答:
Both issues can be solved simultaneously.

Consider for a moment how you say 1 239 475 612 034 in English. It’s not (usually) said as:

one two three nine four seven five six one two zero three four

Instead, it’s read out as:

one trillion two hundred thirty nine billion four hundred seventy five million six hundred twelve thousand and thirty four

The ‘normal’ way to read it is much longer, but those extra words serve an important purpose, they provide information about where in the number you are, which in helps reduce errors (in information theory terms, they serve as a very limited form of in-band error correcting code).

The same feature of the language also makes powers of ten very compact.

For your language, you can go a step further, and make the names of the powers of ten composable. English does this to a limited degree for the tens and hundreds places (so, for example, you have ‘ten thousand’ and ‘one hundred million’), but there’s no reason that it needs to be limited to just a three-digit arrangement. The caveat is that I would expect digit grouping to match up with however wide this ends up betting before looping (so, for example, if you go with one million being the largest power of ten you have a special name for, I would expect the digit grouping in written form to separate digits into groups of 10).


问:
IPA for Voiced Velopharyngeal Stop?
A conlang I am working on contains the nasal syllabic consonants [m̩] and [n̩] fairly frequently.  It seems like it would be a natural step for the language to develop what I would call a voiced velopharyngeal stop occurring before those syllabic consonants are used some of the time, to add emphasis.  This stop is formed by stopping air from flowing into the nasal cavity with the velum while the mouth is in position to form the following consonant, and then releasing it into the nasal cavity.  Think of it as trying to make a “g” sound through your nose only.

Ex:  [ĩɲ'tⁿn̩] => [ĩɲ't̚?ⁿn̩], where the ? represents the consonant in question.

Note:  This is not a glottal stop, though that sound can occur as well in this language.

I have been trying to transcribe the language with the IPA since it helps specify pronunciation of the weird vocabulary of sounds, but I cannot find a symbol in the IPA that represents this sound, even though it seems to me fairly plausible for a language of this type.

The closest I have found is the symbol for a velopharyngeal fricative [ʩ] in extensions to the IPA.  However this still is clearly distinct from the sound I am describing.  Additionally, it appears to only occur as a speech defect and never as a proper consonant in a language.

What is the best way to transcribe this specific sound using the IPA?  Is there an allotted symbol that I just could not find?  What would be the best way to go about phonetically transcribing the sound if there is no exact symbol in the IPA?  Is there a better approximation than [ʩ]?  Additionally, what about the unvoiced counterpart?

I apologize for any mistakes in my use of the IPA, I am still learning.

答: I think I would transcribe this as a kind of pre-stopped nasal where the stop part is velar, like /ᶢn̩/ (and possibly implosive, if I understand your description correctly). Ordinarily, you’d expect it to be homorganic with the following nasal, or influenced by the preceding one. So this seems pretty unstable, in that I don’t know quite how a natural language would get here and stay here. I’d try to reinforce it with another phonological feature, allow an epenthetic vowel, or maybe take it as an opportunity to turn it into a click, for example, in words that lose an initial vowel and end up with this cluster at the beginning of a word/morpheme.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0

Title: IPA for Voiced Velopharyngeal Stop?


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

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

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

Functions, which usually correspond to verbs.

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

As such, Leksah has word order VSO.

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

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

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

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

0 = "Nad" (from NADAZERO)

1 = "Un" (from UNAONE)

2 = "Bis" (from BISSOTWO)

3 = "Ter" (from TERRATHREE)

4 = "Kar" (from KARTEFOUR)

5 = "Pan" (from PANTAFIVE)

6 = "Sox" (from SOXISIX)

7 = "Set" (from SETTESEVEN)

8 = "Ok" (from OKTOEIGHT)

9 = "Nov" (from NOVENINE)

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

42 = "KarelBis"

108 = "UnelNadelOk"

65535 = "SoxelPanelPanelTerelPan"

Note that the spellings are camelcased.

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

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

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

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

答:
In the spirit of functional programming, you can add run length encoding.

Practically speaking, we see that there is no more effective of a method for naming numbers than giving them a sequence of digits.  This is exactly what we do in mathematics. 513843843246213513513813502162324713513541263 is simply best described as that series of digits.

So the issue is specifically that the people speaking your conlang come across cases with long strings of the same digit quite often (as we do).

The solution is to permit explicit run length encoding

The number 1000000 might be expressed as 1 (run 6 0) a 1 followed by a run of 6 0s.  This would also solve the issue of repeat numbers in a number.  You might describe 16333333337 as 1 6 (run 8 3) 7

If I can venture a guess as to how your Haskel based language works, I am guessing 1 6 (run 8 3) 7 would be read as "UnelSoxelConsRunelOkelTerSet," using "Run" as the phonem for this run operation, and inventing a new particle, "Cons" which starts a new cons list (you didn't mention this, but it strikes me as an essential particle for a Haskel based language.  Haskell gets its power from directed acyclic graphs, not just sequences)

Note that the named quantities like million and billion are useful.  They give us hints as to the rough size of the number before we hear every single digit.  But for explicitness, run length encoding works fine.  You might want to prefix large numbers with a number of digits as a hint.

For arbitrary large numbers, which may not run length encode well, a checksum may be in order.  A well chosen check-summing scheme may also allow for correction of errors in communication, not just detection.


问:
What is the minimum number of words needed for a conlang?
What would the minimum number of words needed for a conlang, while still being able to speak with about the same level of information passed as a natural language?</p>

答:
It's really impossible to pick a specific number, like "you need at least 3,427 words to make yourself understandable", without making such claim look ridiculous. The easy rejoinder --- "well, my invented language can make itself perfectly understandable using only 3,426 words: so there!" --- only serves to demonstrate the somewhat absurd nature of the argument.

That said, minimalist invented languages are a thing! (And so are maximal...)

We could look at a couple historical examples of both kinds of language to see what answers our fellow language inventors and natural cultures have come upon:

Basic English is a good starting point as it's an old project (nearly a century old) and is what the Simple English version of Wikipedia is based on. Basic English seems to get by with 2000 words or so.

Toki Pona, on the other hand, a philosophical language rather than an international auxiliary language or an artistic language, makes do with about 120 root words. In the article, it's noted that speakers have to resort to combining these root words in order to get their meaning across when they wish to communicate anything that isn't, strictly speaking, minimalist in nature.

Esperanto has somewhere between 2500 and 5000 basic roots, but again, combining roots allows for greater understandability.

At the other end of the spectrum, English probably exceeds a million words. And even then, we are as prone to forming compound words as anyone else!

Analysis:

I'd argue that that actual answer to your marquee query is NOT ENOUGH BY HALF.

Obviously, 120 words is far too few to really properly communicate anything but the uttermost basics in the most simplistic terms. 2500 is not enough either, because speakers of languages with so few root words end up relying heavily on affixes and compounds to improve communication. And lastly, I'd argue that even a million words is not nearly enough! Even with a million words, English speakers make use of affixes, compounding, abbreviation and we're sprathingly good at just plain making up words on top of everything else.


答:
You can have some fun with this.

If the moderators resemble humans and are not good at repeating identical strings an exact number of times, then you can use something like Hebrew numerals or Greek numerals but with short syllables. The idea being that you effectively have multiple series of digits that cover different place value positions. Combining this idea with a simple collection of syllables that run in some order will give you a number system that's pronounceable but lets you skip zeroes when the gaps can be determined from context.

One problem with a system like this is that it takes up a lot of space. Either many numbers will be homophones with non-numbers or the numbers will be occupying some very important real estate and the rest of the language will have to adapt.

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

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

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

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

Functions, which usually correspond to verbs.

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

As such, Leksah has word order VSO.

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

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

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

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

0 = "Nad" (from NADAZERO)

1 = "Un" (from UNAONE)

2 = "Bis" (from BISSOTWO)

3 = "Ter" (from TERRATHREE)

4 = "Kar" (from KARTEFOUR)

5 = "Pan" (from PANTAFIVE)

6 = "Sox" (from SOXISIX)

7 = "Set" (from SETTESEVEN)

8 = "Ok" (from OKTOEIGHT)

9 = "Nov" (from NOVENINE)

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

42 = "KarelBis"

108 = "UnelNadelOk"

65535 = "SoxelPanelPanelTerelPan"

Note that the spellings are camelcased.

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

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

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

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


答:
It depends on your definition of 'word'.

Tokin pona has 120 word forms, but they are routinely combined into compounds which express more specific information. In Esperanto, as elemtilas said, there are roots which are combined into words — effectively similar to toki pona, only with no spaces in-between:

English: queen

Esperanto: reĝino  (-in- indicates 'female')

toki pona: jan lawa meli ('person' 'lead' 'female')

English has a single morpheme, Esperanto has three morphemes, and so does toki pona. But both Esperanto and English have one word, wheras toki pona has three. So the question of the number of words is not really all that meaningful, as it depends on the structure of your language.

The real question is how many morphemes you need, but even then it's difficult. In toki pona you can combine morphemes to form bigger elements, and each morpheme arguably has a whole range of meanings; from the context you choose the one that is most likely. The word lili means little, small, young, etc. so you cannot know whether jan lili is a young person or a small one. You will typically know from context.

