问:
Can programming languages be categorized as conlangs?
Would it be correct to say that the majority of computer programming languages (such as functional or procedural) are the form of constructed languages? If so, what makes it a constructed language in this case?

Let say a "Hello, World!" program as the example.

Hello World! by Brian Kernighan, from Artsy's Algorythm Auction based on a 1978 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version. 2 lines of C Code. -
   Wikipedia

答:
Going along curiousdannii's idea of languages for human idea exchange, there's an old joke that Python can be used in place of pseudocode, because of its use of English keywords, relatively little punctuation, and ease of understanding.

Here is an example of Kadane's algorithm, expressed in Python (from Wikipedia):

```<code>def max_subarray(A):
    max_ending_here = max_so_far = A[0]
    for x in A[1:]:
        max_ending_here = max(x, max_ending_here + x)
        max_so_far = max(max_so_far, max_ending_here)
    return max_so_far
</code>```

aruslanovych asserts that languages have to convey emotion, metaphor, sensory impressions, etc. but I think this is a Romantic view. Is the Greek Linear B was used to write not a language since it was used for administrative record-keeping and probably tax purposes?

I take a liberal view in that yes, programming languages can represent metaphors, abstraction, and idioms, just maybe not in the sense we're used to. In fact, computers are excellent at abstract concepts and generalizing, with duck typing, object-oriented programming and reflection. Off-topic, I daresay with deep learning, computers can generalize even better than humans can. And, sci-fi speculation, when robots become just as intelligent as humans, we have to consider their languages as "real".

Body:
Going along curiousdannii's idea of languages for human idea exchange, there's an old joke that Python can be used in place of pseudocode, because of its use of English keywords, relatively little punctuation, and ease of understanding.

Here is an example of Kadane's algorithm, expressed in Python (from Wikipedia):

def max_subarray(A):
    max_ending_here = max_so_far = A[0]
    for x in A[1:]:
        max_ending_here = max(x, max_ending_here + x)
        max_so_far = max(max_so_far, max_ending_here)
    return max_so_far

aruslanovych asserts that languages have to convey emotion, metaphor, sensory impressions, etc. but I think this is a Romantic view. Is the Greek Linear B was used to write not a language since it was used for administrative record-keeping and probably tax purposes?

I take a liberal view in that yes, programming languages can represent metaphors, abstraction, and idioms, just maybe not in the sense we're used to. In fact, computers are excellent at abstract concepts and generalizing, with duck typing, object-oriented programming and reflection. Off-topic, I daresay with deep learning, computers can generalize even better than humans can. And, sci-fi speculation, when robots become just as intelligent as humans, we have to consider their languages as "real".


问:
How would the grammar of a conlang develop as a creole from other languages?
Assume that the backstory of a conlang is that it developed from a set of other languages. In other words, speakers of these (different) languages were living in the same area and were communicating with each other and from this a new language emerged, a creole.

In such a situation which aspects of the original languages would be inherited by the new languages? Obviously the vocabulary would be somewhat mixed but what happens with the grammar? Would the easiest concepts prevail? Would it be necessary that one of the original languages would be dominant in some sense or could they have an equal influence?

答:
Yes, the vocabulary of a creole would be mixed, though it's likely that one of the parent languages provides most of the words. I concur with the previous answer to also look at English, since it does a few interesting things going on.

Another interesting language in that regard is the historical lingua franca, Sabir (a pidgin, and as such the precursor to a creole).

Creoles tend to have fairly simple grammar, losing some of the complexity of their parent languages. I'm not sure if necessarily the easiest concepts prevail, but in general, the more rare and complex it is, the more likely it will be lost.

I suggest learning about different natlang creoles to get a basic understanding of the processes, similarities and differences based on the languages involved; you can find a list on Wikipedia that should get you started.

On the more technical side, here is a PDF by McWhorter, and this article on Pidgins and Creoles by Baptista should also provide some more insight.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
What are the common features of "Elvish" conlangs?
I want to create a fantasy world with Elves speaking their own language. In order to avoid unwanted associations with works of other authors, the Elves should speak a newly invented language. What features make a conlang sound "Elvish" in a fantasy setting, delineating it from languages of other races (like humans, dwarves, or orcs)?

My picture of Elves is heavily influenced by the works of Tolkien. The Elves are tall and strong humanoids with very long live-span living in the forests of my fantasy world. They are fond of arts and crafts and of poetry, but also engage in fights and wars when necessary.

Elves like these are a common race in genre fiction by many authors, and they also occur in genre based games (e.g., Dungeons and Dragons). They often have typical Elvish names, and some authors also invented some bits of Elvish languages for them. So I assume there are some common features for Elvish languages. What are they?

答:
In addition to the phonological and phonotactical aspects given by @b a, I want to add some more phonotactical and statistical features for an Elvish language

Preference of front vowels /e, i/ over back vowels /o, u/

Restriction of word-final sound, words tend to end in a vowel or in one of the consonants /t, d, θ, ð, n, s, r, l/

The two-vowel sequences /ae/ and /ie/ occur frequently. Laura Wattenberg calls the combination ae "the defining fantasy vowel". It is very frequent in fantasy names, even more frequent than in Welsh.


问:
Does Volapük contain any elements (order, participle, etc) not present in its European source languages?
Volapük was designed back in the 1800s to be a 'world language', but at first glance, it appears to the layman (me) to just be a mixing of Romance languages, English, and maybe High German. Are there any new ideas or concepts that were presented in this conlang, or were all of its rules simply derived from these parent languages?</p>

答:
The Volapük panoply of mood suffixes contains distinctions that were familiar to its audience through classicising education, but I think it fair to say they weren't in the immediate source languages: the optative, jussive, and potential moods as suffixes don't correspond to what German or English or French does morphologically; nor does giving a suffix to the apodosis of conditionals (if... then). In fact, while the optative is Ancient Greek and the jussive is Sanskrit, the potential in Europe is limited to Finnish, and the apodosis suffix seems to be completely made of whole cloth.

I'll add that, as with Esperanto, a lot of the compounding was schematic and not inspired by natural languages; the notorious example of lu- "derogatory prefix" is probably the most obvious (bien 'bee' > lubien 'wasp'; vat 'water' > luvat 'urine').


问:
Teaching children constructed languages
Are there any modern accounts (either of personal experiences of individuals on this forum, or in general) of an individual creating their own language and teaching it to their child(ren)/family? </p>

答:
There's a pretty badly written account (English translation) of someone's children learning Arka, though I have no idea if it's true.

There's also the better-known case of d'Armond Speers teaching his kid Klingon.

Edit: the author of the first article later confirmed that it was a hoax.

Title: Teaching children constructed languages


答:
One guy taught his daughter Volapuk.

There is a contemporary case of someone teaching their kids their personal conlang, she used to be active on one of Facebook's conlang groups.

The revived languages, Cornish, Hebrew, Sanskrit, have similar dynamics to conlangs. Having government support in the form of schools and day care works wonders for the project being successful.

Getting a child to speak your languages takes time (20+ hours a week) of exposure, and it really helps to have a community of peers who also speak that language, or a child's decision to keep using their parents language will be personal and idiosyncratic. I get this impression from people I've met who tried speaking Arabic or Icelandic to their kids in the US where they got plenty of exposure to their parents, but no particular supporting community of peers.

Title: Teaching children constructed languages

Body: Are there any modern accounts (either of personal experiences of individuals on this forum, or in general) of an individual creating their own language and teaching it to their child(ren)/family? </p>


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:
I'm not entirely sure what Lovecraft meant by "root systems", but whenever you want to do something that human languages don't or rarely do, a good first step is looking at language universals. The traditional ones, however, as set out by Joseph Greenberg, were more about syntax and only a little about morphology, which roots would probably fall under depending on what you want to do with them. Still, we can use the same techniques. We can look at what some real languages do with roots and try to figure out what they don't do, and then do that.

Roots in most languages are pretty static. They have to be, because they carry the majority of semantic content for a word, so they have to remain recognizable. Some languages, though, have morphology that alters what we would think of as the root in Western languages. In many Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, roots are combinations of consonants, usually three but sometimes two, and inflect by changing the vowels. In Arabic the consonants k-t-b are a root that has to do with books and writing. The singular word "book" is kitāb, the plural "books" is kutub, "booklet" is kutayyib with a suffix, "writer" is kātib, and the verb "to write" is kataba.

Some languages also have infixes, which are affixes that are added inside the root instead of being added to the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix). Tagalog, for example:

For example, the verb takbo (meaning to run) + the infix um can be made into the word tumakbo, which equates to the simple past tense past tense ran.

