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18 | How to tag different worlds/languages with the same race name?
Different worlds share the same races, but use different languages. For example Elves. Everybody who wants Elves in their world might create his own language, no matter if someone did it already. Tolkien created his own and I don't think he's the only one.
How should we handle this case in the tag system? Should we have generalized tags, ex elvish or more precise ones, ex tolkien-elvish? Maybe we should have both? Or should we use them with other tags, ex elvish together with tolkien?
More precise tags
Neither tolkien nor elvish is a good name for a tag on this site:
tolkien isn't a good tag name, because Tolkien invented so many different languages, and the topics of interest here are the languages themselves and not him;
elvish definitely isn't a good tag name, because there are many different (and entirely unrelated) languages called "elvish" in different works of fantasy, and someone who's an expert in one won't necessarily know anything at all about another.
We should definitely be using tags like tolkien-elvish, rather than tolkien and elvish. (I've already made a lot of edits to various posts changing the latter to the former.) That's an easy tag for people to favourite if they're experts in Tolkien's elvish languages, and it will come up in the tag list if people search for either tolkien or elvish.
Even tolkien-elvish is not good. It should be Sindarin, Telerin etc.
@curiousdannii You may be right ... but we've also had a few questions already about Tolkien's Elvish languages in general. Not everyone knows the difference between Sindarin and Quenya, or would know to search for names like those. I think it's good that people can search the tags for elvish and find this tag. We can add sindarin and the rest as synonyms.
The original question askers don't have to get the correct tags on their first try, the community can always fix them later. Depending on the volume of questions a single tolkien-languages may end up best.
I don't think we should have generic race names
This site is about creating/learning constructed languages, not about building worlds. It should not be necessary to have tags referring to races living in any world(s) in order to write/understand a question. It might still be part of the question body, but tagging should be about elements that categorize the questions.
As the races are just as invented as the languages those invented folks that speak a language are tightly bound to the specific language, thus there's no real point in having two separate tags.
Tags that refer to existing con-languages, such as tolkien-elvish on the other hand sound like a good idea and should definitely be a thing.
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124 | Tag suggestion/inquiry
Are there tags to specify that a language is for fiction the asker is writing as opposed to an "official" language (esperanto for example)?
In addition to what curiousdannii mentioned, it should be noted that we currently have specific tags for established conlangs (e.g., esperanto, lojban, toki-pona,tolkien-elvish, etc.) rather than having a separate tag for questions that are relevant to a user's own conlanging. Those questions can be far more varied than questions about popular existing conlangs and should be tagged for other properties of the question (e.g., using design-goals for questions regarding how to achieve particular purposes in one's own conlang, using naturalism for questions about whether features one plans on including in one's conlang are naturalistic, etc.).
Such conlangs are sometimes called "artlangs" - we don't have a tag for that currently, but it could be appropriate.
The design-goals tag could also be appropriate, depending on the question.
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5 | Language symbols generators list
A lot of conlangs use custom symbols/alphabet. One of languages designed by me does this too. Because it might be hard to locate generators for some less famous conlangs, we can link all of them here (in answers)!
This might be useful for placing text in the language on the site itself, if the generator supports exporting as image.
If there is a tag defined for a specific language, you can use it in your answer, by adding [tag:language-name], so it's easier to search for it.
Should be make it one tag per answer, or one generator per answer? Also, should we allow links to iconic fonts for specific languages?
My gut feeling is that each answer should be one language, with however many generators are found for that language (and obviously editable/updatable when new ones are found/written). The problem that arises is that a language name may not be unique - so if I tag a set of generators [tag:elvish], how do I know whether we're talking about an elvish written by Tolkien, Brooks, or Potrzebie?
@JeffZeitlin there was a discussion about this. Don't use [tag:elvish], use [tag:tolkien-elvish].
so tags should be of the form tag:creator-language when there's the possibility of confusion? (I note that "Elvish" is the most likely source of problems, but can see this happening with languages from just about any fantasy race)
@JeffZeitlin Yes, here is the discussion btw
OK, thanks for the clarification.
Incidentally, the proposed list would seem to be one sort of resource that this metaquestion would apply to.
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70 | Designing an ad for ConLang SE
Calling anyone with some graphic design skills! Want to design an ad for this site?
Graduated sites all over SE have Community Promotion Ads - advertisements designed, vetted, and chosen by the community which appear on the sidebar of the site. Many of these ads are for other, 'neighbouring', SE sites, to encourage good relations and flow of views and traffic between sites.
There are quite a number of sites - including Science Fiction & Fantasy, Puzzling, English Language & Usage, Worldbuilding and more - whose scopes bear some relevance to constructed languages. These would be great places to place ads for this site and get traffic flowing here.
We could just use the default Area 51 proposal ad, but it's not very pretty. Would anyone like to design a better one? It doesn't have to be some great work of art - just something nice and eyecatching which has some relevance to constructed languages.
Image requirements (for SE Community Promotion Ads):
The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.
Great idea!
I would suggest making creative use of the wider Constructed Language Community flag as it is widely recognisable as a language invention symbol.
Suggestion 1: Superimposition of symbology:
Suggestion 2: Incorporation of symbology:
Interesting idea! Can you post it as a PNG so it won't be dithered? We'll want some sort of text along with this.
They now point to the png versions. What kind of text?
Version 2 looks really cool. Great artwork!
I think the integrated symbology better depicts what we're about here, too.
It was great to see version 1 with additional text "Built your world? Now build your language" on [worldbuilding.se] just now.
Here is my entry. The concept by @elemtitas. Made in Adobe Illustrator, exported as .png.
Also: .svg, .ai.
Vote here, here and here. 6 votes are required to appear as an add.
Pardon my ignorance, but what languages are "lingvoj" and "Fle'iroqia"? (And do we want to promote one or two conlangs above others in the Community Ad? Or is that just my pedantic love of symmetry?)
Lingvoj is Esperanto (the most well-known), fle'iroqia (as you said, in order to not promote something) is a word I made up (using some phonology of one of my draft languages that never was developed).
Though I like the general idea, I'm not sure about these language choices... I had been thinking that site specific language choices might work better. Klingon and Tengwar for Scifi, some weirder looking ones for world building for example. If I have time to make some ads I'll put them up here for the rest of you to consider
@Edlothiad I'm aware... I started off talking about languages but then switched to writing systems, could have been clearer.
So, why aren't the other choices in those votes?
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193 | 2021 Community Moderator Election
The 2021 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://conlang.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.
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89 | Should the question "What are language concepts that are considered to be based on human anatomy?" be closed as Too Broad?
I voted to close this question as too broad:
What are language concepts that are considered to be based on human anatomy?
because it is really endless in possibilities, and I think it is unanswerable at all. I also see no way to make this question more focussed and fitting to a question and answer format.
It was closed, but after that, it was reopened without any substantial edit. Should this question remain open?
I don't believe this question is as broad as you make it out to be. Its wording could perhaps be improved, but asking for examples of facets of human language that are so tied to human anatomy as to be unlikely to appear in the languages of creatures with a very different anatomy is not, in my opinion, too broad. The existing accepted answer is well-reasoned and informative, so it certainly isn't unanswerable.
I could understand why others would disagree -- I'd say it's probably an edge case -- but it seems to me that this sort of question (perhaps worded differently) is the type we would want to see on the site and that closing it despite the existence of a well-written accepted answer and productive discussion in the comments doesn't accomplish anything and serves to make the site seem hostile towards questions I, at least, would be interested in seeing more of.
I think it's just on the border of being too broad, and am happy for the community to decide through its votes. (If anyone feels it is still too broad, please do vote to close it now. Questions can be closed for a second time. And reopened again if needed.)
One thing that would help IMO is to change it to ask for concepts that "could be considered", rather than "are considered", as the current phrasing suggests this is a matter that can be definitively answered without dispute. It wouldn't hurt to ask answers to give references supporting their claims too.
Good idea, I included that into my question.
While I'm biased—being the OP of the question in question—I think the question is only broad but not too broad.
I'm not asking how an alien language could look (or sound) like—that would indeed lead to "really endless [..] possibilities". On the contrary, I'm precisely asking about features in human languages that are based on our anatomy. A reasonable restriction about the anatomical parts is not very helpful—if I had restricted it to our ears or eyes of number of limbs it would void the usefulness of the question, which is to find out which are concepts I hadn't thought about myself. It is also to be kept in mind that all might be a correct answer to somehow open questions.
Furthermore, the overall setting does set certain barriers, the amount of language concepts is certainly a limited number and not necessarily a very high one of that. Moreover, the focus on anatomy does restrict the influence vectors on language quite considerably. It excludes for example more environmental, societal and cultural factors which we are also discussing on this site.
Finally, the already given answer shows that the question is indeed answerable.
Also too broad questions are answerable. The difference is how many different answers there would be. In this case, the answers are two, and they seem to be complete. I would not call the question too broad.
