答:
Most (?) of natlangs do it differently, not by using this "infinitive prepositions". To have some real life examples:

if there is an (morphologically marked) infinitive, it is often used in this case: Slovak "Chcem ísť niekam" (want-1P go-INF somewhere) and "stacking" works as expected: "Chcem ísť jesť" (want-1P go-INF eat-INF). English is in fact also in this class (but the infinitive is marked with a "preposition").

if there is no infinitive, you can kind of assume the second verb to be a subordinate clause and use whatever you do for subordinate clauses: Bulgarian "искам да ям" (want-1P that-CONJ eat-1P).

As for the "would", that word is kind of overloaded in English, but in this case "I would go to eat" it is a conditional and that one is usually expressed differently (note there is no "to" following), either by a dedicated verbal inflection (if your language has them), e.g. Italian "andrei a mangiare" (go-1P-COND to eat-INF), where the "a" is a preposition required by the verb "andare", or a separate conditional particle. Slavic languages often do both, e.g. again Slovak "Išiel by jesť" (go-3P-COND would-COND eat-INF) where the "go" is conjugated as if in the past tense (common form for the conditionals) and the "by" is an uninflected conditional particle (I switched to the 3rd person, because 1st person requires an auxiliary verb and that would unnecessarily complicate the sentence).

Title: How do you write a language without the word "to" preceding verbs?

Body:
I am working on a fantasy language and am perplexed by the true meaning of the word "to" in English, at least when it appears before a verb, as in these sentences.

I want to go somewhere.

I want to go to eat

I want to go play

I want to go skating

I'm not sure if you can "stack" more than two verbs together ("to go to eat", or "to go play"). If you can, it would be cool to see examples. But then the main question is, how do you write these sorts of sentences in a language without "to" (essentially stacking verbs). Do you just leave out "to" altogether, and just put the verbs one after another, or are there some particles involved, etc.? What if you can stack 3+ verbs in a sequence, how does that work in languages without "to"?

Actually thinking more on it, it appears I am stacking 3 verbs (want + go + eat), and you could make it 4 with "would" (I would want to go eat). But can it get any larger? (Tangent question, main question is how to do it for arbitrarily long verb chains in a custom or natural language).


问:
Are there languages that don't prefix verbs with "to be" or "to do" in continuous or progressive aspect and the like?
I am working on a conlang and wondering how we can rework the "continuous" aspect, like present continuous, looking for how other languages implement such a grammatical verb feature. Some examples in English are:

The boy is laughing.

My parents are always making me go to school!

Chinese seems to have:

现在 - xiàn zài - now

此刻 - cǐ kè - at the moment

目前 - mù qián - at present, currently

As in one example:

他现在过得怎么样?

Tā xiànzàiguò dé zěnme yàng?

How is he doing now?

But I don't speak Chinese yet, still working with English. What are 2 or 3 examples from some other non-English language which have the continuous aspect _without the verbs "to do" or "to be" around them, like we have in English?

I would like to say:

He eating.

He wearing clothes.

Why do we need the "to be" as in is in there to make it sound right in English? Is that just an English quirk? Are there languages that have it exactly like I've written? Or even better, where the -ing is itself also a separate word/particle, like in this pseudo-gloss:

```<code>He eat <ASP.continous>
</code>```

I think Chinese has continuous aspect separate, but not sure about the "to be" part preceding it.

Are there languages which do continuous aspect very differently than even these 2 approaches I've described? For example, maybe they have a new word instead of a "to be" form prefixing the main continuous verb, or perhaps they do something else entirely.

I guess I could also ask the same for the perfect aspect, if there are languages which don't precede verbs with "to have" in this context.

"I have always guided him".

答:
Note that continuous aspect is kind of optional. Many languages don't express it at all by default, though there are always means to express it when emphasised or needed. Here's an example from a natural language (German):

Er geht zur Schule "He goes to school" (habitual)/ "He is going to school" (continuous); depending on context.

Er geht gerade zur Schule "He is going to school right now" (continuous aspect emphasised through the adverb gerade, here translated as "right now".

In this example there is no special gramatical form for the continuous aspect, it is only highlighted by use of an adverb. Note that gerade also works in other tenses, like

Er ging gerade zur Schule, als ... "He was going to school, when  ..."

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
Saying "hello" in khuzdul
Khuzdul, Tolkien's mysterious dwarvish language, is limited in vocabulary (we don't know most of the words) and I can't find hello anywhere. Some notes:

According to this, "good" is "gamut" and "day" is "manan", so "gamut manan" might sort of convey what I'm looking for. (On the other hand, I have no idea if the grammar here is correct.)

This lists neither "gamut" nor "manan" as valid words in Khuzdul, so a reliable dictionary also seems to be somewhat in demand.

This gives "huglgla" as hello. Again, this is listed in neither of the above links.

So, how would you say hello in Khuzdul? Are either of the above three sources reliable? The middle link seems to be closest to Tolkien's actual works, and seems to be cited decently frequently, but perhaps work has been done since that was published.

答:
Well, from what we can glean out of the given texts, I'd be looking for something more like "at your service" rather than "good day".

I know the movies aren't canon, but Jackson depicts the Dwarves as not really comprehending Bilbo when tries to "good morning" them. And Gandalf's retort is classic. That greeting might be a cultural artifact of the Shire.

I wouldn't place too much faith in the lists you link to. They're fan art, which is fine as far as it goes. Especially the third one: that's just horrible garbled English. I mean really: Baruk Khazâd! next to Haw aru tauu? - - - I should think it would be difficult to make a worse reconstruction of Khuzdul.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0

Title: Saying "hello" in khuzdul


问:
How to handle denoting the noun in a sentence when there are noun-modifiers present?
I am working on a conlang and considering ways to denote a noun in a sentence. It's easy to handle single-word nouns (translating from English), because, well, they are one word. An example of a single word noun is "tree". In my case, I just prefix them with a. But it gets more complex when you consider more complex multi-word nouns. Some examples include:

The big old tree.

The big old oak tree.

The tree leaf forest.

The dirt path.

The dirt path area.

The town grocery store.

All my examples are where there is a main noun at the end, and everything else comes after the The (it prefixes the noun). But I'm sure there are examples you could come up with where everything else comes after (or surrounds) the key noun, I can't think of any off the top of my head for English.

The first one consists of what are traditionally called adjectives I think. As big and old are just simple adjectives. Adjectives are known as "noun modifiers". In my foobar (fake, for demonstration purposes) conlang, adjectives are prefixed with u, so it makes it easy: ubig uold atree. Cool, that should work...

But then it gets more complicated. "Oak tree" is a type of thing. You could say "oak" is an adjective, but is it really? I don't know for sure.

Then it gets even more complicated. The phrase tree leaf forest should probably be written tree-leaf forest, but when speaking you don't denote hyphens, so there's that. But all 3 of these words themselves (standalone) are nouns ("tree", "leaf", and "forest"). So do I mark them as noun-after-noun, or a bunch of adjectives followed by a single trailing noun. That is the key question I am asking, is it the pattern (in English or any other language), that the noun is either by definition or by some principle a single word (like the trailing forest in tree leaf forest) and the rest are adjectives? Or how should we think of this?

The phrase dirt path area has the same exact problem. What is to be a noun, what is to be a noun-modifier? Because "old" and "dirt" are very different, "old" on its own is an adjective/noun-modifier, while "dirt" on its own is a noun ("old path forest" vs. "dirt path forest"), shouldn't they be distinguished in some way in theory? By that I mean, grammatically classified differently?

In the last case, "grocery store" is the noun, so there is a case where actually, it's not the trailing single one-word noun that should be marked as a noun, it is the 2 word phrase "grocery store" that should be marked as a whole noun. But preceding "grocery store" is "town", which is also (standalone) a noun, but in this case acting as an adjective. But really, "grocery" is the "type" of store, so store is the noun, and grocery is the adjective.

I'm sure there are cases where the noun is 3 words, but I can't think of any ("coffee shop" is 2, "full moon", or perhaps 3 would be "assistant state secretary"). Oh but then you have "assistant state secretary Jane Doe". In the first case you have "secretary" as the trailing noun ("assistant", and "state", being adjectives I guess?), but in the second one "secretary" is now an adjective? And "Jane Doe" is the noun?

Basically the question is, what counts as a noun when there are other seemingly-"modifiers" present around the noun, and what counts as a modifier?

答:
What you call "multi-word nouns" are usually called "noun phrases". It is a peculiarity of English (but not uncommon; isolating languages tend to do this, see Chinese) that you can stack nouns into a noun phrase, with a head and the rest of the nouns as modifiers.

Inflectional languages tend to mark the part of speech of words, and there is no ambiguity between adjectives as modifiers (often in grammatical category agreement with the noun), and a noun (in the appropriate case, usually  genitive or an equivalent). In the former case, you can often turn a modifying noun into an adjective by an appropriate morphological derivation.

I'm sure there are cases where the noun is 3 words, but I can't think of any

Grave sex scandal - one interpretation considers grave to be an adjective, the other one a noun (and conveys a rather macabre meaning).

To turn it into a concrete example, in Esperanto grava seksa skandalo  would be ADJ-ADJ-NOUN, but you could also use (somewhat stiff) grava skandalo de sekso ADJ-NOUN-NOUN_GEN (lit. grave scandal of sex); the macabre meaning would be covered in seksa skandalo de tombo (sex scandal of (a) grave), or using the usual morphological process to turn nouns into adjectives, tomba seksa skandalo. Although Esperanto speakers would likely exploit the agglutinative properties of the language and use seksskandalo if it were not for the difficult -kssk- consonant cluster.


问:
How to break out of the English mold when creating a conlang (specifically in regards to word modifiers)?
I am working on a conlang. I have to some degree (i.e. a little bit) studied the grammar of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, and know Spanish relatively well in comparison from school, though my main language is obviously English. By "study", I don't know all of the grammatical structures of these languages, but I get some of the basics and have gathered inspiration from them. I have decided I like Chinese (Mandarin) and Vietnamese for the "atomicity" (analytical language), where every word is an atom and there are no word conjugations or the like, even for things like making it past tense ("wanted" vs. "want" in English).

But such an atomic/analytic language comes at a cost, you have an extra word for very common things like the past tense of a verb. So I am making some of these common things be turned into a suffix. But it turns out, just by making tenses, plurals, and a few other things into suffixes, it is already starting to look a lot like English  or Spanish. Also, I learned from Hebrew that they have the definite article (like "the" equivalent) prefix every word if you have a complex noun. I think that is repetitive, so I like the way English does it just saying "the" once at the beginning of a phrase. Now, Chinese doesn't use "the" at all, they omit the word entirely. I don't really like losing that extra information (even though in theory you can regain it from context, but I don't know Chinese well enough to see how this really feels omitting the word "the"). So I am opting to have the concept of "the".

Sanskrit has way more verb and noun inflections, but I want to keep most of the words atomic so I don't do anywhere near as many as they do.

That gets us through the words pretty much.

After all of this, we are left with sentence structure. I like the idea of SVO rather than VSO or VOS because SVO seems like (in principle) it flows from one thing to the next, like a programming language. You start with the subject, it "pipes" into the verb as input, and then you pipe in the object from the other side. I mean technically with "piping" you might think "SOV" might make more sense, but splitting the subject and object with a verb means it's easier to distinguish between them. But this is, again, like how English (and Spanish and Chinese) does it. So it seems like I haven't even looked at other languages to mix it up and not be so "English-centric".

So then my sentences are basically like English in the end (since I have "the", "a", and SVO, with a few word suffixes):

