问:
How do I naturalistically merge two languages without a clear Substrate and Superstrate?
For my latest worldbuilding project I'm trying to create a naturalistic language for a fictional empire I've been creating. This empire was born at the end of the Bronze Age when various kingdoms and city states voluntarily united to defend against the growing power of a thalassocracy.

Though the story of the people who speak this language is more or less ironed out, I can't figure out how to proceed when devising a language for this multiethnic, multilingual and not-very centralised empire.

Though the languages spoken within the empire would all be related sister-languages derived from the same Proto-Lang I don't know how to determine wether one of these languages becomes more "prestigious" while the others remain as dialects.

Do I just pick the language with more speakers? Do I just pick the language that the Emperor speaks, even if the rest of the (very powerful) nobility might speak another language entirely? Do I unite the languages in a single koinè? If so, how?

答:
In fact, there are a lot of possibilities, and many of them are attested in the history of natural languages.

Majority language wins. This happened in China at least twice, it was conquered and ruled by foreign people (Mongolians, Manchu), but the ruling class became sinified. It also happened in medieval France and Spain, they were conquered and ruled be Germanic tribes (Franks and Burgundians for France, Vandals and Goths for Spain), but the majority language of the residents won out.

Most prestigious language wins. This happend in antiquity in the Roman empire, and we see it in many post-colonial states in Africa. There are some prerequisites for that such as a working educational system helping that.

Pidgins and Creoles emerge, and a Creole wins. This can be watched in Papua New Guinea, where Creole languages like Police Motu and Tok Pisin are becoming the de facto standard of communication.

Something else happens. The case of English is not as clear as my points 1.–3. suggest: While the majority language finally won, it was heavily impacted and changed by the languages of the conquerors (Normans and Danes).

EDIT Stable multiliguality. Quite rare in the wild, but Switzerland with a coexistence of Swiss German, French, and Italian is an example. The fourth language of Switzerland, Romansh, is under pressure, despite attempts of language preservation.


问:
Could you have a language with only three words?
Don't immediately dismiss this! Just give me a moment to explain and you might realize it's an idea that might have merit, especially considering the question title is a little misleading. Also, I'm no conlang or linguistics expert, so if there's a couple small things I got wrong but don't necessarily make this impossible, especially if fixing it might make it possible, correct me in the comments and I'll integrate it into my question to make the question something that can actually be answered.

Could you construct a language--or, at least, a grammar system--with only three words? OK, so first of all, "word" is not the proper term for what I'm trying to say, but I don't know of a term that fits. So. When I say three words, I mean three combinations of consonants and vowels that morphemes can be derived from. From now on, though, I'm going to refer to them as "words", just because it's the only term that vaguely fits. Again, don't dismiss me immediately. Let me explain my idea, and then please critique it.

The three base words would each have particular consonants and one particular vowel, in the structure 1v2v3 (where v represents the vowel, and the numbers represent the three consonants). For a silly example, let's say the three words are:

Sazar: Fire (s, z, r; a)

Kitiv: Lie (k, t, v: i)

Lomon: Truth (l, m, n; o)

(If I were to actually construct this language, I would definitely use different base words, but let's stick with these for the sake of example.)

There are thirteen distinct combinations of these letters to be derived from these words (1, 2, 3, v, 1v, 2v, v2, v3, 1v2, 2v3, v2v, 1v2v, v2v3), and that's without rearranging the letters at all. If you allow for rearranging letters, there are thirty-one  distinct combinations (if I did my math right). Including the original "word", it's thirty-two.

All these combinations templates can result in 96 different roots/suffixes/prefixes/morphemes/etc. If you somehow made each combination represent some kind of modifier that can be made to a root word, could you construct, if not a language, then at least a grammar system, this way?

For example, if we made v3 represent plurality (-iv=singular, -on=plural, -ar=dual) and v2 represent person (-it=first person, -om=third person, and -az=second person) then that could be the conjugation for the language, giving you:

I: -itiv

You: -aziv

He/She/It: -omiv

We: -iton (or -itar for special, dual cases)

You pl.: -azon (or -azar for special, dual cases)

They: -omon (or -omar for special, dual cases)

Then, -omiv could be extended using v1, which would represent gender (-as=neuter, -ik=female, -ol=male). Using this, the conjugation for he would be the way-too-long-for-conjugation "-omivol".

You could make a modifier for roots that determine whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective, and you could also have the three tenses (it's fascinating how much language fits into groups of three) and make cases using combinations of the vowels and consonants, and you would have to stretch some things for prepositions, but maybe instead of having prepositions be words, you could make this an entirely written language and use visuals to convey prepositions (essentially making sentence order influence the physical positions of the objects the words refer to, instead of the grammatical meaning of the words).

I would probably need to create a couple (or many) other roots that the modifiers would be added to (or at least start with more flexible words than fire, lie, and truth), but could I at least base the grammar system off of only the three original words and modifiers derived from those three words?

I don't see any obvious issues with this language, besides long words, but I would appreciate it if more experienced conlangers could critique this. Also, if there are no issues with a conlang with only the grammar based on the three base "words", what about an entire language, where you could only build basic words by combining roots based on the three base words? This would limit the number of morphemes you could use for grammar, which might be an issue if there are a certain grammatical components every language needs and there aren't enough morphemes for all the components.

答:
After seeing a lot of different things thrown out there, I've decided to take a shot at this one.  I think what you are suggesting is totally possible and plausible.  The confusion of answers arises from that fact that a "word" can be defined in a couple different ways.

One reputable definition which allows for your proposed linguistic system is found in the Collins Dictionary:

A word is a single unit of language that can be represented in writing or speech. In English, a word has a space on either side of it when it is written.

By that definition, you have designed three possible "units" which can be assigned the title "words" legitimately, and your language system works.

On the other hand, you have other possible definitions, such as that found in Meriam Webster:

A speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use

If you opt for that definition (which some people do by default), it's a bit harder to stretch "word" to define what you're talking about.  One of your proposed "words" communicates no inherent meaning, and is necessarily divisible into smaller units.  Of course, it's a bit ambiguous, and one could argue that this definition of "word" obfuscates the nature of compound nouns etc.

In short, I would answer, "It depends."  If you define a word simply as a unit of speech separated by spaces, you're all set.  Other linguists might argue however that you ought to define the different "words" as different classes of words, with the organization of the letters defining words.  And since you're inventing the language, I guess you can set the rules. ☺

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


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

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

答:
I am currently working on a conlang making heavy use of:

-Interdentalized sounds, like what  @J. Siebeneichler pointed out

-Fully Interdental sounds, where you literally have to bite your tongue

-A Rounded Schwa

-and a plosive that isn't quite a pharyngeal plosive but sounds like it as it requires the speaker to press the back of their tongue directly against the back of their throat.

Given, this language isn't really meant for humans, so many of it's other oddities are downright unusable to humans.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


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:
Your lang, your rules. But generally speaking, no, you don't need a dative case.

Funny thing is, you don't even need a dative case even if you were to wrack your brain and come up with handfuls of potential situations! Languages are funny that way. Those sneaky native speakers will just come up with some clever way of handling things!

Title: Do I need a Dative Case?


问:
Sona: how complete it is and how alive it is?
I find the basic ideas of Sona very appealing, but, from what I see in the web, it is not, by far, as popular as Esperanto or Lojban or other well-known conlangs. Therefore my question: Is it a complete language with a community of fluent speakers, translations of literary works available..? Or is it basically dead?</p>

答:
I think it's pretty much dead.

There is~was a Yahoo group. It has 80 members and no recent activity. But Yahoo groups are all screwed up now, so it's difficult to tell.

There is a dead Sona forum with 14 members. There are a couple translations. No activity since 2010.

There is a dead Sona twitter feed with 13 members. No activity since 2013.

There is a dead Sona tutorial website archived by the Wayback Machine. Not reachable by ordinary means.

The grammar book was hosted online in a now defunct location archived by Wayback Machine.


答:
Yours is a very interesting and legitimate question, but in the light of what we know from the languages of the world, what you ask might not be what you mean to ask. Let me expand a bit below.

To answer your question in brief: no, your language does not need a Dative, but yes, your language needs a device (or "construction" in Construction Grammar terms) to express the third argument (also called the "indirect object") of verbs that take on three arguments (subject, object, indirect object).

Now, whether you have separate devices (constructions, or in your case "cases", no pun intended) for semantically different indirect objects or not, that is up to you. Since you already have a Benefactive case that could express an indirect object (whether that is semantically a recipient or a beneficiary or else), then you can use that to express an indirect object that is a simple recipient. So, note that there can be a mismatch between syntactic arguments and semantic arguments (for example indirect object vs. recipient, benefactor, etc). Moreover, depending on what linguistic framework you assume, things can be slightly different. Here I am adhering to some form of (Radical) Construction Grammar.

For example, since you have a Benefactive case and a Lative case you could use the former in sentences like "I gave the book to the man" and "I opened the door for the woman" and the Lative case for "I went to the market" and "I am throwing a stone at you". But again, that is really up to you, as also hinted at in other answers/comments.

The drafts of the first two chapters of Croft's Morphosyntax: constructions of the world's languages expand on this. See https://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/WACpubs.html.

Title: Do I need a Dative Case?

Body: 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>


问:
What is the meaning of this Toki Pona sentence?
I found a sentence written in order to prove that Toki Pona is a complete language. As far as I know it is a foolish nominal sentence.

What is the English translation?

pona sona pi (wawa pi ma Lipija) poka toki lawa mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Atilanisi.

答:
I finally got an answer from the author. The sentence meant:

pona sona pi (wawa pi ma Lipija) poka toki lawa mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Atilanisi.

The influence of Libyan power on the election of Atlantis' vice president.

The closest translation was "The strength of Libya beside many commands of vice president of Atlantis" by jastako.