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139 | Opinions on having (weekly) topic challenges?
What do I mean by topic challenges? Basically, this: How do weekly topic challenges work?. Every week or so, someone (for example, me) makes a post here on meta about a topic to encourage people to ask questions on a particular topic.
Until now I’ve been running a similar thing over on /r/conlangs, but there it was more about open discussions, and kinda not very successful. However, I feel like doing so here could increase overall activity on the site. In addition, I would have an excuse to advertize the StackExchange on the subreddit once a week, telling people to come here if they have a question on a particular topic.
Some example topics might be:
Various linguistics topics such as Morphosyntactic Alignment or Tense/Aspect/Moods/Evidentiality
Connections between worldbuilding and conlangs (e.g. “How might languages in setting X be different”, “non-human languages”)
“Everything about loglangs”
Questions about a particular popular conlang
“Developing writing systems”
If the idea is well-received, I shall assemble an actual list of topics and start next week. If not, back to the drawing board :)
Just to be clear, the challenge is to write good questions on these topics, not to pose challenges to answerers, as proposed here.
Ready to get started?
I guess I’ll start this Friday, that fine with everyone?
I believe these topic challenges would be both a good opportunity to encourage existing members to post more often and to bring new members to the site. That said, a week seems a bit short to me given our site's slow activity at the moment -- so I suggest challenges every two weeks instead.
This could be interesting; as far as the interval, why not do it weekly as proposed, but allow two or three challenges to be running in parallel (that is, on any given week, there would be three topics "open", and one of those topics "ages out" each week, with a new one coming in).
I think two weeks would be better, we don't want to run out of challenge categories too quickly.
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141 | Topics for Topic Challenges
In Opinions on having (weekly) topic challenges? I asked whether we wanted to have topic challenges, that is essentially meta threads encouraging users to ask topics on a specific topics. I would like to start these on Friday (in two days), and we need to collect some interesting topics. Topics can, but don’t have to, be associated with a tag, e.g. phonology. The challenges will remain up for two weeks, so they should be somewhat broad to allow for many kinds of questions.
For convenience’s sake, simply make an answer for each topic, perhaps with some example questions or an explanation for the scope of the topic.
Will there be another featured post announcing each topic challenge, or will that be incorporated into this post, in which case how do we easily see which one is current?
There will be a new post so we can easily promote it. The main question is how do we keep this one here visible, cause keeping it featured isn't really an option. I guess I'll just link back to it every time.
Linking back to it seems easiest
Writing systems
Many conlangers like to develop new writing systems for their conlangs.
Associated tags: writing-systems
Phonology
Many conlangs start at the phonology, i.e. the sound system. As such I reckon many (particularly inexperienced) conlangers have unanswered questions about this topic, both specific their own conlangs (regarding naturalism and the likes) and as a general linguistic topic.
Associated tags: phonology, phonetics, naturalism
This challenge has been run:
Topic Challenge: Phonology
Conlang communities
Questions about real-life communities of conlangers. Questions could be about finding or starting clubs (though not specific recommendations), how to sustain a speech community, perhaps how to teach someone your conlang
Associated tags: conlang-learning, speech-communities
Now running: Topic Challenge: Conlanging Communities
Language contact
Questions about how to simulate language contact in a conlang, including borrowing, pidginisation and creolisation, code switching, sociolinguistics and prestige languages/dialects/registers...
Associated tags: borrowings, code-switching, creoles, diachronics, pidgin, relexification
This challenge has been run: Topic Challenge: Language Contact
Modified Hangul
As a South Korean myself. Let me have a solemn introduction of this propose.
Abstract
온누리의 말이 나라마다 달라 문자가 서로 통하지 아니하니, 이런 까닭으로 사람끼리 말하고자 하는 바가 있어도 결국 각자의 뜻을 능히 전달하지 못하는 경우가 많으니라. 내 이를 가엾게 여겨 기존 스물여덟 자에 <???> 자를 더하노니, 사람마다 하여금 쉽게 익혀 날로 씀에 편안케 하고자 할 따름이니라.
Because languages of the world differ by nationalities and their scripts aren't compatible, people have difficulties when they're trying to communicate. I lamented on this, so here I add <???> characters to existing 28 characters, in hope that everyone will easily learn the resulting new script and use it conveniently.
Objective
Though I don't intend to actually replace scripts of natlangs, I expect that a modified Hangul can be a more practical replacement of phonetic alphabets such as the IPA. Furthermore, conlangs would be able to freely adopt the modified Hangul as its script. Let's see how far we can go.
TAME
Tense-Aspect-Modality-Evidentiality are core parts of verbal morphology. Every(?) natlang will gramatically express at least one of these. Lots of scope for questions here.
Tags: tense-aspect-mood, modals, morphology
This challenge has been run:
Topic Challenge: Tense/Aspect/Mood/Evidentiality
Specific conlang: Klingon
Questions about Klingon.
I choose this specific conlang because it attracts a lot of views, and there are people here to ask and answer questions about it.
Specific conlang: Toki Pona
Questions about Toki Pona.
Tenses
Questions about expression of temporal actions (past, present, future) with the action of verbs (eat, ate, will eat) as it varies through conlangs, and building the changes necessary in a language to express different temporal tenses.
We did just run the TAM topic challenge which included this. No problem running another more specific challenge later, but I think we'd want to wait a while and cover other topics first.
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173 | 2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation
While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Constructed Languages over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 1 5
Users deleted 1 0
Users contacted 1 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue 9 8
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue 0 6
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue 2 0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue 5 16
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue 11 52
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue 5 5
Tag synonyms proposed 1 0
Tag synonyms created 1 0
Questions reopened 1 1
Questions migrated 1 0
Questions flagged⁵ 1 10
Questions closed 14 0
Question flags handled⁵ 11 0
Posts undeleted 0 2
Posts locked 0 10
Posts deleted⁶ 10 25
Posts bumped 0 1
Comments flagged 0 8
Comments deleted⁷ 9 18
Comment flags handled 1 7
Answers flagged 8 15
Answer flags handled 22 1
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Constructed Languages without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
Wishing you all a happy new year...
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:21.616350 | 2020-01-01T17:23:44 | {
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188 | 2020: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation
That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Constructed Languages over the past 12 months:
Action
Moderators
Community¹
Users suspended²
0
3
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
15
17
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
1
0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
0
7
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
0
55
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
3
4
Questions reopened
2
0
Questions protected
1
0
Questions migrated
1
0
Questions flagged⁵
0
7
Questions closed
14
0
Question flags handled⁵
6
1
Posts undeleted
0
3
Posts locked
0
1
Posts deleted⁶
16
11
Posts bumped
0
2
Comments flagged
0
3
Comments deleted⁷
15
17
Comment flags handled
3
0
Answers flagged
1
1
Answer flags handled
2
0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Constructed Languages without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2019: a year in moderation
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
A big thank you to Shog9 for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to Brian for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.
Wishing everyone a happy 2021!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:21.616627 | 2021-01-19T20:03:50 | {
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216 | 2022: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation
That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Constructed Languages over the past 12 months:
Action
Moderators
Community¹
Answer flags handled
8
0
Answers flagged
3
5
Comment flags handled
0
1
Comments deleted⁷
18
13
Comments flagged
0
1
Posts bumped
0
2
Posts deleted⁶
9
12
Posts locked
0
3
Posts undeleted
0
2
Question flags handled⁵
2
3
Questions closed
8
0
Questions flagged⁵
1
6
Questions migrated
1
0
Questions reopened
1
0
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue
0
5
Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue
0
14
Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue
0
9
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue
0
6
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Reopen votes" queue
0
2
Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue
10
6
Users contacted
1
0
Users destroyed³
1,328
0
Users suspended²
0
29
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Constructed Languages without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:
Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2021: a year in moderation
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites
Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^
1,328 destroyed users doesn't seem plausible! You sure that's right?
@curiousdannii - I've destroyed a lot of spam users...
@Mithical Wow. Other sites I'm a mod on didn't even reach double digits of destroyed users. I didn't realise it was such an issue here.
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166 | Announcing a Pro Tempore election
Summary: Constructed Languages Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on April 1 to bring in one more moderator.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The timeline:
Starting on April 1, users can nominate themselves. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)
On April 8, if there are two or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll simply appoint the candidate. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination, but I doubt that will come up.)
If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on April 16.
(Note for current moderators: there's no need to nominate yourself even though you'll likely get an email saying you should. The system assumes the first election is a graduation election, which would mean moderators would need to be re-elected. This isn't that sort of election.)
If you have any questions about the process, please stick them in an answer here.
@jknappen Do you want to nominate yourself? :)
@curiousdannii Done that.
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73 | Do we want list-of-languages questions?
Identifying languages with some specified language feature is a frequent activity, both for natural languages and conlangs. WALS and CALS are popular resources for seeing how common various options are. But they don't have every feature, nor every language.
