问:
For a strict SVO language, how do you handle complex sentences?
All of the SVO example sentences I see are very basic, such as this from Mini:

```<code>[subject] i [verb] a [object]
Tu i manja.              You eat.
Man i bibe a vasa.       Someone drinks water.
Bobi i vasa a veji.      Bob waters the plants.
</code>```

However, in English at least, you can have very complicated sentences and I'm not sure how to start going about mapping the number of edge cases, and how the patterns can boil down to this SVO system?

Just off the top of my head:

I keep wanting to start reading that big book after I sit down for lunch in the middle of the park late some days, just before my usual walk where I causally make my way across the forest.

Where is the SVO here? What is the acronym for this sentence? Or sentences that are just as complex or even more complex, or even simpler yet with many verbs and nouns and adjectives scattered about?

This is a sentence that is just as complex or even more complex, and others are even simpler yet with many verbs and nouns and adjectives scattered about if you know what I mean.

The first sentence is like:

I [S] keep [V] wanting [V] to start [V] reading [V] that big book [O] after [...?] I sit down for lunch in the middle of the park late some days, just before my usual walk where I causally make my way across the forest.

I don't see how you say a language is SVO and have complex constructions like this? Are they nested somehow? Are they chained instead? Or some combination? I don't get it.

If my examples break the SVO mold, what is an example of a strict SVO sentence in some language, which involves much more than just "I love apples" type sentences (obviously-SVO)?

To take it slightly more generally, how can I go about deciphering an arbitrary sentence into something like these acronyms? If I say "my language is strictly SVO", what does that mean about all the possible sentences I can construct, how do I figure out all the possible patterns that exist?

答:
The short answer is that "SVO" is shorthand for "the subject comes before the verb and the object comes after". It doesn't mean that every sentence consists of exactly three components.

But for the long answer…

To understand this, you'll need to know the basics of theoretical syntax. The gist of it is that words in spoken language always come in a linear sequence (that's just a universal constant of how spoken language works), but mentally, these word-sequences seem to be processed recursively—more like a tree than a list. Sometimes words that are next to each other can be manipulated as a whole unit, and sometimes they can't:

This box of chocolates may have been opened.

See [this box of chocolates]? It may have been opened.

*See [of chocolates may]? This box it have been opened.

The standard explanation is that "this box of chocolates" is a single unit in the tree (a single node and all its children) and "of chocolates may" is not.

Phrase-based syntax (as opposed to dependency-based syntax) tends to model this behavior with a context-free grammar, which you're probably familiar with from CS. (If not, you'll want to read up on this.) You can imagine "SVO" being an example of a context-free grammar rule:

S → N i V a N

And then the nonterminals N and V handle all the details of noun phrases and verb phrases, with their appropriate modifiers. For example:

[This] i [is] a [a sentence that is just as complex or even more complex]

All the complexity would be handled by the N (noun) nonterminal, which would have a recursive rule that lets you stick a whole clause into a noun phrase, and so on. How do you stick sentences together? Well, there's another recursive rule for that:

S → S Conj S

Conj → and | or

And it turns out this works fairly well. The actual rules used to describe English (or any other natural language) are incredibly complicated compared to this toy example, but quite a lot of English syntax can be modelled this way, with CFG rules.

A slightly more sophisticated version doesn't stick the subject and verb and object all on the same level, because syntactically, verbs and objects seem to be stuck together more tightly than verbs and subjects (read up on "constituency tests" to learn more about this). So you could instead say:

S → N VP

VP → V N

Or if you wanted your language to be SOV:

S → N VP

VP → N V

And now suddenly the grammar produces "this a sentence is" instead.

The full details of phrase structure syntax take at least a semester to properly explain. But if you want to explore this theory further, I recommend Adger's "Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach", which walks the reader through building a model of English and does a good job of justifying a lot of the theoretical assumptions behind that model.


问:
How to tell if having trailing noun/verb/adjective modifiers will work?
I have basically landed on the desire to create a conlang with the following features (for now):

Only one syllable base words, which have the form cvc ccvc or cvcc (consonant and vowel). There are only about 1k-2k possibilities based on my phonology.

All other words are derived from these base words.

I might add cvcvc words, of which there are at least 50k possibilities.

But in essence, words never end in a vowel.

These "base" words symbolize the union of the 3:

Verb: i (action)

Noun: a (object)

Adjective: u (feature)

So to make it into one of these 3 forms, this is what my question is. On one side, looking at Mini lang, adding a leading standalone vowel makes it so it clearly says "what comes next is a noun/verb/adjective phrase". However, I don't really like the sound of it given all my words end in consonants, it sounds too choppy. I much more like the sound of languages like italian or spanish, which mix ending in vowels with ending in consonants. The vowel-ending makes it seemingly more fluid.

So instead of doing it exactly like Mini lang, I was thinking of have a trailing joined vowel, at the last word of the noun/verb/adjective phrase.

So take this English sentence:

I quickly walked with the big gray wolf.

So while in Mini lang, (I think) you would write it sort of like this (I don't know Mini lang, so this just uses the standalon vowel letters and makes up the remaining words according to my patterns):

a mim u kwik i wak u kon dan big a gris wolf.

([object] I [feature] quick [action] walk [feature] with the big [object] gray wolf)

So it's choppy sounding. But prefixing with the standalone vowel makes it clear that what follows fits a certain pattern.

However, change it up and make the vowel joined to the end of the last word in the pattern, and it sounds smoother:

mima kwiku waki kon dan bigu gris wolfa.

But my question is, will this work out? Will it create confusion? I don't know how to reason about this and tell if it would work in the end for an SVO language. What should I learn to figure this out ,or if you know if it will work or not, what is your thinking?

Basically this is a question about the viability of two similar approaches:

Prefixing a phrase with a standalone vowel.

Suffixing the last word of a phrase with a joined vowel.

答:
Putting a marker onto an entire phrase to indicate its role in the sentence is fairly common. We see it in English for example, where we stick 's onto a noun phrase to indicate it's the possessor of something else. In English, we specifically put this marker on a phrase, not a word, unlike in Latin:

The (king of England)'s name

*The king's of England name

The main thing to watch out for is that you can end up with a lot of these markers piling up. In English, we avoid this by always putting the marker after the phrase, and the marked phrase before its head (the thing it's attached to), which means the markers always end up inside the phrase. Sumerian puts the marker after the phrase, but puts the phrase after its head, so the markers end up on the edge of the phrase and can pile up:

mu ensik ŋirsu=ak=ak=še

mu (ensik (ŋirsu=ak )=ak )=še

name (ruler (Girsu=of )=of )=for

"for the name of the ruler of Girsu"

But this isn't necessarily a problem. Sumerian did just fine with these stacks.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
How to decide if you should create complex words, or multiple words?
I am thinking of examples like these (in English and Vietnamese from Google Translate):

creationism: thuyết sáng tạo

create: tạo

creatable

creatively

When do you make it one word, and when do you make it many words? Is it the particular language style (agglutinative vs. isolating, etc.)? What about when you combine those words with other words:

creationist people

It seems to me that "concepts" broadly defined don't always map to one word. Only a few concepts map to one word, and it depends on the language. Concepts can be many words, and somehow by saying when to make it one word vs. many words, we can aid in the memorization process of mapping new concepts to sequences of (fuzzily-defined) "words".

In my conlang, I am thinking (initially) about making it so you can do like English and create a single word for "creationism" by combining:

bam: create

yan: -tion

yog: -ism

And maybe connect them with an -e-, like:

bameyaneyoga

But then why not make "creationism team" one word too:

bameyaneyogetima

In fact, why not make all noun phrases one word? Are there languages like this?

Or the reverse, why not make all noun phrases be composed of separate words/atoms?

bam yan yog tima

Side note: Is there any research outlining the mental toll either approach takes, or the benefits it provides to learning, memorization, or speaking?

I am having a hard time deciding, from a purity standpoint, what would be better for a minimal language, something like English where we have a mixture of separate words and complex-multi-part-words, or something like Vietnamese (or something even more atomic) where everything is composed of individual words (even all just one syllable each).

My question is, what factors should be weighed when making this decision on how to structure more complex concepts?

答:
The difference really comes down to how you define a "word".

You've got a lot of units that you're combining together to convey more elaborate concepts. Are you putting "words" together to make "phrases", or are you putting "morphemes" together to make "words"?

One common definition is that, the separations between words are the boundaries phonological processes can't cross. Under this analysis, French noun phrases are actually just words with some spaces inside them.

Another common definition is that, the separations between words are wherever people write a space. But this depends on the writing system, not on the language itself.

A third is, words are put together by one set of rules (morphology) and phrases are put together by a different set of rules (syntax). But there are definitely commonalities between how these two sets of rules work; how do you decide which group to categorize a certain rule into?

Fundamentally, the definition of a word is "whatever is the most useful for explaining the data". And since you're inventing the data, you can have it be whatever you want it to be.


问:
Why does English have the word "say", "talk", and "tell", on what to create words for in a conlang?
I am going through word lists in a few different languages and am noticing what they make into words. In Hebrew, for example, they have words both for to x and to be x-ed, like "to merge" and "to be merged". So that could in theory double the vocabulary count. Those revolve around the same base concept and could be done by adding the equivalent of be to the base word.

In English, similarly, we have words like "to say", "to talk", and "to tell". I am getting the sense that synonyms (while these may not be synonyms they are close) are basically words which have the same base concept underlying them, but have a different history associated with them which they mentally invoke (like what I said here about "calculus" vs. "logic" vs. "algebra"). That is, they invoke a slightly different set of mental imagery, even if the base concept they are representing is the same.

So "say" to me means "express words", "talk" means "create words", and "tell" means "inform with words". Something like that, that's at least my initial impression.

So my question is, why do languages have words which can easily be expressed by 2 or 3 other words (and then some other languages do have those concepts expressed in 2 or 3 other words)? I'm not really talking about agglutinative languages, but analytic languages or even fusional languages with inflections, but still they have base verbs.

Is it simply because they are so common that distilling it to 1 word was advantageous? Is it just random evolutionary chance? Or is it something central to certain concepts which make it more natural to encapsulate into a single word?

In going through a Hebrew word list, here are some which were 1-word verbs (and sometimes also 1-word verbs in English), which for a conlang I think could be 2 words:

```<code>to strike            fight work
to illuminate        to light up / be lit up
to honk              make horn sound / sound horn
to murder            kill person
to bake              oven cook
to mock              make fun of
to raise             make high
to reduce            make less
to snatch            evil take
to blind             not see
to flatten           make flat
to disfigure
to unpack
to incense           scent stick
to enact             make active
to urinate           drop liquid
to fatten
to enjoy             feel joy
to deport            send away
</code>```

So I'm wondering why languages don't do this, just having the base concepts represented as solo words, and then the derived concepts using multiple words (for the non-agglutinative languages)?

