问:
Are there speech communities for Tolkien's Elvish languages?
Has anyone tried to put one of Tolkien's Elvish languages Sindarin or Quenya into everyday conversational use? I can imagine fan groups doing this, but I can also imagine big problems with the available vocabulary (and potentially also with the available grammar).

Are there documented events where Elvish was spoken conversationally?

Any additional information (e.g., on how to deal with the vocabulary) are also welcome!

答:
It is not possible to speak Tolkien's Elvish Languages.

This may confuse some people, considering how much nonsense there is online for "how to speak Tolkien's Elvish" (there's even a wikihow article about it). But according to the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, an organization dedicated to the study of Tolkien's invented languages, even Quenya and Sindarin are simply not learnable:

The vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Tolkien's invented languages, even of Quenya and Sindarin, are far too incomplete to allow its casual, conversational, or quotidian use. As Tolkien himself stated, "It should be obvious that if it is possible to compose fragments of verse in Quenya and Sindarin, those languages (and their relations one to another) must have reached a fairly high degree of organization — though of course, far from completeness, either in vocabulary, or in idiom" (Letters p. 380). Indeed, it was never Tolkien's intent to make Quenya, Sindarin, or any of his languages into spoken, written, auxiliary, or otherwise "useful" forms; rather, they were done for purely personal enjoyment. As Tolkien wrote, "It must be emphasized that this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my personal linguistic 'aesthetic' or taste and its fluctuations" (ibid.)

-- the aforementioned E.L.F.'s FAQ, emphasis mine

An article entitled "Elvish As She Is Spoke" goes into more depth about the history of Tolkien's Elvish and the problems with trying to learn to speak it.

"But don't they speak Elvish in the films?"

The lines and lyrics from Tolkien's languages in the Peter Jackson films were written by David Salo, a linguist who wrote a grammar of Sindarin. He built the dialogue he needed on the limited available attested vocabulary, coining some new words himself but with the goal of making it intelligible to any viewers familiar with Tolkien's languages. To quote him:

Why is there Elvish in the movie? Why did Peter Jackson care enough to strive for some accuracy in the way language is presented? (...) The Elvish in the movie is addressed to the minority of viewers who know something about the languages. And what are they going to want to do when they hear the Elvish sentences?  They're going to want to figure out what they mean, and why they mean what they mean. Part of my intention, my particular vision and contribution to this movie, was to create sentences which would be intelligible to the people who study the languages (...) I'm enormously happy to see some people saying based on their knowledge of Elvish, great or small, that they recognized and understood some of what they heard on the screen. That's great - that's exactly the kind of effect that I was looking for.

Here is a collection of the translated dialogue from the LoTR films, with the attested and unattested vocabulary in each line listed. As you can see, a lot of it is attested in Tolkien's works, but there is quite a bit that needed to be invented for the film by Salo. There have been other projects based on Tolkien's Elvish languages in the past as well, but the real fanatics tend to view these as "pseudo-Elvish", since anything not invented by Tolkien can't really be said to be part of Tolkien's Elvish. That said, there's nothing wrong with seeking out resources for and learning these expansions on Tolkien's conlangs -- just know that calling any one an authentic recreation of Tolkien's Elvish is pretty flawed.

Tl;dr

Since Tolkien never fixed his languages firmly or described them completely enough to provide any such comprehensive and corrective model (that never being his goal), ... it is consequently a further inescapable fact that no one has or ever will be able to speak Quenya and Sindarin, any more than anyone will ever (again) be able to speak, say, Etruscan or any other fragmentarily-attested non-living language.

Look into the E.L.F.'s resources (though they do seem a tad outdated) if you're interested in further exploring what information we have about Tolkien's Elvish.


问:
Mixed writing systems - which words should have their own symbols?
Assume that a conlang is written partially with an alphabet and partially with pictograms. The idea is to have something like the Japanese writing system.

Does it follows the structure of natlangs to have symbols for the words which are of particular cultural importance for the speakers of this language? Is there a common pattern or system for a categorisation of words which have their own symbols in most of the natlangs using such a mixed writing system, e.g. man, woman etc?

答:
There is already a conlang that kind of does that. In toki pona you can write the words in a set of pictograms (actually, there are several pictogrammatic writing systems, I'm referring here to the 'hieroglyphs' from the official book). As there are only 120 words, it's easy to have pictograms for all of them.

The only problem is what happens with other words. Names, for example. The toki pona solution is to select a hieroglyph whose word starts with the respective sound. This leaves some choice, as you typically have several pictograms available and you can choose a word whose meaning is somewhat relevant to the name. For example, Kanata (Canada) could start with the pictogram for kasi ("plant, leaf"), to link to the maple leaf; Nokisi (Norway) would start with nena ("hill, mountain"), etc.

Here you are using pictograms to spell a word, but it is easily conceivable to have a separate script for names and foreign words.

If the vocabulary of your language is substantially larger than toki pona's 120 words, you might not want to use pictograms for everything. In this case you could use them either for 'core' words (whether you define them by meaning, age,  etymology or frequency), or it could be words that have no inflections (and thus don't change, eg function words like and and for in English).

In the end it's your choice how you solve this, but there are certainly some possible justifications for different choices that you could explore.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0


答:
One consideration is the source of the symbols themselves. DINGIR had the syllabic value /an/ in Sumerian, but it also stood in for the word "god" because An was a Sumerian god. (And, one step further, DINGIR still meant "god" in Akkadian even though the Akkadian word for god was now ilu.)

The Sinaitic inscriptions were written in an abjad, and yet (may have) used certain letters as the words that the letters were derived from: For instance, the glyph ʾ may have stood for ox (* ʾalp), h may have stood for celebration (* hillul), and r for head (* raʾsh), because the pictures that originally formed those letters depicted an ox, celebration, and a head.

So if your script derives some of its symbols from pictures of something, the symbol could stand in for the word that the glyph depicts (or once depicted). This is a little circular when trying to determine which words should have their own symbols, but the point is that what determines which words have this status is often just an accident of history instead of a categorization of important words.

Title: Mixed writing systems - which words should have their own symbols?

Body:
Assume that a conlang is written partially with an alphabet and partially with pictograms. The idea is to have something like the Japanese writing system.

Does it follows the structure of natlangs to have symbols for the words which are of particular cultural importance for the speakers of this language? Is there a common pattern or system for a categorisation of words which have their own symbols in most of the natlangs using such a mixed writing system, e.g. man, woman etc?


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

Take this phrase in English for example:

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

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

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

答:
For a conlang, it seems like one other way to avoid ambiguity that I do not see noted in previous answers is to have the language enforce grammatical rules such that a pronoun must always refer to a specific type of referent. That is, consider these four possible types of grammar rules (they may be other rules a language may follow):

A pronoun always refers to the last referent, any mention of a prior referent must be renamed. So in your example, the grammar would remove the ambiguity as such a rule would refer to James in your original example:

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

And if Adam was the intent, then it would need to be one of these:

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

or

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

A pronoun always refers to the far referent when two referents are in view, and is left off when the near referent is intended. So of James getting help, no pronoun is used, and the sentence would roughly translate simply as:

Adam sent the essay to James to help with writing

But of Adam, the pronoun would be used:

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

A pronoun always refers back to a subject, never an object (which must be restated if intended). So of James:

Adam sent the essay to James to help James with James's writing

Though I suspect something like #2 for James might be stated as well; or the language would form such a statement to place the main player in the subject position in a passive construction:

James was sent an essay by Adam to help him with his writing

For Adam, it would be as you originally stated:

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

A pronoun always refers back to an object, never the subject (which is restated if intended). So of James it is as you already had:

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

But for Adam, it might be this:

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

Notice in that previous example by restating "Adam" as the object of "to help," it then put Adam in the most recent object position and allows for the "his" to then refer to Adam (who was also the subject).

So for some of these grammatical ways of reducing ambiguity, the sentence structure in the language becomes more important (which may or may not be desirable in the language one is constructing).


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

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

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

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

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

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

答:
Write a text/narrative, small or big, in your starting language. Then as you go through it create each element that may arise which does not exist in your language.

In the beginning it will be a painstaking process, but as you continue it will provide useful insight on exactly which words you need to add.

a general rule to remember —

Anything you create or use out of dire need, will be more difficult to lose track of.

ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0


问:
Could a language with no voiced fricatives exist?
I am working on a language and I am trying to bring it down to seventeen consonants. One of the ways I am trying to do that is by removing all voiced fricatives. Is this even reasonable?</p>

答: Sure. A lot of languages don't distinguish voicing in fricatives. This doesn't necessarily mean that fricatives in such languages will be unvoiced, but most of them will probably do that.</p>


答: According to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), a large database of various world languages' structural properties gathered from descriptive materials like grammars, around a third of the surveyed languages have a voicing contrast in plosives but not fricatives, and another third have no voicing contrast in either plosives or fricatives. Based on this, it seems that by raw numbers you're more likely to have only voiceless fricatives than you are to have both voiced and voiceless fricatives.

Title: Could a language with no voiced fricatives exist?

Body: I am working on a language and I am trying to bring it down to seventeen consonants. One of the ways I am trying to do that is by removing all voiced fricatives. Is this even reasonable?</p>


答:
There are even languages with no fricatives at all. The UPSID sample contains 31 of them, making 6.8% of the sample.