```<code><the> <tree> <fall> <down>
</code>```

However, this gets to the main question. The last real big piece is how to deal with noun modifiers ("adjectives") and verb modifiers ("adverbs"). In English, they appear all over the place in the sentence. Sometimes they appear before the word ("the tree actually fell"), sometimes after ("the tree fell down"). Sometimes both ("the tree actually fell down"). That is for adverbs, but for adjectives too ("I see the *big tree", which I guess is an attributive adjective, vs. predicative adjectives which I can't think of an example of adjective appearing after a noun).

So I am wondering, what are all the ways these "inspiration" languages (in terms of my project) handle adjectives/adverbs ("modifiers")? Are there any languages which greatly restrict their placement in the sentence to only one position (either before or after the noun/verb)? If so, what are some examples in either Chinese, Vietnamese, Sanskrit, and/or Hebrew (or all 4 of them), of if they don't have that feature, what is a language that does (with an example)? If there is a good conlang which demonstrates it, that would be an interesting comment too.

Basically I am trying to not make this language feel like "I just slightly modified English". I thought about the word/sentence features of many other languages and feel I like this structure I have landed on the best so far, but there is still room for improvement and getting better/more influence from these other few languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Sanskrit).

答:
In the long term, learning another language reasonably well is probably the only way to get a "real feel" for how things can sound natural or not in other languages. That's a very ambitious project though, and there are easier things you can do that take you a long way!

Separate what to say from how to say it.

For instance: Being a native English speaker, you are accustomed to having a definite article in your language, as you like being able to separate "the cat" from just any other cat in every sentence. Fine. You know what you want to say. If you want your language to seem more exotic, ask yourself if the way the English language expresses this feature is the only way, or if you could come up with something else.

My native language is Swedish, and we also make the distinction between definite and indefinite. We don't have a word like your "the", however, but instead use different endings to convey the same meaning. Much like English does with the plural. Consider the following translations from English to Swedish.

"cat" -> "katt", "the cat" -> "katten", "cats" -> "katter", "the cats" -> "katterna"

When I started learning English at school I was faced with this strange structure (the English "the"), but the underlying concept was familiar. I could thus relatively seamlessly translate one construction to the other. If my native language had not had the same distinction it would likely have been much harder.

You mention that you know some Spanish, and though definite articles work the same you could observe differences from English there as well. One is that pronouns are not necessary in a Spanish sentence, since this information is expressed in the verb endings. "Voy a comer" translates readily to "I'm going to eat", but take a look at the two sentences and you'll find they are very different. The Spanish one has no pronoun. The English one has the unit "I'm", which could either be interpreted as a pronoun and a verb not present in the Spanish one, or as a unit corresponding to Spanish "soy". Then follows the word "going" which has the same basic meaning as Spanish "voy", a word that is used in the translation, but in a completely different form. You could translate "voy" to the English unit "I'll" and make the whole sentence "I'll eat", but even then that doesn't constitute an exact word-by-word translation as the word "a" would have been taken out.

So: How could you express your desired distinction between definite and indefinite? One way would be to keep the article, but place it after the noun instead. You could use suffixes, like Scandinavian languages, or why not prefixes? Word order? Keep this particular feature the same as in English, but change something else? You have lots of possibilities!

The same procedure can be used for other things you want your language to express.

A comment on SVO word order:

Are you really sure your interpreting this as the most logical word order has noting to do with English being a SVO language? Couldn't you just as well argue that verb-first structures are "more like programming" in that you first state a function and then its inputs? And if not, wouldn't  your comparison to piping fit better with OVS word order? If I tell my terminal to "ls | grep .pdf" it first gets the list of files, the "object", and then feeds this to grep, which could be seen as either the subject or the verb, which filters out the lines containing ".pdf".


问:
How to create words which will be unambiguously parsable in a conlang?
Right now I am working on this, a list of words to translate into the conlang. At first I started by manually deriving the words from Hebrew/Arabic/Sanskrit/Greek/Latin/English/Spanish, but then found it to be too tedious and time-consuming, so I started just randomly assigning many of the words to a set of precomputed words which fit a specific pattern. The patterns are (c = consonant, v = vowel):

cv (2 letters, like "do")

cvc (3 letters, like "bol")

ccvc (4 letters, like "gran")

cvcc (4 letters, like "bord")

ccvcc (5 letters, like "start")

cvcvc (5 letters, like "tekal")

Everything except the 2-letter words is a "base" word form, which starts and ends with a consonant. Then there are these rules:

suffix -a: make it into a noun

suffix -i: make it into a verb

suffix -o: make it into a "feature" (modifier/adjective)

suffix -aha: make noun into plural

suffix -iha: make verb into continuous (like "-ing")

suffix -iho: make verb into past tense (like "-ed")

suffix -ihi: make verb into future tense (like "will x")

suffix -oho: make feature into an adverb (like "-ly")

Then you can start combining words to make more complex words. There are things like -tion (capturing the result of action, written as xom by itself), or -er (the person performing the action, written as pum by itself). So you have for example:

meki: create

mekixoma: creation

mekipuma: creator

This seems all fine and well, with little ambiguity so far. But then I start running into trouble with the following I think.

prefix na-: meaning not.

nav: number 9 (happens to start with na-, but not prefixed with na-).

fod: "fold"

rod: "path" or "road"

So you can have the word phrase "ninefold path" as <navo> (feature/adjective) <fodo> (feature/adjective) <roda> (noun), or navofodoroda.

All is fine and well so far. We separate the words with their POS tag basically.

But now say we add a word like vofod (cvcvc), which isn't derived from "fold" (fod), but means voice. And say we want to say "without voice path", that would be the same then! navofodoroda. So now there is ambiguity!

Darn, how do I avoid this? I already have a pretty strict word-formation structure/system, but it seems to break down even then. I don't get how to avoid such ambiguity.

Perhaps I could put constraints on what letters can be used to create words, but that seems like a nightmare, how do I know what to prevent and where? In that case, no word other than na could start with or contain na-. But that seems quite restrictive, I don't know. Do other natural languages do such a thing (or conlangs)?

If I do that, how many different ways am I going to have to put constraints on word structure, and given what? What are the key words that will restrict other word formations? I have no idea if this is the right track to go down... Any other suggestions?

It is like fourier analysis, it has the word four in it, but it doesn't mean "four" the number. Somehow you are able to tell what it should mean. Or "dominican republic", you have the name "dom" (dominic), but don't think of this as containing it. And the word 'republic' which contains "re" and "public", but it has nothing to do with re + public directly. What are some other examples like this? I can't think of many? Or "nineveh" (assyrian empire), does not mean "nine" + "veh". But we don't have a same word "nine+veh" that means something else, so we never encounter this problem I'm solving. Hoping for some guidance on how to solve this.

答:
It may worth to have a closer look at Lojban. It has a lot of devices implemented to ensure that any legal stream of sounds can be uniquely parsed into words and that compound words can be uniquely split into components. This is done by ascribing special phonotactics to each part of speech, and by adding devices like spoken quotation marks.

Lojban does not prevent semantic ambiguity, however: it allows the speakers to be deliberately vague or ambiguous in what they say.


问:
How to handle the "key" *focusing* words in a Conlang, like the, me, we, here, this, etc.?
So I have a burgeoning conlang that I've been playing around with, still stuck on the word portion (it has been several months). But every now and then I can take a little breather and work on some sentence structures. Today is one of those days.

