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310 | Are there any small scale auxlangs that are actually used by a substantial amount of people?
International Auxiliary Languages are very, very ambitious, and probably bound to fail on a large scale. However, it seems plausible to me that there might be some corners of the world where an auxlang might be used to facilitate communication between more localized groups, much like English is used in many parts of Europe (and really, the world) for this purpose. But does this actually occur anywhere?
I'm not sure this is really well defined enough. Isn't Esperanto an auxlang? So wouldn't it be the obvious example? What does "small scale" mean?
Esperanto is an international auxiliary language, or at least is nowadays treated as such. That is basically the opposite of “small scale”. I’m thinking of something like an auxlang for… idk, the balkan area. Or east asia. Or speakers of Bantu languages.
I think the scenario you describe would lead to a pidgin, and then, perhaps, to a creole.
The line between "conlang" and "supradialectal standard" can get incredibly fuzzy. You mention Rumantsch Grischun and Modern Hebrew yourself, something along similar lines, but much more successful in terms of number of speakers is Bahasa Indonesia. Any number of other supradialectal standards depending on how strict you are with drawing the line may fall under this category.
In addition to supradialectal standards, another thing that may or may not be considered a conlang is controlled languages, such as ASD STE-100 Simplified Technical English which see some use in various technical documents (but aren't really spoken).
I know of one very localized example myself:
Rumantsch Grischun is a constructed variety of the Romansh language which tries to unify the dialect continuum. It is the variety of the language used in official texts and also in some schools and media, but the population in general is rather unhappy about this status quo and prefers using either their own dialects, or Swiss German if that fails.
In addition, some consider Modern Hebrew a conlang, and it does serve as a lingua franca between various Jewish populations. But this is definitely a less prototypical example.
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1012 | Is there a Semitic zonal language?
I am familiar with zonal languages that attempt to smooth out and simplify the differences between languages within a family, such as Slovio for the Slavic languages and Folkspraak for the Germanic languages. Is there an existing zonal language or language project for the Semitic language family?
This was not easy to find!
A bit of jazz Semitic auxlanging going on here.
Ayvarith seems to be an invented language based on Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic.
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255 | Have there been any known instances of conlang-to-conlang translation?
This would include a text written in one conlang and translated straight into another (without being translated to a natural language in between) or, even better, a dictionary meant to translate from one conlang to another.
This seems a little broad to me - there have even been conlangs constructed using other conlangs (and not in the esperanto-ido sense either)
The question in rather broad. One possible answer is obviously "yes", there are known instances. Invented language translation games are as old as our online communities and are still a common occurrence. The Starling Song Relay is the first known formal online conlang-to-conlang translation game, and probably dates to 1998 or thereabouts on Conlang-L.
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90 | What makes lojban such a "logical" language?
The title says it all. While I have not studied it, I have repeatedly heard that lojban is an especially "logical" language, one that could even be a way to speak a "natural" language to the computer that it can understand.
What feature of lojban (or features) makes this so? Is it just that humans haven't gotten to it yet?
Yes - would it remain so pure if a speech community used it like any natural language? I doubt it.
What is meant by "logical language", is that the language's grammar is engineered so that any statement you make is syntactically unambiguous. Grammatically correct statements only parse one way.
In natural languages, and many constructed languages, the meaning of a statement can be interpreted to be a number of things, depending on context.
An example to given in the "Complete Lojban Language" book (CLL), is the term "Pretty Little Girls’ School". In English, there's no way to tell what this means. Does it mean a school for "pretty little girls", a pretty school for "little girls", or a small school that is pretty and for girls?
Lojban's grammar is such that the relationship between words is unambiguous. The meaning to words themselves doesn't matter all too much to the language's designers, just the relation between those words. As such, ambiguity is still possible, but usually in the form of semantic vagueness.
That said, it's not like there's only one way to say anything. According to the CLL, there are Forty ways to translate the English phrase "Pretty Little Girls' School" into Lojban. Among them, is melbi cmalu nixli ckule, which would be a direct translation of the English phrase, word-for-word, and refer a "school for girls who are beautifully small". Whatever "beautifully small" means.
But if you go through the list of possible interpretations, you'll notice that there are in fact some statements that evaluate to the same meaning, either because that's how the semantics work out, or because the two statements can be logically equivalent. (2 + 2 = 4 is equivalent to 2 × 2 = 4 and 2² = 4)
Ultimately, these properties are what make Lojban a tempting tool to use for communicating with AI, who are notoriously bad at working out vague context we use in everyday speech. And it's also why Lojban is called a "Logical Language".
Hm, I remember seeing an appendix to one of the old Loglan books that listed seventeen meanings for “pretty little girls' school”. Now there's forty? Progress!
The syntax of a logical language is amenable to rewriting, which generates a deductive system, a special case of a formal system. There are two main features of a logical language:
Some utterances are provably equivalent to each other
Some utterances provably imply other utterances
For the case of Lojban, I maintain brismu, a living collection of rewrite rules and formal proofs.
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94 | Are words for "machine" and the like in Tolkien present in Elvish/Westron?
Tolkien was very much known to be a bit of a Luddite - no fan of technology; Treebeard says in reference to Saruman
He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.
Which just about sums up his attitude towards technology. I'm curious if as a consequence words for "machine" and the like only show up in, say the Black Speech/Orcish, or if they are known to be rarely used, or derived from Khuzdul.
If there's anything off-topic/that I can improve about this question, please let me know!
I think this is a good question and I upvoted it. Probably the downvoters think that "what's the word for in " questions shouldn't be allowed.
I would find this a good question on scifi.SE, but here it just rubs the the wrong way, in that it is not about the creation of languages, but about this specific fictional work etc.
I'm providing context for my question about if these words exist and whether they derive from black speech/orcish/khuzdul @caconym - and yes, it's about a specific fictional work, because that's where the conlang appears.
@caconyrn Aren't all tolkien-* questions about a specific fictional work?
Could you perhaps search through the dictionaries and report your results? If it is a negative result, is that something actually notable or just the dictionary being small?
Ironically, the word for machine only shows up in the dictionaries of the elvish languages, though the problem there is probably that the dictionaries of orcish/black language/khuzdul are very, very small @caconyrn - so probably not an answerable question to begin with. On the other hand, Khuzdul is based on the semitic languages, and the Black Language might be based on Hittite, so I suppose it'd be possible to try to analyze those compared to Quenya/Noldorin/Sindarin?
I'm voting to close this question because it is a translation request.
Quenya has tanwë which means "device, craft, construction." A search for "machine" on this site which may or may not be reputable gives a couple of other words in Quenya, Sindarin, and Noldorin.
Tolkien did once use the word gun in the Hobbit. This question on sff explains that, and the top answer to it includes this quote:
The Common Speech, as the language of the Hobbits and their narratives, has inevitably been turned into modern English. In the process the difference between the varieties observable in the use of the Westron has been lessened. Some attempt has been made to represent these varieties by variations in the kind of English used ... (LOTR: The Return of the King, Appendix F, "II. On Translation")
I'd recommend reading the entire answer.
Anyway, it seems that, logically, there should be no words for "future" technologies in Middle earth; any translation of them by Tolkien can be explained as Tolkien trying to make it easier for us to understand.
The other point I want to bring up is that many of the words found in modern Quenya dictionaries are not original creations by Tolkien, but derivations from his notes. I doubt he created these words intentionally to violate the technology level of the world.
In the Black Speech, we have only a very limited number of words, as seen here; in Dwarvish, as you pointed out in your own answer here, Tolkien has a very limited vocabulary, and only one word has been borrowed from Khuzdul into the Elvish languages.
I think the quote you have about Sauron being a robot is not literal--the orcs' tehnology was no more advanced than the men and the elves'. I'm sure that "mind of metal and wheels" is meant to be some Entish idiom that references being hasty.
The quote I have about Saruman is definitely not saying he was a robot; the quote was meant to reference Tolkien's association of machinery with evil. I must say, I don't think this quite answers my question.
At least two Khuzdul words entered Sindarin: heledh ‘glass’ and hadhod ‘dwarf’.
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147 | Saying "hello" in khuzdul
Khuzdul, Tolkien's mysterious dwarvish language, is limited in vocabulary (we don't know most of the words) and I can't find hello anywhere. Some notes:
According to this, "good" is "gamut" and "day" is "manan", so "gamut manan" might sort of convey what I'm looking for. (On the other hand, I have no idea if the grammar here is correct.)
This lists neither "gamut" nor "manan" as valid words in Khuzdul, so a reliable dictionary also seems to be somewhat in demand.
This gives "huglgla" as hello. Again, this is listed in neither of the above links.
So, how would you say hello in Khuzdul? Are either of the above three sources reliable? The middle link seems to be closest to Tolkien's actual works, and seems to be cited decently frequently, but perhaps work has been done since that was published.
Well, from what we can glean out of the given texts, I'd be looking for something more like "at your service" rather than "good day".
I know the movies aren't canon, but Jackson depicts the Dwarves as not really comprehending Bilbo when tries to "good morning" them. And Gandalf's retort is classic. That greeting might be a cultural artifact of the Shire.
I wouldn't place too much faith in the lists you link to. They're fan art, which is fine as far as it goes. Especially the third one: that's just horrible garbled English. I mean really: Baruk Khazâd! next to Haw aru tauu? - - - I should think it would be difficult to make a worse reconstruction of Khuzdul.
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108 | Have language regulators ever made concessions and changed the language to adopt naturally occurring changes?
A few conlangs have language regulators or academies. Have any of these ever been faced with naturally occurring linguistic change and changed the official version of the language to match?
Please consider only grammatical, morphological, or syntactic changes, and not simply the inclusion of new words, as I expect that to be very common.
Wouldn't pretty much any spelling reform fall into that category? The issue with figuring out an answer though, is that "language regulators" are rather rarely concerned with issues of grammar, and even less so of syntax (The French Académie's dictionary was originally planned to be accompanied by a grammar, which never got anywhere)
@Circeus To be honest spelling issues hadn't even occurred to me. If there was a natural phonological shift and the regulators were pressured into adopting it that would count I think.
It would seem that Esperanto is one such that not only has done so, but actually has an Academy to guide and legitimize the process.
This article makes note of several, such as new ungendered pronouns (ŝli < ŝi au li; ri = they s.) and the degendering of formerly masculine nouns (dentisto =/= male dentist).
I'm sure that these proposals are coming from the community of speakers themselves and are being agreed to by consensus before any kind of official blessing.
One of the answers there says "As others have mentioned, the Academy of Esperanto is supposed to document changes in language usage, rather than initiate them." If that's true I'm not sure it really counts as the type of academy I'm asking about. But, then two sentences later is "In the rare cases where the Academy has tried to dictate how people should speak, the language community tends to ignore the Academy." so I guess it should count.
Either way, fair enough! But then again, I guess the French are pretty good at ignoring their Academie as well!
sli or ŝli?
@AntonSherwood -- fixed! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
L'Académie has done this in the past, and is dealing with the blowback today.
French, as people tend to know, uses gender in its grammar. Originally, there were feminine forms such as philosophesse in widespread use, but in the 1600s, around the time L'Académie was founded, the idea that "the masculine prevails over the feminine" became a standard French published grammars and dictionaries used, and they explicitly declared this to be the case not because it was an existing linguistic rule in French but because the language should reflect the "natural" male-dominant society of the time. So words such as la philosophesse was declared grammatically incorrect: le philosophe was the only proper term. (Besides, they probably chuckled, it's not like the little ladies could really think anyway, amirite?)
No really, they said that. And L'Académie, who still don't like girl cooties, was on board and kept enforcing that. So you'd see situations where, for instance, if you had an symphony orchestra of entirely female musicians, they'd be referred to as les musiciennes (fem.pl). If they added a single man to the orchestra, now the group is les musiciens (masc.pl), even though the man is outnumbered 100:1.
The blowback happening now, which les immortels (of course, never les immortelles) are fighting hard against, is to tweak French to be a bit more inclusive, by doing things like creating constructions analogous to the "Latinx" term, changing some nouns so that the feminine form is fully accepted as grammatically equal to the male, and perhaps even considered the default; to use an example I just made up, if you referred "an engineer" as a generic, you'd use une ingénieure instead of un ingénieur. And even stopping that stupidity where a single man changes the entire grammatical gender of a group, regardless of how outnumbered he is.
But the question is about conlang language academies.
Fair enough, but it does provide a real-life example.
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291 | How do Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole?
In the book and TV series The Expanse inhabitants of the asteroid belt (Belters) speak a language called Belter Creole, a conlang designed by Nick Farmer which is intended to be the result of creolisation between most of the Earth's languages, including English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Romance languages, Hindi, Slavic, and Bantu. Although the dominant language of the series is English, Belters frequent mix in Belter Creole words, an example of code-switching.
I would like to know in which social situations Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole, or in order words, in which registers. (A register is "a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting" (Wikipedia).) Do Belters code-switch productively in all registers, or only in non-formal registers?
Nick Farmer is pretty active on his twitter, you might be able to get a better answer from him than anyone here.
Agree with Hotkeys on this, at least for a quick answer. It strikes me that a longer and far better answer can be had by perhaps writing a thesis on the topic. There are something like 7 novels and 5 novellas already published, plus at least two seasons of tele. Plus all the scripts, transcripts, drafts & other ephemera. Looks like a good research project in the making!
Nick has talked about how there is no “slang” per se in Belter. Languages like French are spoken both on the street and in high society, so there are multiple registers. It’s an introductory language for many people.
Slang is often used to exclude; if you’re not “one of us” but you still
Speak the language, you still are on the outside because you can’t quite follow what’s being said.
A language like Quechua in South America (according to Nick) doesn’t develop slang because speaking it is already a marker for being low-status socially (vs Spanish speakers). Speaking Quechua already excludes those on the other end of the linguistic divide.
Belter is similar. Nobody but Belters speak it (maybe some inner intelligence officers do, the way UK troops would learn Irish during the troubles. Speaking Belter is a mark of low social status.
Nick has said that he would imagine belters “fluidly speaking belt Lish. One can code shift on the fly between the two languages quite easily. If there amongst a bunch a rock hopper’s, they’ll probably all speak pure LB. When they’re on the docks, when there are more inners around, probably shift more towards English.
Belters have to speak English to deal with the UN/MCRN tax
Collectors. When they get boarded by Mickie Marines, you BETTER speak English. When they deal with the any government office, it’ll be in English.
In Haiti, the majority of the population are monolingual Kreyol speakers. But the language of Education and government forms is French. That leads to some fucked-up outcomes. I imagine Belter would be treated like Creole languages usually are; something broken & degenerate, not a real language.
The correspondence courses Naomi took were almost certainly in English. Nobody is translating engineering textbooks into a “degenerate” language like a Creole, and nobody is teaching this classs in LB. Hinikirii Brown’s tablet on Anderson Station was in English, although he father spoke to her mostly in LB.
Miller is a perfect example of code shifting. Watch his hands throughout the seasons; for a “welwala”, he is the most hand-gesturing Belter on Ceres. When interviewing Gia (who has just had a client murdered in her room), he interviews her in LB to set her at ease. But when talking to the Governor’s agent about the water thieves, he speaks perfect English.
Prax is an educated Belter. You don’t do botany classes in LB. and when he wakes up on the refugee ship, he first asks for Mei in English. When he realizes the crewman he’s speaking to is a Belter, Prax switches to LB. Prax spends so much time speaking English, shifting back into LB is something that takes a moment.
So yeah, my feeling is the code shift mainly comes from “am I speaking to a Belter, or an Inner?” The inner/Belter dichotomy is cooked into LB down to the level of pronouns the way social hierarchy is cooked into Japanese.
“Beltalowda” is the plural pronoun for “Belters” with the connotation of both “all Belters” as well as “us Belters” ( becaus again, almost nobody outside Belters speaks LB). “Inyalowda” is both “all inners” [No distinction between Earther or Martian], and “You inners”.
"When they get boarded by Mickie Marines, you BETTER speak English. When they deal with the any government office, it’ll be in English." I'm not sure how true that is. When one Belter captain speaks to a Martian captain in Jakulski's chapter in Babylon's Ashes, he seems to freely code switch: “Glad to have you here, Captain Montemayor,” Samuels said. “Esá es my department heads. Amash. Rindai. Jakulski." But maybe you're referring to just how Belter Creole is used in the show, not the books?
Also I really doubt there's absolute zero "slang" in Quechua. New ways of speaking are constantly being thought up. Slang in general isn't really related to this question either...
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656 | Are there differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show?
Belter Creole is a conlang creole spoken in the novel series The Expanse by James S. A. Corey. When the novel was adapted into a TV series they got linguist Nick Farmer to develop the language.
Are there substantial differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show? Or is what is in the books just less developed, and Farmer created a more complete but still fully compatible version for the show? Do the later novels, from after the show started to be produced, use Farmer's version or Corey's original version?
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600 | Is any of the Wakandan writing in Black Panther used for something other than English?
For the film Black Panther production designer Hannah Beachler created a Wakandan writing system partially based on real African writing systems. Well that's what this and other news articles say, but if you look at how it's used, for example in the film's intertitles, it's clearly only a transliteration alphabet of English:
You can see here how the letters are 1-1 mappings of the very non-phonemic English spellings.
Now in the film, when the characters aren't speaking English, they are actually speaking Xhosa. (I'm not sure if in-universe that they are meant to be speaking Xhosa, or if Xhosa is just used to represent what would be a distinct Wakandan language in-universe, possibly related to Xhosa.)
Is any of the Wakandan writing in the film used to write Xhosa? Or any other African language, or even an actual conlang?
It's important to note that there were two Wakandan scripts used in the set design of Black Panther -- one is the transliteration alphabet seen here, while the other is a se of symbols based on Nsibidi that is more logographic in nature. They were used on different parts of the set, with the more logographic script occurring in a lot of the more traditional contexts and the alphabet occurring more widely throughout the set.
The Omniglot page for the script includes text written in both English and Xhosa using the script, but the Xhosa text seems transliterated from the romanized orthography for Xhosa. That said, since the author described the alphabetic script as a "more evolved" version of the logography, it's possible that it was deliberately designed to be similar to the Latin transliteration of Xhosa? Granted, that doesn't seem particularly in-character for the Wakanda depicted in the film, but who knows. Perhaps we'll learn more about the script in the inevitable sequel.
I think we can say that the alphabetic script is not only used to transliterate English as it is in the title cards. Consider this image from the article, which features portions of some Wakandan signs:
The glyphs on the rightward sign are difficult to make out and may be part of the logographic script, but those on the leftward sign read "DJO" in the Wakandan script -- as neither DJO nor OJD are allowable clusters in English, it seems unlikely that this is a portion of an English word transliterated into the alphabet.
However, it definitely is used to transliterate English even outside of the title cards. Let's look at the text on the throne in this poster:
The text on the lefthand side of his throne clearly reads "WISDOM" and the righthand text reads "LOYALTY" -- obviously an English transliteration. This is particularly egregious given that this is the king's throne, which arguably shouldn't feature the modern Wakandan script at all, much less Wakandan being used for English. However, it is admittedly a poster, so it's not really properly in the movie -- I cannot find a screenshot of the base of the throne from the actual film, so I can't say whether the text is the same there.
The alphabetic script is frequently used in the set design of the lab, but the only screenshots I can find of it are either too blurry to make out or just feature simply the glyphs overlapping each other for aesthetic in a screensaver-esque fashion.
The "DJO" on the shop sign could be an acronym (like, eg, "KFC"), so it's possible it is still just a transliteration.
@OliverMason Unlikely unless you know of an existing DJO abbreviation that would make sense there -- it's more likely they just used random letters than it is that they worldbuilt an organization and transliterated its abbreviated name.
It's an invented culture, so of course I don't know any abbreviations that would make sense. My point was that it does not have to be an allowable cluster of letters, as "KFC" is not allowable in English, so it could be a random acronym. I think, however, that we're both agreeing on what it is likely to be.
@Sparksbet How are they different words? You mean the glyphs going down the curved part of the wall on either side of the throne, right? It's obvious they are the same characters, so clearly they are the same word. Whether that's 'wisdom' or 'loyalty' or something else I don't know.
@Sparksbet From the Omniglot page: "According to Raven, this means 'meeting-or-congress hall for the panther king and nation'. Source: https://themarysue.com/black-panther-poster-teaser/"
@jastako I'm not referring to the text on the wall behind him in that section, but rather to the text on the throne itself.
@Sparksbet I see where you mean. I didn't even see them before, so I thought you meant behind on the wall on either side.
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290 | Do the ADVENT in XCOM 2 speak a real language?
In the game XCOM 2 ADVENT soldiers shout observations and commands to each other. Their words are not understandable, but context makes clear to the player what they're thinking.
Did the creators of XCOM 2 design a full conlang for ADVENT?
Personally, I'd say these bits and pieces of voice don't sound coherent enough to be a thought-out language. Considering that there are many aliens involved it may also be a lot of languages.
In this article the dev team of XCOM 2 explain that they didn't have the time or resources to invent a full conlang, but instead made up gibberish that got across the sort of 'feeling' they wanted. In order to sound "darker and more ominous," they were deliberate in their choice of sounds for this gibberish, basing it on so-called "guttural languages" such as German and Dutch, and then they designed filters to make the voice actors sound more robotic.
Steve helped shape the final sound by experimenting with the gibberish pronunciations that we came up with. In order to convey meaning to the player, we had to rely solely on the tone and delivery of the lines, with things like ‘Halt!’ Or ‘Enemy Spotted!’ coming across with more intensity than say a standard ‘I’m moving’ line. In the process I also tried to establish vocal patterns in each subset of lines to create some cohesion between the otherwise meaningless words the actors were reading.
A feat on the part of the sound designers and voice actors, to be sure, but not a proper conlang. Nothing stopping XCOM fans from expanding it into a full conlang, though!
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338 | How did Tolkien model diachronic changes in his Elvish languages?
Wikipedia explains that Tolkien modelled changes to his Elvish languages, something we'd call diachronic conlanging these days:
Tolkien conceived a family tree of Elvish languages, all descending from a common ancestor called Primitive Quendian. He worked extensively on how the languages diverged from Primitive Quendian over time, in phonology and grammar, in imitation of the development of real language families.
What is a summary of the major changes he modelled? For example, did he describe something akin to the Great Vowel Shift?
Tolkien mainly played with the consonants in ways similar to the Germanic sound shifts. He also applied lenitation (inspired by Celtic languages) in Sindarin. Afaik, he did not do very much to the vowels (though under some conditions vowels were lost).
The effects on consonants are well illustrated in The Etymologies, a list of Proto-Eldarin roots and their descendants in at least three languages, which you'll find in volume five of the History of Middle-Earth.
OK, here are some details on classical Quenya and classical Sindarin (based on Helmut W. Pesch, Das große Elbisch-Buch, Bastei-Lübbe 2009)
The phoneme inventory of Primitive Quendian was
p t k
pʰ tʰ kʰ
b d g
m n ŋ
r,l
ɣ
w j
a, e, i, o, u, ai, oi, ui, au, eu, iu
An early addition to this repertoire were prenasalised consonants mb, nd, ŋg that developped differently in Quenya and Sindarin.
Sound shifts for Quenya
pʰ tʰ kʰ -> f θ x (later: θ -> s)
b- d- g- -> v- l- Ø
-b- -d- -g- -> -mb- -nd- -ŋg-
mb- nd- ŋg- -> m- n- ŋ- (later: ŋ- -> n-)
The loss of almost all b's, d's, and g's makes Quenya phonological similar to the Finnish language.
Quenya has some old compounds that preserve the pre-shifted state of a root, e.g., for dome > lome "night, darkness" there is an old compund tindome and a newer regular one Aldalome. This adds to the diachronical depth of the language.
Sound shifts for Sindarin
p t k -> b d g
pʰ tʰ kʰ -> v ð ɣ (later: ɣ -> Ø)
mb- nd- ŋg- -> b- d- g-
kʷ -> p
w- -> gw-
Sindarin also has a lot of lenitations (i.e., in certain contexts the initial consonsonant of a word is changed to some "softer" consonant) inspired by Welsh. The lenitations are different for original b d g and b d g that come from mb nd ŋg. Sindarin also has acquired an umlaut y.
EDIT 3: Evolution of initial sp-, st-, and sk-
Both in Sindarin and quenya, consonant clusters with an initial s were simplified in two steps: First, the stop became aspirated and the s was dropped
sp st sk -> pʰ tʰ kʰ
and than the aspirated stops became voiceless fricatives
pʰ tʰ kʰ -> f θ h
In Quenya, also the so-created θ's became s later, such that the net development of Quenya is
st -> s
EDIT 1: Some more information gleened from the dictionary
Quenya Words beginning with h- derive from Primitive Quendian roots beginning in kʰ-. The initial consonant cluster stʰ was simplified via θ to s.
Some words beginning with ç- like hyarmen "south; left side" come from roots beginning in kʰj.
Sindarin has simplified some consonant clusters like kl- kr- via intermediate voiceless l and r but in classical Sindarin those l's and r's are the usual voiced ones (despite being retained in orthography as lh rh).
EDIT 2: The grammatical changes aren't explained in great detail. It seems that Tolkien applied some handwavium here when he states that Quenya was consciously changed for greater clarity. On the other hand, Sindarin has evolved naturally (in Tolkiens internal history) in the woodlands of Middle Earth where everything is interwoven with everything.
Any idea of the grammar changes he made that Wikipedia mentions?
Sindarin did not voice initial voiceless consonants. — The Etymologies show initial sp, st, sk > ph, th, kh > f, þ, h in both Q and S; I don't think they show a Primitive root with sCh.
@AntonSherwood The consonant clusters with an initial s were treated differently from simple consonants, and your sound laws are correct. I will add this to the answer as an edit.
I don't know the exact changes Tolkien enacted, but here are a few in no particular order. You can tell they are quite inspired by real world sound changes in Celtic languages, which I'll mark in brackets. A good summary for quenya can be found here.
Aspirates /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ become fricatives /ɸ θ x/
Lots of syncope, especially the second vowel in trisyllabic words
In Quenya /kʷ/ is retained (Irish), while in Sindarin it becomes /p/ (Welsh)
Vowels are reduced or lost finally, especially in Sindarin (Welsh)
Sindarin features i-affection (Welsh)
Various forms of lenition (Irish, Welsh)
Plenty of assimilation in clusters
Quenya features some palatalization with y /j/
Syllabic consonants become non-syllabic
Some sounds such as /ɣ/ and /ŋ/ are lost or merge with other sounds
In Quenya usually /w/ > /v/, while in Sindarin initial /w/ > /gw/ (Welsh)
Hope this answers your question somewhat.
The usual word for context-dependent alteration of initial consonants in Celtic languages is mutation; there are (i think) three kinds, apparently depending on the lost last consonant of the preceding word.
What is a summary of the major changes he modelled? For example, did he describe something akin to the Great Vowel Shift?
For Sindarin, there are some big changes in vowels comparable to the Great Vowel Shift.
For example, under certain circumstances and in different periods:
á > au
au > o
That's one of the reasons why Sindarin looks quite different from Quenya sometimes. e.g.
Q. - S.
náre - naur
anar - anor
If you want a more detailed "summary", or rather "study", David Salo spent some forty pages to analyze Sindarin's historical sound changes in his book: a Gateway to Sindarin. And here's an essay by Helge K. Fauskanger discussing the Evolution of Quenya.
Or if you want the description from Tolkien himself, you can get Parma Eldalamberon #19, where you can find big phonetic tables by Tolkien.
The biggest Elvish dictionaries made by Tolkien himself are organized by roots - Words in different Elven languages are listed under the proto root from which they are derived.
Here's an example from the Etymologies.
KHER rule, govern, possess. Q[uenya]. heru master, heri lady ...
O[ld ]N[oldorin] khéro master ... N[oldorin]. hîr. N. herth house-hold ...
Note that, at the (external) time of The Etymologies, the Teleri of Beleriand spoke “Ilkorin” and the Noldor spoke what later became Sindarin.
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525 | How does one determine the date a constructed language was invented?
Some constructed languages list a date, or at least year, of creation. Is there any official or unofficial standard to determine that date for any given conlang? The way I see it, there are several possibilities, at least the ones I thought up:
The date that work began on the language
The date of the first evidence of work on the language, if the prior date is not known
The date of the first usage of the language (this could be broken down into public or private usage)
The date of the first publication that mentions the language
The publication date of the first dictionary and/or grammar
For auxiliary languages it's usually publication date of the first grammar/dictionary released to the public or the first work dedicated to the language, whichever comes first.
For Esperanto this was Unua Libro, which was published in 1887 - more than a year after Zamenhof began working on the language. Wikipedia also lists the year of creation of Occidental as 1922, the year de Wahl published the first edition of the Kosmoglotta magazine, despite there being evidence that the language was used much before then, both in private conversation (letters etc.) and even a publication written entirely in Occidental.
The "date of creation" for other types of conlangs seems to be less well-defined, although I'd expect that fictional languages would be associated with the publication of the first book/movie/game that uses them (perhaps with the exception of Tolkien's languages). Wikipedia also uses the day Lojban began being developed as its creation date.
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672 | What are the aspects of Esperanto?
By design (looking at the 16 rules of Esperanto) there is no verbal aspect in the Esperanto grammar. However, one can see an incohative aspect in the prefix ek- (e.g., mi ekridas "I burst out laughing").
More controversial is the question of a perfective/imperfective aspect (see this question and its differing answers) or a continuative aspect. Those aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English (despite tenses named *present perfect or present continous).
What are the verbal aspects in Esperanto and how are they expressed?
Whoever told you Esperanto lacks verbal aspect was lying to you. Yes, aspect isn't mentioned in the 16 Rules. However, this clearly doesn't mean Esperanto completely lacks aspect -- the 16 Rules are not intended to be a linguistically rigorous analysis of Esperanto, but merely a set of easy rules to teach laymen. Zamenhof definitely designed Esperanto containing some aspectual markers, especially given the amount of influence he took from Slavic languages; what is unclear is exactly how much aspectual information he intended to be encoded in certain markers.
Based on your description of Esperanto's complex tenses and your claim that "these aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English", you seem to be under the impression that to truly be present in a language, an aspect must be marked by a single morpheme rather than through syntactic constructions like the verb + participle constructions in English and Esperanto "complex tenses." However, that isn't how that works. The English present/past continuous constructions do mark progressive/continuous aspect. The English present/past perfect constructions do mark the perfect, though "perfect" is a bit more of a complex mix of tense and aspect than it is pure aspect. The fact that certain syntactic constructions are used here rather than a single affix does not make the aspectual marking here any less "pure".