So when thinking about vocabulary size there are several aspects to consider:

Language structure: do you have self-standing morphemes that are combined to phrases (like toki pona), morphemes that are stuck together in compound words (like Esperanto), or single morphemes that express multiple meanings at once (like English king: 'ruler' and 'male' vs queen: 'ruler' and 'female'). If — like Esperanto — you stick to one basic meaning component per morpheme, then the gender of the ruler would have to be expressed in a different morpheme (or it could be omitted altogether). The same also applies to verbs and tenses, pronouns, etc.

Specificity: How accurate do you want your language to be? If you want to be able to express exact meanings, then you need different morphemes. In English there are many words such as Earl, Duke, Count, Margrave, etc. which in toki pona would just be jan lawa ('leader'). Toki pona is good for epics, where such distinctions are not relevant, but if you want to write a detailed history of the Norman conquest, then maybe choose a different language.

Target domain: It also makes a difference what you want to use your language for. If it is an intergalactic lingua franca to be used for trading, then you'd need to be specific about prices and descriptions of objects, but not so much about family relationships. Klingon famously has a vocabulary dominated by words related to fighting and killing, so it might be hard to write a love poem in it (though not impossible). A general purpose language needs to be able to express a wider range of meanings than a domain-specific one.

Overall complexity of your language: How many cases do you have? How many numbers? Grammatical genders? Any such feature needs to be expressed in some way, which could result in more words. If you have singular/dual/plural, you might need three pronouns I, us-two, and us-more-than-two. But you could choose not to have that at all and simply use us-any-number-from-one-to-many. Hawai'ian has a different set of pronouns to distinguish between us all, including you and us all, but not you. If you have a politeness system based on relative ages, then you might want to distinguish between you-who-is-younger-than-me and a more polite you-who-is-older-than-me

Aesthetics: you can make do with one word for move-from-A-to-B. And one word for ingest. But any story you write will quickly become very boring, as you will use the same word over and over again. So you want synonyms to introduce some variation (see the remarks about Klingon above). The more synonyms you have, the more words. They're not strictly necessary, but make your language more pleasant to use. In AI, the opposite is actually used to make it easier for computers to handle events: you have a small set of semantic primitives for the basic events (movement, transfer of objects, etc). But you wouldn't want to read such representations for fun.

To summarise: The right number of words for a conlang is how many you need for it to work, given the purpose and structure of the language. It is a bit of an irrelevant question, really, because you won't know that you have enough words until you're happy that your language is usable. And even then, new words are likely to develop over time. In my view, number of words is not a useful metric when developing a language, unless you want to use it as a constraint (as in toki pona).

Title: What is the minimum number of words needed for a conlang?

Body: What would the minimum number of words needed for a conlang, while still being able to speak with about the same level of information passed as a natural language?</p>


问:
How to showcase a conlang?
How would one go about "Showcasing" a conlang, other than by works of fiction, like Tolkien? I want to have a way to share my language to the world in full, with outlined grammar and everything.</p>

答:
The traditional method of promoting a conlang was creating a booklet, often self-published and self-promoted by the conlang creator.

Nowadays, it is easier to set up a comprehensive website essentially containing the content of that booklet.

The content of the booklet or website typically consists of

A teaching grammar of the conlang

A vocabulary list

Sample sentences like you find in Teach Yourself a language books

Sample texts, often translations of well known texts into the conlang

Frequently used sample texts include The Lord's prayer, the Tower-of-Babel fable, "The North Wind and the Sun", and the Declaration of Human Rights.

Title: How to showcase a conlang?


问:
Which constructed language has the largest body of literature?
Which is the constructed language which has the largest body of literature, including both works that have been originally created in that language as well as works written in natural languages which have been translated afterwards?</p>

答: If you don't consider Sanskrit and Hebrew to be conlangs, your best bet would be Esperanto literature, with over fifty books over at Project Gutenberg alone.</p>

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
Are there any Conlangs using Chinese characters?
The Chinese character system is one that is universal to many Chinese dialects. Two people can pronounce the same character in two different ways, but when writing to each other it is intelligible. </p>

<p>Have people used this opportunity to create a sort of conlang dialect of the language, and in doing so making up entirely new sound for the characters, and perhaps even making up new grammar too. I could image it even being a serious bastardizing of the characters too take on new meanings that would bring it closer to, say, a European language. Like how one uses the Latin alphabet to create a conlang. </p>

答:
I made a language using Chinese characters, I named the language

Yinhan language (印汉语)

Example sentences:

Hello, what are you doing? = 汝好，汝何做？

I'm fine = 吾好


问:
Considering that my elves are anatomically different from humans, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?
For years now, I've been building and rebuilding an alternate Earth dense with geography, geology and wildlife.  Among them is this world's equivalent of humans, Draculodon silvius, the "elf".  Among purebred elves--elves that haven't interbred with their dwarf cousins--the average male stands 84 inches in height and 110 pounds in weight, whereas the average female stands 67 inches in height and 99 pounds in weight.  Other differences are as follows:

Longer arms (65-77% the length of the body)

Longer hips

Shorter torsos

Longer necks

Pointed symmetrical outer ears averaging 3-5 inches in length

Asymmetrical inner ears 70% wider than our own

Longer feet

Thicker soles

Taller cheekbones

Longer, sharper canines

Larger molars

Tooth number:  44

So with those anatomical differences listed above, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?

答:
Your descriptions don't really indicate any different phonemes that could be articulated.

A longer neck might mean deeper voices if the larynx is located further down (as the resonance area beyond the larynx becomes larger); I would assume that the different dental configuration would also not change anything.

If you think of the various places of articulation in the mouth, they would still be in the same place.

However, while the range of sounds will be the same as possible in human languages, you canpick a different subset from the possibilities — any human language only uses a fraction of the possibilities. The composition of that subset would be what makes your language unique.


问:
Do I need a Dative Case?
My conlang already has Benefactive and Lative cases, does it really need a Dative case? I'm racking my brain to find situations that couldn't be covered by those two and would require a separate Dative case. </p>

答:
You might consider something like:

"I gave you it" > "I gave it so that you recieved it"

"I told you it" > "I said it so that you heard it"

"I passed you it" > "I threw it so that you catch it"

Title: Do I need a Dative Case?


问:
Would a "Common Denominator" phonology be too simple (or even non-existent)?
Many languages have sounds that are very hard to pronounce to certain speakers.

For example, the French "R" sound is hard for English speakers. What if we have a language that accepts many variations of a word so that it's still accepted even if it sounds a little different?

Another example, Japanese phonology does not distinguish between L and R. This video shows how incredible it is.

I think this is a similar concept to how languages can change how many things you can notice, even colors can be hard to distinguish if you don't have a word for it.

But if you're coming from a language that does distinguish between the sounds, it will be easier for you to pronounce words of a language that doesn't distinguish it. I think that the Japanese L/R sound is easy because they don't care which one you pronounce, it sounds the same to them.

However, I know it might cause the language phonology to be too simple, which will cause very long words. I have not studied every single language in the world. But is really that bad if we are to create this "combined phonology?"

答:
There are both natlangs and conlangs with extremely simple phonologies.

For natural languages, Central Rotokas holds the record for the smallest attested inventory of consonant phonemes (6).

For a conlang, you may want to look at Toki Pona with an inventory of 14 phonemes: 9 consonants and 5 vowels. Toki Pona has some speech community and is more than just a Plansprachenprojekt.

These examples show that languages with  extremely minimal phonologies are feasible. Yes, words and phrases become longer, but this is compensated by a higher speech rate.


问:
Creation of Alphabets
If the creation of languages is called language invention what is the creation of writing systems called?

I don't think it's called Lettering because when I search for that on the net, I see that this is the creation of fonts. I would like to know what the practice or hobby of creating new writing systems is called.

Si a la creación de lenguajes se le llama conlanging como se le llama
a la creación de alfabetos?

No creo que sea Lettering porque cuando busco sobre eso en la red veo
que es la creación de tipografías. Quisiera saber como se llama a la
práctica o hobby de crear nuevos sistemas de escritura.

答:
"Writing systems" are also called "scripts", so analogous to "language invention", you could call it "script invention".

However, the creation of languages as a hobby is also called "conlanging", from "conlang", shortened from "constructed language". By analogy, "constructed scripts" are sometimes called "conscripts", and the process of inventing them "conscripting". Note that while "conscripts" is pronounced with the same stress pattern whether you are referring to constructed scripts or individuals forced into government military service, the verb form moves the emphasis from "conSCRIPT" to "CONscript", and the participle form "CONscripting", when referring to the creation of writing systems.

Title: Creation of Alphabets


答:
Neography

As with language invention, there are different names for fashioning writing systems.

While "conscirpt" and other "con-" forms are current, their problems are numerous. Neography is a well known term even beyond the art of language invention, well predating and certainly looking & sounding better than the alternatives.

Neografía

Al igual que con la invención del lenguaje, existen diferentes
términos para diseñar sistemas de escritura.

Aunque las formas "conscirpt" y otras del tipo "con-" son términos actuales, sus
problemas son numerosos. La neografía es un término bien conocido
incluso más allá del arte de la invención del lenguaje, y es mas anterior y
ciertamente luciendo y sonando mejor que las alternativas.