Here's a word-for-word translation for what I understand.

pona sona was in fact pana sona: influence (idea sending)

wawa pi ma Lipija: Libyan power

poka: on, about

toki lawa mute: elections

jan lawa nanpa tu: vice president

ma Atilanisi: Atlantis

Suggestions

Feel free to explain how you would have translated that phrase into toki pona.

John Clifford's (Facebook)

kama pi wawa pi ma Lipija pi wile pi jan mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Alansi.

Mine

pana nasin pi wawa pi ma Lipija tawa wile kulupu pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Alansi.


问:
Languages where the part of speech of a root is "fixed"?
By way of introduction, this question is about a quirk of Esperanto, but there is a general conlang question at the end, I promise.

In Esperanto, every root has a natural grammatical part of speech, much like how nouns have a grammatical "gender" (or noun category) in many other languages.

For example, "ŝoveli" means "to shovel". It is naturally a verb. The same root with a noun ending, "ŝovelo", does not mean "a shovel". Rather, it is the noun-of-the-verb, that is, it refers to the act of shovelling. To refer to a shovel, you have to say that it's the tool of the act of shovelling, that is, "ŝovelilo".

Similarly, "humana" means "humane". It is naturally an adjective. The same root with a noun ending, "humano", does not mean "human", it is the noun-of-the-adjective, that is, "humaneness".

This was an interesting design choice, and one that's puzzled me. For an Esperanto speaker, this is something you have to learn about every root, like noun classes in many IE languages.

Are there any analogues to this in natural languages, or is this a device that has been used in other conlangs?

答:
Esperanto roots principally can basically form nouns/adjectives/adverbs and adverbs (and are not words themselves):

Endings:

-o noun

-a adjective

-e adverb

-i verb, infinitive

Roots and derived words:

naci- "nation" - 'noun' root

nacio = nation

nacia = national

nacie = nationally

naciigi = nationalize, suffix -ig' = make ~

pens- "thought" - 'verbal' root

penso = thought

pensema = thoughtful, suffix -em' = inclined to ~

pensi = think

pensado = thinking (the ~, noun), suffix -ad' = act of (repeated) ~ing

hom- "human men/women" - 'noun' root

homo = human being

homa vivo = human life

homaro = humanity, -ar' = collection, the collection of humans

human- = humane - 'adjective'

humanisto = humanist, -ist'

humaneco = humanism, the quality of being humane, -ec' = ~ity

humanismo = humanism, the philosophical movement

So actually the endings do not always guarantee a meaningful word, and the same
for suffixes. Suffixes come into play. The hard thing is to know whether the root
refers to a noun/adjective/verb. And for a verb whether it is transitive or intransitive.

Weird in Esperanto is that the root itself is not used; say as noun/adjective/verb. It consistently requires an ending, despite the root often having an identifiable category. National languages have the same usage problems (roots not being flexed to every category),
but do not have this redundancy of endings. For that they have ad-hoc pseudo-suffixes like -al and -ive.

One might argue that Chinese and English often do not make a distinction between parts of speech. The English success can either be noun or verb.
However Esperanto was made similar to the European languages but clear.

Note for a conlang one cannot simply drop then noun ending and assume every root to be a noun. You would then have to determine whether always a noun is present.

The exceptions to non-standalone roots are prepositions, numbers and such.

kun = with, in company of; a word, "preposition"

kuna = common, communal

kune = together

kuniĝi = come together, -iĝ' = become

tri = three, a word

trio = trio, group of three

tria = third

trie = thirdly

trioblo = threefold, -obl' = multiple

triono = a third 1/3, -on' = fraction

triope = by three, in threes, -op' = group of ~

Sorry if this answer is a bit Esperanto heavy, but a conlang might benefit from this nice system. How about just -a for nouns: scola, biblioteca, bulgaria?


问:
Good Real World Languages to Base Proto-Lang Vocabulary
I'm working on a conlang that requires a LOT of work, particularly in the sound changes from proto-lang to the current version.

Instead of creating a whole set of words from nothing, I am considering using lexicon from an existing language and just putting it through sound changes to break it up and save time.

Factors to consider:

-Meaning simplicity- few to no double-meanings or idioms.

-Rare- Relatively few speakers, perhaps under 5 million to greatly decrease the chances of someone picking up on it (that may be too high or low, I'm not sure myself)

-Phonology- Complex enough to do some interesting sound changes but simple enough to easily transcribe (15 to 25 maybe?)

-Phonotactics- CVC ? This should be easy to copy but also to evolve.

-Availability- Online dictionaries readily available.

Note: I do not want to use a random word generator, as I am terrible at asigning meanings to words just from looking at them.

答:
Well, you could use any language that has a lexicon...

If someone working out your source language by following the sound change bread crumb trail is problematic or undesirable, what is preventing you from simply using a word generator? Good ones allow you to define phonology and syllable shapes.

I used Awkwords for a recent project (creating a long text of gibberish) and found it quite suitable. I think it would work for your needs as well.


答:
I would probably go for a fairly homogeneous language, ie one that hasn't had too much contact with other languages.

English, for example, contains words originating from many other languages (German, Norse, Latin, French,...), so your resulting language will probably also appear mixed wrt to word roots. Other languages (eg maybe Icelandic) will have had less external influences (especially if they are politically controlled), and so the vocabulary will generally be more homogeneous, and might be a better source for you. Unless, of course, your conlang is meant for a trading/colonial society.

Title: Good Real World Languages to Base Proto-Lang Vocabulary

Body:
I'm working on a conlang that requires a LOT of work, particularly in the sound changes from proto-lang to the current version.

Instead of creating a whole set of words from nothing, I am considering using lexicon from an existing language and just putting it through sound changes to break it up and save time.

Factors to consider:

-Meaning simplicity- few to no double-meanings or idioms.

-Rare- Relatively few speakers, perhaps under 5 million to greatly decrease the chances of someone picking up on it (that may be too high or low, I'm not sure myself)

-Phonology- Complex enough to do some interesting sound changes but simple enough to easily transcribe (15 to 25 maybe?)

-Phonotactics- CVC ? This should be easy to copy but also to evolve.

-Availability- Online dictionaries readily available.

Note: I do not want to use a random word generator, as I am terrible at asigning meanings to words just from looking at them.


答: One suggestion I'd give: use Proto-Indo-European lexicon for the words you want in your own proto-language, then use a word generator to create the actual roots of your language. That way you're not going to run into the problem of a having a word list that accidentally includes terms your proto-speakers would be unlikely to have.</p>


答:
A lot of good suggestions are already in here, here are some more

Use another conlang as a base for your vocabulary, for an unusual feel I suggest Volapük or Lojban

Independent of the base you choose, apply some unnatural transformation to the roots to make them look unfamiliar. Potential unnatural transformations include reverting the roots (spelling them backwards), syllable swapping like in Verlan, or a cyclic permutation of the letters (putting the first letter at the end or the last letter at the start)


问:
Is there a middle-written language?

Real languages

I am aware of several types of writing systems.

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

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

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

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

Constructed languages

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

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

Another example:

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

Conclusion

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

答:
Some of Trent Pehrson's ornamental scripts (for conlangs) fit this description somewhat, in that they lack a sense of formal arrangement and can be organised in very creative ways which sometimes appear to focus on a central hub. Trent is a gifted calligrapher and I urge you to check out examples of his outstanding work: http://idrani.perastar.com/ISMS_orthography.htm

Maybe start here: http://idrani.perastar.com/orthography/ksatlai/eikiyo.html

I have designed concentric systems, where an utterance is written beginning with a central shape, enclosed in another shape, enclosed in another shape, and so on. Both Mayan glyphs and Jonathan Gabel's Mayan-inspired Sitelen Sitelen script for writing Toki Pona use enclosure to some degree, though not to the same extent as my example, which produced interesting but unwieldy heavily concentric text objects. (I started to think about making 3D realisations where the text would be read by cutting through the object and reading it in various ways sort of like tree lines.)

Recently I started work on a hub-and-spoke type script with no attached spoken language, where sentences are conceived of as wheels with different areas of the wheel being reserved for different syntactic roles, using a small glyph set of symbols whose meaning alters depending on its position in the wheel. These spokes can have spokes of their own. These sentence wheels can be combined around a central hub to create multi-sentence texts: the central hub contains emotional information about the writer's attitude towards the meaning of the text, and organisational information to help the reader decode the whole.

I also designed a phonetic abugida (originally for Pandunia, not that it needs or wants it!) arranged something like hangeul, with the oddity that words with more than three syllables are written with double glyphs which combine left- and right-facing halves: the left-most syllable cluster marks its vowels to the left, and the right-most syllable cluster marks its vowels to the right. The overall arrangement of each glyph is also bottom to top (I was sick of scripts assuming that you must always start at the top for everything...) See this bizarrely coloured example made in Pics Art of the Pandunia word 'musikosake', music bag, written first without vowels, and secondly with. The left-most half encodes 'musiko', the right-most 'sake'; m is at the bottom left, above it s, above it k; s appears again on the right, then k above it. Aesthetically the vowels are meant to look like bubbles floating upwards, and the letter shapes are designed so as not to impede the flow of the eye even though information is encoded on both sides of the main glyph.

This gave rise to the idea that words in a sentence should be arranged similarly, in balanced pairs or pyramidal shapes starting from the centre of the base. One could write on a square page by turning it lozenge-way, beginning above the middle corner-to corner line, writing from the middle first one way then the other, then going above, creating a pyramid fitting into the paper shape; then repeating under the line by turning the page upside down. Or by writing in upwards columns up to four glyphs wide, where the central or centre-left glyph is the first, aiming to keep syntactic groups such as phrases within one row of, at a maximum, 24 syllables. This would produce columns of glyphs read as 1, 12, 213, and 2134 depending on their weight. Whichever macroarrangement one might choose, overall its arrangement as a script is centrally focused in various ways, inspired by the central focus of each glyph.