There actually has historically been some debate over how Esperanto participles mark aspect when used in complex tenses. Zamenhof himself saw Esperanto participles as marking a mixture of tense and aspect, and this resulted in a divide among Esperantists regarding whether to translate, say "The house was built long ago" with estis konstruata (because the participle happens at the same time as the main verb) or with estis konstruita (as the building is accomplished and focused on describing its result). The latter group largely won out with an un-official notice from the Academy in 1965, which gave the following positions:
The Esperanto tense system consists of but three tenses: the present, the past, and the future.
All other time relationships (such as the pluperfect, future perfect, etc. of many other languages) are expressed by adverbs, conjunctions, or simply by context.
The six participles, used either with nouns or with the verb esti, show aspect, not tense. They show, in other words, in what phase of the action the subject finds himself with respect to the object: whether beginning and unfinished (-ant, -at), finished and fulfilled (-int, -it), or not yet begun but intended or awaited (-ont, -ot).
Accordingly the forms with -ata focus upon the duration or repetition of the act, and the forms with -ita focus upon the result of the act. The forms with -ita can also show priority in time in the event that there is separate evidence of that in the sentence, such as a word like jam = “already.”
(Quoted from Being Colloquial in Esperanto's Appendix on Participles, which goes into more detail about the conflict here.)
While this treatment of Esperanto participles are markers exclusively of aspect is technically not an official order from the Academy, it has generally been treated as such my most Esperantists, and this is largely how Esperantists use participles -- the -anta/-ata participles marking the continuous/progressive, the -inta/-ita participles marking the resultative, and the -onta/-ota participles marking the prospective. This is consistent with how they're used outside of the complex tenses as well. Based on this, one would have to willfully ignore a lot of Esperanto usage and convention to claim its participles don't mark aspect.
In addition to the obvious aspect marking on the participles, it should also be noted a few other affixes mark what could be considered aspect. You've mentioned ek- as a marker of inchoative aspect yourself (it could also be said to mark the momentane). -iĝ- could also be said to have some inchoative flavor to it (though it's a bit more obscured among its other functions, consider that eksidi and sidiĝi are near-synonymous), and -ad- similarly can mark something like continuative or iterative aspect.
Note for non-Esperantists: the dispute over aspect leading up to 1965 was quite acrimonious; and the decision was based not on notions of logic or parsimony, but on prior usage, with Zamenhof's own usage privileged (as @Sparksbet has indeed noted). The advocates of a temporally-based interpretation of compound tense were almost all native speakers of Germanic languages.
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644 | Dialects of Klingon
There seem to be dialects of Klingon, as stated here, Maltz speaks the Rumaiy dialect while Saavik speaks the Kumburan dialect.
Is there something known about the differences between the Klingon dialects? What are remarkable features of the respective dialects?
You might want to consider joining the tlhIngan-Hol mailing list, and asking that there. TTBOMR, the only thing that's been said officially is that the word for 'forehead' is different in just about every dialect.
@JeffZeitlin: Are you active on the mentioned mailing list? Could you post a link to this site there?
I'm not at the computer I receive that list on, and I don't recall the subscription details. It is hosted by the Klingon Language Institute, so you should be able to find info at http://kli.org
Apart from the word for "forehead" being diagnostically different in the various dialects of Klingon (as pointed out by @JeffZeitlin), the only other canonical information I know of is that in some dialects, <D> and <b> /ɖ, b/ are pronounced as /ɳ, m/ (<N> and <M>—though I don't remember if those transliterations are canonical, or invented by me for the Klingon Hamlet).
EDIT: More about dialects from http://klingonska.org/piqad/, citing Klingon for the Galactic Traveller. (I was right that I made up <M>, and <N> is not canonical.)
The Tak’ev Dialect
Dialect spoken in the Tak’ev (taq’ev) region. It is one of the larger
minority dialects and has a much greater number of speakers that the
Krotmag dialect. It sounds like blend of Krotmag an Standard Klingon,
and is the one dialect (that we know of) which most closely resembles
Standard Klingon. It is only briefly described in canon.
Nasal vowels
Pronounces b as mb
Pronounces D as ND
The Krotmag Dialect
Dialect spoken in the Krotmag (Qotmagh) region. This dialect has
fewer speakers than the Tak’ev dialect, but is well known and easily
recognized by other Klingons. Some of the dialects peculiarities have
even influenced Standard Klingon.
Nasal vowels
Pronounces b as m (as in English mime)
Pronounces D as N
Often uses extra words in noun phrases, originally to differentiate between words with b and m (e.g. ’uS qam leg foot, nach qam head face), but now prevalent even when no disambiguation is needed (e.g. NeS ghop arm hand, nach ghIch head nose, qorNu’ tuq family house and even yan ’etlh or ’etlh yan sword sword)
Often adds short extra sentences to disambiguate between verbs with b and m (e.g. mImoH. yIjotchoH. You’re impatient. Calm down!, mImoH. ’oy’ mInNu’wIj. You’re ugly. My eyes ache.)
The Morskan Dialect
Dialect spoken on the conquered Klingon world Morska. We’re treated to
brief bout of the Morskan dialect of Klingon in ST6 when Enterprise
encounters a Klingon listening post. (The Klingon spelling of the word
“Morska” is unknown – the only canon occurrence is in spoken form, in
the Morskan dialect, by that guard in ST6).
The Morskan dialect is characterized by the following speech patterns.
Pronounces tlh as ghl at the beginning of syllables, and as ts (as in English cats) at the end
Pronounces H as h (as in English hat) at beginning of syllables, and not pronounced at all at end
Pronounces Q as Standard Klingon H
Usually drops -’e’ from the final noun in “to
be” phrases (except when the subject of such phrases are emphasised)
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704 | 21st century International Auxiliary Languages
What are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) created and promoted in the 21st century?
I am aware that many people think that Esperanto and Interlingua are in some sense "the last word" on International Auxiliary Languages and that other projects have no realistic chance in succeeding against the established ones. This does not prevent authors to invent new conlangs purposed as IALs, and I like to hear of recent projects fulfilling this criterion.
I am only interested in projects that are worked out to a certain degree, including a grammar, a sketch of derivational morphology, a substantial word list, and some sample texts. Mere conlang stubs don't qualify as answers.
The target group should be really international, conlangs designed for specific subgroups (like interslavic or intergermanic languages) don't count.
Lingua Franca Nova isn't 21st century, but is pretty close (1998)
The only legitimate examples from the Wikipedia article International auxiliary language are Nerrière's Globish (2004) and Interslavic (2006). Both of these fail OP's criteria, since they are specific to one language branch. Other instances either predate 2000 (Kotava, Lingua Franca Nova), or were not intended as auxlangs (Lojban) or both (Toki Pona). To these, Wikipedia's list of constructed auxiliary languages adds Sambahasa (2007) and Lingwa de planeta (2010), both of which pass OP's criteria.
Ironically, the Interslavic wikipedia page says that "the language" dates from 1665—but what that actually means is the first Slavic-based auxlang, rather than Interslavic (initially Slovianski-N), which was created by Jan van Steenbergen in 2006.
(The Wikipedia page is also confusing in that it discusses the multiple variants of Slovianski and preceding and subsequent efforts together, rather than highlighting the lineage of the language now labelled Interslavic. But since work is ongoing to unify all those variants, that confusion is not surprising.)
Lojban is an example. It hasn't been created in the 21st century, but it still has a very active community, and its grammar is specified thoroughly. Of course, it has weaknesses for IALs like a distinction between labial and rhotic consonant and a five-vowel system, but it is much less eurocentric than Esperanto and Interlingua.
It's not intended as an Auxiliary Language though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_language
According to the article, it is in the IAL sub-category of logical languages (see Classification) and one of Lojban's goals is improved communication between humans of any nationality, which makes it an auxiliary language ("a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common first language").
Pierre Janton, who Wikipedia cites in the classification, is an Esperantist who put forward an all-encompassing typology of conlangs, and called it an auxlang typology. Lojban and Loglan were not designed as auxlangs, and the Lojban wiki itself disclaims that purpose: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Is_Lojban_an_auxlang%3F: "As compared to constructed auxlangs from 1997 til 2016 fluent Lojban speakers have not been promoting Lojban as an auxlang."
Lojban was of course primarily designed to be a logical language, but as I said, it has some aspects that make it an auxiliary language. To be honest, the article doesn't really answer the question, as a thing not being promoted as some other thing doesn't make it not that other thing. (Homeopathy has been promoted as a medication and Trump has been promoted as a good president.)
If you're going to ignore the dating requirement, then that makes this question just ask for all auxlangs ever. I don't think this is a valid answer.
You are right about that. But, as Nick made clear in his answer, languages meeting all the criteria are kind of rare (he found 2 in the dozens of existing ALs). And Lojban's 1997 (Year of publication of "The Complete Lojban Language") is pretty close, although.development started earlier. In Wikipedia's list, it would be the sixth-youngest AL.
By ‘labial’ did you mean ‘laminal’?
Yes, actually. Well caught.
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699 | Designing a mildly weird phonology
I want to design a mildly weird phonology with the following features
Not particularly difficult to pronounce for speakers of average European languages
Feeling somewhat unnatural or weird
The weirdness should be noticeable (like the OSV word order in Klingon is). It may include statistical effects (some phones are used more frequent than others thereby producing the effect of weirdness).
What techniques can I use to achieve this effect?
A skewed frequency is a perfectly normal property of many linguistic inventories (eg word distribution across a text etc), so it would probably more 'weird' if all phones would be used with an even frequency distribution.
This question has been voted primarily opinion-based. I'd like to note that @jknappen asks for techniques for a goal, and linguistic difference from European languages isn't so opinion based. 'Unnatural' or 'weird', however might be. But although being words that are ultimately opinion-based, I believe most potential respondents know what techniques achieve such an effect.
Probably the best technique is making the language weird by absence. Instead of giving the language weird phonemes, make it lack the most common phonemes. A language with 5 vowels but no /a/, /i/ or /u/. A language with several consonants, but no /p/, /t/, or /k/. Or totally without bilabials. Or with no stops.
This would be my answer. It could be improved by adding a sentence explaining why this is the "best technique": deleting sounds rather than adding them keeps the language easy to pronounce.
You should start with consonants, I don't think you can make a vowel inventory as weird as a consonant inventory (maybe complex tones? creaky voice?). After that, it depends on your opinion of "particularly difficult" and "unnatural and weird".
- Click consonants can be easy enough if you don't overdo it (more like Bantu languages/Damin and less like Khoisan languages, so only the simple ones).
- Retroflex consonants are also not very European and sufficiently easy to pronounce, but maybe not noticeably weird.
- Ejectives and implosives are similar, but much more noticeable.
- Linguolabials sound and look weird (especially the trill) and are very easy to produce. Same goes for bilabial trill.
- Prenasalization, unclosed plosives and similar modifications are non-European (I don't know much about their ease of pronunciation).
- You could go with something like Kaybop and have manual percussives (Kaybop has clap [bimanual percussive] and facepalm [faciomanual percussive]), which is very unnatural (maybe a bidigital percussive?). These are weird no matter what you say. Also from Kaybop: Phonemic hats.
Klingon frequently uses velar and uvular voiceless sounds, which gives it its typical Klingonyness. You can also remove areas of the IPA (note that it is unadviced to just remove certain sounds), where you can choose randomly from removing all voiced, voiceless, labials, alveolars, velars, plosives, fricatives and so on, or make phonemes from any area noticeably more frequent.
Then there are phonotactics. Many European languages have consonant clusters, so a syllable structure like CV or CVC has an exotic feeling (just look at Austronesian languages like Hawai'i). Ithkuil on the other side is weird because it has so many consonants (and vowels) and very complex clusters.
This concludes my advices, but there are probably many more things fitting your description.
An acquaintance of mine was playing with conlanging at one point, and came up with the idea of removing all voiced consonants...
@JeffZeitlin Seems radical (enough). How did it sound? Btw: Removing consonants can be used as an opportunity to add consonants with other features, like removing voiced and adding palatalized.
It turned out not to be extremely radical; it was for a race that didn't have vocal cords. Effectively, the language was simply whispered.
Reminds me of Parseltongue (from Harry Potter) (which is probably not the language your friend created). Because snakes don't have human mouth anatomy, not even lips, it couldn't use voicing or labial consonants.
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719 | Slang in Esperanto
Esperanto has a literature (both original and translated) including criminal stories. Criminals are often portrayed as speaking some slang, so my question is:
How does criminal slang looks like in Esperanto?
You might get more replies posting this on the Esperanto stackexchange.
Related question on [esperanto.se]: https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/questions/339/do-dialectical-variations-exist-in-esperanto
La sociolekta triopo
Manuel Halvelik created three sociolects for Esperanto, Arcaicam Esperantom (1969), an archaic pre-form of Esperanto, Popido (1973), a constructed dialect of Esperanto, and Gavaro (2006), an argot of Esperanto. Arcaicam Esperantom and Popido are used in the Esperanto literature, but I don't know a work using Gavaro (what is not surprising, looking at the publication date of Gavaro).
An interesting feature of Gavaro are the numerals, they are taken from Volapük and are obscure to Esperanto speakers: 1 bwal, 2 twel, 3 kwil, 4 fwol, 5 lwel, 6 mwel, 7 vwel, 8 zwul, 9 ĵwel, 10 dweg, 100 twum, 1000 mlat.
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575 | What is the influence of Russian on Tolkien's languages?
I have noticed some artifacts from Russian in published earlier manuscripts of Tolkiens works, e.g.,
The figure named Beorn in The Hobbit was named Medwed in earlier manuscripts
In Early Quenya, there is the word velike "great"
So what is the influence of Russian to Tolkien's languages?
To begin with, Tolkien writes in letter 142 that
I love music but have no aptitude for it [...] Slavonic languages are for me almost in the same category. I have had a go at many tongues in my time, but I am in no ordinary sense a 'linguist'; and the time I once spent on trying to learn Serbian and Russian have left me with no practical results, only a strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic
which implies that large portions of his languages are probably not structured on Russian. I then further point to this essay. In summary, the
conclusion that Tolkien “consciously or unconsciously achieved a literary effect in terms of Slavic culture through the prism of the Germanic”, goes too far on too little evidence [...] Better would be to say that Tolkien did indeed incorporate a few Slavic elements into the multifaceted and multi-sourced structure and background of Middle-earth, but that he did so quite sparingly and, in almost every case, only at its furthest margins.
While the detailed analysis can be found in that article, it seems fairly clear that while a few words may have crept in here and there, these words were also Germanic cognates or were cut out of Tolkien's language, with only one or two exceptions.
In the Comparative Tables, Tolkien wrote "East Lemberin is of Lithuanian type". Not really Russian, but that's as close as we can get for direct evidence.
The Tables do show changes, to my knowledge, historically common/similar to both Lithuanian and Russian, and unique to other Elvish dialects.
For example, kj > š, gj > j, kw > k, gw > g.
Also the "strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic" in karatechop's answer IMO, does suggest there could be some Russian influence.
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743 | What are some real world data on the numbers of speakers of constructed languages?
What are some real world data (e.g., from census data, membership data, visitors of conlang related events, other estimates) on active speakers of constructed languages?
There is some basic data at Ethnologue for Esperanto.
The Font of All Knowledge lists some statistics for other invented languages (Hungarian & Russian census data).
Not much, but a (small) start.
For any particular language maybe 1-2 to dozens. The best way to find out would be to collect as many writing samples as possible that have been posted to the internet. Pick some arbitrary cut off for what counts as "speaking" the language for length. When I did this for toki pona, there were maybe a few hundred people who could write at least a few paragraphs.
Na'vi and Klingon probably have at least a handful to few dozen each. I don't know of any corpus gathering projects for those languages.
The number of people who have purchases learning materials, such as the Klingon dictionary, is thousands of times higher than the number of people who invested the time to learn the language. I look forward so seeing more stats out of Duolingo for the Game of Thrones Languages and Klingon.
As for the acid test of fluency- natives who learned the language from their parents, maybe one or two. (Excluding Esperanto natives- there are a lot of those)
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773 | Is there a specific term for a substitution cipher language?
A really simple but effective method to create an unintelligble language from a given language is applying a substitution cipher to the vocabulary. In order to be pronouncable, vowels should be substituted with vowels, and consonants with other consonant of comparable sonority.
It is of course a special case of a relexification, but is there a specific term for this?
"Substitution cipher" would be an appropriate term.
"code" or "coded language". Probably mostly used in conjunction with sign languages, where the signs replace the (spoken) words (e.g. Signing Exact English as opposed to "natural" signed languages), but also for "encoded" spoken languages (either by relexification or phoneme substitution).
There is no need to put scare quotes around "natural." Sign languages like ASL ARE natural languages.
I think we could use some terms from physics here. Let's say a relex is isochor (alternative: isomek from Ancient Greek mêkos "length") if it preserves length of words, and isotonic (alternative: isoson/isosonor/isosonic, a Latin-Greek mix) if it preserves sonority patterns. Your substitution cipher would then be an isochor-isotonic relexification.
But is it really a relexification? It's an encoding, not a different language.
Relexification just means that the vocabulary of a language is changed to get a new language. And OP clearly wanted a new language, not only a cipher or encoding. ("method to create an unintelligble language", line 1)
I have never heard of a "substitution cypher language."
One might adduce Pig Latin or Double Dutch as examples of such a thing, but these are not conlangs. They are typically called "language games." A substitution cypher is not a language--it's a way of disguising one or more languages.
To qualify as a conlang, a constructed communication system has to have its own grammar and its own way of mapping meanings onto words.
By those standards even Esperanto would at least be in question as a conlang either since its grammar is usually basically the same as English except for a few differences. Even though in reality it's flexible, in practice it's usually like English. I don't know where you draw the line between a game & a language but I don't think that's a good way to do it. Just because something doesn't have a completely original grammar doesn't mean it's not a language. I think that line is a lot blurrier than you're making it out to be.
Esperanto's grammar may be similar to English in some ways, but as a whole, it is not English grammar. People who study Esperanto have to learn its grammar too, not just its words. // What is more, a "substitution cypher" is indifferent to the language it is used to encode. The same substitution cypher could be used to encrypt any number of languages. The same can't be said of Esperanto. // Bottom line: is "substitution cypher language" your own coinage, or can I look it up in linguistics articles?
Esperanto Grammar is (in MOST cases) more like English than it is different. The main exception to that being that the plurality of nouns & adjectives has to match. Word order is the same in most cases. If grammar is what makes something a language, then I could take Pig Latin, change the word order & call it a language, right? I'm not sure I would agree that grammar alone makes a language.
Having a grammar like that of English doesn't make Esperanto a substitution cypher. Consider "E-prime," English without the copula. The grammar is almost identical to English, but it is in no way a substitution cypher. BTW, you ignored the point that one substitution cypher can be used to encode any number of languages. Can Esperanto be used to send a message in Vietnamese, German, AND English?
I never said that "grammar alone makes the language." I said that a properly constructed conlang would have its own grammar. You could call your code a language if you wanted to, but if your code strives for minimal deviation from a natural language, you'd be defeating the purpose of conlanging. It is supposed to be, at least, a creative endeavor. Your Pig Latin code is the conlanging equivalent of constructing a miniature golf course comprising one hole with a one-foot putt. You can do it, but don't expect golfers/conlangers to be impressed.
You also pretended that I didn't say the following: "and its own way of mapping meanings onto words." As many people on this list know, vocabulary from one language often fails to map neatly onto the vocabulary of a different language. The "hand" begins at the wrist in some languages and in the middle of the forearm in others. Color terms vary. Vocabulary varies across languages because of culture too. One culture's spinster is another's bachelorette. Well-constructed conlang vocabularies are also "foreign" in the sense just illustrated.
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807 | How is ANADEW pronounced?
How is the acronym ANADEW pronounced among conlang enthusiasts. I have seen it only in print so far and I want to know whether the letters are spelled out or whether it is pronounced as if it were an English word.
Well, spelling out each letter makes 8 syllables, so I guess it's safe to assume it is pronounced as an English word.
As a native speaker of American English from the middle of the North American continent, I have always pronounced it as /ˈænədu/, like Xanadu (the movie), but with out the leading /z/. Visit https://tophonetics.com for a close approximation (capitalization ignored, British and American options generate the same audio).
In some dialects, of both US and UK English dew rhymes with do but in others it is /dju/. We can assume ANADEW rhymes with dew so if you say /dju/ then say /ˈænədju/.
I concur with lee.
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825 | Is there some more detailed information about Dritok available?
Dritok is a conlang by Dan Boozer without any voiced sounds. It is said to be based on chipmunk sounds.
While this language even has a wikipedia article, I was not able to discover some more detailed information about the language like full phoneme inventory or some information about the transcription system used or some glossed examples of it.
Are there some resources on Dritok available?
This website contains a video and links to some resources. The most important is this PDF, which explains gestures ("Dritok Gestural Syntax"), phonology and grammar.
Great resource, the relevant info is on p. 18.
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831 | Constructed languages or dialects for Time travellers
Time travel is a standard trope in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Since time travel disrupts the normal perception of time time travellers may develop some linguistic means to deal with this situation.
My question is: What are examples of either constructed languages for time travellers or constructed varieties of natural languages used by time travellers and how do they deal with aspects related to time travel?
Not an answer, but there is a reddit thread which deals with the problem, although it doesn't give an example.
Ted Chang wrote "Story of Your Life" which was the basis for the movie Arrival. I thought both the book and the visual representation in the film were excellent examples of languages based on a travelers use of time. In this story understanding the language is to understand your life as a simultaneous event, and thus have access to all moments at once.
You may also want to consider Jargon specific to your vision of time travel. Do paradox occur, and if so what is the resultant outcome? Do parallel realities exist, are there different types? Can futures be erased or overwritten, if so, what do you call a future that no longer exists, or a person lost in one? Do you have some sort of McGuffin for the travelling part? Is the language the means of travel? Do bodies travel or only minds?
You might consider leveraging something like Hobo signs, notes left by other travelers, with help or warnings, that type of thing. Alternatively, Signals of fealty and place, such as a question and response or sing the local anthem to identify other travelers as friend or foe. Flushing out what you want them to communicate, as well as the mood or archetypes of the speakers, might help drive the sound and appearance of the language.
You might want to explore the use of Gallifreyan in Doctor Who as he is a member of time-travelling people called the Gallifreyans. He always has a confused sense of time on his show.
It appears that this language uses a series of circles that represent different aspects of time.
That's a tough one. All languages (previously) in existence are in essence linear, because they are phonetic representations of human experience. Even when describing the past or the future, language does so in a linear form. Also, any human language is itself subject to time, with one phoneme uttered after another. In addition, the grammars of some languages are very restrictive to allow expression of effect preceding cause, etc. For example, Indo-Germanic languages cannot have verbs without a subject and the subject must precede the verb. So looking at natural languages it is clear that some are better suited to express time paradoxes etc. than others.
Probably the best candidate languages to extend or base a conlang on would be those languages that do not change sentence structure for singular vs plural, present vs past or future, affirmative vs negative, certain vs conditional, etc. Japanese for example would be a good candidate. To change all of the aforementioned sentence parameters you would just use suffixes, e.g. -ta for past tense, -tachi for plural, -yo for conditional, etc. It could therefore easily be extended with suffixes to express time paradoxes, timelines, etc.
Another language that meets the conditions of unchanging sentence structure related to time & conditions would be Chinese (Literary Chinese to be exact, Modern Chinese would be a bit more problematic due to its compound phrases). This is a monosyllabic language where word meaning is based on tone. Chinese currently has 4 tones. You could add modulations to these tones to express time travel related conditions and effects. But unless you've been brought up in this language it would be extremely hard to learn (just learning to distinguish the current 4 tones in all circumstances is already a daunting task for a non-native speaker unless you're also musically inclined).
If you want to construct a conlang that is not based on any existing language, a good candidate would be a language that is based on harmonics (i.e. multiple frequencies uttered at the same time). Different harmonics could represent different time-related states. However, human vocal chords are not really up to the task of uttering complex harmonics.
There's probably many other ways to answer your question but here's my 2 cents :)
I would like to state that sign languages are a) a human language and b) not linear in your second sense. With two hands and a face, it is both possible and common to utter three signs at once.
Spoken languages can also change the meaning of a word by body language, volume, or tone, for example, In Literary Chinese, every syllable is a word and the tone of the syllable makes it a completely different word (with many underlying meanings). Being able to express different factors at once does not make language in itself (spoken or signed) non-linear.
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1381 | Are there conlangs designed to be whispered?
We all know that natural languages can be whispered and we use whispering for several purposes, e.g., to avoid someone unwanted listening, or in order not to disturb a larger audience. But are there conlangs that are designed to whispered and don't have a "fully voiced" form?
I am aware of Dritok and I'd like to hear from more of them!
Yes.
The Whispering Language is designed for communicating with deaf-mutes -- a language that can easily be lipread.
Ahtialan came to be used as a whisper language.
Xylphika only rarely demonstrates voicing.
Parseltongue seems to be compounded of sibilants and voiceless vowels.
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1446 | Reverse diachronic languages
There is quite an amount of so-called diachronic constructed languages, taking one language (historical like vulgar Latin, or modern like present-day English) and applying some sound shifts and grammatical shifts to this language.
Going the other way round, constructing a language that is older in time than the given language and is meant to be a plausible antecessor of that language is much rarer. I am aware of Arcaicam Esperantom as an example of such a language, but I'd like to learn of more of them.
So what are examples of reverse diachronic constructed languages?
Would Proto Indo-European and other similar projects count for what you are looking for?
No, I want to exclude scientific reconstructions of Proto-Languages and concentrate on the artistic side of diachronics.
I believe Tolkien worked both forward and backward in making the Elvish languages.
worth noting that, because sound changes are not generally reversible, this is much harder, and requires much more fine-grained work (e.g. at the word, or at least root level, rather than at the scale of an entire lexicon) than working forwards in time (it's partly for this reason that many people recommend starting from a proto-lang if there's any chance you may want a sister language at some point in the future, the other reason being that it aids in producing naturalism)
Possibly the most well-known example is Mark Rosenfelder’s Proto-Eastern, which was developed to be a plausible ancestor of Verdurian. Probably there are others as well.
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626 | Free word building in Interlingua
There is even a Wikipedia article on Free word building in Interlingua stating that it is feasible to apply derivational affixes in Interlingua productively even when none of the so-called control languages uses a specific derivation.
However, the Wikipedia article has a lack of real-world examples of such Interlingua words. How productive is Free word building in Interlingua? What are some sample words that are actually used in Interlingua?
I don't see where the wikipedia article says that one can apply derivational affixes in Interlingua even when none of the control languages uses a specific derivation. I cannot find any text saying such in the article.
@Sparksbet I expect the reference is to this line: "For example, jada (jade) can be used to form jadificar, (to jadify, make into jade, make look like jade), jadification, and so on. These word forms would be impermissible in English but would be good Interlingua." None of the control languages has a form "jadification", but it is apparently permissible Interlingua.
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2185 | Are there specific name forms for Interlingua?
While it is not uncommon for Esperanto speakers to use Esperantised name forms like Ludoviko, the Interlingua community usually uses the native spelling of personal names. But I want to know, if there are name forms specific to Interlingua (maybe to be found in literary works originally written in Interlingua). Some examples of such names (with quotations where they are sourced from, if possible) are welcome.
A category I completely overlooked while asking the question are monarchs, their names were once customly translated between the European languages. Taking the Interlingua Wikipedia as a measuring stick, the treatment of their names is somewhat inconsistent and I note the following
There are Interlingua names for the Ancient Roman imperators, like Cesare Augusto, Claudio, Constantino, or Juliano ( https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Imperatores_roman )
For British monarchs, several of them are in Interlingua: Anna, Carolo III, Eduardo, Georgio, Guilielmo, Maria, Ricardo; but: Elisabeth. Victoria is undecidable ( https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Monarchas_britannic )
Swedish kings go by their usual names without modification ( https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Reges_de_Svedia )
Others are inconsistent, I find Carolo Magne (Charlemagne) and Ludovico V besides Charles Martell and Napoléon III.
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1655 | Language statistics and constructed languages
Natural languages are known to follow some statistical laws, the most famous among them is Zipf's law.
Are there published studies of some conlangs with respect to statistical laws of language, not necessarily restricted to Zipf's law, and what are the results of them?
A quick search on "quantitative linguistics esperanto" returns a few hits, eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233561508_Quantitative_analysis_of_Zamenhof's_Esenco_kaj_estonteco
Zipf's Law and other similar laws regarding the statistical behaviour/properties of languages are studied in Quantitative Linguistics. Using QL as a search term together with the name of a conlang (eg Esperanto) will likely lead to some relevant results:
Quantitative analysis of Zamenhof's Esenco kaj estonteco
Investigating Esperanto's Statistical Proportions Relative to other Languages using Neural Networks and Zipf's Law
Equilibrium (Zipf) and Dynamic (Grasseberg-Procaccia) method based analyses of human texts. A comparison of natural (english) and artificial (esperanto) languages
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195 | Which types of conlangs are the most popular to construct?
For example, can it be shown that there are more auxiliary than artistic conlangs? Note that I'm not talking about use, but about which type is more popular to create. The answer can address any level of specificity; i.e. it could address types, subtypes, very broad generalizations, etc. (I'm afraid I don't know very specific categorizations to be more clear; feel free to edit or suggest better words in the comments.) I would prefer answers focused on conlangs from more "modern" times; say, starting with the introduction of Tolkien's languages forward.
If no answer is possible because the data doesn't exist or isn't organized in a way that allows for such an inventory to be taken, that is also acceptable.
This is a hard to answer question, as there isn’t any statistically useful database. CALS has a bunch of data, but only a small subset of conlangers have ever entered their data there. There, there seems to be a clear preference for the creation of Artlangs, i.e. creating languages simply for the sake of creating art, not to fulfill any purpose. A priori langs seem to be favoured over a posteriori, likely because the latter is quite a bit more work-intensive (every new vocabulary item needs to be researched if one wants to do a good job at it…).
A larger sample size can be found on reddit. However, there are no statistics there, and the sample is skewed in favour of beginner conlangers (only few experienced conlangers ever frequent it. source: personal experience as a moderator). To get an idea of the data, we can use Google search results. With the added restriction site:reddit.com/r/conlangs here are some results (first number total of following search results):
Auxlangs: 893
Auxlang: 469
Auxiliary Language: 212
IAL: 212
Artlangs: 430 (this number is problematic because this category appears to be taken as the default by many, yielding no search results)
Artlang: 191
Artistic Language: 239
A priori: 1'170
A posteriori: 328
Naturalistic: 363
“Romance” languages: 1'403
romlang: 363
romance: 1'040
“Germanic” languages: 1'210
germanic: 1'210
Indo-European: 730
Creole: 364
As you can see, on reddit, taking inspiration from existing European language families is very common. From personal experience, among more experienced conlangers there are very few people trying to create auxiliary languages, most people striving to either create naturalistic languages or to push the boundaries of linguistics in some way or another. But I cannot provide any data for this.