It turns out, I have boiled words down to one or two syllable words (which gives about 150k possibilities before compound words take shape). But there are 42 words which just seem special for some reason, and I have made them into the only 2 letter words in the conlang:

```<code>bo,you
da,here
de,of
di,there
do,i
du,by
fa,this
faya,these
fi,that
fiya,those
fe,than
fu,sure
ga,ouch
go,it
gu,but
he,hey
ka,a
ke,okay
la,the
me,what
mu,just
na,no
pe,why
pa,then
pi,if
se,when
ta,at
te,who
tu,to
ve,how
vi,and
vu,or
we,where
wo,we
ya,yes
ye,cheer
zo,they
xo,should
ko,could
po,would
so,so
</code>```

I can probably remove should/could/would from the list, and the expressions "hey" and "yeah", and yes and no. But that leaves us with basic logic (and/or), and the pronouns, and this/that, here/there, the question words (who what when, etc.), and "at", "of", and "the" and "a". That's mostly it.

I am thinking of making ma mean "I", and then maya mean "we" (-ya being a pluralizing suffix). But I haven't seen this multi-syllabic form of pronouns in other languages, so I feel like I'm going out on a shaky limb. Any inspiration in this regards?

But pretty much every other concept other than these I treat as 1 of 4 things: noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. But these last ones, they seem different. Especially the pronouns.

How else can these be handled and dealt with outside of the English paradigm? Not only in terms of where they exist in a sentence (or as part of a word variation), but if they are multisyllabic and/or built out of smaller parts, and/or are conjugated to have plurals or other forms. Are they always treated so specially in languages, or in some languages are they no different than nouns or verbs? That's the main crux of my question. How else can these be dealt with outside of English, treating them as more primary-focused "objects" than tangential "pronouns" or "determiners", etc.

Also sort of tangential, I am wondering why we have so many variations of "I" (me, my, mine, myself, I, at least!). Where can I find more information on why these exist, and how other languages treat them? Do other languages have more, or fewer, forms than these 5? Why or why not?

Side note, it is extremely hard to search the web for "how do other languages handle I", since it's only one letter, google is like Psht! remove it from the search param and find nothing haha.

答:
Wikipedia is a good place to start, and several languages such as Japanese and Chinese have dedicated pages for their pronoun system. Japanese, as it so happens, has the structure you seek where suffixes make pronouns plural: 'Watashi' means 'I', while 'watashi-tachi' means 'we', etc. For many other languages, like Swahili and Arabic, there are good sections on pronouns in the Wikipedia pages for their grammars.

It's worth noting also, that many languages don't use pronouns as much, or use them in a different way than English does. You could for instance use verb forms to convey who is doing the verb (like Spanish does to some extent), modify the nouns to signal that they are being possessed, and so on.


答:
Many languages use prosody to indicate separation between words. In English, for example, almost all words have a single primary stress in them. So when you hear another primary stress, you know there's been a word boundary; this is how you can tell the difference between "greenhouse" and "green house". In Latin, similarly, every word has a single ictus, which appears at a well-defined position following certain rules. Given a stream of syllables in Latin, the ictus will tell you unambiguously where to divide them into words.

Many languages also have explicit marking when nouns are combined into larger noun phrases. This might be a case marking, like in Ancient Greek and Sumerian, or it might be an extra word (often called a "particle"), like in Japanese and Swahili, or it might be a phonological change, like in Akkadian and Egyptian.

Finally, natural languages always have a lot of redundancy in them (which is a feature, not a bug). Most arbitrary strings of phonemes are not meaningful, and in general, changing the grouping of phonemes in a sentence will not produce a meaningful result. (For example, "meaningful" has meaning, "me ningf ull" does not.)

Title: How to create words which will be unambiguously parsable in a conlang?

Body:
Right now I am working on this, a list of words to translate into the conlang. At first I started by manually deriving the words from Hebrew/Arabic/Sanskrit/Greek/Latin/English/Spanish, but then found it to be too tedious and time-consuming, so I started just randomly assigning many of the words to a set of precomputed words which fit a specific pattern. The patterns are (c = consonant, v = vowel):

cv (2 letters, like "do")

cvc (3 letters, like "bol")

ccvc (4 letters, like "gran")

cvcc (4 letters, like "bord")

ccvcc (5 letters, like "start")

cvcvc (5 letters, like "tekal")

Everything except the 2-letter words is a "base" word form, which starts and ends with a consonant. Then there are these rules:

suffix -a: make it into a noun

suffix -i: make it into a verb

suffix -o: make it into a "feature" (modifier/adjective)

suffix -aha: make noun into plural

suffix -iha: make verb into continuous (like "-ing")

suffix -iho: make verb into past tense (like "-ed")

suffix -ihi: make verb into future tense (like "will x")

suffix -oho: make feature into an adverb (like "-ly")

Then you can start combining words to make more complex words. There are things like -tion (capturing the result of action, written as xom by itself), or -er (the person performing the action, written as pum by itself). So you have for example:

meki: create

mekixoma: creation

mekipuma: creator

This seems all fine and well, with little ambiguity so far. But then I start running into trouble with the following I think.

prefix na-: meaning not.

nav: number 9 (happens to start with na-, but not prefixed with na-).

fod: "fold"

rod: "path" or "road"

So you can have the word phrase "ninefold path" as <navo> (feature/adjective) <fodo> (feature/adjective) <roda> (noun), or navofodoroda.

All is fine and well so far. We separate the words with their POS tag basically.

But now say we add a word like vofod (cvcvc), which isn't derived from "fold" (fod), but means voice. And say we want to say "without voice path", that would be the same then! navofodoroda. So now there is ambiguity!

Darn, how do I avoid this? I already have a pretty strict word-formation structure/system, but it seems to break down even then. I don't get how to avoid such ambiguity.

Perhaps I could put constraints on what letters can be used to create words, but that seems like a nightmare, how do I know what to prevent and where? In that case, no word other than na could start with or contain na-. But that seems quite restrictive, I don't know. Do other natural languages do such a thing (or conlangs)?

If I do that, how many different ways am I going to have to put constraints on word structure, and given what? What are the key words that will restrict other word formations? I have no idea if this is the right track to go down... Any other suggestions?

It is like fourier analysis, it has the word four in it, but it doesn't mean "four" the number. Somehow you are able to tell what it should mean. Or "dominican republic", you have the name "dom" (dominic), but don't think of this as containing it. And the word 'republic' which contains "re" and "public", but it has nothing to do with re + public directly. What are some other examples like this? I can't think of many? Or "nineveh" (assyrian empire), does not mean "nine" + "veh". But we don't have a same word "nine+veh" that means something else, so we never encounter this problem I'm solving. Hoping for some guidance on how to solve this.


答:
Are they always treated so specially in languages, or in some languages are they no different than nouns or verbs? That's the main crux of my question. How else can these be dealt with outside of English, treating them as more primary-focused "objects" than tangential "pronouns" or "determiners", etc.

See Vietnamese, it almost does not have personal pronouns, using kinship nouns instead (one can imagine  such a language can lose whatever pronouns remain and then we'll have a completely pronoun-less language).

Also check signed languages, their concept of pronouns is interesting (and not just personal pronouns).

Also sort of tangential, I am wondering why we have so many variations of "I" (me, my, mine, myself, I, at least!). Where can I find more information on why these exist, and how other languages treat them? Do other languages have more, or fewer, forms than these 5? Why or why not?

Of course, fully inflected languages usually inflect the pronoun, and often the possessive as well - e.g. in Slovak, you 6 cases for the pronoun, 6 cases times 3 genders times 2 numbers (=36 forms) for the possessive (in 1st and 2nd person, the gender is marked for the possessee, but in the 3rd person, for the possessor and the possessive does not inflect, to make things more interesting).

In Hungarian, the inflection of personal pronouns is turned head over heels - it is the agglutinative suffix that is inflected by the pronoun. E.g. the dative suffix is -nek (simpifying a bit), but the dative of én (I) is nekem.

Then there are languages with a 4th person (obviative) to mark "less important (than 3rd person)" entities in a sentence.

Title: How to handle the "key" *focusing* words in a Conlang, like the, me, we, here, this, etc.?

Body:
So I have a burgeoning conlang that I've been playing around with, still stuck on the word portion (it has been several months). But every now and then I can take a little breather and work on some sentence structures. Today is one of those days.

It turns out, I have boiled words down to one or two syllable words (which gives about 150k possibilities before compound words take shape). But there are 42 words which just seem special for some reason, and I have made them into the only 2 letter words in the conlang:

```<code>bo,you
da,here
de,of
di,there
do,i
du,by
fa,this
faya,these
fi,that
fiya,those
fe,than
fu,sure
ga,ouch
go,it
gu,but
he,hey
ka,a
ke,okay
la,the
me,what
mu,just
na,no
pe,why
pa,then
pi,if
se,when
ta,at
te,who
tu,to
ve,how
vi,and
vu,or
we,where
wo,we
ya,yes
ye,cheer
zo,they
xo,should
ko,could
po,would
so,so
</code>```

I can probably remove should/could/would from the list, and the expressions "hey" and "yeah", and yes and no. But that leaves us with basic logic (and/or), and the pronouns, and this/that, here/there, the question words (who what when, etc.), and "at", "of", and "the" and "a". That's mostly it.

I am thinking of making ma mean "I", and then maya mean "we" (-ya being a pluralizing suffix). But I haven't seen this multi-syllabic form of pronouns in other languages, so I feel like I'm going out on a shaky limb. Any inspiration in this regards?

But pretty much every other concept other than these I treat as 1 of 4 things: noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. But these last ones, they seem different. Especially the pronouns.

How else can these be handled and dealt with outside of the English paradigm? Not only in terms of where they exist in a sentence (or as part of a word variation), but if they are multisyllabic and/or built out of smaller parts, and/or are conjugated to have plurals or other forms. Are they always treated so specially in languages, or in some languages are they no different than nouns or verbs? That's the main crux of my question. How else can these be dealt with outside of English, treating them as more primary-focused "objects" than tangential "pronouns" or "determiners", etc.

Also sort of tangential, I am wondering why we have so many variations of "I" (me, my, mine, myself, I, at least!). Where can I find more information on why these exist, and how other languages treat them? Do other languages have more, or fewer, forms than these 5? Why or why not?

Side note, it is extremely hard to search the web for "how do other languages handle I", since it's only one letter, google is like Psht! remove it from the search param and find nothing haha.


答:
English has two main ways of indicating the tense/aspect/mood/etc of a verb.

Mood (a real event vs a hypothetical, etc) is indicated by a word at the very beginning of the verb phrase: can, should, might, may, etc. Future time is also indicated this way ("will"). Past vs non-past doesn't get an explicit marking here, but the next verb after this point in the sentence changes its form, so syntacticians generally say there's an invisible element which exists in that position and tells the next verb to change its form. This position in the sentence is generally called "T", for "tense".