I would say this has some precedent in various South Asian scripts such as Thai in which, whilst there is a firm left-right directionality in the flow of the syllabic characters, within each character there is a much more chaotic flow of information.

Rikchik's fascinating writing system is also arguably graphically 'middle-leading': https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/rikchik.htm

As to whether any natural scripts do what you're asking about to any significant extent, other than the example about re Egyptian hieroglyphs and the minor concentric features of Mayan about which I am no expert, I am not aware of any examples - which doesn't at all mean they don't exist.

Title: Is there a middle-written language?


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:
If we consider that the purpose of a constructed language is simply and purely created for Human interractions (like esperanto), mathematics cannot be considered as a conlang because it lacks one important thing that human language has: Context.

When I say:

```<code>He said it last time
</code>```

We need to both have the same context to understand the meaning. Mathematics and Computer programming languages doesn't reach at all this level of tacit agreement.

However, now I also believe that mathematics help Human to understand and express things in a more abstract way. To make a rough comparison, we could then consider a constructed language as General Purpose programming Language + Context and mathematics as Domain Specific programming Language

Body:
If we consider that the purpose of a constructed language is simply and purely created for Human interractions (like esperanto), mathematics cannot be considered as a conlang because it lacks one important thing that human language has: Context.

When I say:

He said it last time

We need to both have the same context to understand the meaning. Mathematics and Computer programming languages doesn't reach at all this level of tacit agreement.

However, now I also believe that mathematics help Human to understand and express things in a more abstract way. To make a rough comparison, we could then consider a constructed language as General Purpose programming Language + Context and mathematics as Domain Specific programming Language


问:
Did a majority of followers of Ido indeed switch over to Occidental?
The Wikipedia article on Occidental/Interlingue says (in this version):

According to the Occidental magazine Cosmoglotta in 1928, a majority of Ido adherents took up Occidental in place of Ido.

Obviously, Cosmosglotta isn't an unbiased publication venue. Is there any independent evidence that this switching of language actually took place?

答:
I'm as pro-Occidental as they come (it's the only auxiliary language that I support) but I came across that article in 1928 during my typing up the archives of Cosmoglotta and that article is nothing more than Ric Berger wishful thinking. He unfortunately spent just as much time attacking Ido as he did supporting Occidental, and kept on proclaiming it to be moribund and ready to collapse for some 20 years.

Here's the article in question that he wrote in 1928 on the Ido conference from which he concluded that Ido was on its last legs:

http://cosmoglotta.pbworks.com/w/page/132587775/Cosmoglotta%20A%20053%20%28oct%201928%29 (Title: Raport del Occidental-Observator Ric. Berger al Association «Cosmoglotta», Wien.)

So the answer is no. However, it's also true that the majority of the Occidentalists at that time were once Idists, from Berger to Gär to Ramstedt to Pigal to de Guesnet and all the rest. There was definitely a large influx from Ido to Occidental, and Occidental as far as I can tell was the most active auxiliary language after Esperanto by the late 30s and into the 1940s. Matejka and Berger had a lot of back-and-forth in the 1920s to early 1930s until Matejka decided to move over to Occidental, which he stayed with until his death in the late 1990s. He's probably the most prominent example of a major Idist who went full in on Occidental. But Berger hadn't taken into account the other source for new Idists, namely new users who weren't satisfied with Esperanto but still liked the overall concept (i.e. the people that thought that Zamenhof almost got it right).

Anyhow, I removed that sentence from Wikipedia last year when going through the Cosmoglotta archives because it certainly isn't backed up by anything besides Berger's wishes.


问:
Is there a constructed language in existence that has graduated to "natural" status?
That is, are there any such languages in use today that are in use for day to day activities, or are formally recognized, etc?</p>

答:
For varying definitions of "conlang", yes:

The very most obvious example is Esperanto with a well-documented native speaker community. It has received limited official recognition, the most interesting of which currently seems to be PR of China's El Popola Ĉinio magazine and China Radio International in Esperanto. There are many more.

A less obvious example would be Classical Sanskrit, which was, arguably, constructed by Pāṇini, and is a Scheduled Language of India with some fifty thousand people speaking it in 1991; it is furthermore an official language of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and reportedly the language of the majority in a village called Mathoor. It is used across all levels of education across India.

A more controversial example would be Modern Hebrew, one of the few successfully revived language in modern times. The page on Wikipedia gives a solid overview of the situation, and is fairly unbiased. Of the three mentioned here, Hebrew is arguably the most successful "graduated" language — if you consider it a conlang to begin with.


问:
What's a good starting place to work on vocab?
Obviously, generating a lexicon is very time-consuming, and there's so much that needs to be done, I often find myself suffering with analysis paralysis, because I just can't decide where to begin.

Word frequency lists don't help all that much, because there's an inverse relationship between how useful a word is and how common it is. The most commonly used word in English is 'the', for instance. If you just made words for the 100 most commonly used words, you wouldn't really be able to make that many sentences, which would make it difficult to work on the grammar.

I've seen some people use the Swadesh list, but I fail to see how that is useful in any way since the list was arbitarily chosen rather than thought through. And besides, it would require you make words for things that are highly unlikely to ever be mentioned, such as a word for 'louse'.

The Conlanger's Lexicon suggests you work by categories, so that that way you can at least form complete sentences, even if this does limit you to writing about one topic. Of course, there's still the problem of which list to begin with. He just lists the categories in the book alphabetically.

Are there other methods to use? And yes, I know about word-generating programs, but those spit out stuff that's much lower quality than stuff generated by hand. And besides, my conlang will have a highly productive word-derivation system, so I don't need that many roots (when I'm writing down lists of words, often times I just write what I want the compound word to literally translate as, though I rarely go back to fill it in because I never get to the words that would comprise the compound).

I've mostly been looking at frequency lists and the Conlanger's Lexipedia, but I would like to know if there was a better way.

答: Also, you can use this wordlist (A Conlanger's Thesaurus). It is really helpful to create a basic word list.</p>


问:
Transliterating toki pona to hebrew
What would be the best choice of niqqud to transliterate toki pona vowel sounds using Hebrew? I'm trying to use the niqqud that would be closest to what is normally used in Hebrew. Should 'e' be אֶ or אֵ? Should o be וֹ or אֹ? Should 'a' be אַ or אָ? Is there a real difference between them or is it important? I would normally omit the niqqud, since toki pona is minimalist & somewhat ambiguous anyway, but I would prefer to use the most phonetically accurate niqqud, when I do use them. There is stress on the first syllable, but no long vowels. would it be unusual to write 'pana' as ַפָנה to show that the first 'a' is stressed?

Normally I would write 'seli' as סלי, but with vowels would סֶלִי or סֵלִי be better?

toki would be טוקי, but should I want to use vowels, should I use טוֹקִי or טֹקִי

I did find this tool for transliterating to hebrew, but it ignores niqqud altogether. 'O' is always written as 'ו', & 'E' isn't written at all, even at the end of a word. At the beginning of a word it's just 'א'.

The vowel sounds are:
a: father
e: get
o: more
i: peel (I would use either ִא or אִי. Is there a difference?)
u: food (I would use וּ. Would it be better to use אֻ instead?)

答:
Here are a few ways to deal with the problem of marking the vowels unambiguously:

Style 1 - normal Hebrew orthography

Considering the fact that there are no length distinctions or gemination, a transliteration into Hebrew would normally use exclusively these diacritics to represent the vowels:

```<code>a אָ *
e אֵ **
i אִי
o אוֹ
u אוּ
</code>```

* add ה at the end of a word; and after letters other than א, add א in the middle of a word

** add ה at the end of a word

In addition, on נ (the only possibly coda in Toki Pona) the diacritic נְ would be used (except as last letter of word). Stress isn't normally marked even in vowelized Hebrew (apart from liturgy or texts for learners), and it's entirely unnecessary in Toki Pona, since there is no phonemic stress.

The advantage of this is that it follows ordinary conventions and is most easily intelligible to someone reading in Hebrew. The disadvantage is that implementing this kind of orthography is far from algorithmic and includes unnecessary information in the spelling.

Style 2 - minimalistic Hebrew orthography

Since Toki Pona is a minimalistic language, I think that a different transliteration convention would better suit it, to avoid redundancy in writing it. There is precedent for a more minimalistic transcription in the convention used for transliterating, e.g., Akkadian into Hebrew. Modifying it to suit Toki Pona's vowels, we get something like this:

```<code>a אָ
e אֵ
i אִ
o אֹ
u אֻ
</code>```

Style 3 - Yiddish orthography

A third option, if you want to minimize use of diacritics, is to follow Yiddish spelling conventions. The only required diacritic is to distinguish between the two forms of א. The Yiddish convention of using וו instead of ו as a consonant can be safely ignored in Toki Pona. And actually, since there are no o/u minimal pairs in Toki Pona, you could get rid of all diacritics if you instead choose to use ו for both vowels, at the price of losing some information (style 4).