FUll output of my UPSID query:

The 'fricative' sounds do not occur in these languages:

Language (sounds)

ALAWA (26)
ANDAMANESE (24)
ANGAATIHA (21)
ARRERNTE (30)
AUCA (21)
BANDJALANG (16)
BARDI (24)
BORORO (20)
BURARRA (21)
DERA (17)
DINKA (32)
DIYARI (25)
DYIRBAL (16)
EKARI (15)
GARAWA (22)
GUGU-YALANDYI (16)
KALKATUNGU (23)
MALAKMALAK (19)
MBABARAM (24)
MURINHPATHA (25)
NASIOI (13)
NGARINJIN (24)
NGIYAMBAA (18)
NUNGGUBUYU (23)
PANARE (25)
WARAY (21)
WESTERN DESERT (20)
WIK-MUNKAN (18)
YANYUWA (32)
YIDINY (16)
YOLNGU (23)

These 31 languages are 6.87% of all languages in UPSID.

Querying for languages without voiced fricatives gives "These 222 languages are 49.22% of all languages in UPSID". So the absence of voiced fricatives is a quite common feature of natural languages.


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

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

答:
Personally, I use (Xe)LaTeX, as well as a Perl6 script to convert a custom-made dictionary format into LaTeX markup. Don't really need anything else, other than the occasional pen and paper for jotting down ideas.

You could also do everything on paper as Isoraķatheð does.


问:
Are there works composed in Quenya or Sindarin by people other than Tolkien himself?
Are there any works composed (e.g., peoms, songs, short stories) in either Quenya or Sindarin by other authors than JRR Tolkien himself?

I am already aware of some dialogues in the Lord of the Rings films, these do not count here as an answer.

答:
Pater Noster in Quenya

Poems in Quenya

Some more poems in Quenya

Pater Noster in Sindarin (JRRT for comparison)

Pater Noster in Sindarin

Poems & Stories in Sindarin

Poem in Sindarin

NB: I am not competent to guarantee that any of these works are "correct" or "grammatical", with the exception of JRRT's submission.


答:
Voiced fricatives are actually rare, humans don't seem to like them for some reason.

Of course, you could also count languages that don't distinguish voicing at all, but many of these make some other distinction like aspiration.

There are some languages out there with phoneme inventories even smaller than what you're aiming for. Piraha and Rotokas come to mind. Creoles in general tend to have minimalistic phoneme inventories too.


问:
Are there nasalized nasal consonants?
As in, [ñ] or [ñ̃]. It seems to me you can make a nasal sound more nasal, maybe by stressing your nose muscles or something in that sense. Does this exist?

EDIT:
Apologies, I was thinking about Nareal consonants, which do apparently exist. (see answer by me below, the other answers are also good.)

答:
Nasal consonants are not nasal because you use any "nose muscles", but because the nasal passage is open and air is passing through it as well as the mouth. To my knowledge, the nasal passage does not have different degrees of being open or closed, so there wouldn't be any way to make a nasal consonant more nasal.

However, there are definitely some sounds that are less nasal than standard nasal stops. Prenasalized and poststopped consonants, where a nasal followed by a non-nasal stop is treated as a single consonant, exist and are phonemic in some languages. There are also denasal phones, in which the nasal passage is open and used as a resonant cavity but air does not flow out the nose (think of how someone sounds when they have a stuffy nose). While denasals are not phonemic in any natlang to my knowledge, they are sometimes allophonic or phonetically present in a language that is losing its nasals.

Title: Are there nasalized nasal consonants?


问:
List of conlangs whose goal is to minimize ambiguity
Which conlangs have a primary goals of avoiding ambiguity?

I know Lojban had that as a goal (and is in fact syntactically unambiguous), but are there others?

答:
Here are the top five best-known (see footnote 1).

Lojban at lojban.org is the better-known successor of Loglan.

Loglan at loglan.org is based on formal logic and is to some extent not unlike a transcription of formal logic (see footnote 2).

Ithkuil at ithkuil.net is like the two above but is as compact as possible, allowing to read, write, say, and hear complex thoughts and ideas in a matter of seconds.

Ceqli at http://ceqli.pbworks.com/w/page/5455970/FrontPage is originally inspired by Loglan but later a bit more naturalist

CycL at http://www.cyc.com/documentation/ontologists-handbook/cyc-basics/syntax-cycl/ is a lot like a programming language intended mainly for neural networks. It's more suitable for expressing knowledge than for communication.

All these have Wikipedia articles under their name, except Ceqli (available on Dutch Wikipedia) to which you can go via the link given.

Footnotes: 1) These languages (except Lojban and possibly Ithkuil) don't actively disambiguate phonemic ambiguity. That's the difference between 'an app' and 'a nap'. It resulted in English a nickname, from an ekename.
2) An example of formal logic, using prerequisite axioms [PERSON(a) 'A is a person', HAVE_ALIENABLE(a, b) 'A has B alienably', HEAD(a) 'A is a head'], is ∀ x: PERSON(x) → (∃ y: HAVE_ALIENABLE(x, HEAD(y))) ('Everyone has a head', 'For every X, if X is a person, there exists some Y which X has alienably and which is a head').


问:
An Elvish word for squirrel
Is there an Elvish word for squirrel?

According to my latest information from Helmut W. Pesch, Das große Elbisch-Buch, Bastei-Lübbe 2009, there is no such word.

My best try is the Quenya word nornoyaulë (literally "oak cat", from norno "oak" and yaulë "cat", formed after a German dialectal word).

答:
peccuvo

peccuvo (Quenya): Squirrel, lit. "nut-hider" [pec 'nut' + kuvo 'hider']
(source: Parma Eldalamberon #22 2015).

Title: An Elvish word for squirrel


问:
Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona?
In Toki Pona, the small word o has several meanings.

In the official book Toki Pona: The Language of Good, it says

The particle o has three uses: (1) after a noun phrase to show who is being called or addressed, (2) before a verb to express a command or request, (3) after the subject (and replacing li) to express a wish or desire.

The question is whether a sentence like ”my friend, come here” (using jan pona mi 'my friend', kama 'come', ni 'here') should be jan pona mi o, o kama ni or jan pona mi o kama ni. Or perhaps those phrases are both acceptable? In that case, are they used interchangeably, or are there different use cases or styles?

It seems there are Toki Pona speakers with different opinions on this. Who are they, and what are their arguments?

答:
The book by jan Pije and jan Lope says:

We've learned how to address people and how to make commands; now let's put these two concepts together. Suppose you want to address someone and tell them to do something. Notice how one of the o's got dropped, as did the comma.

jan San o, ... - John, ...

... o tawa tomo sina! - ... go to your house!

jan San o tawa tomo sina! - John, go to your house!

Title: Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona?


问:
How to model the change of script over time
I want two languages to share a root but I want them to look unrecognizable written down (with the original language having a written form, so not independently created writing systems). Are there any well known patterns of how languages can change their script over time? What is some general advise on how to make this change realistic?</p>

答:
The surface that things are written on. Runes were carved in trees and, as such, do not have curves. The Greek alphabet was written on tablets, and curved lines were possible. The Arabic alphabet was written quickly on papyrus. Also, some civilisations might prefer cursive script over others. Arabic letters differ whether they're isolated, at the beginning of a word, at the end or in the middle. So does your handwriting with the Roman script. But Arabic kept their cursive when the digital age came, and the Roman script got rid of it and created the same character.

Os (runes), psi (Greek alphabet, but modernised on a computer, see footnote 1), šīn (Arabic script, isolated)

ᚩ, Ψ, ش

Let's call the ancestor A. The two daughter languages will be called B1 and B2. A could be a pictographic script, from which B1 devised a syllabary but B2 kept pictographs. Or A was an abjad (alphabet without vowels) and B1 became an alphabet whereas B2 stayed an abjad.

Although language is passed on from mother language to daughter language with diachronics, script doesn't need to. In fact, you don't often see one script in the same language for three language-generations except in some cases like Latin (but Vulgar Latin wasn't really written much). Borrow a script from a neighbouring language. This is what I recommend doing.

Footnotes: 1) Ancient Greek part of the Rosetta stone. Greek characters in Unicode are in many fonts modernised, this is an example of typical Ancient Greek script.


问:
What are reasons to construct an auxlang, artlang, altlang, etc?
What are reasons to construct a language? Why do people construct languages? For example, auxlangs are created for global (or regional) 'compatibility'. Why do people construct artlangs, altlangs, englangs, auxlangs and philangs?</p>

答: I cannot speak for any other language creator, but I have done so as part of "worldbuilding" - for an alien world to have alien languages adds verisimilitude, and even if the language isn't actually heavily used, knowing how the language works and having a partial vocabulary lets me insert words from that language where there is no exact translation in English, or where the English would be a long circumlocution. As an example, one language I worked up has a word that means, literally, "a change in lighting that reveals new detail", but whose use has been extended to the metaphorical equivalent - and in one discussion in the associated story, after one character explained something to another, the second thanked the first - "That was a very useful kurìshdàm; thank you."


问:
Is a naturalistic language without countable nouns possible?
Is a naturalistic language without count nouns possible, thus having only mass nouns? This would mean having many words for things with water: a sea, an ocean, a bottle of water, a puddle, etc.

What about compounding to get these words?