The Linguistics site has a tag, list-of-languages. Tagged questions can ask about languages which meet a particular set of criteria, and are usually allowed to stay open, despite the usual Stack Exchange rule against list questions. (Only 6 out of 127 have been closed so far.) This seems to work quite well. They're not necessarily the best questions ever, but they meet a need that otherwise wouldn't be met, and they have so far avoided the problems which plagued other sites' list questions.
Do we want to allow similar questions here? And do we want all kinds of these list-of-languages questions, or only the ones asking about linguistic features (those are the only ones common or allowed on Linguistics.SE)?
Here are some we've received already:
Questions about linguistic features
Do any conlangs have verbs that change form depending on the object?
Are there conlangs using constructed sounds?
Languages where the part of speech of a root is "fixed"?
Use of string reversion in conlangs
Questions about social features or purposes
Are there any constructed languages designed for legal agreements / country constitutions?
List of conlangs whose goal is to minimize ambiguity [Undeleted and reopened]
Questions about conlang origins
Are there any examples of artificial creoles of natural languages?
Conlangs based on lesser known antique languages
Greek-based altlangs
@jknappen I removed the multiple polling-style answers you posted in favor of an open discussion. If you have thoughts on the issue yourself, please feel free to post it as an answer. But it is generally better to let everyone have a voice in meta to express their own opinions rather pre-posting all sides of the conversation yourself. It's not difficult to infer what the community wants from the conversation while allowing for the possibility that there's an issue we have not considered. Polling is generally not a good substitute for discussion. Thanks.
Apparently that tag has since been removed.
@helmar Yes Robert Cartaino removed it. If the community decides we do definitely want these questions then we can add the tag again.
That makes the questions in question hard to identify though. If you can include the links that would be very much appreciated.
I think that list-of-language questions are a useful contribution to this site. They are usually answerable, and the potential answers add value to the site.
They also may satisfy my curiousity and point me to Conlangs with interesting features that I have never encountered before.
I think the tag wiki should be similar to the on in [linguistics.se]; the lists should contain Conlangs matching well-defined and narrowed criteria given in the question.
I guess a follow up question would be whether we allow only questions that specify linguistic features, or any criteria such as your recent question on languages inspired by antique languages.
I want to propose letting this issue rest unanswered until we are out of private and in public beta and public beta has been around for a bit.
At the moment, we want to seed our site with some good starting questions before it is opened to the general public. Whatever we decide to allow (or forbid) now will be taken as some sort of precedence rule further on. Of course, our policies can always be changed but some policy changes are harder than others.
I don’t think that there is a clear good or bad, right or wrong answer to the question a priori, we’ll have to see how they work out in practice. It could be that list-of-languages questions are few and far between and generally very interesting. It could be that they quickly dominate and become an obnoxious problem. And any other combination or anything in between. Even if we set precedence now with a nice list question that we can all agree on, that may (or may not) open the floodgates of terrible ones within months.
I have been on Anime & Manga and witnessed how the single most popular question type—identification-request—went from disliked but allowed to banhammered. The process was tedious because of how immensely popular these questions were. But it had to be done because only an infinitesimally small number of users actually bothered to read the guidelines and it was all just a way for people to gain badges in the close vote review queue. I suspect that there was very early precedence that just unfolded in a very bad way. In the end, the mods went through and deleted all questions except for a few exemplary one worth retaining which were fitted with a historical lock. Even with these few remaining, the blacklisted tag remained the highest-used.
Because of the work that all of this was, it is best if we put off the final decision until we see what it is actually going to turn into when the site goes live and attracts traffic through Google.
Okay, but what do we do with the ones we get in the meantime? Leave open or close?
@curious - neither; let the voting play out without turning to Meta. The best way to see what the site actually wants is observing what they do, not what meta says, although there are exceptions.
@Mithrandir This is an exception, because we're proposing to go against the general SE rule of no list questions. And for waiting to see what the site wants, we've done that really - 8/9 are open. It's been enough time that we can formalise the community's decision.
I think we have them regularly enough (see also, which prompted me to come and ask the same question) in regard with the size of the site. More importantly, they hard to answer because there's just not enough variety of languages with a lot of material available to answer them! Most people know the big commercial conlangs, maybe a few other conlanger's work (e.g. Zompist's work)... and that's it.
Outside of Zompist and the conlangs in published fictional materials (Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones...), most people can't really talk about more than 2 or three conlangs, and the material for those are probably not online, and the result is little variety in answer to those questions (besides they're usually amounting "I want to know because I wanna for something unique", which is not a good reasoning in conlanging IMO).
TLDR answer:
People usually don't ask these questions (or formulations of questions) to improve their conlanging or share knowledge. They mostly ask it out of a misplaced desire for originality.
There's not enough possible variance in answers (there's maybe some 20 possible conlangs people can base their answers on) for these questions to be useful.
Sorry, but I'm having a hard time parsing what you're saying here. Do you think we should allow them or not?
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47 | Some tag proposals
Open questions
I think a general principle to follow is that most tags shouldn't have "language" or "conlang" in them. Exceptions would be when it's explicitly distinguishing conlang and natlangs, or when there's already a set phrase with "language" in it. Language change is one such example, so the language-change tag for questions on natural developments of conlangs is appropriate.
We've had a few questions about what is required to be a "complete" language. I'm not sure what a good tag could be for those. Idea: what about conlang-mvp? Too cute?
What we've settled on (though feel free to still contest these tags)
For questions on conlangs changing over time, we have decided on both language-change and diachronics.
And what about a tag unnatural-features for questions about designing conlang features with no parallels in natural languages?
We probably need to better distinguish between typology and classification.
What do we want for tags about writing systems? writing-systems
Having both phrase and single word requests at ELU is a mess. Lets simplify things from the beginning, and have a single tag: phrase-requests.
The texts tag is a meta tag, and I don't see how it would be useful to have. I'd say we burn it.
For questions like the one on the Lord's Prayer, what about a tag like conlang-promotion?
conlang-history can probably just be history - we're not here to discuss world history! I'd include in this tag both the history of constructed languages as a discipline, as well as key moments in the development of particular languages, from the human side of development, though not for questions about the development of languages themselves, which should be language-change. history for questions about people, language-change for questions about languages themselves, if that makes sense.
words seems like a pretty useless tag. Can anyone make a case for it?
Maybe vocabulary-development for questions like these?
Methods to avoid similarity in lexicons
What's a good starting place to work on vocab?
I renamed it to vocabulary.
I don't think we need [typology] at all; anything it might be used on could already have [classification] or [terminology].
@CHEESE We'll have to see which questions get asked, but I'm sure there will be ones which won't fit either classification or terminology. Questions asking for an explanation of natlang typology and how it can be adapted to conlangs for example.
I find that diachronics is used wrongly here. A better name would be condiachronics or similar--diachronics refers to language with the focus on language change.
Writing a new answer because I’ve thought a bit more about the whole thing. Here’s my proposed solution:
For questions related to a specific well-known language, always use a language-specific tag, e.g. tolkien-sindarin. Don’t tag your own project that no one has heard of like that though. Don’t use any -language or -conlang suffixes for these, that’s just redundant. E.g. klingon not klingon-language
a. For questions about how such a conlang was developed, changed during its development, and also how it was received or adapted by learners, conlang-history seems appropriate as an additional tag.
For questions about how to make a conlang, I suggest conlang-creation.
a. For questions which are relevant to a specific subfield of linguistics, additional tags such as phonology would be appropriate.
b. I would also like to emphasize that simulating natural language change is a thing that some conlangers do, here diachronics is particularly appropriate.
Various questions regarding conlanging terminology can take a terminology tag, and similarly for classification stuff there can be classification
Questions about creating scripts (including stuff like making fonts) get neography, questions about writing in general writing-systems. Overlap exists, but shouldn’t be cause for worry.
a. For certain constructed scripts such as Tengwar, specific tags might be appropriate.
b. What is our opinion on spelling reforms? Are such discussions even on-topic? If yes, spelling-reform might be useful. This also in particular relates to projects like Blisssymbolics or Pan-Germanic Logograms which lie in a grey zone between writing system and conlang but ought to be on-topic here.
Ah! I think I get what you mean about diachronics now - rather than how speakers of a language change it naturally, do you mean that an author of a conlang used in a story covering hundreds or thousands of years may want to talk about the fictional changes to the language? I think diachronics would be a good tag name for that.
One issue with neography as a tag is that the term is used even for scripts like Hangul (Korean). I don't think we need con- or neo- in front of everything creative on this site, so writing-systems is probably adequate. But lets see what everyone else thinks.