My experiences are largely the same as those of Adarain, though I have access to a data-set that perhaps better shows the predominance of artlangs, as I moderate a moderately sized discord server in which users can request roles that show what kind of languages they make and at the same time get a fancy-coloured name. Many users have more than one roles and the roles are not mutually exclusive either. The first number is the amount of people who have the role, the second number is the amount of people who have it as their primary colour:
A posteriori: 24, 8
A priori: 73, 19
Artistic: 66, 43
Auxiliary: 11, 8
Engineered: 16, 16
Joke: 8, 4
Secret (for secret communication): 12, 4
These numbers clearly show the dominance of a priori artistic languages. Additionally, all but one of the people with auxiliary as their main colour are relative beginners, though this a rather small sample and it may come down to server culture as much as anything.
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359 | What is the word “li” in Toki pona, grammatically?
In Toki pona, words are never inflected, and many words can act as a noun, verb or adjective in different contexts. The word "li" usually separates the subject from a predicate, and “e” goes before the object (in SVO order). With soweli (animal), moku (eat, food) and kili (fruit), one can say:
soweli li moku e kili
The animal eats the fruit.
This is the usage listed in the dictionary section of the official book, Toki Pona: the Language of Good:
li. PARTICLE (between any subject except mi alone or sina alone and its verb; also to introduce a new verb for the same subject)
But there is another usage, as seen in phrase:
soweli li ijo
Animals are things (ijo means thing).
It seems that this usage increases the ambiguity, because
soweli li moku
can mean both ”The animal is eating” (with moku as an intransitive verb), or ”animals are food”.
What role does the li actually have in this phrase?
Li in these examples could be described as a copula - this is the name for a word whose function is to link a subject and predicate.
I guess the lack of an explicit verb for “to be” is what makes this confusing. Are you saying li is a copula both when it means ”animals are eating” and ”animals are food”? In the first case, li goes between the subject and verb, in the second case there is no visible verb, just “animal li food” - it's more like in this case, li means “to be”? Or is it maybe “moku” that goes from meaning “eating” to mean ”be food”, rather than just “food”?
"To be" does function as a copula in English (among other things), but I would not say that this means li means "to be", as it is not a verb and is not used in the same ways. Many languages lack a verb for "to be", and Toki Pona is one of them. However, it serves a similar function when in a NOUN = NOUN context.
Calling li a particle or predicate marker is correct and not misleading. A Toki Pona clause can have more than one predicate. li never marks a non-predicate. It also appears on every predicate except when that predicate is the first one in the clause and the subject is exactly mi or exactly sina (101) or when preceded by the vocative/imperative particle o (102).
I think a good way to analyze this would be to say that every indicative predicate obligatorily has a predicate marker, but sometimes it's null.
mi moku li pakala. (101)
I food LI mistake.
I eat and destroy.
o lukin e ni. (102)
IMP see DObj that.
watch this.
Here's a fragment of (my best guess of) the Toki Pona grammar. I haven't seen any examples of stacking imperative phrases, so I don't know whether look and say would be o lukin li toki or o lukin o toki.
Also, in Toki Pona verb phrases and noun phrases are different syntactically. For instance, *sina moku e soweli ala soweli. cannot be used to mean are you a vegetarian.
LI := 0 | "li"
PredInd := LI VP {PP} | LI NP
ClauseInd := NP [PredInd]
PredImp := "o" VP {PP} | "o" NP
ClauseImp := NP PredImp | PredImp
I'm not thrilled with this analysis because of the asymmetry between indicative and imperative clauses. Unifying the clause types, however, would predict that *li moku. is valid. As far as I can tell, Toki Pona does not permit null subjects in indicative clauses.
I can think of two potential alternative analyses for li: A) it's a pronoun (like in Example 4 Longgu on this WALS article or B) it's a preposition. I'll try to show that both of those analyses lead to bad predictions.
A) li as pronoun.
This falls apart for a couple of reasons. It predicts that mi moku li pakala would be invalid and that the correct form would be mi moku mi pakala. In reality, both forms are fine.
li as a pronoun also predicts that *li moku would be valid since it would contain an explicit subject under that analysis.
Also, *mi moku li. cannot be used to mean I eat it.
B) li as preposition.
If li were a preposition, (103) and (104) would both be valid.
Mi pakala e moku. (103)
I ruin the food.
*Mi e moku li pakala. (104)
*I ruin the food.
If li were a preposition, the following would be invalid.
Ona mute li toki ala toki? (105)
Are they speaking?
Mapping word class jargon from one language to another is a dicy project. Lojbanists decided that they needed to invent entirely new words for word class jargon. That said...
All the toki pona particles (o, li, e, pi, la) act most similar to Japanese particles or English clitics, eg. "the". Clitics bind to a phrase. There are other tests for what counts as a clitic.
They are semantically bleached, do not act like content words. "li" in particular introduces a noun phrase or a verb phrase.
The syntactical li structure was inspired by Toki Pisin ...
and in an online Tok Pisin grammar I found :
[...] Tok Pisin has its own grammatical rules.
First of all, look at the following sentences:
Mi wok. 'I worked.'
Yu wok. 'You worked.'
Em i wok. 'He/she worked.'
Tom i wok. 'Tom worked.'
Note that the last two sentences have the little word i before the verb. (Remember that in Tok Pisin, i is pronounced something like "ee".) This little word is called a "predicate marker", and it must occur in a sentence when subject is em or a noun (like "Tom" or "the bicycle"). This rule is certainly different from anything found in English.
http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/tokpisin.html
So I presume that 'li' is also a "predicate marker" ...
I hope participants here need not be told to pronounce the letter ‹i› as IPA /i/ by default!
I'd guess that i marker evolved from English 3rd person pronouns? Of course, that doesn't mean it's still a pronoun in Tok Pisin, since reanalysis is very much a thing in language evolution.
In some sentences it's a lot like 'は' in Japanese 'タナカさんは先生です' Mr Tanaka is a teacher. The toki pona equivalent would be 'jan Tanaka li jan pi pana sona'.
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653 | Language with contextual-free vocabulary
Every language (I know of) needs a context or a mark of reference for understanding a lot of the expressed message.
I'm refering about concepts like I, you, this, there, tomorrow...
I'd bet there is no organic language that doesn't use such contextual words. Still, though, I wondered:
Is there any constructed language that has no word context-dependant?
If there is: How does it manage to express common messages?
If there isn't: Would it be possible to have such language?
Are you asking if there's a language without deixis? If a language had no referring expressions, well it couldn't refer to anything, in the real world or otherwise.
It sounds to me like formal languages used eg for knowledge representation. These have no context to refer to, so no such words/operators are used.
Firstly, I have thought about this too before. Actually, only one word is needed for all of I, you, this, there, tomorrow, etc. You can analyse these as I, (the person I am referring to), (the thing I am referring to at/by/on ME), (the place I am referring to not at/by/on ME), (the day which is one day later than the day I am in). This goes for most words like those.
Not that I know of. But let's create one for demonstration purposes: Loj-ban mi. It is Lojban, but there's a ban on the word mi (and vi, and ti, and other words incorporating mi as said above).
It would be able to express concepts like 'Bananas grow on trees', as this doesn't depend on the concept I. However, saying stuff like My name is Santa Claus., It's going well. and What are we doing tomorrow? would be impossible.
We could replace it with other concepts, for example, 'the speaker/writer'. But this is ambiguous, take this sentence: I don't know who said that, but the speaker is in big trouble when I find out!. (And, pulling it off correctly, it nevertheless depends on context). Names can be used, so the answer is actually yes. 'Tomorrow' would have to be expressed as a date, 'this' would have to be 'The plate on the table in the house of Joe Example, etc.
Yes, as we proved above with Loj-ban mi, it is possible. Would it be learnable? Probably. But not usable in practice.
Maybe people can be refered always by name and days always by date. Even though that would be still impossible for big communities, I can imagine a small community being able to always name people and, when needed, refering to people by their fathers and so on (maybe to the point of some kind of "Adam and Eve", or "Founding Fathers").
"The" is itself context-dependent, or deictic. So, replacing "I" with "the speaker" doesn't actually solve the problem.Always using an explicit name instead of any pronominal phrases, however, might work.
@AlbertMasclans Wouldn't such metonymy also be context dependent to some degree?
Names are still referring expressions.
@LoganR.Kearsley I know, that's why 'the speaker' is contextual, see my example phrase in my answer. If we'd say 'this (me) speaker', it'd work, but again, we've reached context-dependism (my new cult).
All human communication is context-dependent. A context-independent language would be ununderstandable (by humans, at least).
My anser to this question, Can all sentences be represented logically?
deals with this problem; the basic reasoning comes from Hubert Dreyfus, What computers cannot do, via Setargew Kenaw Fantaw.
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651 | Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn?
Auxiliary constructed languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages.
Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn than natural languages?
I have no idea about any research, but I expect the lack of strong speech communities would make them considerably harder to learn.
Assuming equal amount of resources, etc.
Um, try learning Esperanto by yourself, then any other language by yourself, e.g. Spanish. You'll recognize the 10x difference in difficulty (or so) pretty fast. (Why learn alone? To make it a fair comparison, because you'll probably not have much opportunity to converse verbally with Esperantists.)
Some auxiliary languages are easier to learn than natural languages. There have been many experiments that show that Esperanto is both easier to learn than other languages, and also makes learning future languages easier.
Two quotes from some of the experiments on Esperanto:
"It is possible for the average student to understand written and spoken Esperanto in 20 hours better than he can understand French, German, Italian, or Spanish after 100 hours."
"A child can learn as much Esperanto in about 6 months as he would French in 3–4 years... if all children studied Esperanto during the first 6–12 months of a 4–5 year French course, they would gain much and lose nothing."
However, it's not necessarily true that auxiliary languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages. Esperanto is a very regular language, and that makes it easy to learn. Other languages, such as Interlingua, are not as easy to learn, but are meant to be more recognizable to someone already familiar with the vocabulary of Romance languages. It is still more regular than the natural languages it's based on, so it likely is easier to learn, but it sacrifices some regularity in order to have a more familiar vocabulary.
Somewhere I read that it was 2000 hrs. for French students to learn German, 1500 for English, 1000 for most Romance languages and 150 for Esperanto.
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566 | Which features make a language easier to learn?
Which features make a language easier to learn for children learning a constructed language as L1? Are children learning a language with these features able to learn the language faster than a natural, irregular language without some of these features?
Downvoter care to explain?
Difficult question. I think regularity would speed up learning, as children during language learning overgeneralise (see experiments with English past tense endings). Thus instead of learning the correct exceptions at a later stage the corresponding feature would have been learned earlier.
There is a programme for teaching Esperanto as a first foreign language, as it can be used to increase second language awareness and is supposed to make learning a natural foreign language easier. You don't have to worry about exceptions, for one thing, so you can teach the concept without having to hedge your explanations by listing all the cases where it's different.
My personal view on 'difficulty' of different languages is that all languages are about equally difficult. Some languages are easier/simpler regarding some features (English inflectional morphology), but make up for that in others (vast number of near-synonyms with different distributional characteristics in English). Toki Pona is a very simple language (120 words, virtually no syntactic complexity), so you can learn it almost in a day, but it is very hard to express complicated narratives, and an equivalent text in a more complex language would be far more concise.
Learning Esperanto is reasonably easy, but then you look at how people actually use it in everyday interactions, and you find that it is more difficult than you imagined: there are a lot of the smaller particles that make it tricky to understand for a beginner. But the 'early' sentences composed when the language was still fairly new are a lot simpler. However, they were not suitable for encoding all the pragmatic and other information people need for an everyday language.
So, there are undoubtedly features that make it easier for children to learn a language as L1, but the question is "what for?" It's a bit like learning Lisp programming: understanding the syntax takes literally ten minutes, but that does not mean you can write useful programs in it after that. Languages are more than the sum of syntax and vocabulary, and if there was a language that was easier to learn and use than other languages, and had equal expressive power, then we would all be speaking it already.
I've accepted this as the correct answer. Could you give an extra explanation of paragraph 4?
You mean the Esperanto particles? I found that in the Eo learning literature the sentences used are always very straight forward and easy to understand. But in 'real' texts (eg on twitter, or even Eo stackexchange) a lot of the smaller particles are used whose meaning is very dependent on the context. I personally find that a lot harder to understand.
How about some examples of these ‘smaller particles’?
Children learning an L1 have most of the same challenges as people in general learning an L2. Children learning a conlang, will have all of the problems of children learning a non-community language from a parent-- mostly problems of exposure. Kids need to hear the language for something like 20+ hours a week, less than that and they start to learn a pidgin form that is simplified. See the literature on language death for more about that process.
A rich vocabulary is hard. Teachers of languages say that the shear amount of vocabulary you need to learn is a major barrier to learning a language. This is why auxlangs try to pick words that are highly similar to what someone already knows. toki pona takes the idea of vocabulary reduction to about as far as it can go, but in my experience with it, it still feels like you need to memorize about 3000 set phrases whose meaning can't easily be guessed from the parts.
Morphology is hard. Analytic languages are going to be less difficult. In communities where a polysynthetic language is dying, the kids start using it as if it were analytic, i.e. with sentences with more words instead of one spectacularly complex verb.
Lexicalized grammar is hard. This is when you make up words instead of applying a grammatical rule. For example, in German, you have to just memorize most plurals as a second word. It is easy to accidentally create lexicalizations if you mother tongue has them. For example, in some language antonyms are phrasal or morphological modifications of a base word, in English and other languages, antonyms often are a separate word. My son right now is at the point where he over-regularized past tense English verbs, an indication that lexical past tense forms, (see, saw, eat, ate, etc) are hard, even for kids.
You say “Analytic languages are going to be more difficult,” which surprises me, but then you contradict it. Maybe you want to edit that?
@AntonSherwood oops, you're right.
Human beings first develop with a sense of Self and not being able to distinguish between "Self" and "The World". Things are seen as "Images" and "Objects", only later are abstract ideas understood. Human languages started off as SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) but later changed to different word orders.
With that being said, these features would make it easier to learn languages.
Common Phonemes (/m/, /k/, /i/, /a/, /j/, /p/, /u/, /w/)
No Consonant Clusters ( mk, mp, kp, pk)
Noun based (let verbs and adjectives derived from nouns)
Let any complex words have it's root from the simple (For Example: "Hospital" could be "Health-House" or "Healing Place").
Just like human beings start of learning simple things, then complex, let all "big" words be form from compounds of smaller ones.
Remember language Universals. Frontal vowels (/i/) are usually used in words that represent smallness, sharpness, brightness, closeness, and hapiness. The sound /i/ uses the same muscles as when a human being smiles.
Back vowels (/u/) are usually used in words that represent bigness, depth, roundness, smoothness, darkness, dirtiness, far-distance, and gloominess.
Toki Pona has some of the features of what an easy language would look like. Good luck to inventing an easy/minimalist language. Cheers!
Hello and welcome to the Conlang site. Please consider [edit]ing this to add some references to sources which back up the claims you have made here. I'm not sure about everything you've said here... while consonant clusters may be tricky for children learning language, I doubt something like [mk] makes a difference for adults, and I'm very sceptical that /i/ is used "in words that represent smallness, sharpness, brightness, closeness, and hapiness".
What about misery? Not really related to happiness... Those claims are usually bogus. Also not sure about SOV as the 'initial' sentence structure. I never heard that before in 25 years of being a linguist.
The obvious response to the claim about frontal vowels like /i/ representing small things and back vowels like /a/ representing big things is to point out the words "small" and "big".
It's TRUTH: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-09/uocp-oaa091207.php
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1683 | New examples for Black Speech in Rings of Power
In the latest episodes of The Rings of Power, several orcs say something in Black Speech, which is not translated in the subtitles. I had a brief look on the web, but cannot find anything about the meaning of these phrases.
Has anybody come across an analysis of that, and whether/how it fits in with previous attempts at reconstructing Black Speech from known fragments?
My lame attempt at analyzing Black Speech in Amazon's show: https://un4givenorc.blogspot.com/2023/07/orcish-black-speech-in-amazons-rings-of.html
Would be glad, if anyone corrects misheard phrases or suggest other Elvish etymologies.
EDIT: Neo Black Speech for Amazon's show is obviously not based on any previous attempts. But whoever was responsible for it, seems to have an approach similar to Shadowlandian: some words are derived from other languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien. Neo-BS in ROP has a higher degree of agglutination.
Some phrases that have clear meaning:
Nampat! - wasn't translated in English, but official Russian subtitles and some media articles have a translation: "Death!", but the correct one would probably be "Die!".
Nampak uglursha - in the context probably some equivalent of "Rest in peace", "nampat" (see above) seems has meaning "die"; other options include: Gnomish "nam-" (to withdraw, retire); "ak" is probably some grammatical or objective clitic pronoun; "uglur" may be derived from Adunaic "aglar" (glory), however "ugl-" in other Neo-BS dialects means "to frighten, scare"; "-sha" is probably postposition "with", used as preposition in Orc-curse
Izmûmbogh - I smell him! - my guess was "I can feel (him)" < Gnomish "ist-" (feeling, sense), "og-" (can, be able / adjective suffix / agental suffix); Sindarin "im" (I, 1st person singular pronoun)
Kishdibatoth! - Search it! < Quenya "ces(ta)" (to search for,
examine); "ib" - probably some grammatical suffix; "-at" BS infinitive/gerund/participle suffix expressing intention or purpose; "oth" < Sindarin "eth" (any 3rd person pronoun) or "ed" (it), could be also from early Noldorin "os" (around)
The quoted web page may go away, leaving this answer quite stale. Could you add the content from that web page to the answer?
Most translations are purely speculative, so I will not quote everything here, at least until 1st season ends.
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963 | Is there a toki pona hieroglyphics font?
For the toki pona language there is a writing system where each word is replaced by a single logogram or hieroglyph. There is also a web-based converter which allows you to enter a text in toki pona and converts it into a single PNG rendering in said hieroglyphs.
However, I was wondering if there was a way to directly produce texts in hieroglyphs, either as a font, or as a set of individual image files (ie one per word/hieroglyph), which could be used to render texts on webpages etc.
toki!
a, mi jo e sitelen tawa toki pona. nimi ona li linja pona. sina ken anpa e ona kepeken nimi tawa ni.
Hi! Yes, I have a script for toki pona. Its name is linja pona. You can download it by using this link.
"Ah, I have images for toki pona. It's name is linja pona ("good lines"). " Don't quite get the second part, but it's a link to a toki pona hierogplyphics font that one can use. -- maybe "you can download and use it here"?
Base on this Meta discussion I'm inclined to remove this answer if @KNTRO won't give a translation. Of course you can make the case in Meta that answers in conlangs should be allowed.
"Hi!
Yes, I have a script for Toki Pona. Its name is linja pona. You can download it by using this link".
tenpo ni la, sina pillin pona anu seme?
How would I type in it?
Here's an example, using GIMP 2.10.10.
@curiousdannii You forgot to add the ”” emoji in the edition.
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1128 | How to choose a writing system for a conlang?
When one creates a conlang, it notionally has its own writing system (although in many cases actually working out the writing system is ignored, and everything is simply done in transliteration). If one is going to actually work out the writing system, how should one decide/evaluate whether to create ideograms, an abugida, an abjad, a syllabary, or an alphabet?
This is very close to something I'd think should be closed as a design choice question. There's no reason why any language couldn't be written with any of those types of writing systems. So could you [edit] this to focus the question somehow, perhaps by asking what characteristics are associated with each type of writing system?
Technically, you're correct. However, I already know what the "key" differences are; the lingustics.se version of the question would be about why various languages evolved their writing systems (see the comment(s) to @OliverMason 's answer). Here, I'm trying to apply that idea specifically to choosing a type of writing system for a conlang.
The answer mostly depends on your grammar and phonotactics:
Alphabets
Examples: Latin, Ogham, Mongolian. Alphabets are a pretty reasonable writing system for most spoken languages. I think there's a good reason why the majority of languages with standard written forms use some sort of alphabet. That said, they seem to take a long time to develop, so alphabets are unlikely for concultures that recently discovered writing.
Abjads
Examples: Arabic, Hebrew, Tifinagh. Abjads are good for languages with few vowels and very few minimal pairs distinguished by vowels. It's especially good in languages with triconsonental roots or other forms that undergo dramatic vowel shift as part of regular grammatical processes to improve coherence across grammatical forms.
Abugidas
Examples: Devanagari, Ge'ez (Ethiopic), Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. Abugdias are pretty good for languages with relatively simple syllable structure (ideally not more complex than (C)CV(C)). Based on the real world, it seems that they're best suited for languages with a high number of tones or phonations.
Syllabaries
Examples: Hiragana*, Vai, Cherokee. Syllabaries are really only appropriate in languages with relatively simple phonology, ideally not more than (C)V (or adopt a pseudo-syllabary like the kana with separate symbols for coda consonants). Otherwise the number of characters grows exponentially, or will not do a very good job representing all segments of the language, though this is not necessarily a dealbreaker (cf. Cherokee).
* Hiragana is not a true Syllabary because each kana actually represents a mora, not a syllable.
Logographies
Examples: Chinese, Cuneiform, Mayan. Logographs are best suited to isolating and analytic languages. The earliest writing systems seem to be logographies though, so cultures that only recently discovered writing are most likely to have logographies.
Great point "That said, they seem to take a long time to develop, so alphabets are unlikely for concultures that recently discovered writing."
Yeah, using symbols to represent individual sounds makes sense to us, but it's apparently not as intuitive as using them to represent concepts or words.
Trial and Error
Natural languages tend to end up with a writing system because it was, at some point in time in history, foisted on them. The Sumerians wrote in cuneiform. This later got foisted on the Akkadians, the Hittites, the Iranians, etc. The Romans wrote with an alphabet, and that got foisted on just about the whole world, even those prestigious languages that have long had their own systems. Mostly as a matter of convenience to online existence.
As a language inventor, you get to play with these forces and circumstances. And I at least advocate out several forms of writing for a language to see which you think is the better fit. Especially if you happen to be, as a matter of philosophy, a language inventor. If you happen to be a language discoverer, then you might come to the realisation that such-and-such a language uses a particular system, and you'll just live with it.
Trying out several systems at once, perhaps using a well known example text, will give you a good feel for how it meshes with the language structure. This exercise will also teach you how well (or how poorly) you understand either that kind of writing system or your own language's make-up! If you think a fixed syllable structure might benefit from a syllabary, then try it out! But if you discover that your "fixed syllable structure" is full of complications, exceptions, alterations, and so forth, you might find that a syllabary becomes unwieldy. That's not necessarily a bad thing --- scribes and writers have long had to deal with terribly complex writing systems (Egyptian! Sumerian! Chinese!)
Creating a few "temporary" writing systems for use with any later invented language project could also be useful. Doing this, you won't have to invent a whole new syllabary, a whole new alphabet for each future language project. The actual symbols won't necessarily be the symbols that get used for any language; they're just a tool to help you evaluate compatibility.
As for an evaluation tool, first I'd do some research into how many symbols various natural language systems have. In English, which uses an alphabet, we basically have 26 symbols. Abjads only notate consonants. So if English used an abjad, that would be 19 to 21 symbols (depending on how you count w & y). At the other end is Chinese, whose logogrammes number over a hundred thousand (according to WP's citation of a modern Chinese dictionary); but you'd only need about 2000 to read a newspaper.
This will you give a rough idea of how much work is going to go into devising characters for the invented language vs how much work is going to go into inventing the language.
Then, you'll want to consider how different writing systems work vs how your language works. No writing system perfectly captures the sounds of any language, except for the IPA. Everything else is a compromise. A language that is heavy on nuanced content words, a logography might be too unwieldy. A language with few lexical items might be very comfortable with logogrammes. A language with lots of vowels may not get along with anything but an alphabet: is PN abjad spelling for pan, pawn, pain, pean, pen, pin, pine, pane, pone, pon, or pun?
You'll also want to consider aesthetic qualities of the writing system. If you find cuneiform logogrammes are just the bees knees, then aesthesis might outweigh the difficulties of having to make hundreds of symbols. If calligraphy is more your style, then an alphabet or an abjad might be better choices.
Lastly, don't neglect combination systems! If you really like the aesthetics of logograpmmes, but don't want to bother with hundreds or thousands, consider a hybrid system where certain symbols have come to take on syllabic or alphabetic function, while certain words or classes of words continue to be written using full logogrammes.
I would say that depends on the structure of your language. If you have a small inventory of phonemes, then an alphabet might be best; if you have a fixed syllabic structure, then you might want to use that.
In general there is no reason why you only need one writing system. For toki pona you have a normal Latin writing system, but you also have ideograms and even a meso-American-style hieroglyphic writing system.
It depends what you want to use it for. Klingon has some very nice looking characters, but they are rather impractical, so mostly an ASCII transliteration is used. I would definitely recommend having a transliteration to make it easier to write the language on computers.
Other than that, it's up to you what works best!
"Other than that, it's up to you what works best!" Well, yes - but that's exactly the question - how do I evaluate what works best for a language? Why do the Indic languages generally use abugidas, while the Semitic languages generally use abjads, and the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages use alphabets? Why did Japanese shift to being primarily a syllabic language, while Chinese never did?
I guess it's got a lot to do with culture and history. There are many non-linguistic influences that are relevant. That depends on the details of the purpose of your language, and is impossible to answer without more details.
@JeffZeitlin One case where it is really obvious is Korean: King Sejong created Hangul, as he wanted a literate population and thought it was easier to use than Japanese/Chinese. So there is no single answer possible without any more context.
The writing system of the language mostly depends on the grammar, syntax, and structure of the language. i.e. The writing system of a language always evolve in such a way that it would be easy enough to write the language without any difficulties in writing the language. To be more clear, here's the comparison,
|---------------------|----------------------|
| Language | Writing |
| type | type |
|---------------------|----------------------|
| Inflectional | Alphabet / Abjad |
|---------------------|----------------------|
| Agglutinative | Abugida / Syllabary |
|---------------------|----------------------|
| Analytic | Ideogram |
|---------------------|----------------------|
As you can see in the above table, most of the world languages are by this. European languages and Semantic languages are highly inflectional, and they use Alphabet and Abjad respectively. Indian languages like Tamil(Dravidian), and Japanese(Japonic) are agglutinative, and use abugida and syllabary respectively. Chinese is a highly analytic language and it uses ideograms.
But it has to be noted that writing systems also depend on the languages and cultures that are nearby, but languages like Japanese still created its own script (Hiragana and Katakana, which are syllabaries) so that it would be easy to write.
Coming back to the question, choosing the right writing system is necessary as it is the first thing people are going to study in a language.
If you choose ideogram like Chinese, it would be easy if the conlang
is analytical. It would be a nightmare to see Latin like highly
inflectional languages in ideogramic symbols.
If your conlang is agglutinative, abugida and syllabary would be a
great choice. Alphabets too make a fine choice, but trust me,
representing agglutinating parts in alphabets is not efficient. Korean might be an exception.
Alphabets are universal, and could be used for any type of language.
But if you want to increase the complexity of the language and need
more elegant and unique language, it might not be great to choose
alphabets.
Thank you for reading.
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563 | How to model the change of script over time
I want two languages to share a root but I want them to look unrecognizable written down (with the original language having a written form, so not independently created writing systems). Are there any well known patterns of how languages can change their script over time? What is some general advise on how to make this change realistic?
You might want to look into the derivation of the various Indian scripts - Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, et cetera - they're all ultimately derived from the Brahmi script. Similarly, you could look into Syriac vs Arabic, although those are clearly related in their written forms.
Alternatively, there are possibilities for deliberate differentiation (though your question seems to want to avoid this solution); originally, Korean was written with Chinese characters, but the current Hangul writing system was deliberately created. Until relatively recently, I believe that linguists considered Serbian and Croatian to be the same language, but Croatian was written with the Latin alphabet while Serbian was written with the Cyrillic.
The surface that things are written on. Runes were carved in trees and, as such, do not have curves. The Greek alphabet was written on tablets, and curved lines were possible. The Arabic alphabet was written quickly on papyrus. Also, some civilisations might prefer cursive script over others. Arabic letters differ whether they're isolated, at the beginning of a word, at the end or in the middle. So does your handwriting with the Roman script. But Arabic kept their cursive when the digital age came, and the Roman script got rid of it and created the same character.
Os (runes), psi (Greek alphabet, but modernised on a computer, see footnote 1), šīn (Arabic script, isolated)
ᚩ, Ψ, ش
Let's call the ancestor A. The two daughter languages will be called B1 and B2. A could be a pictographic script, from which B1 devised a syllabary but B2 kept pictographs. Or A was an abjad (alphabet without vowels) and B1 became an alphabet whereas B2 stayed an abjad.
Although language is passed on from mother language to daughter language with diachronics, script doesn't need to. In fact, you don't often see one script in the same language for three language-generations except in some cases like Latin (but Vulgar Latin wasn't really written much). Borrow a script from a neighbouring language. This is what I recommend doing.
Footnotes: 1) Ancient Greek part of the Rosetta stone. Greek characters in Unicode are in many fonts modernised, this is an example of typical Ancient Greek script.
You're sure that's not an omega? The same glyph appears at least twice with accents.
Hmm, I think it is omega too. I'll look if I can see psi. I just want to point out that the psi Unicode glyph is a bit modernised.
And your Rosetta Stone example looks a lot closer to the modern capital Greek alphabet than do the multitude of local Greek scripts from 500 BC.
Since we're talking about script, the time period is good enough. It was a Greek script handwritten.
There are several factors in a writing system that can be subject to change:
The style of writing: In fact, style is ever-changing in human culture, and we see new styles every generation. Old styles may be revived, or the new styles become divergent enough to be considered a new writing system. Note that handwriting from a century ago (e.g., in Germany) is already very hard to read for the current generation and special training is needed to do it.
The set of symbols used for writing: Some symbols may fall out of use, others are newly introduced (either by borrowing (Greek Y and Z into Latin Y and Z), or by modification of existing symbols (Latin V splitting up into U, V, W), or by new invention "out of nothing" (Emoji).
The use of diacritical marks: The writing system may be borrowed from another language and is not a perfect fit for the new language. Some devices are needed to accommodate the sounds of the new language to the writing system, like digraphs (e.g, English sh or ch), diacritical marks, additional letters, or a combination of any of the former.
Whether the introduced changes create a new writing system or just a variant of an existing writing system is merely a question of definition. I remember a heated debate on the Unicode mailing list whether Hebrew and Phoenician are one or two writing systems.