Aspect and voice, on the other hand, are indicated by auxiliary verbs in between "T" and the verb: it was written, it was being written, it had been being written. This position in the sentence is sometimes called "Aux", for "auxiliary".

Some syntacticians claim that this is universally true. All languages work like English and have a "T" position and an "Aux" position and the "Aux" position is used to indicate aspect and voice. According to these syntacticians, if a language doesn't indicate aspect with an auxiliary, it's because there's actually an invisible hidden auxiliary, it's there but we can't see it. You may have run into these claims before.

Many other syntacticians, though, think this is stupid. Because many languages really don't seem to have auxiliary verbs for aspect like English does. In Latin and Ancient Greek, for example, it's marked directly on the verb:

Currebam "I was running", cucurrī "I ran"

Ἔφευγον "I was running", ἔφυγον "I ran"

Other languages, such as German (see jk's answer for examples), don't have any explicit marking for this sort of aspect distinction at all.

Still others use something other than an auxiliary verb. Egyptian uses a preposition:

jw.f ꜣtp ꜥꜣ.f "he loads up his donkey", jw.f ḥr ꜣtp ꜥꜣ.f "he is loading up his donkey"

Ḥr is a preposition literally meaning "on", derived from a noun meaning "face" or "surface".

If you don't go for the "every language actually works exactly like English" theory (most linguists nowadays don't), I suspect English is in the minority here. Auxiliary verbs for aspectual information show up in some other non-English languages as well, such as Lingála, but most languages either put the marking directly on the verb, or don't mark it explicitly at all.

Title: Are there languages that don't prefix verbs with "to be" or "to do" in continuous or progressive aspect and the like?

Body:
I am working on a conlang and wondering how we can rework the "continuous" aspect, like present continuous, looking for how other languages implement such a grammatical verb feature. Some examples in English are:

The boy is laughing.

My parents are always making me go to school!

Chinese seems to have:

现在 - xiàn zài - now

此刻 - cǐ kè - at the moment

目前 - mù qián - at present, currently

As in one example:

他现在过得怎么样?

Tā xiànzàiguò dé zěnme yàng?

How is he doing now?

But I don't speak Chinese yet, still working with English. What are 2 or 3 examples from some other non-English language which have the continuous aspect _without the verbs "to do" or "to be" around them, like we have in English?

I would like to say:

He eating.

He wearing clothes.

Why do we need the "to be" as in is in there to make it sound right in English? Is that just an English quirk? Are there languages that have it exactly like I've written? Or even better, where the -ing is itself also a separate word/particle, like in this pseudo-gloss:

```<code>He eat <ASP.continous>
</code>```

I think Chinese has continuous aspect separate, but not sure about the "to be" part preceding it.

Are there languages which do continuous aspect very differently than even these 2 approaches I've described? For example, maybe they have a new word instead of a "to be" form prefixing the main continuous verb, or perhaps they do something else entirely.

I guess I could also ask the same for the perfect aspect, if there are languages which don't precede verbs with "to have" in this context.

"I have always guided him".


问:
How long do words get in other languages, and how hard are long words to say or read?
So I have a list of basic words in my budding conlang. I would like to construct compound words now, like we do with Latin/Greek in English (e.g. "hyacinthoides"). One word I can create in this conlang is "third fingered abnormality":

```<code>saloyowizitxihawinanoyotxa
</code>```

That is 12 syllables(!) How do I tell if these compound words are too hard to say and/or remember? There is a word separator, -wi-, in that word, so you can tell how it is spliced together. Another option is to use hyphens, but I love how in English we have these long chemical/other names which are one word no hyphens, and I want to do similarly.

I tried asking about the languages with the longest words (like Latin/Greek in English), but it seems to come down to aggutinativity. Then what is it like speaking an agglutinative language with very long words in a long sentence, is it easy to understand? How about reading comprehension, is it also easy to read? Finally, what are some examples of languages which aren't agglutinative that have long words with as many syllables as my word above?

I think Sanskrit may be a close contender for long words. This list also helps.

答:
The complexity of a pronouncing a word does not depend on its length, but more on its phonological structure. Even long words in a language you are familiar with will be quite easy to pronounce (provided you can remember them), whereas short words in languages with a very different phonology could be much harder.

In agglutinative languages you have the equivalent of a sentence or phrase in one word; that is essentially the same as writing a sentence in English without spaces and saying that -- this should not be any more difficult than saying the sentences in the 'normal' way.

The compound word in your language is only hard because to people not knowing the language it is a meaningless collection of letters. If you had "thirdfingeredabnormality", this would be easy to say for any English speaker, as you can make sense of groups of letters. If I gave you "Dreifingrigebesonderheit" (an approximate German translation), it's still easy for me (as I speak German), and you might find it easier (even if you did not speak German yourself) because there is some resemblance to English morphemes.

So, to summarise, it's familiarity, not length, which is the main factor in determining how difficult something is to pronounce. And reading comprehension of long words is fine, as long as you can make sense of their components, just as you make sense of the words in a (long) sentence.

For non-agglutinative languages: German forms compounds by simply joining words together (possible with linking morphemes), where English links them but keeps spaces or hyphenation. This is rarely taken to extremes, but you can form quite long words. One infamous example is the Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän, the "captain of the Danube steam boat company". You could easily expand it to refer to his daughter, the Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänstochter, etc. Any German speaker would immediately understand the meaning of those words without difficulty.


问:
What are some key languages which don't have distinctions between me, myself, and I?
I am working on a conlang and would like to treat "I" or "me" or "myself" as one thing, "me", as a noun I guess. Are there languages that do this, that don't have these distinctions? If so, what are some key examples? As a bonus, what are some things they do instead, or where can I look for more information?

I want to say something like:

me - see - tree

me - see - the - tree

But have it sound, well, not so caveperson like. So wondering if other languages do this, and how they can "cope" without these distinctions/features.

答:
To add on to Tristan's answer, most Bantu languages also lack case.

In Swahili, for example, mimi can mean either "I" or "me", yeye either "he" or "him" (or "she" or "her" or…), and so on. Word order makes the relationship clear: objects come after the verb, subjects come before. So even ignoring agreement marking, it's clear that mimi ninapenda yeye means "I love him", not "he loves me".

Swahili also allows pronouns to be incorporated into the verb itself, as an alternate way of indicating subjects and objects. For example, in ninampenda, the ni means the subject is first person singular, and the m means the object is third person singular: again clearly "I love him" rather than "he loves me".

English has a few lingering relics of case marking on pronouns, but if you look at nouns, it should be clear that they're not really necessary. In a sentence like "the scientist loves the engineer", there's no case marking at all, but it's completely unambiguous who's the subject and who's the object. The fact that we still have different forms for "I" versus "me" is more a historical accident than anything that actually carries functional load.


问:
What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
The conlang I am working on has very strict rules on word formation:

They must start and end with a consonant

They can only have single vowels between consonants (which can be in consonant clusters).

They can't end in h, w, or y (since they don't make a highly distinct word-ending sound.

The only use a smallish subset of consonants (missing the "th" sounds, the retroflex sounds, etc.).

End word with vowel to convert it into a noun/verb/adjective (convert it into speakable form).

But, I want to be able to talk about other languages in the conlang, hence the tone guide. That will make it so you can say the "j" in "measure" even though that is not in the consonant inventory. And other sounds as well. And you should be able to pronounce any sound from any language. But that's about as far as I want to go.

I don't want to allow you to use any word from any language in a sentence necessarily (at least I don't think so as of this time). So if you have a word with the "harsh h" sound like in Hebrew/Arabic, you need to do some slight transforming of it before it fits into the language. Likewise, it only supports 5 vowels in the main language, although you can say 15+ vowel variations to cover all languages when speaking about other languages. However, the "e" sound in English "pet" is, for example, not in the vowel inventory, so you might have to change it to "peyt" (like Spanish accent) or something along those lines.

The question is though, how would you absorb new words into the language? What is the process? Say I give a guide to someone to learn this language. They go out and speak it in front of friends. They are out to a sushi dinner. Now they want to say "maguro" or "sashimi" (well, it turns out these words fit well into the language, sort of). But imagine these words didn't fit in, what would they do? There must be rules of some sort to guide the transformation of any word, is that correct? How do natural languages do it, or a few of them covering the different approaches?

Basically, I am wondering if it would be better to "borrow" the word (morphing it slightly), or just come up with a completely new word and map it to the foreign word.

I would like to control exactly how each word/meaning is sounded out. So sushi would be like "sushim" as the base (start and end with a consonant, single vowels in between), and "sushima" as the food, etc.. (end with vowel to convert into speakable word from base word). But what about more complicated words like "hannukah" with the harsh h (I am pretty sure it has a harsh h, correct me if I'm wrong), or some french word with the guttural r sort of sound, or "crouch" with the compound vowel sound. Basically, wondering what sort of things I should put into place so you can use words from other languages quickly and painlessly, yet they still fit into the language paradigms/rules.

Another example would be proper names like the store Macy's, or Outback, those words don't fit directly into the conlang, so how would they be transformed or redone?

答:
If you want to be strict, coerce them into your phonological rules.

Macy's: that would fit as macys; if /y/ is not a vowel, then macis

Outback: start with a consonant, so use one that is not too pronounced, such as /h/: hotback [*]. Also drop the /u/ from the diphthong. Or use hatback if your /a/ is pronounced more open (in that case hatbeck might work better). Looking at Elopa below, you could also use holdback to approximate the English pronunciation.

It will look strange, but not to speakers of your own language.

Here are some examples of country names from toki pona (leaving out the ma signifier):

Amerika: Amelika

Africa: Apika

Europe: Elopa

Egypt: Masu - if you can't coerce it, come up with a new word

Canada: Kanata

Grenada: Kenata - sometimes you might end up with identical forms for different places/people: that's not a problem, happens in natural languages as well.

Greece: Elena - you can also use the 'local' name for a country as a starting point.

[*] This is similar to Spanish speakers sometimes adding an initial schwa sound when words start with a consonant when speaking English.