I'm not convinced of the "conlang" prefix. Seems a bit redundant considering the sites topic.
language-development is an annoyingly ambiguous name. My personal suggestion for tags of this kind would be:
lang-creation for questions about how to make languages
lang-change or lang-history for questions about how conlangs changed over time through revisions seem alright, I don’t see the need to differentiate (and personally would probably favour the latter tag)
diachronics for how natural languages change, which is obviously a very different set of questions. Also appropriate here would be questions of the sorts of how native speakers altered a conlang (really only applicable to Esperanto at the moment)
I could go for language-creation (I don't like shortening it to lang). I think a plain "history" is fine - what other kind of history questions will we get? What kind of natural language diachronic questions would you imagine? Most of those should be asked at Linguistics.SE.
Or conlang-creation. I just don't really like lang-creation.
I think we need separate tags for the history of constructed languages as a discipline (including events like the creation of individual conlangs) and for how conlangs have changed over time, either naturally, or through top-down changes from the creator/committee. I'm not sure what would be clear tags for those two things though. I'd prefer a plain "history" for the first, and I think "language-change" might work for the second.
Either way, I would just like to very clearly separate diachronics. I don’t really see a problem with shortening language to lang, that’s common slang among conlangers. As for language change, diachronic conlanging is absolutely a thing, and so questions on diachronics ought to be on topic. I’ve already asked a questions with that tag myself.
Mind giving me a link to that question so I can get a better idea of what you mean?
The tags are clickable, but here ya go
@curiousdannii - there are at least three different "histories" when it comes to conlangs: one is the rl history of the creation of the Conlang ("did Tolkien create Quenya before Syndarian?"); other is the rl history of language evolution ("is there something like a Esperanto slang?"), and the third is the con-history of the language ("when did Quenya split from Syndarian?".
@Luis Yep, and we'd tag them as [tag:history], [tag:language-change], and [tag:diachronics].
@Luis Maybe a tag internal-history for the fictional history of a conlang in its fictional world can be an addition to the tag set, but only a few conlangs I am aware of have a significant internal history worth asking questions about.
TLA's (aka Three letter acronyms) aren't good tags (or part of good tags, as in the proposed conlang-mvp) because
Many people don't get them at first sight
TLA's usually don't have a unique resolution and conflicting usuages might be conflated in one tag
TLA based tags are hard to suggest: When I am looking for suitable tags for my questions I often enter a "suspicious" substring of the tag and watch the autosuggested tags from the site.
I agree! Gotta start brainstorming somewhere though.
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136 | Thinking of a new question format
I am pondering about a new type of questions that does not ask about facts for existing conlangs but provides kind of a challenge and allows for answers presenting a new ad hoc conlang.
The question would look approximately as follow
Present a sentence [given by the asker or of your own choice] in a conlang that fulfills the following criteria [given by the asker]
An expected answer would look approximately as follows
[Name of the conlang] [Some info on creator and creation date] [Sentence in the conlang] [[gloss or explanation of the sentence in English]
Would such a type of question admissible here? Shall I try one such question?
My worry is that these puzzle questions would take over the site.
I don't think this would work well.
Too Broad
Generally, on the Stack Exchange network, we expect questions to have objective, quantifiable answers - and a limited number of them.
One of the universal close reasons on every Stack Exchange site is "Too Broad":
Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. Avoid asking multiple distinct questions at once. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.
Questions that have an unlimited number of answers are almost universally closed. This type of question would allow an unlimited number of answers - each conlang could get at least one answer, and "answers presenting a new ad hoc conlang" would only exacerbate that.
That already makes me wary - that there would be an unlimited number of possible answers to this "challenge".
Now, while there are sites that have "challenge" questions, such as Puzzling.SE, they have specific rules for regulating them to fit on the site. Questions on Puzzling.SE that don't have a clearly correct answer are closed.
Not useful
If we take a look at the help center, we'll also see some guidance:
Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
This is basically the definition of an "open-ended" question, where every answer is equally valid.
The type of questions that you're proposing seem like they'd be too broad, not useful, and not a good fit for the site.
Aside from that, though, the goal of the site is to create a repository of useful questions and answers about constructed languages - both existing ones and ones that people are creating. These don't seem like they'd fit into that goal - they'd be providing a sort of "fun challenge" for users, but they don't actually help the site.
In fact, there's the possibility of hurting the site. If you have a fun, easy, but not the main point of the site type of question to ask, it can quickly grow and take over the site, drowning the site in these and making people uninterested in the site. See identification questions on Movies.SE and Anime.SE - they were flooded with low quality questions for years until they banned them. These seem like even less useful and lower-quality than identification questions.
A small number of sites have a sort of puzzle/challenge question format, and on those sites it does work well. It could be a source of increased energy for this site. Or it might not work at all. For it to work it would need to be tightly regulated. But I'm not sure what that would mean here. Hopefully someone with more experience on the other sites could give us some ideas of what boundaries to set.
One thing I do know though is that answers should be evaluate-able. Did you already have any way in mind by which answers could be compared or ranked?
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127 | Do we need both the [comparative-linguistics] and [typology] tags?
As of right now, we have both the typology and comparative-linguistics tags. Currently typology lacks usage recommendations, which I think we see reflected in the questions that have been tagged with it. The comparative-linguistics tag does have usage recommendations, which describe the tag as being for "questions about the similarities and/or differences between two conlangs or a conlang and a natlang." However, what this describes is usually considered a subset of linguistic typology, which is concerned with classifying languages based on their features and with describing common structural and featural properties of language and their distribution throughout the world's languages.
Based on this, is it necessary to have both of these tags?
I believe these tags should be merged into a single tag and that typology should be the master tag, since the way these tags have been used on this site, which has so far been to compare languages with similar features or to discuss feature-based classifications like "analytic" and "synthetic", is pretty much exactly what would be described as "linguistic typology."
Linguists typically use "comparative linguistics" to describe the subfield of historical linguistics that evaluates the relatedness of languages using the comparative method, referring more to the genetic relatedness of two languages rather than possession of similar features. Comparative linguistics under this definition isn't really particularly relevant to conlanging, so I don't think having comparative-linguistics as a tag synonym for typology is a bad thing, but because "typology" is more technically accurate I believe it should be the master tag.
I think I agree, but three of the comparative-linguistics tagged questions are about general comparisons that wouldn't really be appropriately tagged as typology.
@curiousdannii I don't think general comparisons of languages (I assume you mean the "how similar is X to Y" questions) fall outside the scope of typology, actually. They might not be the kinds of typological questions a linguist might ask, but they're certainly more typological than they are any other linguistic subfield. In any case, I don't think it would be a problem to have such questions tagged under the typology master tag -- we can afford for the tag to be a bit broader, I think.
Time to move this forward probably. Any ideas of a good tag description?
@curiousdannii Something like "Questions about comparing languages or classifying them into categories based on their linguistic features", perhaps? I'm open to suggestions for improvements, though.
@curiousdannii This is one that would probably need to have a proper tag wiki, tbh.
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167 | 2019 Community Moderator Election
The 2019 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://conlang.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.
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191 | Announcing a Pro Tempore election for 2021
Summary: Constructed Languages Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on September 20th to bring in one more moderator.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The timeline:
Starting on September 20th, users can nominate themselves. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)
On September 27th, if there are two or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll extend the nomination period for a week. If, at the end of that extension period there are still less than two candidates, I'll simply appoint the candidate. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination, but I doubt that will come up.)
If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on October 5th (or October 12th, if we need to extend the nomination period).
If you have any questions about the process, please stick them in an answer here.
The official call for nominations will come out soon, and I want to encourage active users of this site to nominate themselves. Moderation of conlang is currently a lightweight task and a good opportunity to become a moderator without prior moderation experience.
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158 | Are tag badges disabled on this site?
It is more than 24 hours ago that I reached a count >100 on the tag "conlang-creation" but I did not receive a tag badge. I also notice that on the activity tab of my user page there is no possibility to switch between the tracking of priviledges and the tracking of tag badges.
Are tag badges disabled on this site? If so, why?
EDIT: Images from conlang and language learning—note the missing wheel in the conlang view
Probably just caching/some other delay?
A tag must appear on a minimum of 100 questions to be eligible for tag badges (source). conlang-creation, which is the most popular tag on the site, currently has only 38 questions, so this site is not yet eligible for any tag badges.
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99 | Some people have a highly specific definition for conlang. Are other conlang-like things on topic?
There are long boring discussions about non-natural language taxonomies. Many of these imply that a conlang is a natural-looking (not an engineered language), artistic (not for community use, let alone global use), that generally is built with the same methodology of Tolkien's Elvish--- and everything else is not a conlang.
There are websites dedicated to conlangs where those communities aggressively chase off people who want to discuss auxiliary languages (better Esperantos), things that make no effort to be artistic (e.g. engineered languages, which have no fanciful conworld, false history, etc), or things that are not distinct enough (e.g. relexes, which would also exclude oddities like con-dialects, which are just mild relexes of English)
So, taxonomically, what are the bounds of "non-natural language" that we expect to allow here?
"Many of these imply that a conlang is a natural-looking (not an engineered language), artistic (not for community use, let alone global use), that generally is built with the same methodology of Tolkien's Elvish--- and everything else is not a conlang." Really? I haven't seen such a definition before.