I'd have to argue that diacritics and change of a few symbols wouldn't make it seem a completely different language, just a derivative.
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886 | What are some strategies for setting verbs apart from other words without knowing it's a verb
In languages with conjugated verbs there is usually a similar structure across verbs that makes them easy to recognize even if you do not know the word. For example in German, all verbs after the pronoun 'Sie' end with 'en' which makes them easy to recognize. This is compounded by the fact that verbs are in second position, making the verb in a sentence very easy to pick out.
In my language verbs are not conjugated, nor do they have tense. The way the language is structured, there can be multiple verbs per sentence, and it would make the language easier to parse if verbs could be picked out easily. I also worry that similar sounding nouns will become easy to confuse with verbs as I grow my dictionary, which would be nice to avoid completely.
I considered making all verbs have a particular ending, but this quickly gets repetitive and breaks up sentence flow since the sound will be made several times in one sentence.
What strategies can I adopt to make the verbs recognizable as verbs even if the reader/listener does not already know the specific verb being used?
Sorry, your title doesn't make a lot of sense - setting verbs apart when you don't know which they are? Do you want to ask about strategies for languages without verb inflection? Why is a language having multiple verbs in a sentence a problem? That doesn't prevent a purely strict syntactic strategy.
Your German example is not correct; you could easily say Sie geht weg, where the verb ends in -t.
@OliverMason I was referring specifically to the formal second person pronoun, I tried to convey that by capitalizing, which is how it is set apart in the language
@curiousdannii I want to be able recognize verbs on sight/sound because verbs dictate sentence flow in my language. Having multiple verbs in a sentence can be hard to follow because it is not necessarily clear from context what the verbs are, which makes the entire sentence difficult to parse
In Lojban, cmevla (proper nouns, like .alis.) are the only words ending in a consonant. Depending on how big your vowel inventory is, you could make all verbs end in a vowel and everything else end in a consonant. That way, they are easy to pick out and still provide much variety.
To generalize that, you could just take the last sound of a verb from any distinct group of sounds, like nasals, fricatives or labiliased consonants ("labialiseds"?). One could also use that to make word correspondences, e.g. nominalization changing the verb's final sound to the corresponding nasal.
You also mentioned position in the sentence. Having the verb in a specific position (first, last, second, etc.) is a good way to distinguish them, but depending on your language, dependent clauses could get difficult.
Of course, coupling position in sentence with a specific ending sound provides a nice way to recognize sentence borders. There, one could again use the ending sound kind to modify the verb to signify a dependent clause.
There are several options; the most obvious ones I can think of are:
Position: In Hawai'an (and Klingon), the verb is at the initial position of the clause. If there are multiple clauses in a complex sentence, you will need to mark the clause boundaries in some way, eg through punctuation or use of specific conjunctions. So you can put anything in that place, and it will be interpreted as a verb: 'Ono means "delicious" as an adjective, in 'Ono ka hua moa it is used as a verb to mean "the egg is delicious". That also might solve problems when you later grow your lexicon.
Markers: In toki pona, the verb is always in second position in a clause, and is separated from the subject (which is in first position) through the particle li. So the sentence waso li lape can be parsed as waso - subject, lape - verb, even if you have no clue what the words actually mean ("bird" and "to sleep" respectively) Note: the personal pronouns mi ans sina are an exception to this rule, as they are not followed by li. Lape can also be a noun ("the sleep"). Transitive verbs are separated by e from the object, which again helps identifying the sentence structure.
Morphology: if you want to avoid repetitive sounds, you can nominate different verb endings (or prefixes) to either introduce variation for variation's sake, or to indicate other features (number, tense, aspect, modality, ...) While Esperanto uses a limited set of verb endings indicating (mostly) tense, it does not sound repetitive. If your verbs are not marked for grammatical features, morphology obviously is not an option.
Actually, the adjective-as-a-verb example doesn't quite translate properly into English (where delicious is not a verb).
I like the idea of a specific verb for "being delicious" :)
What you want to avoid the most is to have too many rhyming words. A rhyme occurs when the last vowel and any consonants following it are the same.
You could end all verbs using the same consonant or consonant cluster. This would also give you an easy way to form verbs from nouns and nouns or adjectives from verbs: just add a suffix.
Instead of just ending all verbs with one ending, you could also have a small set of possible endings - which could carry some meaning too. Or you could simply forbid all consonant clusters in your language except when a word is formed by adding to a previous verb.
Example:
Say our language uses -ct for intransitive verbs and -st for verbs that imply causality - the subject causes something to the object.
The noun vis means life, the verb visect means to live and the adjective visecti means alive.
By extension, avisecti means dead and avisectist means to cause death.
If you're curious, the idea came from French where infinitive verbs have one of four endings. I knew most verbs rhymed in [e], [iʁ] or [waʁ] but I was quite surprised when I realized that all other verbs end in [ʁ]. It's just not as obvious since it's just one consonant. It's also less obvious when you conjugate verbs, but still...
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898 | Conlangs based on Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?
Have there been any attempts to create a language based on Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?
Of course PIE has had an effect on other languages, and through them ended up in many a posteriori conlangs as well. What I mean is whether there have been any attempts to create a usable language based on what we know of PIE and filling in the blanks with conlangery.
The answers to this question list some.
Could you perhaps clarify your question a bit: are you looking for conlangs which were developed from PIE (e.g. development of an alternative history in which there’s another branch of Indo-European languages), or languages which attempt to “complete” PIE in an artistic fashion?
Academia Prisca published Modern Indo-European as a revival of a late stage of the Indo-European language (Northwest Indo-European, billed as the ancestor of Italo-Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic). Resources published for learning include a grammar, syntax, conjugator, vocabulary, lessons and texts. Since it is meant as a modern revival, it introduces neologisms (such as read and write), but as far as I can tell, the entire lexicon is derived from cognate languages.
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1004 | Are there any Conlangs using Chinese characters?
The Chinese character system is one that is universal to many Chinese dialects. Two people can pronounce the same character in two different ways, but when writing to each other it is intelligible.
Have people used this opportunity to create a sort of conlang dialect of the language, and in doing so making up entirely new sound for the characters, and perhaps even making up new grammar too. I could image it even being a serious bastardizing of the characters too take on new meanings that would bring it closer to, say, a European language. Like how one uses the Latin alphabet to create a conlang.
Note that written Chinese is intelligible only because people learn it as they would any language. Written Chinese is really written Mandarin; Cantonese is also written but often socially stigmatised, and other dialects probably are too, without being mutually intelligible.
@curiousdannii I am aware of the points you mentioned, and I tried to convey that in the OP. Was I u clear?
You made it sound like it's naturally universal to the many Chinese dialects. But it's not, no more than English is in Europe.
@curiousdannii I see. Though are mandarin and Cantonese the only two?
No many, probably most, Chinese dialects/languages would get written, with very levels of stigmatisation.
For those interested in the topic of writing Chinese topolects, Language Log writer Victor Mair has written on it quite a bit (sadly this link that should be a list of his post is nonfunctional, but searching the blog for "topolect" should get you quite a few posts)
This may be a stretch and probably not what you’re looking for, but:
Essentially, that’s what Japanese did. Japanese and Chinese have nothing in common, yet when the Chinese writing system made it to Japan over 1000 years ago it was the only one they had. Initially, it was used only to write Chinese, but then it was developed into a system suitable to write Japanese via many intermediate steps and multiple parallel paths. Now, centuries later, Japanese has:
some characters that are identical to (traditional) Chinese ones with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 大 (large) or 中 (centre)
some characters whose written forms have been simplified from traditional Chinese but with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 国 (state) 売 (to sell)
two sets of characters that are radically simplified/modified from their traditional forms and used only for their phonetic value (katakana and hiragana)
some characters whose written forms are as in traditional Chinese but whose meanings have departed. The best example I could find was 豚 which means pig in Japanese but piglet in Chinese.
(Of course, some characters’ meanings departed in Chinese while they are still used in their original sense in Japanese like 湯 (hot water in Japanese and old Chinese; soup in modern Chinese; they shouldn’t be listed in a separate bullet point because they generally fit the first)
compound words composed of more than one character with a meaning akin to the Chinese one
compound words composed of more than one character with a completely different meaning (手紙 which in Japanese means letter (the one you send) but in Chinese is toilet paper)
entirely newly created written compounds, often spelt with hiragana and kanji to better reproduce Japanese grammar
new characters created by combining individual parts, e.g. 働 (to work) made from the individual symbols 人 (man, person) and 動 (to move); the former regularly becomes a ‘pole with a steep hat’ in compounds such as 休
As Japanese and Chinese are linguistically so different (Chinese can have closed syllables, it has tones, the vowel registers differ and more), the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters obviously differs substantially from their original at the time of borrowing. In general, most characters can be pronounced in two or more ways depending on their surrounding. These pronunciations are grouped into kun (have nothing to do with the Chinese original pronunciation; this is a Japanese word with a similar or identical meaning) and on (more or less loosely modelled on the Chinese pronunciation when the character was borrowed which may have happened more than once). However, even on pronunciations can be considered a simplification at best; a bastardisation of th original pronunciation may be more accurate.
Differences notwithstanding, I know one Chinese who claims to be able to get the basic gist of written Japanese and with some crude knowledge of Japanese I was able to grasp the meanings of some things written in Chinese on Taiwan recently. So a certain degree of intelligibility seems to be conserved.
Very creative, +1
Toki pona is a minimalist language with a ~125 word vocabulary that can be written using a proposed system of either Chinese or Japanese characters, although it is officially written in the Latin alphabet.
On tokipona.net, click on "Word List" in the group of links at the top for the full list of words, or compress for ways to write it using different alphabets. 言良り良去私 (toki pona li pona tawa mi)='I like toki pona.', literally 'toki pona is good to me'.
Wow that’s great thank you.
Would you know that example sentence in the Chinese version?
Do you mean using Chinese characters? 言好哩好去我。You can type any toki pona word into the text box on the site I linked above, and press compress to see the equivalent Chinese or Japanese character.
Outright Chinese characters? I am not aware of one (Though you might want to look up A Book from the Sky). Conlangs using Chinese-style characters? Certainly. Mark Rosenfelder, in Advanced Language Construction, draws examples from his own Uyseʔ and Wede:i. While the Grammar of Wede:i is available, only a little of its written system us described, and Uyseʔ is hardly online at all. This reflects more on the sheer amount of work to make an ideogram system presentable to the reader though.
There are also three scripts on Omniglot that arguably use "Chinese-style" characters - Chữ Vòng (a con_script_ used for writing Vietnamese, rather than being for a con_lang_), Trantanese, and possibly Gagrite.
In addition to the languages/writing systems from my previous comment, there is also the real language Nüshu (Wikipedia link) (Omniglot link), whose writing is derived from Chinese characters, but is phonetic rather than ideographic/logographic.
Adding one more example of the work done by Mark Rosenfelder: Yingzi. He created a written script in the style of Chinese characters for the English language.
I made a language using Chinese characters, I named the language
Yinhan language (印汉语)
Example sentences:
Hello, what are you doing? = 汝好，汝何做？
I'm fine = 吾好
Is there a place where we can learn more about the Yinhan language? It would be nice to have a link to it in the answer.
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1032 | Is mathematics considered a constructed language?
Mathematics consists of various names, relationships, etc. that have been consciously constructed and developed over time. On the other hand its a "formal" language whose scope is extremely specialized compared to a regular language. How else does mathematics compare/contrast with constructed languages?
Have a read of Can programming languages be categorized as conlangs? Most people would say that programming languages aren't conlangs, and mathematics is leagues further away than that.
@curiousdannii I've read that question, but I don't find it to be very satisfying for mathematics. The top answer claims that programming languages are encoding instructions for machines which isn't at all relevant (or even accurate IMO). More importantly I view programming languages are specific formal systems while mathematics is the study of formal systems more generally, etc., so it seems like an argument from the specific to the general.
@curiousdannii But on the other hand I think the second answer makes a good point about "translatability" being a crucial criteria for language. I feel like formal systems are the missing link and in particular the inability of formal systems to translate into anything external to their own system.
Maybe you could [edit] this to explain why you think mathematics could possibly be considered a constructed language.
Jesse Adam's answer already does a good job of establishing that programming languages do not have the same expressive power as human language. The notation used in mathematics certainly also does not have the same descriptive power, but it may be useful to look at representations of human language using formal logic, as that's probably the closest tie between linguistics and mathematics that you've got.
Formal semantics, as a discipline, does a lot of work defining a languages grammar using typed lambda calculus (something many computer scientists and mathematicians may have encountered before). This generally follows in the tradition of logician Richard Montague, creating what is called a Montague grammar. In a grammar such as this, a sentence like "Every woman sees a man" is represented as:
∀x(woman′(x) → (∃y(man′(y) ∧ sees′(x,y)))
And, in order to derive this compositionally (i.e., from the meaning of each word in the sentence combined together), the meanings of each word is as follows:
"woman" = λx.woman′(x)
"man" = λx.man′(x)
"sees" = λy.λx.sees′(x,y)
"a" = λP.λQ.∃x((P(x)∧Q(x)))
"every" = λP.λQ.∀x((P(x)∧Q(x)))
Hopefully you can already see a problem here -- where do we actually get the meanings of woman′ and man′ and sees′ from? In this type of grammar, any noun like "woman" or "man" is a function mapping entities to boolean values -- in other words, "woman" is a list of every entity that exists in the world and either a 1 or a 0 depending whether that entity is a woman. A transitive verb like "sees" is a function that maps entities to entities to boolean values based on whether the first entity sees the second entity.
This, as you can imagine, isn't a super satisfying way to define a word -- defining "woman" as the set of all women is kinda circular, at best -- but semanticists generally acknowledge that the meaning of individual lexical items just cannot be formalized like this and leave that for lexical semanticists to figure out (and they, to my knowledge, generally do not try to formalize the meanings of individual words like this.
So, this has all been sort of a tangent from your original question, but in short: mathematics and the notation we use for it are not language in and of themselves, but there are formal/mathematical ways of representing human language. These formalisms can capture a lot about the relationships between words in a language, but they struggle to capture the actual meaning of a particular word, and thus in that way still ultimately fall short of the underlying expressive power of human language unless augmented with some way of truly capturing a content word's meaning.
Most conlangs aim to emulate the expressive capabilities of human language and, as such, we generally would not consider formal languages like programming languages or lambda calculus conlangs.
I think Programming and Mathematics fail to meet the standard because, despite being more precise, they are ultimately nowhere near as expressive as a language like English.
Per request I will expand on my answer. Take, for example, the English sentence "Jane missed the bus this morning and couldn't get to the office in time her interview, needless to say, she was not selected for the position." There is no way to express that in any programming language that I know of.
var Jane = {Name:"Jane", Employment:"Unemployed", Bus:data.Buses[4]};
data.Buses[4].Depart("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
Jane.ArriveAt(data.Buses[4], "2019-10-05 07:45:00");
I won't go on trying the futile exercise of typing out a description of events in Javascript. Note that without knowing English the code makes no sense. Anything in code that isn't a keyword like "if" or "foreach" or "function" isn't part of the language and so you can only describe procedures for moving bits around, one way to illustrate this is to convert my Javascript to do the same thing, but with different variable names - the program will be exactly the same as far as the language specification goes and the resulting executable.
var x = {a:"", b:"Unemployed", c:y.z[4]};
y.z[4].dp("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
x.w(y.z[4], "2019-10-05 07:30:00");
If those two paragraphs mean the exact same thing as far as the language is concerned, you've completely failed to communicate anything useful. Computer scientists working on artificial intelligence are working to make systems where "bus" is a keyword, there is an idea of "bus" in the language. Until that technology is fully realized, we will be stuck with programming languages that are limited to describing things a computer can understand, a much lesser standard than what a human can. This is what I mean by less expressive.
Hello and welcome to the site! Could you please [edit] this to explain a little more what you mean by expressive?
But on the other hand, there are many programming and math concepts that natural languages can't convey successfully, or at least not well (because the concept of Jane missing the bus, etc., was conveyed, just not well). Different languages are used for different things. I'm not saying that math (or programming) is a conlang, but I don't think you've proved it isn't.
@RoryM.Tims Was the concept of Jane missing the bus conveyed? If you don't speak English, you have no way of inferring this information from the programming language. The string "Jane" doesn't point out the real-life entity Jane in Javascript. Nor do things like naming a variable bus, depart, or employment actually indicate anything about those concepts without knowledge of their meaning in English.
If we consider that the purpose of a constructed language is simply and purely created for Human interractions (like esperanto), mathematics cannot be considered as a conlang because it lacks one important thing that human language has: Context.
When I say:
He said it last time
We need to both have the same context to understand the meaning. Mathematics and Computer programming languages doesn't reach at all this level of tacit agreement.
However, now I also believe that mathematics help Human to understand and express things in a more abstract way. To make a rough comparison, we could then consider a constructed language as General Purpose programming Language + Context and mathematics as Domain Specific programming Language
I would argue that mathematics itself is not a language in the way that English, Mandarin, Swahili, Quechua or even Esperanto are because, depending on how you define it, it is either too limited (mathematical notation) or it is too ill-defined (mathematics as practiced by mathematicians).
Mathematical English comes close to being a constructed language, but I would argue that it isn't one because usual mathematical practice does not sharply delineate it from ordinary English. Mathematical English is more like a constructed register of English than a constructed language.
I'm using Mathematical English in a very narrow sense; it is the variant of English that is used to provide semantics for logical formalisms, such as first-order logic. Consider this handout for example.
In Mathematical English, the meanings of certain closed-class English words are given new definitions and some of the semantics and pragmatics of English is deliberately changed.
In particular, in Mathematical English words like and, or, not, and if are used differently than in ordinary English. In particular, they are used in an entirely truth-functional way.
In the quote below, if, and, and ⊨ (read as "entails") are part of Mathematical English.
A, α ⊨ (θ ∧ ψ) if A, α ⊨ θ and A, α ⊨ ψ
This explains the meaning of the symbol for conjunction ∧ by using the meaning of and in Mathematical English, which is similar to, but not exactly the same as, the meaning of and in English.
I asked this question. After reading the responses and similar posts, I’ve come to the following understanding.
At this point in history I think mathematics is very clearly constructed so my question reduces to whether mathematics is a language. This question has already been asked (1,2) but I don’t find the answers completely satisfying.
The question "Is math a language?" obviously begs the questions: What is math? What is language? I would define natural language loosely as the normal languages that we know: English, Spanish, etc. But mathematics is more about the study of formal systems involving formal languages.
The divide between natural and formal language is especially evident in the impossibility of translation between them. For example, consider the formal system of chess with a formal language of pieces, moves, etc. It’s impossible to translate a natural language expression like “I love you” into chess moves without extreme contrivance. In the other direction a sequence of chess moves has no inherent meaning outside of chess. There’s plenty of natural language around chess in discussion, explanation, description, etc. But the internal language of chess is formal and strictly limited to chess. Set theory, a popular mathematical framework, is quite similar. You can't naturally say "I love you" with sets.
It’s worth noting that formal languages can be translated between each other in some sense similar to natural language. For example, chess or Magic the Gathering can be "translated" into a turing machine (ie. played on a computer). More surprising a turing machine can also be translated into MTG.
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1181 | Is there an open-source set of topics and vocabulary for making a language tutorial?
Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and grammar by topic. Instead of stealing from Berlitz or Duolingo, I'd like to steal from people who give me permission to do so.
An example of what I have in mind, I'd like a set of topics and vocabulary like the following:
Lesson 1: Greetings
Hello
How are you?
Fine.
Thank you.
Goodbye.
Lesson 2: Classroom objects
pencil
notebook
textbook
paper
Lesson 3: Simple sentences
I
You
a
have
I have a pencil.
You have a textbook.
Of course, given a standard template, I'm willing to adjust according to the needs of my grammar, but a starting point could help a lot.
Related questions: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1099/are-there-any-sites-you-can-use-to-develop-an-online-course-for-your-own-conlang
https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/250/are-there-any-good-programs-out-there-to-help-when-constructing-languages
https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/459/whats-a-good-starting-place-to-work-on-vocab
https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1036/are-there-any-free-online-conlang-creation-tools
The Fundamento de Esperanto was published in 1905, so as far as I know it's in the public domain everywhere. It's one of the foundational documents of Esperanto, containing a short grammar description, a dictionary of thousands of words, and crucially a book of exercises (called the ekzercaro).
The ekzercaro fits what you're asking for. It is divided into sections, and every section after section 4 contains sample sentences and new vocabulary items. For example, this is one of the sentences in section 5:
Leono estas besto.
And these are the English definitions of the terms introduced in that sentence.
leono lion
esti be
as ending of the present tense in verbs
besto beast
Some of the designs of this course may or may not be suitable for your needs. For one thing, the ekzerzaro does not aim to have a very complete vocabulary because it is assumed that you will check the dictionary for other words you used. That means that the exercises do not teach you the word for "cat" even though they teach the word for lion very quickly.
Some sections are paragraphs to read. My favorite thing about this exercise book is that it contains a short story about a fairy interspersed throughout it. Section 27 is a discussion of Esperanto grammar written in Esperanto, which will probably have to be completely rewritten for your language.
You'll have to make adaptations depending on your language and culture. If you use these exercises to teach contemporary American English, you'll have to adapt to the ways the world has changed in the last century. For example, early on, there is is a sentence about hitting a student, and I am thankful that that is not a typical part of my country's culture anymore.
One place to start is the Universal Language Dictionary. ULD Version 2.7 is listed on the Frath Wiki. ULD Version 3 is available in Google Sheet form.
The Universal Language Dictionary is a list of concepts that can be represented as a word in a conlang. Each concept belongs to a category such as "Function words", "Clothing", and "Foodstuffs". Each concept also has a level between 0 and 3.
To design your course, you can sort these by level, and then sort each level by categories as you wish. Level 0 has only 30 words and it make sense to do them in this order:
Function Word
Adpositions
Numerals
Degree
The other categories have dozens of categories and 100-1000 words in them, so they take more work to sort, but at least it's a start.
You'll probably want to deviate from this pattern some. I'd want to introduce some nouns and greetings before I get into function terms. I'd also introduce food items as soon as I introduce the word eat.
You'll need to introduce some terms that aren't on the list, and of course other grammar. There's no word for "the" or "a" on the list because those are not considered universal.
Some background information can be found here. This includes the relevant license for version 2.7 of the ULD:
Copyright 1992-1995 by Richard K. Harrison. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for unrestricted use of these files by any individual for his/her own pleasure, private research, personal communication, etc. Use of these files by any government agency, business entity, educational institution, or any other organization requires permission.
I would guess that other versions of it have similar permissions, but I can't guarantee it.
I found a great blog post called Avoiding the "Boing" by author and conlanger E.M. Epps, in which she laid out a lot of information on conlanging that's helpful for new and experienced conlangers. One resource she recommends for vocabulary is the McGuffey readers. These are books that were used to teach English-speaking children to read. They're numerically ordered by difficulty, so that you can start with the Primer or start with the "New First Reader", and that's likely to be plenty of content for a lot of conlangs.
A few downsides to this:
It tries to focus on a small number of English letters at a time, so the vocabulary choices are affected by English. Solution: Don't follow this slavishly.
The subject material is intended for children, so adults may find it hard to connect. Solution: For a more adult vocabulary, replace "milk" with "coffee" and replace "play" with "awkward smalltalk".
It was originally intended for people who are already fluent in the language, so it doesn't directly teach the grammar. Solution: You can call attention to new grammar points as they come up. The primer does some of this for you in that it takes multiple pages before plural nouns, possessives, and conjugated verbs are introduced.
There could be errors in this since I'm not very familiar with it.
Fluent Forever's approach looks like it's adaptable to any language. Fluent Forever is a language learning app you can buy. Their approach involves the learning taking steps to make their own flashcards and get materials, so I think it's adaptable for new languages.
I'm going to highlight specifically their vocabulary learning approach because I think that's usable to conlangers. They provide a 625 word core vocabulary of easily pictured frequent words that you can copy from their website. It might not be exactly 625 words in your language, because you might divide up the semantic space differently. For each of these words, you can make multiple flashcards with example pictures. The learner makes their own flashcards by selecting pictures and example sentences. If you don't have the app, they recommend you create your flashcards in random order on the the Anki flashcard program, and then it will quiz you with spaced repetition.
They also have a method of teaching phonetics through recordings of minimum pairs. That could be worthwhile if you have the time to make many recordings.
Their approach to teaching grammar is with naturally occurring example sentences and just enough translations to give people their bearings. Since there aren't naturally occurring sentences in your language, you'll have to come up with your own. My opinion is that you can't learn a grammar solely from a small number of example sentences.
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2153 | Is merging singular and dual naturalistic?
So, In the conlang I'm working on currently, nouns decline for number - singular, dual or plural. My problem is, due to phonological changes, in many nouns, the forms for singular and dual have merged, while the plural form stayed separate.
Question is... is this distinction - of 1-2 vs ≥3 - at all naturalistic, or would it be more natural to say that with the merging of singular and dual, the plural form of those nouns would shift and take on the role of dual as well?
It's certainly not common. One of Greenberg's linguistic "universals" (number 34) says that, in languages with a number distinction, the first distinction made is always singular versus plural; they don't make any other distinctions until they have that one.
But, as a general rule, universals aren't. That is, there are practically no rules that every language in the world adheres to. Look at the Kiowa language (and the Tanoan languages more broadly) for a truly bizarre number system which groups the dual into either the singular or the plural, depending on which happens more often for the noun in question.
So the short answer is, it's not very common, but it's also not impossible, and the things that make a language distinctive are the uncommon aspects of it.
Ha! Beautiful case of ANADEW there, love it. Thanks for the example :)
@Cecilia Kiowa orthography is also a thing of beauty if you haven't seen it before!
Look at Hungarian - an utterly unremarkable singular/plural number system.
Yet, body parts that come in pairs are singular, and that covers the whole pair. E.g. egy szem (lit. one eye) means both eyes. You can make a regular plural if you want, that means more eyes. And a one-eyed pirate would be félszemű kalóz (lit. half-eyed).
Now imagine such a Hungarian-like protolanguage evolves to expand this "dual" to many more noun classes, up to the point it becomes the prototypical number distinction.
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1024 | Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?
Exactly what it says on the can - I'm looking for a word in tlhingan-Hol (Klingon) for "skull".
Fallback: In case there isn't a canon word, I'm defaulting to using "head bone" as a replacement. I know from TKD that nach is "head" and Hom is "bone". Is this combination nach Hom correct? e.g. is jaghpu'ma' nach HomDu' a reasonable translation for "our enemies' skulls"?
[Update from 2022]
Turns out the word was (semi-officially?) added to the lexicon a few months after the question and @Richard's answer - at qepHom 2019 (an annual meeting of Klingonists in Germany).
The word for "skull" is DughrI'
(Added on 11/17/2019)
See kli.com New Klingon Words (not in the original lexicon) page as citation.
Indeed, there doesn't seem to be any canon word for "skull" in Klingon, so a compound should be fine.
Note, however, that some compounds are constructed without separation between their parts (see for example Wiktionary's list of Klingon compound words) with no apparent rule as to why, so "skull" could conceivably be nachHom.
BUT, since -Hom is also the diminutive suffix, nachHom would primarily mean "little skull", making nach Hom is the less ambiguous translation.
Thanks for the reference to wikitionary "words by etymology" - never thought there's such a resource. I think that since there's a diminutive suffix '-Hom', 'nachHom' would be read as "smallhead" rather than "skull"
@G0BLiN I definitely should have checked that before answering. In this case, 'nach Hom' is better, I think.
Richard - maybe edit your answer to reflect on why nachHom may not be suitable in this case? Comments aren't permanent, but this insight is relevant to the answer.
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927 | Term for the converse of "instrumental"
We can make a noun for the instrument of an action, by taking the verb for the action and adding an instrumental marker.[1]
For instance, in English, we can add "-er",[2] like so:
I cut the box with a box-cutter.
Conversely, we can make a verb for an action, by taking the noun for the instrument and adding... what could you call it?
In English, we don't necessarily have an affix, since we can just verbalise the noun, like so:
I will knife you with my knife.
...but we might use "-ise" this way, at least jocularly:
I will hammerise him if he comes at me with that knife.
So is there a term for such a marker, indicating the use of an instrument? "Usive"? "Usual"?
[1] I was going to call this "instrumentive", on the pattern of "agentive" and "patientive", but the word doesn't appear in any dictionary I checked. It is used in some books on linguistics, though, per Google Books.
[2] This is also the agentive suffix in English, but I'm imagining a scenario where the agent and the instrument are clearly distinguished.
I have never come across a specific term for this -- generally it is a verb derived from a noun, in the sense that it is the action associated with that noun. So you could call it verbalisation, or verbification, as verbalisation also means to put something into words. I would also guess that this is fairly specific to English, as it's got a somewhat fluid word class system.
@OliverMason: Yeah, I had "verbalise" already, but was hoping for something more specific. And as it happens, I had this question while pondering a system inspired by Latin: verb → -atus (past participle used as verbal noun) → -ator (agentive noun) → -atory (noun for place or practice of the agent)
I think you're conflating a/o confusing a couple different things here.
First, "cutter" is not "instrumental". (At least in English!) In English grammar, -er is (among zillions of other uses) the morpheme that indicates "agent noun"; so, cutter means "thing that cuts". It is the actual agent by which cutting happens.
The Instrumental Case is a grammatical function that indicates the means by which the agent or subject of the verb does the action:
I-subj cut-verb the.box-obj (with.a.box.cutter)-instr.
If English had case endings like Latin, you could see the difference easily:
Puer-NOM cistam-ACC cultello-ABL secavit-VERB
Latin uses the ablative case to denote the instrumental case, due to ancient case syncretism of the old ablative, locative and instrumental cases.
-ise / -ize, in English, is a grammatical morpheme that indicates the word is a denominal verb. This means that the verb in question is made from a noun. We already know that English weirds. It verbs nouns at the drop of a hat.
I will hammer him if he attacks me with the knife.
Your example, "I will hammerise him if he attacks me with a knife", doesn't actually make sense in context. This is because -ise doesn't mean "use something as an instrument", it means "turn something into something else".
Immigrants ought to be Americanised through educational programmes.
The machine pulverises large pieces of stone into gravel.
I think your best bet, as far as "converse" of or "opposite" of the instrumental case, would be the
noninstrumental case, which I just made up. It does what the instrumental case does, only in the other direction. Essentially, the speaker denies the instrumentality of the named article.
Puer-NOM cistam-ACC cultellei-NONINST secavit-VERB
I considered "deinstrumental", but that's already a thing (a noun or verb made upon an instrumental form).