(From http://talktagalog.com/tagalog-verbs-grammar-prefixes-infixes-suffixes/)

In the Arabic example, some of the morphology was inflectional, meaning it added some extra meaning to the original root--making a plural, for instance. Some was derivational, meaning we added something to the root that created a new root word--making "books" from "book" is inflectional, but making "book",  "writer", and "to write" from the root k-t-b is derivational. So one possible meaning for "root system" is a system of derivational morphology, and a "unique agglutinative root system" would be a unique agglutinative system of derivational morphology. Speakers tend to regularize morphology over time, but derivational morphology is a little more resistant to it than inflectional: in English, nobody uses "whom" anymore, but we still preserve irregularities like "in-vincible" vs. "un-beatable" vs. "a-sexual". So with derivational morphology, you have a bit more freedom to concoct a weird, wild system without having to simulate a bunch of lazy peasant speakers who can't be bothered to keep using your fancy inflections.

Anyway, hopefully this gives you some ideas for how to create your own system.

Title: unique agglutinative root system?


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:
The best possible approach to a writing system "from the middle" is probably a text spiralling outwards.

One famous artefact, the Phaistos Disk, shows a spiral layout of the text, but is is unknown whether it should be read inwards (most scholars prefer this) or outwards and the writing system is still undeciphered.

Your graphical samples suggest a symmetric progression of symbols to the right and left—I think this is unrealistic because lazyness and economy of writing will soon lead to the abandonment of one of the symmetric halves, leaving either right-to-left or -left-to-right writing.

Title: Is there a middle-written language?


问:
Syntactic word that carries no meaning - is there a name for that?
Is there a name for words that exist purely for syntactic reasons and carry no lexical meaning?

Reason:

Some forms of sentence in my language don't have verbs, but information such as tense and mood are indicated by affixes on the verb. So, in cases where you need to modify the verb, a meaningless verb fills in; the verb carries no meaning on its own, existing just to hold affixes.

Example:

Here is a sentence without a verb. No verb is used for just applying an adjective to a noun. Adjectives are applies directly to the noun.

Mopifa-di-mopi

Life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood is alive.

But (for example), past tense is marked by a suffix on the verb so it needs a verb to attach onto; ta "stands in" for the absent verb, giving -to (past tense) something to attach to.

Ta-to mopifa-di-mopi

(null)-(past) life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood was alive.

"Ta" is the word I'm talking about.

答:
A common term for such a word would be auxiliary. An example from the Australian language Walmajarri is ma-rna-n-ta-lu, where ma is the auxiliary to which the suffixes are attached. However as your word is used for carrying the TAM (Tense/Aspect/Mood) suffixes another term is copula. Copulas are often verbs (such as the English be) but not in all languages.

For a natlang I would strongly warn you that just because you haven't yet identified a meaning for the auxiliary, you shouldn't assume that it does not has one. As you're making a conlang you can declare that it truly has no meaning whatsoever, but do realise that makes it rather unnatural. In natlangs it's extremely uncommon to say something without it meaning something. For example, in Walmajarri the ma auxiliary is one of two auxiliaries, which communicate different modality or information structure meanings. Unless the auxiliary is very short (in which case it could be analysed as epenthetic or just an allomorph of the tense morpheme) then if naturalism is at all a design goal it should carry some semantic or pragmatic meaning. This gives you an opportunity to think of something interesting and perhaps even unique for your conlang.


答:
One general term would be function words; these are words that do not carry any lexical meaning, but are used to link content words together and clarify their relationships (eg in the case of prepositions or conjunctions).

It is indeed difficult to see exactly what you have in mind without any examples; other possibilities would be particle, which is eg used in Japanese to mark certain grammatical features (such as 'direct object').

Some people use the term empty verb for the auxiliary in phrases like to have/take a shower, where you could just use to shower directly; here you can add the tense feature to the auxiliary as in She had/took a shower.

As an aside: there are no words that "carry no meaning". If a word has no meaning, it is redundant, and would not be there at all. In linguistics you distinguish between lexical meaning and functional/grammatical meaning: the former you would find in a dictionary definition, whereas the latter is not always easy to put into words, as it describes relationships between elements in and structure of a sentence.

Update after example: Hard to say. A particle usually doesn't change its form (at least in English and most other natural languages I know), so the fact that the marker -to is attached to it would rule that possibility out in my view. That would leave empty verb as the most likely option, but then it is not really necessary when the marker is not used. I guess it would still be my preference, though.

Title: Syntactic word that carries no meaning - is there a name for that?

Body:
Is there a name for words that exist purely for syntactic reasons and carry no lexical meaning?

Reason:

Some forms of sentence in my language don't have verbs, but information such as tense and mood are indicated by affixes on the verb. So, in cases where you need to modify the verb, a meaningless verb fills in; the verb carries no meaning on its own, existing just to hold affixes.

Example:

Here is a sentence without a verb. No verb is used for just applying an adjective to a noun. Adjectives are applies directly to the noun.

Mopifa-di-mopi

Life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood is alive.

But (for example), past tense is marked by a suffix on the verb so it needs a verb to attach onto; ta "stands in" for the absent verb, giving -to (past tense) something to attach to.

Ta-to mopifa-di-mopi

(null)-(past) life-(adj-on)-wood

The wood was alive.

"Ta" is the word I'm talking about.


答:
I am not aware of a generic term covering all instances of function words without meaning, but only some specific cases. The pronoun it in phrases like It's raining or It seems that ... is called a dummy pronoun, pleonastic pronoun, or expletive pronoun.

Extending from this example one may call the particle ta in the question a dummy verb.


问:
How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?
As something of a follow-on to my question about “naturalizing” conlangs, I’m looking for any information - actual tools would be nice, too, if available - for “borrowing” from one conlang into another in a realistic manner. There would be a number of subsidiary questions for this, some of which I include here:

Assuming that I’m borrowing from sourcelang to destlang, should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form (ignoring issues of orthography relative to different writing systems)? By destlangize, I mean things like…

Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?

Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?

Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?

What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow?

What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?

(At the suggestion of a commenter, I wish to make it clear that I am interested in this issue primarily with respect to “naturalistic” conlangs and natlangs.)

答:
There are a few words in Esperanto that are arguably borrowed from Ido; examples include olda "maljuna, malnova" and kurta "mallonga". With respect to the subquestions: These words didn't need any changes, they already blend perfectly into Esperanto. The borrowings from Ido still are in a niche position in Esperanto and live mainly in the poetic register.

Of course Ido (as a fork of Esperanto) shares a lot of vocabulary with Esperanto, but this is due to inheritance and not borrowing.

I also remember vaguely that some of Tolkien's Elvish words were borrowings between Sindarin and Quenya, but unfortunately I don't have an example at hand. This would be a "constructed borrowing" between conlangs, adding to their naturalness and their diachronic depth.


问:
How can syntactic ambiguity with pronouns be avoided?
Due to the way pronouns work in place of any particular noun (subject or object) in the sentence, this often leads to ambiguous grammatical constructions.

Take this phrase in English for example:

Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing

Do him and his refer to Adam (where James will help edit Adam's essay or give him suggestions) or James (where Adam is sending James an exemplar to help James see examples of good writing)?

How would ambiguities like this be avoided in constructed languages? I know a simple solution is to just eliminate pronouns from the language but is there an alternative solution to allow pronouns to be used unambiguously?

答:
Here are three options you might want to consider:

Noun classes assign each noun a class (well known examples include the gender systems of Indo-European languages, and also the more elaborate systems of Bantu languages). Having pronouns agree with the noun class of the nouns talked about greatly helps reduce ambiguity, though it would likely not help in your specific example with two male human participants.

Obviation is the system of having two distinct third person pronouns, one (the proximal) referring to the most salient (important, topical) referent and one (the obviative) to less salient ones. In your example, likely Adam would be the proximal, and James the obviative. There are nice examples on the relevant Wikipedia article.

A third option, which is to my knowledge only attested in signed languages is Indexing. This is basically the human language equivalent of variables in programming languages: a new variable, usually a location in the sign space, is assigned to every important referent, and referred to by pointing at the location or otherwise involving the location during signing of relevant words. I believe Lojban does something similar to this as well.


答:
Should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form?

In natural languages, borrowed words are almost always "destlang-ized" to some degree, but it won't necessarily always to the same degree. Even within the same language, often some borrowed words will be more integrated into the language than others. The more recently a word was borrowed, the more speakers of the language will treat it as a "foreign" word and be willing to make exceptions for it, but as its use becomes more and more common, speakers will inevitably begin to treat it as a native word if it doesn't fall out of use.

Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?

Sometimes, sometimes not. There are examples of both in natlangs.

The English verb "to google" has been borrowed into many languages, and it seems to typically conform to the conjugation patterns of those languages. Even in Japanese, a language with a famously closed class of verbs, borrowed "to google" as a verb ググる(it may have become a verb after being borrowed as a noun, but either way, it's quite remarkable).