答: Yes. A language can treat all nouns as mass nouns and require classifiers when counting objects.</p>


答: As a matter of fact, Mandarin Chinese can be considered to be such a language - it treats every noun as a mass noun. Every noun requires a "measure word" for counting, like "bottle" in "four bottles of water" or "sheet" in "ten sheets of paper". Chinese has a considerable list of these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_classifiers) but there's no particular reason that a language with only mass nouns would need to have so many classifiers.</p>

Title: Is a naturalistic language without countable nouns possible?

Body:
Is a naturalistic language without count nouns possible, thus having only mass nouns? This would mean having many words for things with water: a sea, an ocean, a bottle of water, a puddle, etc.

What about compounding to get these words?


问:
Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
Are there known cases of borrowing of words from a constructed language into a natural language?

Words constructed arbitrarily in a natural language don't count here. For example, the Estonian word relv "weapon, firearm" coined in the 20th century (probably influenced by English revolver) wouldn't count.

答:
The most common one I can think of is yahoo, which was the name for brutish humans in the language of the Houyhnhnms from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  The words Lilliputian and Brobdignagian have also entered the language from the same source, as have big-endian and little-endian, supposedly calques from the fictional Lilliputian language.  Utopia is the endonym for the island nation of Thomas More’s novel, although it’s derived from Greek roots.  Several of the portmanteau words Lewis Caroll had his characters from Wonderland or his other fictional settings say have become real words, for example, chortled.  These might be considered words from an invented dialect.  Munchkin, from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, has become both a dictionary word for a small person and a slang word for an immature powergamer.  (Arguably, Oz has become a nickname for Australia.)  Robot is another common word that might qualify: it was a trademark in the play Rossum’s Universal Robots, derived from Czech roots.  None of these, however, were ever fleshed out into complete conlangs.

Another well-known example is Idaho, a made-up name that was passed off as a word from some Native language that supposedly meant, “gem of the mountains” even though the Natives did not mine or cut gems.  As far as we know, a man named William Craig just invented it as a hoax.  This was originally proposed as a name for what is now Colorado, but voted down in Congress after a blistering speech by Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, who said, “I do not believe it is an Indian word, [...] No Indian tribe in the nation has that word [...] It is a corruption certainly, a counterfeit, and ought not to be adopted.” No one has any idea where the word Oregon comes from, either, but certainly not any language native to the Pacific Northwest, so it’s only fair that Lane relented in 1863 when the name was re-used for the entirely different territory that still bears it today. There are many other stories of made-up foreign-sounding names becoming official, including Plano, Texas, which does not really mean flatland in Spanish.

To my surprise, I can’t think of a good example from Tolkien: Hobbit, for example, has become a name for the extinct species Homo Floresensis, but within the conceit of the novel, Tolkien used it as the translation from his conlang into English.  Hobbit is an obscure Old English word that had been used occasionally before.  Tolkien reveals in the appendix to Return of the King that it was an English calque for the actual endonym Kuduk in his conlang, meaning Hole-Dweller. Similarly, most of the other words in Tolkien that sound exotic were revived from Old English as “translations” from his conlangs, along with the obsolete plural forms elves and dwarves that he personally brought back.  He might have a strong claim that the word orc today brings to mind his orch, translated from his conlangs into English as orc, but which is nothing like the sea-monster named Orc in the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, so the word should just be considered a homophone.  The most familiar words from his conlangs themselves, not translated into English, would be the inscription on the One Ring.  That is, unless you consider the English translations in the body of the text a conlang!

In Star Trek, the writers originally borrowed names from Western mythology, like Vulcan and Romulan, and later on, when they developed more serious conlangs for those species, came up with the justification that they didn’t really call themselves that in their own languages at all.  However, loghaD gives the example of Qapla', from Klingon, occasionally used by SF geeks to mean “Success!” in English, although it would not be familiar to most native speakers.  I’ve heard geeks drop words and phrases from many sources about as often, like grok from Robert Heinlein’s Martian and Bah-weep-graaaaagnah wheep nini bong from Transformers: The Movie.

Kryptonite, now used as a generic word for an Achilles’ heel, was retconned into the alien endonym Krypton, a combination of the names of the Adam and Eve-figures of the alien species, Kryp and Tonn, plus the scientific suffix -ite.  That it’s a homonym of a different chemical element in English is, in-universe, a coincidence.  This is of course from DC Comics’ Superman.

Murry Gell-Mann has said he took the word quark from a nonsense poem in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, where it could have meant many different things at once.

There are several other made-up words in science fiction that have become at least somewhat widely-known.  Ansible, by Ursula K. LeGuin, has been borrowed by many other works of science fiction.  Zeerust, from Douglas Adams’ The Meaning of Laff (which gave geographic names joke definitions) is actually used by some writers, particularly at TV Tropes, in the sense he gave it: the particular kind of datedness of something that tried to be futuristic way back when.  Morlocks, from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, appears in some dictionaries as a generic term for feral people. At least one college gave freshmen an orientation course called “Finding your Patronus,” after the spell from Harry Potter.

It’s anybody’s guess where Biblical and other mythological names that have become dictionary words, such as Eden, cherubic, Semitic or siren, came from, but one possibility is that some were made up from whole cloth at some point.

Unless you are an especially fundamentalist member of the Latter-Day Saints movement (not the same thing as a member of the FLDS!), you consider Joseph Smith’s Reformed Egyptian a conlang that gave us such words as Deseret.  If any example I mentioned is from a scripture you believe to be literally true, I respect your religious freedom.

One edge case: a barbarian originally meant someone who didn’t speak Greek, and who sounded to the Greeks like he was saying “bar-bar-bar.”  There’s a joke like this in what might be considered a work of ancient SF, Aristophanes’ The Birds, where a foreign god speaks only in nonsense syllables that the picaresque heroes pretend to translate, and although none of them became words, the calque Cloudcuckooland did.

All of those are words in English, but you asked about loanwords from any conlang to any natural language.  Someone else brought up the conlang Esperanto, which now has native speakers (although I’m not aware of any loanwords from Esperanto in natural languages other than the name of the language itself).  Some other answers on this site have suggested that Classical Sanskrit or Modern Hebrew might be considered conlangs of a sort, which in the process of turning a natural language into a literary language more like what its compilers wanted it to be, created a new one.  One might then bring several others up, such as Old Church Slavonic, Indonesian, Katharevousa, Guarani or Bokmål, although I certainly do not have the expertise to debate how to classify any of them.


问:
Which features make a language easier to learn?
Which features make a language easier to learn for children learning a constructed language as L1? Are children learning a language with these features able to learn the language faster than a natural, irregular language without some of these features?</p>

答:
Difficult question. I think regularity would speed up learning, as children during language learning overgeneralise (see experiments with English past tense endings). Thus instead of learning the correct exceptions at a later stage the corresponding feature would have been learned earlier.

There is a programme for teaching Esperanto as a first foreign language, as it can be used to increase second language awareness and is supposed to make learning a natural foreign language easier. You don't have to worry about exceptions, for one thing, so you can teach the concept without having to hedge your explanations by listing all the cases where it's different.

My personal view on 'difficulty' of different languages is that all languages are about equally difficult. Some languages are easier/simpler regarding some features (English inflectional morphology), but make up for that in others (vast number of near-synonyms with different distributional characteristics in English). Toki Pona is a very simple language (120 words, virtually no syntactic complexity), so you can learn it almost in a day, but it is very hard to express complicated narratives, and an equivalent text in a more complex language would be far more concise.

Learning Esperanto is reasonably easy, but then you look at how people actually use it in everyday interactions, and you find that it is more difficult than you imagined: there are a lot of the smaller particles that make it tricky to understand for a beginner. But the 'early' sentences composed when the language was still fairly new are a lot simpler. However, they were not suitable for encoding all the pragmatic and other information people need for an everyday language.

So, there are undoubtedly features that make it easier for children to learn a language as L1, but the question is "what for?" It's a bit like learning Lisp programming: understanding the syntax takes literally ten minutes, but that does not mean you can write useful programs in it after that. Languages are more than the sum of syntax and vocabulary, and if there was a language that was easier to learn and use than other languages, and had equal expressive power, then we would all be speaking it already.


问:
Klingon: does anyone actually use pIqaD, or is the Latin transliteration sufficient?
Having just started the Duolingo Klingon course, I'm wondering if anybody is using the Klingon writing system (pIqaD) at all, or whether the Latin transliteration is always used?

As the characters look pretty hard to learn for someone with a Western background, I tend towards the transliteration only; I guess one issue is a cursive (ie handwriting) script, as the original characters seem hard to write by hand.

答:
Mark Shoulson revived the proposal to encode Klingon in Unicode, in a 2016 document called “pIqaD (Klingon) and its Usage.”  In it, he gives several examples, including a comic book, Star Trek: [Manifest Destiny] #1, translated into Klingon and printed almost entirely in pIqaD.

The most recent example I’ve seen of someone using pIqaD in a context that has nothing to do with Star Trek is that some fans of the pro soccer player Meghan Klingenberg, of the Portland Thorns, bring this banner to all her home games in Portland, Oregon (photo by Molly Blue):

The Klingon Wiki has a list of fonts that support Klingon, including several that encode it in the region of the Private Use Area standardized by the Linux Kernel, and later, the ConScript Unicode Registry and adopted by the Klingon Language Instutute.  There are, additionally, several TeX packages not listed there that support Klingon.

