aware of automated translation tools or other tools helping in creating pasigraphies.

Title: Has anyone made image based languages?


问:
Can Kēlen truly be considered verb-free?
It has been claimed that the conlang Kēlen, winner of the 2009 Smiley award, is supposed to challenge Greenberg's universal of always having a noun-verb distinction by eliminating verbs. In light of the fact that Kēlen has a special word-class called relationals, which are four predicating words that take noun phrase arguments, is it not more factual to analyse the relationals of Kēlen as a very limited and closed class of verbs? They do seem to fulfill the same function words called "verbs" do in other languages, and are necessary for predication — another domain typically reserved for verbs (even if we assume zero-copula).</p>

答:
Relationals in Kēlen have no other purpose, so are verbs in all but name.

Kēlen is an engineering language, masquerading as an art lang. It doesn't have a history or proto-lang like some other art langs, so it is obvious that the relationals are a one for one replacement of verbs, but without any verb-like conjugation seen in english (e.g. run -> running).

Compare tenseless languages, which make use of other ways of conjugating the verbs (aspect or mood) or other words (verbs/adverbs/preposition). Kēlen uses both of those schemes.

Take the Kēlen relational word LA for instance

pattern
english equivalent

LA NP
NP exists, there is NP

LA NP LOC (NP)
NP is at a location

LA NP (ñe) NP
NP is (the same as) NP

LA NP pa NP
NP is/has/contains NP

In the examples the role LOC is performed by sū, which is a preposition. The Kēlen word ñe modifies the relational to be possessive rather than stative. The relations between verbs and relationals go on. It even has inflections for LA.

Why is this significant? It's because the relationals serve no other purpose that they have to be considered direct relations to verbs. For a comparison that shows how a word having multiple purposes could denote verblessness, see how Salishan Languages can be considered nounless:

Words with noun-like meanings are automatically equivalent to [be + NOUN] when used predicatively, such as Lushootseed sbiaw which means '(is a) coyote'. Words with more verb-like meanings, when used as arguments, are equivalent to [one that VERBs] or [VERB+er]. For example, Lushootseed ʔux̌ʷ means '(one that) goes'.

In natural languages, where words evolve in meaning over time, you can see meanings change over time. See how the words Be, Is and Am come about:

Old English bēon, an irregular and defective verb, whose full conjugation derives from several originally distinct verbs. The forms am and is are from an Indo-European root shared by Latin sum and est . The forms was and were are from an Indo-European root meaning ‘remain’. The forms be and been are from an Indo-European root shared by Latin fui ‘I was’, fio ‘I become’, and Greek phuein ‘bring forth, cause to grow’. The origin of are is uncertain.

- Google.

It should be possible to make a language where your verb is a primarily a noun/adjective/adposition but can be considered a verb only secondarily, as it's meaning changes over the imaginary history of the language. Maybe the word LA primarily means SEAT or GROUND (specifically a noun, not another verb). But when it's used with another word, it's meaning changes from the noun to a verb-like sense.

This way you could have a verbless language, where it's verb-like words evolved out of non-verbs.

But Kēlen has no such evolution of relationals, so they can serve no other purpose than to be one for one verb replacements.


问:
In compound words/suffixed words, does the stress change?
I'm creating a language where the stress is on the third to last syllable and I have a sound change where an unstressed short vowel at the beginning of a word is deleted. (so in  'a.ta.ra. the word vs (a)'ta.ra.ra. where the first vowel would be deleted) My entire language so far hinges on this sound change to be a thing please help?</p>

答:
This is really one of those times where the only viable answer is "it's completely up to you!"

Sometimes the stress changes, sometimes it doesn't. This depends on the stress rules of the language. In your case, I'd suggest that if you like that vowel deletion, then you should codify the rule to indicate that addition of a suffix that causes a shift of stress will also cause the deletion of unstressed short vowels.

If you don't address the rules regarding stress, then you'd leave yourself open to words like atárara remaining in the language.

This could give you some interesting consonant clusters word intially: tálipo > *talípora > tlípura. Nothing unusual there, really.


问:
Are there conlangs designed to be whispered?
We all know that natural languages can be whispered and we use whispering for several purposes, e.g., to avoid someone unwanted listening, or in order not to disturb a larger audience. But are there conlangs that are designed to whispered and don't have a "fully voiced" form?

I am aware of Dritok and I'd like to hear from more of them!

答:
Yes.

The Whispering Language is designed for communicating with deaf-mutes -- a language that can easily be lipread.