Yet it's also possible for exceptions to be made. This happens with some English noun borrowings (most English speakers won't try to pluralize edamame or Pokémon with English plural morphology), but not with others (many English speakers will pluralize zucchini as zucchinis, and you'll pretty much never heard zucchino).

In my experience, verbs are more likely to take on the native conjugation patterns than nouns are native declension patterns, but I don't have any data to back that up cross-linguistically. A borrowed word is definitely more likely to be conjugated or declined like a native one the longer it has been in the language (the pedantry about pluralizing Latin borrowings in English is an exception to this, but that's more because of the social prestige associated with having studied Latin).

Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?

This really is a case-by-case thing. If the language uses a completely different writing system, almost definitely, but sometimes the orthographical conventions won't be the same as native words. Japanese uses katakana for borrowings, for instance, and English borrowings from Japanese and Chinese tend to follow whatever romanization scheme was most popular when they were borrowed, even if the pronunciation is pretty opaque. For instance, the Chinese word 道 was borrowed as "Tao" in English based on older Chinese romanizations, even though the Chinese word now romanized as dào and the English derived word "Taoism" is more often pronounced /ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm/ in English (though a spelling pronunciation /ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm/ has arisen due to this).

Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?

Almost always yes. While sometimes educated speakers or upper-class speakers will try to pronounce a borrowed word with its "original pronunciation" rather than its borrowed one ("gyro" is a good example of this), even those pronunciations are almost always somewhat changed to fit the destlang's phonology better, and often they aren't even closer to the pronunciation in the sourcelang. How exactly the word is altered to fit the destlang's phonology depends on the particulars of the borrowing situation, however.

What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow? What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?

I've combined these questions because I feel there's a lot of overlap in the answers. Often, words are borrowed to fill a semantic gap in the destlang, which is why words for new technologies are so often borrowed (think of how many languages borrowed the word "television"!)

Borrowings are also often used to refer to the "versions" of certain things from the part of the world that speaks that language -- consider how anime, a generic word for all animation in Japanese, was borrowed into English as a word for a style of Japanese animation, or how English borrowed "chai" from the Hindi/Urdu word for tea, चाय (cāy) / چای (ćāy) to refer to tea with certain spices based on Indian recipes.

Also, sometimes words are borrowed because they carry some social value seen attractive by the speakers of destlang. Maybe destlang speakers think sourcelang sounds refined and sophisticated, and so upper-class destlang speakers borrow words from sourcelang to sound fancy. Of course, this sort of situation depends on a lot of social and sociopolitical factors wherever the languages are spoken.

Title: How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?

Body:
As something of a follow-on to my question about “naturalizing” conlangs, I’m looking for any information - actual tools would be nice, too, if available - for “borrowing” from one conlang into another in a realistic manner. There would be a number of subsidiary questions for this, some of which I include here:

Assuming that I’m borrowing from sourcelang to destlang, should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form (ignoring issues of orthography relative to different writing systems)? By destlangize, I mean things like…

Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?

Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?

Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?

What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow?

What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?

(At the suggestion of a commenter, I wish to make it clear that I am interested in this issue primarily with respect to “naturalistic” conlangs and natlangs.)


答:
An addition to Sparksbet's excellent answer I'd add one tool to your armamentarium:

DENATURALISATION of BORROWINGS

Sometimes foreign words borrowed a long time ago from L1 become naturalised in L2 only to become denaturalised again in later times. In other words, the legitimately L2 word becomes more like the antecedent L1 word.

Case in point, PEKING. English borrowed this city name centuries ago and happily naturalised it (as we tend to do sooner or later with every word we borrow!). But recently, you've probably noticed an odd spelling "BEIJING". For some strange reason, this word has de-evolved from its naturalised form to something approaching a modern Mandarin pronunciation-spelling of the name, rather than the English pronunciation of the name.

This doesn't always happen. Thus far, we continue to pronounce Baile Átha Cliath as DUBLIN; Moskva as MOSCOW; and Krung Thep Maha Nakhon as BANGKOK.


答:
There is something about language, which seems so obvious to us humans that it is rarely stated: Language is encoded in a linear, one-dimensional fashion.
The words you utter (and the sillables in those words; and the phonemes in those sillables) form an ordered sequence in time. Imagine e.g. dicating a table to someone else: You have to pick a certain manner of saying each item in the table (e.g. "each row after one another" vs. "each column after another") You have to come up with a map (and agree upon with your correspondent!) from the two-dimensional paper to the one-dimensional verbal language.

Now, picking a direction of writing is perfectly analogous to drawing a curve (a line) on your writing material. There are many different ways you  can do such a thing, the ones that natural languages use have a tendency to be sensible by virtue of being simple to write down, and not too ambiguous to read.
Some examples (with no claim to completeness):

left-to-right (see e.g. Latin script)

right-to-left (see e.g. Arabic script)

top-to-bottom (see e.g. Japanese)

spiraling inwards, both clockwise and anticlockwise

spiraling outwards, both clockwise and anticlockwise

in the manner of the furrows a plough makes; (also with arbitrary starting directions, and perhaps vertically instead of horizontally)

Unfortunately, I did not quite understand your own examples, as they seem to violate that basic rule of being linearly encoded and not redundant. You can of course come up with orderings like "975312468" or "864213579"; which can certainly be described as "reading from the middle in a horizontal way". The problem with those is that it feels very cumbersome to write or read in such a fashion, as your eyes have to skip around way too much.

Title: Is there a middle-written language?

Body:
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.


问:
Dialects of Klingon
There seem to be dialects of Klingon, as stated here, Maltz speaks the Rumaiy dialect while Saavik speaks the Kumburan dialect.

Is there something known about the differences between the Klingon dialects? What are remarkable features of the respective dialects?

答:
Apart from the word for "forehead" being diagnostically different in the various dialects of Klingon (as pointed out by @JeffZeitlin), the only other canonical information I know of is that in some dialects, <D> and  /ɖ, b/ are pronounced as /ɳ, m/ (<N> and <M>—though I don't remember if those transliterations are canonical, or invented by me for the Klingon Hamlet).

EDIT: More about dialects from http://klingonska.org/piqad/, citing Klingon for the Galactic Traveller. (I was right that I made up <M>, and <N> is not canonical.)

The Tak’ev Dialect

Dialect spoken in the Tak’ev (taq’ev) region. It is one of the larger
  minority dialects and has a much greater number of speakers that the
  Krotmag dialect. It sounds like blend of Krotmag an Standard Klingon,
  and is the one dialect (that we know of) which most closely resembles
  Standard Klingon. It is only briefly described in canon.

Nasal vowels

Pronounces b as mb

Pronounces D as ND

The Krotmag Dialect

Dialect spoken in the Krotmag (Qotmagh) region. This dialect has
  fewer speakers than the Tak’ev dialect, but is well known and easily
  recognized by other Klingons. Some of the dialects peculiarities have
  even influenced Standard Klingon.

Nasal vowels

Pronounces b as m (as in English mime)

Pronounces D as N

Often uses extra words in noun phrases, originally to differentiate between words with b and m (e.g. ’uS qam leg foot, nach qam head face), but now prevalent even when no disambiguation is needed (e.g. NeS ghop arm hand, nach ghIch head nose, qorNu’ tuq family house and even yan ’etlh or ’etlh yan sword sword)

Often adds short extra sentences to disambiguate between verbs with b and m (e.g. mImoH. yIjotchoH. You’re impatient. Calm down!, mImoH. ’oy’ mInNu’wIj. You’re ugly. My eyes ache.)

The Morskan Dialect

Dialect spoken on the conquered Klingon world Morska. We’re treated to
  brief bout of the Morskan dialect of Klingon in ST6 when Enterprise
  encounters a Klingon listening post. (The Klingon spelling of the word
  “Morska” is unknown – the only canon occurrence is in spoken form, in
  the Morskan dialect, by that guard in ST6).

The Morskan dialect is characterized by the following speech patterns.

Pronounces tlh as ghl at the beginning of syllables, and as ts (as in English cats) at the end

Pronounces H as h (as in English hat) at beginning of syllables, and not pronounced at all at end

Pronounces Q as Standard Klingon H

Usually drops -’e’ from the final noun in “to
  be” phrases (except when the subject of such phrases are emphasised)

Title: Dialects of Klingon

Body:
Apart from the word for "forehead" being diagnostically different in the various dialects of Klingon (as pointed out by @JeffZeitlin), the only other canonical information I know of is that in some dialects, <D> and <b> /ɖ, b/ are pronounced as /ɳ, m/ (<N> and <M>—though I don't remember if those transliterations are canonical, or invented by me for the Klingon Hamlet).