```<code>a אַ or א
e ע or ע
i אי
o אָ or ו
u ו
</code>```

Sample differences

```<code>Roman x Hebrew x Minimal x Yiddish x 4-vowel
a     x אָ      x אָ       x אַ       x א
akesi x אָקֵסִי   x אָקֵסִ    x אַקעסי   x אקעסי
anpa  x אָנְפָה   x אָנפָ    x אַנפאַ    x אנפא
mije  x מִייֵה   x ֵמִי     x מייע    x מייע
mute  x מוּטֵה   x ֵמֻט     x מוטע    x מוטע
seli  x סֵלִי    x ִסֵל     x סעלי    x סעלי
toki  x טוֹקִי   x טֹקִ     x טאָקי    x טוקי
wawa  x וָאוָה   x וָוָ     x ואַואַ    x ואוא
</code>```

Title: Transliterating toki pona to hebrew

Body:
Here are a few ways to deal with the problem of marking the vowels unambiguously:

Style 1 - normal Hebrew orthography

Considering the fact that there are no length distinctions or gemination, a transliteration into Hebrew would normally use exclusively these diacritics to represent the vowels:

a אָ *
e אֵ **
i אִי
o אוֹ
u אוּ

* add ה at the end of a word; and after letters other than א, add א in the middle of a word

** add ה at the end of a word

In addition, on נ (the only possibly coda in Toki Pona) the diacritic נְ would be used (except as last letter of word). Stress isn't normally marked even in vowelized Hebrew (apart from liturgy or texts for learners), and it's entirely unnecessary in Toki Pona, since there is no phonemic stress.

The advantage of this is that it follows ordinary conventions and is most easily intelligible to someone reading in Hebrew. The disadvantage is that implementing this kind of orthography is far from algorithmic and includes unnecessary information in the spelling.

Style 2 - minimalistic Hebrew orthography

Since Toki Pona is a minimalistic language, I think that a different transliteration convention would better suit it, to avoid redundancy in writing it. There is precedent for a more minimalistic transcription in the convention used for transliterating, e.g., Akkadian into Hebrew. Modifying it to suit Toki Pona's vowels, we get something like this:

a אָ
e אֵ
i אִ
o אֹ
u אֻ

Style 3 - Yiddish orthography

A third option, if you want to minimize use of diacritics, is to follow Yiddish spelling conventions. The only required diacritic is to distinguish between the two forms of א. The Yiddish convention of using וו instead of ו as a consonant can be safely ignored in Toki Pona. And actually, since there are no o/u minimal pairs in Toki Pona, you could get rid of all diacritics if you instead choose to use ו for both vowels, at the price of losing some information (style 4).

a אַ or א
e ע or ע
i אי
o אָ or ו
u ו

Sample differences

Roman x Hebrew x Minimal x Yiddish x 4-vowel
a     x אָ      x אָ       x אַ       x א
akesi x אָקֵסִי   x אָקֵסִ    x אַקעסי   x אקעסי
anpa  x אָנְפָה   x אָנפָ    x אַנפאַ    x אנפא
mije  x מִייֵה   x ֵמִי     x מייע    x מייע
mute  x מוּטֵה   x ֵמֻט     x מוטע    x מוטע
seli  x סֵלִי    x ִסֵל     x סעלי    x סעלי
toki  x טוֹקִי   x טֹקִ     x טאָקי    x טוקי
wawa  x וָאוָה   x וָוָ     x ואַואַ    x ואוא


问:
State-based analogue to distributive case
I am developing conlang that has grammatical cases system for nominals that for each spatial case there is state-based case.

In Finnic languages grammatical cases that denote states occur, examples in Finnish:

Essive (ESS) with the ending -na/-nä denotes being in state, corresponds to the combination 'as X' in English. lapsi - 'child', lapsena - 'as child / being a child'

dialectal Exessive (EXESS) with the ending -nta/-ntä denotes a departure from state, corresponding to English 'from being X...'. lapsi - 'child', lapsenta - 'from being child'

Translative (TRANSL) with the ending -ksi denotes a transition into state, corresponds to English 'to (becoming) X'. aikuinen - 'adult', aikuiseksi - 'to adult'. lapsenta aikuiseksi = '[maturing] from child to adult'.

There is clear spatial analogy:

Locative ↔ Essive

Ablative ↔ Exessive

Allative ↔ Translative

You can construct state-based analogues to other spatial cases. For example, for the Prolative case ('through X') we can make Essive-Prolative, which would mean 'passing through a state of being X / through way of being X"

There is a Hungarian grammatical case called Distributive (DISTR) with the ending -nként, which is equivalent to 'per X'. For example, hét - 'week', hetenként - 'weekly, once per week'. It has a clear spatial-temporal nature.

I am trying to come up with a state based analogue for this case. Let's call it 'Essive-distributive', but I am stuck with the expansion of the analogy. What exactly can 'per being in state' mean? Can anyone suggest a meaning and usage for such a case?

答:
I suspect you could just make up a name. That's certainly a legitimate glossopoetical strategy.

In English, i'd just call it a distributive sense of the state-noun and have done with it: Such-and-such only happens thrice per childhood, you know!

Or ...thrice childhoodly if you prefer!

I frankly don't get the difference between LOC/ABL/ALL & ESS/EXESS/TRANSL, which I'm guessing must be a Finnish Thing.

I would understand "in the child" and "in childhood" to be locative senses of the thing-noun and state-noun respectively; "from the child" & "from childhood" likewise are ablative. So it is for "per child" and "per childhood", being the distributive sense.


答:
If I understand you correctly (big if there!), you are looking for a periodical state that repeats, not necessarily at the same time interval (though the two might in reality be linked) — as it happens we are using the sun rising as a proxy for the time passing.

This could be a tree blossoming, or losing its leaves. It could be the tide coming in. It could be birds migrating and passing through. It could be a woman's menstrual cycle. It could be being asleep/awake.

Title: State-based analogue to distributive case

Body:
I am developing conlang that has grammatical cases system for nominals that for each spatial case there is state-based case.

In Finnic languages grammatical cases that denote states occur, examples in Finnish:

Essive (ESS) with the ending -na/-nä denotes being in state, corresponds to the combination 'as X' in English. lapsi - 'child', lapsena - 'as child / being a child'

dialectal Exessive (EXESS) with the ending -nta/-ntä denotes a departure from state, corresponding to English 'from being X...'. lapsi - 'child', lapsenta - 'from being child'

Translative (TRANSL) with the ending -ksi denotes a transition into state, corresponds to English 'to (becoming) X'. aikuinen - 'adult', aikuiseksi - 'to adult'. lapsenta aikuiseksi = '[maturing] from child to adult'.

There is clear spatial analogy:

Locative ↔ Essive

Ablative ↔ Exessive

Allative ↔ Translative

You can construct state-based analogues to other spatial cases. For example, for the Prolative case ('through X') we can make Essive-Prolative, which would mean 'passing through a state of being X / through way of being X"

There is a Hungarian grammatical case called Distributive (DISTR) with the ending -nként, which is equivalent to 'per X'. For example, hét - 'week', hetenként - 'weekly, once per week'. It has a clear spatial-temporal nature.

I am trying to come up with a state based analogue for this case. Let's call it 'Essive-distributive', but I am stuck with the expansion of the analogy. What exactly can 'per being in state' mean? Can anyone suggest a meaning and usage for such a case?


答:
Interesting concept for a case. In my interpretation this kind of an abstract distributive case would apply in sentences like this one (a probably very clumsy reformulation of a famous first sentence in literature)

Every unhappy family is different in their unhappiness.

I looked up the really case-rich conlang Ithkuil and did not find a precedent for this kind of case. Feel free to name it by any name you like. When you don't have an own idea, I suggest respective case for that one.


答:
Try Khmer, (Cambodian) it has about 17 million speakers, a fun alphabet (abugida) where the two different series of consonants changes the vowel marker's sound. There's no inflection, it's very analytical, and it has a ridiculous number of glottal stops.

For the most part the phonotactics are CVC, but you don't say most of the consonants at the end of a word and instead do a glottal stop. It's an asian language, but it's not tonal.

As a bonus it also has a completely different vocabulary depending on whether you are talking about the king or not.


问:
unique agglutinative root system?
The language of The Old Ones is described as "an agglutinative speech
with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages" (H.P.
Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time", Chapter 4). What techniques
could a conlanger use to devise a unique root system for an
agglutinative language?</p>

答:
In my opinion, it reflects, if anything, more on Lovecraft's lack of linguistic understanding than anything about the language of the Old Ones, since the roots in human languages get pretty damn ridiculous, so it's really hard to imagine something "utterly unlike any found in human languages". You would have to design a phonology produced by speech organs completely unlike those of humans to approach this.

Where I to tackle this, I would go for a system not unlike Arabic, but where the root is constituted of a set of vowels instead (with maybe "consonant harmony"?).

Alternatively, Mark Rosenfelder's Kebreni has roots where vowels are swapped around a whole lot, and I doubt that metathesis as a base derivational system exists in any human language.

Generally, I'm not sure designing something literally outside the boundaries of what the human mind can handle is by definition possible, which is what Lovecraft truly was after in his poor description attempt.

Title: unique agglutinative root system?


问:
Are there any sites you can use to develop an online course for your own conlang?
Creating a conlang is usually only half (or less than half!) of the necessary effort: someone has to be able to learn it, unless you want to keep it as your own private secret code.

I use Duolingo to learn various languages, and it does of course have an Esperanto course on it, as well as Klingon and High Valyrian. However, it is unlikely that it will feature many more Conlangs, especially not one that you will develop yourself.

Now, it is of course not feasible to re-implement all of Duolingo's features, but I was just wondering if there are any apps/websites that you can use to develop an on-line course for your own conlang (it has to be fully automated, with no human teaching involved).

Is there something along the lines of Duolingo available where you can create your own courses?

答:
Apparently folks can do this with Memrise, as evidenced by the Sajem Tan lessons.

There's been talk that I found on Duolingo forums, but if they're at all serious, they probably won't allow "dabbling". You'd need a serious effort to make and maintain enough lessons for people to actually learn a language.


问:
Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works?
Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works, that made extinct all fallacies that could be made extinct by creating a language from scratch to avoid them?

Some example of those fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Verbal_fallacies

答:
Looking at the list of fallacies you quote, I would say this is not possible — most of them have got nothing to do with the language itself, but with the way it is used. It's a bit like making a kitchen knife that you cannot use to hurt someone with.

The Fallacy of Composition is related to reasoning. I cannot think of any way that a language can make that impossible. As long as you have expressive power in the language to express anything, you can express incorrect reasoning as well. The same goes for False Attribution, which is about how you use language, not anything in the language itself.

Loki's Wager refers to the absence of clear definitions or boundaries. The world is not clear-cut, so language cannot be like that either. Defining where the head starts and the neck ends is unrelated to language. Unless you want to accompany each word in that language with a book that defines exactly what it means.

Even the Fallacy of Accent is a problem, unless you take stress patterns out of the language, which then is a lot less usable, as stress is a good way of expressing nuances of meaning.

Syntactic ambiguity is about the only one which could be avoided through careful language design. But most 'usable' languages have some of that as well, especially if they are reasonably complex.

Most of these verbal fallacies are to do with the way you use language and express meanings, which you could do in any language. Syntactic ambiguities crop up more often than you would think, but unless you are a linguist, you won't even notice most of them, as it is usually very clear which meaning is the appropriate one in the context.

So, my answer is no, because it is not even possible to do that.


问:
How many words should I create in a conlang?
Question 1: How many words are minimal for a naturalistic conlang? (1000, 1500, 3000 or even more)