Ahtialan came to be used as a whisper language.

Xylphika only rarely demonstrates voicing.

Parseltongue seems to be compounded of sibilants and voiceless vowels.


问:
What glyph to pick from alternatives in Kēlen script?
The Kēlen alphabet as given on https://www.terjemar.net/kelen/writing.php shows variants for some letters. Here is an example:

Are there rules on when to pick which form?

答:
As far as I can tell, no such rules are mentioned anywhere.

However, the general orthography page only seems to mention one form for each letter, and those forms are also the only ones I can find in any Kelen word of the day entry I've looked at - granted, I haven't looked at all that many of them, so I may have missed some that use the alternate forms. It does, however, seem to me like those forms are the only ones in use.


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

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

For now, everything I thought about:

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

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

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

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

Any more ideas?

答:
Let's first take note that no actual Turing-complete machine has ever been built, nor can one ever be built. Modern computers are good enough approximations for most purposes, but they are in reality just very large finite state machines. A true Turing machine requires infinite storage space.

The infinite storage space of the Turing machine model is mirrored in the (computationally equivalent) lambda calculus by the capacity to define an infinite number of arbitrarily-named variables. This suggests a natural connection to human languages: the potentially-infinite set of variables in lambda calculus corresponds to the set of words in a human language, while human grammars correspond to the reduction rules of lambda calculus. Transferring that back to the Turing machine model, the infinite storage tape of a Turing machine corresponds to the potential vocabulary of a human language, while the state transition rules correspond to a grammar.

So, the first thing you need to make a human language "Turing complete"--capable of referring to or describing anything that can be referred to or described--is an infinite vocabulary! That's clearly impossible, but like real computers approximate Turing machines, we can approximate a "Turing complete conlang" simply by ensuring there is some way to create new lexical items--either strictly by as-needed de-novo coinage, or oligosynthesis, or whatever other word-formation techniques you like--and then abstract away from the vocabulary and looking at the rules for how that vocabulary is used.

Continuing the analogy, the fact that there are two such radically different formulations for computation that are nevertheless provably identical in expressive power (the lambda calculus and Turing machine--and, in fact, even more different formalisms than that, like the SKI combinator calculus, NAND machines and the One Instruction Set Computer, etc.) suggests that there may not be any single simplest set of grammar constructs that make an abstract language "complete".

Empirically, however, if you put stock in David Gil's work on so-called IMA (Isolating-Monocategorial-Associative) language, the only necessary and sufficient requirement for effective human communication (or as he puts it, enough grammar "to sail a boat") is the existence of a generic "association operator"--a way to say "the things represented by these two sub-phrases are related somehow"--and literally everything else can be handled by pragmatics.

So, you need the ability to introduce whatever words you find that you need in a given situation, and you need at least one operator that can specify arbitrary relations between things (e.g., the generic English preposition "of")--which could have a surface expression as simple as juxtaposition. Everything else is sugar, that just makes figuring out the pragmatic details easier.

Title: "Turing-completeness" in conlangs


答:
Esperanto took its vocabulary from different European language families, especially Romance and Germanic languages. Beside that it ensured the word choice did not lead to ambiguities like homonyms and plural meanings. (Slovio will not need this.)

Also there is a strong word creation mechanism in Esperanto. You will need to know a fraction of the word stems in comparison to other languages, and be able to actively create new words, that you know are correct. A child, a mentally handicapped, an aged person will all be able to be fluent in the language.

Slovio unites the Slavic languages, with appropriate simplifications. It has the advantage to be "immediately" readable by users of the Slavic family. One may compare this language with Interlingua for Romance languages. But Slavic languages seem to be even more similar.

Concrete Esperanto I consider a more powerful language, but with its claim on more heterogeneous language origins, it has coincidental choices (Tuesday = mardo, month = monato), and a hard phonetical spelling (peace = paco [pátsoh]).
Also Esperanto has its own accented letters for phoneticism: ĉĝĥĵŝŭ (she = ŝi).

And Slovio is a more acceptable, familiar language, though non-Slavic loan words risk getting purged. Though not to the degree as in Interlingua.

Myself I am Esperanto user, and merely have read a bit on Slovio. It seems there are some small reforms (?) on Slovio, say on verbs. But that is less important (than with Esperanto). As Slavic languages can have their difficult parts, which in Slovio are simplified, I would be interested how Slovio would compare to Basic English, an English without unneeded, superfluous terms, and inflections.