EDIT: More about dialects from http://klingonska.org/piqad/, citing Klingon for the Galactic Traveller. (I was right that I made up <M>, and <N> is not canonical.)

The Tak’ev Dialect

Dialect spoken in the Tak’ev (taq’ev) region. It is one of the larger
  minority dialects and has a much greater number of speakers that the
  Krotmag dialect. It sounds like blend of Krotmag an Standard Klingon,
  and is the one dialect (that we know of) which most closely resembles
  Standard Klingon. It is only briefly described in canon.

Nasal vowels

Pronounces b as mb

Pronounces D as ND

The Krotmag Dialect

Dialect spoken in the Krotmag (Qotmagh) region. This dialect has
  fewer speakers than the Tak’ev dialect, but is well known and easily
  recognized by other Klingons. Some of the dialects peculiarities have
  even influenced Standard Klingon.

Nasal vowels

Pronounces b as m (as in English mime)

Pronounces D as N

Often uses extra words in noun phrases, originally to differentiate between words with b and m (e.g. ’uS qam leg foot, nach qam head face), but now prevalent even when no disambiguation is needed (e.g. NeS ghop arm hand, nach ghIch head nose, qorNu’ tuq family house and even yan ’etlh or ’etlh yan sword sword)

Often adds short extra sentences to disambiguate between verbs with b and m (e.g. mImoH. yIjotchoH. You’re impatient. Calm down!, mImoH. ’oy’ mInNu’wIj. You’re ugly. My eyes ache.)

The Morskan Dialect

Dialect spoken on the conquered Klingon world Morska. We’re treated to
  brief bout of the Morskan dialect of Klingon in ST6 when Enterprise
  encounters a Klingon listening post. (The Klingon spelling of the word
  “Morska” is unknown – the only canon occurrence is in spoken form, in
  the Morskan dialect, by that guard in ST6).

The Morskan dialect is characterized by the following speech patterns.

Pronounces tlh as ghl at the beginning of syllables, and as ts (as in English cats) at the end

Pronounces H as h (as in English hat) at beginning of syllables, and not pronounced at all at end

Pronounces Q as Standard Klingon H

Usually drops -’e’ from the final noun in “to
  be” phrases (except when the subject of such phrases are emphasised)


问:
Is there a stroke order for any of the Klingon alphabets?
Is there an order in which you write the strokes making up a letter belonging to the Klingon alphabet (apart from the Latin alphabet)?

Are letters from Klingon alphabets intended to be written manually, as opposed to solely being printed?

I looked at Klingon alphabets and pIqaD but neither had information about this.

答:
There have been stroke ordering proposals by fans devising handwriting of pIqaD. One is http://klingonska.org/writing/examples/pic/zrajm-piqad.jpg , from  Zrajm of Klingonska Akademien: http://klingonska.org/piqad/. Another had been proposed by the late Glen Proechel's group:

Interstellar Language School (lead by Glen F. Proechel) has published “An Alien Writing System Primer” explaining how to write pIqaD in longhand. (It is non-canon, of course – and to my knowledge not endorsed by the KLI.)

It was 20 years ago, I've seen it, and I don't remember it. (I do remember not liking it. ;^)


答:
Its common for languages to borrow the words for trade goods introduced to them by other cultures. These are called 'Wanderwoerter', or 'wandering words' in German. All the words for 'tea' in our world, for instance, can be traced back to just two distinct roots. One gave rise to the word for tea in China and Mongolia, the other is the common ancestor for the words for 'tea' everywhere else. Words for region-specific materials also tend to get borrowed. Though they can also just be named after foreign locations that the people who speak the destlang got the material from (we have quite a number of these in English).

Words for technologies also tend to migrate. Hungarian has multiple words related to horse riding that originated in Turkish.

Also note how English likes to borrow foreign words for foreign objects. We have words like sombrero from Spanish and kimono from Japanese. Note however that borrowed words may not hold the same meaning as they do in their parent languages. In Spanish the word 'sombrero' is the word for any hat with a brim. And kimono is the name for a specific garment, but in English we normally use it to refer to any kind of traditional Japanese dress. This is pretty common cross-linguistically.

Also note that some languages borrow foreign words more than others. Some prefer to just derive new words from native words. Finnish used to be like this. German still is to a large extent (though that doesn't mean loan words don't exist in German, there are a few from French and English, such as bon-bon, pommes frites, and jeans).


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:
Building on the answer by thrig: one could say poka pilin (side with a heart) for the left side and poka pilin ala for the right side.

It should be rather neutral and understandable as it is based on biology facts instead of culture-specific ideas.

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


问:
Is there anyone that has a conlang as their first/only language?
It seems that people generally use constructed languages in very limited circumstances, or within small communities that speak the language.  Thus it seems to me unlikely that one of these languages would every be someone's first or only language.

Are there any documented cases of a child learning a conlang as their first language?

答:
Yes. According to Wikipedia, Esperanto has 350 native speakers (data 1996). There is also a story about a linguist only speaking to his son in Klingon, but even though the child picked it up somewhat, later in life the child stopped speaking Klingon. Currently, he doesn't.

Also, see Esperanto native speaker AMA on reddit and a blog I enjoyed about speaking Esperanto natively.


问:
Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn?
Auxiliary constructed languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages.

Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn than natural languages?

答:
Some auxiliary languages are easier to learn than natural languages. There have been many experiments that show that Esperanto is both easier to learn than other languages, and also makes learning future languages easier.

Two quotes from some of the experiments on Esperanto:

"It is possible for the average student to understand written and spoken Esperanto in 20 hours better than he can understand French, German, Italian, or Spanish after 100 hours."

"A child can learn as much Esperanto in about 6 months as he would French in 3–4 years... if all children studied Esperanto during the first 6–12 months of a 4–5 year French course, they would gain much and lose nothing."

However, it's not necessarily true that auxiliary languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages. Esperanto is a very regular language, and that makes it easy to learn. Other languages, such as Interlingua, are not as easy to learn, but are meant to be more recognizable to someone already familiar with the vocabulary of Romance languages. It is still more regular than the natural languages it's based on, so it likely is easier to learn, but it sacrifices some regularity in order to have a more familiar vocabulary.


问:
Language with contextual-free vocabulary
Every language (I know of) needs a context or a mark of reference for understanding a lot of the expressed message.

I'm refering about concepts like I, you, this, there, tomorrow...

I'd bet there is no organic language that doesn't use such contextual words. Still, though, I wondered:

Is there any constructed language that has no word context-dependant?

If there is: How does it manage to express common messages?

If there isn't: Would it be possible to have such language?

答:
Firstly, I have thought about this too before. Actually, only one word is needed for all of I, you, this, there, tomorrow, etc. You can analyse these as I, (the person I am referring to), (the thing I am referring to at/by/on ME), (the place I am referring to not at/by/on ME), (the day which is one day later than the day I am in). This goes for most words like those.

Not that I know of. But let's create one for demonstration purposes: Loj-ban mi. It is Lojban, but there's a ban on the word mi (and vi, and ti, and other words incorporating mi as said above).

It would be able to express concepts like 'Bananas grow on trees', as this doesn't depend on the concept I. However, saying stuff like My name is Santa Claus., It's going well. and What are we doing tomorrow? would be impossible.

We could replace it with other concepts, for example, 'the speaker/writer'. But this is ambiguous, take this sentence: I don't know who said that, but the speaker is in big trouble when I find out!. (And, pulling it off correctly, it nevertheless depends on context). Names can be used, so the answer is actually yes. 'Tomorrow' would have to be expressed as a date, 'this' would have to be 'The plate on the table in the house of Joe Example, etc.

Yes, as we proved above with Loj-ban mi, it is possible. Would it be learnable? Probably. But not usable in practice.


答:
All human communication is context-dependent. A context-independent language would be ununderstandable (by humans, at least).

My anser to this question, Can all sentences be represented logically?
 deals with this problem; the basic reasoning comes from Hubert Dreyfus, What computers cannot do, via Setargew Kenaw Fantaw.

Title: Language with contextual-free vocabulary

Body:
Every language (I know of) needs a context or a mark of reference for understanding a lot of the expressed message.

I'm refering about concepts like I, you, this, there, tomorrow...

I'd bet there is no organic language that doesn't use such contextual words. Still, though, I wondered:

Is there any constructed language that has no word context-dependant?

If there is: How does it manage to express common messages?

If there isn't: Would it be possible to have such language?


答:
One thing you may want to consider is how the sourcelang word reached the destlang. If the word was spread through literature to the destlang speakers, then it may be spelled the same as it is in the sourcelang but pronounced according to the pronunciation of the destlang. If the word is spread through oral communication then it may sound like the sourcelang but be spelled differently. One example would be ray (or rai), a Spanish word descended from the English ride as in I got a ride home.