I'd recommend going with what Wikipedia includes, which has artlangs, auxlangs, and englangs, but not programming languages or other such things with "language" in the name.
@curiousdannii David Peterson wrote an excellent taxonomy article is some blog probably back around 2012. I can't find it anywhere now. You'll just have to trust me. Zompist is a conlang forum, you can go experimentally see what happens if you participate wrong there, re misunderstanding that community's idea of what counts as a conlang.
I'd actually be interested to learn what forums actively chase auxlang qua invented language discussions away! Even in the aftermath of the Great Sundering, the discussion of auxlangs as invented languages was always welcome at Conlang-L (I know, I participated in many discussions abouts IALs, philosophical languages, etc.) Other forums I am or have been involved in have been similarly welcoming. Relexes are not invented languages, so are considered off-topic. Constructed dialects are on-topic if they are dialects of an invented language. If you're in the Gnoli Triangle, you're on-topic!
@elemtilas Yeah, but that (gnoli triangle) is the definition of what is on topic for that mailing list. You'll have to take my word that there are flame wars on the internet. Also, I think the exclusion of relexes was an aesthetic decision of someone rather than a decision based on what relexes are, I wrote a blog post on it- http://fakelinguist.wakayos.com/?p=473
I understand there are flame wars. Hence the Great Sundering. The Gnoli Triangle is not a manifesto of what is on-topic for Conlang-L; rather it is a general statement on what types of invented languages actually exist. Relexes, generally speaking, are excluded because they are codes or cyphers. They may be entirely aesthetic: but a pretty code is still a code! I actually read this blog post of yours a number of years ago! I actually agree with you that relexes have their place & uses. SE-Constructed Languages is not that place.
To borrow a definition from one of my answers
"Constructed languages" on this site refers to artificially created languages for intelligent beings, not machine languages. In the absence of another qualifier a "language" is, as I wrote on another site, a system for communicating propositional and conceptual information to other beings. This is different from communication. Programming languages can definitely be used to communicate - and they carry meaning - but that doesn't make them languages. Purely referential communication (using symbols to directly refer to things in the world without metaphorical extension) is not enough to be a language, language must be able to communicate abstract concepts that are beyond any sensory or referential basis.
The community here has already shown that artlangs, auxlangs, and englangs are all on-topic. We also have questions on relexes and con-dialects. I don't think I've seen a question on a con-writing system, but I have one in mind, and I expect it would be seen as on-topic too.
In general, Stack Exchange sites do not need to preemptively decide on the on-topicality of tangential topics. We have the classification tag for questions asking whether something should be seen as a conlang, and if there is a future edge case question then we can discuss the specific merits of that question when it arises.
There is no place for advocacy here. This is a question and answer site, not a discussion forum.
What the scope is concerned, International Auxilliary languages, languages created for use literature or film (artlangs), philosophical languages, languages designed for a special purpose (e.g., to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) are all on topic.
Also language projects that are mere stubs and not fully fleshed out and questions about language design are on-topic, IMO.
Some things are clearly off-topic: Formal languages as discussed in automata theory and theoretical computer science, programming languages, and maybe other things only accidentally being named "language".
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114 | Is Mand'oa, essentially a relex, on topic here?
Mand'oa as far as I can tell is roughly an English relex.
But it has a grammar document.
It has a dictionary.
It has a font which people use to make tattoos.
I know that many folk feel that relexes are aesthetically bad, but that is, imho, separate from what counts as topicality.
I agree that relexes are roughly coded English. But where else would one ask about Mand'oa, this fandom thing that Star Wars fans engage in that outwardly looks like what the Elivish or Klingon fans do, but lacks a sufficiently distinct grammar and lexicon to be isolated from accusations of being a relex? You can't ask a Mand'oa question on the English SE on the grounds that Mand'oa is just coded English.
I'm asking about this specific language, not just whatever whatever.
Why not? Creating a relex is frwoned by conlang designers (as it shows no real devotion to language design), but this does not stop it from being a conlang. Whenever there is a good question about it, ask it.
Possible duplicate of Some people have a highly specific definition for conlang. Are other conlang-like things on topic?
Well as I wrote on the other question: "In general, Stack Exchange sites do not need to preemptively decide on the on-topicality of tangential topics. We have the classification tag for questions asking whether something should be seen as a conlang, and if there is a future edge case question then we can discuss the specific merits of that question when it arises." It's already clear the relexes aren't off-topic purely for being relexes. Ask a question about Mand'oa and then we can actually decide whether it's on-topic or not. We decide the scope of questions, not languages.
I don't see how it's an actual relex. Just looking at the citied grammar page, I see verb formation mechanics that differ from English; lack of a full infinitive; lack of a definite article. M. has a grammatical imperative, English doesn't.
Very similar, maybe. A relex, probably not.
In any event, I agree with you: how can you find about a relex or a near-relex if you don't ask? I don't think relexes should be necessarily be banned just because they aren't invented languages. There are processes that go into creating a relex that are identical to creating an invented language. First off, I can think of phonology, matters of overall aesthetics, matters of writing system. I'd defend the creator of a relex asking about these matters here, even if his end product is a cypher for English.
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212 | I created a spreadsheet to help catalyze and organise the conlang process
I've worked on and finally finished version 1.0 of a spreadsheet which aims to catalyze and organise a conlang. I call it "Der Spracherfinder". I created Der Spracherfinder because starting a conlang felt like rebuilding the factory each time I wanted to build a tire. Additionally, I've tried several other software like CWS, PolyGlot, Lexique Pro, and some others. But none of those really helped me get started or organise in a user-friendly manner. Thus, I spent some time developing Der Spracherfinder which features:
a resources page + definitions
an interactive IPA chart,
an interactive transcription chart,
an interactive phonotactics sorter,
a syllable construction template,
a morphology organiser,
a proto-lexicon organiser with 500+ suggested thematically sorted words,
an interactive "Verb Conjugator",
an interactive "Noun Conjugator",
a phonological evolution organiser, and
a final / modern lexicon page.
Download a copy of the latest version here
I'd like to see it in any case.
This seems like a meta question.
@Vir I added a link whence you may download a copy.
I like the tool and thank you for it. If you have some questions about developing it, I'd be interested to help if I could.
It looks like a good initial reference point. I can imagine it saving many hours compared to seeking and cross-referencing many different websites. Plus how several sheets carry work over could save a lot of time building words. I do wish I had had this sheet starting out for those reasons.
Here is some feedback from briefly playing with several of the sheets.
I especially like the phonotactics calculator idea so I spent more time playing with it than the other sheets! It could benefit from a set of options for nasals like it has for the other types. With that, I would more or less be able to produce my clustering rules, which is what the chart currently aims for. I wonder if one or more more such tables could handle phonotactics in different places in a word (e.g., initial syllable, middle, end), which would then make it more practically useful. Either way, again, a good starting point to give people arriving at that stage useful resources and a big headstart on scratch.
The conjugator would benefit from a reference link so that people see there are even more aspects they could consider. Perhaps also some nod toward grammatical moods. I myself have found a set of grammatical moods the trickiest to devise than a set of aspects, cases, etc. A set up similar to the custom options on the noun sheet could do the job here.
Your lexicon sheet prompted me to a question I had never considered before: do we have best practices for setting up a lexicon spreadsheet?
If I might suggest even one link for the references section, it would be wals.info.
Sticking to word generation, some additional possible sheets to consider might catalyze parts of speech; suggest useful tags to note along with parts of speech which one might wish to filter for some time (e.g., place names, exceptions to normal phonetic rules, onomatopoeia, idioms, numbers); and verbs which take objects in different/multiple cases.
I appreciate your feedback. I'm happy to hear Der Spracherfinder is useful :) . I would enjoy learning from and collaborating with other conlangers to improve Der Spracherfinder! Admittedly, I am still a baby conlanger who knows a decent vocabulary of linguistic terminology (and 60% fluent Deutsch) but yet lacks skill. I have much to learn. Again, thanks! Happy New Year!
I've been revamping the phonotactics calculator, and I've added many, many more options like "forbid nasal + velar". I am wondering what options for nasals (or any other phonotactical constraints) you would suggest.
Hi, I replied (too late apparently) when you asked in the chat room. I don't know what options would be popular among conlangers, so I suggested putting in options for syllable structures: let folks fill in which phonemes can take those places. E.g., if the biggest syllable the sheet can handle (can be manually edited) is CCCVCCC (7 elements), you could put in 7 columns with dropdowns to select C/V/blank. Folks could set/copy for their possible syllables then list acceptable characters in the columns. This would be easier for you, but not easily represent rules like "nasals, but not n.+velar."
The obvious problem here is that a question on Der Spracherfinder can easily become very long and broad. User Interface questions can become "Opinion Based" very soon, another reason to close a question on stackexchange sites.