This is not even to address the fact that words only cover a fraction of the "base concepts" that we know about as human beings. By that I mean, there are certain concepts which we isolate as distinct "things" philosophically, which are usually described as multiple words for whatever reason. This is things like "to dry out", "to open a door" (create opportunity), "to tone down", "to cast a spell", "to deal with", "to hop over", "to put away", "to block someone's view", "to get up early (לְהַשְׁכִּים)", "to wake up", "to take a risk", "to slow down", and many things which I can't think of off the top of my head. If there are 100k words roughly speaking in a language, then there are at least 10m "terms" (multi-word concepts) I would say, if not way more.

And also not to even address the fact that in some/many languages, we have words for things which are highly specific (like "samsara" in Sanskrit, meaning "the cycle of birth and death", and a lot of other intricate meaning in there).

But so my question is, why would a language have many different words for roughly the same concept coming at it from a very slightly different angle (say, speak, talk, tell)? Why not just use multiple words? And do languages sometimes do these sorts of things in multiple words? It would just help show, yes, it's arbitrary and you can go either way, or no, there is some rhyme/reason making words for certain things. I can't tell how language works in this sense.

答:
It's a matter of frequency and language contact I would think. Obviously this is speculative, as we can't know how these issues developed.

However, I would guess that the reason is that individual words are more precise and concise. To tell includes aspects that say doesn't cover, for example that it is directed towards another person, and it would be a longer utterance. And speak is different again. If you wanted to express all these nuances using just a basic common word (or morpheme) for 'utter', you'd have to be very long-winded. Just have a look at toki pona, which has exactly one word for all this (toki), and try to express "I told him about my new car", "I said that I was going home", "I speak Spanish". It is possible, but it is not very efficient.

Similarly, an English person goes to France, and sees their various types of bread. Of course you can call them all bread, but that is a very broad term. So you call the long thin one a baguette, and that saves you saying long thin French bread that you eat in the morning because it is stale by lunchtime all the time when you label your Instagram holiday breakfast photos.

It seems that humans can cope more easily with having a multitude of similar yet subtly different terms to express nuances of meaning than with being long-winded with a set of basic words that need to combined to express the same meaning. I guess long sentences are harder to keep track of (see the concept of the seven items in short term memory), so you compress these long-winded descriptions by having a single short-hand word for it.

Of course there are no true synonyms, as that would be wasteful. Words that mean the same differ either in their pragmatic use (eat vs wolf down), or their regional distribution (cob vs roll and a multitude of other terms for small baked goods), or nuances of meaning.

What does that mean for a conlang? I think it makes it more natural if there are near-synonyms. Having just one word per broad concept makes it look very planned and artificial. Unless, of course, you want to achieve that; it'd be easier to deal with for learners (initially) and also machines. Having a more complex vocabulary with multiple words for similar concepts makes the language more sophisticated and natural.


答:
Your question touches two themes in linguistics.

1. Zipf's law

The law states (in some mathematical language) that more frequent words are shorter and less frequent words are longer. A language has a single short word for a concept that is needed frequently. This is culture dependent: In a Christian country, there is a short word church while in a polytheistic country the same concept may be expressed as praying place for Christians or even as praying place for adherents of Christianism. Short words that are rarely used get archaic and forgotten (by playing wordle and quordle I discovered how many 5-letter-words exist in the English language that I never encountered consciously until I saw them there) and are replaced by a circumlocution or a transparent compound word.

2. Style

The many English words for to say are in fact a consequence of an ancient style dictate (in classical terms variatio delectat: variation enjoys the listener/reader). Semitic languages are different is this respect, Arabic goes mainly with only one word for to say and there is nothing wrong with that.

Title: Why does English have the word "say", "talk", and "tell", on what to create words for in a conlang?

Body:
I am going through word lists in a few different languages and am noticing what they make into words. In Hebrew, for example, they have words both for to x and to be x-ed, like "to merge" and "to be merged". So that could in theory double the vocabulary count. Those revolve around the same base concept and could be done by adding the equivalent of be to the base word.

In English, similarly, we have words like "to say", "to talk", and "to tell". I am getting the sense that synonyms (while these may not be synonyms they are close) are basically words which have the same base concept underlying them, but have a different history associated with them which they mentally invoke (like what I said here about "calculus" vs. "logic" vs. "algebra"). That is, they invoke a slightly different set of mental imagery, even if the base concept they are representing is the same.

So "say" to me means "express words", "talk" means "create words", and "tell" means "inform with words". Something like that, that's at least my initial impression.

So my question is, why do languages have words which can easily be expressed by 2 or 3 other words (and then some other languages do have those concepts expressed in 2 or 3 other words)? I'm not really talking about agglutinative languages, but analytic languages or even fusional languages with inflections, but still they have base verbs.

Is it simply because they are so common that distilling it to 1 word was advantageous? Is it just random evolutionary chance? Or is it something central to certain concepts which make it more natural to encapsulate into a single word?

In going through a Hebrew word list, here are some which were 1-word verbs (and sometimes also 1-word verbs in English), which for a conlang I think could be 2 words:

```<code>to strike            fight work
to illuminate        to light up / be lit up
to honk              make horn sound / sound horn
to murder            kill person
to bake              oven cook
to mock              make fun of
to raise             make high
to reduce            make less
to snatch            evil take
to blind             not see
to flatten           make flat
to disfigure
to unpack
to incense           scent stick
to enact             make active
to urinate           drop liquid
to fatten
to enjoy             feel joy
to deport            send away
</code>```

So I'm wondering why languages don't do this, just having the base concepts represented as solo words, and then the derived concepts using multiple words (for the non-agglutinative languages)?

This is not even to address the fact that words only cover a fraction of the "base concepts" that we know about as human beings. By that I mean, there are certain concepts which we isolate as distinct "things" philosophically, which are usually described as multiple words for whatever reason. This is things like "to dry out", "to open a door" (create opportunity), "to tone down", "to cast a spell", "to deal with", "to hop over", "to put away", "to block someone's view", "to get up early (לְהַשְׁכִּים)", "to wake up", "to take a risk", "to slow down", and many things which I can't think of off the top of my head. If there are 100k words roughly speaking in a language, then there are at least 10m "terms" (multi-word concepts) I would say, if not way more.

And also not to even address the fact that in some/many languages, we have words for things which are highly specific (like "samsara" in Sanskrit, meaning "the cycle of birth and death", and a lot of other intricate meaning in there).

But so my question is, why would a language have many different words for roughly the same concept coming at it from a very slightly different angle (say, speak, talk, tell)? Why not just use multiple words? And do languages sometimes do these sorts of things in multiple words? It would just help show, yes, it's arbitrary and you can go either way, or no, there is some rhyme/reason making words for certain things. I can't tell how language works in this sense.


问:
What is the difference between city, county, state, and nation (and others)?
This is kind of along the lines of my last question on why words for "say", "tell", and "talk", etc.. But it is more philosophical, not sure if it's better for the world-building community.

I am working on a conlang for a world, and am wondering if I should include these listed words (city, county, state, country/nation). Zipcode is a clear physical boundary with a number. City, county, state, and nation seem simply like "government boundary" or "administrative boundary". I know Google Places API supports these:

```<code>administrative_area_level_1
administrative_area_level_2
administrative_area_level_3 (also possibly city)
administrative_area_level_4
administrative_area_level_5
administrative_area_level_6
administrative_area_level_7
continent
country
locality (city when supported)
sublocality
sublocality_level_1
sublocality_level_2
sublocality_level_3
sublocality_level_4
sublocality_level_5
</code>```

So to me that tells me these names for these administrative areas are legacy, based on an evolutionary vocabulary talking about the size of the place and how the rules get structured. For a nation, it controls states. A state controls counties, counties control cities. But why did we call them these names? Why not just have "admin level 1" and "admin level 4", etc.? And also, the first civilization (like Sumer) were city-states? Or cities, within an empire? It is so convoluted and confusing.

"Neighborhood" makes sense, because that is what surrounds your house (like mathematical neighborhood). But there are two uses of neighborhood, that mathematical definition, and admin level 5 or whatever boundaries (sub-city casual boundaries).

Must these terms be defined? How can I avoid defining them?

My conlang is an auxlang, but I don't want a 1-to-1 mapping from English/US to the conlang. I would like to "clean up" some of the legacy terms, like this case, if necessary. City seems like an arbitrary boundary which is extremely hard to define. And like Google Maps shows, it doesn't work in all places. So having it be a tree of nested administrative boundaries makes more sense. Do any languages do it like that?