Question 2: How many words do the conlangers usually create?

答:
Let's start with some numbers: Esperanto started with 900 radicals (which is different from the number of words that can be formed from that radicals) while Interlingua debuted with a dictionary containing the impressive number of 27000 words. The last number is surely very much on the upper end for a conlang creation, one tenth of it is more realistic.

So a realistic starting number for a not too schematic language (e.g., avoiding something like the Esperanto prefix mal- as an obligatory tool to construct an antonym) would lie in the region of 2000 words including some derivational morphology.

I don't have statistics on how many words conlangers create on average, but there are certainly some conlang enthusiasts out there who just love to create words and to give them etymologies (based on the real world or fictional ones). Those enthusiasts may create very rich constructed vocabularies.


答:
The answer to both of these questions lies somewhere between "it depends" and "let's speculate a little".

The act of inventing a naturalistic language does not necessarily mean that you must also create a naturalistically large lexicon. After all, it's the grammar, the syntax, the usability in a wide variety of normal contexts that determines naturalism.  A natural language might have anywhere between 15000 and 1,000,000 words. And as you can see from the several English entries, there's not even a consensus as to how many words there are in a language. The number of words you should create is entirely up to you. A more interesting question, interesting in the broad sense of course!, is how many words is enough words to create? This is not only more interesting to consider, but also harder to answer because there is no pat response and any answer given will be purely opinion.

I'd argue that 2000 is a bare bones lower estimation, given that this is the lexicon size for Basic English. But B.E. isn't exactly "naturalistic", so that figure is undoubtedly low. Somewhere between 3000 and 6000 gives you a little more than dry bones to gnaw on!, but still hardly approaches the naturalism of a natural language, to say nothing of the works of the more gung ho kind of lexicophilic glossopoets!

As for the second question, we do have some recent figures. The results of a recent survey of language inventors determined a spread of approximately 500 (+/-) to >5,000 over 246 respondents. Of note are the lowest and highest categories, with about 70% of respondents falling into the <500 & >5000 categories. The remaining 30% fall between 500 and 5000 words.

Title: How many words should I create in a conlang?

Body:
Question 1: How many words are minimal for a naturalistic conlang? (1000, 1500, 3000 or even more)

Question 2: How many words do the conlangers usually create?


答:
Jesse Adam's answer already does a good job of establishing that programming languages do not have the same expressive power as human language. The notation used in mathematics certainly also does not have the same descriptive power, but it may be useful to look at representations of human language using formal logic, as that's probably the closest tie between linguistics and mathematics that you've got.

Formal semantics, as a discipline, does a lot of work defining a languages grammar using typed lambda calculus (something many computer scientists and mathematicians may have encountered before). This generally follows in the tradition of logician Richard Montague, creating what is called a Montague grammar. In a grammar such as this, a sentence like "Every woman sees a man" is represented as:

∀x(woman′(x) → (∃y(man′(y) ∧ sees′(x,y)))

And, in order to derive this compositionally (i.e., from the meaning of each word in the sentence combined together), the meanings of each word is as follows:

"woman" = λx.woman′(x)

"man" = λx.man′(x)

"sees" = λy.λx.sees′(x,y)

"a" = λP.λQ.∃x((P(x)∧Q(x)))

"every" = λP.λQ.∀x((P(x)∧Q(x)))

Hopefully you can already see a problem here -- where do we actually get the meanings of woman′ and man′ and sees′ from? In this type of grammar, any noun like "woman" or "man" is a function mapping entities to boolean values -- in other words, "woman" is a list of every entity that exists in the world and either a 1 or a 0 depending whether that entity is a woman. A transitive verb like "sees" is a function that maps entities to entities to boolean values based on whether the first entity sees the second entity.

This, as you can imagine, isn't a super satisfying way to define a word -- defining "woman" as the set of all women is kinda circular, at best -- but semanticists generally acknowledge that the meaning of individual lexical items just cannot be formalized like this and leave that for lexical semanticists to figure out (and they, to my knowledge, generally do not try to formalize the meanings of individual words like this.

So, this has all been sort of a tangent from your original question, but in short: mathematics and the notation we use for it are not language in and of themselves, but there are formal/mathematical ways of representing human language. These formalisms can capture a lot about the relationships between words in a language, but they struggle to capture the actual meaning of a particular word, and thus in that way still ultimately fall short of the underlying expressive power of human language unless augmented with some way of truly capturing a content word's meaning.

Most conlangs aim to emulate the expressive capabilities of human language and, as such, we generally would not consider formal languages like programming languages or lambda calculus conlangs.

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>


答:
Information on a minimum useful vocabulary size appears within this answer to a question on Worldbuilding SE.

I don't have a reference but some philologists and linguists have speculated that you could survive (explain who you are, ask for employment and food, etc.) in a foreign land with as few as 500 words. Henry C. Fenn, author of several language texts, felt that a vocabulary of 5000 words was sufficient to support learning new words by context, e.g. by conversing with natives and reading newspapers. In my own experience as a linguist and translator I found 5000 generic words plus about 2000 topical words (those popular for only a few years) sufficient for keeping up with current events. This gives you some idea of the vocabulary size you should be considering.


问:
Do toki pona speakers, in practice, permit compounding more than three words?
In toki pona, compounding multiple words together is possible. For example:

tomo: room/box/structure/home

  telo: water/fluid

  tomo telo: bathroom

It also allows compounding three words together:

tomo pi telo nasa: a bar

  kiwen mun laso: blue moon rocks

This is where the official grammar stops, and the official stance is that larger statements are ungrammatical. However, I am wondering if it is common in practice for people to compound more than three words.

Suppose I wanted to say “the broken yellow dome hut.” The official grammar would have me say something in a full sentence:

tomo sike pakala li jelo.

However, despite the rules of grammar, do people ever say:

tomo sike pakala jelo.

Or include other compounds of many words with pi?

(Note: I am not asking whether this is grammatical according to official rules. I am asking whether colloquial toki pona permits this.)

答: I don't know if it's "pu" (official) or not, but the whole point of toki pona is that it's very simple/minimalist so the idea is not to say any more than is absolutely necessary to describe something so I would think it would be discouraged. 'coffee' is generally translated as 'telo pimeja wawa'(dark water/liquid of strength/energy).</p>


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

答:
Linear B is an interesting example for this:

This system was apparently designed for a non-Greek language, as it did not fit the sounds of Greek very well. In fact, it is likely that Linear A was used to write the pre-Greek language of Crete, and the incoming Greeks adopted this writing system for their own use, but without changing how the system fundamentally works. In doing so, they developed "spelling conventions" to represent sound patterns found in Greek but not in the syllabary.

First, there are many Greek sounds that are missing in Linear B signs, such as [g], [kh], [gw], [b], [ph], [th], and [l]. To solve this problem, signs for similar sounds are used instead: p-signs are used for [p], [b], and [ph]; k-signs are used for [k], [g], and [kh]; t-signs are used for [t] and [th]; q-signs are used for [kw] and [gw]; and r-signs are used for [r] and [l]. However, while this convention was likely easily understood by ancient Mycenaean scribes, it took modern scholars a lot of theoretical analysis and work, plus comparison with later Greek dialects and reconstructed Mycenaean words to rediscover how this system works

And more relevantly:

Another inadequacy stems from the fact that Linear B signs usually represent Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllables, but the syllabic structure of Greek allows initial consonant clusters, ending consonants, and dipthongs. In the case of a syllable with a initial consonant cluster, individual consonants in the cluster are written by a CV sign whose vowel matches the vowel of the syllable. Therefore, for example, the word tri is written as ti-ri, and khrusos as ku-ru-so. In the case of ending consonant, the situation becomes more complicated. Ending consonants such as [l], [m], [n], [r], and [s] are not usually written, whereas other consonants such as [k] and [p] are written in a way similar to initial consonants.

So one way to represent consonant clusters in a syllabary is to pick a "dummy vowel" that gets read over when the word is pronounced, as in Linear B, or Japanese katakana when writing foreign words.

The question doesn't mention just how complex the syllable structure is; if it's not too complex, you can also do what Japanese hiragana does with the ん character and have a single character that represents a syllable-ending consonant. Or something like what Brahmi does for vowels and nasals, adding strokes and dots to represent them. Maybe if kra, tra, and pra are common syllables in your language, you could have a stroke that represents an r between the consonant and vowel, and add it to the characters for ka, ta, and pa.


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

soweli li moku e kili

The animal eats the fruit.

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

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

But there is another usage, as seen in phrase:

soweli li ijo

Animals are things (ijo means thing).

It seems that this usage increases the ambiguity, because

soweli li moku

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

What role does the li actually have in this phrase?

答: In some sentences it's a lot like 'は' in Japanese 'タナカさんは先生です' Mr Tanaka is a teacher. The toki pona equivalent would be 'jan Tanaka li jan pi pana sona'.


答:
It depends on the type of conlang you are creating.

I have read, for example, that certain highly polysynthetic languages such as those Eskimo-Aleut, Salishan, and Wakashan stock tend to have only a couple to a few thousand roots, while analytic and fusional languages such as the Austroasiatic Aslian languages, such as Semai and Jahut, have thousands of roots in a category completely lacking in SAE languages, namely "expressives" or ideophones.

Now, obviously roots are not identical to words, but I recall reading in a grammar Inuktitut that there are hundreds of "postbases"—suffixes with often highly salient meaning such as "to help" or "to hunt"—, while likewise the Northwest Coast Wakashan and Salishan languages have hundreds lexical affixes with similarly or even more precise and concrete meanings, such as body parts, common spatial relations, and the like. If I am correct, however, though extremely morphologically complicated, remarkably regular rules apply to these affixes; if your conlang was to adopt say a hundred lexical affixes, it could cut down on the need for separate lexical stems quite significantly.

On the other hand, if you opt for sound symbolism and a fusional and/or isolating route, you probably need at least 3,500-8,000 lexical items; I say 3,500-8,000 because that is the range I regularly run across as between the number of Chinese Characters in common usage and the number of characters the average, college-educated Chinese adult knows. I am aware that Chinese Characters and words or even morphemes do not have a 1-to-1 mapping, but nonetheless I see that as a reasonable range for an isolating language.

This I cannot answer very well, but I can say that I would assume it is significantly lower than a thousand, because so many conlangs are never fully able to be usable or are just naming languages. But for usable conlangs, I would guess around 3,000 or a little more, excluding naming languages and highly developed conlangs.