"English weirds"—love it. Conflating, yes, but I thought I said as much in my post. English doesn't have distinct grammatical forms for what I was trying to describe, and I don't actually know Latin—just enough to explore Latinate English forms and/or be dangerous and/or get conlang ideas.
Revisiting (much later!) and accepting. I do disagree with you that "-ise" can't be instrumental. I don't recall now what specific example I was thinking of at the time, though I'm sure I had one! But I do have an example now where it's clearly not "turn into the thing", and is arguably instrumental: "brutalise". If I brutalise someone, I use brutality on them.
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1569 | Did the Elvish languages converge before they diverged?
I have the impression that Tolkien, for whom pinning anything down permanently was Not The Point, worked his philology forward and backward almost equally.
Is it known whether or not Qenya and Goldogrin (early versions of what became Quenya and Sindarin) were initially conceived as related? Or did Tolkien begin them independent of each other (though perhaps with many loanwords) and later think “oh, they ought to be related” and adapt them to fit each other?
Tolkien did work out the history of his languages both forward and backward, that is:
construct a pseudo-historical background and deduce the form you have
actually decided on from an antecedent and different form (conceived
in outline); or you can posit certain tendencies of development and
see what sort of form this will produce. - A Secret Vice
But AFAIK, these two languages have always been related from the earliest materials so far published (Qenya Lexicon, Gnomish Lexicon, The Books of Lost Tales …), just as their speakers in the Legendarium.
I'm not aware of any material regarding even earlier stages of them.
The ‘Sindarin’, a Grey-elven language, is in fact constructed deliberately to resemble Welsh phonologically and to have a relation to High-elven similar to that existing between British (properly so-called, sc. the Celtic languages spoken in this island at the time of the Roman Invasion) and Latin. - Letter #165
I can't say whether Tolkien had Gnomish in mind, or which idea came to him first: to resemble Welsh phonologically, or to have a relation to Quenya.
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1731 | What are some different ways to use applicatives?
I'm most familiar with "applicative" meaning a specific way of rearranging the arguments of a verb. For example, the -el- suffix in Lingála adds a direct object to a verb, the person who benefits from the action (deleting the previous direct object if one already exists): kosála "to work on [something]", kosálela "to work for [someone]".
However, I've also heard the word "applicative" being used more broadly, for any marker on a verb that adds an argument (sometimes replacing an existing one). In this sense, causatives would also be applicatives, since they add a new argument: the person who is causing the action to be done.
What are some examples of "applicatives" in this broader sense? In other words, what are some different types of arguments natural languages can add to their verbs?
I'm still not totally used to this site's on-topic/off-topic guidelines, but I figure I might as well ask a question and see. "How is X done in natural languages" seems to be on-topic so I'm hoping "what do natural languages use X for" also is.
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2202 | How do I make my language *look* weird?
We have some discussion of creating "weird" phonology already. But often, people will encounter conlangs by seeing them written. And many of those weirdnesses won't come across well in writing—if I include click consonants and write them as ǁ and ǂ, that's just as meaningless to an average reader as putting apostrophes everywhere in sci-fi names (I'm thinking of DC Comics martians, with names like John and Megan but spelled J'onn and M'gann). And most English-speakers can produce a retroflex consonant without much effort, but I can't think of any way of spelling a name that will tell them to do that.
What are some ways to make my conlang sound weird, unusual, or otherwise foreign to Standard Average European speakers, that will come across accurately in text (i.e. the foreign-ness doesn't disappear if you just ignore all the unfamiliar letters)?
For users of Standard Average European (SAE) languages, some sounds strongly suggest weirdness, specially sounds from Slavonic languages or Semitic languages, like kh, gh, or q.
In addition, SAE languages have a highly conventionalised set of allowed initial consonant clusters that can be approximated by the following set
bl br
dr
fl fr
gl gn gr
kl kn kr ks kv/kw
pl pn pr ps
sl sn sr sk skl skr skv/skw sp spl spr st str sv/sw *
tr ts
thr
vl/wl vr/wr
* s can turned to or replaced by sh in some SAE languages in some or
all of these environments
Deviating from this conventional set, either by extending it (dl, tl, thl, dn, fn, tn, thn would constitute mild deviations, pfr, kkh, kshtr, psl or similar are wilder deviations), or by restricting it further, in the extreme to no initial consonant clusters at all, will create a feelable effekt. Add a lot of kh and q, and the language looks already weird.
Fantasy names are often pretty rich in vowels and tend to have hiatusses like ae, ie, or ue, this is another marker of weirdness and a "fantasy signal".
EDIT: Quite another approach, starting with completely unproblematic phonemes and clusters, is to impose a strong patterning at allowed word forms. like Lojban or Loglan do. A single word of those languages would not create much irritation, but a complete sentence (not to mention longer texts) already looks really weird.
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2208 | Construction of sets of languages and stories for kids in those languages
This is a software engineering question.
How would you use a script to create not one language but four languages whose words were made up of pieces of words of all four languages, and then make a set of stories for kids in these languages that interrelated everything (and, then, the languages could be studied)?
Thanks.
"Made up of pieces" makes me think of a permutational approach. Let
kitabo be the root word for "book" and the word for book in language 1 (l1).
Than bokita can be in l2, and taboki in l3, and for l4 you can choose another permutation like kibota. Here, I permuted syllables, you can also choose to permute only the consonants or the vowels.
The short function words may pose a problem, you can have them the same or somehow different for the four languages.
The second task is probably not feasible. Although large language models (LLMs) can now produce stories, they need to be trained on a large amount of data in the target language. Because your four languages are brand new, the data are lacking.
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2224 | Words for an association of an object with an emotion
How would you coin a word, for:
a word, for dealing with a person, where
...
the word was something in a situational experience
the situation, was known to the listener
the situation, was associated with a feeling or an emotion (or, a blur, between the two
the object was presented to the listener to recall the emotion
(and, perhaps, the emotion resulted from an implicit, conversation, which, may (or may not, have nothing to do with the situation
The word, described something the person applied or did
Thanks.
Overall, that was not a positive experience. Perhaps, I should delete my post.
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2139 | Language and language storage system reflecting non-linear brain structure
Consider the following sentence.
"A sailor {went, ate, made, tailored} to see see see and {did, wanted, embedded-inspired} what they could do"
Now, suppose that instead of having a book I have a computer.
I turn each node in this sentence into a node in a graph, and display it it (including the set structure).
Then, I branch the elements of the "set, nodes(?.
The branches, lead to other sentences (sentence continuation
I regard the entire graph as what I want to say.
I use something like vision or something like TalkBack to go through the graph, which, does away with order (in some ways. It's a graph, it's non liner.
Has anyone implemented software to support this type of language construction.
Please create the accessibility tag for me. Don't just assume a language is liner or don't comprehend and include reading considerations.
Thanks.
What would you want the software to do, specifically, to support this?
For example my first thought would be something involving GraphViz, since that's useful for almost anything involving drawing graphs, but that only helps if your goal is drawing it out.
Your description sound almost like dependency parsing, analyzing the sentence as a tree (acyclic graph), although on a different level (not syntax).
This is well established in (corpus) linguistics, and subsequently there are some (not many, though) tools for intractive tree editing - se e.g. a list of tools working with Universal Dependencies. And often you are not restricted to the existing tagset (and dependency relations), but you can use your own.
Warning, since the tools are often "research quality" and used in a rather niche environment, installing and using them is sometimes not for the faint of heart.
It sounds like you want software to support writing, viewing, and editing a non-linear language.
Miss Rosette
The descriptions I've seen of "Miss Rosette" seem like exactly what you're looking for -- it's software to support writing and editing "The Elephant's Memory"(a)(b)(c), a 2D non-linear language.
Alas, I've only found descriptions of it; I've never seen the software itself.
General 2D drawing software
My understanding is that many people use general-purpose drawing software (such as, for example, Inkscape or Vectr using a "library of symbols") to create written text that is even a little outside the capabilities of a linear word-processor.
Specialized 2D drawing software
There are a lot of specialized tools to make 2D non-linear diagrams.
Perhaps they are close enough that they could be (mis-)used directly
as software to support writing a 2D non-linear language.
Some of this software is open-source,
so perhaps they could be tweaked to better support
writing 2D non-linear languages in general,
or specialized to better support some specific 2D non-linear language.
Tools for "schematic capture" and "PCB layout" (generating 2D non-linear images called "schematic diagrams" and "PCB artwork", respectively) include, for example, gEDA and KiCad. Often they represent "activities" where lots of different things are happening simultaneously.
Tools for mapping computer networking include, for example, draw.io (also known as diagrams.net) and ASCIIFlow and Mermaid.
Tools for "technical drawings" also called "mechanical drawings" include, for example, LibreCAD and QCAD and FreeCAD and the 2D parts of JSCAD.
Tools for 2D chemistry drawings of molecules include, for example, the 2D parts of MolView.
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2182 | How to come up with novel words for exact concepts that result from specific fact combinations: word coining acts
Here is something I would like to be able to describe with a single word:
"You hold something in your hand (or that somethibng is perhaps in your pocket or attached to your body in done way), you are coerced to put it down, or discard it, focus on what you are doing, and forget the thread of thought associated with what that object was leading you to, or where that object is."
This, is very specific.
I want to coin a new word for it.
However, there is not an app where I can type concepts in and get a word suggestion for it (math, at, a moderate, to advanced, level, and dictionaries, do this).
However, as this sentence illustrate, I want novel coinings.
I need them, because, without these describing what I am experiencing, I will never be able to talk.
There is also the issue that no app exists where you can type stuff in and get word suggestions (these, would be, novel, invented, exactly describing words for the concept).
But there is also the issue that once you see a word your mind associates it with a concept, making it difficult to go though the list (this might make the language creator distinct and different from the language's users, by means of this specific language handicap of the creator, if present).
Is language creation a one-to-many language process (coiner and users)?
How do you implement a coining act (for the concept I described in particular, and for any concept in general)?
Thanks.
As we are here on a conlanging site, there are already some good questions and answers on coining new words.
The most important thing is, that the vocabulary fits to the overall style of your conlang, this includes aspects like phonology and phonotactics (the choice and sequence of sounds). A word can be unmotivated (in the system of your conlang), i.e., without any clues of its meaning, or motivated, e.g., by being a derivation of some other word in the conlang, or a compound word. Some conlangers go further and construct a fantasy culture around their languages (or languages around the worlds they are building), a new-coined word may reflect some of this cultural influence and be motivated by that.
(EDIT): So, in the concrete and very specific example of the question, there could be a famous story known to the educated people in that world, connected to the name of an ancient hero X who had exactly this feeeling, and there is a word that sounds like "have a feeling like hero X" in your conlang.
At the end of the day, you are the conlang designer and it is your choice of the perfectly cromulent word.
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677 | How to link extraterrestrial animal names from other language with terrestrial languages?
As title states; how to name extraterrestrial fauna/flora to human languages, would reffering to animals similar to cows as to cows and to plant that bears round red fruits as to apple be linguisticly acceptable? Or maybe new words would have to be put in place to describe those creatures?
This is primarily opinion-based, and probably should be closed on that basis. This is not a new problem, either; there's plenty of SF where this has had to be done. Each author has done what has seemed best to him/her, ranging from making up nonsense words, to using terrestrial names based on appearance or behavior, to using modified terrestrial names based on appearance or behavior, to ....
Oh, I did not know it had such obvious resolution. So all are correct? Each one will be accepted?
Karol, you're the creator, you can do whatever you want! :)
@KarolOfGutovo If you're looking for what other constructed languages do (along the lines of jknappen's answer), you could edit your question to ask how other conlangs deal with this
There is natlang precedent: consider the Tasmanian wolf and tiger.
I think, the more generic a term is, the better you can use a known term in your native language. The more specific a term is, the greater is the need for some circumlocution or some conlang term.
Examples: Specific kinds of flowers and trees in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" have constructed names like mallorn, niphedril, or simbelmyne. He consistently used pipe-weed (the word tobacco is used by the narrator, but not in dialogues). Already on the level of genera, Tolkien uses terms like pine tree, oak, ... and of course there is grass, there are trees, there are horses and so on.
Whether you want to call some space creatures "cows" depends on the picture the word "cow" evokes and the uses of cows (Do they give milk and flesh? Can you use oxen for ploughing or driving a cart?) in your fictional culture.
Tolkien mentions horses and grass and so on because his Middle-earth is in the distant past of our world, in which those plants &c that have unfamiliar names are now extinct.
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1561 | I want to build a language that expresses the maximum amount of information with minimal words spoken
I'm trying to come up with a conlang for a setting where spoken word casts magic etc. In this case, a group of wizards, etc. Develop arcadian, which functions to give the most information with the least amount of time spoken. I'm very new to conlangs, but I got a crude idea of how this could work. You start with a base, maybe a verb. Then, you add modifiers to designate direct objects, adjectives, etc. I know that this is pretty difficult, especially for a beginner. But, I'm hoping I can get some good tips and feedback on approaching this.
One already-existing conlang that goes in that direction is Ithkuil, a language made to compress information as much as possible, mainly by having a big number of phonemes (including tone) and short morphemes.
The most impressive example given by the author (in my opinion) is
Aukkras êqutta ogvëuļa tnou’elkwa pal-lši augwaikštülnàmbu.
‘An imaginary representation of a nude woman in the midst of descending a staircase in a step-by-step series of tightly-integrated ambulatory bodily movements which combine into a three-dimensional wake behind her, forming a timeless, emergent whole to be considered intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically.’
On the other hand, Ithkuil also strives for perfect exactness, so I'd suggest you could take some inspiration from it, but should cut e.g. some of the 96 cases, to make your language actually usable in practice.
I made a similar post on reddit and most comments suggested taking inspiration from ithkuil.
First of all, natural languages seem to have a rather constant rate of information (measured in information per time), independent of genetic relations and of the typological classification of the language, for a scholarly reference see this answer on linguistics.se.
But as a conlang designer, you can strive for a higher information rate, specially when your conlang is used by people with some superhuman powers. As an example to achieve higher information rate, you may look at Dutton Speedwords.
Along the same lines, see Heinlein’s Speedtalk.
This sounds like a bad idea to me. Redundancy (ie "superfluous" information) improves the robustness of transmission of a message, so while you can reduce it in artificial languages to increase the bandwidth, you trade this off against a higher rate of errors and failed transmissions.
Now imagine you had a list of spells, and in order to reduce the time needed to cast them, they are all abbreviated with a six-digit/letter code. Now you have a noisy environment, say during a storm or a battle, and you want to cast a particular spell. How likely is it that one of the letters or digits is coming across wrongly to the receiver of that spell? And then, instead of a fireball, you might create a bunch of flowers instead. Or you summon the wrong demon. There's a reason why phonetic alphabets ("alpha", "bravo", "charlie"...) exist. Similarly, a single spelling mistake (no pun intended) can achieve the same disastrous outcome in writing.
If you want to increase the robustness of your words, you could reduce the number of phonemes (as there is, say, no danger of confusing /k/ and /g/ if they don't make a distinction in your language); then either the words need to be longer (see eg some Hawai'ian words), or you need longer phrases (as you will have fewer words available that are not long) or multiple sentences (see eg toki pona).
Unfortunately there are certain quantitative properties of language (or any code for that matter) which cannot be overcome: you can't increase the amount of information transmitted without also increasing the danger of corrupting the message. Natural languages seem to have found a good balance over time to ensure adequate speed of information transmission overall.
If your message can be transmitted repeatedly (eg in a casual conversation), getting it wrong occasionally might not be a problem (as long as you notice it), but for a high-stakes, one-off communicative event (spell casting, military comms [see Charge of the Light Brigade], safety warnings, ...) I would want enough redundancy to make sure the message comes across correctly the first time.
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748 | In what ways are grammatical genders useful?
In a previous question about making a language easy to learn as a second language I suggested that grammatical genders have very little usefulness. A couple of people, however, suggested that grammatical genders have more usefulness than I think. Because of this I am interested in hearing about any potential uses for grammatical genders.
Usefulness can be identified by looking at what happens when the grammatical gender is removed. If the speaker needs to communicate the lost information through other means then the grammatical gender is deemed useful.
Are you asking about gender-like grammatical gender (male vs. female, maybe neuter) or about noun classes, which can be very complex (ranging from animate vs. inanimate to several hundred different classes)?
@Richard I am mainly interested in grammatical genders with a small number of classes (2, 3, or 4) since the inspiration for my question came from French and German. That said, I would be fine with an answer that talks about noun class systems with a larger number of classes.
The generic term for genders is "word classes". In some languages male/female isn't the main way to divide up the world.
Word classes are useful for co-ordination. If a language lacks gender, (or animacy, what have you), then you need some other way to know what adjective goes with what noun, which antecedent a pronoun refers to and so on. A language with lousy coordination might be English, with things like "He saw him hit him with it."
They make languages hard for language learners because the semantic relationship between the word classes overtime becomes increasingly arbitrary and creates a lexical burden for language learners, i.e. you just have to memorize the word class for each word. Also, gender marker is obligatory, so you have a high entry cost-- you can't say anything until you work out the genders of the relevant words.
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1461 | How to prevent pronoun dropping in my language?
I have an idea for a language I am toying with where sentences have a fairly rigid structure, unfortunately I get the feeling that if I were to start with a precursor protolang (as part of me developing the language) with this structure, the leading pronoun would be worn away and eventually dropped by the time I figure out what the modern version of the language would look like.
I would end up with a Pro-drop language.
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are pragmatically or grammatically inferable.
The sort of 'rigid structure', besides being SOV, I have been thinking of would be something like:
<subject-pronoun><pronoun-context-suffix> <first-object> <optional-second-object> <verb>...
The unique difficulty is, that I intentionally want all sentences to be of this form.
Whereas in english you might say "The dog barks, and that makes me happy", in this language it would be "I 'happy-mood-indicator' dog barks'. Or where you might say "Alex gave them a book" in this language you would say "I 'uncertainty-indicator' Alex them gave book" if you didn't know it definitely happened, or "I 'profession-indicator' Alex them gave book", if it's your job to make sure Alex give them the book, "I 'part-of-group-indicator' Alex them gave book" if you being part of a group is important to the context (in this way, we only have the singular subject pronoun) and so on for different contexts.
But as you might guess, if all sentences start with the subject pronoun, I can't see a reason why the word would naturally stay as part of the sentence structure.
How can I prevent it being dropped?
It sounds like you’re not just wanting the subject to be mandatory, but you want a first-person subject to be mandatory, even when the actual subject isn’t first-person (e.g., how would you distinguish ‘I think/know/etc. Alex gave them a book’ and ‘Alex gave them a book’ if a first-person subject and epistemic marker equivalent to ‘I think/know/etc.’ is mandatory?). Mandatory subjects are common, and mandatory epistemic markers not unheard of – but mandatory first-person subject pronouns is not something I’ve ever seen in a natural language.
I'm interpreting the question as how do I make obligatory subject pronouns at the beginning of a sentence diachronically stable under some perhaps-reasonable assumptions.
First, the idea you're describing with an obligatory clause-initial subject pronoun and some kind of clitic in Wackernagel's position (directly after the first constituent) might already be fairly stable.
There is natural language precedent for obligatory subject pronouns, for example, see Fijian. There's nothing directly equivalent to the context particles, but Fijian does have some TAM marking particles that appear before or after the verb, which appears directly after the subject pronoun.
Speculating a bit, I think you're onto something that subject pronouns are frequently pragmatically inferrable. Indeed, some languages regularly drop the subject pronoun even in cases where the verb lacks person marking.
In order to combat this, you might do something like fuse the subject pronoun and negative marker, yielding something similar to the negative subject prefixes in Swahili and other Bantu languages.
Your definitely into something here. I'll have a think. Woul making them or some of the clitics prefixes be plausible? Initial mutation? One last thing, does the distance of the clause-initial pronoun from the verb (which would normally get conjugated) help at all?
I'm not sure how to answer your follow-up question. There's some natural language precedent already for some of the features you describe individually (clause-initial pronouns, second-position clitics, mandatory subject pronouns even in the presence of a lexical subject). I don't think the exact combination of features you propose is attested, but that's sort of to be expected as you add consider more features together simultaneously.
The broad picture of what you're describing, an SOV language with a rigid structure but a lot of clause-initial grammatical morphemes is, I think, somewhat uncommon. I would recommend poking around WALS for examples of languages, for example SOV languages with clause-initial negation or maybe evidentials that are second-position enclitics. A language with the feature you want will sometimes have a reference grammar available if you search for it. Reference grammars are good sources of inspiration.
thats great, thanks very much. I'll brave WALS again
You can also combine features. This link combines, for example, the order of object and verb and coding of evidentiality https://wals.info/combinations/83A_78A#2/18.0/149.4 . Most languages have a feature value for order of object and verb and there aren't many options total so it's a good feature to combine with other things (order of adposition and noun also has lots of data).
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1566 | Are there set example sentences used when developing a conlang?
When working on fonts, it's typical to use a pangram to show how it handles letters, like so:
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Is there an equivalent set of sentences for testing how a conlang handles things like clauses, conditionals, pronouns etc?
I'm asking as I'm trying to figure out how my conlang with an idiosyncratic sentence structure (topic marker (linked to the class of subject or object or the verb) - one of several first person pronouns - relationship marker - object and/or subject and verb.) would handle some of the above things?
See also this one which is related, but probably not the same question: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/q/1407/142
Probably the closest thing is the text of the Tower of Babel legend that has been (is still?) customarily used to demonstrate your conlang (the alternative being the Lord's Prayer, but this suffers from stilted, archaic language and a necessary religious bias; OTOH, it is available for almost all natlangs). Not quite demonstrating all the possible grammatical features, but the text is rich and long enough to demonstrate basic concepts, and yet short enough to be easy to translate without too much effort.
In phonetics the standard text is the story of the Northwind and the Sun, for the same reasons.
Omniglot.com uses Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." (Also not demonstrating a large number of grammatical features.)
Shleicher's fable (and the king and the god) is also fairly commonly used, at least for Indo-European a posteriori languages, based on their intended use for comparing natural IE languages
I have found these 218 Sentences to Test Conlang Syntax quite useful.
The sentences range from demonstrating tense, aspect and mood:
The sun shines.
Happy people often shout.
You should go.
to demonstrating more sophisticated concepts such as clausal subjects:
Why he has left the city is a mystery.
and inferential knowledge and evidence:
Evidently that gate is never opened, for the long grass and the great hemlocks grow close against it.
I did find it useful to make many more variants over time, and a version which indexes the grammatical concepts so that you can look up later how you did it would be an improvement. But it's a very good foundation, for my [unspent] money.
This google doc is my master copy, of which you are welcome to make your own in the file menu.
I originally found it here, 8/25/13. The original site was down, so I saved them. I understand credit is due a Mr. Gary Shannon.
I hadn't even noticed that your answer credits Gary Shannon, presumably the same who originally put up the Graded Sentences for Analysis that I suggested! Your list includes a selection from those (plus a few more), and is probably more useful overall.
I'm glad for your answer, too, as it gives me lots more to test, like you said, for interesting features I may not have thought about yet. Although I admit that if I had seen all 1,000+ to start, rather than 218, with I might not have started ha ha ha.
The Graded Sentences for Analysis list (mirror) provides 1000-plus sample sentences, apparently from an old out-of-copyright textbook on English grammar and sentence diagramming.
Rather than trying to translate every single one, you might browse through them looking for interesting features—things you may well take for granted in your native language!
A sample:
Directly opposite stands a wonderful palace.
Rip's dog walked along slowly after him.
The warm south wind, heavy with the perfume of blossoms, came through my window.
He tried, but failed.
She had a little narrow blue ribbon over her shoulders, that looked like a scarf.
I think that that man is a Swede.
I must now relate what happened to me a few days before the ship sailed.
Ye gads! Over 800 more test sentences than I had before. Does anybody have a term for a rabbit hole with the properties of a black hole...
I put both sets together onto spreadsheets. Also, for some reason highlighting column A shows a count of 6, but there's nothing in it by several other methods I think of to find the 6: 6 units of emptiness.
Anyway: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1imbqkviBURbRh_EOAvGpVmjEnYUgHKrUQNszPEA9JKI/edit?usp=sharing
I am enjoying these! I am up to one about "the smallest boy" and I suggest a variant "one of the smallest boys." I don't immediately find a "one of the" or "among the" comparison in either set's comparisons, though it could be hidden with a phrase I haven't thought of. Coming up with new structures for these comparatives can be tricky, so it's handy to have differences like this to begin with.
Another common one I've seen among conlangers is The North Wind and the Sun, from Aesop's fables. The IPA (the association, not the alphabet) uses it as a demonstration text; after they describe a language's phonetics and phonology, they'll usually give a transcription of the fable in that language. This means that there are a lot of parallel versions out there to compare.
For reference, this is the version they used for General American English:
The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.
ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd ən (ð)ə ˈsʌn wɚ dɪsˈpjutɪŋ ˈwɪtʃ wəz ðə ˈstɹɑŋɡɚ, wɛn ə ˈtɹævəlɚ ˌkem əˈlɑŋ ˈɹæpt ɪn ə ˈwoɹm ˈklok. ðe əˈɡɹid ðət ðə ˈwʌn hu ˈfɚst səkˈsidəd ɪn ˈmekɪŋ ðə ˈtɹævəlɚ ˈtek ɪz ˈklok ˌɑf ʃʊd bi kənˈsɪdɚd ˈstɹɑŋɡɚ ðən ðɪ ˈəðɚ. ðɛn ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd ˈblu əz ˈhɑɹd əz i ˈkʊd, bət ðə ˈmoɹ hi ˈblu ðə ˈmoɹ ˈklosli dɪd ðə ˈtɹævlɚ ˈfold hɪz ˈklok əˈɹaʊnd ɪm; ˌæn ət ˈlæst ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd ˌɡev ˈʌp ði əˈtɛmpt. ˈðɛn ðə ˈsʌn ˈʃaɪnd ˌaʊt ˈwoɹmli ənd ɪˈmidiətli ðə ˈtɹævlɚ ˈtʊk ˌɑf ɪz ˈklok. ən ˈso ðə ˈnoɹθ ˌwɪnd wəz əˈblaɪʒ tɪ kənˈfɛs ðət ðə ˈsʌn wəz ðə ˈstɹɑŋɡɚ əv ðə ˈtu.
Various translations into other natlangs are catalogued at the Aesop Language Bank. For example, here's Turkish.
There are a few other sample texts that are especially common for Indo-European conlangs.
The King and the God is a short passage based on an episode from the Brahmanas:
The King and the God
Once there was a king. He was childless. The king wanted a son. He asked his priest: "May a son be born to me!" The priest said to the king: "Pray to the god Werunos." The king approached the god Werunos to pray now to the god. "Hear me, father Werunos!" The god Werunos came down from heaven. "What do you want?" "I want a son." "Let this be so," said the bright god Werunos. The king's lady bore a son.
Various PIE scholars have used this as a way to demonstrate different reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European. For example, here's Byrd's:
H₃rḗḱs dei̯u̯ós-kwe
H₃rḗḱs h₁est; só n̥putlós. H₃rḗḱs súhxnum u̯l̥nh₁to. Tósi̯o ǵʰéu̯torm̥ prēḱst: "Súhxnus moi̯ ǵn̥h₁i̯etōd!" Ǵʰéu̯tōr tom h₃rḗǵm̥ u̯eu̯ked: "h₁i̯áǵesu̯o dei̯u̯óm U̯érunom". Úpo h₃rḗḱs dei̯u̯óm U̯érunom sesole nú dei̯u̯óm h₁i̯aǵeto. "ḱludʰí moi̯, pter U̯erune!" Dei̯u̯ós U̯érunos diu̯és km̥tá gʷah₂t. "Kʷíd u̯ēlh₁si?" "Súhxnum u̯ēlh₁mi." "Tód h₁estu", u̯éu̯ked leu̯kós dei̯u̯ós U̯érunos. Nu h₃réḱs pótnih₂ súhxnum ǵeǵonh₁e.
Another text used for the same purpose is Schleicher's Fable:
The Sheep and the Horses
A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.
This was introduced by August Schleicher in the 1800s (hence the name) to demonstrate his theories about PIE, and since then has become a standard way of showing the difference between PIE reconstructions. For consistency, here's Byrd again:
H₂óu̯is h₁éḱu̯ōs-kʷe
H₂áu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osméi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁ést, só h₁éḱu̯oms derḱt. Só gʷr̥hₓúm u̯óǵʰom u̯eǵʰed; só méǵh₂m̥ bʰórom; só dʰǵʰémonm̥ h₂ṓḱu bʰered. H₂óu̯is h₁ékʷoi̯bʰi̯os u̯eu̯ked: "dʰǵʰémonm̥ spéḱi̯oh₂ h₁éḱu̯oms-kʷe h₂áǵeti, ḱḗr moi̯ agʰnutor". H₁éḱu̯ōs tu u̯eu̯kond: "ḱludʰí, h₂ou̯ei̯! Tód spéḱi̯omes, n̥sméi̯ agʰnutór ḱḗr: dʰǵʰémō, pótis, sē h₂áu̯i̯es h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ gʷʰérmom u̯éstrom u̯ept, h₂áu̯ibʰi̯os tu h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁esti". Tód ḱeḱluu̯ṓs h₂óu̯is h₂aǵróm bʰuged.
You can find a nice overview of several different reconstructions in the Wikipedia article.
Neither of these is as common among conlangers as The North Wind and the Sun or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but they're moderately popular among people making a posteriori Indo-European languages, because you can find several different reconstructions for different stages of Proto-Indo-European and its descendants (Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, etc) to compare against.
I posted this one as a separate answer so it can be voted up or down separately; in particular, neither of these is as widely popular as the fable in the other answer.
The first article of the Universal Declaration of Humar Rights seems quite popular in some circles, i.e. r/conlangs.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
I use it for my conlangs. For some classes of conlangs, it might be hard to translate; especially in worldbuilding, some of the less concrete cultural things like "freedom" and "a spirit of brotherhood" might be a difficulty.
I do agree this is a popular item to translate, Tuxysta. Also, here on the Earth I am in favor of this declaration. In my opinion it also worth noting an unfortunate property which it has as an early item of translation for worldbuilders. It uses vague, abstract concepts like 'freedom' (e.g., to do what? to not do what?) and 'equality' (e.g., equal in what sense? to what degree?). The conlanger may naturally take equivalents of these terms as natural as he tries to translate it, where I feel these could be very rich semantic areas to invent anew as a fiction grows.
Definitely! Additionally, the phrase "in the spirit of brotherhood" is quite awkward to translate, esp. in world building.
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1207 | Words for Mercy in Toki Pona?