However, questions on conlanging tools are on topic in principle. Try to make your question as narrow and focussed as possible, and think of possible answers that go beyond "I like this feature/I don't like this feature".
In addition, the conlang chat room has relaxed rules. You can post a link to your spreadsheet there and call for opinions there.
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14 | What legal aspects should one consider when creating a constructed language?
Constructed languages, like everything, is an intellectual property, and most countries worldwide do care about protecting the rights of the owners.
If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?
My common sense suggests me that something is obvious here:
entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;
lots of things are public domain, e.g. SVO/OVS clause order or the Latin alphabet;
…but I'm totally lost about the case if some aspect(s) of existing works can be incidentally copied or deliberately borrowed.
Where should I start here?
If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?
No. It is conceivable that conlangs might be patentable under US law, but none so far have been.
entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;
Probably not. Again, it might infringe a patent, but there are very few patents on writing systems. Copying a specific font or typeface would constitute copyright infringement, but not copying the writing system in abstract.
Where should I start here?
I'd start by reviewing Sai's talk at LCC 6 on the legal status of conlangs, and the accompanying slides and legal memo.
You might also review the Language Creation Society's involvement in the Axanar case regarding whether or not Paramount "owns" Klingon.
Re fonts, one thing people usually don't realize is that it's not the visual design of the characters that's protected, but rather the code that implements a particular instantiation thereof. Which is why it's legal (albeit ethically questionable) to make a ripoff font by tracing over letters and re-doing the kerning instructions etc.
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261 | Is there any concept of "isomorphic" constructed languages?
What I'm thinking is: if two conlangs have the same syntactical structure and can be translated by simply exchanging words while maintaining the same (or very similar) structure, is there are specific term for this scenario, and are there any examples for this? I'd imagine Lojban and Loglan would probably fit in this category as Lojban is, after all, a child project of Loglan. Are there any other examples of conlangs designed with identical (or very similar) syntactic features, and is there a name for this relationship?
There is the term relexification meaning that the words of a given language are replaced by new words without changing the structure of the starting language. Relexification does not only occur in conlangs but also in natural languages.
Note also that a conlang derived by relexifying a source language is generally referred to as a "relex".
For a lower-level kind of isomorphism: I have read a story in which an alien speaks a synthetic language, suited to its own vocal tract, into a machine that converts its speech phoneme-for-phoneme into a human language.
It could be a scene in Poul Anderson's A Circus of Hells, or not.
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119 | How does the Wede:i language reflect their cultural focus on government?
We can see that the Wede:i have a focus on the state in their culture:
The central fact of existence has always been the state, always essential. The southern religions had always preached support for the state, the importance of the collective good, and the social lubrication necessary to a populous and busy state: manners and decorum; respect for superiors; fair and just treatment for inferiors.
Can we see this in their language? i.e., are there more government-related words than in other languages?
I don't think you can generally assume a strong correlation between the vocabulary of a language and culture of the kind you are asking about. Just like the "50 Eskimo words for snow" is a myth, it would also apply to other languages...
Not knowing the language in question I would think that there is a cultural influence, but not as obvious as having more words in a given topic area. I would expect a fine-grained system of honorifics, expressed in, for example, different verbal affixes depending on whether you speak to someone who is superior to you or not. So you express respect by using a different form of the verb, but not a different lexical item.
The same would apply to other areas of discourse. Politeness markers, modality (should, could, would,...) all play a role in social interaction, but do not necessarily manifest themselves directly in the vocabulary.
Actually, it's true that Eskimo has 50 words that have something to do with snow (though that's different from are syn- or hyponyms for) because many Eskimo languages are polysynthetic. Nevertheless, I agree nobody should say it, as it's misleading (and English has (allowing quite some derivational morphology) snow, blizzard, snowstorm, firn, graupel, sleet, slush snowbank, snowdrift, snowfall, snowflake, powder snow, snow blanket, snow crystal, white cover, yellow snow, frozen vapour, H2O, snowman material, snowfield, snow blind-ifier, snowcap, frozen water, ice, etc.).
Here's a take on that: Geoffrey Pullum's "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf
Also, adding something about politeness markers: in Holland, we learn that the English are more polite: they say Yes, I am/No, he wouldn't instead of Dutch Ja/Nee (Yes/No). This gives a wrong perspective: when you grow up with it, you'll use it when it's appropriate, without thinking to be polite every second of the day. Vice versa, in Britain (and wherever they learn Dutch, German, etc.) they think German people worry much about when they should use du (informal) or Sie (formal). They don't. Forget stories about colleagues knowing each other for years using Sie: they didn't care.
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307 | How similar are Loglan and Lojban?
Loglan is a predecessor to Lojban, and Lojban apparently directly grew out of Loglan.
How similar are the two languages at this point? Are they more like dialects of the same language, or more like Anglo-Saxon and English at this point?
Lojban vocabulary was deliberately constructed from scratch, in an attempt to get around James Brown's copyright on Loglan (Brown was the creator of Loglan, but continued to retain control over it. The Logical Language Group was formed to reinvent the words, beginning in the late 1980s, while retaining Loglan's grammar.
The words LLG created are the gismu, the roots that make up Lojban. They generated over 1300 of them, taking source words from Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian and Arabic and scored many potential gismu by their similarities with the source words. The highest-scoring gismu were used; from there, the rest of the vocabulary was generated.
Now, this was similar to Brown's original process, although he used Japanese, French and German as three more reference languages, while leaving out Arabic. This algorithm was quite similar to the one used to generate Lojban's gisme. Brown's scores - and, in a sense, the LLG's - were explicitly based on learnability, which is why these languages were used. However, the implementation of the Logban algorithm resulted in a completely new lexicon, due to different weightings, quantification of similarity, and the differing source languages.
Since the relexification, the grammar of Lojban has changed in certain ways. While it would have been easier for speakers of Loglan to learn shortly after its inception, it has now diverged enough that the two languages, while based on the same principles, are now very different. I think the analogy of Anglo-Saxon and English is a good one.
Lojban started as a relexification of Loglan but it has evolved independently from Loglan since that starting point. I don't think that the two languages can be considered dialects of each other because there is no mutual understandability left because every single word of Loglan was replaced with something different in Lojban (with the famous exception of the word blanu "blue").
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438 | What similarities does The Black Speech in Tolkien have to Hurrian?
I've just come across this quote from Wikipedia:
Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski claimed a strong similarity to Hurrian, which had recently been partially deciphered at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.
How similar are they, actually? What similarities do they have? Grammatical structure? Vocabulary? Is it even possible to tell, seeing how few examples of the Black Speech we have?
Well, The Font of All Knowledge (a.k.a. Wikipedia) tells us several things:
There is not much similarity as far as phonology, as Hurrian seems to lack consonant voicing distinction (except in certain circumstances). BS clearly has this distinction.
There's not enough BS to determine much by way of grammar, but Hurrian seems to be extremely agglutinative; BS doesn't appear to be at all.
Hurrian seems to have more vowels.
BS has more consonant clusters.
Upon reading this analysis of Black Speech, I think it is clear that Professor Tolkien must have taken some words & grammatical forms into BS from Hurrian. For example:
-at < Hurrian -ed- formant of jussive/intended future in verbal form formant of future in verbs
-ûk < “All”, “completeness”; Hurrian -ok, formant with a meaning “fully, truthfully, really” in a verbal form.
Hurrian texts were known since discoveries in the 1910s & 1930s. A grammar wasn't published until 1941. Based on the Analysis, I think it very likely that Prof. Tolkien gained inspiration from the Hurrian direction. I'm not sure I'd agree with "strong similarity" based on the extreme paucity of BS evidence. More evidence, a lost grammar, those would be more convincing one way or the other.
It's entirely possible that BS could be agglutinative (Rosenfelder actually analyses the "One Ring" inscription as the opener to the Language Construction Kit book). At the very least, the verbal inflections doesn't give any indication whatsoever to state it "doesn't appear to be at all" agglutinative.
Note that I said "extreme paucity of BS evidence". Pace Mr Rosenfelder, we can analyse one or two sentences and come up with nine different interpretations. Until there's more data, I at least can't agree with ányone's pronouncements one way or the other, though the evidence we do have doesn't give me much confidence that the agglutinative camp will win the day!
According to Wikipedia Tolkien himself said it "appeared" to be agglutinative. Also, you should probably compare the languages based on the 1941 grammar since Tolkien didn't have access to the Font of All Knowledge
Tolkien's own assessment definitely bears more weight than anyone else's opinion, certainly mine included. While I'd take his words as "weighing heavily towards the agglutinative camp", still, we just don't have enough evidence to say one way or the other.
The apparent scarcity of consonant clusters in Hurrian could be an artifact of the syllabic script (compare Linear B).
@AntonSherwood - Point noted. Perhaps it evens out in the wash.