问:
what real world language does this look like?
This isn't really about a conlang, it's an alternative orthography but I didn't know where else to ask it.
I found an alternative orthography for english called 'EBEO'(Even Better English Orthography) at https://alternatescriptbureau.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/ebeo-a-phonetic-orthography-for-english/. it uses the letters á, à, ā, ȧ, é, è, ē, í, ó, ò, ō. ú, ū, ù, đ, ŋ, ś, ŧ, ŵ & ź in addition to the standard english letters. What language does that look like (ŵat láŋúaj das đát luk lāk?)

Here's the Universal Declaration of Human Rights & the days of the week in EBEO:

Ól hùmen bíŋs ar born frí ánd ikūl in dignití ánd rāts. Đē ar éndàd wiŧ rízen ánd konśens ánd śud ákt tòerds wan enađer in e spirit of brađerhud. (Artikel 1 of đe Ùniversal Déklárēśen of Hùmen Rāts)

dēz av đ wík

mandē

túzdē

winzdē

ŧerzdē

frādē

sáterdē

sandē

dē is day

答:
Well, it looks like a sample of an English based creole language written down by an amateur linguist or a missionary in a private orthography. It looks like a first attempt on a writing system for a previously unwritten language, it does not look really ripe: Too many diacritics on the vowels, and some confusable diacritics, too, e.g., á, à, ā, ȧ, what do they become in handwriting?

EDIT: Also important: What happens when all diacritics are left out, is this writing system still readable and understandable, or does it fail under such circumstances?


答: Elon.io lets you make your own lessons and courses. It spaces your repetition of each word/phrase based on how often you have been getting it right. It provides computer pronunciation options based on real world languages, as well as statistics on your set of words and performance.</p>

Title: Are there any sites you can use to develop an online course for your own conlang?

Body:
Creating a conlang is usually only half (or less than half!) of the necessary effort: someone has to be able to learn it, unless you want to keep it as your own private secret code.

I use Duolingo to learn various languages, and it does of course have an Esperanto course on it, as well as Klingon and High Valyrian. However, it is unlikely that it will feature many more Conlangs, especially not one that you will develop yourself.

Now, it is of course not feasible to re-implement all of Duolingo's features, but I was just wondering if there are any apps/websites that you can use to develop an on-line course for your own conlang (it has to be fully automated, with no human teaching involved).

Is there something along the lines of Duolingo available where you can create your own courses?


问:
Should languages spoken by two similar races have the same protolanguage, or can they be not related by protolanguage?
Should languages spoken by two similar races have the same protolanguage, or can they be not related by protolanguage? I guess they should be similar for example in phonetics or in some other features (grammar?). But should they be created from one protolanguage?

the same question on worldbuilding.SE

答:
I guess this is up to you as the world builder.

Note that there is no known connection between language and race, all human beings no matter of of skin colour, hair, or other characteristics used to define "race" can learn any human language as their first language. Large language families like Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, or Indogermanic cross the boundaries of continents and races.

So again, it is up to you, depending on the in-world history, geography, and your personal preferences (some conlang inventors like modelling diachronics, other prefer to invent unrelated languages).

Note also that there is a phenomenon called sprachbund: genetically unrelated languages develop common features due to close contact. There is a famous sprachbund on the Balkan, there is Standard Avarage European, there are the Pacific Northwest languages forming a sprachbund with some interesting and maybe insipiring common features.


问:
How can I add irregularities to a morphological paradigm?
So, I'm trying to make something with a naturalistic feel, even though the current phonetic system distinguishes about 38 phonemes... Let's say I'll tackle this later.
I have issues with grammar... I want to use Proto-Kartvelian as a root source but make a language that has Indo-European grammatical structure. So... When I tried making noun declensions I generally end up making something that turns into agglutinitive suffixes... E.g. if we have a masculine noun ending in -o, I simply use consonants after the -o to express cases, then change the -o to -a for plural and repeat. E.g. -o/ -og/ -ot/ -om/ -ol vs -a/ -ag/ -at/ -am/ -al...
 It is too regular. How do I change certain things so that it looks less artificial, but still maintain some logic... I need advice. </p>

答:
"Indo-European grammatical structure"—I presume you are referring to the highly inflecting state of most ancient languages. This will be quite an undertaking, given that Sanskrit nouns have eight cases and three numbers and several declension classes, given the complexity of the Ancient Greek verbal system. Study those systems to some detail and than decide what you want to take from them.

Also look at derivative morphology: There are common verbal prefixes among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and Germanic (at least), and there are common methods to form compound nouns. Also several means to create nouns from verbs or verbs from nouns go far back in time and can be reconstructed for the protolanguage.

I wish you a lot of fun and good look with you conlang project!

OwnerDisplayName: midoriyaizuku


答: In general, we don't want to make descriptions so long and complicated as to be difficult to follow. That is more important than exact word count, in my experience (as an admin of the "toki pona taso" group on Facebook). For example, if someone mentioned a "poki kala suli pi telo ala", I wouldn't find that at all strange as a description of an empty aquarium. However, if someone spoke of an "ilo sona lili pakala laso", I'd probably have to read it a few times to figure out what they're talking about (in this case I'm thinking of a dysfunctional blue laptop). So compounds with "pi" tend to have a bit more leeway because that groups the words together somewhat, making it easier to decipher. But shorter, simpler descriptions are generally preferred, and in practice this usually does turn out to be three words or less.</p>

Title: Do toki pona speakers, in practice, permit compounding more than three words?

Body:
In toki pona, compounding multiple words together is possible. For example:

tomo: room/box/structure/home

  telo: water/fluid

  tomo telo: bathroom

It also allows compounding three words together:

tomo pi telo nasa: a bar

  kiwen mun laso: blue moon rocks

This is where the official grammar stops, and the official stance is that larger statements are ungrammatical. However, I am wondering if it is common in practice for people to compound more than three words.

Suppose I wanted to say “the broken yellow dome hut.” The official grammar would have me say something in a full sentence:

tomo sike pakala li jelo.

However, despite the rules of grammar, do people ever say:

tomo sike pakala jelo.

Or include other compounds of many words with pi?

(Note: I am not asking whether this is grammatical according to official rules. I am asking whether colloquial toki pona permits this.)


答:
One possibility: perhaps your "-a- for plural" derives from an ancient word for "many" that was of a different declension, having different endings, so you could posit:

S  -o / -og / -ot / -om / -ol

vs

P  -a / -az / -asis / -amis / -ay

Another possibility: the historical importation of a foreign declension pattern into words of certain classes, which practice later infects native words of other classes either in whole or in part.

Consider the Latin words that have Greek declension and extrapolate from there.

A third possibility: the later "regularisation" of ancient defective words actually introduces an irregularity. For example, your modern word for "mob" might be an ancient plural form of "person", so you could posit:

S -a / -ag / -at / -am / -al

vs

P -a / -az / -asis / -amis / -ay

Title: How can I add irregularities to a morphological paradigm?

Body:
So, I'm trying to make something with a naturalistic feel, even though the current phonetic system distinguishes about 38 phonemes... Let's say I'll tackle this later.
I have issues with grammar... I want to use Proto-Kartvelian as a root source but make a language that has Indo-European grammatical structure. So... When I tried making noun declensions I generally end up making something that turns into agglutinitive suffixes... E.g. if we have a masculine noun ending in -o, I simply use consonants after the -o to express cases, then change the -o to -a for plural and repeat. E.g. -o/ -og/ -ot/ -om/ -ol vs -a/ -ag/ -at/ -am/ -al...
 It is too regular. How do I change certain things so that it looks less artificial, but still maintain some logic... I need advice. </p>


答:
Introduce sound changes.

For a simple example, say that the sequence -om- becomes -um- in all situations at one point in the language's history, and -at- becomes -it-.

This would (using your examples) mean that instead of

-o/ -og/ -ot/ -om/ -ol

-a/ -ag/ -at/ -am/ -al

you'd have:

-o/ -og/ -ot/ -um/ -ol

-a/ -ag/ -it/ -am/ -al

Now introduce another one: in the case of back vowels (o and u), if they're followed by a voiced stop, the stop becomes devoiced.

-o/ -ok/ -ot/ -um/ -ol

-a/ -ag/ -it/ -am/ -al

So, irregularity but obviously still based on what was originally a completely regular system.

ADDENDUM:

One thing I should have noted is that the two sound changes only effect the affixes, but that's not how sound changes work. Once you take into account what the affix is attached to, you can introduce even more irregularity.

Now let's introduce two masculine nouns, say minano and nukugo. Under your original system they'd be:

minano / minanog / minanot / minanom / minanol

minano / minanag / minanat / minanam / minanal

nukugo / nukugog / nukugot / nukugom / nukugol

nukuga / nukugag / nukugat / nukugam / nukugal

After the first sound change:

minano / minanog / minanot / minanum / minanol

minana / minanag / minanit / minanam / minanal

nukugo / nukugog / nukugot / nukugum / nukugol

nukuga / nukugag / nukugit / nukugum / nukugal

Okay, no problem, still sort of regular, no difference between the two nouns, the only change has been to the affix.

And after the second:

minano / minanok / minanot / minanum / minanol

minana / minanag / minanit / minanam / minanal

nukuko / nukukok / nukukot / nukukum / nukukol

nukuka / nukukag / nukugit / nukukum / nukukal

Now add a third sound change: If you an unvoiced consonant between two identical vowels, that consonant is dropped and the vowels become one lengthened one

minano / minanok / minanot / minanum / minanol

minana / minanag / minanit / minanam / minanal

nuuko / nuukok / nuukot / nuuum / nuukol

nuuka / nuukag / nuugit / nuuam / nuukal

Okay, now we have a situation where you've got nuuum. Let's suppose the phonotactics of your language don't allow vowels that long or the same vowel repeated that often, and if that situation ever arises, that third vowel is replaced by a glottal stop followed by a schwa (that I'll write as 'e).

minano / minanok / minanot / minanum / minanol

minana / minanag / minanit / minanam / minanal

nuuko / nuukok / nuukot / nuu’em / nuukol

nuuka / nuukag / nuugit / nuuam / nuukal

Final sound change: if a word final -t or -l is preceded by -ku- or -ko-, the vowel is dropped.

So here's the final outcome of the two words:

minano / minanok / minanot / minanum / minanol

minana / minanag / minanit / minanam / minanal

nuuko / nuukok / nuukt / nuu’em / nuukl

nuuka / nuukag / nuugit / nuuam / nuukal

The first has remained pretty regular, the second not so much.


问:
Anti-Newspeak, making a language harder
So, the government of Oceania in 1984 creates a new, altered cersion of English to make its people easier to control.

What about the opposite?

A dictator wants to make his people harder to control, so that any invading nation would have to go through an ungodly amount of trouble to subjugate them.

Could he do it?

I'd imagine he'd start by gradually altering the language to be more complex, more foreign to neighbouring languages, and popularizing words or phrases that are harder to interpret by an outside listener.

He has already completely isolated this nation from the surrounding region, and the language present there is pretty unusual for the region, think Hungarian or Basque.

I am however unsure if this'd be enough; other ideas would be helpful if you think it could be done.

答:
Implement some "levels of trust" in the language: Design phrases or word choices that signal the initiated that you are talking to non-trusted people or that non-trusted people may be listening, design other phrases that signal that you can talk more freely.