I would like to translate Bismillah Ir-Rahmani Ir-Rahim into Toki Pona.
The parts I'm struggling with are the Rahma part, and the Raheem part, as they encompass similar but subtly different meanings of Mercy.
Rahma is more closely associated with motherly love. Rahim is more of an extreme mercy regardless of what is being forgiven.
I haven't found a translation for mercy, let alone one that encompasses these subtle differences.
toki!
Toki Pona has a word for mercy, and it is simply olin, just like love, tenderness, warmth, etc.
For instance:
mi jo e olin tan sina
(I have mercy because of you),
or
mi jo e olin tawa sina
(I have mercy for you).
What about if you specifically need the concept of judicial mercy, of not punishing someone who is rightly deserving of some kind of punishment?
The thing is that Toki Pona is not designed for complex concepts, like judicial ones, medical ones, technical ones, etc.
Or, when used for complex concepts, you have to be very complex about explaining them, rather than letting one word or phrase do all of the work.
Maybe something like:
"jan sewi li pana e olin tawa jan li lawa pona la lon nimi ona."
If you wanted to write it in what looked like arabic there is an adaptation of Arabic for English that could be also used for toki pona here.
یاَن سِوئ لئ پانا اِ اُولین تاوا یاُن لئ لاوا پُونا لا نئمئ اُونا.
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1185 | How to say, 'Haters gonna Hate' in Toki Pona
The closest I could find was
jan ike | awen pali e ona | pilin ike tawa
enemy | continue | hate
But I've not figured out if that the right way to combine those phrases
The consensus answer (thanks Oliver Mason) for how to translate Haters gonna hate into Toki Pona is the following:
tenpo ale la jan ike li ike
Tenpo ale la translates as at all times and captures the sense of inevitability in haters gonna hate in English. It also serves to rule out other possible readings such as the tautological bad people are bad. Here ike is used as "commit evil acts", one of which is presumably hating.
I interpret Haters gonna hate as a phrase for dismissing all criticism as inevitable or unfounded regardless of its content.
I don't think hate in this context literally refers to feeling hatred/enmity, but to hating on, which is not quite the same thing and covers things like insults and ridicule.
I think we strip out a lot of the detail of haters gonna hate and get something reasonable.
jan ike li ike
person bad PRED bad
bad people are bad
Since jan ike is so much broader than bad person in English, I think this does a good job of conveying the intent of the expression. People predisposed to ridicule or insult you are going to ridicule or insult you regardless of what you do.
The right way to combine the phrases you gave above would be
jan ike li awen pali e pilin ike tawa.
However, there are a few constructions in there I'm not sure about
li awen pali
PRED keep do
I don't know whether you can use awen like this as an auxiliary verb of sorts to mark habitual or progressive aspect, as you seem to be doing here.
pilin ike tawa
feeling bad towards
I don't know whether you can use an objectless preposition attributively like this. My guess is yes since prepositions besides e (if analyzed as a preposition) do not form a distinct word class in Toki Pona. I'm having trouble finding an explicit citation for the non-existence of prepositions as a distinct word class, this is the closest I can find.
This is a lot to digest, but I feel like the restatement of "bad people are bad" is no more accurate than "long cat is long" or "Boys will be Boys". It feels like tautological emphasis instead of the subtext of "let people who are hateful be hateful, and don't let them get to you, because no matter that you do to appease them they will remain unchanged." I'll try to go over what you said later, to understand the technix6 points you are making.
maybe add a tenpo ale la to the front: at all times/always bad people are bad.
@olivermason I like that addition
@olivermason I'm close to accepting this answer ingles you want to add your own with that addition?
Please wait for Oliver to add his answer, he deserves the credit for the “always” addition.
Thank you, both! It's fine, I'm happy for you to accept this answer. :)
@GregoryNisbet would you consider editing in the 'always' part ?
I'd say something like
jan pi lawa ike li wile e ijo ike tawa sina lon tenpo ale
Which means: "People of bad heads want bad things for you, always".
You could also use:
jan pi toki ike li wile e ijo ike tawa sina lon tenpo ale
Which means: "People of bad talking want bad things for you, always".
How does that literally translate back?
"People of bad heads want bad things for you, always".
You could also use:
"jan pi toki ike li wile e ijo ike tawa sina lon tenpo ale" > "People of bad talking want bad things for you, always".
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1887 | If I want my conlang's compound words not to exceed 3-4 syllables in length, what kind of phonology should my conlang have?
I've thought about using phonemic tones and permitting lots of clusters as ways of keeping my words short, but I don't want the syllables to be so heavy that every compound becomes a tongue-twister.
How should I go about making a happy medium between a phonology that generates only very heavy single syllable words vs. a phonology that is so simple that compounds must each comprise 6 or more syllables?
In case the future reader has not heard the term, 'phonotactics' is useful to look up here.
Related: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1608/how-does-one-go-about-designing-phonotactics-for-a-conlang
If you want fewer syllables per word, you'll want a larger number of possible syllables. (For a metaphor, think about how many letters vs how many kana vs how many kanji you need to represent a particular Japanese word. The more possible glyphs/syllables you have, the fewer of them you need to convey the same amount of information.)
Some good ways to do this:
Allow lots of different coda consonants.
Have lots of different vowels.
Allow clusters of two consonants in onsets or codas, instead of just one.
For example, if you start out allowing only CV syllables, and then you decide to add long vowels, that doubles the number of possible syllables. If you allow CVn instead of just CV, that doubles it again. If you allow sC instead of just C, that's another doubling…
This is why English has over ten times as many common syllables as Japanese (Oh's corpus analysis gives 6,949 vs 643 in the 20k most frequent words), and thus why English words consist of fewer syllables than Japanese ones. We have a whole lot of vowels, many possible codas, and very elaborate clusters in both onsets and codas (consider "strengths"). Japanese only allows two possible coda consonants (N and Q) and the only valid onset cluster is Cj.
why only mention coda consonants? Lots of distinct consonants will increase the number of syllables regardless (although having ones allowed in both onset and coda will do so fastest)
An example is some dialects of Inuktitut. A syllable is (C)V(/p t k q/) (ignoring sandhi in the final consonant). With 15 consonants, 3 vowels that can be long or short for 6 total, and the 4 consonants allowed in the coda, that's 360 potential single syllable words. Depending on the accents and such, English has upwards of 300,000 potential distinct one-syllable words.
@Tristan Mostly because coda consonants are almost always (always?) more restricted than onset consonants. Increasing the number of onset consonants, when there are already a lot of them, has less of an effect than increasing the number of coda consonants, when there aren't many. But of course you're right, more distinct consonants also gives more syllables.
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781 | Are there any "unspeakable" languages?
Sorry, my title is slightly misleading; what I'm after is more like a written language that doesn't have its roots in spoken language, and has no definitive translation into speech, but is none-the-less concise and clearly understandable. Tall order, I know - perhaps something similar would be cave-paintings: they seem to have a strong meaning that one could imagine was clear to people at the time, and which may convey a narrative of some sort; but the actual recital might have many variations. Or a more modern example: when you see a red circle around a drawing of a cigarette, with a red line across, you know it means that you are not allowed to smoke (so the meaning is clear and concise) - but the equivalent wording depends on the viewer, and could include phrases like "Don't smoke", "No smoking", or many others,
It seems achievable, at least, that one could construct such a language, which might even be universally understandable; but has it already been done in the form of a full language?
Well, there are sign languages, which are signed, rather than spoken - do they qualify?
Emoji? http://this.deakin.edu.au/society/is-emoji-the-language-of-the-future
@j4nd3r53n Interesting that you mention in a comment that your ideal is to produce a written language that is self-explanatory and could be universally deciphered. I'm actually working on the same thing. It's rather a shame that SE doesn't allow PMs, otherwise I'd get in touch.
The answer is a definite Yes, there are.
The example that comes immediately to my mind is Bliss symbolics (also known as Semantography) by Charles Bliss from 1942–1949. As an additional bonus, it is still used and developped further, and may even be included into Unicode at some date.
EDIT: The term to look for is pasigraphy. There were lots of pasigraphies (Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen, gives the number 60) mainly in the 19th century, but the most successful ones were created in the 20th century. There were both philosophical pasigraphies (often using digits or abstract symbols) and naturalistic ones (starting from pictograms).
I've accepted your answer, but is this the only one? I have some reservations, though; Bliss still seems strongly bound to things like European concepts of grammar and the time-sequential delivery of speech, and I would like to move beyond this - the ideal (admittedly naive) would be a language or writing system that would somehow be self-explanatory, so that anybody could look at a 'text' and begin to work out what it means. As you can see, I have wild ideas, but wouldn't it be great to have such a tool?
Wait for other answers to come in, I am pretty sure there are others around, although I don't have information about them at hand. It is not necessary to accept an answer quickly; as a rule of thumb upvote quickly, wait with acceptance a day or two to encourage other answers.
Yes? I'll follow your suggestion, then, and 'un-accept' for now :-)
Most of what are generally considered languages, whether natural or constructed, are in fact two languages, one written and one spoken. We usually learn the two together, and thus learn the mapping between them. These can vary in how obvious they are. At one extreme are languages that use a very standard mapping. It is virtually impossible to be able to read the Roman alphabet - in English or French, say, and to be able to speak Portuguese, but not to be able to read Portuguese, as a friend of mine found out. She had these skills but had never learnt to read Portuguese. Her mum was shocked to find her reading a book in Portuguese and asked where she learnt to do that. She had not learnt - she could just do it.
The next step is English or Gaelic (and not many other languages) where the mapping is so poor that it is possible to be fluent in the spoken language, and not to be able to read the language, even though you can read another language in the same alphabet. 100 years ago there was a famous disaster involving a ship called the Iolaire. Virtually everyone on board, and the bereaved relatives, had Gaelic as a first language, but they could not read Gaelic and so had no idea the ship's name was Gaelic - they pronounced it as an English person would and had no idea what the name meant.
Next come languages like Chinese, which is in fact several spoken languages, with one written language. The symbol 米 means rice. How you pronounce it varies according to whether you speak Mandarin or Cantonese, or even Japanese which sometimes uses Chinese symbols (Kanji). Thus you can learn written Mandarin (you now know one word) with no clue as to how to pronounce it.
We use some logograms in English. Some, such as ☏, are pictographic in origin, and so have no inherent pronunciation - we just translate them to English as we read them. Others, such as &, are alphabetic in origin. This one is a fancy way to write et, which is Latin or French for "and". We ignore this and just pronounce it "and". Of course other people, such as the Germans, will pronounce these symbols differently.
You could always learn a natural or constructed language from a book that had no pronunciation guide, if it was written in Cyrillic, using Chinese characters, or using its own made-up logograms. But of course, you could find out how to pronounce it.
Next, a language could be constructed without a vocal form. I am not aware that this has occurred. The problem here is that there is no way stop someone inventing a vocal form for each symbol. This is a bit like learning Old English or Ancient Greek. We do not know exactly how they were pronounced, and so we use what is basically a modern guess.
The only examples I can think of where there is no vocal form is the sign languages used by deaf communities. They are genuine languages, unlike signed English, and usually have no accepted spoken or written form.
Hi David, and thanks for your thoughtful answer. I like the connection you make to the language users' experience. So, if one were to construct a language, for example, that was entirely pictorial and meant to be understood by anybody, it would have to have a set of easily recognisable pictograms of objects from the shared experiences of humanity at its core, and an obvious way of composing concepts - a grammar of sorts, probably based on how close and in what sequence they occur in directions away from the central object. Sorry, I'm getting carried away here :-)
There have been many attempts at making languages easy to learn like this. They usually start well but soon run out of symbols/sounds/gestures. And the existing words develop new meanings, form bahuvrihis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahuvrihi) and so on and the original meaning soon becomes irrelevant. In fact, 米 represented a sheaf of rice
https://es.dreamstime.com/imagenes-de-archivo-gavilla-del-arroz-despu%C3%A9s-de-la-cosecha-en-el-campo-image35200104 but few people know or care as they write Chinese. So in the long run I think you would be just as well off with arbitrary symbols.
Yes, there are. There is a language called Silbo that is whistled and not spoken. There are around 70 whistled languages in the world. They're mostly for conveying words long distances.
That's an interesting idea, but there are a few issues. Firstly, isn't whistling a variety of speech in the linguistic sense? I put my mouth parts in a certain position and I blow - that makes a whistle a pretty standard pulmonic phoneme. Such a phoneme, s͎ in Shona exists. Whistled languages attach different meanings to the sound at different pitches, but this also is not unusual in speech - the Chinese do it all the time.
I was just going by the question of being "unspeakable" as asked. If that wasn't the question, then my answer doesn't apply, and I'm not sure what's being asked. Other than signs/symbols, then aren't they all spoken?
The second issue is whether it is a different language if you just take Spanish and replace the sounds, keeping the grammar and vocabulary. Each sound is just an allophone of an existing Spanish phoneme. Is it any more a separate language than Morse Code, where you take an existing language (say English) and just replace the graphemes? Wikipedia thinks that 'whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication', and I can't find any references to whistled languages that aren't based on non-whistled languages.
I think your point is quite valid. It is just that I am not sure if whistling should be counted as speaking. In normal English we regard speaking, singing, shouting and so on as different, but I think it is all speech to a linguist. I am quite happy to accept that, using normal terminology, Silbo is unspoken. But if it is just phoneme alteration, then it is people choosing not to speak, rather than being unable to speak.
Take a look at Computer Languages
Programming Languages and any computer language made to be understandable by humans is based on an already existent language (mostly english). Just to make things easy. But computers do not understand human languages, at least not directly. Machines still "communicate" and interpret information, but they do it in a language we don't understand.
Another thing you should consider, is Braille, since it's a writing system, but not a Spoken Language, as you say.
OP asked for a language that "doesn't have its roots in spoken language". Computer languages are - as you say - based on a spoken language and can often be directly translated to it. Also, since Braille is just a writing system, it's neither a spoken language nor an unspoken language.
Computer languages and braille are not conlangs in the sense that this site concerns.
Are programming languages even actual languages in the ordinary sense of the word?
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820 | A Hypothetical Mediterranean Language Inspired by Both Greek and Latin
Here is the scenario:
In or before the Classical Period, a king from some Greek city-state--it doesn't matter which--first brought all the other Greek city-states together to become one unified nation. Either he or his heir then declared that the whole of the Mediterranean belong to the Greeks. First phase of the grand plan was to conquer the Mediterranean was to absorb the lands of their closest neighbors, the Roman Republic. The Republic, weak from the Conflict of the Orders, embraced their Greek conquerors with minimal resistance. In absorbing Greek and Roman lands together, Greek and Roman culture merged into one, and that includes language.
The inspiration behind this scenario is that both Greek and Roman cultures have such inspirations on modern Western culture that it's hard to decipher where Greek ended and Roman began. But what if both cultures were merged into one new one? If you mix Greek with Latin, what should I look out for in regards to grammar?
I ask this because many people are not convinced that Glosa, an auxlang already inspired by both Greek and Latin, won't be the natural answer to this question.
This is really too open-ended for the way this site is intended to operate. You're free to pick and choose how you wish. Can you narrow the question somehow?
How is this not narrow?
For a non-hypothetical Greco-Latin contact language see this questions (still without an answer) https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/7332/are-there-attestations-of-greco-latin-contact-languages-from-antiquity
The situation you describe, in which Classical Greece invades the Roman Republic, has two probable outcomes. (This is assuming a single language "merged into one" excludes the possibility of both languages coexisting. However, a language can also exert influence on another without supplanting it.)
If the Romans adopted (or were forced to adopt) their conquerors' language, which is what happened in other nations after Alexander the Great's conquests later in history, then the spoken language would become Greek. The influence of the Latin language in such a case would exist as a substrate, which could introduce Latin loan words and grammatical structures into Roman Greek.
If the Romans didn't choose (or weren't forced) to adopt Greek as their language and continued to speak Latin, then Latin would remain the spoken language, but would have Greek influence on vocabulary and grammar, as a superstrate or adstrate. As it is, Latin already has Greek influence on its vocabulary, with learned words like philosophia; but in the case of a Greek conquest, it would probably gain more mundane words as well.
A comparable case in history with regard to English could be the Norman invasion of England. Anglo-Norman and English were spoken alongside each other. Eventually, English was the only language spoken of the two in England, but not without considerable influence from Anglo-Norman. Looking at this case might give an idea of how a language could change followed by the invasion of another one.
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1411 | Considering that my elves are anatomically different from humans, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?
For years now, I've been building and rebuilding an alternate Earth dense with geography, geology and wildlife. Among them is this world's equivalent of humans, Draculodon silvius, the "elf". Among purebred elves--elves that haven't interbred with their dwarf cousins--the average male stands 84 inches in height and 110 pounds in weight, whereas the average female stands 67 inches in height and 99 pounds in weight. Other differences are as follows:
Longer arms (65-77% the length of the body)
Longer hips
Shorter torsos
Longer necks
Pointed symmetrical outer ears averaging 3-5 inches in length
Asymmetrical inner ears 70% wider than our own
Longer feet
Thicker soles
Taller cheekbones
Longer, sharper canines
Larger molars
Tooth number: 44
So with those anatomical differences listed above, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?
There’s really only one part of anatomy relevant to producing speech, namely the shape of the mouth. Do your elves have any significant differences to humans in this regard? If not (as appears to be the case), then they will produce exactly the same phones as humans can.
You say 44 teeth --- are those 44 tiny teeth in the usual upper / lower single row arch; or do they have 32 normal sized teeth and a bunch of (what for us would be supernumerary) other teeth, like in a case of hyperdontia? Or do they have really long jaws to accommodate the extra teeth. Also, where are the extra teeth located? More molars? Extra canines?
@elemtilas The incisors and the molars.
What about the incisors and the molars?
@elemtilas You asked where the extra teeth are located.
Yes I did. So can you clarify: are their jaws longer or are they wider? Or both? And by how much? Let's put it this way: can you tell me how many molars, premolars, canines and incisors? Do they have other kinds of teeth as well and how many? Are they all arranged in a single line?
Does more teeth imply more of a muzzle, and a longer tongue? Then their language might distinguish more points of articulation for consonants than human languages do. Other than that, nothing jumps out at me that would do more than give them a strange ‘accent’.
Your descriptions don't really indicate any different phonemes that could be articulated.
A longer neck might mean deeper voices if the larynx is located further down (as the resonance area beyond the larynx becomes larger); I would assume that the different dental configuration would also not change anything.
If you think of the various places of articulation in the mouth, they would still be in the same place.
However, while the range of sounds will be the same as possible in human languages, you canpick a different subset from the possibilities — any human language only uses a fraction of the possibilities. The composition of that subset would be what makes your language unique.
It's worth thinking a bit about how the IPA table is divided and the motions underlying these sounds (i.e. gestural phonology).
We have places of articulation, and manners of articulation.
If your elves' have vocal tracts with analogous structures (moving backwards: lips, teeth, alveolar ridges, hard palates, soft palates, uvulas, pharynxes, and glottises) then the same places of articulation will exist. If you have additional structures, you'll have additional places of articulation, and if you're missing some structures you'll have fewer.
Now methods of articulation. There are four main articulators involved in speech, each of which allows for the production of sounds in a different set of places of articulation. These are the lips, the tongue, the pharynx, & the glottis.
Each articulator can produce a variety of gestures:
Complete closure: this gives stops, taps, and trills
Close restriction: this gives fricatives
Open restriction: this gives approximants and vowels
The tongue, and to a lesser extent the lips are very flexible and can contact multiple places of articulation. In humans, the lips can contact the other lip, or the teeth, whilst the tongue can contact anything from the lips to the uvula. If your elves have especially short lips, or lack the overbite common in humans today, they might find labiodontals difficult and lack them, and if they have short tongues, they are unlikely to have linguolabials, or even dentals.
Additionally, these articulators are able to form a variety of shapes and can use different parts of themselves to make the articulation. This gives the difference between retroflex and alveolar consonants (are you contacting with the top of the tongue, the tip, or even the bit just below the tip), between sibilants & non-sibilants (is the tongue flat or grooved), and between laterals and non-laterals (is the restriction made with the edges of the tongue or the centre). In natural languages, these shape contrasts are only observed with the tongue as articulator, but if your elves have especially bendy lips, they might be able to produce analogous contrasts with their lips.
The glottis and pharynx are fairly restricted due to their very nature, both only being able to act in their respective place of articulation, but you do have some freedom here in terms of what articulations they can actually produce. Human glottises can produce stops or fricatives, but the pharynx cannot produce stops. Perhaps your elves are able to fully close their pharynx (not only would this allow for pharyngeal stops, it would also allow for a new secondary articulation, intermediate between clicks, which use a velar closure, and ejectives, which use a glottal closure).
In humans, because our jaws are hinged at the back, fully open restriction is only really possible from the soft palate forwards. This is why the distinction between approximants and fricatives starts getting fuzzy around the uvula and back, the open restriction & close restriction are just too nearby for the clumsy back of the tongue, or the pharynx, or glottis to reliably distinguish them (likewise, vowels are articulated exclusively in the space between the alveolar ridge and soft palate). If your elves have mouths that swing open in such a way that the back is as open as the front, they might be able to reliably distinguish uvula fricatives from approximants.
In addition to these main articulators, there are a couple of other things to consider. These are the vocal chords and the nasal cavity.
Vocal chords give you the ability to distinguish voicing. Humans have tremendous control over our vocal chords allowing for languages that distinguish many different phonations (modal voicing, voiceless, creaky, breathy, etc), as well precise differences in voice onset time (voiced, tenuis, aspirated). If your elves have even finer control they may be able to distinguish even more levels, and if they have weaker control, they may distinguish fewer, or none at all.
The nasal cavity allows for nasal sounds. Gesturally, nasals aren't a separate method of articulation, but a secondary articulation on top of a voiced stop (the same secondary articulation that would go on a nasalised vowel, approximant, or fricative). In nasalised sounds, the very back of the soft palate (around the uvular) lowers, allowing air to enter it at the same time as it enters the mouth, this adds an additional resonating chamber giving an extra overtone visible in a waveform. Because the back of the soft palate has to lower to produce them, nasals are most easily produced forward in the mouth, are difficult on the soft palate, and impossible further back than the uvula. If your elves' nasal cavity connects further forwards than humans, they might find velar or even palatal nasals difficult, if it connects further back, they might find uvular nasals easy, and have an additional series of pharyngeal nasals even further back that they can produce but find difficult.
Any other changes to the vocal tract will affect the timbre of the sounds produced, but not what the sounds actually are at a gestural level (or how they would likely be perceived by a human with some exposure to the language). Many of the changes discussed above (especially adding or removing structures from the vocal tract) will also affect the timbre. As it is, it sounds like all the differences between your elf vocal tract and a human one are of this type.
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856 | Is Basic English a well-defined constructed language?
Wikipedia says that Basic English is an English-based controlled language, an international auxiliary language, and an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English.
The problem is: there is a fixed number of 850 basic words for beginners, but there is no definite list. Some lists have 1500 words, others have 2000 words, but one can always draw more words from the English language. For instance: how would you talk about a cucumber, an oak tree or a rhinoceros without some silly circumlocution or using the real English word?
So, is Basic English a well-defined constructed language that can exists on its own?
The website describing Ogden's Basic English is here.
Wiktionary has the 850 word list here.
I would argue that Basic English is a (rather) well defined invented language. Wikipedia lists it as a controlled natural language, which simply means that it is a natural language whose natural form and evolution have been suspended and its new form and evolution have been created by someone. In this case, Charles Ogden.
Classical Latin I have seen argued is a similar beast: a natural language that has some constructed or artificial tendencies, just not a single author.
The controlled language is, I would argue, the "fourth axial point of the Gnoli Triangle" --- the point where the art, science/engineering & practicality of invented languages become cotangent with the world of natural languages.
Basic English and its relatives might thus be seen as "conlang-natlang creoles". Where the creolisation process happens between two types of language rather than between two specific languages.
As for existing on its own, I think that is a rather different matter. If we were to replace the grammar with some kind of fundamental rule list and replace the English lexicon with unique, perhaps even levelled-Germanic words, we'd basically end up reinventing Esperanto. Or Folksprak. As such, yes, it could "exist on its own".
But Basic English is quite different among auxlangs, in that its essential function is that of a "bridge language". It is designed to bring people who have no English at all across the gap and to a place where they can immerse themselves in the broader Anglophone world. Basic English is thus, in this key regard, self limiting in scope and usefulness. It's great so long as the learner has extremely limited access to English speakers or English media.
As soon as that learner discovers the Internet or Anglophone aural culture (radio, television, movies) or English literature (broadly defined as anything written), they are going to discover the limitations imposed by Basic English. They'll have to leave it behind. In that sense, Basic English can't really have its own existence.
To build on your example: a Basic English speaker would simply have to step off the bridge and begin learning the "extended" lexicon of ordinary English!
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866 | What verbs should be irregular in a naturalistic conlang?
I've read that the most commonly used verbs in a language are almost always irregular, and for the most part the irregular forms of verbs can be traced to an archaic form being preserved in the language, or to the influence of other languages.
When creating a naturalistic conlang, what verbs should be irregular? I'm already aware that 'to be' is almost always irregular, but are there any general patterns for which verbs are most often irregular in a natlang? (For example, are verbs involving movement more commonly irregular than not?)
The more used a verb is, the more likely it is to resist evolution. So the most popular verbs are likely to be the most odd. This is common with auxiliaries.
Sometimes, irregular verbs form when two verbs becomes a single one. For example, a verb might have a polite and an informal variants which have different roots, but the informal one eventually falls out of use except for in the first person singular. Or the formal variant might become the past tense of the informal one.
I doubt this is very naturalistic, but if you're looking for inspiration to guide your choice of irregular verbs, you could also think of the activities which were more common during the evolution of the language. A conlang spoken by a prosperous society might have more irregular verbs related to possession, social interactions and art - while a conlang spoken by nomads living in a land with cataclysmic climate would have more irregular verbs about natural phenomenons and actions that everyone has to perform in order to guarantee their survival.
Note that verbs can have varying degrees of regularity. English has a pretty clean system, with a few boldly irregular verbs, a decent list of somewhat irregular verbs and a lot of very regular verbs.
Meanwhile, French verbs tend to be split across different groups based on their ending. There's -er, -ir, -oir and -re. Verbs within one group tend to have similar conjugations. Still, there is so much irregularity in French verbs that students often refer to verb conjugation volumes that have the full conjugation of about 100 model verbs. At the end of those volumes is a list of all French verbs with the page number of the most similar model verb.
EDIT: scrolling through the list of model verbs in a Bescherelles conjugation volume, those are the verbs which seem less regular to me (native French speaker):
to be - être (also an auxiliary)
to have - avoir (also an auxiliary)
to go - aller (sometimes used as an auxiliary)
to die - mourrir
to know - savoir
must - falloir (it's a whole verb in French)
can - pouvoir (it's a whole verb in French)
to have a duty [to do something] - devoir (mostly used as an auxiliary)
to be of value - valoir
to want - vouloir
to rain - pleuvoir
to drink - boire
to do / to make - faire (not an auxiliary in French)
Biblaridion just released a video on this topic and it's just too good for me not to point out. https://youtu.be/wnvpejRsQ2Y
The first class of verbs that is often highly irregular are the auxiliary verbs. This does not only comprise to be and to have but also the modal auxiliaries (like must, can, shall, and will). They are used very frequently and tend to erode phonetically, and they are also prone to suppletion (showing a mixture of different stems from originally different words).
A quick check (for my native language German) seems to confirm your intuition that verbs of motion are more often irregular than average. They are also used quite frequently. In Romance languages, the basic verb for to go (e.g., French aller or Italian andare) is very irregular and mixing several different stems ((vulgar) Latin ambulare/allare, vadere, ire).
Some verbs are irregular because they rhyme with an irregular verb, e.g., German schreiben, schrieb, geschrieben "to write", borrowed from Latin scribere, became irregular because of rhyming verbs like bleiben "to stay".
Though if enough verbs which rhyme take the irregular pattern, then arguably the language is developing a regular inflection class.
I wouldn't categorize all German strong verbs as irregular. They follow regular patterns. Ablaut follows rules that are clearly definable. It's no longer the default conjugation pattern for newly-coined or borrowed verbs in New High German but it is actually still productive, as can be seen by recent innovations such as gewunken instead of gewinkt. I'd argue that matching schreiben to the pattern of bleiben, schweigen, treiben and others is in fact an act of regularization.
Well, the statement is demonstrably untrue. Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) doesn't have irregular verbs, because verbs aren't conjugated. Quechua doesn't have any. And languages like Inuktitut has no irregularity in verbs because of the way that the language assembles words based on a root+affixes.
Good point, but the question was about languages with irregular verb conjugations, not asking if there are languages without irregular verbs.
The point is there's no particular reason why verbs have to be irregular at all.
True. But the point of my question concerns including irregular verbs in a conlang. I'm well aware it's not a requirement for a language.
@KeithMorrison your argument is true for irregular inflections. There certainly are no irregular inflections in a language that doesn't inflect at all. That does not mean that there are no irregular verbs in the languages you mentioned. In Mandarin, for example, 有 (yǒu, to have/possess) is negated irregularly with 没 (méi) instead of regular 不 (bù). And I don't know about Inuktitut, but agglutinative Hungarian sure as hell does have irregular inflections. Just look up the verb van (to be) which is quite irregular, with suppletion and everything.
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900 | Language with nominal TAM and no verbs: Ergative or tripartite?
I'm working on a language with nominal tense–aspect–mood (TAM), i.e. inflecting nouns instead of verbs. So, a sentence like "the woman sees the man", could be roughly translated to something like "the womans see the man".
This type of sentence shows an ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment: the subject of a transitive sentence is marked (ergative case), while the direct object is unmarked (absolutive case).
I also like the idea of removing verbs as a class (since tense, aspect and mood can be expressed by the subject) and "reclassify" those words as nouns. So "the womans see the man" could actually mean something like "the woman makes sight of the man", in the sense of "making eye contact". In other words, having ungrammaticalized verbs.
Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.
So my question is: does the language need a marking for the direct object (accusative case), having then a tripartite alignment? Or can I simply get away with only TAM marking (absolutive case) and no markings for verbs or direct objects?
I have the feeling that I'm forgetting something. I think that the idea of "not having verbs" makes sense to me, since many languages like English, French or Spanish actually lack of inflections and employ only word order, but I might be wrong.
What do you think? Thanks!
But makes is a verb, and not a typical ungrammaticalised one.
@curiousdannii The woman makes here is more like an interpretation. The actual translation would take only one word, as the word "makes" comprises both tense and person.
Well then you need to edit this to explain more clearly.
In your example:
Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be
"the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man"
are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.