Title: Creation of Alphabets

Body:
If the creation of languages is called language invention what is the creation of writing systems called?

I don't think it's called Lettering because when I search for that on the net, I see that this is the creation of fonts. I would like to know what the practice or hobby of creating new writing systems is called.

Si a la creación de lenguajes se le llama conlanging como se le llama
a la creación de alfabetos?

No creo que sea Lettering porque cuando busco sobre eso en la red veo
que es la creación de tipografías. Quisiera saber como se llama a la
práctica o hobby de crear nuevos sistemas de escritura.


答:
According to magazine author Arika Okrent in "Discouraging Words" from Failure Magazine (July 21, 2009), it's Esperanto.  She writes,

What is the most widely used invented language?

Definitely Esperanto, which is ironic because when you say “Esperanto,” most people say, “Didn’t that die out in the 1920s?” Or, “Esperanto? That failed utopian project?” But in terms of invented languages, it’s the most outlandishly successful invented language ever. It has thousands of speakers—even native speakers—and that’s a major accomplishment as compared to the 900 or so other languages that have no speakers.

That's not hard to believe either.  According to Esperanto.net,

Professor Sidney S. Culbert of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, has done the most comprehensive survey on language use ever attempted. He has conducted interviews in dozens of countries around the world and tested for "professional proficiency", i.e. much more than just "hello, please, goodbye".

Based on this survey, Prof. Culbert concluded that Esperanto has about two million speakers worldwide.

Obviously, this doesn't quite answer your question, since it was specifically about published literature.  However, according to this answer on the Esperanto stack, there are probably around 200 novels that were originally published in Esperanto, along with 400 volumes of short stories - and that's in the fiction category only.  There's a list of Esperanto libraries on wikapedia, some of which have thousands of works in them.

Very likely Esperanto.

Title: Which constructed language has the largest body of literature?

Body: Which is the constructed language which has the largest body of literature, including both works that have been originally created in that language as well as works written in natural languages which have been translated afterwards?</p>


答:
It is indeed possible to create a non-trivial ‘lowest common denominator’ phonology. I know because I made one myself a while ago. For consonants, I took the 10 most common segments from PHOIBLE disregarding voicing distinctions:

/m n/

/p t k/

/s h/

/l j w/

Vowels are much easier: /a i u/ is suitably lower-common-denominator, and is widely attested.

Title: Would a "Common Denominator" phonology be too simple (or even non-existent)?

Body:
Many languages have sounds that are very hard to pronounce to certain speakers.

For example, the French "R" sound is hard for English speakers. What if we have a language that accepts many variations of a word so that it's still accepted even if it sounds a little different?

Another example, Japanese phonology does not distinguish between L and R. This video shows how incredible it is.

I think this is a similar concept to how languages can change how many things you can notice, even colors can be hard to distinguish if you don't have a word for it.

But if you're coming from a language that does distinguish between the sounds, it will be easier for you to pronounce words of a language that doesn't distinguish it. I think that the Japanese L/R sound is easy because they don't care which one you pronounce, it sounds the same to them.

However, I know it might cause the language phonology to be too simple, which will cause very long words. I have not studied every single language in the world. But is really that bad if we are to create this "combined phonology?"


问:
Were Tolkien's Elvish languages based on known natural languages?
I'm a great fan of Tolkien's books, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. One thing I have always wondered about in his books though, is whether the Elvish tongues were actually fully new languages. Were they totally constructed as it were from scratch, or was Tolkien patterning them after some European / other languages that were actually in use (or ancient languages out of use)?

答:
Tolkien took inspirations from lots of existing languages. His inventions bear much resemblance to those languages in phonology and in syntax, but less obviously so in vocabulary.

Ken's answer already presents the two best known languages (Finnish and Welsh) that gave rise to Quenya and Sindarin, but they were not all.

Actually it[Quenya] might be said to be composed on a Latin basis with two
other (main) ingredients that happen to give me 'phonaesthetic'
pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is however less consonantal than any
of the three. (Letters)

A Latin student can easily recognize the shared stress rule between Quenya and Sindarin in the Appendices.

In longer words it falls on the last syllable but one, where that contains a long vowel, a diphthong, or a vowel followed by two (or more) consonants. Where the last syllable but one contains (as often) a short vowel followed by only one (or no) consonant, the stress falls on the syllable before it, the third from the end.

Words in Quenya that begin with ps-, ks-, I think, show some Greek influence.

ksaráre psare súle

Telerin's phonology is again "of an approximately Latin type"(PE19).

And there is Danian "in general a Germanic type", Ossiriandic - Old English, East Danian - Old Norse, Taliska - Gothic, West Avarin - Irish, West Lemberin - Finnish, East Lemberin - Lithuanian (ibid.). Most of the dialects mentioned here only exist in the Comparative Tables though (or remain unpublished).


答:
It's worth thinking a bit about how the IPA table is divided and the motions underlying these sounds (i.e. gestural phonology).

We have places of articulation, and manners of articulation.

If your elves' have vocal tracts with analogous structures (moving backwards: lips, teeth, alveolar ridges, hard palates, soft palates, uvulas, pharynxes, and glottises) then the same places of articulation will exist. If you have additional structures, you'll have additional places of articulation, and if you're missing some structures you'll have fewer.

Now methods of articulation. There are four main articulators involved in speech, each of which allows for the production of sounds in a different set of places of articulation. These are the lips, the tongue, the pharynx, & the glottis.

Each articulator can produce a variety of gestures:

Complete closure: this gives stops, taps, and trills

Close restriction: this gives fricatives

Open restriction: this gives approximants and vowels

The tongue, and to a lesser extent the lips are very flexible and can contact multiple places of articulation. In humans, the lips can contact the other lip, or the teeth, whilst the tongue can contact anything from the lips to the uvula. If your elves have especially short lips, or lack the overbite common in humans today, they might find labiodontals difficult and lack them, and if they have short tongues, they are unlikely to have linguolabials, or even dentals.

Additionally, these articulators are able to form a variety of shapes and can use different parts of themselves to make the articulation. This gives the difference between retroflex and alveolar consonants (are you contacting with the top of the tongue, the tip, or even the bit just below the tip), between sibilants & non-sibilants (is the tongue flat or grooved), and between laterals and non-laterals (is the restriction made with the edges of the tongue or the centre). In natural languages, these shape contrasts are only observed with the tongue as articulator, but if your elves have especially bendy lips, they might be able to produce analogous contrasts with their lips.

The glottis and pharynx are fairly restricted due to their very nature, both only being able to act in their respective place of articulation, but you do have some freedom here in terms of what articulations they can actually produce. Human glottises can produce stops or fricatives, but the pharynx cannot produce stops. Perhaps your elves are able to fully close their pharynx (not only would this allow for pharyngeal stops, it would also allow for a new secondary articulation, intermediate between clicks, which use a velar closure, and ejectives, which use a glottal closure).

In humans, because our jaws are hinged at the back, fully open restriction is only really possible from the soft palate forwards. This is why the distinction between approximants and fricatives starts getting fuzzy around the uvula and back, the open restriction & close restriction are just too nearby for the clumsy back of the tongue, or the pharynx, or glottis to reliably distinguish them (likewise, vowels are articulated exclusively in the space between the alveolar ridge and soft palate). If your elves have mouths that swing open in such a way that the back is as open as the front, they might be able to reliably distinguish uvula fricatives from approximants.

In addition to these main articulators, there are a couple of other things to consider. These are the vocal chords and the nasal cavity.

Vocal chords give you the ability to distinguish voicing. Humans have tremendous control over our vocal chords allowing for languages that distinguish many different phonations (modal voicing, voiceless, creaky, breathy, etc), as well precise differences in voice onset time (voiced, tenuis, aspirated). If your elves have even finer control they may be able to distinguish even more levels, and if they have weaker control, they may distinguish fewer, or none at all.

The nasal cavity allows for nasal sounds. Gesturally, nasals aren't a separate method of articulation, but a secondary articulation on top of a voiced stop (the same secondary articulation that would go on a nasalised vowel, approximant, or fricative). In nasalised sounds, the very back of the soft palate (around the uvular) lowers, allowing air to enter it at the same time as it enters the mouth, this adds an additional resonating chamber giving an extra overtone visible in a waveform. Because the back of the soft palate has to lower to produce them, nasals are most easily produced forward in the mouth, are difficult on the soft palate, and impossible further back than the uvula. If your elves' nasal cavity connects further forwards than humans, they might find velar or even palatal nasals difficult, if it connects further back, they might find uvular nasals easy, and have an additional series of pharyngeal nasals even further back that they can produce but find difficult.

Any other changes to the vocal tract will affect the timbre of the sounds produced, but not what the sounds actually are at a gestural level (or how they would likely be perceived by a human with some exposure to the language). Many of the changes discussed above (especially adding or removing structures from the vocal tract) will also affect the timbre. As it is, it sounds like all the differences between your elf vocal tract and a human one are of this type.

Title: Considering that my elves are anatomically different from humans, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?