Another thing you may want to consider is the possibility of usages that sourcelang speakers may consider "incorrect". An example of this would be the French word le parking, which means car park in English. In the case of "incorrect" usage the important thing to consider is which social societal group naturalized the word and in what context. If the word was naturalized by academics, then it may continue to be pronounced and used the same way it is in the sourcelang (as in the cases of many Latin words used in English). If it was naturalized by non-linguists in normal social contexts, then it may be naturalized with spelling errors, mispronunciations, and odd usages (consider le shopping in every day French).


问:
Which categories of inalienable possession have conlangs expressed?
In many natlangs a grammatical distinction is made between alienable and inalienable possession. Inalienable possession is used for things which are in some way conceptualised as being inseparable from their possessor.

Lévy-Bruhl (and then later Chappell & McGregor) identified that natural languages with a morphologically distinct inalienable possession use inalienable possession for four categories:

spatial relationships such as the ‘top’ or ‘front’ of something

physical parts, especially human body parts

kinship bonds

objects which are essential for a person’s survival

For the conlangs with inalienable possession, do they also use it for all four of these categories? Do any conlangs have inalienable possession for a type of nominal relationship which doesn't fit into any of these categories?

This is an list of languages question, which on this site means that multiple answers presenting different languages are allowed. However, if possible, do present as many languages as you can in a post. Conlangs newly constructed to answer this question are not allowed.

Chappell, Hilary & William McGregor. 1996. Prolegomena to a theory of inalienability. In Hilary Chappell & William McGregor (eds.), The grammar of inalienability, 3–30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1914. L’expression de la possession dans les langues mélanésiennes. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 19(2). 96–104.

答:
Lojban differentiates between inalienable possession, alienable possession, and association: po'e, po, pe. But Lojban does so because its design aspired to typological completeness: it's followed the textbooks in its differentiation between alienable and inalienable possession. See http://www.lojban.org/static/publications/refgram_chunked/cllc/8/3/

"Something is intrinsically (or inalienably) possessed by someone if the possession is part of the possessor, and cannot be changed without changing the possessor. In the case of Example 3.5, people are usually taken to intrinsically possess their arms: even if an arm is cut off, it remains the arm of that person."

So (2) physical parts. (Lojban deals with (1) as a predicate relation, not a possession.) Not (4), as far as I know. Logically (3) kinship bonds should be inalienable as well, but those too are represented in Lojban as predicate relations. (In fact the expression of relations between entities through overt predicates diminishes the role of possessives in Lojban overall.)


答:
I’m going to try to avoid any kind of argument about politics, religion or what does or does not count as a “conlang,” and just give this as a historical case that I think is relevant to the spirit of the question.

Biblical Hebrew was a natural language, and Rabbinic Hebrew a scholarly one, but modern Hebrew needed a vast number of neologisms, greatly exceeding the number of ancient words in the Bible.  Since most of the early revivalists were native speakers of Central and Eastern European languages, those also influenced its development.  So Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s dictionary of modern Hebrew words, many of which he himself invented or extended the definitions of, bears some similarities to creating the vocabulary of a conlang.

He and his wife were famously the first parents in modern times to raise their child to know only Hebrew and nothing else.  Their son Ittamar Ben-Avi, born in 1882, would later recall that he was sent to his room whenever any guests came over who did not speak Hebrew, so he would not hear another language, and that his father became enraged when he caught his mother singing lullabies to him in her native Russian.

Title: Is there anyone that has a conlang as their first/only language?

Body:
It seems that people generally use constructed languages in very limited circumstances, or within small communities that speak the language.  Thus it seems to me unlikely that one of these languages would every be someone's first or only language.

Are there any documented cases of a child learning a conlang as their first language?


问:
Finding inspiration for letter forms?
I believe I've mentioned before on here how I struggle to come up with forms for letters.

I've tried to solve this by looking at other systems. Despite the diversity in our world, I've found it surprisingly hard to find a multitude of systems to draw from.

The problem is: writing systems have different factors that can influence their design. Syllabraries tend to have more complex characters than alphabets, because they don't have to write as many of them to spell out a word. And besides, they need a wider diversity of symbols anyway. Logographic systems are no different. Also the medium makes a huge difference. The aesthetic of one script may not be too practical to replicate using a medium it wasn't intended for.

I've found this all divides up writing systems into multiple different categories based on design. This means that if you stick with a certain medium and type of writing system, you won't have much to go off of. Like, if you look at alphabets, all that really seems to be out there is Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Korean. And if you look at cursive scripts, you only really have two options: English cursive, and Arabic, which is technically an abjad. And of course if you want a logographic system, the only living logographic system (aka, the only one to see use in a world where literacy was normal writing was part of every day life) is Chinese. Beyond that, all you have to look at are long extinct logographic systems that were all made to be carved into stone. Or cuneiform, which used some rather odd tools and medium to write. How many systems do you know of that were written in clay, and were always stamped rather than drawn?

I can't come up with forms that really look overly different from the few alphabets currently in use. Worse yet, most of them are closely related to each other! It seems like every symbol possible has already been used in a writing system somewhere.

The only thing that has really helped me is I've noticed that most lower-case Latin letters are built from a limited number of shapes: a circle, loop, short line, long line, long line with a loop, and a dot. Sadly, I can't really come up with any practical letter forms that don't use these shapes. They're pretty simple and basic.

答:
After all, there is a limited number of shapes that one can draw with reasonable effort. You can measure the effort for writing a character in a writing system by the number of strokes needed. For alphabets, there should be no more than 5 strokes, for a syllabary maybe 7 or 8.

But there are more shapes available than you may think: For a relatively recent (in terms of writing systems) invention, you can look at the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics having a distinct look from other writing systems.

The different Indic writing systems are also a good source of inspiration: While sharing a common set of characters and common principles, the letter shapes are always different in the various Indic and Indic inspired (like Thai or Khmer) scripts.

And it is still possible to invent a new and distinct writing system from scratch: Tolkien's Tengwar shows clear external influences (from Indic scripts and from Francis Lodwick's Universal Alphabet) but is clearly distinguished from both sources of inspiration.

Title: Finding inspiration for letter forms?


问:
Swadesh List for Verb Infinitives?
I was looking through Wikipedia's Swadesh Lists recently and wondered if there was anything like a Swadesh list for verb infinitives, similar to how Spanish verbs work (to be, to want, to eat, to know, to jump, etc.) or verb meanings. Is there one? What verb infinitives does it contain (what number)? </p>

答:
It's worth noting that there are PLENTY of word frequency lists around, but almost no one ever bothers to even try compiling cross-linguistic ones (for reasons that should be pretty obvious). Lists for English, furthermore, hardly ever even attempt to separate different word categories (again for reasons that ought to be obvious).

The Conlanger Lexipedia is based off a 1500 roots list (with some caveats) compiled from a 1.1 million word corpus of science-fantasy writing. You can count the verbs yourself... once you decide what counts as a verb (the list can't tell apart verb vs. adjective vs. noun uses, and the commoner an English content word, the likelier it is to drift between noun/verb/adjective).

The top 200 words (page 36-37 of the book) have the following roots that are "primarily" verbs:

go, will, know, see, come, like, would, could [end of top 50 words, could is 49]
  look, give, seem, must, call, think, make, ask, work, run, mean, may, wear, feel, want, stand, hear, open, should, end, keep, sit, need, turn, move, try, begin, place, close, talk, can, get, take, tell, find, speak, might, let, hold, fall, bring

Be mindful of the biases introduced by an English list: the English auxiliary system, in particular, wouldn't be reproduced in any other languages as the past forms (and very often the main forms!) would be regular verbal inflections instead of separate forms. Arguably, I shouldn't have included the auxiliary verbs at all, really:strictly speaking these verb have no infinitive form to begin with.

Title: Swadesh List for Verb Infinitives?


问:
Designing a vocabulary for geographical features
I want to draw a map of a fictional world resembling Europe in climate and basic geographic features (so there are rivers and lakes, alpine mountains, mittelgebirge, marsh lands and bogs, some plains and forests).

I am thinking of dithematic words (similar to typical endocentric compound words where the second part denotes the general feature and the first part gives a distinguishing detail), so I need words for river, lake, mountain, marsh, bog etc. and some determining words.

However, I want the words to look naturalistic and not overly schematic. What techniques can I use to make the geographical features look naturalistic?

EDIT: Assume that I have already designed a phonology for my conlang stub, and that I have already some phonotactics and candidate root words. What I am interested in is some natural looking variation of the names to generate.

答:
There are many factors that make actual real-world placename not look schematic (unless, maybe, you're looking at Japanese placenames...)