The font downloads and some other support files are on this page, although you might not necessarily want to install the registry entries,  It’s usable; I got this image in LuaLaTeX with the KAG pIqaD font, complete with kerning:

Here is the same template with the font Klingon pIqaD vaHbo’ by Mike Neft:

Source code, in case the template is useful:

```<code>\documentclass[preview,varwidth]{standalone}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\makeatletter
%% Use the ISO 639 language code tlh as an abbreviation.
\newcommand\@tlhfontname{pIqaD}

%% Because many Klingon fonts do not contain a Latin alphabet, take the ratio
%% of the height of the H in the main text font to either the Latin H of the
%% the pIqaD font if it contains one, or the Klingon H if it does not, and
%% scale the pIqaD by that ratio.  This means pIqaD will match the height of
%% English.
\newlength{\@capheight}
\settoheight{\@capheight}{\normalfont H}

\newlength{\@tlhheight}
\settoheight{\@tlhheight}{{\fontspec{\@tlhfontname}
                           \iffontchar\font`H
                              H
                           \else
                              \symbol{"F8D6}
                           \fi}}

\newcommand{\@capratio}{\strip@pt\dimexpr 1.0pt *
                        \numexpr\@capheight\relax /
                        \numexpr\@tlhheight\relax\relax }

%% For symmetry with Polyglossia's \sanskritfont, \sanskrittext,
%% \devanagarifont, etc.
\newfontfamily{\klingonfont}{\@tlhfontname}[Scale=\@capratio]

\newcommand\klingontext[1]{{\klingonfont #1\relax}}

%% It's more consistent with LaTeX conventions to define strictly text-mode
%% symbols with names like \texttlhA than \klingonA, and this is a Very
%% Serious Project™.
\newcommand\texttlhA{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhB{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhCH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhD{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhE{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhI{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhJ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhL{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhM{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DA}}}
\newcommand\texttlhN{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DB}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNG{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DC}}}
\newcommand\texttlhO{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhP{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DF}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhR{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhS{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhT{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTLH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhU{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhV{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhW{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhY{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGlott{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhZero{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhOne{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTwo{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhThree{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFour{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFive{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSix{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSeven{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhEight{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNine{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhComma{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhStop{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhMumm{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FF}}}

\makeatother

\newcommand\tlhIngenbergh{\texttlhTLH\texttlhL\texttlhI\texttlhNG%
\texttlhE\texttlhN\texttlhB\texttlhE\texttlhR\texttlhGH}
% Could also directly insert the Unicode PUA characters.
\newlength{\nameWidth}
\settowidth{\nameWidth}{\tlhIngenbergh}

\begin{document}

\resizebox{\nameWidth}{!}{\texttlhMumm} \\
\tlhIngenbergh

\end{document}
</code>```

Body:
Mark Shoulson revived the proposal to encode Klingon in Unicode, in a 2016 document called “pIqaD (Klingon) and its Usage.”  In it, he gives several examples, including a comic book, Star Trek: [Manifest Destiny] #1, translated into Klingon and printed almost entirely in pIqaD.

The most recent example I’ve seen of someone using pIqaD in a context that has nothing to do with Star Trek is that some fans of the pro soccer player Meghan Klingenberg, of the Portland Thorns, bring this banner to all her home games in Portland, Oregon (photo by Molly Blue):

The Klingon Wiki has a list of fonts that support Klingon, including several that encode it in the region of the Private Use Area standardized by the Linux Kernel, and later, the ConScript Unicode Registry and adopted by the Klingon Language Instutute.  There are, additionally, several TeX packages not listed there that support Klingon.

The font downloads and some other support files are on this page, although you might not necessarily want to install the registry entries,  It’s usable; I got this image in LuaLaTeX with the KAG pIqaD font, complete with kerning:

Here is the same template with the font Klingon pIqaD vaHbo’ by Mike Neft:

Source code, in case the template is useful:

\documentclass[preview,varwidth]{standalone}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\makeatletter
%% Use the ISO 639 language code tlh as an abbreviation.
\newcommand\@tlhfontname{pIqaD}

%% Because many Klingon fonts do not contain a Latin alphabet, take the ratio
%% of the height of the H in the main text font to either the Latin H of the
%% the pIqaD font if it contains one, or the Klingon H if it does not, and
%% scale the pIqaD by that ratio.  This means pIqaD will match the height of
%% English.
\newlength{\@capheight}
\settoheight{\@capheight}{\normalfont H}

\newlength{\@tlhheight}
\settoheight{\@tlhheight}{{\fontspec{\@tlhfontname}
                           \iffontchar\font`H
                              H
                           \else
                              \symbol{"F8D6}
                           \fi}}

\newcommand{\@capratio}{\strip@pt\dimexpr 1.0pt *
                        \numexpr\@capheight\relax /
                        \numexpr\@tlhheight\relax\relax }

%% For symmetry with Polyglossia's \sanskritfont, \sanskrittext,
%% \devanagarifont, etc.
\newfontfamily{\klingonfont}{\@tlhfontname}[Scale=\@capratio]

\newcommand\klingontext[1]{{\klingonfont #1\relax}}

%% It's more consistent with LaTeX conventions to define strictly text-mode
%% symbols with names like \texttlhA than \klingonA, and this is a Very
%% Serious Project™.
\newcommand\texttlhA{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhB{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhCH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhD{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhE{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhI{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhJ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhL{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhM{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DA}}}
\newcommand\texttlhN{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DB}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNG{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DC}}}
\newcommand\texttlhO{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhP{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DF}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhR{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhS{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhT{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTLH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhU{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhV{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhW{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhY{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGlott{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhZero{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhOne{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTwo{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhThree{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFour{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFive{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSix{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSeven{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhEight{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNine{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhComma{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhStop{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhMumm{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FF}}}

\makeatother

\newcommand\tlhIngenbergh{\texttlhTLH\texttlhL\texttlhI\texttlhNG%
\texttlhE\texttlhN\texttlhB\texttlhE\texttlhR\texttlhGH}
% Could also directly insert the Unicode PUA characters.
\newlength{\nameWidth}
\settowidth{\nameWidth}{\tlhIngenbergh}

\begin{document}

\resizebox{\nameWidth}{!}{\texttlhMumm} \\
\tlhIngenbergh

\end{document}


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

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

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

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

答:
To begin with, Tolkien writes in letter 142 that

I love music but have no aptitude for it [...] Slavonic languages are for me almost in the same category. I have had a go at many tongues in my time, but I am in no ordinary sense a 'linguist'; and the time I once spent on trying to learn Serbian and Russian have left me with no practical results, only a strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic

which implies that large portions of his languages are probably not structured on Russian. I then further point to this essay. In summary, the

conclusion that Tolkien “consciously or unconsciously achieved a literary effect in terms of Slavic culture through the prism of the Germanic”, goes too far on too little evidence [...] Better would be to say that Tolkien did indeed incorporate a few Slavic elements into the multifaceted and multi-sourced structure and background of Middle-earth, but that he did so quite sparingly and, in almost every case, only at its furthest margins.

While the detailed analysis can be found in that article, it seems fairly clear that while a few words may have crept in here and there, these words were also Germanic cognates or were cut out of Tolkien's language, with only one or two exceptions.


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

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

答:
I recall some years ago, someone submitted a greeting for Conlangery that was a bunch of insect sounds. According to the conlanger it is meaningful, though I don’t vet greetings too thoroughly.

Also, in my earliest conlang, Yeltax, there is a harmonic tone, with two simultaneous pitches. It’s impossible for humans to produce in normal speech, as the aliens who speak Yeltax have a syrinx, which makes two base frequencies possible. (Note: I made that before I learned any phonetics, and now I think I’d want to think about the acoustics here to distinguish this from the harmonics we use for vowels.)

In general, though, most conlangers don’t make up too many sounds. Many of the gaps in the IPA chart are physically impossible, and it’s questionable that we’ve missed a major articulator. I think most of the true inventions will be for non-human languages.

Leaving behind sound, though, it could be said that Rikchik has a robust alien phonetics that was invented from scratch. Since the aliens have many tentacles for signing, and a very non humanoid appearance, their signs can’t be related to any of the features of signs in human sign languages. Once again, invented phonetics is probably going to be for aliens.


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

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

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

答: We don’t know. It is written in an unknown script, by an unknown author. We don’t even know whether it is even in any language at all, or just random scribbles. Any attempts to connect it to a known language (such as Latin) have failed thus far.</p>


答:
Old Entish is a possibility, though not really by direct attestation. The Professor says of Old Entish that it is "...slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the loremasters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing" (LotR Appendix F)

It is after all spoken by Ents and Huorns (sentient tree-like beings). Lots of deep, rolling hoomhomming and baruurundillanding, possibly with subsonic undertones.

Title: Are there conlangs using constructed sounds?

Body:
Usually, constructed languages of all kind (naturalistic or not) draw their sounds from existing natural languages.