Body:
For years now, I've been building and rebuilding an alternate Earth dense with geography, geology and wildlife.  Among them is this world's equivalent of humans, Draculodon silvius, the "elf".  Among purebred elves--elves that haven't interbred with their dwarf cousins--the average male stands 84 inches in height and 110 pounds in weight, whereas the average female stands 67 inches in height and 99 pounds in weight.  Other differences are as follows:

Longer arms (65-77% the length of the body)

Longer hips

Shorter torsos

Longer necks

Pointed symmetrical outer ears averaging 3-5 inches in length

Asymmetrical inner ears 70% wider than our own

Longer feet

Thicker soles

Taller cheekbones

Longer, sharper canines

Larger molars

Tooth number:  44

So with those anatomical differences listed above, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?


问:
What is the influence of Russian on Tolkien's languages?
I have noticed some artifacts from Russian in published earlier manuscripts of Tolkiens works, e.g.,

The figure named Beorn in The Hobbit was named Medwed in earlier manuscripts

In Early Quenya, there is the word velike "great"

So what is the influence of Russian to Tolkien's languages?

答:
In the Comparative Tables, Tolkien wrote "East Lemberin is of Lithuanian type". Not really Russian, but that's as close as we can get for direct evidence.

The Tables do show changes, to my knowledge, historically common/similar to both Lithuanian and Russian, and unique to other Elvish dialects.
For example, kj > š, gj > j, kw > k, gw > g.

Also the "strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic" in karatechop's answer IMO, does suggest there could be some Russian influence.


问:
Can a toki pona vocative phrase go before an adverbial phrase?
If I wanted to translate an imperative phrase: "Dad, eat quickly!" I can say

tenpo lili la mama o moku

However it seems a bit odd to me to put my vocative mama in the middle.  It seems more natural to me that the vocative clause go towards the beginning of the phrase.

I might try

*mama o tenpo lili la moku

But I am not sure that this is right.  It is my impression that o marks the verb, moku, in place of li rather than marking the noun, mama. And if the sentence were "Dad eats quickly", I'm quite sure

*mama li tenpo lili la moku

would not be grammatical.

Is there a common easily understood way to put the vocative noun at the front of the sentence?  How do toki pona speakers usually structure imperative sentences with an adverbial phrase?

答:
(I'm not an active tp speaker, so this is not based on my experience of usage, but just from the official book)

You could split it into two sentences (as suggested in lesson 17 of TLoG):

mama o pali e ni: tenpo lili la sina moku

"Dad, do this: eat quickly"

This has the advantage of having the addressee at the front, and it keeps the overall structure simple, which after all is a guiding principle of toki pona.


答:
You're right that a 'la' phrase can't be inserted in the middle of a sentence: it always precedes a sentence, providing additional context (or a conditional). This is the only way I've seen used in the community. And by way of concurrence, from pu page 23, "[la] allows you to link two sentences, or link a fragment to a sentence."

There are a couple answers to your example that are idiomatic in common toki pona.

mama o moku kepeken tenpo lili.

Dad, please eat using little time [quickly].

kepeken can be used to describe usage of more abstract ideas and isn't just for physical objects.

o pali e sitelen sina kepeken nasin pona.

Complete this drawing using simple methods [simply].

The second answer is a bit more literal about "adverbial phrase," and comes in the form of a modification on moku. This usage is less idiomatic in spoken and written toki pona, but I do see this form from time to time.

mama o moku pi tenpo lili.

Dad, please eat quickly.

Just like content words can be used to modify a head noun, content words can also be used in the same way to modify a verb. Where 'moku' is 'eat', 'moku lili' can be 'eat only a bit of'.

In general, one of these two methods will suffice. It's sometimes also possible to incorporate into a 'la' phrase preceding the rest of the sentence, but it's not always straightforward for a reader to comprehend, because it can easily be misunderstood as a conditional instead of an addition to context.

Title: Can a toki pona vocative phrase go before an adverbial phrase?

Body:
If I wanted to translate an imperative phrase: "Dad, eat quickly!" I can say

tenpo lili la mama o moku

However it seems a bit odd to me to put my vocative mama in the middle.  It seems more natural to me that the vocative clause go towards the beginning of the phrase.

I might try

*mama o tenpo lili la moku

But I am not sure that this is right.  It is my impression that o marks the verb, moku, in place of li rather than marking the noun, mama. And if the sentence were "Dad eats quickly", I'm quite sure

*mama li tenpo lili la moku

would not be grammatical.

Is there a common easily understood way to put the vocative noun at the front of the sentence?  How do toki pona speakers usually structure imperative sentences with an adverbial phrase?


问:
Is there a set of sound change rules that undoes Grimm's law?
Zompist has a Sound Change Applier that comes with some example rules:

```<code>[sm]//_#
i/j/_V
L/V/_
e//Vr_#
v//V_V
u/o/_#
gn/nh/_
S/Z/V_V
c/i/F_t
c/u/B_t
p//V_t
ii/i/_
e//C_rV
</code>```

Is there a set of similar rules that would "undo" Grimm's Law sound changes?

答:
Define categories for aspirated and unaspirated voiced stops, voiceless stops, and fricatives:

```<code>A=ḅḍġǵ
U=bdgɠ
V=ptkƙ
F=φþxẍ
</code>```

(I’m forced to use strange characters for each of these phones due to the one-character-per-phone restriction of SCA².)

Then Grimm’s law can be reversed as follows:

```<code>U/A/_
V/U/_
F/V/_
</code>```

(As far as I can tell, PIE had none of /ɸ θ x xʷ/. If it had, Grimm’s law would of course be impossible to undo as it would have caused mergers. Luckily, this does not appear to have been the case.)

Body:
Define categories for aspirated and unaspirated voiced stops, voiceless stops, and fricatives:

A=ḅḍġǵ
U=bdgɠ
V=ptkƙ
F=φþxẍ

(I’m forced to use strange characters for each of these phones due to the one-character-per-phone restriction of SCA².)

Then Grimm’s law can be reversed as follows:

U/A/_
V/U/_
F/V/_

(As far as I can tell, PIE had none of /ɸ θ x xʷ/. If it had, Grimm’s law would of course be impossible to undo as it would have caused mergers. Luckily, this does not appear to have been the case.)


问:
Inventing A Plural Form For First And Second Person
I am working on the pronoun system for my conlang.

The table below illustrates what I have ended up with so far.

I am looking for suggestions on how - if even needed - to implement a plural form that only includes the first and second person, but not the third (1+2+2+...).

Should I replace the dual form and let it be up to the context, wether its 1+2 or 1+2+2+...

Or should I implement a total new form for it and how would I name it then?

答:
After thinking about this a bit, I realised that you are basically describing a minimal–augmented pronoun system. In a minimal–augmented system, each person comes in two pronominal forms: minimal, which is singlar for 1, 2 and 3, but dual for 1+2; and augmented, which is more than minimal. Slotting your pronominal table into this system gives the following:

Minimal
Augmented

1
1+3+3+…

1+2
1+2+3+…

2
2+2+…

3
3+3+…

But now that I look at this table, I notice something odd. See, the augmented form of 3 is many 3s, and the augmented form of 2 is many 2s. But the augmented form of 1 refers to many 3s! This is odd, especially considering that a first person plural pronoun is usually 1+1+… — no need to drag random third persons into it. Similarly, your augmented 1+2 pronoun should be many first and second persons, without third persons. Thus, your 1+2+2+… form should be the augmented 1+2 pronoun:

Minimal
Augmented

1
1+1+…

1+2
1+2+1+2+…

2
2+2+…

3
3+3+…

Or, if you prefer, you can shoehorn it into a more ‘traditional’ form and call it a first person inclusive plural:


问:
Is the Voynich manuscript written in a natural or constructed language?
The Voynich manuscript is dated to the early 15th century.

It is a medieval handwritten book of almost 250 pages, and even today the text cannot be understood. It has become quite famous, and it is recognised as one of the main unsolved problems in the history of cryptography.

Can we tell whether it is written in a natural or constructed language?

答:
There's no evidence to say that it is a constructed language.

The idea was investigated in detail by John Tiltman, a British army officer who specialized in cryptography. The possibility of the Voynich manuscript being a constructed language was brought to his attention by William Friedman, an expert on the manuscript. Friedman confided to Tiltman, after decades of work on it, that he thought the writing could be a form of "synthetic universal language", and so the cryptographer expanded his investigation in that direction, writing a paper on the theory.

The basic premise behind a "synthetic universal language" is to use characters to represent certain logical ideas; by chaining together letters, you can create "words" that describe more complicated principles. By adding the appropriate prefixes and suffixes, characters can be quite powerful. Tiltman noticed that some of the patterns in the words fit this type of design. However, the evidence for this sort of construction was not strong enough, and Tiltman's analysis of the frequency of the occurrence of certain letters did not support Friedman's hypothesis.

Tiltman also traced the historical origin of a "universal language", to determine if such an idea had been bounced around early enough. However, this proved difficult, and Tiltman found no concrete examples prior to the mid-17th century. This is two centuries after the Voynich manuscript was written - sometime in the 15th century - and so if the manuscript was indeed written in a universal language, it would predate these universal languages by two centuries.

Tiltman noted

It was clear that the productions of these two men [Wilkins and Dalgarno, two early proponents of universal languages] were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution. When I was
attempting to trace back the idea of universal language, I came upon a printed book entitled The Universal Character by Cave Beck, London 1657 (also printed in French in the same year). Cave Beck was one of the original members of the British Royal Society and his system was certainly a cumbersome mixture.

Beck's writing claims that the idea of a universal language goes back to the 16th century, but this still places it many years after the manuscript's origin.  The idea of synthetic universal languages, though perhaps relatively widespread in the 17th century, simply was unknown in the 15th. This was a strike against Friedman's theory. If the Voynich manuscript was a synthetic universal language, it would have borne no relation - in time of conception of structure - to later examples.

The universal language route is of course not the only possibility; constructed languages can take many forms. However, it was possible the most promising option, and research into it went nowhere. Friedman's claim remains unsupported, and, to my knowledge, no further academic analyses have been done. We certainly can't rule out the theory that the Voynich manuscript is written in a constructed language, but we have no reason to believe that it is.


问:
Strategies for marking boundaries between potentially discontinuous top-level clauses
What are some strategies for making boundaries between top-level clauses obvious?

I think the most straightforward strategy is some kind of collection of sentence-final particles, but I'm curious about others.

I'm particularly interested in features that would enable discontinuous clauses.

I was reading a paper recently about prolific agreement in some Nakh-Daghestanian languages. The noun class that the absolutive argument belongs to can be repeated many times throughout the sentence:

```<code>Aˤli-l      qːatːa          b-ullaj      b-ur
Ali(I)-ERG  house(III).ABS  III-do.PROG  III-AUX
</code>```

Here's an excerpt from Foley's paper Agreement in the Languages of the Caucausus showing a curious fact about this agreement. There are many kinds of words that can exhibit agreement with the absolutive argument, but agreement isn't uniform within a word class.

So far we’ve seen that NEC languages allow verbs of all stripes to
  agree — lexical and auxiliary, finite and nonfinite. But agreement is
  not limited to verbs. A remarkable property of NEC agreement is its
  ‘promiscuity’: a wide range of lexical categories can participate in
  gender agreement, all controlled by an absolutive clausemate.
  ...
  Yet while agreement in NEC may be promiscuous, it is also spotty. For
  any given lexical category that can potentially agree, typically only
  a minority of lexical items in that category actually do. For example,
  just 32% of Archi verb stems participate in agreement (Chumakina &
  Bond 2016:111) ...

A feature like this could be useful for making clause boundaries obvious if the repeated feature changes frequently from clause to clause. I think the absolutive argument is probably pretty variable, but I am not certain.

For instance, suppose we have two sentences. Following the notation of the paper, I'm using ROOT(n) to mean that ROOT has the nth noun class. (I) and (II) don't have any independent expression.

```<code>1) 1sg-ERG cat(I)-ABS see-PRES-I
   I see the cat.
2) 1sg-ERG mouse(II)-ABS NEG-see-PRES-II
   I see the mouse
</code>```

Combining the sentences in the following way is possible, since it's clear which verb goes with which argument

```<code>3) 1sg-ERG cat(I)-ABS mouse(II)-ABS see-PRES-I NEG-see-PRES-II
   I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
</code>```

What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses?

答:
What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses?

Interesting question! For a start, some languages have ‘verbal classifiers’ (Aikhenvald 2000). These are a set of incorporated nouns or dedicated affixes which agree with a verbal argument, most commonly the S/O argument. Such a system will certainly be mostly or entirely orthogonal to the gender system, so is useful for further disambiguation. Even 5 or so verbal classifiers — a very small number — is enough to give a reasonable number of class/classifier combinations: (I denote the noun classes in uppercase and verbal classifiers in lowercase)

```<code>1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I NEG-i-see-PRS-II
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse
</code>```

By the way, I see no reason why the  verb should agree only with the absolutive argument in noun class (cf Bantu), so let’s add some polypersonal agreement for further disambiguation:

```<code>1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
</code>```

Let’s go further. In some languages, alignment is lexically determined by the verb used. Though this usually occurs with agreement affixes, one can imagine a system where there are several possibilities for case-marking of intransitive and transitive verbs, with the verb retaining its transitivity. This adds extra information when two verbs are juxtaposed with their arguments interleaved. In this case, it seems reasonable for a verb like ‘see’ to take absolutive–dative marking (or absolutive–accusative, or nominative–accusative, if you like):

```<code>1sg-ABS cat(I,i)-DAT mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
</code>```

Let’s go further. It is common for converbal constructions to specify whether the verb is same-subject or different-subject with respect to the main verb, or following clause in the case of clause chaining. Of course, the converbal affix only attaches to the verb itself. However, the Australian language Kayardild has a rather odd construction in which an oblique case is suffixed to nearly every single word of a different-subject complement clause (Evans 1995). This gives me enough precedent to postulate a system wherein a same-subject or different-subject affix is added to every word of the relevant clause:

```<code>1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
</code>```

(Incidentally, converbs already allow a certain amount of discontinuity in the main clause: e.g. the man, being a traitor, was tried by the king.)