I am thinking for equivalent conlang words:

globe

globe-government-1 (nation)

globe-gov-2 (state in some cases, county or province or city in others)

globe-gov-3 (city, or county or province).

This doesn't make it clear that in China "city" is level 4 or level 5, while in the US it is level 3 or whatever. But I don't think you really need that distinction, do you? Not sure what to make of this complicated situation, how to simplify it.

答:
The simple answer is we have these words because they're useful. People find it easier to talk about state government vs city government, rather than talking about level two government vs level four government. And governments are not all alike! In America, a "state" and a "territory" are both administrative units smaller than a "nation", but the difference between them is very politically important—states get representation in Congress, territories don't. Or, English has borrowed the word "satrapy" to describe a certain level of ancient Persian administration, simply because they functioned differently enough from "states" or "counties" that it's easier to use a different name for them.

The specific words we use exist for historical reasons, such as a "county" being the region governed by a count. But the existence of different words for these different levels is simply something that speakers have found useful. It's often important to be able to distinguish between a state, a territory, a province, and a region, and these words have specific implications (and sometimes specific political meanings) that "hierarchy level 3" does not.


问:
Can you reuse the same word (sound) in multiple unrelated contexts?
Starting to get a word list together for Tune. As described, words can be either one or two syllables, starting and ending with a consonant, and with simple vowels in between. Words are then sometimes suffixed to disambiguate their POS. I am introducing the idea of saying a word to distinguish between a "formal" name, and an arbitrary descriptive phrase. The descriptive phrase is casual, doesn't need the prefix term ("gray wolf"), but a formal name is prefixed with a word like "form" ("Gray Wolf", so "form Gray Wolf").

That word list is coming up on 3000 words, I imagine there will be another 1000 necessary foundational words, which are just super abstract and generic words (mostly conceptual words, as opposed to animal names like "rabbit", though I have a few animal names which I need to probably delete). What I was thinking is, allocate some number of words (say 4000 additional words, so the total is <= 10k, so it would be possible to learn them all), and use those words for proper names. Sort of like how "Brian" and "Paul" (in today's world) don't meaning anything, likewise "foo" and "bar" might be "names" which can be applied to say, the gray wolf. So the gray wolf would just be called "foo", let's say. And a rabbit would be called "bar".

Well what I'm wondering is, what if you reused these names, in unrelated contexts. Like calling an oak tree "foo" as well, and calling a granite rock "foo" as well. Well maybe, "foo rock", "foo tree", and "foo animal". As long as you don't reuse the name in too similar a context/scope, then it seems like this might be fine?

The reason I think it might be fine is, usernames. There are millions of usernames just introduced in the past few years since Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, and a hundred other social media sites came out. Usernames might be a person's name like @jack, or full name like @BarackObama, or might be a thing like @DrumPlayer123 or something random like @asdf123. We can even speak these, same with hashtags, #IsItMeOrIsThatWeird, etc.. There are an unlimited set of possibilities here. You might have @Wolf1 and @Wolf2 and @Wolf17, all in your little group. Basically, words are used out of context for a unique identifier. It's not like we get confused that @Wolf1 might be a wolf.

So likewise, I am thinking we can have arbitrary names applied to the millions of species, molecules, etc., even if that name is used in some base context. But instead of arbitrary symbols, just limiting it to a set of a few thousand words. Maybe these words have a base meaning, maybe they don't.

I think this would work because you can create scopes, and within each scope, have a few thousand things with unique names. Maybe there are 2 or 3 levels for the "formal" names. That is 1000x1000x1000 or a billion possibilities at least. So maybe you'd need 4 levels, the "dark gray wolf animal" essentially, for formal names. You can leave out context if it's apparent, "dark gray wolf", or even "dark gray" when talking about wolves.

Would something like this system work? What are the main pros and cons of this approach? Would it create confusion? Do any natlangs or conlangs do anything like this? It seems English does to some degree with people names, which are used to label mathematical things (Schrodinger's equation, Lie groups, etc.).

答:
The word you are looking for is homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings.

It would work.

Pros include that you get a lot of words, that you could get by with fewer roots, and that you get a lot of room for fun word play. As for the latter, the Japanese are fond of this.

Cons include that it might be a little harder for others to learn, and that you as a creator would need to be careful not to introduce confusion.

Would it create confusion? I suppose it depends on how well you build the language, but in natural languages it isn't too bad. Look at English!

English reuses words, as do all languages I know. And not just for names.

A file could be something you store in a computer or actual papers you store in a filing cabinet. You could use a file to remove rough edges from an object, unless it's a file of soldiers. If you go back to Shakespearean times, the verb file was used in a similar meaning to the modern word defile, which is not the opposite of the verb file.

If you don't fixate on spelling, there are other kinds of _file_s as well, such as Francophiles, pedophiles and others.

It's not hard to imagine a plant and a kind of rock both also called "file", without adding more confusion than there already is.

In my native Swedish, the word fil takes almost all of the meanings above, including the ones that English spell with ph-, and is also the word for a kind of sour milk I like to have for breakfast.

English is even sort of extreme in this context, as many words are used as verbs, nouns and adjectives, in what we looking at it from the outside might perceive as a chaotic manner. You can fish for fish and drink a drink made from an orange orange.

If you haven't seen it, search for a poem that starts "Dearest creature in creation". It's main aim, as I see it, is to ridicule English orthography, but it does a pretty good job at demonstrating the abundance of homophones as well.


问:
What are all the ways you can modify the base "number" concept in a language?
I can think of these examples of numbers, but maybe there are more?

```<code>one,two,three
single,double,triple
first,second,third
primary,secondary,tertiary
,couple,triplet
</code>```

How should I think of these, how do they relate to each other? In my conlang like I have mentioned, I have a base word and then append -i for verbs, -a for nouns, and -u for adjectives/features. Say the base concept of "one" is zen. One sounds like it would be a noun to me, so zena. First is a modifier/feature so it gets the -u, zenu. A single can be like a "single" (single shot at a coffee shop, so a noun or an adjective?) But so now we have let's say 2 adjective forms. Same with primary, so that is 3 adjective forms. So I'm unsure how to fit this into my pattern, and not sure if there is even more I should be aware of.

How do other languages handle these situations? Do they add extra words perhaps (for isolating languages)? If so, what is an example? I feel like I must have to add a particle or modifying word to some of these to make it a differently scoped adjective in the other cases, but it's hard to pinpoint how they are different.

答:
Traditional grammar usually talks about four types: cardinal ("one"), ordinal ("first"), distributive ("one by one"), and adverbial ("once"). These are, not coincidentally, the four types of numbers that are distinguished in Latin morphology: ūnus, prīmus, singulī, and semel respectively. The first three are all adjectives, the fourth is an adverb.

But of course these aren't the only options. Even in Latin you also have the "multiplier" numbers, like simplex "single" and duplex "double", which are traditionally not grouped in with the other numbers. Or you could talk about fractions, like "half" and "third". English has two separate series of ordinals, one from Germanic and one from Latin, with slightly different meanings: "first" versus "primary".

English generally uses different words for each of these classes, but Swahili for example has a much more regular system. Swahili just has one* word for each number, the cardinal: mtoto mtatu "three children". To make the ordinal, you use the associative marker -a: mtoto wa tatu "third child", literally "child of three". For the other constructions where English and Latin have special words, just attach the number to a different noun: mara tatu "thrice", literally "three times"; mara tatu zaidi "triple", literally "three times more"; sehemu ya tatu "one-third", literally "(one) portion of three".

* Well not perfectly regular, because natural languages never are. "First" has a special form, kwanza, derived from the verb "begin"; "two" has a special form, pili, used in counting. But these are the only exceptions I know of.


问:
What similarities does The Black Speech in Tolkien have to Hurrian?
I've just come across this quote from Wikipedia:

Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski claimed a strong similarity to Hurrian, which had recently been partially deciphered at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.

How similar are they, actually? What similarities do they have? Grammatical structure? Vocabulary? Is it even possible to tell, seeing how few examples of the Black Speech we have?

答:
My translation and analysis of A. Nemirovsky's Hurrian hypothesis: http://blackspeech.ru/new/wiki/doku.php?id=hurrian_hypothesis

There's not enough BS to determine much by way of grammar, but Hurrian seems to be extremely agglutinative; BS doesn't appear to be at all.

Black Speech is definitely agglutinative (but to a lesser degree than Hurrian) - all ring inscription analyses agree on that. The quote from Tolkien himself (Parma Eldalamberon journal #17, taken from a letter to Mr. W. R. Matthews, 1964):

The Black Speech was not intentionally modeled on any style, but was meant to be self-consistent, very different from Elvish <...> It was evidently an agglutinative language, and the verbal system must have included pronominal suffixes expressing the object, as well as those indicating the subject...

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


问:
New examples for Black Speech in Rings of Power
In the latest episodes of The Rings of Power, several orcs say something in Black Speech, which is not translated in the subtitles. I had a brief look on the web, but cannot find anything about the meaning of these phrases.

Has anybody come across an analysis of that, and whether/how it fits in with previous attempts at reconstructing Black Speech from known fragments?

答:
My lame attempt at analyzing Black Speech in Amazon's show: http://blackspeech.ru/board/viewtopic.php?id=194
Would be glad, if anyone corrects misheard phrases or suggest other Elvish etymologies.

EDIT: Neo Black Speech for Amazon's show is obviously not based on any previous attempts. But whoever was responsible for it, seems to have an approach similar to Shadowlandian: some words are derived from other languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien. Neo-BS in ROP has a higher degree of agglutination.

Some phrases that have clear meaning:

Nampat! - wasn't translated in English, but official Russian    subtitles and some media articles have a translation: "Death!", but the correct one would probably be "Die!".

Nampak uglursha - in the context probably some equivalent of "Rest    in peace", "nampat" (see above) seems has meaning "die"; other    options include: Gnomish "nam-" (to withdraw, retire); "ak" is probably some grammatical or objective clitic pronoun; "uglur" may be derived from Adunaic "aglar" (glory), however "ugl-" in other Neo-BS dialects means "to frighten, scare"; "-sha" is probably postposition "with", used as preposition in Orc-curse

Izmûmbogh - I smell him! - my guess was "I can feel (him)" < Gnomish "ist-" (feeling, sense), "og-" (can, be able / adjective suffix / agental suffix); Sindarin "im" (I, 1st person singular pronoun)

Kishdibatoth! - Search it! < Quenya "ces(ta)" (to search for,
examine); "ib" - probably some grammatical suffix; "-at" BS infinitive/gerund/participle suffix expressing intention or purpose; "oth" < Sindarin "eth" (any 3rd person pronoun) or "ed" (it), could be also from early Noldorin "os" (around)


答:
The first word of the set to exist was likely some form of city or village, since that was where humans lived permanently. Most cities have pretty clear, if not sharp, unofficial borders. Where they don't, it's often because they've grown together. Note also that cities aren't a subset of any of the above, except in a purely administrative sense; Kansas City is in Kansas and Missouri, Sault Ste. Marie is in the US and Canada, and Baarle is in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Some sort of word for kingdom probably came next. Note that this doesn't map directly to the modern idea of nation, as kings were often the subjects of emperors and thus the kingdom part of an empire. The concept of empire changed between the Roman Era and the Victorian Era, but the resulting entities were both called empires.

In the modern day, nations have started forming unions, like the Commonwealth of Independent States and European Union. Will this congeal into another administrative block? If so, a simple numeric tower doesn't have space for it. One could tag it an empire, but there's strong social reasons they aren't using the word "empire".

I don't know your goals. This would give an auxlang a very "a priori" feel. For a bureaucratic race, I can see them obliviating all previous distinctions. (I would think city would exist, though, since most places aren't tiled into cities; there's still a lot of farms and wilderness out there.) For a real-world language, there's no way it could match reality, which is more complex than even the current vocabulary. Puerto Rico is a territory, not a state (which is a big difference in the US), and a lot of times gets its own entry in lists of nations. Hong Kong is a SAR (special administrative region), not province. Flattening everything is easy but problematic.

Title: What is the difference between city, county, state, and nation (and others)?

Body:
This is kind of along the lines of my last question on why words for "say", "tell", and "talk", etc.. But it is more philosophical, not sure if it's better for the world-building community.

I am working on a conlang for a world, and am wondering if I should include these listed words (city, county, state, country/nation). Zipcode is a clear physical boundary with a number. City, county, state, and nation seem simply like "government boundary" or "administrative boundary". I know Google Places API supports these:

```<code>administrative_area_level_1
administrative_area_level_2
administrative_area_level_3 (also possibly city)
administrative_area_level_4
administrative_area_level_5
administrative_area_level_6
administrative_area_level_7
continent
country
locality (city when supported)
sublocality
sublocality_level_1
sublocality_level_2
sublocality_level_3
sublocality_level_4
sublocality_level_5
</code>```

So to me that tells me these names for these administrative areas are legacy, based on an evolutionary vocabulary talking about the size of the place and how the rules get structured. For a nation, it controls states. A state controls counties, counties control cities. But why did we call them these names? Why not just have "admin level 1" and "admin level 4", etc.? And also, the first civilization (like Sumer) were city-states? Or cities, within an empire? It is so convoluted and confusing.

"Neighborhood" makes sense, because that is what surrounds your house (like mathematical neighborhood). But there are two uses of neighborhood, that mathematical definition, and admin level 5 or whatever boundaries (sub-city casual boundaries).

Must these terms be defined? How can I avoid defining them?

My conlang is an auxlang, but I don't want a 1-to-1 mapping from English/US to the conlang. I would like to "clean up" some of the legacy terms, like this case, if necessary. City seems like an arbitrary boundary which is extremely hard to define. And like Google Maps shows, it doesn't work in all places. So having it be a tree of nested administrative boundaries makes more sense. Do any languages do it like that?

I am thinking for equivalent conlang words:

globe

globe-government-1 (nation)

globe-gov-2 (state in some cases, county or province or city in others)

globe-gov-3 (city, or county or province).

This doesn't make it clear that in China "city" is level 4 or level 5, while in the US it is level 3 or whatever. But I don't think you really need that distinction, do you? Not sure what to make of this complicated situation, how to simplify it.


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

What about the opposite?

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

Could he do it?

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

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

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

答:
The purpose of Newspeak (control) is not achieved by making the language simpler; it is by making it impossible to think certain undesirable things. If the ideology of an invading force is aligned with the ideology of the previous system, then Newspeak would just continue to work fine.

However, if the invaders have an opposing ideology, then the now occupied citizens would presumably not be able to communicate with them at all, as they lack the concepts and means to express the invaders' ideas.

So the complexity of the language is not really related to the issue of control (or non-control), which is achieved by other means.

Title: Anti-Newspeak, making a language harder


问:
How do languages distinguish formal and casual noun phrases?
It turns out that it appears Chinese has about 100 "base" (1-character) words for various foundational animals, and then the rest of the animals are combinations of those bases (or other adjectives):

hippo: river horse

lemur: fox monkey

giraffe: long neck deer

etc.

I am doing similarly for other areas of the lexicon (games/sports, plants, rocks, etc.). So I have stuff like this:

antelope: even-toed ruminant

wren: hole-dweller bird

emu: camel bird

ibis: wading bird

etc.

I am still stuck on the problem of figuring out how to distinguish common noun phrases vs. formal noun phrases. I tried asking how Chinese does it but I still don't get how Chinese distinguishes between the two. Like, how do you say "long neck deer" but not mean "giraffe"? Likewise, how can I say "the wading bird caught a fish" and mean the generic/casual noun phrase "wading bird" which is not the same as the formal noun phrase "wading bird [ibis]".

How do some natural or conlangs handle this? Oh, in Chinese, the name for "gorilla" is "large monkey" and chimpanzee is "black monkey". But gorillas can be black, and chimpanzees can be "large". So how would you say "large monkey" and not mean gorilla, or black monkey and not mean chimpanzee? How does this work?

The only way I can see this working is by doing something like a prefix particle meaning "the noun phrase next is a formal phrase", so "formal large monkey" means gorilla, but "large monkey" is just a large monkey. But that would mean to talk about things like dogs and cats you have to prefix every word with "formal", "the formal curly-haired dog [poodle]" or "the formal hairless cat". I don't think that is ideal, but not sure. So wondering how other languages (natlangs and conlangs) can handle this situation.

How do you use the terms of the formal noun phrase in a casual way?