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


答:
The word Qapla' ("success") is listed as an English word on Wiktionary, which in essence means that it is regarded as an English loanword from Klingon. It has sparked some debate, but it has survived Wiktionary's verification process twice (once in 2007 and again in 2008), even after a specific policy limiting words from fictional universes was instituted.

I wonder if the Klingon insult petaQ may also attain a similar status at some point. Although hardly commonplace, I've seen people use it in social media, without reference to Klingons or Star Trek, and as a part of otherwise English sentences (rather than just as an isolated phrase, as is usually the case with Qapla'). They usually spell it differently, however, with variations including p'tak, p'takh, patak, p'tok and others.

Title: Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages

Body:
Are there known cases of borrowing of words from a constructed language into a natural language?

Words constructed arbitrarily in a natural language don't count here. For example, the Estonian word relv "weapon, firearm" coined in the 20th century (probably influenced by English revolver) wouldn't count.


问:
How do Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole?
In the book and TV series The Expanse inhabitants of the asteroid belt (Belters) speak a language called Belter Creole, a conlang designed by Nick Farmer which is intended to be the result of creolisation between most of the Earth's languages, including English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Romance languages, Hindi, Slavic, and Bantu. Although the dominant language of the series is English, Belters frequent mix in Belter Creole words, an example of code-switching.

I would like to know in which social situations Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole, or in order words, in which registers. (A register is "a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting" (Wikipedia).) Do Belters code-switch productively in all registers, or only in non-formal registers?

答:
Nick has talked about how there is no “slang” per se in Belter. Languages like French are spoken both on the street and in high society, so there are multiple registers. It’s an introductory language for many people.

Slang is often used to exclude; if you’re not “one of us” but you still
Speak the language, you still are on the outside because you can’t quite follow what’s being said.

A language like Quechua in South America (according to Nick) doesn’t develop slang because speaking it is already a marker for being low-status socially (vs Spanish speakers). Speaking Quechua already excludes those on the other end of the linguistic divide.

Belter is similar. Nobody but Belters speak it (maybe some inner intelligence officers do, the way UK troops would learn Irish during the troubles. Speaking Belter is a mark of low social status.

Nick has said that he would imagine belters “fluidly speaking belt Lish. One can code shift on the fly between the two languages quite easily. If there amongst a bunch a rock hopper’s, they’ll probably all speak pure LB. When they’re on the docks, when there are more inners around, probably shift more towards English.

Belters have to speak English to deal with the UN/MCRN tax
Collectors. When they get boarded by Mickie Marines, you BETTER speak English. When they deal with the any government office, it’ll be in English.

In Haiti, the majority of the population are monolingual Kreyol speakers. But the language of Education and government forms is French. That leads to some fucked-up outcomes. I imagine Belter would be treated like Creole languages usually are; something broken & degenerate, not a real language.

The correspondence courses Naomi took were almost certainly in English. Nobody is translating engineering textbooks into a “degenerate” language like a Creole, and nobody is teaching this classs in LB. Hinikirii Brown’s tablet on Anderson Station was in English, although he father spoke to her mostly in LB.

Miller is a perfect example of code shifting. Watch his hands throughout the seasons; for a “welwala”, he is the most hand-gesturing Belter on Ceres. When interviewing Gia (who has just had a client murdered in her room), he interviews her in LB to set her at ease. But when talking to the Governor’s agent about the water thieves, he speaks perfect English.

Prax is an educated Belter. You don’t do botany classes in LB. and when he wakes up on the refugee ship, he first asks for Mei in English. When he realizes the crewman he’s speaking to is a Belter, Prax switches to LB. Prax spends so much time speaking English, shifting back into LB is something that takes a moment.

So yeah, my feeling is the code shift mainly comes from “am I speaking to a Belter, or an Inner?” The inner/Belter dichotomy is cooked into LB down to the level of pronouns the way social hierarchy is cooked into Japanese.

“Beltalowda” is the plural pronoun for “Belters” with the connotation of both “all Belters” as well as “us Belters” ( becaus again, almost nobody outside Belters speaks LB). “Inyalowda” is both “all inners” [No distinction between Earther or Martian], and “You inners”.


答: Although one of the "o"s is usually dropped, you don't have to, especially if it adds a certain emphasis to something or has some poetic value in a song etc, or maybe if you're calling someone first, making sure they're listening, then continuing. It's just not often done. So for general purposes, yes, drop an "o".</p>

Title: Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona?

Body:
In Toki Pona, the small word o has several meanings.

In the official book Toki Pona: The Language of Good, it says

The particle o has three uses: (1) after a noun phrase to show who is being called or addressed, (2) before a verb to express a command or request, (3) after the subject (and replacing li) to express a wish or desire.

The question is whether a sentence like ”my friend, come here” (using jan pona mi 'my friend', kama 'come', ni 'here') should be jan pona mi o, o kama ni or jan pona mi o kama ni. Or perhaps those phrases are both acceptable? In that case, are they used interchangeably, or are there different use cases or styles?

It seems there are Toki Pona speakers with different opinions on this. Who are they, and what are their arguments?


问:
How Standard Average European is Esperanto?
Esperanto is by design based on European languages, so every similarity to European languages is in fact intended.

But I want to know how Standard Average European (SAE criteria listed by @Sparksbet) Esperanto is. One of the hallmarks of SAE, the have-perfect, is absent from Esperanto, and some criteria are formulated in a way that I feel not able to evaluate them. Has someone undertaken this already, or can do it on-the-fly?

See also this combination of features in Esperanto that is not matched by SAE languages but by central Semitic languages and Welsh.

答:
Esperanto shares a number of similarities with Standard Average European and is definitely Eurocentric.

One Eurocentricism is definitely non-existent in Esperanto, and two are questionable.

✱ Definite and Indefinite Articles

Esperanto uses a definite article la for definite nouns and uses no article for indefinite nouns. This is like some West Germanic languages (but only in the plural), Icelandic, Faroese and (Ancient) Greek. This doesn't fit the SAE exactly, which states that there is an indefinite article alongside the definite article. Nevertheless, it is also missing in quite] a few European languages.

✓ Post-Nominal Relative Clauses with Resumptive Pronouns

Esperanto has post-nominal relative clauses and allows resumptive pronouns (verification needed). The latter part may be because of a Eurocentricism on Zamenhof's part he didn't notice. This fits the SAE standard.

✕ 'To have' Perfect

Esperanto uses esti 'to be' where European languages use 'to have'. Active-passive is indicated with the participle, cf. mi estas vidinta 'I have seen' and mi estas vidita 'I have been seen'. This doesn't fit the SAE but isn't completely different.

✓ Nominative Experiencer

Esperanto is nom.-acc. and uses nom. for A and E, whereas for P acc. is used.This fits the SAE standard.
Esperanto prefers 'standard' verbs like 'I like it' over a bit more complicated constructions like 'it satisfies me'. This fits the SAE standard.

✱ Active-Passive

Like I said above, passive is formed with 'to be'. But so is the active. The difference isn't the verb 'to be'-'to have', but the participle (specifically, whether the participle has -ta or -nta). This literally does fit the SAE but doesn't act like the SAE languages.

✓ Anticausative Preference

Preferences are up to the speakers. I'm not a speaker but I'd say there is a preference for anticausatives over causatives, especially since many Esperanto speakers are European and copy their preferences to Esperanto.

✓ Dative External Possession

Esperanto uses dative external possession, especially in translations where another language, with dative external possession, is translated to Esperanto. This fits the SAE.

✓ Comparative particle

Esperanto uses the particle ol 'than' for comparatives. Ol comes from German als 'than', also a comparative particle. This fits SAE perfectly.

✓ Relative Clause Based Equative Construction

Esperanto uses tiel ... kiel for 'as ... as' relative-clause based equative constructions. Literally, that is 'so (in that manner) ... how/as (relatively used: in what manner, in which manner)'. This fits SAE.

✓ Reflexive and Intensifier Pronoun

Esperanto doesn't have a form like the English 'himself' and uses mem 'self'. This is the root of 'himself'. Lin mem 'himself' is literally 'him self'. The reflexive is different, Esperanto uses si. This fits SAE standards.


问:
What do double consonants specify in Esperanto?
The Esperanto word for 'Finland' is Finnlando. What does the doubled consonant specify? The Esperanto alphabet is phonemic. Why are there two consonants? Is it gemination (which doesn't appear often elsewhere in Esperanto)?

答:
There are two questions (with answers) on the Esperanto stackexchange dealing with this problem (and yes, it is perceived as a problem even among Esperanto speakers):

Double letters in Esperanto

Asking specifically about Finnlando

The conclusion is: The double letter should be pronounced differently from the single letter, and it should be a true double consonant (not just a long consonant). Finnlando becomes hard to pronounce by these rules, and Esperantists are in fact shifting to the word Suomio.


答:
There are several factors in a writing system that can be subject to change:

The style of writing: In fact, style is ever-changing in human culture, and we see new styles every generation. Old styles may be revived, or the new styles become divergent enough to be considered a new writing system. Note that handwriting from a century ago (e.g., in Germany) is already very hard to read for the current generation and special training is needed to do it.

The set of symbols used for writing: Some symbols may fall out of use, others are newly introduced (either by borrowing (Greek Y and Z into Latin Y and Z), or by modification of existing symbols (Latin V splitting up into U, V, W), or by new invention "out of nothing" (Emoji).

The use of diacritical marks: The writing system may be borrowed from another language and is not a perfect fit for the new language. Some devices are needed to accommodate the sounds of the new language to the writing system, like digraphs (e.g, English sh or ch), diacritical marks, additional letters, or a combination of any of the former.

Whether the introduced changes create a new writing system or just a variant of an existing writing system is merely a question of definition. I remember a heated debate on the Unicode mailing list whether Hebrew and Phoenician are one or two writing systems.

Title: How to model the change of script over time

Body: I want two languages to share a root but I want them to look unrecognizable written down (with the original language having a written form, so not independently created writing systems). Are there any well known patterns of how languages can change their script over time? What is some general advise on how to make this change realistic?</p>


答:
The advantage of just leaving two o's is that you have one fewer rule to make people learn.

Merging o's might sound better especially if o o is something that sounds wrong in your mother tongue. Sandhi, the rules for pronouncing and changing pronunciations of words at barriers is undefined in toki pona- no one with any clout ever definitively said anything one way or the other. Instead, we will get people doing what they do in their native language.

Title: Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona?


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

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

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

答:
One way to look at "elvish" features is to compare how different elvish languages look, and to take inspiration from that.

A look at the phonologies of a few elvish languages:

Quenya

(phonology from here)