Have many different etymological sources from names

In practice, names have a lot of forms, and the younger the names, the more varied the forms: religious names (i.e. saints) and feasts, people names ("X's place", "X's farm", "X's dwelling" are all very common sources of names, but just look at how many us towns are named after female given names!), other placenames (e.g. Athens, Georgia), etc.

Layer the source languages

European names show variety at least in part because the names comes from many layers of languages: France has names in modern French from Germanic, Celtic, Romance (French, Old French, Spanish, Latin roots), and pre-IE languages. In England you have Scottish, Celtic, Old English, Normand and Old Norse/Danish names.

People really don't pay that much attention to the form of a word

A simple example is how common "new town" is as a name: Newton, Newcastle, Villeneuve, Neuville, Villanueva, Villanova, Neustadt, Neuburg, Novgorod, Novohrad, Nevşehir, Yenişehir...  All of these are fairly common city names in their respective languages. "Blue Lake" may not feel original, but to te people who come later, it's just a name like any other. The same as we don't really notice "Rowan" or "Rose"  are common nouns once they are people's name.


答:
The first thing is: Design not only one word for each geographical feature, use several of them. To give some examples from a natural language (German in this case): A mountain may have a name in -berg (which is frequent in the mittelgebirge) but also -spitze, -horn, -kopf, or -kuppe. Some beacon mountains have names of their own without an element meaning "mountain" (e.g., Brocken, Großer Belchen, Kahler Asten, or Eiger). Similarly, cities are not just -stadt "city", but there are also cities in Germany with names in -burg, -berg, -heim, -reut, -furt, or -hafen.

The second thing is: Hydronyms are special. The names of larger rivers often reflect an older substrate and are not taken from the current language of the place and don't have any transparent meaning. Examples are Potomac, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri in the USA or Thames, Rhine, Rhône, and more in Europe.

With this in mind, the names on the map should show some interesting variation.

Title: Designing a vocabulary for geographical features

Body:
I want to draw a map of a fictional world resembling Europe in climate and basic geographic features (so there are rivers and lakes, alpine mountains, mittelgebirge, marsh lands and bogs, some plains and forests).

I am thinking of dithematic words (similar to typical endocentric compound words where the second part denotes the general feature and the first part gives a distinguishing detail), so I need words for river, lake, mountain, marsh, bog etc. and some determining words.

However, I want the words to look naturalistic and not overly schematic. What techniques can I use to make the geographical features look naturalistic?

EDIT: Assume that I have already designed a phonology for my conlang stub, and that I have already some phonotactics and candidate root words. What I am interested in is some natural looking variation of the names to generate.


问:
Is there existing terminology for distinguishing multiple imperative moods?
I have found a conlang, Klyran, which has a rather interesting feature: multiple imperative moods. Quoting from the documentation:

For imperative mood there are number of suffixes that correspond to different sort of request from begging to ordering with threat of killing in case of refusal. These suffixes can be omitted.

(For the case of an suffixless imperative form, a "default" form of the imperative mood is presumed, similar to a real-world imperative in meaning.)

While this part of the language has not been fully fleshed out (nobody yet has bothered to define the various imperative mood affixes) -- is this feature (multiple imperative moods) something that has existing terminology surrounding it?

答:
I don't think there is any really reliable cross-linguistic labelling system that would include all of these. There are terms for most of them, but they're often used for only a few languages, and perhaps not very consistently. For someone who is created a conlang, they have flexibility then to adapt these terms for their language, however the important thing is to clearly describe in detail the full semantics of the language, rather than just assigning labels.

The broad category for all of these is deontic modality, which covers the modality of how the speaker thinks things ought to be. Within deontic modality there are many subtypes. The SIL Glossary has a very useful section giving a hierarchical description of deontic modality.

English actually has a very large number of modal verbs, with subtly different senses, so with examples from English we can illustrate a lot of the subtypes, even though they're usually not given clear labels. The English modals are however very complex, most of them being used in different contexts to mean very different things.

The imperative is actually one of the least marked ways of issuing a directive/command. In English it is a structurally different way of forming a sentence, but in other languages it may have a more regular structure with a particular verb form that fits into a wider affix paradigm.

Should is usually weaker than the imperative, giving a recommendation. Possible labels include hortative and propositive.

Have to, need to and must can all be stronger than the imperative, but they also often imply that the person giving the instruction needs to plead to some extent with those they are instructing; an autocratic dictator would never tell their servants that they need to do something, they would simply tell them to do it (with an imperative sentence.) Labels include precative for requests, and directive and obligative for commands that emphasise obligation.

When will or shall are emphasised and stressed in English they are used to indicate a serious instruction, which sometimes sound almost sinister with an implied threat for those who disregard them: "You will do this... (or else!)" The label commissive is used for threats, but not exclusively, as it's also used for promises.


问:
What are the aspects of Esperanto?
By design (looking at the 16 rules of Esperanto) there is no verbal aspect in the Esperanto grammar. However, one can see an incohative aspect in the prefix ek- (e.g., mi ekridas "I burst out laughing").

More controversial is the question of a perfective/imperfective aspect (see this question and its differing answers) or a continuative aspect. Those aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English (despite tenses named *present perfect or present continous).

What are the verbal aspects in Esperanto and how are they expressed?

答:
Whoever told you Esperanto lacks verbal aspect was lying to you. Yes, aspect isn't mentioned in the 16 Rules. However, this clearly doesn't mean Esperanto completely lacks aspect -- the 16 Rules are not intended to be a linguistically rigorous analysis of Esperanto, but merely a set of easy rules to teach laymen. Zamenhof definitely designed Esperanto containing some aspectual markers, especially given the amount of influence he took from Slavic languages; what is unclear is exactly how much aspectual information he intended to be encoded in certain markers.

Based on your description of Esperanto's complex tenses and your claim that "these aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English", you seem to be under the impression that to truly be present in a language, an aspect must be marked by a single morpheme rather than through syntactic constructions like the verb + participle constructions in English and Esperanto "complex tenses." However, that isn't how that works. The English present/past continuous constructions do mark progressive/continuous aspect. The English present/past perfect constructions do mark the perfect, though "perfect" is a bit more of a complex mix of tense and aspect than it is pure aspect. The fact that certain syntactic constructions are used here rather than a single affix does not make the aspectual marking here any less "pure".

There actually has historically been some debate over how Esperanto participles mark aspect when used in complex tenses. Zamenhof himself saw Esperanto participles as marking a mixture of tense and aspect, and this resulted in a divide among Esperantists regarding whether to translate, say "The house was built long ago" with estis konstruata (because the participle happens at the same time as the main verb) or with estis konstruita (as the building is accomplished and focused on describing its result). The latter group largely won out with an un-official notice from the Academy in 1965, which gave the following positions:

The Esperanto tense system consists of but three tenses: the present, the past, and the future.

All other time relationships (such as the pluperfect, future perfect, etc. of many other languages) are expressed by adverbs, conjunctions, or simply by context.

The six participles, used either with nouns or with the verb esti, show aspect, not tense. They show, in other words, in what phase of the action the subject finds himself with respect to the object: whether beginning and unfinished (-ant, -at), finished and fulfilled (-int, -it), or not yet begun but intended or awaited (-ont, -ot).

Accordingly the forms with -ata focus upon the duration or repetition of the act, and the forms with -ita focus upon the result of the act. The forms with -ita can also show priority in time in the event that there is separate evidence of that in the sentence, such as a word like jam = “already.”

(Quoted from Being Colloquial in Esperanto's Appendix on Participles, which goes into more detail about the conflict here.)

While this treatment of Esperanto participles are markers exclusively of aspect is technically not an official order from the Academy, it has generally been treated as such my most Esperantists, and this is largely how Esperantists use participles -- the -anta/-ata participles marking the continuous/progressive, the -inta/-ita participles marking the resultative, and the -onta/-ota participles marking the prospective. This is consistent with how they're used outside of the complex tenses as well. Based on this, one would have to willfully ignore a lot of Esperanto usage and convention to claim its participles don't mark aspect.

In addition to the obvious aspect marking on the participles, it should also be noted a few other affixes mark what could be considered aspect. You've mentioned ek- as a marker of inchoative aspect yourself (it could also be said to mark the momentane). -iĝ- could also be said to have some inchoative flavor to it (though it's a bit more obscured among its other functions, consider that eksidi and sidiĝi are near-synonymous), and -ad- similarly can mark something like continuative or iterative aspect.

Title: What are the aspects of Esperanto?


问:
Is there any importance of "dots" while constructing alphabets for a language?
In English, there is a little dot over small letters of i and j. I am not sure what that dot signifies to - pronunciation or sound.

In Gujarati, Hindi and Sanskrit languages, there happens to be dot over letters which signifies to sound "-n" for example Ganga written in either of three with dot over "Ga" alphabet sounds "Gan".