Let’s go further. Negative concord allows the negative to be marked several different times within the clause (e.g. dialectal I ain’t got no money). It is straightforward to state that e.g. the negative prefix must be applied to both the absolutive argument and the verb:

```<code>1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.
</code>```

All these together then give enough leeway to do stuff like:

mouse(II,i)-ABS-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-ABS-DS i-chase-PST-II-I-SS NEG-i-catch-PST-II-I-DS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS, 1sg-ABS-SS rat(II,ii)-DAT-SS cat(I,i)-ABS-DS ii-see-PST-II-SS i-tell-PST-I-1sg-DS, ii-catch-PST-II-I-SS i-get.bored-PST-I rat(II,ii)-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS.

The cat chased a mouse, but didn’t catch it; I saw a rat, and told the cat. The cat caught the rat but got bored.

(Warning: I’m a bit unsure as to whether some of the nouns should take SS or DS marking, but it should be fine as is.)

Body:
What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses?

Interesting question! For a start, some languages have ‘verbal classifiers’ (Aikhenvald 2000). These are a set of incorporated nouns or dedicated affixes which agree with a verbal argument, most commonly the S/O argument. Such a system will certainly be mostly or entirely orthogonal to the gender system, so is useful for further disambiguation. Even 5 or so verbal classifiers — a very small number — is enough to give a reasonable number of class/classifier combinations: (I denote the noun classes in uppercase and verbal classifiers in lowercase)

1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I NEG-i-see-PRS-II
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse

By the way, I see no reason why the  verb should agree only with the absolutive argument in noun class (cf Bantu), so let’s add some polypersonal agreement for further disambiguation:

1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

Let’s go further. In some languages, alignment is lexically determined by the verb used. Though this usually occurs with agreement affixes, one can imagine a system where there are several possibilities for case-marking of intransitive and transitive verbs, with the verb retaining its transitivity. This adds extra information when two verbs are juxtaposed with their arguments interleaved. In this case, it seems reasonable for a verb like ‘see’ to take absolutive–dative marking (or absolutive–accusative, or nominative–accusative, if you like):

1sg-ABS cat(I,i)-DAT mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

Let’s go further. It is common for converbal constructions to specify whether the verb is same-subject or different-subject with respect to the main verb, or following clause in the case of clause chaining. Of course, the converbal affix only attaches to the verb itself. However, the Australian language Kayardild has a rather odd construction in which an oblique case is suffixed to nearly every single word of a different-subject complement clause (Evans 1995). This gives me enough precedent to postulate a system wherein a same-subject or different-subject affix is added to every word of the relevant clause:

1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

(Incidentally, converbs already allow a certain amount of discontinuity in the main clause: e.g. the man, being a traitor, was tried by the king.)

Let’s go further. Negative concord allows the negative to be marked several different times within the clause (e.g. dialectal I ain’t got no money). It is straightforward to state that e.g. the negative prefix must be applied to both the absolutive argument and the verb:

1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

All these together then give enough leeway to do stuff like:

mouse(II,i)-ABS-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-ABS-DS i-chase-PST-II-I-SS NEG-i-catch-PST-II-I-DS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS, 1sg-ABS-SS rat(II,ii)-DAT-SS cat(I,i)-ABS-DS ii-see-PST-II-SS i-tell-PST-I-1sg-DS, ii-catch-PST-II-I-SS i-get.bored-PST-I rat(II,ii)-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS.

The cat chased a mouse, but didn’t catch it; I saw a rat, and told the cat. The cat caught the rat but got bored.

(Warning: I’m a bit unsure as to whether some of the nouns should take SS or DS marking, but it should be fine as is.)


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

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

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

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

答: The words plaĝo & strando both mean beach. Another example is kruro & gambo for leg. See this question. Plaĝo is from French plage. My guess is strando comes from the Norwegian word stranden meaning 'bay'. EDIT: According to wiktionary strand is from the Old English word for shore/seashore. Norwegian is a Germanic language, so stranden may have come from strand.


问:
Could a language with only fricatives at the end of words reasonably exist?
There are several non-constructed languages, including English, in which almost all words end in consonants, but what about a language in which almost all words end in a certain type of consonant? In my case, I'm trying a synthetic language which relies on different types of fricatives at the end of words to show grammatical meaning. The language has several non-fricative consonants, but would it be realistic for those consonants not to form endings while the fricatives do?</p>

答:
Yes, of course, that's entirely possible!

See also word-final voicing in Basque, which is an example of a sound change that affects word-final consonants especially much. Conceivable, such could also lead to spirantization (plosive>fricative) word-finally. (And there are certainly more other ways such a trait could come to be)


问:
Setting a signature Phonetics
A year ago, I became fascinated by conlanging. So I set out to create one for my soon-to-be-completed world, but no matter what I came up with, the words sounded like English. It feels like I am just copying an existing language. After a bit of reading and watching videos on Atriflexian, I developed a little idea about phonotactics but never got around to my original problem.

Italian, Spanish, French, German, English... each of these dominant languages have common roots, but one will not confuse one language with another. Is there some concept that I might be missing?

答:
Look at the vowel system of each language, and you will see striking differences between them:

Italian: Seven pure vowels

Spanish: Five pure vowels

French: Seven vowels plus rounded front vowels plus nasal vowels

German: A lot of different vowels  (actually nine basic vowels plus rounded front vowels plus shwa)

English: A lot of very strange vowels: Back unrounded vowels and shwa even in stressed and long syllables, lots of diphthongs, relative rareness of pure, non-diphthongised vowels

So, doing something with the vowel system will make your conlang acoustically different from the major European languages. Not only the set of chosen vowels but also their relative frequencies play a role, making /i/ or /u/ the most frequent vowel in your conlang will make its sound very exotic.

Title: Setting a signature Phonetics


问:
How to go about making a simple to speak (for English speakers) conlang?
I am new to conlanging, and would like to create a language which English speakers can easily learn. How would you suggest I go about optimizing it for English speakers? Which features should I choose to allow English speakers to learn it easily?</p>

答: Well, obviously plain English is the simplest language to an English speaker. You can simplify it it even further by restricting the vocabulary and get at designs like Basic English. Or you can aim at people with low competences in language or reading, for German there is Leichte Sprache in this domain, I am not aware of a special English in that domain (but very close to that is Simple English Wikipedia, the term Special English itself was used for the controlled language used by Voice of America.</p>


答: Start with "normal" English and restrict it by adding rules specifically crafted for certain communication situations - one widely used and successful example is the Aeronautical phraseology, which, despite the name is actually a controlled language.</p>

Title: How to go about making a simple to speak (for English speakers) conlang?

Body: I am new to conlanging, and would like to create a language which English speakers can easily learn. How would you suggest I go about optimizing it for English speakers? Which features should I choose to allow English speakers to learn it easily?</p>


问:
Does a constructed language need an ontology?
I am very confident my implied premise is valid. There is no sense in trying to construct a language without a complete list illustrating the semantic relationship of the anticipated words.

I have not invested any time into understanding the modular construction of sound that I seem to be seeing as the focus of the questions posted here, but it would seem that the number of modular sounds might equal to the number of items in the collation format for the ontology.

Seem reasonable???

答:
Constructing an ontology first is one approach to language construction, and it leads to so-called philosophical languages or a priori conlangs. This approach was especially popular in the 19th century, before more natural conlangs like Volapük and Esperanto appeared.

Naturalistic conlangs are most often constructed without an explicit ontology and have semantic irregularities of all kind.


问:
Reverse diachronic languages
There is quite an amount of so-called diachronic constructed languages, taking one language (historical like vulgar Latin, or modern like present-day English) and applying some sound shifts and grammatical shifts to this language.

Going the other way round, constructing a language that is older in time than the given language and is meant to be a plausible antecessor of that language is much rarer. I am aware of Arcaicam Esperantom as an example of such a language, but I'd like to learn of more of them.

So what are examples of reverse diachronic constructed languages?

答: Possibly the most well-known example is Mark Rosenfelder’s Proto-Eastern, which was developed to be a plausible ancestor of Verdurian. Probably there are others as well.</p>

Title: Reverse diachronic languages


答:
Be extremely analytic.

Definitely don't inflect nouns. Keep verb and pronoun inflections to a bare minimum, and rely on modal verbs and adpositions as much as you can in place of complicated syntax rules. English inflection is so degenerate that including more than three forms per verb will be hard for English speakers -- you have slightly more leeway with pronouns, which in English decline into five forms under three principal parts, but don't overdo it.

Keep the phonology to a subset of English's.

English has a lot of vowels, usually at least 10. While you probably shouldn't try to use all of them, keep to ones that are common in multiple dialects of English: /ə/, /ɪ/, and /ɑː/ for instance.

Avoid <r> entirely. You don't want to deal with differences between the English <r> and your conlang's and if it is the same as one possible English <r> then some other English dialects are going to run into problems with it.

Avoid intervocalic /VtV/. In American English, a regular sound change flaps /VtV/ to /VɾV/, but this is not so in all dialects, and thus may cause issues.


答:
The easiest sort of conlang for English speakers would be one where the grammar of English is maintained unchanged, and you just add or replace a bunch of vocabulary. If you add a lot of new vocabulary for new concepts you could consider it some kind of new dialect. If you replace existing vocabulary so that the existing concepts are referred to with new words, then that's a relexification.

One example is The Gostak:

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.

Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.

But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.


问:
What is the oldest known constructed language?
Historically speaking, what is the oldest known constructed language that we are able to determine with historical evidence?</p>

答: The oldest language whose creator set out to actually invent a language (as opposed to Pāṇini, who wanted to create a classical standard out of an already  extant language) was probably Lingua Ignota. The formerly brilliant Langmaker website had an article on it (now accessible through the Wayback Machine). It was made in the twelfth century, predating another early conlang, Balaibalan, which was made somewhen between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.</p>


问:
How is Ido helpful in everyday's life?
Constructed languages such as Ido are easy but is there anyway it is helpful. Do they have any purpose in real life other than being an experiment?</p>

答:
Note: the formulation of the question has changed after I submitted my response: originally it was about conlangs with Ido as a specific example. Hence my answer is not so much about Ido in particular, but conlangs in general.

Esperanto is widely spoken all over the world, and is thus practically useful for communication; less widely used languages either have their own enthusiasts' communities (eg toki pona). Other, more obscure languages won't have that.

But they can still be useful in a variety of ways:

expanding your horizon: learning a new language gets you to think in a different way (see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) from your native one. This is one reason toki pona was designed the way it was: the limited vocabulary forces you to shed aspects of meaning that are not essential for what you want to say. Klingon has a very lop-sided vocabulary, which again makes it easy to express some aspects, but hard to reason about others. This applies both to natural languages (through attached cultures) and constructed languages.