```<code>         Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d            k g
Fricative  f v     s     (ç)      x     h
Trill                r
Semivowel (ʍ) w             j
Liquid               l

      Front Central Back
Close  i(ː)         u(ː)
C-Mid  eː           o:
O-Mid  ɛ            ɔ
Open         a(ː)
</code>```

Sindarin

(phonology from here)

```<code>         Labial  Dental Alveolar Lateral Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasal        m       n                              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d                            k g
Fricative  f v     θ ð   s       ɬ                      χ      h
Trill               r
Approximant                          l       j    ʍ w

        Front Central Back
Close   i y             u
Near-C  ɪ               ʊ
O-Mid   ɛ               ɔ
Open          a
</code>```

Some common denominators in Tolkien's Elvish: They all have distinction between voiced and unvoiced stops and (labial) fricatives, both have the somewhat /ʍ/ as a phoneme or allophone as well as /ŋ/, /x~χ/ and /h/. With vowels, they each have four vowel heights but nothing much in common beyond that. Allowed syllables seem to be (CC)V(CC) in Quenya (many more details at Wikipedia) and (C)V(C) in Sindarin, though I don't see that explicitly.

Pathfinder Elf Names

(names from here)

Male Names: Caladrel, Heldalel, Lanliss, Meirdrarel, Seldlon, Talathel, Variel, Zordlon.

Female Names: Amrunelara, Dardlara, Faunra, Jathal, Merisiel, Oparal, Soumral, Tessara, Yalandlara.

My interpretation of the names hints at some of these features: Only two nasals, voicing distinction, five vowels.

Allowed syllables: Apparently (C)V(CC) or (C)V(LC) where L is a liquid (l or r) or nasal

Dungeons & Dragons Elf Names

(names from 3.5 edition Player's Handbook p. 16)

Male Names: Aramil, Aust, Enialis, Heian, Himo, Ivellios, Laucian, Quarion, Soveliss, Thamior, Tharivol

Female Names: Anastrianna, Antinua, Drusilia, Felosial, Ielenia, Lia, Mialee, Qilathe, Silaqui, Vadanja, Valanthe, Xanaphia

Family Names: Amastacia, Amakiir, Galanodel, Holimion, Liadon, Meliamne, Naïlo, Siannodel, Ilphukiir, Xiloscient

Here we seem to have gemination at the end of words, vowel length, maybe uvular stop; th and ph are probably fricatives and not aspirated, judging by the presence of v and absence of f. Syllables seem to be (C)V(CC).

Using the very questionable methodology of taking the least common denominators of all of them would give us something like:

```<code>          Labial   Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n
Stop       p b     t d                      k g
Fricative  f v     θ       s z                    h
Trill                        r
Approximant                  l       j       w

        Front Central Back
Close   i               u
Mid     e               o
Open          a
</code>```

If you want an elvish language to be easily recognizable as elvish, you might be able to copy some of these features. I'm not sure, though, that there is any feature that might be universally understood as elf-like.

Body:
One way to look at "elvish" features is to compare how different elvish languages look, and to take inspiration from that.

A look at the phonologies of a few elvish languages:

Quenya

(phonology from here)

         Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d            k g
Fricative  f v     s     (ç)      x     h
Trill                r
Semivowel (ʍ) w             j
Liquid               l

      Front Central Back
Close  i(ː)         u(ː)
C-Mid  eː           o:
O-Mid  ɛ            ɔ
Open         a(ː)

Sindarin

(phonology from here)

         Labial  Dental Alveolar Lateral Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasal        m       n                              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d                            k g
Fricative  f v     θ ð   s       ɬ                      χ      h
Trill               r
Approximant                          l       j    ʍ w

        Front Central Back
Close   i y             u
Near-C  ɪ               ʊ
O-Mid   ɛ               ɔ
Open          a

Some common denominators in Tolkien's Elvish: They all have distinction between voiced and unvoiced stops and (labial) fricatives, both have the somewhat /ʍ/ as a phoneme or allophone as well as /ŋ/, /x~χ/ and /h/. With vowels, they each have four vowel heights but nothing much in common beyond that. Allowed syllables seem to be (CC)V(CC) in Quenya (many more details at Wikipedia) and (C)V(C) in Sindarin, though I don't see that explicitly.

Pathfinder Elf Names

(names from here)

Male Names: Caladrel, Heldalel, Lanliss, Meirdrarel, Seldlon, Talathel, Variel, Zordlon.

Female Names: Amrunelara, Dardlara, Faunra, Jathal, Merisiel, Oparal, Soumral, Tessara, Yalandlara.

My interpretation of the names hints at some of these features: Only two nasals, voicing distinction, five vowels.

Allowed syllables: Apparently (C)V(CC) or (C)V(LC) where L is a liquid (l or r) or nasal

Dungeons & Dragons Elf Names

(names from 3.5 edition Player's Handbook p. 16)

Male Names: Aramil, Aust, Enialis, Heian, Himo, Ivellios, Laucian, Quarion, Soveliss, Thamior, Tharivol

Female Names: Anastrianna, Antinua, Drusilia, Felosial, Ielenia, Lia, Mialee, Qilathe, Silaqui, Vadanja, Valanthe, Xanaphia

Family Names: Amastacia, Amakiir, Galanodel, Holimion, Liadon, Meliamne, Naïlo, Siannodel, Ilphukiir, Xiloscient

Here we seem to have gemination at the end of words, vowel length, maybe uvular stop; th and ph are probably fricatives and not aspirated, judging by the presence of v and absence of f. Syllables seem to be (C)V(CC).

Using the very questionable methodology of taking the least common denominators of all of them would give us something like:

          Labial   Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n
Stop       p b     t d                      k g
Fricative  f v     θ       s z                    h
Trill                        r
Approximant                  l       j       w

        Front Central Back
Close   i               u
Mid     e               o
Open          a

If you want an elvish language to be easily recognizable as elvish, you might be able to copy some of these features. I'm not sure, though, that there is any feature that might be universally understood as elf-like.


答:
Children learning an L1 have most of the same challenges as people in general learning an L2. Children learning a conlang, will have all of the problems of children learning a non-community language from a parent-- mostly problems of exposure. Kids need to hear the language for something like 20+ hours a week, less than that and they start to learn a pidgin form that is simplified. See the literature on language death for more about that process.

A rich vocabulary is hard. Teachers of languages say that the shear amount of vocabulary you need to learn is a major barrier to learning a language. This is why auxlangs try to pick words that are highly similar to what someone already knows. toki pona takes the idea of vocabulary reduction to about as far as it can go, but in my experience with it, it still feels like you need to memorize about 3000 set phrases whose meaning can't easily be guessed from the parts.

Morphology is hard. Analytic languages are going to be less difficult. In communities where a polysynthetic language is dying, the kids start using it as if it were analytic, i.e. with sentences with more words instead of one spectacularly complex verb.

Lexicalized grammar is hard. This is when you make up words instead of applying a grammatical rule. For example, in German, you have to just memorize most plurals as a second word. It is easy to accidentally create lexicalizations if you mother tongue has them. For example, in some language antonyms are phrasal or morphological modifications of a base word, in English and other languages, antonyms often are a separate word. My son right now is at the point where he over-regularized past tense English verbs, an indication that lexical past tense forms, (see, saw, eat, ate, etc) are hard, even for kids.

Title: Which features make a language easier to learn?

Body: Which features make a language easier to learn for children learning a constructed language as L1? Are children learning a language with these features able to learn the language faster than a natural, irregular language without some of these features?</p>


答:
Tl;dr: Esperanto possesses about 8/12 SAE features

Let's go through these features one by one. This is going to be pretty long, sorry for that. For reference, I'm using the famous Haspelmath paper as reference for which features define the SAE sprachbund, as I did in my earlier post.

1. Definite and indefinite articles - ✗

Esperanto defies SAE norms out the gate here, as it only has a definite article.

libro - "a book"

  la libro - "the book"

This is actually quite bizarre, as those SAE languages that do not fit this criterion (such as Slavic languages, which heavily influenced Esperanto) have no articles at all. However, some neighboring non-SAE languages do have only a definite article, so this isn't too bizarre cross-linguistically.

2. Relative clauses with relative pronouns - ✓

Haspelmath characterizes this way of forming relative clauses, unique to SAE languages, by the following criteria:

The relative clause is post-nominal

There is an inflecting relative pronoun

This pronoun introduces the relative clause

The relative pronoun functions as a resumptive, signalling the head's role in the relative clause.

Esperanto relative clauses fit all of these criteria.