My translation and analysis of A. Nemirovsky's Hurrian hypothesis: http://blackspeech.ru/new/wiki/doku.php?id=hurrian_hypothesis
There's not enough BS to determine much by way of grammar, but Hurrian seems to be extremely agglutinative; BS doesn't appear to be at all.
Black Speech is definitely agglutinative (but to a lesser degree than Hurrian) - all ring inscription analyses agree on that. The quote from Tolkien himself (Parma Eldalamberon journal #17, taken from a letter to Mr. W. R. Matthews, 1964):
The Black Speech was not intentionally modeled on any style, but was meant to be self-consistent, very different from Elvish <...> It was evidently an agglutinative language, and the verbal system must have included pronominal suffixes expressing the object, as well as those indicating the subject...
The linked article defines ergative alignment as "both subject and object are expressed with special markers inside verbal form", I don't think that's correct.
Also, if you quote text from a different answer, please link appropriately, so people know this is what you're doing.
The linked article defines ergative alignment as "both subject and object are expressed with special markers inside verbal form", I don't think that's correct.
Yes, it is not correct. It's a translation of quote from author of Hurrian hypothesis. Please, read my comments to it and Conclusion.
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371 | What is R'lyehian based on?
In his Cthulhu Mythos, H. P. Lovecraft includes several snippets of the R'lyehian language, including the "Cthulhu chant":
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
We have a vocabulary list available, that gives us a decent taste of the words - for instance, 'ai means speak or call.
Does this bear any resemblance to any natural languages? Do we know the inspiration for the words?
[χθ̪ʊːɫʱʏ ɸt’ɒːʛ̃] :P
Ostensibly, the transcription we have of R'lyehian is supposed to be a crude attempt to represent utterly inhuman sounds with the Latin alphabet. Most of what I can find on R'leyhian claims that it attempts to be an un-Earthly language: it does not distinguish between parts of speech, for example. It seems likely to me that Lovecraft at least attempted to invent a fully a priori conlang here.
I've found a Quora answer claiming the language "has basic elements of Welsh and German glottals," but it's unclear what exactly that means and where they got that information from.
@Riker To my knowledge, we only have the transcription in the Latin alphabet, so we don't know for sure that the language has glottal stops and similar sounds, much less that it took inspiration from Welsh and German. Especially considering that transcription was supposed to represent something decidedly inhuman, I'd wager it unlikely we can really reconstruct an inventory based on it.
R'lyeh isn't really based on anything. To my knowledge, based on a documentary, Lovecraft would walk in the woods and just try out sounds. Like he did for Cthulhu.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
is really Lovecraft just trying to transcribe inhuman, alien sounds in the Latin alphabet. So there really isn't a proper R'lyeh language, however that doesn't stop Lovecraft's fans and inspired writers from "reverse engineering" the sentence and creating something tangible.
EDIT: The documentary was Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown
Credit to Mast for finding the documentary.
What documentary was this?
"To my knowledge, based on a documentary" - please could you cite your source more precisely? Stack Exchange works best with verifiable knowledge.
@Mithical It has been a while since I've seen it, but it could well be Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008).
@Mast Aye, that's the one! I remember specifically that Neil Gaiman was in it.
Anyone who has read Lovecraft knows that he liked to play with words, so inevitably that would have included playing with them in sound. So, we could simply assume that the well-known phrase is nothing more than a jumble of letters; or we could assume, as Lovecraft presented in many stories, that the phrase has a definite meaning in English - but coded to hide the meaning.
For example, the use of an apostrophe denotes letters that have, quite literally, been hewn away - so, Ph' could well mean 'Few'.
Go to an etymology website and look up 'ng': again, quite literally, it refers to Angles or English.
Then there is the jumble of letters, mglw': through German-Hebrew, those letters mean moglisherweise which translates as possibly/potentially.
Over time, language (its usage and pronunciation) changes. Being something of an antiquarian (among other things), Lovecraft would have known this and he clearly drew from a lot of sources for his stories.
So, for example, the Necronomicon may well have been inspired, at least in part, by the Shams al-Ma'arif; the Great Race clearly has references to Madison Grant's work; there are the remains of megalithic structures in continental North America; and Nan Madol and the structures of Pohnpei in the South Pacific clearly had an influence in such stories at The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Dagon, and The Call of Cthulhu.
Cthulhu. There was a time when the 'h' was a silent letter making, from a speech perspective, CTulu.
So I present the following:
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=ketchup
More South Pacific and Chinese references. Chew Tulu. C'Tulu. Brine of fish.
R'lyeh. Rule. Yeh is an interesting bit. It has several different meanings. As yeh-teh it means 'small manlike animal' in old Tibetan (a place that often features in Lovecraft's stories) and is linked to the Yeti (or Mi-Go). However, it is also linked to the various names of the Abrahamic deity: Yehovah and Yaweh being two - and those names are derived from the Egyptian Moon Goddess, Iah (from which we also get Al-Iah: the true Roman script being what it is, a lower case 'l' is indistinguishable from an upper case 'I').
Ia(h), Ia(h), Shub-Niggurath. Think 'black ziggurat'. Another play on words.
And what of Yog Sothoth? Yog comes from the Turkish, in which the -g- is a "soft" sound, in many dialects closer to an English "w" and means roughly "to condense".
Which makes Yog Sothoth a condensed or agglutinated being - much as would be the case if, for example, all the Abrahamic faiths came together under the roofs of masonic lodges (of which, some of the oldest are in the Far East and Tibet).
Lastly, Lovecraft's works are focused on cosmic horror. In modern times, cosmic refers to outer space - but it used to mean worldly or of this world. It comes from the word 'kosmos' which means 'world order'.
However, all this aside, these things could simply be my way of entertaining myself and there really is nothing but a good yarn in Lovecraft's tales.
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646 | Is there a stroke order for any of the Klingon alphabets?
Is there an order in which you write the strokes making up a letter belonging to the Klingon alphabet (apart from the Latin alphabet)?
Are letters from Klingon alphabets intended to be written manually, as opposed to solely being printed?
I looked at Klingon alphabets and pIqaD but neither had information about this.
There have been stroke ordering proposals by fans devising handwriting of pIqaD. One is http://klingonska.org/writing/examples/pic/zrajm-piqad.jpg , from Zrajm of Klingonska Akademien: http://klingonska.org/piqad/. Another had been proposed by the late Glen Proechel's group:
Interstellar Language School (lead by Glen F. Proechel) has published “An Alien Writing System Primer” explaining how to write pIqaD in longhand. (It is non-canon, of course – and to my knowledge not endorsed by the KLI.)
It was 20 years ago, I've seen it, and I don't remember it. (I do remember not liking it. ;^)
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248 | With the death of CSUR, has there been any new Unicode proposal for con-scripts?
The CSUR (ConScript Unicode Registry) is — or, rather, with its last update in 2008, was — a project "to coordinate the assignment of blocks out of the Unicode Private Use Area (E000-F8FF and 000F0000-0010FFFF) to constructed/artificial scripts, including scripts for constructed/artificial languages." As its authors do not seem to be involved with it anymore and the page suffering neglect, I can assume the project has stalled or died. Has anyone come up with a similar project since?
Is the CSUR really dead, i.e., are there conscripters that tried to submit an encoding proposal recently and failed to do so?
There exists the UCSUR (Under-ConScript Unicode Registry) which was created as a sort of temporary holding place for proposals to avoid conflicts until the CSUR is once again active.
The page doesn't seem to have any contact information - how can you submit a new script?
The about page has an email, I can only assume this is where to contact for proposals.
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102 | How could a syllabary be adapted for a language with a complex syllable structure?
By definition, a syllabary has separate glyphs for each possible syllable (and usually unrelated or at least not systematically related ones for similar syllables, unlike alphasyllabaries). This obviously clashes in practicality with having complex syllable structure, leading to a large amount of possible syllables and therefore a large amount of symbols. How can this conflict be dealt with?
Linear B is an interesting example for this:
This system was apparently designed for a non-Greek language, as it did not fit the sounds of Greek very well. In fact, it is likely that Linear A was used to write the pre-Greek language of Crete, and the incoming Greeks adopted this writing system for their own use, but without changing how the system fundamentally works. In doing so, they developed "spelling conventions" to represent sound patterns found in Greek but not in the syllabary.
First, there are many Greek sounds that are missing in Linear B signs, such as [g], [kh], [gw], [b], [ph], [th], and [l]. To solve this problem, signs for similar sounds are used instead: p-signs are used for [p], [b], and [ph]; k-signs are used for [k], [g], and [kh]; t-signs are used for [t] and [th]; q-signs are used for [kw] and [gw]; and r-signs are used for [r] and [l]. However, while this convention was likely easily understood by ancient Mycenaean scribes, it took modern scholars a lot of theoretical analysis and work, plus comparison with later Greek dialects and reconstructed Mycenaean words to rediscover how this system works
And more relevantly:
Another inadequacy stems from the fact that Linear B signs usually represent Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllables, but the syllabic structure of Greek allows initial consonant clusters, ending consonants, and dipthongs. In the case of a syllable with a initial consonant cluster, individual consonants in the cluster are written by a CV sign whose vowel matches the vowel of the syllable. Therefore, for example, the word tri is written as ti-ri, and khrusos as ku-ru-so. In the case of ending consonant, the situation becomes more complicated. Ending consonants such as [l], [m], [n], [r], and [s] are not usually written, whereas other consonants such as [k] and [p] are written in a way similar to initial consonants.