I have heard (but I don't have hard references for this) that travellers and gypsies in Europe have such devices in their languages.

Title: Anti-Newspeak, making a language harder


问:
Finnish as if it were English
I am fascinated by Finnish and sound changes. I had an idea for a funny version of Finnish where it has these properties:

Orthographic [k] changes to [q].
[Q] is pronounced /ð/ (voiced TH) before e or i (unvoiced TH) and /θ/ otherwise.
There are no noun cases.
Orthographic [h] changes to phonetic and orthographic [/f/].
There are a few irregularities. For example, even though hän is he, it becomes 'faqin'.
There is a word for a or the. It is 'ifi' and derived from the Finnish word for one.
The words are read as if they are English otherwise.
Words are translated word for word.
Phonetic /s/ or /f/ is removed before or after orthographic [q]
Word endings are copied from English. (-ed is same as English past tense, and verbs are conjugated though I don't have time to describe.)
Here is an example from Lord of the Flies (first three sentences):

Ifi poiqa qansa reilu fiqet lasqet faqinitqe alas ifi qesta farwat ilqa after roq qofti ifi laguni. Waiqa faqin omisted oted faqin qoulu wilapaita ia ialited se nit alqen ifi qasi faqin paita iutuned eta faqin fiuqsetwaes qipqied faqin farma paita iutuned eta faqin fiuqset qipqied faqin otsu. Qaiqi piorista faqin ifi piqa murqated osaqi ifi widaqo waes ifi iqilpi after lampo.

The question is about mutual intelligibility and translating things. I am curious about how this "reconstructed Finnish" translates to actual Finnish. I looked up how words are ordered, and it said that the word order tends to be the same as English. I suspect that the word endings and sounds (dental fricatives, voiceless labiodental fricatives, and more vowels) will pose major barriers to intelligibility.

Bottom line: if I were to speak this version of Finnish to someone in Finland who spoke Finnish, would they be able to understand without English?

答:
Since this question was closed in Linguistics, I think it appropriate to note the answer here.

I speak English and a reasonable amount of Finnish, and I could make absolutely no sense of any of that at all, even knowing the sound laws you posit and where the text comes from. It was basically utter gibberish from start to finish. I’m guessing the first three words are meant to be ‘with the boy’, but after that, I’m lost. –-- Janus Bahs Jacquet (9.APR.2020)

Title: Finnish as if it were English


问:
How to choose a writing system for a conlang?
When one creates a conlang, it notionally has its own writing system (although in many cases actually working out the writing system is ignored, and everything is simply done in transliteration). If one is going to actually work out the writing system, how should one decide/evaluate whether to create ideograms, an abugida, an abjad, a syllabary, or an alphabet?</p>

答:
I would say that depends on the structure of your language. If you have a small inventory of phonemes, then an alphabet might be best; if you have a fixed syllabic structure, then you might want to use that.

In general there is no reason why you only need one writing system. For toki pona you have a normal Latin writing system, but you also have ideograms and even a meso-American-style hieroglyphic writing system.

It depends what you want to use it for. Klingon has some very nice looking characters, but they are rather impractical, so mostly an ASCII transliteration is used. I would definitely recommend having a transliteration to make it easier to write the language on computers.

Other than that, it's up to you what works best!


问:
How to say right and left in Toki Pona?
As we know, Toki Pona is a quite minimal language and it sometimes not easy to come up with a word we use everyday in English. The problem is that I cannot think of a non-culture-specific and easily understandable way of saying right and left.

How to say right (and left) in Toki Pona as those words are not a part of the official dictionary?

答: One popular proposal that comes up in a lot of discussions on this topic is to base it on the direction of the official writing system (i.e. Latin characters). Thus "poki open" for left, and "poki pini" for right. However, there is still no real consensus on how to say "right" and "left", so these expressions might not be understood by everyone.</p>

Title: How to say right and left in Toki Pona?


答: As the other comments have said, this number can vary drastically depending on how in-depth you want to go. To get literally every concept that exists in say, English, you'd need tens of thousands. However, as Zipfian laws have shown, 20% of words receive 80% of the use, and the most common words are used exponentially more than the less common. I tend to strive for 1000 words as a start; the top 207 of which can essentially be a Swadesh list. When going for larger sums of words you can use lexicon generators like Awkwords. This could be used to create phonologies, or even morphologies if you use the formatting correctly.</p>


答:
Trial and Error

Natural languages tend to end up with a writing system because it was, at some point in time in history, foisted on them. The Sumerians wrote in cuneiform. This later got foisted on the Akkadians, the Hittites, the Iranians, etc. The Romans wrote with an alphabet, and that got foisted on just about the whole world, even those prestigious languages that have long had their own systems. Mostly as a matter of convenience to online existence.

As a language inventor, you get to play with these forces and circumstances. And I at least advocate out several forms of writing for a language to see which you think is the better fit. Especially if you happen to be, as a matter of philosophy, a language inventor.  If you happen to be a language discoverer, then you might come to the realisation that such-and-such a language uses a particular system, and you'll just live with it.

Trying out several systems at once, perhaps using a well known example text, will give you a good feel for how it meshes with the language structure. This exercise will also teach you how well (or how poorly) you understand either that kind of writing system or your own language's make-up! If you think a fixed syllable structure might benefit from a syllabary, then try it out! But if you discover that your "fixed syllable structure" is full of complications, exceptions, alterations, and so forth, you might find that a syllabary becomes unwieldy. That's not necessarily a bad thing --- scribes and writers have long had to deal with terribly complex writing systems (Egyptian! Sumerian! Chinese!)

Creating a few "temporary" writing systems for use with any later invented language project could also be useful. Doing this, you won't have to invent a whole new syllabary, a whole new alphabet for each future language project. The actual symbols won't necessarily be the symbols that get used for any language; they're just a tool to help you evaluate compatibility.

As for an evaluation tool, first I'd do some research into how many symbols various natural language systems have. In English, which uses an alphabet, we basically have 26 symbols. Abjads only notate consonants. So if English used an abjad, that would be 19 to 21 symbols (depending on how you count w & y). At the other end is Chinese, whose logogrammes number over a hundred thousand (according to WP's citation of a modern Chinese dictionary); but you'd only need about 2000 to read a newspaper.

This will you give a rough idea of how much work is going to go into devising characters for the invented language vs how much work is going to go into inventing the language.

Then, you'll want to consider how different writing systems work vs how your language works. No writing system perfectly captures the sounds of any language, except for the IPA. Everything else is a compromise. A language that is heavy on nuanced content words, a logography might be too unwieldy. A language with few lexical items might be very comfortable with logogrammes. A language with lots of vowels may not get along with anything but an alphabet: is PN abjad spelling for pan, pawn, pain, pean, pen, pin, pine, pane, pone, pon, or pun?

You'll also want to consider aesthetic qualities of the writing system. If you find cuneiform logogrammes are just the bees knees, then aesthesis might outweigh the difficulties of having to make hundreds of symbols. If calligraphy is more your style, then an alphabet or an abjad might be better choices.

Lastly, don't neglect combination systems! If you really like the aesthetics of logograpmmes, but don't want to bother with hundreds or thousands, consider a hybrid system where certain symbols have come to take on syllabic or alphabetic function, while certain words or classes of words continue to be written using full logogrammes.

Title: How to choose a writing system for a conlang?

Body: When one creates a conlang, it notionally has its own writing system (although in many cases actually working out the writing system is ignored, and everything is simply done in transliteration). If one is going to actually work out the writing system, how should one decide/evaluate whether to create ideograms, an abugida, an abjad, a syllabary, or an alphabet?</p>


答:
The answer mostly depends on your grammar and phonotactics:

Alphabets

Examples: Latin, Ogham, Mongolian. Alphabets are a pretty reasonable writing system for most spoken languages. I think there's a good reason why the majority of languages with standard written forms use some sort of alphabet. That said, they seem to take a long time to develop, so alphabets are unlikely for concultures that recently discovered writing.

Abjads

Examples: Arabic, Hebrew, Tifinagh. Abjads are good for languages with few vowels and very few minimal pairs distinguished by vowels. It's especially good in languages with triconsonental roots or other forms that undergo dramatic vowel shift as part of regular grammatical processes to improve coherence across grammatical forms.

Abugidas

Examples: Devanagari, Ge'ez (Ethiopic), Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. Abugdias are pretty good for languages with relatively simple syllable structure (ideally not more complex than (C)CV(C)). Based on the real world, it seems that they're best suited for languages with a high number of tones or phonations.

Syllabaries

Examples: Hiragana*, Vai, Cherokee. Syllabaries are really only appropriate in languages with relatively simple phonology, ideally not more than (C)V (or adopt a pseudo-syllabary like the kana with separate symbols for coda consonants). Otherwise the number of characters grows exponentially, or will not do a very good job representing all segments of the language, though this is not necessarily a dealbreaker (cf. Cherokee).

* Hiragana is not a true Syllabary because each kana actually represents a mora, not a syllable.

Logographies

Examples: Chinese, Cuneiform, Mayan. Logographs are best suited to isolating and analytic languages. The earliest writing systems seem to be logographies though, so cultures that only recently discovered writing are most likely to have logographies.


答:
I think, it depends on

Language type

Language usage

First, language type plays an important role in determining the number of words in that language. i.e., Let us take English as an example. English mostly do not create words from the root, rather it kind of borrows from other languages. Languages like Chinese and Tamil do not borrow words, it creates new words from the existing words. So, if a conlang you are going to create is like English, it might need more words.

Secondly, where and how this conlang is going to be used plays an major role too. For example, take Dovah language, a conlang. This language does not need words related to technology and science as this language is not going to be used in modern timeline, but an ancient timeline. So if the conlang is going to be made for a specific purpose, it is not necessary to add unrelated words.

So, number of words could be even 340 words(Taki Taki (also called Sranan), 340 words. Taki Taki is an English-based Creole spoken by 120,000 in the South American country of Suriname.) to 250,000 words(English) and it has to be noted that Taki Taki is not a full-fledged language and English is one of the most spoken language.

And as a personal advice, before creating a conlang, please refer to the grammar and phonology of other language families other than your mother tongue language family, it would help you to make a unique conlang easily.

Thanks,


答:
The writing system of the language mostly depends on the grammar, syntax, and structure of the language. i.e. The writing system of a language always evolve in such a way that it would be easy enough to write the language without any difficulties in writing the language. To be more clear, here's the comparison,