The Question

Slovio is based on the ideas of Esperanto. The alphabet for instance, including the x-system. Suffixes, prefixes. It is also simplified.

Remains the "ideology:"

There is the (contestable) fact that when one first learns Esperanto and then French, one learns French faster, than immediately learning French.

I see this also for Slovio: it might make learning faster and more pleasurable, so when after that learning a more complicated Slavic language, one progresses better. Not sure whether faster.

A Serbian and a Bulgarian will be able to communicate, even without Slovio. Slovio as common lingua franca? Who knows. With respect to Russian it might have a harder political stand.
It might be a more homely language.

Title: How much of Slovio is based on Esperanto?

Body:
According to Wikipedia,

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

[...]

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

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


答:
There is a esoteric programming language (neither a conlang, nor a mainstream programming language) called Piet, whose source code is in the form of pixel art. Maybe it can inspire you.

If you can accept emoji as sort-of images standing for names, maybe adding conventional images (or other Unicode characters) to serve as verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, can work.

Title: Has anyone made image based languages?

Body:
This is my first visit here. I have been writing machine/computer languages for about 8 years now. I am completely self taught and use my own tools. I have many languages that I have completed that work wonderfully.

I have a program that I use with each language that translates in real time. Everything works nicely. My languages are around 56k words each. I use a combination of Excel and various custom tools to generate the languages.Language creation is not a easy process, but it is fun.It takes me about 4 hours to create one from scratch. I believe what I am creating is more like machine languages? I am certainly not knowledgeable about how to properly create languages as most on here. Its just a fun obsession.

Lately I have been into creating image languages. Languages based on images. I was curious if anyone has ever made a image language? How did you do it? Did you create your own custom font to go along with your language? Did you program a translation tool or app? What have you experimented with?

This is kinda the package I build with my languages. I even experimented with a meme language. A silly language using 500 of the most popular internet memes in .jpg format. With a tool to translate to and from English. It would be cool if others are doing stuff like this.


问:
History of world language
If we look at world history—I am speaking a little vaguely, since it is not possible to be completely accurate. The human race began from a single region, as you can see in the bottom image.

What kind of effect did these migrations have on language?

The first humans that were in Africa had to use some kind of language for communication, and when these people migrated from Africa to European regions, the migrants created new languages. Now, what I am wondering, since they were not expert linguistics, the languages that developed in these regions must have some kind of influence from their predecessor.

If we look at the languages that exist today, they differ greatly from other regions—here I am talking about the root languages (I am not sure "root language" is the right word here, if someone knows the right word then please edit it.), like Latin, Sanskrit, etc.

So how did these changes occur? The reason why I am interested in this is, I am creating cultures from languages, you can say the influence of language on culture. The first language, Vietrian, splits in two to create Old Viereian and New Vietrian. The basic difference is: "old" is used for spells making, and "new" is used for communication, this also vague since it is a five-page long difference. New Vietrian was enchanted so that the listener listens to it in their mother-tounges. This new language was passed down as "Zirian". From Zirian, every language emerges, except for Necromancers and Elves.

答:
No language (present company excluded) is created. All languages change over time, and as parts of the same language get separated geographically (or socially), they diverge. At some point they have diverged so much that they become separate languages (after having been different dialects/sociolects of the same language).

In fact, there are no 'languages': all there is is the capability of an individual to transfer mental phenomena/thoughts into speech, and the reverse capability of transferring speech back into thoughts. This is negotiated by individuals, and if they can successfully communicate, they speak the same 'language'. My speech changes when I always speak with the same group of people, and when I then meet someone from another group I haven't seen for a while, communication might be more difficult, as we use different words or pronounce words differently.

Some languages get preserved, mainly for ritualistic reasons: if you believe that your words invoke magic, or address a deity, you are careful about not changing this, as the words might lose their power. This relates to your 'old' variant. A writing system also helps to ossify a language, so Latin and Ancient Greek still exist (but notice how modern Greek and all the Romance languages have evolved from them).

Languages are commonly traced back to proto-languages (like indo-european), but a lot of this is conjecture, and made difficult by the lack of evidence (spoken variants are not usually preserved over time).

So languages differ if they are isolated from each other. Geography is a strong factor, so mountain villages often have their own dialects. Similarly with islands (though trade would then link them up again). Social class is also important: if peasants don't talk to knights or aristocrats, their language (sociolects) will grow apart. A writing system (if there is sufficient literacy) might slow that down, especially use of different words, while purely spoken languages would diverge faster between separate groups. Isolated countries are also different from countries that are well-connected with their neighbours. Shared culture also preserves linguistic coherence.