I'm thinking of doing this:

```<code>smale kalime markat - small black monkey - bonobo (formal)
smal kalim markat   - small black monkey - (generic)
</code>```

Adding the -e to the preceding words so they are like joined in the formal case.

答:
In English, we use stress. Think about how you say "greenhouse" versus "green house", or "redwood" versus "red wood": English doesn't allow two stressed syllables in a row within a lexical unit, but it's just fine if they're in different units.

Also, different syntactic options. A "whale that is blue" is unambiguously about its color, not its species, because "blue whale" (the species) is a fixed phrase that cannot be rearranged.


问:
Why have words for above/below top/bottom but not left/right front/back?
I am working on the directions and spatial stuff in a conlang currently, and wondering why conceptually we have words for the y-axis, but not the x-axis or z-axis?

above/on top of (that one isn't a word for some reason)

below/under

top

bottom

But we don't have words for these:

beyond the right side (like above/below)

beyond the left side

beyond the front side

beyond the back side

on the right side (like top/bottom)

on the left side

on the front side

on the back side

We have right/left/up/down/forward/backward, but for some reason in English at least we don't have simple words for this. Why is that, is there some fundamental reason? Do any languages, conlangs or not, have words for these sorts of things? Wondering what the spectrum looks like.

Top/bottom are like because of gravity pulling everything "down". So you can stack on the top, or put below. But put to the right side of, there's no force of gravity tugging in that direction, so maybe that's why?

答:
We have an absolute frame of reference for up and down (namely which direction gravity pulls), but no absolute frame of reference for left and right. What I consider to be "left" as I type this is almost certainly not the same direction you consider to be "left" as you read it.

We do have words like "behind", using relative directions. Swahili treats "on top of" (juu ya) and "in front of" (mbele ya) the same way it treats "beneath" (chini ya) and "behind" (nyuma ya); Latin has a single word for "in front of" but no single word for "behind". It's really just a historical accident that English has a single word for some of these and needs multiple words for others (we used to have "before" but it's seldom used with that meaning now).

Using relative directions for horizontal things is not universal, though. Some indigenous languages of Australia use absolute directions for everything, with basic words for "north of", "south of", "east of", and "west of" (or equivalent in their coordinate system).


答:
This works mainly through context. That is a bit difficult to give examples for without actual context:

Situation: a (very) large aquarium with whales of different species. If you say "the blue whale eats a lot more krill than the humpback", then it is clear that the "blue" is not an adjective, but part of the phrase "blue whale". If there was a blue whale and a green whale, then it would be different.

Situation: you're in a zoo at the gorilla enclosure. "This large monkey is the alpha male" -- should be obvious if your term for gorilla was "large monkey". If it's not obvious, you could ask "Do you mean large monkey or large monkey?"; but this would only happen infrequently. Otherwise the terms would change over time to be less ambiguous. If you're in front of the chimpanzee enclosure, it would be obvious that large was an adjective (unless agorilla was also there and had taken charge of the tribe).

Situation: your in front of a row of houses. "I like that green house" is obvious, as there's no greenhouse. Even if you say "that green house is full of plants" there is no scope for misunderstanding. If there was a greenhouse visible, that would change, and again if it wasn't obvious (eg if there was also a green house with many plants), you can ask for clarification.

A lot of language use is contextual (which is why isolated sentences are often ambiguous, since they are lacking context), so I wouldn't worry too much about making your own language too precise and unambiguous. Just look at toki pona, which is so vague that you can not really use it without actual context.

If you're using language out of context (eg an encyclopedia article), then you need to define initially what it is you're talking about, thus providing context. "The blue whale is a species of whale that eats krill. Blue whales live in the oceans." -- it is clear that in the second sentence you're not using blue as an adjective. Imagine writing a toki pona Wikipedia article about apples: kili is fruit, so you need to be more specific. kili sike? That's round fruit, which could still be anything. But if you are in an apple orchard, then talking about apples is a lot easier.

Title: How do languages distinguish formal and casual noun phrases?

Body:
It turns out that it appears Chinese has about 100 "base" (1-character) words for various foundational animals, and then the rest of the animals are combinations of those bases (or other adjectives):

hippo: river horse

lemur: fox monkey

giraffe: long neck deer

etc.

I am doing similarly for other areas of the lexicon (games/sports, plants, rocks, etc.). So I have stuff like this:

antelope: even-toed ruminant

wren: hole-dweller bird

emu: camel bird

ibis: wading bird

etc.

I am still stuck on the problem of figuring out how to distinguish common noun phrases vs. formal noun phrases. I tried asking how Chinese does it but I still don't get how Chinese distinguishes between the two. Like, how do you say "long neck deer" but not mean "giraffe"? Likewise, how can I say "the wading bird caught a fish" and mean the generic/casual noun phrase "wading bird" which is not the same as the formal noun phrase "wading bird [ibis]".

How do some natural or conlangs handle this? Oh, in Chinese, the name for "gorilla" is "large monkey" and chimpanzee is "black monkey". But gorillas can be black, and chimpanzees can be "large". So how would you say "large monkey" and not mean gorilla, or black monkey and not mean chimpanzee? How does this work?

The only way I can see this working is by doing something like a prefix particle meaning "the noun phrase next is a formal phrase", so "formal large monkey" means gorilla, but "large monkey" is just a large monkey. But that would mean to talk about things like dogs and cats you have to prefix every word with "formal", "the formal curly-haired dog [poodle]" or "the formal hairless cat". I don't think that is ideal, but not sure. So wondering how other languages (natlangs and conlangs) can handle this situation.

How do you use the terms of the formal noun phrase in a casual way?

I'm thinking of doing this:

```<code>smale kalime markat - small black monkey - bonobo (formal)
smal kalim markat   - small black monkey - (generic)
</code>```

Adding the -e to the preceding words so they are like joined in the formal case.


问:
What is a constructed variety of a natural language called?
What would a conlang created to be an alternate version of an already existing natural language be classified as?

For example, a version of English that could have been spoken in an alternate steampunk-era Victorian England, or a conlang of the Finnish language in the year 2349. To be clear, I'm assuming that the conlang would be an actual, dedicated one, and not just a few "alternate" words thrown in for flavor; the examples I picked were just the first ones that came to mind.

(Bonus: is there a classification for a conlang created to be a conlang of a conlang in this same way?)

答:
That would be an a posteriori conlang, in contrast with an a priori one. Wikipedia. The process of changing a language through time is called diachronic conlanging.

An example of a very well-done a posteriori conlang would be Carisitt which has been developed as if it was a natural language deriving from PIE (that is, it is also an example of diachronic conlanging). Examples of an a priori conlang are abundant, for instance all of Tolkien’s works.


答:
In addition to what @Draconis say, many of the compound names don't make sense grammatically unless they are read as a unit. A river horse could not be interpreted as "a horse that is river", it wouldn't make any sense. You could get an ambiguity if you referred to one as a horse of the river, but riverhorses are safe to talk about.

These sort of compounds are common in other Germanic languages as well, and are generally distinguished by stress. In Germanic languages outside English, we typically indicate this altered stress in writing to a much larger degree. In Swedish, the word 'flod', meaning river and the word 'häst', meaning horse, nicely combine to 'flodhäst', which is what we call hippos.

This is sort of similar to your suggestion of a special form of adjectives used only in formal phrases! If you don't want a special verb form, which might feel a bit contrived, you could instead use different constructions, just as we do when we combine two nouns. Maybe adjectives normally come before the noun, but are placed after it in case of formal phrases?

The special forms for adjectives are interesting though!


问:
How to structure verb phrases (as opposed to noun phrases)?
In my question about formal vs. casual noun phrases, I got to the point of distinguishing between causal and formal nouns.

Notice that the noun phrases all end with -a, the noun-creator affix. That is because in English at least, to my understanding, noun phrases have the form:

```<code>[preceding stuff] [trailing noun]
</code>```

So we can get by with always appending -a to the last word, making the whole thing a noun phrase.

But I'm not sure it works the same with "verb phrases" in English.

```<code>grow up
wake up
burn bridge
raise a glass
make a toast
...
</code>```

I can only think of 2-word examples, but in these examples, the verb is first, not last. These are what I would call "formal" verb phrases, because they are basically standardized idioms or something like that. They go together. But you can extend the verb with modifiers/adverbs, like:

```<code>eventually quickly wake up
[preceding casual modifiers] [verb] [following formal modifiers]
</code>```

Do I have this correct?

Are there languages which are more strict and make it so all "verb phrases" and noun phrases have the same general form?