Tiu blua balono, kion mi estis tenanta, knalis

  "That blue balloon, which I was holding, popped."

Here, the relative clause kion mi estis tenanta follows the nominal head balono. It is introduced by an inflecting relative pronoun kion, which is inflected for the accusative case to mark the balloon's role in the clause (that it is the object of estas tenanta. Pretty much prototypical SAE here.

3. 'Have'-perfect - ✗

Many European languages used a form of "to have" plus a passive participle to mark what we can loosely call the perfect. The languages that possess this construction have grammaticalized it to different degrees, but according to Haspelmath, "what is important here is that they all must have had basically the same meaning when they were first created."

Esperanto does not have a 'have'-perfect. Instead, Esperanto emulates Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in using "to be" + an active participle -- a form Haspelmath explicitly contrasts with the 'have'-perfect in his article.

Mi estas vidinta la viron.

```<code>mi est-as vid-i-nta          la  vir-on
I  be-PRS see-PERF-ACT.PTCP  the man-ACC
</code>```

"I have seen the man."

Unsurprising given Zamenhof's language background, but not SAE.

4. Nominative experiencers - ✓

With "verbs of sensation, emotion, cognition, and perception," there are two main strategies for expressing the experiencer -- either the experiencer is treated like an agent and marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "I like it"), or it is treated like a patient or goal and the stimulus is marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "It pleases me", "It is pleasing to me"). English pretty much exclusively uses nominative experiencers, but this isn't strictly binary across languages -- many languages, including quite a few SAE languages, will have some verbs that do the former and some that do the latter. However, most SAE languages have a very strong tendency to prefer nominative experiencers.

Esperanto primarily uses nominative experiencers.

Mi vidis fantomon. - "I saw a ghost."

Mi timas la mallumon. - "I fear the darkness."

Mi flaras florojn. - "I smell flowers."

Esperanto does possess at least one verb that bucks the trend, plaĉi.

Ĉokolado plaĉas al mi

  "I like chocolate" (lit., "Chocolate is pleasing to me.")

However, even this construction is gradually becoming less used over time as speakers favor the nominative experiencer verb ŝati instead.

Mi ŝatas ĉokoladon.

  "I like chocolate."

Therefore, I think it's safe to say that Esperanto is pretty SAE in this regard.

5. Participial passive - ✓

To quote Haspelmath: "Standard Average European languages typically have a canonical passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb ("be", "become", or the like). In this passive the original direct object becomes the subject and the original subject may be omitted, but it may also be expressed as an adverbial agent phrase."

Esperanto passives behave pretty much exactly in this way. Unsurprising, since none of the language families from which it draws its inspiration differ from the SAE trend here either.

La knabo estas batita (de sia fratino).

```<code>la  knab-o  est-as bat-i-ta           de si-a      frat-in-o
the boy-NOM be-PRS hit-PERF-PASS.PTCP of REFL-POSS brother-FEM-NOM
</code>```

"The boy is hit (by his sister)."

Granted, these passive participle constructions in Esperanto can often be avoided using anticausitive morphology or free word order in contexts where this type of passive construction would be unavoidable in, say, English. But this construction exists and is certainly frequently used enough to be considered a nicely SAE feature of Esperanto.

6. Anticausative prominence - ?

Esperanto possesses both a causative affix -ig and an anticausative affix -iĝ, both of which are used very frequently.

```<code>fand-i           fand-iĝ-i          brul-i             brul-ig-i
melt-INF         melt-ANTIC-INF     burn-INF           burn-CAUS-INF
"to melt (tr.)"  "to melt (intr.)"  "to burn (intr.)"  "to burn (tr.)"
</code>```

To say for certain that Esperanto has a preference for one over the other, some proper analysis of the language's vocabulary and usage would have to be done. In my limited experience, I'd say that they're about equally common in Esperanto, but it's really not possible to say without a lot more research into Esperanto verbs and their usage.

7. Dative external possessors - ✓

As @jknappen has pointed out, Esperanto does allow for dative external possessors

Mi lavas al mi la manoj.

  "I wash my hands." (literally, "I wash to me the hands")

I can't personally speak for how common they are, but the only requirement for this criterion is that they exist.

8. Negative pronouns and lack of verbal negation - ✓

This is another easy one, as this SAE feature is explicitly spelled out in the basic 16 rules of Esperanto:

When another NEGATIVE word is present, the word NE [English no, not] is omitted.

```<code>  Mi ne  venis     Neniu  venis
  I  not come      No.one comes
</code>```

9. Particles in comparative constructions - ✓

There are quite a few ways of marking comparatives, but particle comparatives like the English "than" are pretty overwhelmingly SAE. Esperanto uses a particle comparative, as its ol is pretty much identical in function to English "that".

10. Relative-based equative constructions - ✓

Esperanto's equative construction tiel ... kiel is actually more transparently based on relative clauses than the English construction, as it uses synchronic relative correlatives -- and even the English "as ... as" construction is considered relative-based by Haspelmath. Another transparently SAE feature.

11. Subject person affixes as strict agreement markers - ✗

It's far more common, cross-linguistically, for languages with person-marking to be pro-drop. However, several SAE languages (including French, German, and English) inflect the verb to agree with the person/number of the subject without allowing the subject to be dropped.

While Esperanto is not pro-drop, to my knowledge, Esperanto does not inflect verbs to agree with the person or number of the subject, and so it avoids this SAE feature.

12. Intensifier-reflexive differentiation - ✓

European languages verb frequently distinguish between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns, but using one form for both appears to be more common worldwide. English actually averts this, as it uses its reflexive in this intensifier function (e.g., "He did it himself").

Esperanto's intensifier particle, mem, is distinct from its reflexive pronoun si.

Li batis sin.

  "He hit himself."

Li mem batis ĝin.

  "He hit it himself."

Thus, Esperanto is SAE in this regard.

Title: How Standard Average European is Esperanto?

Body:
Esperanto is by design based on European languages, so every similarity to European languages is in fact intended.

But I want to know how Standard Average European (SAE criteria listed by @Sparksbet) Esperanto is. One of the hallmarks of SAE, the have-perfect, is absent from Esperanto, and some criteria are formulated in a way that I feel not able to evaluate them. Has someone undertaken this already, or can do it on-the-fly?

See also this combination of features in Esperanto that is not matched by SAE languages but by central Semitic languages and Welsh.

Body:
Tl;dr: Esperanto possesses about 8/12 SAE features

Let's go through these features one by one. This is going to be pretty long, sorry for that. For reference, I'm using the famous Haspelmath paper as reference for which features define the SAE sprachbund, as I did in my earlier post.

1. Definite and indefinite articles - ✗

Esperanto defies SAE norms out the gate here, as it only has a definite article.

libro - "a book"

  la libro - "the book"

This is actually quite bizarre, as those SAE languages that do not fit this criterion (such as Slavic languages, which heavily influenced Esperanto) have no articles at all. However, some neighboring non-SAE languages do have only a definite article, so this isn't too bizarre cross-linguistically.

2. Relative clauses with relative pronouns - ✓

Haspelmath characterizes this way of forming relative clauses, unique to SAE languages, by the following criteria:

The relative clause is post-nominal

There is an inflecting relative pronoun

This pronoun introduces the relative clause

The relative pronoun functions as a resumptive, signalling the head's role in the relative clause.

Esperanto relative clauses fit all of these criteria.

Tiu blua balono, kion mi estis tenanta, knalis

  "That blue balloon, which I was holding, popped."

Here, the relative clause kion mi estis tenanta follows the nominal head balono. It is introduced by an inflecting relative pronoun kion, which is inflected for the accusative case to mark the balloon's role in the clause (that it is the object of estas tenanta. Pretty much prototypical SAE here.

3. 'Have'-perfect - ✗

Many European languages used a form of "to have" plus a passive participle to mark what we can loosely call the perfect. The languages that possess this construction have grammaticalized it to different degrees, but according to Haspelmath, "what is important here is that they all must have had basically the same meaning when they were first created."

Esperanto does not have a 'have'-perfect. Instead, Esperanto emulates Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in using "to be" + an active participle -- a form Haspelmath explicitly contrasts with the 'have'-perfect in his article.

Mi estas vidinta la viron.

mi est-as vid-i-nta          la  vir-on
I  be-PRS see-PERF-ACT.PTCP  the man-ACC

"I have seen the man."

Unsurprising given Zamenhof's language background, but not SAE.

4. Nominative experiencers - ✓

With "verbs of sensation, emotion, cognition, and perception," there are two main strategies for expressing the experiencer -- either the experiencer is treated like an agent and marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "I like it"), or it is treated like a patient or goal and the stimulus is marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "It pleases me", "It is pleasing to me"). English pretty much exclusively uses nominative experiencers, but this isn't strictly binary across languages -- many languages, including quite a few SAE languages, will have some verbs that do the former and some that do the latter. However, most SAE languages have a very strong tendency to prefer nominative experiencers.

Esperanto primarily uses nominative experiencers.

Mi vidis fantomon. - "I saw a ghost."

Mi timas la mallumon. - "I fear the darkness."

Mi flaras florojn. - "I smell flowers."

Esperanto does possess at least one verb that bucks the trend, plaĉi.

Ĉokolado plaĉas al mi

  "I like chocolate" (lit., "Chocolate is pleasing to me.")