On the other hand, social factors can also play a role: you might want to imitate a higher-prestige sociolect, and your language then changes as well. Many learners of English want to speak with a British accent, but are mostly exposed to American English through films etc, so they might speak a mixture of American and British English. These might then become different dialects and eventually languages (though English-speaking cultural domination would preserve some cohesiveness here).

So there are plenty of options for you to decide how and why your languages diverge, based on the civilisation you want to model.

Title: History of world language


答:
What you describe reminds me of Latin enclitics -que 'and' and its less used counterpart -ve 'or', both attached to the first word of the subordinate clause (except prepositions). These are both co-ordinating conjunctions, not subordinating, but the basic idea could certainly be applied to any sort of conjunction.

ego domum ii tuque Romam iisti. 'I went home and you went to Rome.'

si ruber sive purpurus fias, mirer. 'If you should turn red or if you should turn purple, I would be surprised.'

It also makes me think of participial constructions, including the ablative absolute. These allow not only simultaneity, but also anteriority and posteriority to be expressed without any conjunction at all; although they can also be paired with a conjunctive adverb in the main clause (note tamen 'nevertheless' in the second example).

domum ambulans, bovem vidi. '(While I was) walking home, I saw a cow.'

urbe capta, rex tamen altus stabat. '(Although) his city (had been) captured, the king nevertheless stood tall.'

moriturus te saluto. 'I (who am) about to die salute you.'

As a bonus, there are also Old English correlative conjunctions. In OE, the same conjunction would often be repeated at the beginning of both clauses, with their relationship denoted by word order: the main clause usually took verb-second order, whereas the dependent clause usually took verb-final order.

þā hē hām cōm, þā wæs hē glæd. 'He was glad when he got home.' (lit. 'When he home came, then was he glad.')

You could conceivably do something similar while omitting the conjunction altogether.

Title: Do we know languages which think about subordinate conjunctions (like 'as,' 'even,' 'while') differently than English does?

Body:
for my conlang, I am trying to think of how to do the subordinating conjunction 'as,' 'even,' 'while' (and related: 'even though,' etc.).

In the languages that I know well enough to use these words (English, Spanish, and Turkish), they are separate words. I wonder, do we know languages which use other constructions for 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' other than with a separate word linking two clauses?

Example:
We ate as we ran.

I have covered quite a lot of grammar so far with systems of agglutinating clitics and affixes, so I'm trying to get my mind around how 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' could be handled without separate words. I guess I could just have like a "simultaneity clitic" for 'while' like I have a "conditional clitic" for 'would'...?

This has been difficult for me to conceptualize quietly in my head, so I really appreciate input and discussion :)


问:
How should my conlang enable arbitrarily large integers to be said?
Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. It's named Leksah.

Leksah is heavily influenced by the programming language Haskell. As such, Leksah has only 3 parts of speech:

Literals, which usually correspond to nouns. These are always written titlecased. (Yep, like German!)

Functions, which usually correspond to verbs.

The particle "-el", which applies a function.

As such, Leksah has word order VSO.

Yet there is a special kind of literals: Numerals. There are infinite number of integers, and I cannot make every single new word for every integer.

Furthermore, it seems no natural languages can spell every integers. The maximum units are "vigintillion" for English, "무량대수"(無量大數) for (Sino-)Korean and so on.

That said, let me introduce some aspects of my world. The main residents of my world are angels (dubbed moderators in my world), and some of those whose "duties" are related to math (cryptologists in particular?) has obligations involving huge numbers. That's why my conlang must enable such numbers to be said.

So here's a sketch of how numerals would be dealt. Integers shall be written and said in decimal. Here's how digits are said:

0 = "Nad" (from NADAZERO)

1 = "Un" (from UNAONE)

2 = "Bis" (from BISSOTWO)

3 = "Ter" (from TERRATHREE)

4 = "Kar" (from KARTEFOUR)

5 = "Pan" (from PANTAFIVE)

6 = "Sox" (from SOXISIX)

7 = "Set" (from SETTESEVEN)

8 = "Ok" (from OKTOEIGHT)

9 = "Nov" (from NOVENINE)

Though these are literals, as an exception, they can be applied by "-el". In this context, it concatenates digits to make bigger numbers:

42 = "KarelBis"

108 = "UnelNadelOk"

65535 = "SoxelPanelPanelTerelPan"

Note that the spellings are camelcased.