easier language learning: this is especially valid for Esperanto. A conlang is often more regular, so learners can learn about concepts of linguistics without worrying too much about exceptions to myriad rules. There is an actual programme (whose name escapes me) where Esperanto is taught as the first foreign language to school kids. This makes it easier for them to learn subsequent languages and they progress faster (even taking into account the additional time of learning Esperanto)

in-group communication: if you and your friends share an obscure conlang, you can use it to communicate in secret in public. Or you might find it easier to talk about a shared hobby (eg going to the extreme of jargon use by turning it into a language). Or you could write a secret diary in it.

more concise expression: in computing you have the concept of DSLs (domain specific languages). You can design a conlang which is suited specifically for a particular purpose (expressing emotions, describing inter-personal relationships, mathematics, etc). Natural languages are general purpose languages, but with a conlang you can hone in on areas that you are interested in, and ignore others. This again relates to linguistic relativity in a way.

game/recreational use: you can use a conlang as an 'exotic' language for NPC in games to make them more realistic. The player can then pick up the language (or learn it, if it is a more well-known conlang) and communicate with the NPCs. Or you could write songs in a conlang (who understands song lyrics anyway!) Or write poetry.

...

I personally found Esperanto easy to learn, and when learning other European languages you notice a cross-over in vocabulary. As I learned other languages before, it didn't really give me a better understanding of languages per se (I'd actually studied linguistics by that time already), but I can imagine that it makes it easier to acquire natural languages. I'm not familiar with Ido, so I cannot say anything specifically to that.

Title: How is Ido helpful in everyday's life?


问:
How to modernize a dead language vocabulary
This is an enthusiastic question: Currently I'm studying Akkadian for fun, but as it is a dead language, the vocabulary may have some missing words/concepts.  For example, I didn`t found a word for "steel", or some mathematical terms (I'm a mathematician).  How could I borrow some modern word to akkadian? Form which language should I look for? (hebrew? arabic?) How could the word be "transformed" to look akkadian?</p>

答:
There are several possible approaches here, and which you choose will depend somewhat on what your goals are for this project.

The simplest option would be to borrow the term as a loanword from a globally hegemonic language of today (likely English), making only the phonetic adaptations necessary to fit Akkadian phonology (e.g. you don't have any dental fricatives /θ ð/, so would need to replace these with some other consonant, e.g. the alveolar stops /t d/).

With this approach, you might have a word for steel as šaṭīlu- (š being the only coronal fricative, the a being inserted to break up the illegal onset cluster, and the unaspirated t being borrowed as emphatic).

You can instead choose to borrow the word from a language that was hegemonic at some point in the past, likely when the new technology was introduced. If you're doing this though, you need to be aware of the stage in the language's development you're borrowing into.

With this approach, you could do what Arabic and Hebrew did and borrow Middle Persian pwlʾpt' (pōlāwad), possibly as something like pūlâdu-, and then apply whatever sound changes would be expected to occur since the borrowing (if any).

You could also coin a word based on native roots, looking at the etymologies for the missing words in related or nearby languages (this technique was used a lot in the revival of Hebrew).

With this approach, your word for steel might be kûnu- (possibly phonemically kônu-, if there was an o phoneme) from the verb kânu "to be firm", following the same etymology as that of English "steel".

The other of your major choices is to look at the word in related languages, and construct what the Akkadian cognate would be, had the word existed at the Proto-Semitic stage (something that certainly would not have been the case here, seeing as Proto-Semitic predates the discovery of steel or most of mathematics by quite some time).

Unfortunately I can't use "steel" as an example here very well, because most of the nearby Semitic languages borrowed their word from Persian. Instead lets look at "equation". Here the Arabic word is مُعَادَلَة muʿādala, a verbal noun of a Form III verb. Form III verbs in Arabic (which promote the indirect object of a Form I verb to their direct object) do not have a direct cognate class in Akkadian, but the Gt-stem has the closest semantics in this case. The equivalent construction then might be something like tedāltu-.

As I say, which approach you should take depends on your goals.

Borrowing from a modern hegemonic language is probably the easiest if you just want to make it usable today, and aren't interested in some alternate history for the language where it survived.

Borrowing from a formerly hegemonic language on the other hand, is good if you are interested in that alternate history, and intend to apply various sound changes from the historical Akkadian to your present day form.

Coining the word from native roots also works well if you're not interested in alternate history, but is likely to make it harder for other people to learn. This method has historically been popular only when there is already a community who uses the language (in at least some contexts), rather than those where someone is trying to build the community from the ground up.

Constructing plausible cognates tends to make the most sense for accidental gaps in the lexicon where a word did presumably exist, in other instances it would be pretty unusual.

OwnerDisplayName: Mosconi


答:
Ido still has a small speech community, so by learning Ido you join that community and you can communicate with fellow samideanoj. Note that the community is small, probably eurocentric, and aging. You are engaging in a very special and rare hobby, I'd say.

Second, Ido is to a high degree mutually intelligible with Esperanto, so learning Ido will give you access to Esperanto, too. However, if you want to become an Esperantist, you should of course learn the original Esperanto instead.

Title: How is Ido helpful in everyday's life?

Body: Constructed languages such as Ido are easy but is there anyway it is helpful. Do they have any purpose in real life other than being an experiment?</p>


问:
Has anybody come up with a "Japanized" version of toki pona?
I saw a post on twitter about creating a "Japanized" version of toki pona. Has anyone done that? toki pona certainly seems to be influenced at least a little bit by Japanese anyway (word structure/particles). The poster suggested starting by substituting the vocabulary with the equivalent Japanese words, which would be a little difficult, because tp words can vary quite a bit in meaning so it's difficult to fit them into one word/kanji. Kanji are usually chosen with simplicity in mind first, over having the exact equivalent meaning. 'lon' for example can mean at/in/on, but also means true/real/alive. 在 is the standard kanji used. 'tawa' can be go/move (could be 行?), but also means for (as in 'for me/you'). Officially 去 is used. The word 'toki' could be 話 (hana, speak) or 語 (go, language) depending on the context, but generally 言(gen?) is used.(言良-good statement/quote 話良-good speech, & 語良-good language, would all normally just be written as 言良). Has anybody created a list of toki pona words with the equivalent Japanese words? I use the seperate kanji as well as unofficial words like te...to for surrounding quotes</p>

答:
This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but are you familiar with sitelen telo?

https://imgur.com/a/A30SGum


答:
Languages adopt new words (in the sense you're talking about) four ways:

Immigration: simply borrow a word from another language, with some phonological changes if necessary to adapt it to the new language. English, as possibly the greatest vocabulary thief in history, does this all the time. Examples are too numerous to mention.

Adaptation/Evolution: you take an existing word from a related concept and either use it directly with a new meaning, or modify it a bit to differentiate it from the original word and meaning, or simply have the concept itself change over time. As an example, the word "toilet" made the transition "cloth cover for folded clothes" > "cloth cover for a dressing table" > "things related to dressing" > "washing (ie, thing you do prior to dressing" > "room where you wash" > "room for personal hygiene" > "the ceramic thing you sit on to defecate".

Metaphor: use a word or phrase that has some kind of metaphorical association with what you want to name. As an example, "steel" comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning something like "to stand fast" (ie, be resilient). A computer mouse comes from the shape and cord resembling a real mouse and its tail, as a more modern example.

Deliberate coinage: more likely a modern phenomenon, but it could happen. See, for example, "kleenex"

Title: How to modernize a dead language vocabulary

Body: This is an enthusiastic question: Currently I'm studying Akkadian for fun, but as it is a dead language, the vocabulary may have some missing words/concepts.  For example, I didn`t found a word for "steel", or some mathematical terms (I'm a mathematician).  How could I borrow some modern word to akkadian? Form which language should I look for? (hebrew? arabic?) How could the word be "transformed" to look akkadian?</p>


问:
Is mathematics considered a constructed language?
Mathematics consists of various names, relationships, etc. that have been consciously constructed and developed over time. On the other hand its a "formal" language whose scope is extremely specialized compared to a regular language. How else does mathematics compare/contrast with constructed languages?</p>

答:
I asked this question. After reading the responses and similar posts, I’ve come to the following understanding.

At this point in history I think mathematics is very clearly constructed so my question reduces to whether mathematics is a language. This question has already been asked (1,2) but I don’t find the answers completely satisfying.

The question "Is math a language?" obviously begs the questions: What is math? What is language? I would define natural language loosely as the normal languages that we know: English, Spanish, etc. But mathematics is more about the study of formal systems involving formal languages.

The divide between natural and formal language is especially evident in the impossibility of translation between them. For example, consider the formal system of chess with a formal language of pieces, moves, etc. It’s impossible to translate a natural language expression like “I love you” into chess moves without extreme contrivance. In the other direction a sequence of chess moves has no inherent meaning outside of chess. There’s plenty of natural language around chess in discussion, explanation, description, etc. But the internal language of chess is formal and strictly limited to chess. Set theory, a popular mathematical framework, is quite similar. You can't naturally say "I love you" with sets.

It’s worth noting that formal languages can be translated between each other in some sense similar to natural language. For example, chess or Magic the Gathering can be "translated" into a turing machine (ie. played on a computer). More surprising a turing machine can also be translated into MTG.


问:
Have language regulators ever made concessions and changed the language to adopt naturally occurring changes?
A few conlangs have language regulators or academies. Have any of these ever been faced with naturally occurring linguistic change and changed the official version of the language to match?

Please consider only grammatical, morphological, or syntactic changes, and not simply the inclusion of new words, as I expect that to be very common.

答:
It would seem that Esperanto is one such that not only has done so, but actually has an Academy to guide and legitimize the process.

This article makes note of several, such as new ungendered pronouns (ŝli < ŝi au li; ri = they s.) and the degendering of formerly masculine nouns (dentisto =/= male dentist).

I'm sure that these proposals are coming from the community of speakers themselves and are being agreed to by consensus before any kind of official blessing.


答:
I would argue that mathematics itself is not a language in the way that English, Mandarin, Swahili, Quechua or even Esperanto are because, depending on how you define it, it is either too limited (mathematical notation) or it is too ill-defined (mathematics as practiced by mathematicians).

Mathematical English comes close to being a constructed language, but I would argue that it isn't one because usual mathematical practice does not sharply delineate it from ordinary English. Mathematical English is more like a constructed register of English than a constructed language.

I'm using Mathematical English in a very narrow sense; it is the variant of English that is used to provide semantics for logical formalisms, such as first-order logic. Consider this handout for example.

In Mathematical English, the meanings of certain closed-class English words are given new definitions and some of the semantics and pragmatics of English is deliberately changed.

In particular, in Mathematical English words like and, or, not, and if are used differently than in ordinary English. In particular, they are used in an entirely truth-functional way.

In the quote below, if, and, and ⊨ (read as "entails") are part of Mathematical English.