So one way to represent consonant clusters in a syllabary is to pick a "dummy vowel" that gets read over when the word is pronounced, as in Linear B, or Japanese katakana when writing foreign words.
The question doesn't mention just how complex the syllable structure is; if it's not too complex, you can also do what Japanese hiragana does with the ん character and have a single character that represents a syllable-ending consonant. Or something like what Brahmi does for vowels and nasals, adding strokes and dots to represent them. Maybe if kra, tra, and pra are common syllables in your language, you could have a stroke that represents an r between the consonant and vowel, and add it to the characters for ka, ta, and pa.
I like that there’s actually a historic precedent to what I rambled on about in my answer!
The best solution to this is to not make your writing system syllabic if your language does not support the syllabic structure by having a low number of syllables.
I guess that one of the most commonly cited examples of a syllabic writing system is the Japanese katakana/hiragana system. Japanese phonology fits these systems very well because syllables are basically (C(y))V with the principal exception of syllabic n and the secondary one of ‘double consonants’ (まって — matte). Therefore, Japanese needs only around 50 distinct symbols for its syllabary. It made perfect sense to simplify complex Chinese characters to a reduced form carrying just a phonetic information.
On the other hand, languages such as German or English would be terrible choices for inventing a syllabary. Their syllable structures have very little constraints at all; basically anything is possible. Coming up with a syllabary would require many hundreds if not thousands of characters — to the point where it would be simpler and more consistent to create an ideographic writing system instead.
Take for example to write. In a syllabary, the symbol for write in I write would be the same as in right (there) or you are right. But then if you take I wrote, the wrote would be something completely different (yet with the same symbol as rote memorisation, I think?). I have written would use two symbols, neither of which has anything to do with the previous ones.
In an alphabetic or alphasyllabic system, there would at least be some visual resemblence between all those forms allowing for recognition. That’s also why English benefits from its extremely irregular (based on phonetics) spelling: meanings can be recognised based on writing and words with similar meanings are written similarly. Their common root is retained in a common spelling which is not possible in a pure syllabary.
A language’s writing system will either have been developed by the language itself or have been copied and adapted from geographically close languages. Of course, it would be possible for a Germanic-type language with a highly variable syllable structure to adapt a syllabic writing system initially — but it is very highly likely that it will soon be improved in numerous ways until an actually working alternative has been found.
Instead of thinking how you can bring the two ends together, I would propose you think of which writing system actually makes sense for your language.
I asked this question knowing fully well that some languages such as Mycenaean Greek and Mayan were written with syllabaries despite not being very suited to it. It would be quite natural for a language to start using a syllabary if they learned writing from a culture which used one.
I see no reason why a syllabic couldn't be as conservative as an alphabetic one, similarly reflecting the phonology of a past time, and thus providing opportunities for distinction between homophones.
devanagari is technically an abugida, but it sort of resembles a syllabary with complex syllable structures.Letters/syllables without a vowel are simply blended together. For example देवनागरी (devanagari) is दे de व v(a) न n(a) ग g(a) री ri. Using it to write the english word "star" would look like स्टार. Seperated that looks like: स=s ट=t(a) र=r the letters for 's' & 't' simply blend into one character that is still recognizable.
As in Anton Sherwood's comment below, Devanagari has a mark that indicates the absence of a vowel. Type a combination like स्टार (star) & delete टार (tar) स (sa) becomes स् (s).
Both the Brahmic scripts and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics have a grapheme for "suppress this sign's inherent vowel".
This could get tedious with big clusters; also, if you're starting with a pure syllabary, you have to decide which vowel to suppress!
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430 | Is the concept of “spatial aspect” attested in any natural language?
As described here, Aspect refers to the grammatical marking of the relation between topic and eventuality time, that is, it marking in what way the time an action actually occurs relates to the time currently being talked about. So in the sentence “Before returning home, he had gone shopping”, the topic time would be the moment of arriving home, and the eventuality time the time of going shopping, and the English past perfect marks that the latter happened before the former.
A logical extension of this system then would be to not only mark for differences in topic and eventuality time, but also topic and eventuality space. In the above sentence, the topic space (or location) would be the home, while the location of the shopping would be the eventuality space. The sentence might then mark for the fact that the shopping center is far away from the home, as opposed to (for example), inside the home. Further distinctions could be made with regards to motion: shopping is fairly stationary, but in “To get home, he had to drive on the highway”, there is clear motion towards the topic space and this too might be marked.
So I am curious, does anything along these lines exist in natural languages? The closest thing I was able to find were cis- and translocative markers in some languages, but the examples don’t really make it clear that this is used in a mandatory inflectional manner the same way temporal aspect is in many language.
Why do the andative and venitive aspects you linked to not count? Languages that have temporal aspects also have to default to something when the aspect isn't relevant, so I don't see why the fact it isn't mandatory disqualifies it
Natural languages aren't constructed languages. The question is off-topic for this site.
@kiamlaluno I sincerely disagree. To create a naturalistic language, one must look at the data found in natural ones. As such, if I come up with an idea such as this, I'll want to verify its plausibility
Naturalistic languages aren't natural languages. It's not that, because I want to create a constructed language that resemble Italian, I can ask questions about Italian here.
@kiamlaluno The single most important way in which one can improve in conlanging is to learn more about what languages do in general. I could restate my question as I have thought of this feature for my conlang, is it naturalistic?, which would be the same question essentially, but likely attract lesser quality answers. To ban questions on linguistic patterns would be to ban questions on music theory on a composition forum.
@ba From what I can tell, those systems seem to be somewhat marginal in the verbal system, often (but not necessarily) restricted to certain verbs such as ones of motion. In addition, they only describe one axis of the two I mentioned (they only encode direction of motion, but not distance). As such there is a lot of room for expansion and I’m curious to see how far natural languages take it.
You can ask the question about a feature on constructed languages, and how to make it sound more natural. There is Linguistics for questions about features common to a group of natural languages.
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it asks about natural languages and does not adequately make its relevance to conlangs known.
I don't think marking questions as off-topic solely because they don't explicitly reference conlangs in the question is good precedent -- certainly there are some questions about natlangs that are not a good fit for this site, but questions about typology and stuff like "does this exist in a natlang?" seem perfectly within the purview of this site.
It's late and I'm tired, and I'm afraid that I may be misunderstanding your question, which is why this is a comment and not an answer. Have you looked at any signed languages?
@TRiG I have looked at one (Swiss German) in the past but can't remember anything like what I'm looking for. I know they sometimes allow for places to be indexed, in which case eg a verb of motion can inflect for the destination, but this seems more akin to using pronouns to me.
I don't know of any languages where spatial marking is thoroughly compulsory in the same way aspect often is, however I do know of some potentially interesting cases of spatial marking. A lot of Papuan languages have grammaticalised systems for showing directionality and location. They are usually described as being relative to the speaker, but in at least some cases I have found them described as being relative to either the speaker or the village, or some other not wholly speaker-focussed system. The Nimboran languages in particular have highly complex systems e.g. Wilden(1976) describes Kemtuk as having the following system: https://i.sstatic.net/giiWp.png, but says that it is optional. Anceaux (1965) describes 16 different spatial categories in Nimboran proper, but in a rather unhelpful manner. He notes that the unmarked position category, when the speaker is involved has a specific meaning of "near the speaker", but that it is also always used when the speakers position is indefinite or irrelevant, such as in stories or general statements. In at least some languages I have looked at, these markers were compulsory with motion verbs.
A somewhat different system involving location relative to other events is described by Huisman (1973) who reports that Angaataha has a class of medial verbs which are inflected for whether they occur in the same place or in a different place as the following conjunct.
As far as I can tell, none of this completely satisfies your request, but it shows that at least some things are definitely attested, and distinguish other, or more fine categories than what you've found yourself.
By definition, aspect is defined in relation to the action's temporality. As such, no there is no language, natural or otherwise with "spatial aspect".
However, countless languages do incorporate spatiality in verbs, whether that be in morphology or, less commonly, in the verbal paradigm. Germanic languages particles come to mind, but Nuučaan̓uł has affixes meaning, among others "at the ear", "at the side of a vessel" and "on the beach" (Advanced Language Construction, 179-180). Quechua does have (as I understand it) a mandatory directional -mu for verbs of movement. If absent, it explicitly excludes movement toward the speaker.
For sure nothing prevents you from making spatiality the main category affecting verbal forms.
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