```<code>[preceding formal modifiers] [verb/noun]
</code>```

If that would be the case, then I would say (in the conlang), something like:

```<code>When I was young I wanted to up grow
I just up wake
Please don't bridge burn
</code>```

That would greatly simplify the system, because you could join words in a formal chain with a simple suffix on each preceding word, like -o or -e in the image above, and then the final word in the verb phrase would end in -i. But if I have to allow for putting things on either side, then I might need to have prefixes in addition to suffixes, and it might get more complex. So looking for inspiration how other languages have handled this.

答:
Verbs like "wake up" and "turn on" are known as phrasal verbs in English, and they have some very interesting syntactic properties. For example, "turn on" (phrasal, meaning "betray") acts differently from "turn on" (not phrasal, meaning "activate"): "she turned on him" versus "she turned him on".

For the most part, these are a peculiarity of English syntax. German has its own version, known as the separable prefix verbs, since a piece of them sometimes detaches and moves to the end of the sentence (aufgehen "to get up" → ich gehe auf "I get up").

But most other Indo-European languages just represent them by adding a morpheme to the verb, like Latin gradior "walk", ingredior "go in", ēgredior "go out", transgredior "go across", regredior "go back", dīgredior "go away", and so on. Pretty much any English word ending in -gress was formed this way: ingress, egress, transgress, regress, digress, etc.

Another option, more common in East Asia, is known as serial verbs. You put multiple verbs together in a row to form a more complex meaning. Here's an example from Maonan (taken from Wikipedia which cites Lu Tian Qiao 2008):

ɦe2 sə:ŋ3 lət8 pa:i1 dzau4 van6 ma1 ɕa5 vɛ4 kau5 fin1 kam5

I want walk go take return come try do look accomplish ?

Very literally, "I want to walk, go, take, return, come, try, do, look, and accomplish. Okay?" More idiomatically, "Could I walk over, bring it back, and try it out?" Those more elaborate verbs are formed from several simpler verbs strung together without any nouns or other elements in between.

Phrases like "make a toast" are just idioms, and they act like any other verb and object in English. You can "make a quick toast" or "make another toast", for example. There's nothing special about them syntactically.


问:
Technique to use lots of homonyms and not make things confusing in a conlang?
I just learned today really how prevalent homophones are in Chinese, some of which are listed here. I asked a similar question about how to say Chinese sentences using all the variations of meaning of a homophone here.

We dried the sweet smelling anhydride into a liver powder.

It would be like:

We gān the gān smelling gān into a gān powder.

Now I'm curious. If there are only 400-something Chinese syllables, times 4 tones, so about 1600 possible 1-syllable words. Yet there are at least 10k characters in use, meaning roughly 5 meanings are possible per phonetic syllable. I am not sure I am doing calculations right, but that is at least true for gān from my other post, which has at least 5 unrelated meanings.

My question is, how far can you take this? What other languages have such a high degree of reuse of phonetic words? Natural or constructed languages. English has some, but IMO to a much lesser extent (I know of a handful of words with 2 distinct meanings, like "bear" the animal vs. "to carry", but 99% of words have 1 general meaning, as opposed to Chinese which has way way more homophones). How do you not create confusion when devising a system like this?

English avoids confusion when using the multiple meanings of a single homophone by the use of affixes, as in:

The bear beared the bear bearing bears.

But if there were 5 unrelated meanings of the word "bear", then I don't see how it could not create confusion.

I have ported 4,000 words to the conlang I'm working on so far, but they are all highly generic words, plus animal names (so far). In Chinese, they have about 100 1-character animal names, then the rest of the animals are derived from these 100 combining them together or with adjectives (hippo = river horse, panda = cat bear, etc.). But now I am thinking of how to port things from these categories, each which have thousands if not way more "types" of things:

body parts (tongue, bones, muscles), diseases (malaria), rocks (emerald), occupations (ballet), material (cotton), food (vegetable, bread, etc.), building type, land forms, flowers, trees, fish, molecules, etc..

I was also looking at the Organic Chemistry nomenclature in Chinese, which has seemingly random and meaningless names for various organic compounds, with barely any phonetic resemblance. In essence, they are just reusing existing sounds/homophones, adding one more meaning to the sound/word. If I could do this, and do it well, then I could basically pick a word like "wolf" and call a specific animal a "wolf", a molecule a "wolf molecule", and a building a "wolf building", basically creating new unrelated meanings for the same underlying word, and theoretically there would be no confusion. But this is a very foreign concept to me, so (a) I'm not sure it would even work out in the end, or (b) how confusing it could be come, and (c) how to proactively avoid creating confusing scenarios.

How did Chinese not make things confusing when creating these homophones? Coming from a programming/software background, the only way I could see this reliably being done is to have millions of sentences in a database, and every time you add a new homophone, you would check if it would create confusion against the millions of sentences. Even that wouldn't be enough, you would have to try and construct sentences from each homophone to make sure no confusion would take place. But that seems like an insurmountable challenge, so curious how a natural language like Chinese has accomplished this. And also curious if there are other constructed languages that have created a high degree of homophones like this. But more generally, wondering how I could take advantage of this sort of high-homophone-density system in the conlang I'm working on.

答:
Coming from a programming/software background, the only way I could see this reliably being done is to have millions of sentences in a database, and every time you add a new homophone, you would check if it would create confusion against the millions of sentences.

That's basically how it works. Remember that the purpose of every natural language is to communicate, and every natural language is under enormous evolutionary pressure to fulfill this purpose.

Suppose I want to bring a new word into English; perhaps I want to talk about the purviews of ancient Sumerian deities, so I borrow the Sumerian word me. It turns out that the purviews of ancient Sumerian deities are very cool and come up in conversation all the time, and soon everyone in my social circle wants to talk about them.

Will the borrowed word me catch on, or will the homophone with "may" (or the homograph with "me") be too confusing? Well, speakers will find out pretty quickly. If it's causing problems and impeding communication, they'll switch to "purview" or "domain" or borrow another word like partzum that's less ambiguous. After all, their goal is to convey some particular meaning, and they'll choose their words to achieve this goal. If a word doesn't help with this purpose, it won't be used.

We see this happen all the time in language evolution. If a word is too ambiguous to be useful, it will be replaced. In most varieties of Occitan, the word for "rooster" is a descendant of Latin gallum—except in Gascony, where it's been replaced by a word for "vicar". Why? Because sound changes in Gascon caused the descendant of gallum "rooster" to sound the same as the descendant of cattum "cat" (compare castellum > Gascon castet). This ambiguity was apparently unacceptable to the Gascon farmers, who started calling their roosters "vicars" instead; the context makes it clear enough if you're talking about a farm animal or a priest, so this homophone wasn't an issue.


问:
Are there examples of languages where prepositions are treated as nouns/verbs/adjectives instead?
I am struggling figuring out how to consider "function" words (like particles or prepositions) in a conlang. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives have been relatively straightforward but not these function words. Here are 70 prepositions from English:

aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, anti, around, as, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, concerning, considering, despite, down, during, except, excepting, excluding, following, for, from, in, inside, into, like, minus, near, of, off, on, onto, opposite, outside, over, past, per, plus, regarding, round, save, since, than, through, to, toward, towards, under, underneath, unlike, until, up, upon, versus, via, with, within, without

Some are movement/location/position based, some are containment, etc..

Are there any languages which lack treating these kinds of words like this, and instead treat them as nouns, verbs, or adjectives/adverbs ("features"/modifiers)? If not, why not? If so, what are some examples?

答:
Swahili has very few actual prepositions; in most cases where English would use a preposition, Swahili uses a noun.

Paka iko ndani ya sanduku.

cat located inside of box

The cat is in the box.

Paka iko juu ya meza.

cat located top of table

The cat is on the table.

Nitakwenda nyumbani baada ya kesho.

I-FUT-go home-LOC after of tomorrow

I'll go home after tomorrow.

These "prepositions", ndani, juu, baada, are syntactically just class-9 nouns meaning "the inside", "the top", and "the time after"; as nouns, they can be joined to other nouns with -a "of". Swahili really likes its nouns and uses them in many cases where English would want a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, etc.

Notably, the main reason English has so many prepositions is because they used to be an open class. All the ones starting with "be-", for example, are derived from nouns.


问:
How to turn "with", "and", "together", and related words/constructs into verbs or nouns?
I am trying to have every word have a corresponding noun and verb, to see if it's possible. Currently I am focusing on prepositions, which need some massaging for the conlang I'm working on, as I don't want a direct clone of English haha.

I'm currently wondering about the words like "with", "and", and "together". I would make them into the same verb like "join", and after thinking about it, I'm not sure how these words are really different! You say stuff like "red together with blue", but I don't get how to describe/delineate the true underlying meaning of these 3 or 4 (+join) words.

How could these 3 words (and potentially others) be nounified and/or verbified, and how would they at the same time retain their unique features (if there are any)?

答:
If you have a strategy for generally verbing nouns, then I recommend using it on prepositions' noun meanings. One such strategy might be making the (transitive) verb of a noun mean "to [the noun in question]-ify x."

Regarding noun meanings, those are usually simple enough. For example, the word for "with" might mean "thing that is used, tool", or "usage, use". The word of "like" might mean "similarity". The word for "and" (which is approximately equivalent in meaning to "together with") might mean "togetherness, withness".


问:
How can my conlang say "hot/cold" without ambiguity?
I'm creating a conlang for worldbuilding, and I'm building vocabulary for basic physical adjectives such as "long/short", "heavy/light", and "hot/cold". The major speakers of this conlang are angels, whose "duties" are to teach people science. As such, I imagined this conlang would have no chance of miscommunication. I thought one way of achieving it would be to let the said vocabulary very literal to the human perceptions. Here's the sketch:

Length:

Though one might think the human vision can measure distance between objects well, it actually doesn't measure that; it actually measures the angular distance between them, and angular distance is a dimensionless quantity.

Fortunately, there is an unexpected feature of human vision that measures the actual length of something; it is the wavelength of the perceived light, which is expressed as the hue of a color.

And thus I decided to say "long in length" as re (from "red"), and say "short in length" as wi (from "violet").

Time:

Though humans can perceive the flow of time, humans don't have a direct sense to measure the length of a duration. Yet there is an unexpected sense that has something to do with time. Our hearing can perceive the pitch of a sound, which is physically the frequency – the reciprocal of the duration of a cycle.

And thus I decided to say "high in frequency" as hi, and say "low in frequency" as lo. Of course, these refers to frequency and not to time. To refer to time, or to flip the dimension of a quantity in general, replace the positive vowels to negative; lô for "long in duration" and hî for "short in duration".

Mass:

Okay... This is where things get exotic. There is absolutely no perception measuring mass; this fact can be seen by going to the outer space, where there is no g-force to create weight.

Yet there is a physical quantity involving mass that we can perceive by some means. It is pressure, which we perceive by the pressure of the atmosphere, subtracted by the inner pressure of our body.

And thus I decided to say "high in pressure" as mo (from "atmosphere") and "low in pressure" as wa (from "vacuum").

So how I say "heavy in mass" and "light in mass"? Since the physical dimensions – length, frequency, and pressure – form a basis, I can combine the words created so far to indicate multiplicative combination of dimensions, like this:

rehi "fast" / wilo "slow"

rehihi "high in acceleration" / wilolo "low in acceleration"

rere "wide in area" / wiwi "narrow in area"

rerere "big in volume" / wiwiwi "small in volume"

reremo "strong in force" / wiwiwa "weak in force"

rereremo "high in energy" / wiwiwiwa "low in energy"

rererehimo "strong in power" / wiwiwilowa "weak in power"

remolôlô "heavy in mass" / wiwahîhî "light in mass"

mowîwîlôlô "dense" / warêrêhîhî "sparse"

Temperature/Electric current:

And this is where I have a problem. As for temperature, our sense of heat doesn't actually measure temperature. It actually measures the transferred heat per time, which is power.

Electric current is even more troublesome. Does anyone know what sense we use when electric current passes through one's body? The sense of pain maybe?