```<code>|---------------------|----------------------|
|      Language       |         Writing      |
|        type         |          type        |
|---------------------|----------------------|
|    Inflectional     |   Alphabet / Abjad   |
|---------------------|----------------------|
|    Agglutinative    | Abugida / Syllabary  |
|---------------------|----------------------|
|      Analytic       |        Ideogram      |
|---------------------|----------------------|
</code>```

As you can see in the above table, most of the world languages are by this. European languages and Semantic languages are highly inflectional, and they use Alphabet and Abjad respectively. Indian languages like Tamil(Dravidian), and Japanese(Japonic) are agglutinative, and use abugida and syllabary respectively. Chinese is a highly analytic language and it uses ideograms.

But it has to be noted that writing systems also depend on the languages and cultures that are nearby, but languages like Japanese still created its own script (Hiragana and Katakana, which are syllabaries) so that it would be easy to write.

Coming back to the question, choosing the right writing system is necessary as it is the first thing people are going to study in a language.

If you choose ideogram like Chinese, it would be easy if the conlang
is analytical. It would be a nightmare to see Latin like highly
inflectional languages in ideogramic symbols.

If your conlang is agglutinative, abugida and syllabary would be a
great choice. Alphabets too make a fine choice, but trust me,
representing agglutinating parts in alphabets is not efficient. Korean might be an exception.

Alphabets are universal, and could be used for any type of language.
But if you want to increase the complexity of the language and need
more elegant and unique language, it might not be great to choose
alphabets.

Thank you for reading.

Body:
The writing system of the language mostly depends on the grammar, syntax, and structure of the language. i.e. The writing system of a language always evolve in such a way that it would be easy enough to write the language without any difficulties in writing the language. To be more clear, here's the comparison,

|---------------------|----------------------|
|      Language       |         Writing      |
|        type         |          type        |
|---------------------|----------------------|
|    Inflectional     |   Alphabet / Abjad   |
|---------------------|----------------------|
|    Agglutinative    | Abugida / Syllabary  |
|---------------------|----------------------|
|      Analytic       |        Ideogram      |
|---------------------|----------------------|

As you can see in the above table, most of the world languages are by this. European languages and Semantic languages are highly inflectional, and they use Alphabet and Abjad respectively. Indian languages like Tamil(Dravidian), and Japanese(Japonic) are agglutinative, and use abugida and syllabary respectively. Chinese is a highly analytic language and it uses ideograms.

But it has to be noted that writing systems also depend on the languages and cultures that are nearby, but languages like Japanese still created its own script (Hiragana and Katakana, which are syllabaries) so that it would be easy to write.

Coming back to the question, choosing the right writing system is necessary as it is the first thing people are going to study in a language.

If you choose ideogram like Chinese, it would be easy if the conlang
is analytical. It would be a nightmare to see Latin like highly
inflectional languages in ideogramic symbols.

If your conlang is agglutinative, abugida and syllabary would be a
great choice. Alphabets too make a fine choice, but trust me,
representing agglutinating parts in alphabets is not efficient. Korean might be an exception.

Alphabets are universal, and could be used for any type of language.
But if you want to increase the complexity of the language and need
more elegant and unique language, it might not be great to choose
alphabets.

Thank you for reading.


问:
If 'Amlonde' were a word in Sindarin or Quenya, what would it mean?
I learned that in the real world Amlonde is a given name of South African origin (I cannot be more precise on linguistic background or meaning). But the word looks suspiciously like a word from Tolkien's Elvish languages. I looked it up in Helmut Pesch's dictionary, but it is not attested there.

So my question is: Can this word be analysed in Sindarin and/or Quenya, and what would it mean than?

EDIT: Some clarifications on possible answers: I am not looking for arbitrary suggestions of a meaning. Any analysis shall be based on published material on Sindarin and Quenya, including diachronic development and lesser known dialects. An answer that the word is in fact impossible in Quenya or Sindarin with some argument why this is the case is also a legitimate answer.

答:
There is actually a neat analysis in Quenya according to a Tolkien Dictionary Site:

am-: is a prefix that means "up"

londë: means "(landlocked) haven"

So you can imagine it describing a place that once was a harbour, but through geographical changes has become landlocked, and is possibly on a hill or mountain. Or it could be a refuge, a safe place in the mountains.


答:
The number of words in a conlang is up to you- you can start small, then add on layers and layers of vocabulary.

For example- Toki Pona started with just 120 words, but added on a few extra words.

Remember that you can never stop adding words. Whenever you find that you need to add words, just add them.


答:
Try using YouTube.

Advantage- There are a lot of people on YouTube that could see your course.

Disadvantage- This is a double-edged sword. You may not get many views since there are so many people and your video could get lost among the sea of videos.

Another platform is Udemy.

Advantage- It gives you look and feel of an actual course, and if you get 1000 people on Udemy for a $10 course (let's say it's a 50/50 split between you and Udemy) you get $5000.
But you need 1000 subscribers AND 4000 hour watchtime (your subscribers need to be interested and you can't be just  another YouTuber they subscribed to) just to start making ads. And those ads pay when someone clicks on them.

Disadvantage- Let's be real, many people just want the freebies. And even if someone is interested in your course, Udemy is probably having some discount for your course.


问:
Are there any good programs out there to help when constructing languages?
Are there any tools out there to keep track of which works you have already defined, managing your lexicon easily, and storing conjugations and the like?

Barring that, what are some good strategies to keep everything organized in text files?

答: Like bb94, I use XeLaTeX, but I want to specifically mention the glossaries package (\usepackage[xindy]{glossaries}), which lets you use Xindy to automatically sort your words. Use XeLaTeX+Xindy because it supports Unicode. This lets you include glosses (\usepackage{gb4e}) and charts of irregular declensions right in your dictionary. It's a little technical, but you get really nice output and don't have to worry that you've put entries in the wrong order.


问:
I'm creating a constructed language. Does this type of conlang exist?
Is there a type of conlang which tries to combine and simplify French and English?
(Few word examples)

I- Mi

You- Vu

We- Nu

This- Di

That- Do

Who- Ve

What- Ku

No- No

Note:- This language is not just French and English combined. It also makes up similar sounding or entirely different words.

答:
Probably something similar already exists. Languages of this type are called somewhat despectively Euroclones in the conlang community and the field of such languages is pretty well trotted out, though most designers prefer English-Spanish blends with simpler phonology over English-French blends. Euroclones are often marketed as International Auxiliary Languages by their respective proponents.

For the personal pronouns, Ido looks like a good match.