However, even this construction is gradually becoming less used over time as speakers favor the nominative experiencer verb ŝati instead.

Mi ŝatas ĉokoladon.

  "I like chocolate."

Therefore, I think it's safe to say that Esperanto is pretty SAE in this regard.

5. Participial passive - ✓

To quote Haspelmath: "Standard Average European languages typically have a canonical passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb ("be", "become", or the like). In this passive the original direct object becomes the subject and the original subject may be omitted, but it may also be expressed as an adverbial agent phrase."

Esperanto passives behave pretty much exactly in this way. Unsurprising, since none of the language families from which it draws its inspiration differ from the SAE trend here either.

La knabo estas batita (de sia fratino).

la  knab-o  est-as bat-i-ta           de si-a      frat-in-o
the boy-NOM be-PRS hit-PERF-PASS.PTCP of REFL-POSS brother-FEM-NOM

"The boy is hit (by his sister)."

Granted, these passive participle constructions in Esperanto can often be avoided using anticausitive morphology or free word order in contexts where this type of passive construction would be unavoidable in, say, English. But this construction exists and is certainly frequently used enough to be considered a nicely SAE feature of Esperanto.

6. Anticausative prominence - ?

Esperanto possesses both a causative affix -ig and an anticausative affix -iĝ, both of which are used very frequently.

fand-i           fand-iĝ-i          brul-i             brul-ig-i
melt-INF         melt-ANTIC-INF     burn-INF           burn-CAUS-INF
"to melt (tr.)"  "to melt (intr.)"  "to burn (intr.)"  "to burn (tr.)"

To say for certain that Esperanto has a preference for one over the other, some proper analysis of the language's vocabulary and usage would have to be done. In my limited experience, I'd say that they're about equally common in Esperanto, but it's really not possible to say without a lot more research into Esperanto verbs and their usage.

7. Dative external possessors - ✓

As @jknappen has pointed out, Esperanto does allow for dative external possessors

Mi lavas al mi la manoj.

  "I wash my hands." (literally, "I wash to me the hands")

I can't personally speak for how common they are, but the only requirement for this criterion is that they exist.

8. Negative pronouns and lack of verbal negation - ✓

This is another easy one, as this SAE feature is explicitly spelled out in the basic 16 rules of Esperanto:

When another NEGATIVE word is present, the word NE [English no, not] is omitted.

  Mi ne  venis     Neniu  venis
  I  not come      No.one comes

9. Particles in comparative constructions - ✓

There are quite a few ways of marking comparatives, but particle comparatives like the English "than" are pretty overwhelmingly SAE. Esperanto uses a particle comparative, as its ol is pretty much identical in function to English "that".

10. Relative-based equative constructions - ✓

Esperanto's equative construction tiel ... kiel is actually more transparently based on relative clauses than the English construction, as it uses synchronic relative correlatives -- and even the English "as ... as" construction is considered relative-based by Haspelmath. Another transparently SAE feature.

11. Subject person affixes as strict agreement markers - ✗

It's far more common, cross-linguistically, for languages with person-marking to be pro-drop. However, several SAE languages (including French, German, and English) inflect the verb to agree with the person/number of the subject without allowing the subject to be dropped.

While Esperanto is not pro-drop, to my knowledge, Esperanto does not inflect verbs to agree with the person or number of the subject, and so it avoids this SAE feature.

12. Intensifier-reflexive differentiation - ✓

European languages verb frequently distinguish between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns, but using one form for both appears to be more common worldwide. English actually averts this, as it uses its reflexive in this intensifier function (e.g., "He did it himself").

Esperanto's intensifier particle, mem, is distinct from its reflexive pronoun si.

Li batis sin.

  "He hit himself."

Li mem batis ĝin.

  "He hit it himself."

Thus, Esperanto is SAE in this regard.


问:
Is there evidence that any natural languages were actually constructed?
Is there any evidence that a ‘natural’ language that exists today was created by somebody a thousand (or two) years ago. And that it evolved till today? </p>

答:
Possibility? Of course, there is always a possibility, but rather remote one, if you mean a full featured well-known modern language.

The best candidates are "taboo languages", where the lexical items are replaced because of taboo/religious pressure. Perhaps the best known is Dyirbal, where a special version of the language is to be used in front of "tabooed" persons.

Though it probably does not go millennia into the past, and it's questionable if it should be considered a language, since it is just a vocabulary encoding.


答:
Cryptolects (aka Cants or Secret languages) come to my mind as candidates. While they are typically not fully constructed, they often contain a constructed core vocabulary making the language unintelligible to outsiders. When they exist long enough, they are learned as first language by the group members.

Examples of such cryptolects include Verlan (French based) and Läppe Tellep (German dialect based).

EDIT: It took me some time of searching for this one because I forgot the name: Eskayan spoken on Bohul island in The Phillipines.

EDIT2: Another example where it is probably no longer decidable whether it is an isolate language or a secret language is the Nihali language in central India.

Title: Is there evidence that any natural languages were actually constructed?

Body: Is there any evidence that a ‘natural’ language that exists today was created by somebody a thousand (or two) years ago. And that it evolved till today? </p>


答:
People learn languages from other people who speak them. If someone ever got others to adopt his language as their "natural language," they would have had to learn it from him. Without a community of speakers, it would have been impossible for this to happen. At some point we have to account for the fact that someone would have had to design the language and actually teach it to others.

I believe that this has never happened in recorded history. We do indeed find that an early Greek philosopher named Pherecydes invented an "artificial" word for "table":

He maintained that the divine name for "table" is θυωρός, or that which takes care of offerings. (Diogenes Laertius 1.119)

There is no evidence for anyone ever having invented an entire language, which would certainly be much more notable.

This leaves thousands of years of prehistory (before the invention of writing) when this could have happened, but it seems much more difficult to design a language without writing, or, for that matter, to do it without the linguistic knowledge that exists today.

Coining of new words has always happened, but that is language change, which develops from an existing language, and not the invention of an entire language from scratch.


答: Yes, the Damin language (Wikipedia article), a ceremonial language and only natural click language outside Africa, was probably constructed.</p>


答:
Depending if you include scripts in the definition of "natural language", Hangul is a famous example of an alphabet that was created in the 15th century and has evolved since then.

In addition, the notoriously difficult Tangut script was created "in a very short time" around 1036 and was widely used in books and inscriptions by the Western Xia for about 500 years.


问:
Is any of the Wakandan writing in Black Panther used for something other than English?
For the film Black Panther production designer Hannah Beachler created a Wakandan writing system partially based on real African writing systems. Well that's what this and other news articles say, but if you look at how it's used, for example in the film's intertitles, it's clearly only a transliteration alphabet of English:

You can see here how the letters are 1-1 mappings of the very non-phonemic English spellings.

Now in the film, when the characters aren't speaking English, they are actually speaking Xhosa. (I'm not sure if in-universe that they are meant to be speaking Xhosa, or if Xhosa is just used to represent what would be a distinct Wakandan language in-universe, possibly related to Xhosa.)

Is any of the Wakandan writing in the film used to write Xhosa? Or any other African language, or even an actual conlang?

答:
It's important to note that there were two Wakandan scripts used in the set design of Black Panther -- one is the transliteration alphabet seen here, while the other is a se of symbols based on Nsibidi that is more logographic in nature. They were used on different parts of the set, with the more logographic script occurring in a lot of the more traditional contexts and the alphabet occurring more widely throughout the set.

The Omniglot page for the script includes text written in both English and Xhosa using the script, but the Xhosa text seems transliterated from the romanized orthography for Xhosa. That said, since the author described the alphabetic script as a "more evolved" version of the logography, it's possible that it was deliberately designed to be similar to the Latin transliteration of Xhosa? Granted, that doesn't seem particularly in-character for the Wakanda depicted in the film, but who knows. Perhaps we'll learn more about the script in the inevitable sequel.

I think we can say that the alphabetic script is not only used to transliterate English as it is in the title cards. Consider this image from the article, which features portions of some Wakandan signs:

The glyphs on the rightward sign are difficult to make out and may be part of the logographic script, but those on the leftward sign read "DJO" in the Wakandan script -- as neither DJO nor OJD are allowable clusters in English, it seems unlikely that this is a portion of an English word transliterated into the alphabet.

However, it definitely is used to transliterate English even outside of the title cards. Let's look at the text on the throne in this poster:

The text on the lefthand side of his throne clearly reads "WISDOM" and the righthand text reads "LOYALTY" -- obviously an English transliteration. This is particularly egregious given that this is the king's throne, which arguably shouldn't feature the modern Wakandan script at all, much less Wakandan being used for English. However, it is admittedly a poster, so it's not really properly in the movie -- I cannot find a screenshot of the base of the throne from the actual film, so I can't say whether the text is the same there.

The alphabetic script is frequently used in the set design of the lab, but the only screenshots I can find of it are either too blurry to make out or just feature simply the glyphs overlapping each other for aesthetic in a screensaver-esque fashion.


答:
You could argue that modern Hebrew is at least partly constructed.

Hebrew fell into disuse and only survived as a 'sacred' language in a religious context. Then, with the rise of the Zionist movement towards the end of the 19th Century, Hebrew was modernised and used as a lingua franca in the Palestine region. In the process, aspects of Hebrew variants were combined, and the vocabulary was extended to allow the use of Hebrew in modern day life.

See the Wikipedia article on the Revival of Hebrew.