问:
How do swear words work in real languages?
How many swear words should you have in a conlang, and how are they designed? What is their purpose really? And should any other "regular" words be constructed out of them? Like if "bar" was a swear word, then "foobar" was a goose or "barfoo" was a house, is that a problem? Also, what are swear words actually, do they have a consistent meaning across cultures?

答: Swear words can be indeed a problem for the rest of the vocabulary. German once had a whole wealth of verbal compounds with the prefix after-. They fell out of usage when the noun After "anus" became widely used a medical term. The process behind this is called taboo.


问:
How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there?
I've seen several variations of Tolkien's Elvish around, with different names, such as Sindarin and Q(u)enya.

How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there, and how do they differ from one another?

答:
It's a tough question, and one that may be impossible to answer. There are tons of references all over the internet, such as Wikipedia (whose sources look decent on this one), Wikia, and a half dozen others I looked at.  Basically, though, it looks as though the consensus is that the Elvish tongue is divided into Eldarin (the tongue of the elves during the March) and Avarin (the tongue of the Avari, a group of elves who never started on the migration to Valinor).  The Eldarin tongue was divided into Quenya (language of the Vanyar) and Common Telerin (the third elven tribe to take the Great Journey).

The Quenya was divided into Quendya (the daily tongue of the Vanyar) and Exilic Quenya (tongue of the Noldor, such as Galadriel), while the common Telerin was divided into Telerin (language of the Teleri of Valinor), Sindarin (language of the Teleri of Beleriand), and Nandorin (language of the Nandor).

Counting them, you would have at least a dozen, give or take a few for dialects off of the ones I've listed.


问:
How do conlangs/natlangs have prefixes suffixes and not get them jumbled up?
When thinking how to build a conlang system of prefixes/suffixes, I get stuck right at the beginning: how do you prevent clashes within the prefix/suffix/base system?

By that I mean the following. Say you have these prefixes:

a

an

ani

amo

am

ami

amo

ach

acho

Then say you have these word "bases":

ma

man

mother

noise

nose

norm

match

cheek

chim

chin

aman

amish

achy

norma

macha

And you have these suffixes:

chum

ma

ama

amo

ana

vana

chana

I just picked random ones for demonstrative purposes. These will come into conflict in the following scenarios:

a + amish = aamish?

an + noise = annoise?

am + macha + ama = ammachaama?

The point is, some of them won't be able to combine:

If one ends with a vowel and the other starts with the same vowel (or even a vowel at all), and you don't have long vowels, then what do you do?

If one ends with a consonant and the other starts with the same consonant (and you don't have long/geminate consonants), then what do you do?

I am vaguely starting to imagine a system where you have two forms to each prefix/base/suffix, so like:

If ending in a consonant, it can end in a sibilant/fricative like s or f, or a nasal like m or n, so you have pairs like "mas" and "mam", and you pick one depending on the following word chunk you are working with.

If ending in a vowel, and the next begins with a vowel, you put a y or w between. So a + ama would become "awama".

Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.

How do natural languages (or conlangs for that matter) deal with this problem? Like in Sanskrit, or Latin, I see these sorts of prefixes/suffixes like my examples, and yet somehow the system seems to work (I haven't studied enough examples in each language though to know how/why it seems to work). What constraints do they place on the system? Etc. How do they create a prefix/suffix system that just works?

I ended up making all prefixes/suffixes/bases have to start/end with a consonant, and to combine you join with a vowel. That means for extra syllables, which I would like to get rid of. So instead of "kan" and "van" combining to form "kanavan", for example, I would like to just do "kanvan". Or even better, just have things that don't start/end with consonants, like "ka" and "an", and have them be, I don't know, "kan" or "kawan". How do you accomplish such a system? What are the range of possibilities which you can use (taking inspiration from natlangs or conlangs the like)?

答:
If ending in a consonant, it can end in a sibilant/fricative like s or f, or a nasal like m or n, so you have pairs like "mas" and "mam", and you pick one depending on the following word chunk you are working with.

This is called "allomorphy" and it's quite common. For example, in Ancient Greek, the negative prefix is /a/ before a consonant (asymmetric, atheism) but /an/ before a vowel (anemia, anorexic). Inuktitut, a famously agglutinating language, has a lot of allomorphy rules.

Usually this sort of thing results from some sort of phonological pattern. The negative prefix in Greek came from PIE *ṇ-, which historically became /a/ in certain environments and /an/ in others. But by the time of Plato, it no longer seems to be a part of the language's phonological system; it's just a quirk of this one prefix.

If ending in a vowel, and the next begins with a vowel, you put a y or w between. So a + ama would become "awama".

This is called "epenthesis" and it's one type of phonological process, which is also quite common. The difference between this and allomorphy is that these phonological processes seem to happen at a different level; it doesn't matter that it's specifically the prefix a- being used here, it just matters that two /a/ phonemes ended up next to each other, and that's not allowed.

Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.

Sure, but natural languages have a high degree of redundancy, so losing a couple bits of information here isn't a problem.

How do natural languages (or conlangs for that matter) deal with this problem? Like in Sanskrit, or Latin, I see these sorts of prefixes/suffixes like my examples, and yet somehow the system seems to work (I haven't studied enough examples in each language though to know how/why it seems to work). What constraints do they place on the system? Etc. How do they create a prefix/suffix system that just works?

In Latin, at least, only the last phoneme of a prefix ever gets changed when it attaches, and there usually isn't much functional load on this last phoneme. This makes sense, because if the assimilation had ever created an unacceptable ambiguity, speakers would have found some way to fix that (by, say, ceasing to use one of the ambiguous prefixes).

So when we do occasionally see a high functional load on the last phoneme of a prefix (ad-esse "to be present" vs ab-esse "to be absent"), the system must have some way of keeping them distinct; in this case, ad-esse is able to assimilate in forms like assum "I am present" and affuī "I was present", while ab-esse is not (absum, abfuī). If it didn't, speakers would have found, created, and used workarounds over the centuries.


问:
How important/useful is it to derive words from smaller parts in a conlang?
In a similar light to How do conlangs/natlangs have prefixes suffixes and not get them jumbled up? , what is the use or purpose of deriving words from smaller parts in a conlang, generally speaking? It appears that natural languages evolve to do this out of necessity, reusing parts and attaching things to parts to extend them ("ex-" extend, extra, extravagant, "inter-", etc.). But is it really necessary? What advantages does this provide us in language?

The only advantages I can see is that it occasionally can give use some clue as to the words meaning. But it will never give us an accurate definition of the word's meaning. So why even bother is my main question?

For example, you might have bi- meaning two, so you have biannual (2x per year) and biweekly (every two weeks (why not twice a week? another story lol)). So given you know "weekly" already, you might be able to guess that biweekly means twice a week or every two weeks or something. But even with bi-, you might not have an accurate guess. For example, bible, biography, billing, all start with bi, yet don't mean two.

Which brings me to my second point. Often times you have words which have the same spelling as the prefix (assuming we're talking about English), but which don't have any relation. Beneath, Benefit. Bell- (war), belligerent, bellyache, bell itself. There are better examples out there. So this seems like, more than adding a degree of helpfulness, it actually adds more to the confusion overall. In the end you need to memorize the meaning of every word, and then you can backtrace/recover the meaning of the "etymological parts" from the definition of the whole. But then it's like, if we're building a conlang, what is the purpose of deriving words from smaller word parts? Other than to resemble natural languages and their evolutionary dirtiness perhaps, I guess.

It seems that you would be better off just picking random words to mean different things. Especially for foundational concepts. So instead of "inter-x" like "internet" and "interconnected" and "interwoven", you would just have "foo", "bar", and "baz" (no ba- prefix lol). So there is no relation derived from simpler parts, thus removing the confusion. But does this make it harder to learn a language? That is, do the prefixes/suffixes (as in these English examples) actually aid in understanding/memory in some way or sort? Maybe there is some benefit after all, I am not sure.

How important/useful is it to derive words from smaller parts in a conlang?

Sandhi in Sanskrit (for combining words) seems related to this question in some way, is it necessary to do such a thing in a conlang though?

答:
All languages have some way to combine atomic units to make more complex or elaborate meanings. Sometimes the result is considered a single word; sometimes it's not. But the underlying principles are the same either way. The advantage is that it lets you express concepts that you don't have atomic words for.

The problem you're seeing is, most of your examples aren't formed within English. They're formed within other languages and then borrowed into English. "Belligerent" is a perfectly regular formation in Latin, from words meaning "war" and "carry". But in English it's pretty much opaque and has to be learned as an indivisible unit. If you look at a regular formation within English, like "uninteresting", you probably have no difficulty at all realizing it means "not interesting", and "interesting" means that it "interests" you. (The fact that "interest" is then made up of "inter" and "est" isn't an English thing, it's a Latin thing.)

English is also fairly unusual among the world's languages in that it doesn't like using regular English compounds for new technical terms (and will instead apply Latin or Greek compounding rules and then borrow the result into English). Most languages are more transparent in these sorts of compounds.


答:
As jlawler mentioned in a comment, every culture has "taboos" (also sometimes spelled "tabu", borrowed from Polynesian). The term usually refers to objects and actions that are somehow culturally forbidden or repulsive, but it can also refer to concepts and words.

What words are taboo varies a lot by culture. Nowadays in American English they tend to refer to sex and bodily functions (fuck, shit, ass, slut). In other, usually older varieties of English, they had more to do with religion (damn, hell, bloody). In Classical Latin you would swear by a god or a demigod (one of the most common expletives is usually translated "by Hercules"). In some long-ago ancestor of English, the Proto-Indo-European word for "bear" seems to have become taboo, which is why we say "bear" (possibly from a root for "brown", possibly from a root for "wild animal", there's not a consensus) instead of some cognate with Greek arktos.

The one constant, though, is that there'll always be some sort of taboo (both culturally and linguistically). If you're inventing a conculture, decide what they consider forbidden. If you're tying your conlang to an existing culture, look at what words they swear by. But in a natural language, there will always be something that's considered offensive.

Title: How do swear words work in real languages?