Yet I think there are some disadvantages compared to natural languages:

This scheme wastes time when saying a power of 10. "10000" is spelled "UnelNadelNadelNadelNad".

This scheme is very prone for a listener to accidentally omit or duplicate a digit, especially when the same digit is repeated.

How should I modify this scheme to avoid such situations? Is there any conlang can say arbitrarily large integers?

答: For precise integers, I see no viable systematic alternative that covers them all up to arbitrary size. But often, you don't need precise integers with all digits specified, spelled out, and spoken. For unprecise integers you can design some spoken form of exponent notation (like 1.0E9 in some programming language notation).


答:
You could do what humans normally do when dealing with arbitrally long numbers - treat them as strings.

We don't normally use values higher than milion in daily life - would you dictate a 10 digit phone number* as

"Six bilions**, two hundred eighty three milions, one hundred eighty five thousands, three hundred seven"

Or as

"Six two eight three one eight five three zero seven"?

They could be grouped in sets of three digits (the holy trinity), and if you really wanted, you could prepend each set with triad ordering number (or names of saints if going for religious vibes)

"Six in 4th triad, two hundred eighty three in 3rd triad, one hundred eighty five in 2nd triad, three hundred seven in 1st triad".

OR

"Six in name of Michael, two hundred eighty three in name of Joseph, one hundred eighty five in name of Lucas, three hundred seven in name of Adam".

* Please don't call it. Using a beginning of very important constant as example.

** Definition of bilion gets finicky based where you are, here means 1000 Milions.

Title: How should my conlang enable arbitrarily large integers to be said?

Body:
Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. It's named Leksah.

Leksah is heavily influenced by the programming language Haskell. As such, Leksah has only 3 parts of speech:

Literals, which usually correspond to nouns. These are always written titlecased. (Yep, like German!)

Functions, which usually correspond to verbs.

The particle "-el", which applies a function.

As such, Leksah has word order VSO.

Yet there is a special kind of literals: Numerals. There are infinite number of integers, and I cannot make every single new word for every integer.

Furthermore, it seems no natural languages can spell every integers. The maximum units are "vigintillion" for English, "무량대수"(無量大數) for (Sino-)Korean and so on.

That said, let me introduce some aspects of my world. The main residents of my world are angels (dubbed moderators in my world), and some of those whose "duties" are related to math (cryptologists in particular?) has obligations involving huge numbers. That's why my conlang must enable such numbers to be said.

So here's a sketch of how numerals would be dealt. Integers shall be written and said in decimal. Here's how digits are said:

0 = "Nad" (from NADAZERO)

1 = "Un" (from UNAONE)

2 = "Bis" (from BISSOTWO)

3 = "Ter" (from TERRATHREE)

4 = "Kar" (from KARTEFOUR)

5 = "Pan" (from PANTAFIVE)

6 = "Sox" (from SOXISIX)

7 = "Set" (from SETTESEVEN)

8 = "Ok" (from OKTOEIGHT)

9 = "Nov" (from NOVENINE)

Though these are literals, as an exception, they can be applied by "-el". In this context, it concatenates digits to make bigger numbers:

42 = "KarelBis"

108 = "UnelNadelOk"

65535 = "SoxelPanelPanelTerelPan"

Note that the spellings are camelcased.

Yet I think there are some disadvantages compared to natural languages:

This scheme wastes time when saying a power of 10. "10000" is spelled "UnelNadelNadelNadelNad".

This scheme is very prone for a listener to accidentally omit or duplicate a digit, especially when the same digit is repeated.

How should I modify this scheme to avoid such situations? Is there any conlang can say arbitrarily large integers?


答: If -el "applies", I'm not sure about using it between digits. By that logic, KarelBis would be 4 applied to 2, so 2^4. Going that route, and assuming base 10 is the more common counting system in your world, you would need a word for 10, eg. Dix (from French). So 1001 would be DixelDixelDixUn: 10 * 10 * 10 + 1. Or these moderators could use prime numbers (important in cryptography) to communicate among themselves. If -el is the concatenator for powers, and let's say -id is the concatenator for multiplication (and no concatenator for addition), then 4837560 would be TerelBisidTeridPanidSetidDixTeridKaridDixelDixKaridDixTer. That is, 2^3 x 3^1 x 5^1 x 7^1 x 13^1 x 443^1 with 443 = 4 * 10 * 10+4 * 10+3, though I don't see a way to put that in parenthesis. Harder than spelling out the digits!