```<code>A, α ⊨ (θ ∧ ψ) if A, α ⊨ θ and A, α ⊨ ψ
</code>```

This explains the meaning of the symbol for conjunction ∧ by using the meaning of and in Mathematical English, which is similar to, but not exactly the same as, the meaning of and in English.

Title: Is mathematics considered a constructed language?

Body: Mathematics consists of various names, relationships, etc. that have been consciously constructed and developed over time. On the other hand its a "formal" language whose scope is extremely specialized compared to a regular language. How else does mathematics compare/contrast with constructed languages?</p>

Body:
I would argue that mathematics itself is not a language in the way that English, Mandarin, Swahili, Quechua or even Esperanto are because, depending on how you define it, it is either too limited (mathematical notation) or it is too ill-defined (mathematics as practiced by mathematicians).

Mathematical English comes close to being a constructed language, but I would argue that it isn't one because usual mathematical practice does not sharply delineate it from ordinary English. Mathematical English is more like a constructed register of English than a constructed language.

I'm using Mathematical English in a very narrow sense; it is the variant of English that is used to provide semantics for logical formalisms, such as first-order logic. Consider this handout for example.

In Mathematical English, the meanings of certain closed-class English words are given new definitions and some of the semantics and pragmatics of English is deliberately changed.

In particular, in Mathematical English words like and, or, not, and if are used differently than in ordinary English. In particular, they are used in an entirely truth-functional way.

In the quote below, if, and, and ⊨ (read as "entails") are part of Mathematical English.

A, α ⊨ (θ ∧ ψ) if A, α ⊨ θ and A, α ⊨ ψ

This explains the meaning of the symbol for conjunction ∧ by using the meaning of and in Mathematical English, which is similar to, but not exactly the same as, the meaning of and in English.


问:
How to prevent pronoun dropping in my language?
I have an idea for a language I am toying with where sentences have a fairly rigid structure, unfortunately I get the feeling that if I were to start with a precursor protolang (as part of me developing the language) with this structure, the leading pronoun would be worn away and eventually dropped by the time I figure out what the modern version of the language would look like.

I would end up with a Pro-drop language.

A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are pragmatically or grammatically inferable.

The sort of 'rigid structure', besides being SOV, I have been thinking of would be something like:

<subject-pronoun><pronoun-context-suffix> <first-object> <optional-second-object> <verb>...

The unique difficulty is, that I intentionally want all sentences to be of this form.

Whereas in english you might say "The dog barks, and that makes me happy", in this language it would be "I 'happy-mood-indicator' dog barks'. Or where you might say "Alex gave them a book" in this language you would say "I 'uncertainty-indicator' Alex them gave book" if you didn't know it definitely happened, or "I 'profession-indicator' Alex them gave book", if it's your job to make sure Alex give them the book, "I 'part-of-group-indicator' Alex them gave book" if you being part of a group is important to the context (in this way, we only have the singular subject pronoun) and so on for different contexts.

But as you might guess, if all sentences start with the subject pronoun, I can't see a reason why the word would naturally stay as part of the sentence structure.

How can I prevent it being dropped?

答:
I'm interpreting the question as how do I make obligatory subject pronouns at the beginning of a sentence diachronically stable under some perhaps-reasonable assumptions.

First, the idea you're describing with an obligatory clause-initial subject pronoun and some kind of clitic in Wackernagel's position (directly after the first constituent) might already be fairly stable.

There is natural language precedent for obligatory subject pronouns, for example, see Fijian. There's nothing directly equivalent to the context particles, but Fijian does have some TAM marking particles that appear before or after the verb, which appears directly after the subject pronoun.

Speculating a bit, I think you're onto something that subject pronouns are frequently pragmatically inferrable. Indeed, some languages regularly drop the subject pronoun even in cases where the verb lacks person marking.

In order to combat this, you might do something like fuse the subject pronoun and negative marker, yielding something similar to the negative subject prefixes in Swahili and other Bantu languages.


问:
What CompSci concepts have been used in conlanging?
I am looking for things in the vein of the use of run-length encoding in representing arbitrarily large integers in a Haskell-based conlang.

An example might be tree data structure based punctuation in a writing system (Lispy), a language in which sentence ends are signaled not by structure but by an explicit stop word (like a C-style language's semi-colon), or a language in which there are labels (explicitly or implicitly) assigned to each sentence, which can be used to refer to that sentence (assembly or BASIC-like).

Could someone share some examples of how CS ideas are used in conlanging?

答:
Some examples of conlangs which use CS concepts include

Fith, as pointed out to me by @bradrn in the comments of this question. It is a stack-based conlang, similar conceptually to forth, or min. It is spoken by "a race of centaur-like marsupials" known as Fithians.

Shallow Fith, which is intended as a human speak-able subset of Fith, devised to allow Fithians and humans to communicate.

The conlang from this question, Leksah. It is a functional conlang, inspired by Haskell,  which was created for a world-building project. Leksah has functions, which act similarly to verbs, a function application word, and literals, which act somewhat like nouns.

Edit:

I am in the process of creating an as-yet unpublished conlang with a system of pattern matching with pronouns.
For example, The red horse is friends with the black dog. The red <third-person pronoun> is much bigger than the black <third-person pronoun>, would mean that

The red horse and black dog are friends.

The red horse is much bigger than the black dog.


答:
We can read ontology a little more broadly, but it's hard to do so without getting into worldbuilding. Generally the division between meanings (e.g. bend vs. fold vs. break, in French your knees don't bend, they fold, also the love-like distinction of English) can be considered of an ontological nature, and quite often these are strongly informed by the specific cultural history that lead to them

The distinction between "cooking" and "baking" derives from how historically in Europe these were the remits of different people working in different places. It is quite artificial when you really look at it, and other languages use the same work for the heating of bread (or bread equivalent) and meat.

An ontology is useful to figure out where concepts are classified by the speakers (e.g. what counts as a flower, what counts as art, what counts as crime, as a bird, as a bug?). Even on a grammatical level (what is dubious or unreal enough that it qualifies for the subjunctive?) Otherwise, you're really just relexifying your mother tongue.

Title: Does a constructed language need an ontology?

Body:
I am very confident my implied premise is valid. There is no sense in trying to construct a language without a complete list illustrating the semantic relationship of the anticipated words.

I have not invested any time into understanding the modular construction of sound that I seem to be seeing as the focus of the questions posted here, but it would seem that the number of modular sounds might equal to the number of items in the collation format for the ontology.

Seem reasonable???


问:
Finding Sentence Structure in VSO
I'm making a Conlang, and this conlang uses a Verb-Subject-Object Sentence Structure. I'm trying to convert part of the poem "The New Colossus" into the Conlang, but I'm stuck trying to figure out which parts of the poem are which.
Specifically, I'm stuck trying to find (and convert to VSO) this part;

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

If someone could assist me with finding and converting the structure here, it would be great.

答:
This sentence is in the imperative mood, so there is no subject (it´s implied to be the addressee). The verb is give, me is the indirect object (the target of give), and the rest of the sentence is the direct object.

The direct object is a complex noun phrase, with masses being the head, a set of determiner/adjective groups (your tired etc) as pre-modifiers, and a post-modifying clause yearning to breathe free. This could be interpreted as a relative clause with who are being omitted for poetic reasons.

[Note: I have labeled the possessive pronoun your as a determiner here, as it has the same function, and cannot be used at the same time as another determiner.]

UPDATE: It has occurred to me after Anton´s comment that there is also a slightly different interpretation of the direct object possible. Instead of it being a single noun phrase with the head masses, it could also be a list of three different groups of people:

give me your tired (people)

give me your poor (people)

give me your huddled masses

This is ambiguous, so it really depends on how you read it. The adjectives tired and poor could in that interpretation also act as nouns.

So the direct object could either be a single noun (masses), or an enumeration of three. But this does not affect the overall sentence analysis otherwise.

Title: Finding Sentence Structure in VSO


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:
There are many languages without case distinctions on their pronouns. Mandarin, Japanese, and Arabic are some especially prominent examples (although Arabic does have special clitic pronouns that can be attached to verbs to mark the object).

To someone who speaks one of these languages, the lack of case does not sound at all cave-man-ish.


问:
How do you write a language without the word "to" preceding verbs?
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).

答:
The to in English marks an infinitive, which is often used as a verb complement:

I plan to eat a burger.

Another way of expressing the same relationship (that your intention is to eat someting) would be

I plan eating a burger.

(That sounds a bit odd to me, though, as plan would probably be used more often with a to-infinitive rather than an ing-clause). This almost sounds to me like me planning while I am eating.

If your intention is not just to eat, but to go somewhere to eat, you say

I plan to go (out) to eat a burger.

You can add some modality, and say

I would plan to go to eat a burger (if I had the time to do the planning).

Basically you're adding more features to your verb group.

The question now is, what do you want to express, and then you need to think about how to do that. You seem to be coming from the other direction, trying to replicate the form/structure and not the function of English verb constructions.

I would think of what you want to say:

semantic content: this is done by choosing a particular verb (eat, go, plan)

pragmatics: be judgemental/evaluative (talk/chat/gossip/converse/...)

modality: how likely is it? Do I have to do it? Am I abble to do it? In English you use modal verbs for that (can, would, should, must)

tense: when does it happen? Past, future, present? This is done by modals (will) or morphology (planned, ate, went)

link with subject/object: for redundancy, do you want to have shared features between the subject or object and the verb? I eat, but she eats. You could be inventive and have the verb agree with the object (*I eat a burger, *I eats two burgers)

...

You don't need to express any of this (apart from the semantic aspect) through the verb. You could have separate words that signal any of these, or use word order: if the verb is before the noun, then it means you disapprove of what happened, if it is after, you're fine with it (that would be an odd example, but hey, it's your language and you can do what you want to).

Or you could have affixes that you attach to the words (which is like regular past tense markers in English).

Some verbs (and nouns) take complements, eg anything related to planning/thinking. Or other verbs that relate to actions: I'm waiting to start, or I'm waiting for Godot to arrive. So for longer verb groups you're probably looking at having such verbs at the beginning.

So the length of verb groups really depends on what you want to put into it.