Is there any importance altogether to have such notations? Why? How do you add the same while devising grammar rules for a constructed language?

答:
You are the one who constructs the writing system, so it is your choice whether you assign some "meaning" to dots.

There are constructed scripts with dots carrying some meaning:

In Tengwar one, two or three dots above a consonant denote different vowels following that consonant (there some other markers for more vowels)

In Kelen a dot below a vowel denotes the length of the vowel

I'm currently not aware of a constructed scripts where some dots are just part of certain letters (like in the Latin alphabet i and j) without adding information to a dotless base form.


答:
In English, the dot does not carry meaning. It's just part of the lower case letters i and j. There is no dotless base form. Note that the letters i and j aren't dotted in every font or variant of the Latin alphabet. Notably, there is no dot in Gaelic type.

Turkish, on the other hand, does distinguish between dotless I/ı (representing the phoneme /ɯ/) and dotted İ/i (/i/).

Historically, the tittle was added to improve legibility. In late medieval blackletter, the letters i, m, n, and u were basically all made up of vertical strokes, minimum basically was ııııııııııııııı. So a dot was added to i: ıııiııiıııııııı.

Dots can be used for a variety of purposes: Inuktitut syllabics (a constructed script for a natural language) use dots to indicate vowel length, while the Hebrew abjad uses them as vowel marks (niqqud), so does Tengwar. In Arabic, they are used to distinguish letters that have come to otherwise look identical (i‘jām).

Dots are an easy way to derive one symbol from another.

As jknappen has already said: it's up to you what you want to use dots for in your script or if you want to use them at all.

A thing you might want to consider is the medium your script is supposed to be written on. Dots can be easily produced with ink on paper but they are harder to carve in wood where you might want to use a short line instead. Of course, if it is meant to be mainly printed or displayed by screens, reproducibility is much less of a concern.

Title: Is there any importance of "dots" while constructing alphabets for a language?

Body:
In English, there is a little dot over small letters of i and j. I am not sure what that dot signifies to - pronunciation or sound.

In Gujarati, Hindi and Sanskrit languages, there happens to be dot over letters which signifies to sound "-n" for example Ganga written in either of three with dot over "Ga" alphabet sounds "Gan".

Is there any importance altogether to have such notations? Why? How do you add the same while devising grammar rules for a constructed language?


答:
When designing some of my recent attempts at languages, I've used a list of Proto-Indo-European roots (taken from here). Looking at the verbs covered by those roots, you get a good list of verbs which would be important to a pre-literate culture. So while you get verbs like "to paint" (since slapping colour on things is rather old) or "to shop/trade" you don't get verbs like "to write" or "to read".

Obviously this is somewhat culturally biased: someone living in other parts of the world without domesticated animals is unlikely to need a verb for "to domesticate/tame", while the plains/steppe dwelling PIE culture didn't need a verb to describe a long crossing over water ("to sail"), whereas someone from a culture in the South Pacific would. Still, it's a good place to start because it gives you functional verbs that a human society is more than likely to have.

Title: Swadesh List for Verb Infinitives?

Body: I was looking through Wikipedia's Swadesh Lists recently and wondered if there was anything like a Swadesh list for verb infinitives, similar to how Spanish verbs work (to be, to want, to eat, to know, to jump, etc.) or verb meanings. Is there one? What verb infinitives does it contain (what number)? </p>


问:
How to link extraterrestrial animal names from other language with terrestrial languages?
As title states; how to name extraterrestrial fauna/flora to human languages, would reffering to animals similar to cows as to cows and to plant that bears round red fruits as to apple be linguisticly acceptable? Or maybe new words would have to be put in place to describe those creatures?</p>

答:
I think, the more generic a term is, the better you can use a known term in your native language. The more specific a term is, the greater is the need for some circumlocution or some conlang term.

Examples: Specific kinds of flowers and trees in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" have constructed names like mallorn, niphedril, or simbelmyne. He consistently used pipe-weed (the word tobacco is used by the narrator, but not in dialogues). Already on the level of genera, Tolkien uses terms like pine tree, oak, ... and of course there is grass, there are trees, there are horses and so on.

Whether you want to call some space creatures "cows" depends on the picture the word "cow" evokes and the uses of cows (Do they give milk and flesh? Can you use oxen for ploughing or driving a cart?) in your fictional culture.


答:
Dots (and diacritics generally) have been used in writing systems for several reasons:

To mark vowels

In abjads and some abugidas, consonants are written as large characters, and vowels are written as diacritics around the main characters, frequently a dot or dots, but also dashes and other small marks.

One option for a con-writing system which I haven't seen before would be to swap this, and have the vowels be the main characters, and the consonants be indicated by diacritics.

Sound modifications

Diacritics are used in some writing systems to indicate some sort of sound modification, such as voicing, lenition/fortition (turning a stop into a fricative or vice versa), vowel length, or tone.

To increase the character inventory

If a language borrows a script from another language, it might not have enough characters for all of its phonemes. One common option is to use diacritics to make more characters. This is common when languages adapt the Latin script, such as in French or Vietnamese.

Or because of language change, the writing system may no longer be adequate if new phonemes arise. One option is to add a mark to an existing character. (This is probably actually the origin of all of French's diacritics.)

To improve legibility

Diacritics can be used to improve legibility, which is the origin of the dot of "i" and "j". Some languages also use diacritics to distinguish homophones.

To mark syllables

The diaereses is used to indicate that two adjacent vowels are to be pronounced separately, as in the name Noël.

This is not a complete list. The Wikipedia page for diacritics gives a thorough look at what writing systems for conlangs use them for.


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

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

答:
Well, LaTeX is a great platform for writing anything, and you already seem to use it to some success. So I suggest using LaTeX and creating pdf out of it for distribution.

What helps in the long run is creating a font with all the special characters for your conlang. TeX and LaTeX come with a reasonably usable font creation program called METAFONT, but the so created fonts are only usable in the TeX universe—which may be sufficient for you. I have successfully created fonts with METAFONT, and our partner TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange has a lot of people that are willing to help with METAFONT.


答:
Note that a break down of concepts according to part-of-speech (like verb, noun, adjective, adverb, etc.) does not generalise well over the languages of the world. The amount of verbs—whatever you define them, anyway—can vary to a large degree in natural languages, and adjectives may be completely absent (their role being taken over either by verbs [like the apple reds] or by nouns [the apple's redness]). So asking for a list of verbs already introduces some bias (wanted or unwanted, depending on your design goals) into your conlang design.

It is therefore quite understandable that such lists don't exist.

Title: Swadesh List for Verb Infinitives?


问:
Which IPA phones can be made and understood underwater?
I have a human culture that gradually develops an underwater civilisation. They still require mouth and nose breathing and will be living in air bubbles, retaining traditional phones. They do spend a lot of time swimming around and I want them to be able to communicate through water as well. Modified and new underwater phones will develop over time etc.

What I'm interested in and haven't been able to find an answer to is, of our current available phones, which ones can be made, heard and understood underwater?

let's work off the idea that there is no breathing equipment in the way of these vocalisations. Free diving.

Before I start constructing modified sounds and augmentations etc I would like to know what I can keep of our current soundbank. What do I have to throw out completely. I may ask a later question on constructing/modifying new sounds for underwater languages.

I understand that humans hearing underwater is affected by bone conduction, skipping the first 2 ear bones. We will be able to hear much higher frequencies and from further away, although direction will be hard to discern. I'm still reading up on all of these features but just wanted to say I was aware of these various facts. For the purpose of this question, I'm just focused on using current known sounds underwater.

答:
From reading the answers to the Worldbuilding SE you reference, I would draw the following conclusions:

anything unvoiced goes out of the window. So no /f/, /p/, /k/, /t/, /s/ etc. They are pretty useless, as they are predominantly in the higher frequency ranges (especially the fricatives) or very short and without much energy (which would be provided by the glottis). And higher frequency sounds travel less well in water.

consonants in general are either short (plosives) or prefer higher frequency bands (fricatives), so apart from /r/ and /l/ (and possibly /v/, /z/) would not carry well underwater.

vowels seem best suited. And looking at the frequency characteristics, those with lower formants seem slightly preferable, so /u/ and /o/, and the back /a/: vowels produced at the back of the vocal tract. The fronted vowels (/i/, /e/, frontal /a/) would have a higher frequency component again.

So in summary I would think a vowel-based phoneme inventory might be best. This inventory could be supplemented by some approximants (/l/, /r/, /j/, and /w/). Which is weird, as consonants usually carry most information in natural language!

Compare:

Whch s wrd, s cnsnnts sll crr mst nfrmtn n ntrl lngg!