I supposed that, I should employ some other physical quantities to refer to them. For instance, if I meant ra (from "ignorance") for "high in entropy" and said no (from "knowledge") for "low in entropy", "hot in temperature" would be rereremonô and "cold in temperature" would be wiwiwiwarâ. What would be the best options?

答: Well, you should not confuse entropy and temperature, they are different physical concepts. Temperature is, like pressure, an intensive property that is independent on the size of the system. Entropy, on the other hand, is an extensive property like volume that doubles when you double the size of the system. So when your conlang is aware of those physical concepts, it should have different terms for both of them.


问:
sama pi or sama e?
I would like to say something like

These are the same as my house.

I'm not sure if this should be:

ni li sama e tomo mi.

or

ni li sama pi tomo mi.

My understanding is that you only use e for verbs acting on an object, and don't otherwise. sama does not seem like a verb that is acting on tomo mi. But I'm more used to this with ken and wile.  For example

mi ken kepeken e ilo tu.

mi wile moku.

I'm not sure if it is natural to use it with sama especially when I would need pi to indicate that mi modifies tomo not sama.

What would be the "correct" option here?

答:
I would use

ni li sama tomo mi

Technically, according to Toki Pona: The Language of Good, sama is an adjective. So the overall structure of the sentence would be NOUN + li + ADJECTIVE (p.20). The adjective in this case would have a complement tomo mi, to be "like my house"

As you correctly say, e is only used with verbs, and pi only connects noun phrases, so perhaps sama pi tomo mi could be interpreted as a literal translation of "the likeness of my house", but it would be rather weird (and probably ungrammatical)

Title: sama pi or sama e?


答:
You could also phrase it as "ni li tomo sama tawa tomo mi", kind of like "these are the same house from the perspective of (/ compared to) my house".

I feel like I should mention too that toki pona doesn't really have a true correct or wrong way to say things. If I remember correctly (don't have my ku with me right now), Sonja herself said that any toki pona that makes sense to the speaker is correct toki pona. Think about which phrasing best reflects how you intuitively think about what you're describing, and pick that one.

Title: sama pi or sama e?

Body:
I would like to say something like

These are the same as my house.

I'm not sure if this should be:

ni li sama e tomo mi.

or

ni li sama pi tomo mi.

My understanding is that you only use e for verbs acting on an object, and don't otherwise. sama does not seem like a verb that is acting on tomo mi. But I'm more used to this with ken and wile.  For example

mi ken kepeken e ilo tu.

mi wile moku.

I'm not sure if it is natural to use it with sama especially when I would need pi to indicate that mi modifies tomo not sama.

What would be the "correct" option here?


答:
toki a!
mi jan Kasikusa

sina sona ala sona e ni: sama is also a preposition, at least in common use. You can use it as such. It thus might be said, as a translation of the English phrase "These are the same as my house",  "tomo ni li sama tomo mi".

Title: sama pi or sama e?


答:
I don't think that there is a definitive conceptual scheme for ensuring that prepositions all have cognate nouns and verbs.  Your way would work fine, but you should bear in mind that there are other schemes as well.  For example:

Root #1:

P = with (comitative)

Adv = together

Conj. = and

N = companion (widest definition)

V = accompany

Root #2:

P = with (instrumental)
Adj = useful, handy
Adv = usefully, handily
N = use /jus/
V = use /juz/

Root #3:

P = meaning "joined.to"
Adj. = joined, conjoined
N = juncture
V = join

Title: How to turn "with", "and", "together", and related words/constructs into verbs or nouns?

Body:
I am trying to have every word have a corresponding noun and verb, to see if it's possible. Currently I am focusing on prepositions, which need some massaging for the conlang I'm working on, as I don't want a direct clone of English haha.

I'm currently wondering about the words like "with", "and", and "together". I would make them into the same verb like "join", and after thinking about it, I'm not sure how these words are really different! You say stuff like "red together with blue", but I don't get how to describe/delineate the true underlying meaning of these 3 or 4 (+join) words.

How could these 3 words (and potentially others) be nounified and/or verbified, and how would they at the same time retain their unique features (if there are any)?


问:
Ways of having the equivalent of -ed (past participle) or -ing (present participle/gerund) in conlang?
You can turn verbs/nouns into adjectives using participles like this:

The big-eyed monkey.

The jumping spider.

The loved rabbit.

However, I don't think these structures exist in Chinese, for example, so I would imagine they would just be said sort of like this:

The big-eye monkey.

The jump spider.

The love rabbit.

It doesn't quite get across the same meaning though. So how would a language outside of English say these sorts of things? Do they have their own participle/gerund forms, or do they just leave them off, or do something else? Wondering if you need to be this specific or can just leave them off.

答:
Every language has ways of turning one category of word into another. For turning verbs into adjectives, for example, English has very regular active participles (-ing), slightly less regular passive participles (-ed), and some much less regular derivational processes (-able).

Other languages do it differently. Ancient Greek loves its participles and can express all sorts of things like "belonging to the people who have finished ___ing for themselves" in a single word. Swahili on the other hand doesn't really do participles at all; instead it uses relative clauses, turning an entire clause into a modifier ("a living person" → "a person who lives").

English often lets you turn one category into another without any special marker, because our syntax is very strict and that generally shows what category you mean ("you can verb any word"). Languages with less strict syntax generally don't allow this because it gets confusing. As a rule of thumb, strict syntax correlates with simpler morphology, and lenient syntax correlates with more complex morphology.


问:
How to tell what feels good in terms of sentence structure (like we do in English)?
I am basically finished with the first draft of the conlang, having figured out how to handle nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, gerunds, participles, particles, and other features from English and Chinese and a few others. Mostly stuck with what feels to be SVO structure, but generics are stacked before the main specific noun/verb, so instead of "crea-tion", it is more like "result create". But similarly it follows "big tree" (generic first).

However, now I'm wondering how to make the language "feel good", like poetry. How does that even work?! Not how to make complex Shakespeare-like sentences, but how to just do regular sentences and make sure they don't feel "clunky" or, like in English, ungrammatical. What does that even mean to "feel ungrammatical". Is it a statistics-based thing, where we get a bunch of sentence templates in our brains, and if it doesn't fit the template it feels "out of place"? I wonder how languages with highly flexible word orders work then, like Latin (I guess). It seems people say even those languages have "preferred" word orders, so maybe it is also a statistical thing as to what feels good.

Is there any research on this topic? I am wondering what the next steps to take are to make sure things "sound good" (I know that is subjective, but at the same time, it's kind of not, many in English agree that certain phrases "feel weird"). After browsing through examples in a variety of languages from around the world, it appears that things can be said in almost any way imaginable, with word orders covering every permutation pretty much, some with more detail, some with less, etc.. So I'm not sure how to tell if it feels good.

How does it even work in natural languages? Does it just take a lot of speaking and refining it so we create statistical patterns basically? How much work would it take for a conlang to have that natural feel?

答:
This is the field called "syntax": the study of how words are put together into sentences. The simplest explanation would be that every language has rules for this, but what those rules are, and how flexible the results are, varies from language to language.

If you're interested in the theory, I recommend Adger's Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach, which you can find online. There are a lot of different theories of syntax out there, but I've found Adger's explanation of his version of minimalism compelling and also understandable.


问:
Can a conlang be used for machine-machine communication?
On Wikipedia page we can read that constructed language is devised for human or human-like communication. Given the fact, that there are already some constructed language examples for human-computer communication such as Lojban, can constructed language be created by humans for machine-machine communication? Or it won't be a constructed language anymore?

One example could include a Droidspeak code (the fictional language spoken by droids).

答:
Yes, but why?

Constructed languages would be better for machine communication than natural languages because languages evolve based on how people use them but machines have some difficulties learning how to interpret those changes. With a fully constructed language, the machine can understand exactly what things mean because all of the rules and details are well document and not allowed to change through natural processes.

However, machines already communicate by sending data in specified formats; why would using a constructed language be beneficial in any way?


问:
How to get rid of "for" and "of" when making a conlang coming from English, aiming toward Chinese?
I have learned about serial verb constructions, and I am looking into Leonard Talmy and his theories of translating between and among Chinese/English. I have seen a few examples where "for" is used in the English, but obviously nothing (even close) to it is in Chinese, it's completely different. I haven't yet been able to wrap my head around how to get rid of the idea of "for", as in "I will wait for you", or "I want it for my friends", or "the main thing is for you", "let those eyes droop down for just a little longer", etc.. amongst a million other more complex examples.

How does Chinese do away with "for"? What patterns can I go by? I can see how "to" is made into the verb "arrive", so there is a 1<>1 mapping between English/Chinese in that small aspect. And "up" is "ascend" and "down" is "descend", etc.. But what about "for"? How can I get rid of "for" when creating my conlang so it doesn't feel like it's a direct port of English?

Same with "of", I can't find a verb for that one, or an equivalent construct in Chinese. So not sure what to do when essentially translating to Chinese. (Which will help when building the conlang, to give it a flavor of Chinese).

The only example I've found of "for" so far is in The Linguistic Encoding of Motion Events in Chinese:

But it is not enough to go off of.

答:
If you don't want your conlang to be a reskin of English, I recommend not trying to find "the Chinese equivalent of this English word". Words don't match up one to one between languages. Instead, think about the actual meaning behind each English phrase, and other ways to convey that meaning: not the words but the meaning they're being used to transmit.

"To", for example, means a dozen different things in English. Some of those are translated with a verb meaning "arrive" in Chinese. Most aren't. Translation isn't as simple as just find-and-replacing each word with its direct equivalent. The "to" in "to like" means something entirely different from the "to" in "to the store" and it's a historical accident that English uses the same word for them.

"For", similarly, can convey a lot of different things. In the sentence at the end of your question, it indicates that what follows is the duration of the event (rather than, say, how long it took before the event happened). Latin conveys that by putting the time in the accusative case for a duration and the ablative case for the span during which it happened. Some of your other examples use "for" to indicate the beneficiary of the action. Latin indicates this with the dative case, while Lingála adds an applicative (a modifier that adds an extra argument to a verb).

Other examples in your question use "for" to indicate the the recipient of something being transferred (also the dative in Latin, the word's position in the sentence in Lingála) or to change a one-argument verb into a two-argument verb (Latin uses prefixes or switches words entirely; Lingála would use another applicative). Since they mean fundamentally different things, it's really just a coincidence that English uses the same word for all of them. Other languages generally do not.


问:
What languages prefer the shortest sentences?
I read somewhere that Chinese prefers short sentences while English prefers longer ones. I don't have great examples of this, yet.

This is particularly problematic in legal texts where an English sentence can be hundreds of words or a long paragraph, making it tricky to translate into Chinese (somehow). I am listening to the Tao Te Ching, which appears to be composed of very short sentences, yet offers great insight.

What languages prefer the shortest sentences, and compose meaning out of extremely short sentences?

What languages prefer short sentences. And which compose meaning out of extremely short sentences?

(I tried to make it into short sentences, but it feels awkward with that conjunction in English beginning the second sentence.)

I tried to make it into a short sentence. But it feels awkward. With that conjunction in English. The conjunction which begins the second sentence.

Wondering how short you can get and still be expressive.

Wondering how short you can get. And still be expressive.

What languages (natural or conlang) use short sentences mostly? What are the general patterns for it or where to look for more info?

I would like to learn how to write in English with short sentences, like the Tao Te Ching. Or even in the conlang I'm working on. To have short sentences everywhere. But not quite sure how that would look/feel/work.

In English it feels like a mixture of short and long sentences is the most poetic and expressive and beautiful sounding, but I'm guessing that's probably just a quirk of English somehow. So curious what the possibilities are for expressive, beautiful statements, rich with meaning, yet concise and to the point.

From the Tao Te Ching:

```<code>Once upon a time, those who knew the Way, were a mysterious and subtle people.
Transient yet profound.
Tranquil yet utterly unfathomable.
Since they are inexplicable, I can only tell what they seem like:
Cautious, as if wading through a winter river.
Wary, as if afraid of their own neighbors.
Grave, like the courteous house guests.
Elusive, as of melting ice.
Pure and natural, as of unchiseled gems.
Wide and open, as of a deep valley.
Yet mysterious, oh yes, they were like troubled water.
Who can remain tranquil amidst troubled airs, that calmness may flow from within?
Who may remain at peace eternal, that motion would yield birth to nature?
For those who follow the Way, fulfillment has never been their aim.
Only as they are forever unfulfilled, can such freshness be ever renewed.
</code>```

Is it some sort of poeticness that is happening here, or can any language have shorter sentences like these and have it be the norm?

答:
This question is really difficult to answer, because sentence length is a tricky beast. We usually measure it in words or tokens (which is words + punctuation marks). There are languages that can put much information in one word, like Greenlandic, a polysynthetic language. Such languages have short sentences in this measure.

The second problem is that sentence length is dependent on factors like genre, the existence of prescriptive style guides and personal preference of the author or speaker. Some prefer extremely long sentences, others prefer to produce aphorisms and proverb-like statements.

So I'm afraid there is no general answer, but my bet for a language with short sentences (measured on some carefully translated common text, to eliminate genre/preference as good as possible) is a polysynthetic one like Greenlandic.

P.S. Although average sentence length on a multilingual corpus seems to be a low hanging fruit, I did not find any papers on that in a very quick and dirty search.


问:
Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?
I am a native English speaker that wanted to make a conlang.... recipe for disaster, I know.
My language has Nominative, Accusative, Dative and Genitive. I was having difficulty internalizing how to use the Dative case and went looking for guides to help familiarize myself with it.
I found that languages differ in exactly how they use it and what can count as a Dative. I had previously tried to translate the phrase "the son of god is given," and realized that I didn't know weather "god" should be in the dative or not. The language treats "of god" in this case as an adjective. Since it's a noun shouldn't it have nominative marking, which is the "default" or should/could anything that's not nominative or accusative get shoehorned into dative marking?

So in summery:
-Does anyone have recommendations for resources that provide a better perspective on what datives can be like in different languages?

-What do languages tend to do when a word doesn't fit into any of their cases-- what does it default to?

-What if anything should inform my decision on how the dative is used?

答:
Ask a Native Speaker

Seriously.

You can look in grammars and check out WALS and CALS, but really I'd suggest introspection. Let your inner native speaking guide show you how her language works.

For example, you've told us that "of God" (and presumably other similar phrases like "of wood" and "of England") is 'treated as an adjective'. What this tells me is that, leaving aside theological considerations and matters of scriptural exegesis & translation, properties like origin and constitution  the like can't be nominal.

So, "of England" is always going to be "English"; "of wood" is always going to be "wooden". I'd suspect that "of God" is thus always going to be "divine" or "godly".

As you talk with her about her language, your understanding of how it works will improve.

This is but one way to create a language. There are other ways, too.


答:
The dative is indeed a very diverse case, reading some teaching grammars of languages with a dative (e.g., Latin, Classical Greek, and German) or a preposition close to the dative case (Italian and French) can inform you about possible usages of the Dative.

An interesting thing are dative external possessors (as Haspelmath calls it), one of the common features of the Standard Average European sprachbund, see this question on Esperanto here and this question on esperanto.se, but absent from English.

For your question: God could be an external possessor in the sentence A son was given but this would not mean the same as in Christian theology where mankind is the external possessor of the Son of God.

At the end of the day, it is your conlang, and the dative will mean what you want it to mean. Test what sounds right to you.

Title: Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?

Body:
I am a native English speaker that wanted to make a conlang.... recipe for disaster, I know.
My language has Nominative, Accusative, Dative and Genitive. I was having difficulty internalizing how to use the Dative case and went looking for guides to help familiarize myself with it.
I found that languages differ in exactly how they use it and what can count as a Dative. I had previously tried to translate the phrase "the son of god is given," and realized that I didn't know weather "god" should be in the dative or not. The language treats "of god" in this case as an adjective. Since it's a noun shouldn't it have nominative marking, which is the "default" or should/could anything that's not nominative or accusative get shoehorned into dative marking?

So in summery:
-Does anyone have recommendations for resources that provide a better perspective on what datives can be like in different languages?

-What do languages tend to do when a word doesn't fit into any of their cases-- what does it default to?

-What if anything should inform my decision on how the dative is used?


问:
Do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?
In order for me to ask a higher quality question, I need to know, do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?</p>

答:
Yes and no.  Every language spoken by humans has its own way of dividing the universe of possible speech-sounds into a few dozen phonemes, and its own restrictions on how phonemes can go together to make syllables and words (phonotactics).

If the language is written, there must be a way of mapping phonemes (or syllables) to characters.

But you're not required to make any of these different from those of all other languages!

You're not required to define the phonology first; likely it will not settle down until you're well into composing sample sentences and think “hm, that consonant-cluster or this diphthong doesn't fit the intended flavor.”  Similarly, you might make a full grammar and dictionary in Latin script (or Cyrillic or hiragana or ...) before deciding that your fictional culture needs its own writing system.


答:
The names of cases are pretty arbitrary -- there is no law that a language has to have any particular cases.

Many inflected languages express functions through particular endings; for example, the actor of a given action, the thing/object the action affects, or the target of the action. As these are similar across languages, philologists are using the same names for these paradigms of endings, and call them cases, using the names from Latin grammar.

So the nominative indicates who executes an action, the accusative expresses the object or thing, and the dative the target. The genitive expresses possesion.

Now in English we don't really have cases (apart from pronouns), as function is expressed by word order or through prepositions.

The girl gives the dog a bone

The nominative is the default first noun group, and because give takes two objects, the dog is the 'dative' and 'a bone' is the accusative. But they're not marked. If you swap them around, you need to use a preposition:

The girl gives a bone to the dog

(You can also insert a preposition into the first example for emphasis: The girl gives to the dog a  bone (and to the cat a piece of string))

So when designing your own language, you don't need to start off with cases a priori. Think about the functions you need to express, and then think of a way how to express them using morphology (word endings) or syntax (word order, prepositions/particles).

In your example, the son of god is given, one would call of god a genitive; German: "der Sohn Gottes", Latin: "filius dei" (note that English uses of, whereas German and Latin use endings). The son is nominative; as the whole example is in the passive voice and it is the subject. (It would be in the accusative if it was X gives the son of god).

So my advice is: if you're unclear about grammar, simply think of the functional relationships between the words. This is usually what cases express, and they are realised in different ways in different languages. If your conlang is not inflected, you use prepositions, otherwise endings. Whatever floats your boat... But don't get fixated on linguistic terminology from a specific language. Esperanto, for example, does not have a dative, but uses prepositions instead to express an indirect object (the dog in the example above), but the accusative for the direct object (la knabino donas al hundo oston, or la knabino donas oston al hundo)

As an example: give (as a conceptual act) has the following 'slots'

actor

object

recipient

When you use a word expressing the concept of giving, these are the slots you need to fill (some are optional sometimes). How do you distinguish the slot fillers from each other? This is where your word endings or prepositions as markers come in.


答:
Well, first of all, every language uses its cases differently. Even though both Latin and German have a "nominative" case, they're not used in exactly the same way. This means there's not really a resource describing what the "dative" means in different languages, because the name is really just a label; more often you'll find a resource describing what all the cases are like in one specific language.

The name "dative" comes from the Latin word for "give", because that's one of its most obvious uses: when you have a verb like "give" that takes three nouns, the third one usually goes in the dative. For the same reason, it's sometimes called the "indirect object case": conventionally, the first noun attached to a verb is called the subject, the second one is called the direct object, and the third one is called the indirect object.

But in Latin, that wasn't its main purpose. The real purpose of the dative case in Latin is to indicate who benefits from an action. The person who benefits from giving is the recipient, for example. But it's also used with verbs that take less than three nouns. The person experiencing an emotion is given in the dative (mihi placet "this pleases me"), as is the person making use of a thing (mihi nomen "my name"), and the person whose perspective is being referenced (mihi vidētur "it seems to me").

In Greek, on the other hand, the dative tended to indicate the circumstances of something. In Greek you can use the dative to indicate someone who was nearby during an event, even if they weren't directly involved, or the time or place where it happened. In Latin, other cases or prepositions are used for this.

To answer your explicit question, it is common for languages to have a "default" case when nothing else applies. In Latin this is the nominative; in English, the accusative. (Think about which form you use when there's no verb in the sentence: "who's there?" "me", not *"I".) But it's generally used when nothing in the sentence assigns the noun a different case. It sounds like "of god" here has a specific role it's been assigned—a modifier to "son"—and that role would normally give it a case. I don't know how the cases work in your particular conlang, but Latin and English would both use the genitive here (filius deī, "the god's son").