...sight is a verb.
In order to have a verbless phrase, you'd want something like "the man within the woman's sight", making it clear you're using the noun "sight" and not the verb "sight".
However, and I've seen this pointed out, if you end up needing particular constructions in order to indicate actions, all you're doing is making an overly complicated verb.
I know it's hard to actually grasp the meaning of what I want to express using English words instead of the lexicon of my language (which I don't have yet). Of course in English you can use more or less any word as a verb, if placed in a certain order and interpreted as so. Not so much in many other languages where verbs present a typical form (-er/ir, in French, -en in German, -i in Esperanto...). So, in a certain way, English kind of "needs particular constructions in order to indicate actions".
Maybe you're using nouns as instrumentals... so can you have noun cases, i.e. an instrumental case to distinguish whether a noun is the Object versus the Instrument?
And, I'm not sure that that necessarily makes the Instrumental Noun just a complicated verb.
Woman-SUBJ+TAM Man-OBJ Eye-INST
"Woman's (focus?) [is] on the Man via (her) Eye".
With a fixed word order, no case markings are needed.
Or TAM could potentially mark the subject. Instrumentals could be chained after the object, making them feel just a bit like adjectives or adverbs or something.
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908 | Good cultures to base a robotic language off of
I've created a race of nomadic robots, but am having trouble finding a culture to base their language off of. They're peripatetic nomads, meaning they travel around offering goods and services to any friendly people they come across, but most nomadic peoples of this style either use the languages of their country, or the language is too fluid and natural to be suited for machines.
Are you seeking a natural language basis? Otherwise, languages like ROILA or Lojban might be better suited, as they are already intended to be machine-recognizable languages.
Hello and welcome to the site. Unfortunately this question in its current form isn't a good fit for the site. We like questions to be specific and, if possible, objectively answerable. In principle you could base a robotic language off any human language and culture.
Could you [edit] this question to give a lot more detail, to explain what you mean by basing a language off their culture (are you thinking in terms of the vocabulary needed for a nomadic culture?), and to explain more why the nomads you've considered are not good options for you? What does it mean for a language to be "too fluid and natural" for machines?
I think this is a perfectly valid question, asking for inspiration to kick-start developing a conlang. Not all questions are directly about the shape of a language, see eg this one: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/119/how-does-the-wedei-language-reflect-their-cultural-focus-on-government?rq=1
@OliverMason That question is much more specific and doesn't really have much in common with this question IMO. As I wrote above, there's lots of scope for improvement with this question, so I hope it will be edited soon.
You'd have to be more precise about how human-like your robots are at the very least. Technically, a robot's language could be similar to the TCP protocol for all we know, and transmitted as a sequence of beeps.
@curiousdannii Since this question was already closed and reopened (see revision history), I think it's better not to close it twice unilaterally
@ba The question has not been edited and gives no criteria for answers to be judged by. Any culture is in principle good to base a robotic language off. No argument was made by the reopen voters that it meets the general standards of the Stack Exchange network. I think I was justified in closing it again, but of course any decision like this can be challenged in [Meta].
@curiousdannii Oliver Mason did make an argument in the comments above (even if you didn't agree). I think that all languages about conlang creation are going to have to be somewhat subjective (though you closed it as "too broad" which doesn't seem to be your reason). And I think that the fact that there are already two answers shows that the question is answerable
Humans in such kind of situation devolop a Pidgin specifically for trade. It is arguably easy not only for humans but also for robots: no complicated ingredients in syntax nor morphology, and also usually a simple phonology.
Interesting point. Robots which are able to produce any sound would probably not have to worry much about phonology and could just produce sequences of beeps, but they would stick to the sounds pronounceable by the people they trade with.
How about Polynesian languages? The people travelled far distances, their culture was very spread out, and they don't really have a country that 'owns' the language.
A further positive aspect is that you can pick up basic Hawai'ian on Duolingo; this quickly gives you a feel for the language. It's VSO, so sounds unusual enough to Western cultures who are more used to SVO. It would also be very plausible for machines who might process knowledge in predicate calculus (as in eats(cow, grass)).
The vocabulary has a strong English influence, due to the colonialisation by the Americans, who made teaching the language illegal, but you will probably adapt that anyway to choose your own words.
Thanks, I’m going to look at their culture as well as their history and add Yiddish vocabulary as well
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961 | Has anyone analysed the invented languages in the Earthsea books?
Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea stories contain vocabulary and utterances from three invented languages. The first step to fleshing these out into fully developed conlangs would be to list all the examples from the books and make some notes on any regularities or inconsistencies. Has anyone done this and put it up online?
There is some information on one of them, Hardic, and a fragmentary word list.
Thanks! I'll accept if no one else provides more stuff.
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973 | Is this sonority hierarchy correct?
I need to sort these phonemes properly before I get into clusters and making syllables, but I'm not sure I did it right.
Looks alright to me.
Sonority refers to the amplitude of the sound signal; ie the louder a sound is, the higher it ranks. Vowels are loudest, as they are voiced and generally less constricted than most consonants. Within the vowels, the open ones (eg /a/), are louder than the closed ones (/i/, /u/). Then laterals, nasals, fricatives, and finally plosives. Within each of these groups (where applicable) the voiced variant is higher than the voiceless one (eg /g/ > /k/, and /d/ > /t/).
This matches the ranking in your image, so I would say it is correct.
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957 | what kinds of vocal sounds echo less?
Please bear with me as I elaborate.
I'm looking to create a language for humanoids that live in a set of cave systems and tunnels. While their language may have been 'born' on the surface, they have moved under the ground ages ago. The Ecosystem under the ground is very hostile, and so they had to adapt their language to carry less when spoken.
For this purpose, I'm trying to find out which of the known vocal sounds would be more prevalent in such a language.
(I am a true novice in the field, mind you, so I'm, reading several language construction guides to help in this endeavor)
So, what I'm asking, essentially, is which of the vocal sounds (labial, dental, palatal etc etc) would echo more, and which would echo less. I've searched in vain for an answer, and I don't have a convenient cave to test that in.
Thank you!
I'd say, any sound which can be whispered
It would probably be a question of volume and frequency pattern. Loud sounds would travel further (and thus have more potential for echo). I would like to stress that I too have no cave to try this out, so there is a certain speculative aspect to this answer.
So, avoid vowels (obviously), and voiced sounds (prefer /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/ over /b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /z/).
However, such a language would be pretty hard to use, so you'd need to compromise. Assuming low frequency sounds have less energy, the vowels /u/ and /o/ might be suitable, and perhaps the schwa.
Plosives (/p/, /b/, /t/) feature a burst as the air is released, which might also not work well, so you're probably better off using fricatives.
That leaves you with voiceless fricatives: /f/, /th/, /s/, /S/, /h/. Though voiced, nasals might also be suitable, as the mouth is closed during the articulation and thus it is possible to pronounce them without releasing too much acoustic energy.
I have assumed a Western phoneme set. Other sounds common in non-Western languages might work, though eg clicks would probably not.
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1116 | Should languages spoken by two similar races have the same protolanguage, or can they be not related by protolanguage?
Should languages spoken by two similar races have the same protolanguage, or can they be not related by protolanguage? I guess they should be similar for example in phonetics or in some other features (grammar?). But should they be created from one protolanguage?
the same question on worldbuilding.SE
I guess this is up to you as the world builder.
Note that there is no known connection between language and race, all human beings no matter of of skin colour, hair, or other characteristics used to define "race" can learn any human language as their first language. Large language families like Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, or Indogermanic cross the boundaries of continents and races.
So again, it is up to you, depending on the in-world history, geography, and your personal preferences (some conlang inventors like modelling diachronics, other prefer to invent unrelated languages).
Note also that there is a phenomenon called sprachbund: genetically unrelated languages develop common features due to close contact. There is a famous sprachbund on the Balkan, there is Standard Avarage European, there are the Pacific Northwest languages forming a sprachbund with some interesting and maybe insipiring common features.
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1156 | Official resource on simlish language
I know that Simlish language is not fully created. It is just a list of words and sentences.
Where can I find the full list (official source)?
P.S I wanna create this language as fully created conlang.
According to the Font of All Knowledge, Simlish
worked best as a "language" made up of gibberish words that could not
be translated, so that the dialogue's meanings would be left open to
the imagination of the player.
and that William Wright, the Sims creator, intended it to be that way.
Here's a good Youtubeumentary on the topic. The voice actors, the audio director, they aver that it's gibberish. Meaning or emotion without form: while some words and phrases may have acquired "meanings", it doesn't seem like they've actually acquired "translations".
For example, if an English speaker says sulsul means "hello" while a French speaker says it means "bon jour", that doesn't mean hello = good day. All three are greetings, and I think that's rather Wright's point: sulsul has acquired universal meaning without actually acquiring a specific translation.
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967 | Are there any constructed languages designed with a constructed script, both aiming to be international and auxiliary?
Hangul is a beautiful constructed script, used to write the natural languages of Korean, Jeju, Hokkien, and Cia-Cia, perhaps others. The shape of the letters mimic the shape of the mouth, and a letter for a voiceless consonant is directly related to the letter for its voiced counterpart. Personally, I think it's brilliant and should be adopted worldwide, perhaps with some additions to consider sounds that do not exist in Korean (by far the most dominant language using it).
One idea of constructed international auxiliary languages is that those languages should have a simple and logical grammar to be easy to learn. But it appears most of those languages are still written with the Latin alphabet, which doesn't have much or any connection between the look of a letter and its pronunciation — this still needs to be learned by heart. A learner cannot derive the pronunciation of a previously unknown letter from its shape.
Have there been any designs of constructed languages, aiming to be international auxiliary languages (thus not counting fictional alien/fantasy languages), which from the start had a dedicated constructed script designed to be as simple as possible, yet universally applicable?
Well arguably the simplest script is the one you already know, and a majority of people are familiar with the Latin script...
@curiousdannii Pragmatically true; also pragmatically, the same argument is used to describe why English is currently the main international language — constructed languages are often coming from idealistic principles moreso than pragmatism, and some idealist out there might have thought radically and rethought not only the language but also the script.
I found one language called Bliss Symbolics that is
It is an International Auxiliary Language
It has its own character set, not based on Latin characters or any other character set.
I also found another IAL that doesn't use latin characters called Temenia that uses Greek characters instead of Latin. While this language doesn't apply exactly to your question, you seem to be interested in NON-Latin based character IAL's.
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1210 | What things can `la` mark in Toki Pona?
I was under the impression, until recently, the la in Toki Pona is a topic marker of sorts similar to the Japanese topic marker wa but used less frequently since Toki Pona is not topic-prominent.
In particular, I thought that la
Requires the noun phrase it marks to appear at the beginning of the clause.
Does not give the noun phrase it marks a particular semantic role.
However, a section about it on Wikibooks suggests that its usage is much more limited.
Time-Manner-Place Schema
Time comes first in a la fragment, manner is a modifier to the main verb, and place is always last in a lon prepositional phrase.
Time la S li V Manner lon Place
What is la in Toki Pona? What are the limits on the noun phrases la can mark and the roles they can have in the clause?
The particle la in Toki Pona is used mainly for two scenarios.
The first scenario is for the If/when something, then that condition. The la particle is placed in the second half of a sentence. Some examples:
mi lape lili, la mi pilin ike (If I sleep a little, then I feel bad
or When I sleep a little, I feel bad)
sina moku e telo mute, la sina anpa e telo mute lon tenpo lili (If
you drink much water/liquid, you are going to pee much in a short time)
The second scenario is for the context, like time, possibilities, or even non yes/no questions. The la particle is placed in the first half of a sentence. Some examples:
tenpo pimeja ni la, mi lukin e lipu sin (I am going to read the new book tonight)
tenpo suno pini lili la, mi kute mute e kalama musi (Yesterday I listened to much music)
ken la, pilin pi meli lili li pilin ike (Maybe the girl's sad —literally, "Maybe the heart of the girl feels bad")
tan seme la, kulupu pi jan lili sona li tawa ala tomo sona? (Why are the scholars not going to the school?)
Hope this helps!
generally 'pee' is translated as 'pana e telo jelo'. "sina moku e telo mute, la sina pana e telo jelo pi mute lon tenpo lili"
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1217 | What is a realistic *upper bound* on the complexity of nominals that can be incorporated into a verb?
Some languages feature noun incorporation. Here's an example from Lahkota from the Wikipedia article on incorporation. I suspect the difference in meaning is similar to the man chopped the wood vs the man chopped wood, but I can't say that with confidence based on the short section of the article.
wičháša kiŋ čháŋ kiŋ kaksáhe
man DET wood DET chop
wičháša kiŋ čhaŋkáksahe
man DET wood.chop
In most of the examples I can find, incorporated nouns are devoid of the following features
overt case marking
overt number marking
possessive modifiers
adjectives
What are some options for allowing more complex nominals to be incorporated that are still somewhat naturalistic?
Part of the confusion here is that the loss of the grammatical markers you note are a logical consequence of the the semantic use of incorporation.
An incorporated noun may be best compared, in my opinion, to a nonfinite verb, which will also typically lack much of the morphological features of a normal verb. This alone makes it evident why the standard markers a noun may present will usually be absent. Marianne Mithun describes four major reasons to incorporate a noun (quoting summary from Rosenfelder, Advanced Language Construction, pp. 182-184):
Narrow the focus of a verb by adding some sort of descriptor to it. You may want to incorporate tools, for example. In Nahuatl, such incorporation often translate to "X like (a) Y(s)".
Allow an otherwise oblique argument (usually of a semantically, if not syntactically labile verb) to become its subject (cf. English, "My head aches" vs. "I have a headache").
Background an argument that has already been mentioned.
Adding a classifier of some sort. This is an integral part of verbal morphology in the Algonquian Languages, for example. Chinese also does it to create suppletive forms of single-syllable verbs that may be highly polysemous or homophonous.
Add to this the fact that in most languages, you cannot incorporate the subject noun of an unergative verb (probably no language at all allow it, but I haven't looked into it in details), it is easy to see why incorporated/nonfinite nouns have little need for all the bells and whistles of regular arguments: you are either generalizing or backgrounding the noun, so you don't want or need to add these syntactic elements.
Regarding possessive markers specifically, I should point out that even in languages without incorporation, possessive markers are liable to be dropped if the possessor is already a separate argument in the sentence: I stole money from him, It struck him on the nose, J'ai mal à la tête, Je lui ai cassé le bras.
Finally, if a language has incorporation, it is usually rare for it to have a fully separate word category of adjectives as we understand them to begin with! In many of these languages, adjectives take the form of descriptive verbs or adjunct nouns that can themselves be incorporated into themain noun (cf. English Bluebeard, whiteboard, blackbird...), and syntactically, it doesn't typically work to incorporate an entire relative sentence.
However, some languages, such as Chukchi do allow for the whole noun+adjective phrase to be incorporated, and quite a few languages allow for numeral markers to be incorporated, although this is actually part of the verbal paradigm itself i.e. if you incorporate "I saw two persons" you are incorporating the noun "person" to a verb root that means "see two X", not incorporating "two men". That's what happens in Southern Tiwa or Algonquian languages (Nishnaabemwin: Giibimdaaswishiniizhdaabaan’gizwag, "They came in twelve carloads").
So, in summary, I would say aside from adjuncts noun and adjectives (which itself would make your language unusual, though not outside the realm of human experience), any other grammatical attribute of the noun you want to "incorporate" you should do so as an integral part of you verb paradigm, not as part of the incorporated root per se. If you are seeking a language that looks as natural as possible, anyway.
Worth noting that (if I'm remembering the Mithun paper correctly), languages with a "higher numbered" type of noun incorporation will always have the lowered numbered types. So if a language uses noun incorporation for discourse purposes (type 3), it'll also use noun incorporation for types 1 and 2.
@Sparksbet I can't say I'm familiar with this aspect of the theory (Rosenfelder doesn't even allude to it in any way). I was only interested in explaining what sometimes is included, and why what isn't, isn't.
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1263 | Alternate direction systems for spatial reference
What are some alternative direction systems besides egocentric direction systems (left, right, &c)?
Some natural languages use {north, south, east, west} like Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal (Maya) (source for Tzeltal). The situation in Tzeltal is probably more complex, since there's references to an uphill/downhill distinction too, but I'm having trouble locating a free resource for it.
Ithkuil uses the position of the sunrise and sunset. It does not appear to use the current position of the sun.
How about listener-centric positioning? Taking the concept of "Left ... no, YOUR left." or "At your 3 o'clock" to a new extreme ...
@Lou I think that would make a good answer.
Hawaiian uses 'seaward' (kai) and 'upland/inland' (uka), and words for 'south/left' (hema) and 'right/north' (ʻākau) (East and West are different words as well).
Okay. How about instead of an egocentric direction system, employing a listener-centric or "you"-centric system? We do this in natural language when we say "On your left" or "At your 3:00". Probably such a system would be developed among speakers from a highly empathetic and listener-oriented culture, where the individual's reference is considered secondary to the listener's.
So when I tell you of an incident, I need to know where you were at the time, and which way you were facing?
Interesting question, I hadn't thought that far ahead to be honest. I imagine you would construct all storytelling and accounting from the listener's POV. E.g. when Allan is telling Bob about the time Carl spoke to David, Allan will implicitly frame the story from Bob's perspective, as if Carl and David are on Bob's "left" and "right" respectively, in Bob's mental space. Which I suppose is not dissimilar from how we tell stories in an egocentric spatial system.
Or perhaps, within the narrative, everything that Carl or David says uses the other person as a spatial reference. So Carl might say to David "There's a fly on your left ... oh no, it's moving above the head of the person you're talking to." It's not fleshed out, but OP asked for alternate ideas of spatial referencing systems, and it was the first thing that came to mind.
I suppose you can also allow circumlocutions similar to English's on your left when using an allocentric coordinate system. So, when telling a story about yourself that involves no other people and takes place away from where the current conversation is happening, you can say things like on my left, there was a red car. In that case, the on my would not be optional.
The problem with using someone else as reference is that you need to know at all times where someone is in reference to you, which is fine if you are talking to them face to face but does no good if you are not face to face.
True. I never claimed it was a good or efficient system - it's just an idea of an alternative direction system. But I imagine such speakers would devise workarounds.
The thing with languages is that if the "workarounds" are more effective at communication than doing it the "proper" way, the workarounds are highly likely to become the proper way.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. We're talking about conlangs here - nothing says that they have to be practical, efficient or even match up to real life in any way.
All answers so far assume a system of orthogonal directions, each having an "anti direction". I suspect this predisposition is connected to our left-right symmetric bodies with natural forwards and backwards, as well as ups and downs. Languages constructed for aliens need not conform to this!
Take a starfish, for instance. If they have five distinct arms, that would give five directions in their plane, along with up and down.
For radially symmetric, disk-shaped creatures (or for communicating between radially symmetric spaceships or other vehicles) the only meaningful purely self-relative directions would likely be relative up and relative down (along with hither and away). For a creature shaped like a jellyfish, without any visual clues to other fixed directions, this could be combined with cardinal up and down.
Star or disk shaped creatures could of course point, either by turning their up or down towards something (which would be two different prepositions!), or by deforming themselves, shining a light etc. They could also use auxiliary phrases as "towards Alice" or "the way we came".
A more sophisticated option would also be to talk of the direction perpendicular to cardinal up AND to relative up, maybe like a cross product in mathematics? This would be sort of akin to our left and right, if the creature moves in its relative up direction, that is.
For directions on a galactic scale, much SF (and the Traveller RPG) use Coreward (toward the center of the galaxy), Rimward (away from the center of the galaxy), Spinward (moving about the center of the galaxy in the same direction as general stellar motion), and Antispinward or Trailing (moving about the center of the galaxy in the direction opposite to the general stellar motion).
So, one idea I was considering is a spatial reference system designed for indoor navigation. It's intended to coexist alongside an egocentric direction system which is much more typical.
There's a cardinal direction, let's call it P that refers to the direction towards the primary entrance/exit or "downhill" as a metaphorical extension.
If used in a room or house, the primary entrance is the front door to the house, the main door to the room, the door you used, or the door that is currently to your back.
If used outside on a hill or mountain, the foot of the hill is the primary entrance. Let q refer to a direction 90 degrees to the right of the current direction.
The idea, basically, is that if you are travelling uphill or into a room, P is the direction you would have to go to double back.
Here's a crude drawing of a room with the directions labeled with their symbolic names.
+-------------------------------------+
| |
| |
| |
| |
A Pq |
| |
P---+---Pqq |
| |
V Pqqq |
| |
| |
| |
+-------------------------------------+
This is, essentially, the system firefighters use. One side of the building, usually the side facing the street is designated Alpha, then you proceed around, clockwise, so that, if you're facing the building from the street, the left side is Bravo, the back side is Charlie, and the right side is Delta. The corners, logically, are Alpha-Bravo, Bravo-Charlie, Charlie-Delta, and Delta-Alpha. If you tell me you need a ladder on the Bravo side near the Bravo-Charlie corner, I know exactly where to send it.
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1197 | How much ambiguity for argument roles is possible without sacrificing comprehensibility?
For the purposes of this question, I'm specifically interested in marking theta-roles of verb arguments and possessive constructs, i.e. the things prototypically marked by case in languages that have extensive case systems. Many languages use some combination of word order, case marking, argument indexing on the verb, and explicit adpositions to disambiguate/identify arguments within a clause.
Some languages consistently do not mark certain distinctions like subject vs direct object or between different kinds of objects. Yagua makes no distinction between the non-subject core arguments of ditransitive verbs.
I'm wondering how minimal or ambiguous the morphology/syntax relevant to argument roles in a language can be while still being comprehensible.
I think that's a kind of "how long is a piece of string" question. I guess it depends on the semantics: for a toy language or one that is more restricted (eg trade transactions only) it might be easier to avoid misunderstanding than for a general one.
Could you please explain the term theta role for non-generativists? I tried looking up the phrase but I'm afraid I'm totally lost.
I was using the term somewhat loosely and probably incorrectly. I just meant some abstract trait that can be used to distinguish different verb arguments.
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1373 | Naturalness of different universal quantifiers based on the size of the domain you're quantifying over
English has a few determiners and determiner-like things that express universal quantification including all and every.
How naturalistic is it to have different sets of quantifiers based on features of the domain such as its number (and possibly other features like animacy or remoteness).
The noun governed by the determiner can be either singular or plural with little change in meaning.
Every rose has thorns.
All natural numbers are odd or even.
These sentences have the same meaning as All roses have thorns and Every natural number is odd or even.
In some languages, such as French, have something that can be analyzed as a determiner inflecting for gender and number of the noun: tous/toute/tous/toutes which means all. Although French also has chaque, analogous to the English every and each. The distribution is similar to English, but I can't provide any examples that I can independently verify because I'm not a native French speaker.
Anyway, I'm wondering about the naturalness of having different determiners depending on the number of the domain rather than the thing directly governed by the quantifier.
For instance, suppose we had every(0) every(1) every(2) every(paucal) every(plural)
every(2), every(paucal) and every(plural) are all(paucal) fairly natural.
every(2) seems to map onto English both more or less directly, although both cannot be used with a singular noun.
every(paucal) continent has a name starting with a vowel or a glide.
every(plural) electron is small.
However, a construction like all(0) does have uses that aren't jokes and aren't related to logic or math.
A construction like the following seems reasonable and fairly easy to interpret.
I have done all(0) of my homework.
I would argue that as you define it, every(1) is just a special case of definiteness, with "Every(1) sun is bright" meaning the same as "The sun is bright."
This is not inherently unnatural. As you point out, English "both" (and reasonable translations such as Spanish "ambos") easily fit the role of every(2) (I would argue that whether the noun is marked as singular or plural isn't particularly interesting here).
every(1) can be reasonably analyzed as a definiteness marking and is encompassed in most Indo-European languages by the definite article ("the", "el", "i", το), as shown by the sentence "The sun is shining." (This sentence can be used without explicitly introducing the sun into the conversation specifically because there is only one reasonable referent.)
In particular, I could see one set of forms evolving from the definite articles in a language with heavy number marking (i.e. "the (singular)" becomes each(1), "the (dual)" becomes each(2), etc.).
What I would be very surprised to see in a natural language is a fully consistent system of these, where each(), every(), and all() all cover the same numeric distinctions in the vein of the Esperanto correlatives.
I would also be surprised to see more than a couple of these in any language that does not make at least as many number distinctions elsewhere.
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1088 | Transliterating toki pona to hebrew
What would be the best choice of niqqud to transliterate toki pona vowel sounds using Hebrew? I'm trying to use the niqqud that would be closest to what is normally used in Hebrew. Should 'e' be אֶ or אֵ? Should o be וֹ or אֹ? Should 'a' be אַ or אָ? Is there a real difference between them or is it important? I would normally omit the niqqud, since toki pona is minimalist & somewhat ambiguous anyway, but I would prefer to use the most phonetically accurate niqqud, when I do use them. There is stress on the first syllable, but no long vowels. would it be unusual to write 'pana' as ַפָנה to show that the first 'a' is stressed?
Normally I would write 'seli' as סלי, but with vowels would סֶלִי or סֵלִי be better?
toki would be טוקי, but should I want to use vowels, should I use טוֹקִי or טֹקִי
I did find this tool for transliterating to hebrew, but it ignores niqqud altogether. 'O' is always written as 'ו', & 'E' isn't written at all, even at the end of a word. At the beginning of a word it's just 'א'.
The vowel sounds are:
a: father
e: get
o: more
i: peel (I would use either ִא or אִי. Is there a difference?)
u: food (I would use וּ. Would it be better to use אֻ instead?)
Here are a few ways to deal with the problem of marking the vowels unambiguously:
Style 1 - normal Hebrew orthography
Considering the fact that there are no length distinctions or gemination, a transliteration into Hebrew would normally use exclusively these diacritics to represent the vowels:
a אָ *
e אֵ **
i אִי
o אוֹ
u אוּ
* add ה at the end of a word; and after letters other than א, add א in the middle of a word
** add ה at the end of a word
In addition, on נ (the only possibly coda in Toki Pona) the diacritic נְ would be used (except as last letter of word). Stress isn't normally marked even in vowelized Hebrew (apart from liturgy or texts for learners), and it's entirely unnecessary in Toki Pona, since there is no phonemic stress.
The advantage of this is that it follows ordinary conventions and is most easily intelligible to someone reading in Hebrew. The disadvantage is that implementing this kind of orthography is far from algorithmic and includes unnecessary information in the spelling.
Style 2 - minimalistic Hebrew orthography
Since Toki Pona is a minimalistic language, I think that a different transliteration convention would better suit it, to avoid redundancy in writing it. There is precedent for a more minimalistic transcription in the convention used for transliterating, e.g., Akkadian into Hebrew. Modifying it to suit Toki Pona's vowels, we get something like this:
a אָ
e אֵ
i אִ
o אֹ
u אֻ
Style 3 - Yiddish orthography
A third option, if you want to minimize use of diacritics, is to follow Yiddish spelling conventions. The only required diacritic is to distinguish between the two forms of א. The Yiddish convention of using וו instead of ו as a consonant can be safely ignored in Toki Pona. And actually, since there are no o/u minimal pairs in Toki Pona, you could get rid of all diacritics if you instead choose to use ו for both vowels, at the price of losing some information (style 4).
a אַ or א
e ע or ע
i אי
o אָ or ו
u ו
Sample differences
Roman x Hebrew x Minimal x Yiddish x 4-vowel
a x אָ x אָ x אַ x א
akesi x אָקֵסִי x אָקֵסִ x אַקעסי x אקעסי
anpa x אָנְפָה x אָנפָ x אַנפאַ x אנפא
mije x מִייֵה x ֵמִי x מייע x מייע
mute x מוּטֵה x ֵמֻט x מוטע x מוטע
seli x סֵלִי x ִסֵל x סעלי x סעלי
toki x טוֹקִי x טֹקִ x טאָקי x טוקי
wawa x וָאוָה x וָוָ x ואַואַ x ואוא
!פוֹנָה אָ thanks!
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1033 | Where should I start? Want to create a fictional conlang with old English, old Irish, and ancient nordic elements with unique written elements
So I had an idea for a PC game that harkens somewhat to my ancestors... Imagine a fictional world blessed with angels, dragons, elves and fey and lots more, where technology is present but very rare in distribution, where most of the planet is still forested and wild. And where the setting takes place primarily on a fictional version of Ireland that is far larger than the real one. I'm Irish and Scandinavian, so I want to make a conlang that has Irish and Scandinavian elements to it, as well as viking elements. I want to make a written alphabet and language that follows what would of been the way the ancient people wrote , read and spoke "as close as possible anyway." And I have no idea where I should start. So what I am asking really is where should I begin? I have no clue.
A lot of people recommend the Language Construction Kit.
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1071 | Do I need a Dative Case?
My conlang already has Benefactive and Lative cases, does it really need a Dative case? I'm racking my brain to find situations that couldn't be covered by those two and would require a separate Dative case.
No it's not needed. Lots of languages don't have a dative case. Lots of languages don't have any cases.
It depends what you define as a dative case
@Dr. Shmuel A case denoting the recipient of an action and, in this case, outside of what would fall into the Benefactive case. I'm just trying to figure out what situations would fall into the Dative case but not the Benefactive if that makes sense.
Yours is a very interesting and legitimate question, but in the light of what we know from the languages of the world, what you ask might not be what you mean to ask. Let me expand a bit below.
To answer your question in brief: no, your language does not need a Dative, but yes, your language needs a device (or "construction" in Construction Grammar terms) to express the third argument (also called the "indirect object") of verbs that take on three arguments (subject, object, indirect object).
Now, whether you have separate devices (constructions, or in your case "cases", no pun intended) for semantically different indirect objects or not, that is up to you. Since you already have a Benefactive case that could express an indirect object (whether that is semantically a recipient or a beneficiary or else), then you can use that to express an indirect object that is a simple recipient. So, note that there can be a mismatch between syntactic arguments and semantic arguments (for example indirect object vs. recipient, benefactor, etc). Moreover, depending on what linguistic framework you assume, things can be slightly different. Here I am adhering to some form of (Radical) Construction Grammar.
For example, since you have a Benefactive case and a Lative case you could use the former in sentences like "I gave the book to the man" and "I opened the door for the woman" and the Lative case for "I went to the market" and "I am throwing a stone at you". But again, that is really up to you, as also hinted at in other answers/comments.
The drafts of the first two chapters of Croft's Morphosyntax: constructions of the world's languages expand on this. See https://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/WACpubs.html.
Your lang, your rules. But generally speaking, no, you don't need a dative case.
Funny thing is, you don't even need a dative case even if you were to wrack your brain and come up with handfuls of potential situations! Languages are funny that way. Those sneaky native speakers will just come up with some clever way of handling things!