i i ei, a ooa uuay ay o ioaio i aua auae!


答:
I would recommend using a transliteration into ASCII or something similar which can be more universally used if the correct font is not available. For example, Esperanto uses some uncommon diacritics (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ), which are not always available. As a result people write them by using the letter 'x' which is not used in Esperanto: cx, gx, ux, etc.

Using digraphs or trigraphs you should be able to represent your extra characters; another option would be to append digits, as in a1, a2 for different variants of the letter a.

If your system is unambiguous (like the Esperanto convention), then you can easily convert between it and a proper representation including all the characters.

Note: in German, the umlaut characters are often represented by appending an 'e': ü becomes ue. This is not unambiguous, as there are valid combinations of u followed by e which are not ü; an automatic back-transliteration is not possible. This is something you need to look out for.

Title: I'm constructing a language with some rather hard-to-produce symbols. Computer or paper?

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

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


答:
My inclination would be to simply create a font for my language's writing system, and then use that font in whatever application I'm using to build my dictionary or text corpus. You can then use e.g., Word's autocorrect or an additional program like AutoHotKey to change easy-to-remember/easy-to-type sequences to the specific character from your font - for example, if your writing system has a glyph for the sound represented in English by the digraph ch, you can set up autocorrect or AHK to change ch to whatever your glyph is.

There are many font editors out there; the ones that I would recommend at this point (for Windows; I don't do a lot of language development on other systems) would be FontForge or any of FontLab's font-creation tools (TypeTool, Fontographer, FontLab Studio, or FontLab VI).


答:
A while ago, someone on reddit tried to test this experimentally (using a bathtub). Here’s what they found:

Vowels

Overall, these were the hardest to distinguish (at least personally). The most striking vowels were /æ, i, u/. /a, o, ɑ, ɒ, ɔ/ all seemed to blend together, losing distinction. The same happened to
    close-mid and open-mid center vowels as they too blurred. The front
    close vowels also blurred, as did the back close and close-mid vowels.

Tone definitely helped to distinguish sounds, and you can really play with vowel length. It's eerie to hear your voice carry underwater
    and not dissipate as quickly. You can also factor in uvular trilled
    vowels. With tone these sound very unique.

Consonants

I found it most easy to distinguish /p, t, k/ from their ejective counterparts, but not voiced /b, d, k/. Like the vowels, most of
    the fricatives (labial, dental, and alveolar) blurred together. You
    can distinguish this amorphous group against /ts'/. Retroflex
    fricatives merged with /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. As you farther back the
    consonants begin to get indistinguishable from vowels. The other
    consonants followed suit, at least to my ears. Nasals were all
    identical. Clicks were not possible, unless you want to inhale
    and choke on water.

reddit post

Now of course this isn’t exactly hard science, as it’s all based on the perception and articulatory skill of one person. Still, it provides intersting data.

Title: Which IPA phones can be made and understood underwater?

Body:
I have a human culture that gradually develops an underwater civilisation. They still require mouth and nose breathing and will be living in air bubbles, retaining traditional phones. They do spend a lot of time swimming around and I want them to be able to communicate through water as well. Modified and new underwater phones will develop over time etc.

What I'm interested in and haven't been able to find an answer to is, of our current available phones, which ones can be made, heard and understood underwater?

let's work off the idea that there is no breathing equipment in the way of these vocalisations. Free diving.

Before I start constructing modified sounds and augmentations etc I would like to know what I can keep of our current soundbank. What do I have to throw out completely. I may ask a later question on constructing/modifying new sounds for underwater languages.

I understand that humans hearing underwater is affected by bone conduction, skipping the first 2 ear bones. We will be able to hear much higher frequencies and from further away, although direction will be hard to discern. I'm still reading up on all of these features but just wanted to say I was aware of these various facts. For the purpose of this question, I'm just focused on using current known sounds underwater.


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

答:
No, even among natlangs there are no true universal sounds. The closest would a low /a/ type vowel, which 98%+ of natlangs do have, but not all. Note that this is in terms of phonemes, not allophones. Other very common phones include the stops [p/b], [t/d], and [k/g], as well as one or more nasals.

When creating a conlang, a minimum of two to three vowel phonemes or three consonant phonemes (with more consonants if there are few vowels and vice versa) would be expected for a naturalistic phonology. The natlangs with the smallest phoneme inventories have on the order of around ten to twelve phonemes, however analyses of such languages are usually controversial. Such languages also often have tone or phonemic length, which does make it harder to compare languages and harder to come to consensus on what should count as 'smallest'.


答:
Most if not all phonemes in a language will share something with at least 2 other consonants. For example, if a language has a plosive, then it'll probably have several. Likewise, if it has a voiced plosive, it'll probably have other voiced consonants, possibly of other points of articulation.

Of course, this just the majority of the time. English, for instance has only one palatal consonant (the 'y' sound) and only one lateral (our 'l'). Though few languages have more than one lateral consonant (assuming they have any at all), and 'y' is the only common palatal consonant. All the others are rare.

There, however, a few universals. All languages have voiceless stops. They may only have one (and there are that do), but they will always have one. Also, all languages have monophthongs. So that means that there aren't any natural language out there that only have diphthongs for vowels. Note however, that diphthongs in a language can be made up of monophthongs that don't exist in the language. Take note that the English 'o' sound is actually a diphthong. English doesn't have the monophthong 'o' for some reason. This is why books that teach you foreign languages often tell you cut off the last part of the 'o' sound. What they're actually trying to get you to do is not do the off-glide that our 'o' normally has.

Beyond that though, there are no universals. No one phone is found in all languages. And exactly how many phonemes a language has varies widely. The most common is 5 vowels (the standard 5-vowel array you see everywhere) and 20 to 25 consonants. But there's languages with only half a dozen consonants, and others that have dozens. Then there's the case of Ubykh, which not only has dozens of consonants but only contains 2 vowels, which are of course prone to considerable allophony. In general, its hard to find languages that have fewer than 5 vowels, but they do exist. Several native languages up in Canada only have 4 vowels. The Semitic languages only have 3 vowels (well, modern Arabic also has 2 diphtongs, and its three monophthongs distinguish length, though classical Arabic only had 3 monophthongs, I don't know about Hebrew).

Title: What are sounds that I have to include in my phonology for it to be naturalistic?

Body: Additionally, are there any such things as hierarchies, where if I want to include one sound, I should also include another?</p>


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

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

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

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

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

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

答:
Many languages mark things like those you mention at the beginning of a word. Noun class in Swahili and the other Bantu languages comes to mind. It doesn't require all roots to begin with a vowel; the prefixes also include vowels (as in Kiswahili).

Russian has prepositions (not prefixes) such as в, which are pronounced as part of the onset of the following word (and it does sometimes cause initial consonant clusters), in addition to case. There's no reason why a conlang couldn't have the same as a prefix for gender, case or tense.

You might also want to look at the WALS chapters Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology, Position of Case Affixes, and Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes for lists of languages that have these features as prefixes.


答: The closest in design is John Wilkin's Philosophical language. The words are formed according to a scheme not unlike Dewey Decimal Classification: Every letter of a word adds some more specific information to it. In this scheme, the first letter already carries a lot of information (giving the basic factorisation into classes) and the additional letters add specifics.</p>

Title: Conlang where the initial consonants of words have meaning?

Body:
A lot of languages, both natural and constructed, mark things like part of speech, gender/noun class, tense, and what not with suffixes. But what about prefixes?

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

答:
The obvious comparison to make here is to Japanese, as it's a real-life hybrid script and is currently the only non-Chinese language to use them. However, it's important to consider that Japanese did not have an existing writing system when Chinese characters were brought over, and for quite a while the Japanese elites wrote strictly in Classical/Literary Chinese, even after the evolution of hiragana (which were more often used by women).

Given that you have actual Chinese people in this exiled empire you describe, they will almost certainly be writing in Literary Chinese but speaking some form of vernacular (the specifics of which will depend upon where in China they've come from), so it's possible that Chinese characters will be repurposed to write Nahuatl, particularly if the Chinese become the dominant group in the area. Or it's possible that the opposite will happen, particularly if the Aztecs are the dominant group, and the Chinese will begin to write their language (be it Literary Chinese or their spoken vernacular) using the Aztec script.

The idea of the Chinese script influencing the Aztec script but the opposite not being likely seems to be based on some misplaced ideas about simpler characters being inherently better and more likely to catch on -- which script becomes dominant is more likely to be influenced by the sociopolitics of this situation rather than any inherent qualities of the script. Also be sure to keep in mind that different scripts are better for different writing materials -- will the Chinese be able to continue to produce the kinds of paper, ink, and brushes they're used to in the Americas? These are the sorts of things you need to research, ponder, and decide for yourself.