Body: How many swear words should you have in a conlang, and how are they designed? What is their purpose really? And should any other "regular" words be constructed out of them? Like if "bar" was a swear word, then "foobar" was a goose or "barfoo" was a house, is that a problem? Also, what are swear words actually, do they have a consistent meaning across cultures?


问:
Looking for a conlang I once encountered
I am looking for a conlang I once encountered. Sadly I lack specific and reliable info, but I'll dump what I can recollect.

It was built from simple semantic units (syllables?), with the latter developing and specifying the meaning of the previous. Perhaps there was even more structure, in the grammar or how the syllables were initially arranged. In this regard it seems quite similar to Ygyde.

I think it had a concise and pretty name, possibly starting with D. When searching I came across Damin, but that is obviously not the one.

It was no toy project. It seemed like the author had put a lot of effort to it and the work was still progressing. He claimed the language was to be ideal in some sense, as if he was reconstructing a primordial universal language or if the current languages were to converge to this one. But I don't think it had any speakers, or any significant number of them.

I failed to find it through search engines and through public conlang lists. I looked into engineered languages at Wikipedia and I can tell I am not looking for Toki Pona, Loglan, Lojban or Ithkuil

答:
I just came across an old bookmark leading to Dama Diwan and it is my mystery language! complete with the claims of minimality, optimality, construction through divination, ...

... case closed


答:
Be careful to distinguish the words of the language and the orthography - the latter can sometimes obscure the former¹. If the German orthography spelled it Donau Dampfschifffahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän (perhaps with some additional spaces in the second word) , the end result would be the same, it would just be more readable (cf. scriptio continua). Similarly English could equally well write it Danubesteamboatcompanycaptain and still be called English as we know it. This is just a convention and as a conlang author, you are free to pick one.

Though, if we dive deep enough, we find the very definition of "word" somewhat unclear and fuzzy - is the French qu'est-ce que four words, or just a simple single interrogative pronoun/particle? (that could be written kesk in some con-orthography)

Word stress can be helpful to determine what are the word boundaries, but then you have e.g. Slovak where stress falls on prepositions (and yet we do not call them inflectional prefixes); languages without word stress (above mentioned French, or Chinese); short "words" are often unstressed; there are clitics; there are exceptions (English Baghdad).

Modern Chinese (pǔtōnghuà) takes it to the extreme: the language is written without word boundaries, there is no word stress, there is an extremely limited number of syllables and almost each of them is a meaningful morpheme (often unrelated to the word it forms). E.g 中国 - 中 means "central" and 国 "country". Yet, 中国 means "China" - one word or two? Then, 共产 means "communist" - one word or two? (共 is "common,together" and 产 "produce"). And 党 is "party". Is then 共产党 (communist party) one word, two words or three words? And what about 中国共产党 (Communist party of China)? Why cannot we say it is one word?

¹ Although written languages are generally considered somehow "inferior" or "derived", I do not think that by today this is entirely valid - written languages have their own life, their own rules, ecology and sociolinguistic standing, ever since near 100% literacy. Just consider how much communication (including this one) is predominantly in written form.

Title: How long do words get in other languages, and how hard are long words to say or read?

Body:
So I have a list of basic words in my budding conlang. I would like to construct compound words now, like we do with Latin/Greek in English (e.g. "hyacinthoides"). One word I can create in this conlang is "third fingered abnormality":

```<code>saloyowizitxihawinanoyotxa
</code>```

That is 12 syllables(!) How do I tell if these compound words are too hard to say and/or remember? There is a word separator, -wi-, in that word, so you can tell how it is spliced together. Another option is to use hyphens, but I love how in English we have these long chemical/other names which are one word no hyphens, and I want to do similarly.

I tried asking about the languages with the longest words (like Latin/Greek in English), but it seems to come down to aggutinativity. Then what is it like speaking an agglutinative language with very long words in a long sentence, is it easy to understand? How about reading comprehension, is it also easy to read? Finally, what are some examples of languages which aren't agglutinative that have long words with as many syllables as my word above?

I think Sanskrit may be a close contender for long words. This list also helps.


问:
Are words based on acronyms treated differently when the language changes over time?
Do sound and grammar changes affect acronyms, that can be pronounced as words, differently than other words in a language?

Are words based on acronyms treated differently or not when sound/grammar changes evolve?

more immune to the sound changes that the rest of the language undergoes.

not immune but more resistant (taking longer before being treated like any other word).

treated exactly the same from the get go.

dependant on the language/s in question and as such, do what you want as long as you are consistent.

I want to figure out if I need to make special exceptions, or not, for words in my conlangs that are originally based on acronyms.

For example, English acronyms that can be pronounced as words:

LiDar

Sonar

fubar

Nato

Noaa (I've always internally pronounced it "noah", but a quick Google search says other people may pronounce it phonetically)

Not so much English acronyms that you still pronounce out loud phonetically:

eg

wtf

gis

答:
It depends on the word in question. Not that many English speakers would recognise laser as an acronym, so it has effectively become a 'normal' word. And it can be inflected, as in She was lasering away that old tattoo.

It is different for acronyms that are spelled all in upper case, I think; NATO is kind of 'frozen' in that respect, and I doubt it will ever undergo the same process as laser.

In the past, SPQR was a common acronym, but I don't know of any acronyms that morphed into words, so it is difficult to give any historical examples regarding sound changes.

I would make a distinction between 'word-like' acronyms (radar, laser, ...) and clear abbreviations (NATO), and treat the former like other words, but keep the latter fixed. It can also depend on what the acronym describes: a tool (laser) is different in applicability from a group of countries (Benelux). You can't easily turn the latter into a verb.

Regarding the need to be consistent: you don't need to. Languages are not logical, they evolve. There is no requirement to be consistent at all. Have as many irregularities and exceptions as you like!


答:
Perhaps you'd be interested to see how other languages do things here: https://wals.info/ .

If I do not overlook anything, then all the features you are thinking about are discussed here with examples from throughout the world.

Without being exhaustive of the topics you mention, here are some examples that this site covers your questions.

Now, Chinese doesn't use "the" at all, they omit the word entirely. I
don't really like losing that extra information

Chapters 37 and 38 discuss ways of marking definiteness and indefiniteness (English 'the,' 'a').

If you wanted to skip having a separate word to show definiteness, you might read how some languages use 'one' or 'this' to do the jobs.

Distinct from doing this job with any dedicated words, one strategy you may not have considered is reordering or omitting grammar elements to indicate definiteness. Turkish distinguishes 'a' from 'one' with word order "I saw [one] red [a] car," changes the noun case to do what 'the' does in "I saw the car," and lets the absence of {a, this, that} to indicate "the" in "Car was red."

Using omission and word order, you can also come up with something which is not explicitly related to markers of definiteness per se. If I understand the Ngiyambaa (Pama-Nyungan; New South Wales, Australia) example of doing without a 'the,' folks usually indicate 1st and 2nd person, so could indicate 3rd person by omission; therefore, when they do mark 3rd person, it also means 'the,' even though this marker's explicit job is not being a definite article.

So I am wondering, what are all the ways these "inspiration" languages
(in terms of my project) handle adjectives/adverbs ("modifiers")? Are
there any languages which greatly restrict their placement in the
sentence to only one position (either before or after the noun/verb)?

I do not see that this is discussed explicitly as the topic of a chapter, but there are 19 chapters on word order, 7 on syntax for noun phrases, and 31 more on either simple or complex clauses.

Here is one on Order of Adjective and Noun. On its (or any) map page, on or below the map you can search up each of the languages you want to see. I don't think that Sanskrit is included in any of the surveys, though.

I have often satisfied "What are all the ways..." questions there. It can help you be aware of how English does things so that you can pick the English way only when it does stand out to you in comparison.

Lastly, if you'd like some food for thought from somebody who has worked on similar goals of breaking out of his English mold, I can tell you how my conlang does some of these things in not-English ways.

Otherwise, altogether, I can definitely tell you there are still possibilities for you to enjoy discovering :)

Title: How to break out of the English mold when creating a conlang (specifically in regards to word modifiers)?

Body:
I am working on a conlang. I have to some degree (i.e. a little bit) studied the grammar of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, and know Spanish relatively well in comparison from school, though my main language is obviously English. By "study", I don't know all of the grammatical structures of these languages, but I get some of the basics and have gathered inspiration from them. I have decided I like Chinese (Mandarin) and Vietnamese for the "atomicity" (analytical language), where every word is an atom and there are no word conjugations or the like, even for things like making it past tense ("wanted" vs. "want" in English).

But such an atomic/analytic language comes at a cost, you have an extra word for very common things like the past tense of a verb. So I am making some of these common things be turned into a suffix. But it turns out, just by making tenses, plurals, and a few other things into suffixes, it is already starting to look a lot like English  or Spanish. Also, I learned from Hebrew that they have the definite article (like "the" equivalent) prefix every word if you have a complex noun. I think that is repetitive, so I like the way English does it just saying "the" once at the beginning of a phrase. Now, Chinese doesn't use "the" at all, they omit the word entirely. I don't really like losing that extra information (even though in theory you can regain it from context, but I don't know Chinese well enough to see how this really feels omitting the word "the"). So I am opting to have the concept of "the".

Sanskrit has way more verb and noun inflections, but I want to keep most of the words atomic so I don't do anywhere near as many as they do.

That gets us through the words pretty much.

After all of this, we are left with sentence structure. I like the idea of SVO rather than VSO or VOS because SVO seems like (in principle) it flows from one thing to the next, like a programming language. You start with the subject, it "pipes" into the verb as input, and then you pipe in the object from the other side. I mean technically with "piping" you might think "SOV" might make more sense, but splitting the subject and object with a verb means it's easier to distinguish between them. But this is, again, like how English (and Spanish and Chinese) does it. So it seems like I haven't even looked at other languages to mix it up and not be so "English-centric".

So then my sentences are basically like English in the end (since I have "the", "a", and SVO, with a few word suffixes):

```<code><the> <tree> <fall> <down>
</code>```

However, this gets to the main question. The last real big piece is how to deal with noun modifiers ("adjectives") and verb modifiers ("adverbs"). In English, they appear all over the place in the sentence. Sometimes they appear before the word ("the tree actually fell"), sometimes after ("the tree fell down"). Sometimes both ("the tree actually fell down"). That is for adverbs, but for adjectives too ("I see the *big tree", which I guess is an attributive adjective, vs. predicative adjectives which I can't think of an example of adjective appearing after a noun).

So I am wondering, what are all the ways these "inspiration" languages (in terms of my project) handle adjectives/adverbs ("modifiers")? Are there any languages which greatly restrict their placement in the sentence to only one position (either before or after the noun/verb)? If so, what are some examples in either Chinese, Vietnamese, Sanskrit, and/or Hebrew (or all 4 of them), of if they don't have that feature, what is a language that does (with an example)? If there is a good conlang which demonstrates it, that would be an interesting comment too.

Basically I am trying to not make this language feel like "I just slightly modified English". I thought about the word/sentence features of many other languages and feel I like this structure I have landed on the best so far, but there is still room for improvement and getting better/more influence from these other few languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Sanskrit).


答:
You can look at how it is done in real languages. What typically happens is that the word is phonologically morphed to match the phonotactics of the adopting language.

Japanese provides some obvious examples. The form of a Japanese syllable is stereotypically (C)V(n): Consonant or Consonant+y plus a vowel, with /n/ as the only final consonant. So what does Japanese do with English?

ice cream > aisu kurīmu

mansion > manshon

pray > purei

Inuktitut (some dialects) also does the same thing:

coffee > kaapi

Ottawa > Aatuvaa

To use the last example, Inuktitut only uses the vowels /a, a:/, /u,u:/, and /i,i:/. and there's no /w/. "Ottawa" is normally pronounced [ˈɒt ə wə], so ['a:t u va:] is actually pretty close: if I used it while speaking English, must people would either not hear the difference or assume I was pretending to speak with a comedic German accent by replacing the /w/ with a /v/.

Title: What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?

Body:
The conlang I am working on has very strict rules on word formation:

They must start and end with a consonant

They can only have single vowels between consonants (which can be in consonant clusters).

They can't end in h, w, or y (since they don't make a highly distinct word-ending sound.

The only use a smallish subset of consonants (missing the "th" sounds, the retroflex sounds, etc.).

End word with vowel to convert it into a noun/verb/adjective (convert it into speakable form).

But, I want to be able to talk about other languages in the conlang, hence the tone guide. That will make it so you can say the "j" in "measure" even though that is not in the consonant inventory. And other sounds as well. And you should be able to pronounce any sound from any language. But that's about as far as I want to go.

I don't want to allow you to use any word from any language in a sentence necessarily (at least I don't think so as of this time). So if you have a word with the "harsh h" sound like in Hebrew/Arabic, you need to do some slight transforming of it before it fits into the language. Likewise, it only supports 5 vowels in the main language, although you can say 15+ vowel variations to cover all languages when speaking about other languages. However, the "e" sound in English "pet" is, for example, not in the vowel inventory, so you might have to change it to "peyt" (like Spanish accent) or something along those lines.

The question is though, how would you absorb new words into the language? What is the process? Say I give a guide to someone to learn this language. They go out and speak it in front of friends. They are out to a sushi dinner. Now they want to say "maguro" or "sashimi" (well, it turns out these words fit well into the language, sort of). But imagine these words didn't fit in, what would they do? There must be rules of some sort to guide the transformation of any word, is that correct? How do natural languages do it, or a few of them covering the different approaches?

Basically, I am wondering if it would be better to "borrow" the word (morphing it slightly), or just come up with a completely new word and map it to the foreign word.

I would like to control exactly how each word/meaning is sounded out. So sushi would be like "sushim" as the base (start and end with a consonant, single vowels in between), and "sushima" as the food, etc.. (end with vowel to convert into speakable word from base word). But what about more complicated words like "hannukah" with the harsh h (I am pretty sure it has a harsh h, correct me if I'm wrong), or some french word with the guttural r sort of sound, or "crouch" with the compound vowel sound. Basically, wondering what sort of things I should put into place so you can use words from other languages quickly and painlessly, yet they still fit into the language paradigms/rules.

Another example would be proper names like the store Macy's, or Outback, those words don't fit directly into the conlang, so how would they be transformed or redone?


答:
There must be rules of some sort to guide the transformation of any word, is that correct?

If you believe in optimality theory (OT), this comes down to the constraints on valid words in the language. For example, "must begin with a consonant", "can't include /θ/", and "must end in a consonant other than /h/" are all constraints. But the language would also include constraints like, say, "don't insert an /h/" (to keep /h/s from appearing in random places). And the relative ranking of these constraints would determine what happens to foreign words.

For example, maybe "must begin with a consonant" outranks "don't insert an extra /ʔ/". So given the choice between letting a foreign word start with a vowel (violates the first constraint) and inserting an /ʔ/ at the beginning (violates the second constraint), speakers would choose the second option. Why an /ʔ/ rather than any other consonant? Well, maybe "don't insert a /q/" outranks "don't insert an /ʔ/" too, so inserting /ʔ/ is preferable to inserting /q/.

According to optimality theorists, every language includes a vast, near-infinite set of these constraints, with a strict ranking, and speakers will unconsciously modify words to comply with them. One advantage of this explanation is that the same constraints are used for native words as for foreign words, so you don't have to invoke any special machinery to make it work.

If you don't believe in OT (i.e. you prefer rule-based systems over constraint-based systems), you'll generally have a set of repair rules that are invoked whenever a word violates a language's phonotactics. These rules are specific to each individual language, and their goal is to fix all the violations. If your phonotactics don't allow /ħ/, for example, you might have a repair rule that says "replace /ħ/ with /h/". If your phonotactics require consonants at the start of a word, you might have a repair rule that says "insert /ʔ/ before an initial vowel". And so on.

This explanation has the advantage that it clearly explains why all languages seem to have their own idiosyncratic repair rules, which aren't generally necessary for native words. For example, all Swahili words must end in a vowel. When a foreign word doesn't, an /i/ is generally inserted. An optimality theorist would say this is because of some special constraint that's never needed for native words, while a rule-based phonologist would say there's just a repair rule that inserts that /i/. (Māori and Japanese similarly usually require words to end in a vowel; Māori inserts /a/, Japanese inserts /u/. So this doesn't seem to be something universal.)


答:
Acronyms are, for the most part, a relatively recent phenomenon (as they make the most sense with a high level of literacy), and so it's hard to really look at what's happened in natural languages.

Prior to the modern era, we have a small number of initialisms (e.g. SPQR), but as these do not seem to be pronounced as words in their own they're not a good point of reference. They also don't seem to have remained in continuous use, also limiting their usefulness.

An exception to this is Hebrew. The Jewish community has had a high of literacy for a long time, and many acronyms have been attested since the Middle Ages or earlier (e.g. Tanach "Hebrew Bible" < TNK < Torah 'Instruction', Neviʾim 'Prophets', and Ketuvim 'Writings'). Unfortunately to my knowledge, none of the sound changes to Hebrew since these acronyms are first attested would have affected them, and so we can't actually see if they behaved like normal words or not.

My hunch would be that acronyms would behave like normal words (at least in the short/medium term), but also be more liable to spelling pronunciations.

Title: Are words based on acronyms treated differently when the language changes over time?

Body:
Do sound and grammar changes affect acronyms, that can be pronounced as words, differently than other words in a language?

Are words based on acronyms treated differently or not when sound/grammar changes evolve?

more immune to the sound changes that the rest of the language undergoes.

not immune but more resistant (taking longer before being treated like any other word).

treated exactly the same from the get go.

dependant on the language/s in question and as such, do what you want as long as you are consistent.

I want to figure out if I need to make special exceptions, or not, for words in my conlangs that are originally based on acronyms.

For example, English acronyms that can be pronounced as words:

LiDar

Sonar

fubar

Nato

Noaa (I've always internally pronounced it "noah", but a quick Google search says other people may pronounce it phonetically)

Not so much English acronyms that you still pronounce out loud phonetically:

eg

wtf

gis


答:
Swear words can mean different things in different cultures & languages. I speak English as my first language, where most of our swear words are known as "potty language" & for good reason. Most of the English swears are about sex or the body.

In French, the language of my dad's family, a bunch of the swears are evangelical. I'm not sure that's the right word. What I mean is that most curse words are about the church. Now there's an interesting point to be heard there! What do we call swears? "Spitting oaths"? Promises basically. Using the Lord's name in vain.

Using the Lord's name in vain does NOT primarily mean "oh my god lol", it means "I swear to God" or when you put your hand on the bible in a courtroom & say "I swear to speak the truth" or whatever. If you keep your word, then good for you. It is "bad" when you swear on the bible or God's name & then break your promise/oath. So that might be why French swears are often religious. Similar to the religion argument, bad words are often called "curse" words.

I recommend watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU comedy sketch & I think he has done a few more acts about curse words too.

I had read a book series (Codex Alera) where they use "crows" as a swear word. I think this is because crows are a motif throughout the books & might have some sort of special power, which means that they always end up on battlefields, feasting on the carrion & fallen friends. I believe Carrion & Maggots might also be swears. "Crows take it/you" means "god-damn it/you". They even just use "(oh) crows" to mean "(oh) heck/shit".

They use "Bloody" (as in "bloody crows" to mean "holy shit/smokes/cow/crap" or "bloody/fucking hell") which is a word used in this world. Bloody is used as an intensifier.

In relation to the religious swear/curse words, they also say "great furies" as in "oh my god". The furies are basically (pokemon crossed with spirit guides crossed with the concept of animism) who give powers to the owners like bending in ATLA. The great furies are like the spirit who lives in the mountain & his wife the storm/wind/bad weather on top of the mountain. So they can swear by the Great Furies as the folks on earth say "I swear to the Fae" or "God help me".

Another concept to consider is slurs. Slurs are usually based on or used against marginalized communities. (Black people & any marginalized racial/cultural/ethnic group; down syndrome, autism, learning disabilities, & other mental illnesses, neurodivergencies, & disabilities; Romani/Roma (this one is actually a huge issue bc I know people named the G slur); trans, gay, otherwise queer, & intersex; etc.)

So to answer your questions:
How many swear words should you have in a conlang,
You only really need one or two source words, but you can use as many as one curse for every noun, verb, & adjective you invent. You could also choose a source category (religion, sex, even smth like plants or careers). Having a category might be able to limit you to a degree.

and how are they designed?
I believe they usually come up naturally. Maybe through mistakes. Maybe some teen afraid of sexual maturity tries to desexualize things by thinking of different words (like "feet" in the bible, or maybe pull smth out of ur ass like "hawthorn berries") & then they accidentally pavlov themself into sexualizing hawthorn berries & now hawthorn berries are a euphemism  for sex. As mentioned with the crows, they could be related to undesirable topics like death. In cultures where nudity is natural I would assume that sex swears are less common. (They sexualize people less in those cultures than cultures where modesty is the norm. Typically. I'm generalizing.) So if sex is a taboo topic, swears would be about sex. If death is a taboo topic, then swears about death would be more common. If the taboo topic is malicious magic, then curse words might actually be about curses! Slurs have more defined or easily assigned sources. Swears can be considered a subset of slang. I also had a thought while answering one of the later questions: Things that used to be ok are now slurs because the people are still hated. "coloured" used to be the correct term, but since society still hated POC it stopped being a proper term. "L**e" used to be the used term, but it is a slur, so people started using "handicapped", but that term also started feeling offensive & now "disabled" is the correct term. It is in part due to inaccuracies in language I suppose. Like how "hermaphrodite" is a perfectly useful term for hermaphroditic animals but is not an accurate term for humans (with disorders/differences in sexual development or who are intersex). This is more slur based than swear based though.

What is their purpose really?
Their purpose is to emphasize. I don't usually swear, but sometimes, sometimes there is a situation that really warrants an oath. Promises (swear to god) are used to create honesty & binding. As in they are bound to their word. I think swears are also used as catharsis or emotional indicators. You use swears when you're angry, when you're courting someone, when you're really really excited... They are for emphasis, usually emotional. That's my opinion at least! My experience is my own.

And should any other "regular" words be constructed out of them? "Like if "bar" was a swear word, then "foobar" was a goose or "barfoo" was a house,"
I think maybe the other way around? As a mentally ill baker I deal with the term "retarded fermentation" because the word "retard" (the e is pronounced like "look") means "late". Tardy. I mentioned I speak french lol. A retarded fermentation is a fermentation (in sourdough) that takes extra long to develop more flavour. Slow. Late. When this term applies to a person, it means they are "mentally slow" I guess. Which is kind of true. You know how your brain is not fully developed until age 26? A ton of mentally ill/neurodivergent people don't finish brain development until age 30 ish. I think that it is more likely that words (that have related words) turn into slurs. Whether or not the related words are considered slurs is really a societal/cultural thing & can depend on the worldview of the people. Sam hill versus damn hell? Idk. One last thing to note: Basement is not a sexual word even though it has "semen" in the spelling.

is that a problem?
It depends. I said it was a cultural thing. If you use a slur in a hockey name (Like the new york n*****s or smth) then yes that is a problem & a slur! If the word "semen" is in the word "basement" then no that is not an issue, they have different etymologies. For things like "retarded fermentation"? Well that's a touchy one. I dislike the term because the source word is now used as a slur, but it was chosen for its accuracy. Maybe changing it to "Fermentation retardé" would be better because it has a different pronunciation & placement & maybe that would be enough. For words like "asshole" to mean "anus" I would say that yes it is still considered a swear word because the first part, "ass" is used because it is a dirty word for bum. "pussy hair" would also be considered like that because it is the hair of the swear word, unlike pubic hair which is a perfectly fine term. So in general I would say it depends on how the words relate & how society reacts.

Also, what are swear words actually,
I feel like I answered this ok throughout this answer. A swear word is a word with a connotation of unprofessionalism that is used colloquially to add emotional emphasis. Although the connotation of swears/swearing can change throughout cultures & time.

do they have a consistent meaning across cultures?
Ah yes I just answered this! They do not have a consistent meaning! From my experience they have the connotation of rudeness & emphasis, but to other cultures they can be related more to spiritual impurity or the keeping of promises. They almost definitely have even more meanings in other cultures & languages. What is considered a "bad word" might not be what we consider "swear" words or "potty" mouth.

I hope this helped!


问:
Is it possible to have consonant followed by Uvular sound
I am thinking of creating a language that has a sound system a little similar to Latin, with a guttural feel like German. The people who are going to speak this language are harsh and sound annoyed at all times. At the same time, they are very much attached to their roots; they perform little to no interaction with other races. So there is little influence of foreign languages on theirs.

I thought the sound /q/ would be great here, but the consonant clusters are too hard for me to pronounce. Hence, I am finding it difficult to form words. I am wondering if there is any kind of rule in syllable structure that helps or obstructs this kind of sound system building.

答: Uvulars can absolutely go in clusters. As some examples, Georgian წყალი (ts'q'ali; "water"), Arabic القراءة (alqira'a; "reading"), or Inuktitut ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ (qaniujaaqpait; "syllabics").


问:
Is lowering the tongue at word-ending a voiceless vowel?
In my conlang, some consonants can cluster with l at the end. For example, 'story' is 'coánl'; following dictionary.com's IPA for 'metal' as / ˈmɛt l / I had set out pronouncing this like /koˈa:n l/. So trying to be the most clear since I am no expert in how to write these things, (for relevant consonants C) -Cl ending sounded like [Cəl].

Pronouncing over time, I happened to hit on a different way. I like this a lot better. I don't know how to describe it in IPA, though. I have done my best here to use notation correctly and understandably and made my best analysis after trying to figure it out. Maybe the difference is now I'm ending the word with a voiceless vowel? I'd appreciate guidance.

Using coánl, I'm going to make a contrast with what my mouth is doing.

When I end the words / ˈmɛt l / or /koˈa:n l/, my tongue

drops from the alveolar ridge

stops behind my upper teeth

my lips do not keep broadening with the [a:] after the [n]

it sounds like the /l/ ends the syllable.

In contrast, my new way of saying 'coánl,'

my tongue continues downwards and forwards past my teeth

while my lips do continue to broaden in the motion they were making for /a:/

I think I stop my vocal cords with the L sound, same as before.

With these motions, now the [l] itself sounds like it does at the start of a [-la] syllable rather than the end of an [əl].

I pronounce [la] with only the start of an [a]? Or to put it another way, the /a/ goes through both consonants now? Is this what you call an voiceless vowel, or something else?

Thank you for your thoughts

答:
Ultimately, if your vocal cords stop vibrating and you're still pronouncing the word (i.e. there's still breath moving through your vocal apparatus), then whatever phoneme you're pronouncing will be voiceless.

This article has not only a review of the mechanics, but also some IPA notation to help you notate. Particularly initial vs final voicing or devoicing. And this video has good examples of voiced vs voiceless vowels in Cheyanne.


问:
List of segment usage based on how many people use it?
The great Phoible 2.0 has exclusive list of segment usages based on "Languages", but since some languages such as Lak are only used by handful of people, it won't make any sense if I employ their pronunciations/segments in the language I'm creating , is it?

For example, /k͈ʷ/ sounds are ONLY used in Lak, this sounds would definitely not recommended to be put into my collection of alphabets of my language.

After all, what's the point of making a language if "only handful of people in the whole Earth knows how to pronounce it correctly"!?

And, English and Japanese are both count as "one" language, but we can't never deny the fact that "English speaker" is WAY~ more then "Japanese speaker"!

(~400M native speaker against ~128M according to Wiki)

So, if I choose some sounds that "only" English speakers knows how to pronounce over some "Japanese-only" sounds, you could bet that there are about 272M more people knows how to pronounce that sound correctly.

So, I was wondering if there is some other "outstanding" list out there based their list on "the amount of people using it"?

Much appreciated!

答:
All consonants in 50% or more languages:

m, k, j, p, w, n, t, l, s, b, ŋ, g, h

All vowels in 50% or more languages:

i, u, a, e, o

I hope this answers your question


答:
Well, you need to add numbers of speakers from another source (e.g. Wikipedia or Ethnologue, or some other list with speaker estimates). Pro-tip: Use a list where the languages are ordered by the number of speakers. You can use a cut-off (no matter whether you choose 10k or 100k speakers) and set that cut-off for the number of speakers (in statistical lingo, this kind of adjustment is termed smoothing). This frees you from looking up the numbers for languages with fewer speakers.

Be aware of the following: By weighing the languages by the numbers of their speakers you are putting a bias into your language design, heavily favouring Mandarin, English and Hindi/Urdu over the rest of the languages. This kind of bias may be or may not be a good thing in your conlang.

Title: List of segment usage based on how many people use it?

Body:
The great Phoible 2.0 has exclusive list of segment usages based on "Languages", but since some languages such as Lak are only used by handful of people, it won't make any sense if I employ their pronunciations/segments in the language I'm creating , is it?

For example, /k͈ʷ/ sounds are ONLY used in Lak, this sounds would definitely not recommended to be put into my collection of alphabets of my language.

After all, what's the point of making a language if "only handful of people in the whole Earth knows how to pronounce it correctly"!?

And, English and Japanese are both count as "one" language, but we can't never deny the fact that "English speaker" is WAY~ more then "Japanese speaker"!

(~400M native speaker against ~128M according to Wiki)

So, if I choose some sounds that "only" English speakers knows how to pronounce over some "Japanese-only" sounds, you could bet that there are about 272M more people knows how to pronounce that sound correctly.

So, I was wondering if there is some other "outstanding" list out there based their list on "the amount of people using it"?

Much appreciated!