You might consider something like:
"I gave you it" > "I gave it so that you recieved it"
"I told you it" > "I said it so that you heard it"
"I passed you it" > "I threw it so that you catch it"
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1101 | Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works?
Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works, that made extinct all fallacies that could be made extinct by creating a language from scratch to avoid them?
Some example of those fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Verbal_fallacies
Looking at the list of fallacies you quote, I would say this is not possible — most of them have got nothing to do with the language itself, but with the way it is used. It's a bit like making a kitchen knife that you cannot use to hurt someone with.
The Fallacy of Composition is related to reasoning. I cannot think of any way that a language can make that impossible. As long as you have expressive power in the language to express anything, you can express incorrect reasoning as well. The same goes for False Attribution, which is about how you use language, not anything in the language itself.
Loki's Wager refers to the absence of clear definitions or boundaries. The world is not clear-cut, so language cannot be like that either. Defining where the head starts and the neck ends is unrelated to language. Unless you want to accompany each word in that language with a book that defines exactly what it means.
Even the Fallacy of Accent is a problem, unless you take stress patterns out of the language, which then is a lot less usable, as stress is a good way of expressing nuances of meaning.
Syntactic ambiguity is about the only one which could be avoided through careful language design. But most 'usable' languages have some of that as well, especially if they are reasonably complex.
Most of these verbal fallacies are to do with the way you use language and express meanings, which you could do in any language. Syntactic ambiguities crop up more often than you would think, but unless you are a linguist, you won't even notice most of them, as it is usually very clear which meaning is the appropriate one in the context.
So, my answer is no, because it is not even possible to do that.
The fallacy of accent was removed by lojban, to make a question you put the word xu somewhere at the sentence (you don't use ? for it) the word before the xu is the word you are stressing. This fixes fallacy of accent because you need to say xu to both make the question and stress it and the specific part of the sentence the word xu is will dictate the stress, saying the same sentence in a different way will do nothing.
Fallacy of division use as example "...2nd grade in Jefferson elementary eats a lot of ice cream" you can't know if 1-The average amount of icecream the students of this second grade eat is alot of ice cream. 2-The median amount the students eat is alot. 3-The total amount they class eat collectively is alot of ice cream. 4-Each person at the class eat alot of ice cream. This could be solved by forcing the writer to specify all the choices that apply when telling that, so he can't be vague as in english, if some of the choices is not said is because it don't apply.
Sure -- accent would be possible. Being not vague makes a language pretty much unusable, as you have to be so wordy in every little thing you say. But you asked for all fallacies to be avoided.
@minoret, xu is used to indicate a question. It can't be used when the sentence isn't a question but a statement. "I didn't buy the car" compared to "I didn't buy the car" are two different statements requiring emphasis to differentiate, and neither are questions.
Isn't the fallacy of accent more of a shortcoming of many writing systems that don't (usually) indicate accent even though it carries meaning? Prosody is part of the language after all. The ambiguity only arises once you leave it out when writing your language down.
@LukasG Yes; on the wikipedia page it states that this is "considered obscure". But I guess even if stress patterns are indicated, if you place it on an unexpected word, that might change the meaning to be confused or ambiguous.
In English you can stress any word in a sentence and topicalize it that way. A different language could use different methods to mark the topic of a sentence (e.g. Japanese topic marker は wa). If the stress falls on an unexpected word, most people will indicate it, as this self-demonstrating example shows. I don't see any difference in principle between (not) indicating accent in English and e.g. (not) indicating vowels in Hebrew/Arabic. Both can usually be inferred from context and can be indicated to disambiguate.
What I mean is that written language usually doesn't fully represent all aspects of the spoken language (and might at the same time differentiate things the spoken language doesn't). Is that a fallacy or just a trade-off between being practical and being perfectly unambiguous?
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1123 | Anti-Newspeak, making a language harder
So, the government of Oceania in 1984 creates a new, altered cersion of English to make its people easier to control.
What about the opposite?
A dictator wants to make his people harder to control, so that any invading nation would have to go through an ungodly amount of trouble to subjugate them.
Could he do it?
I'd imagine he'd start by gradually altering the language to be more complex, more foreign to neighbouring languages, and popularizing words or phrases that are harder to interpret by an outside listener.
He has already completely isolated this nation from the surrounding region, and the language present there is pretty unusual for the region, think Hungarian or Basque.
I am however unsure if this'd be enough; other ideas would be helpful if you think it could be done.
Interesting question! Gut feeling is that it wouldn't be enough, unless he's creating an invented language. Even then, I don't think it would be possible to make people harder to control in the event of an invasion and occupation. I also think this particular question might be more appropriate on Worldbuilding, as it doesn't seem to be about invented languages per se. Though I could be wrong on that score.
@elemtilas I am making a conlang, but I want to know what ways I can evolve it to show that part of their history. Thank you though!
Agreed with @elemtilas, that this is much more of a Worldbuilding SE question. But FWIW, I don't personally think a hypothetical society with a very difficult-to-learn language would present a problem for subjugation. Slaves who were abducted during the Middle Passage and shipped to Britain and the Americas probably didn't speak English, but no amount of morphological complexity in their native language is going to stop a motivated coloniser. They were taken away anyway and would've been killed for escaping or resisting, so what good would it have done if their language was super difficult?
Implement some "levels of trust" in the language: Design phrases or word choices that signal the initiated that you are talking to non-trusted people or that non-trusted people may be listening, design other phrases that signal that you can talk more freely.
I have heard (but I don't have hard references for this) that travellers and gypsies in Europe have such devices in their languages.
Tying this into the idea of evidentiality, which already exists in natlangs, could be a cool idea as well.
The purpose of Newspeak (control) is not achieved by making the language simpler; it is by making it impossible to think certain undesirable things. If the ideology of an invading force is aligned with the ideology of the previous system, then Newspeak would just continue to work fine.
However, if the invaders have an opposing ideology, then the now occupied citizens would presumably not be able to communicate with them at all, as they lack the concepts and means to express the invaders' ideas.
So the complexity of the language is not really related to the issue of control (or non-control), which is achieved by other means.
Incomprehensive languages on themselves never stopped conquering by brute force; the winner's language being imposed on the conquered people.
Forbidding the local language. Out of respect for many fine people in China, I will not mention China. China itself was under colonial suppression with even Opium, though Chinese is hard to master for an European. The colonial past of the Western countries has similar phenomena. There was also the persecution of Esperanto by dictators like Stalin; a language to contact with the rest of the world. As I thinks your proposed self-isolation may have a contrary weakening effect too.
A (pseudo) secret language like from gypsys, or a (high-level) signal language at least caused a cultural identity. But your argument of "ikh ken dir nisht farshteyn" (I cannot understand you - and you not me), would require a stoicism, like in Gordon R. Dickson's sf universe "Soldiers, Ask Not."
Without a culture ready to encorporate pride, stoicism, self-sacrifice it would be hard.
Never done with success (native Americans), but alluring as theme in science-fiction.
One scenario: the dictator could oppress his people, and let his secret agents launch a secret revolution language against oppression. That could be feasible.
A further bit of science fiction too: Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao.
Couldn't the dictator just impose a completely new language? If all children were taught this new language at school from a young age, and if all teaching materials and literature they had access to was in that language, they'd eventually forget their parents' tongue. It happens all the time with kids that move to a different country when they're young.
Imposing a new language through the education system would make it easier for the dictator to control access to information and therefore to control the population. At the same time it would create an artificial language barrier with the surrounding nations. Still, it wouldn't be the language itself that makes a population easier or harder to control, only the fact they use a different language.
If you really want a language whose grammar makes it inherently harder to lie and manipulate people, as a thought experiment you could perhaps try to create:
A language even less expressive than stereotypical caveman speech, where the grammar is so ambiguous it is impossible to understand a sentence outside of its context. Take these words for example:
Anger death flower friend.
This could mean many things: It angers me that my friend stepped on the flowers and ruined them / My anger ceased since I was brought flowers by a friend / The death of this person angers me, so I brought flowers to his relatives.
I don't see how you could incite a revolution or plot a coup while speaking such an ambiguous language. But then again, I don't see how someone could cause a society's communication skills to devolve to that point.
A very verbose language with a complicated grammar that makes it hard to write short sentences that leave part of the context out, so anyone trying to lie would have to be extremely careful not to contradict themselves. Again, I'm not sure how you could force people to speak such a language for long without it evolving to be more functional.
I added a few ideas for languages to my answer that previously focused on the worldbuilding aspect only.
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1377 | Do we know languages which think about subordinate conjunctions (like 'as,' 'even,' 'while') differently than English does?
for my conlang, I am trying to think of how to do the subordinating conjunction 'as,' 'even,' 'while' (and related: 'even though,' etc.).
In the languages that I know well enough to use these words (English, Spanish, and Turkish), they are separate words. I wonder, do we know languages which use other constructions for 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' other than with a separate word linking two clauses?
Example:
We ate as we ran.
I have covered quite a lot of grammar so far with systems of agglutinating clitics and affixes, so I'm trying to get my mind around how 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' could be handled without separate words. I guess I could just have like a "simultaneity clitic" for 'while' like I have a "conditional clitic" for 'would'...?
This has been difficult for me to conceptualize quietly in my head, so I really appreciate input and discussion :)
You mean along the lines of "we ate running"?
Hmm, that is interesting! So for "simple" simultaneous event verbs, an adjective might do the job?
From the point of view of a Slavic language speaker, it is English and (especially) Spanish that does without the conjunctions: comemos corriendo. In e.g. Slovak, you have to use the conjunction, while you can make a grammatical phrase using transgressive, it would be extremely stilted and archaic. Then again, Old Czech used imperfectum (heavily conjugated) quite extensively in subordinate roles (but not exclusively, thus just comment and not an answer) , as opposed to the "plain" aorist past tense.
I've looked up what are the transgressive and imperfectum and found examples for how sorts of conjugation can do this thing. Thank you!
In Inuit languages, there are no separate subordinating conjunctions. In Inuktitut, you identify the subordinate clause by an affix that indicates a conjunction.
For example, take the sentence "While Mary was eating, John was walking." In some Inuktitut dialects, you'd only indicate time tense for the superordinate phrase ("John was walking"), while the subordinate verb wouldn't have a tense marker, but instead use the conjunctive affix -tillu- (with the appropriate person marker)
Mary niri-tillugu John pisu-lauq-tuq (Mary eat-CONJ.3s John walk-Past-Part.3s)
It obviously gets a lot more complicated, but that gives one example of how to do it. If English had a similar setup, you might see something like this:
Mary eat John walked.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to relate them serially (Mary ate then John walked), you might see this sort of construction:
Mary ate John walked.
And you'd obviously reverse them for the other sequence, so "John walked Mary ate."
Obviously it would have to get more sophisticated, but you get the idea.
That's very interesting! I'll definitely play with it. Is there a source you recommend for reading about this? Naturally I can also look for myself.
What you describe reminds me of Latin enclitics -que 'and' and its less used counterpart -ve 'or', both attached to the first word of the subordinate clause (except prepositions). These are both co-ordinating conjunctions, not subordinating, but the basic idea could certainly be applied to any sort of conjunction.
ego domum ii tuque Romam iisti. 'I went home and you went to Rome.'
si ruber sive purpurus fias, mirer. 'If you should turn red or if you should turn purple, I would be surprised.'
It also makes me think of participial constructions, including the ablative absolute. These allow not only simultaneity, but also anteriority and posteriority to be expressed without any conjunction at all; although they can also be paired with a conjunctive adverb in the main clause (note tamen 'nevertheless' in the second example).
domum ambulans, bovem vidi. '(While I was) walking home, I saw a cow.'
urbe capta, rex tamen altus stabat. '(Although) his city (had been) captured, the king nevertheless stood tall.'
moriturus te saluto. 'I (who am) about to die salute you.'
As a bonus, there are also Old English correlative conjunctions. In OE, the same conjunction would often be repeated at the beginning of both clauses, with their relationship denoted by word order: the main clause usually took verb-second order, whereas the dependent clause usually took verb-final order.
þā hē hām cōm, þā wæs hē glæd. 'He was glad when he got home.' (lit. 'When he home came, then was he glad.')
You could conceivably do something similar while omitting the conjunction altogether.
Useful suggestions! Mr. Morrison pointed out that in Inuktitut "you'd only indicate time tense for the superordinate phrase ('John was walking'), while the subordinate verb wouldn't have a tense marker..." If not exactly the same (they mark for person), your point about participial constructions gives an accessible English example of the same thing. "Walking home [no tense], I saw a cow."
Switching word order is a cool idea, too. As a side effect of how I do other relative clauses, the suboridnate clause already changes word order.
I chose:
As you ate, he ran.
Nehoi nata, lehoi wewe.
@Vir The cool thing about participial constructions is that, while they don't display tense or absolute time, they usually do display aspect or relative time; i.e., time relative to the finite verb: Walking home, I saw a cow occurs alongside after walking home, ... and before walking home, ... You can play with absolute and relative time in all sorts of fun ways. // As an aside, I like how your language sounds.
Thank you! In phonology, it's mostly based on Nahuatl. Nahuatl is my favorite-sounding language. The phonotactics are a little more custom. The sound is the most fun part for me: making up words is easier to any degree if it sounds good. Re relative time, yes! That 'as'/'while' are indicating simultanaeity, seems obvious now but I didn't grok if for quite a while, heh. Aspects were much easier for me to analyze than these subordinating conjunctions. Still, I would be interested to learn from a relative time sentence which my current grammar can't express.
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1226 | What are resources for conlangers designing a knot writing?
I have not encountered many con-scripts encoding information in knots, rather than by marking flat media. I imagine that many conlangers would enjoy the inspiration of Andean khipus, which, going back to about 3,000 BCE, are ancient comparable with Proto-cuneiform.
I made one such conscript. I found another for writing English.
Some useful resources include:
Ashley's Book of Knots
Animated Knots
Various macrame websites and the concept 'sinnet' (you could decorate "nodes" within)
I think khipus and knot-writing most fascinating and I have greatly enjoyed the exercise. If people comment with specific curiosities, I will try to help. This question doesn't, per se, require an "answer" but I hope posting it may be useful and fruitful for the community.
Thanks, jk - Reinstate Monica, Andrew Ray, and curiousdannii for your input about correct posting!
One knot-like writing system (not mine) is Sylvia Sotomayor's Kelen Ceremonial Interlace Alphabet (can be found at http://www.terjemar.net/kelen/lajathin.php). It is ceremonial because it would likely be immensely impractical in every-day usage. The alphabet uses an interlace pattern where each letter is defined by a binary left-right pattern.
From the author: "If these make your eyes water, don't feel alone. The idea was to create an alphabet for identifying things and places that could only be read by the initiated."
The following PDF distributed as a handout by the author at the LCC2 conference for even more information.
http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/Sylvia_Sotomayor.pdf
That is so cool! Thank you for sharing, @brightlySalty, and welcome! I shall send my compliments to the designer.
Alas! I get a 404 error when using that website's contact page.
In case you know Ms. Sotomayor over there, let her know I'd love to talk to her and ask her about her conscript.
Unfortunately I don't. This PDF from her LCC2 talk, though, has more information about it. http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/Sylvia_Sotomayor.pdf
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1784 | Are there best practices for creating a lexicon or dictionary spreadsheet?
Mine has evolved over years and I'm sure I can still learn more about how to organize it. This might be an even more helpful question for folks starting out.
It all comes down to preference, as long as the spreadsheets are neat and easy to read. Looking for other alternatives beyond spreadsheets is also a viable option. As an example, I used a bit of programming knowledge to take the data from my spreadsheets and represent them in a format that resembles old dictionaries. (That might not be for everyone, caffeine overdose is real :)
Thanks, Paul. I reckon that dictionary-look adds a bit of flavor and verisimilitude for you.
It gives the lexicon a professional look that just makes it a lot easier to find motivation to work on (it's also a lot easier and more intuitive to use, so that's a plus)
I'll throw my hat in on the main best practices I have, anyway.
In my view, the number one best practice in assembling a conlang lexicon must be:
Get familiar with whatever filters, advanced find & replace, slicers, conditional formatting, grouping, sorting, and other organizational tools your medium has. 10 minutes per day for a week asking, "What does the next menu option do?" may save you days of tedious manual searching/organizing over time. I have learned new spreadsheet features and functions while conlanging that I could use elsewhere, too.
Here I discuss an "alphabetically" organized google sheet, with the advantage it can expand indefinitely and organize numerous nuances.
The conlang-guiding spreadsheets @Ylahris made, Der Spracherfinder, has a theme-based starter words lexicon template. This could have the advantage over my suggestions if you're aiming to showcase relatively fewer words, or looking for prompts to get started.
Here's a simple template with a bit of nonsense to give the idea.
Notes on the template
Why not just write all the parts of speech a word can do in one cell?
So that I can more easily find or organize patterns/exceptions, I have definition columns for different parts of speech and different transitivity situations (to shoot, to shoot it, to shoot at it).
What's the benefit of the Type column? Why start with the filter there?
I sometimes want to deal with or look among all words of a type. I could name quite a few more of these tags which I have found useful. But in short this tagging system saves me a lot of time and a lot of "I have fixed all the ones I could find. But could I be missing some?"
Why are certain cells colored in the template?
Conditional formatting can help color-code certain patterns automatically. Here, I have it highlighting duplicate/homograph words and certain tags.
What is the advantage of the +/- at left?
When you have dozens or hundreds of words starting with each letter, the collapsible grouping saves a lot of time scrolling, either when initially alphabetizing and/or editing words. Sometimes you want to Ctrl+F search only certain letter sections, too.
What do I need the top "?" sections for?
Often times working on thing A brings thing B to my attention. If I can make a note and place to put it in an "under construction" section at the top, I can follow through thing A without forgetting thing B.
Sometimes I'm on a roll thinking up good-sounding words. It's not always when I'm on a row thinking analytically and defining new concepts/grammatical approaches for the same words. While I am on the aesthetic roll, having a separate workshop section for extra "sounds good, needs definition" words can save time and improve both goals over all.
Although I've never tried it, it seems like a data structure other than a spreadsheet (a database of some form) would be more suited to the complex relationships between lexemes and definitions.
If presented sequentially, it seems like ordering the lexicon according to its writing system ("alphabetical order") is the only really workable method. Trying to order by meaning ignores just how messy meaning can be and doesn't account for figures of speech or semantic shifts.
You could also sort by the Romanization. That's what I do because a) I can't be bothered to remember the order of the Atili alphabet and b) I only rarely care how a word is actually spelled in Atili.
Organizing a lexicon when it gets greater than 100 words is a problem. I tried text files, Markdown, and spreadsheets but they all seem to get harder to work with as the lexicon grows. I am working on the following hierarchy which may be implemented in a database. Note that each level may have more than one entry for the entry above.
word
etymology
pronunciation
part of speech
definition
example
gloss
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1511 | Is lowering the tongue at word-ending a voiceless vowel?
In my conlang, some consonants can cluster with l at the end. For example, 'story' is 'coánl'; following dictionary.com's IPA for 'metal' as / ˈmɛt l / I had set out pronouncing this like /koˈa:n l/. So trying to be the most clear since I am no expert in how to write these things, (for relevant consonants C) -Cl ending sounded like [Cəl].
Pronouncing over time, I happened to hit on a different way. I like this a lot better. I don't know how to describe it in IPA, though. I have done my best here to use notation correctly and understandably and made my best analysis after trying to figure it out. Maybe the difference is now I'm ending the word with a voiceless vowel? I'd appreciate guidance.
Using coánl, I'm going to make a contrast with what my mouth is doing.
When I end the words / ˈmɛt l / or /koˈa:n l/, my tongue
drops from the alveolar ridge
stops behind my upper teeth
my lips do not keep broadening with the [a:] after the [n]
it sounds like the /l/ ends the syllable.
In contrast, my new way of saying 'coánl,'
my tongue continues downwards and forwards past my teeth
while my lips do continue to broaden in the motion they were making for /a:/
I think I stop my vocal cords with the L sound, same as before.
With these motions, now the [l] itself sounds like it does at the start of a [-la] syllable rather than the end of an [əl].
I pronounce [la] with only the start of an [a]? Or to put it another way, the /a/ goes through both consonants now? Is this what you call an voiceless vowel, or something else?
Thank you for your thoughts
Ultimately, if your vocal cords stop vibrating and you're still pronouncing the word (i.e. there's still breath moving through your vocal apparatus), then whatever phoneme you're pronouncing will be voiceless.
This article has not only a review of the mechanics, but also some IPA notation to help you notate. Particularly initial vs final voicing or devoicing. And this video has good examples of voiced vs voiceless vowels in Cheyanne.
Very helpful! I made "voiceless vowel" my sort of hypothesis to question when read that and the voicelessness article with the example of Japanese speakers moving their lips but not saying the vowel. It is helpful to be able to confirm whether I am analyzing correctly from what I am reading; I can grab a new tool by the wrong end sometimes. Thanks for the clear rule and the audio examples!
@Vir -- Glad I could be helpful! One of the great things about glossopoesy is that even when you grab the tool by the wrong end, it'll still function! Maybe not quite as expected, but something wonderful is bound to emerge!
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1778 | Treat the gerund and/or infinitive as a case
Basic questions:
Do we know of any property of a gerund or infinitive which prevents it being treated totally like a type of noun?
Do we know any language which expresses gerunds or infinitives as a noun case?
Background:
I combine noun particles to mark noun properties like declension, plurality, etc.
Examples with accusative particle 'ya,' then with three noun particles:
Na caye ya mwaecolo.
2PS.FUT change ACC everything.
You will change everything.
Na caye yaliaŋc omahál.
2PS.FUT change ACC.DEM1.PL dress.
You will change these dresses.
I have been making verbs into certain non-finite verbs in the same way.
Na hel óya caye.
2PS.FUT avoid GER/INF.ACC change.
You will avoid changing.
For years I have just had it sitting to the side, the only noun particle with nothing else in its category.
It just occurred to me I could treat this infinitive/gerund particle ó as another noun case. As above, it already indicates a type of object for use with some verbs. It can be compatible with other noun particles (e.g., this swimming, many changings, neither swimming nor running...). I could give it some pronouns (like my other cases have) for where the antecedent is an action (e.g., He did so). It would be an unusual case insofar as it can also combine with other cases (It's safe from running.)
Presently I haven't found a sentence where treating gerund-ness as a noun case messes things up. I could use help thinking of a test situation for this.
Based on Draconis' input, this idea might appeal more to someone in whose language ALL nouns are also verbs.
You'd want to think about constructions like "a talent for swimming" or "the art of cooking", but if it can combine with other "cases", this isn't an issue.
My question for you is: why call it a "case" at all? The word "case" is usually used for a marking that can be applied to any noun to indicate its relationship to other words in the sentence. And this doesn't seem like a marking you can put on any noun: you can't put it on nouns at all, only on verbs.
So I'd probably call it a particle that turns a verb into a noun (gerund or infinitive or whatever you want to call it) and leave "case" for the exclusive markings. But the definitions of these terms aren't set in stone, and it certainly wouldn't be the weirdest use of "case" out there.
For a real-world example, Swahili has a single category of marking on nouns that encodes number, gender, and certain semantic roles (like "this is where the action is happening"). This is the category that triggers agreement on verbs and adjectives, and can be used to distinguish pronouns; since it covers semantics that would be marked by case in other languages, it's not unreasonable to consider this a "case" marking, in the sense used in your question. And there's a special one of these markings for infinitives (number 15).
"only on verbs": This is an especially relevant point. Most of my words can be nouns or verbs. But now that you mention I do have some just-nouns. All the other cases would work with those, but not this one. So sitting in a category by itself is more apt. Thank you for your insight! This was a blindspot for my testing because naturally all the non-finite verb test sentences I would think of would use n/v words. I'll check out Swahili marking, too.
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2120 | For writing a grammar, benefit of linguistic vs "readable" terminology
I am writing a grammar for my conlang. I imagine finishing it and hiring a grad student or somebody to read it for comments, but otherwise, realistically, it probably has no other audience than myself so this question admittedly doesn't matter. Still, I am interested to consider what advantages or disadvantages community members consider. Thank you for your time.
In many places, I use linguistic terms like 'nominative.' Sometimes I don't find such terms for my concept, or I find a closely related term but think it would mislead, in which case I might derive a "readable" alternative: the alwaysative and neverative verb aspects, say.
Writing a grammar, would you err toward consistency either with linguistic or with "readable" terminology? Why?
Why do you think the linguistic terms aren't "readable"? Even 4 year olds learn the terms "phoneme" and "grapheme" at school in Australia. Whereas no one would have any idea what "alwaysative" or "neverative" would mean without you explaining it, so you might as well just use the conventional terminology.
Linguistic terms are not "readable" because 'readable' is a category I made up for this question to contrast linguistic terms. Those terms which no one can have learned anywhere else (because I made them up) aim to be learned upon reading: readable. It does not deny legibility to other sets of terms. Your question about the word 'readable' underlines the challenge of making up terms. Is there a conventional linguistic term for linguistic neologisms? Is there conventional linguistic terminology for an aspect indicating an action always happens? Never happens? Glad to hear.
This isn't actually a problem unique to conlanging. Linguists working with natural languages run into this all the time too! Fundamentally, the goal of your terminology—whatever you end up using—should be to give the audience a clear understanding of what you're talking about.
If your cases happen to work very similarly to certain cases in Latin, then using the traditional Latin names might serve this purpose. It means people who already speak Latin (or Greek or German or…) don't need to learn a new name for "this is the case for the subject of a verb". When that happens, using a term like "nominative" can be helpful. There are a whole lot of languages in the world that have a "nominative" case, so most linguists are familiar with it.
However, most cases don't work quite like certain cases in Latin. When this happens, you have to decide if it's worth using a name that's close enough, even if it's a bit misleading, or if it's worth creating a new name that your audience needs to learn. Which way this tradeoff swings tends to depend on how close your thing is to the traditional meaning, and how common the established terminology is. (A lot more people know "dative" than "adessive".)
Personally, I would err on the side of using more accurate names for things, even if you need to create new terms for it. When two languages both have a "dative" case because it's used for the recipient of giving, even though in one language it's fundamentally a case about beneficiaries and in the other language it's fundamentally a case about circumstances, the standardized name is actively hindering readers' understanding. Calling them the benefactive and circumstantial cases could avoid that.
Thank you for the insight. I will wait to see whether some more come in before marking Answered, and I am glad that a mix of traditional and made-up terms is a well-tested approach already.
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1125 | Finnish as if it were English
I am fascinated by Finnish and sound changes. I had an idea for a funny version of Finnish where it has these properties:
Orthographic [k] changes to [q].
[Q] is pronounced /ð/ (voiced TH) before e or i (unvoiced TH) and /θ/ otherwise.
There are no noun cases.
Orthographic [h] changes to phonetic and orthographic [/f/].
There are a few irregularities. For example, even though hän is he, it becomes 'faqin'.
There is a word for a or the. It is 'ifi' and derived from the Finnish word for one.
The words are read as if they are English otherwise.
Words are translated word for word.
Phonetic /s/ or /f/ is removed before or after orthographic [q]
Word endings are copied from English. (-ed is same as English past tense, and verbs are conjugated though I don't have time to describe.)
Here is an example from Lord of the Flies (first three sentences):
Ifi poiqa qansa reilu fiqet lasqet faqinitqe alas ifi qesta farwat ilqa after roq qofti ifi laguni. Waiqa faqin omisted oted faqin qoulu wilapaita ia ialited se nit alqen ifi qasi faqin paita iutuned eta faqin fiuqsetwaes qipqied faqin farma paita iutuned eta faqin fiuqset qipqied faqin otsu. Qaiqi piorista faqin ifi piqa murqated osaqi ifi widaqo waes ifi iqilpi after lampo.
The question is about mutual intelligibility and translating things. I am curious about how this "reconstructed Finnish" translates to actual Finnish. I looked up how words are ordered, and it said that the word order tends to be the same as English. I suspect that the word endings and sounds (dental fricatives, voiceless labiodental fricatives, and more vowels) will pose major barriers to intelligibility.
Bottom line: if I were to speak this version of Finnish to someone in Finland who spoke Finnish, would they be able to understand without English?
In what way did the English ~ Finnish speaker over at the other place not answer your question?
My comment on [linguistics.se] was deleted together with the question, so I repeat it here:
To answer this question, you need to conduct experiments with native speakers of Finnish. For experiment design, you can use, e.g., methods from the INCOMSLAV project that sutdies intercomprehesibility of Slavic languages.
Since this question was closed in Linguistics, I think it appropriate to note the answer here.
I speak English and a reasonable amount of Finnish, and I could make absolutely no sense of any of that at all, even knowing the sound laws you posit and where the text comes from. It was basically utter gibberish from start to finish. I’m guessing the first three words are meant to be ‘with the boy’, but after that, I’m lost. –-- Janus Bahs Jacquet (9.APR.2020)
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1280 | Is it attested for noun classifiers to be coopted for directionality?
A noun classifier marks on the verb some information about the form of one of its arguments. For example, Atili has a handful of "stationary" classifiers that produce semantic distinctions:
Emanyo bu-vahkin-us azven<k>o.
Emanyo ball-cook-P/3;PFV cow<3>
Emanyo cooked the meatball.
vs
Emanyo mal-vahkin-us azven<k>o.
Emanyo board-cook-P/3;PFV cow<3>
Emanyo cooked the brisket.
Atili also has "motile" classifiers that indicate manner of motion:
Yeredol many-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol run-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol runs to the beach.
vs
Yeredol ib-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol climb-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to.
Yeredol climbs (down) to the beach.
Is it attested for a language to use a similar system for encoding whether motion is towards or away from the speaker, as in the following hypothetical examples?
Yeredol ko-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol go-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol goes (away) to the beach.
vs
Yeredol kom-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol come-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol comes to the beach.
Do the cislocative and translocative preverbs ko and kom occupy the same slot in the verb template as bu (ball) and ib (climb)? Can you combine them giving something like ? Emanyo bukom[throw]a azvenko (Emanyo threw the meatball towards me.) Also, do bu (ball) and ib (climb) occupy the same slot in the verb template?
Yes, the idea is that all three of these things occupy the same slot and if you need to combine them you'd need some sort of circumlocution like "There (ball)was a cow and Emanyo (ven)threw it." or "Emanyo (ball)threw the cow towards me." I prefer the latter form in general, but bear in mind that in discourse, if the meatball was already introduced, the sentence "Emanyo (ven)threw the cow." would suffice since we already know what form the cow is in (a ball). Mostly the "motile" classifiers are restricted to animate referents and the "stationary" classifiers to inanimate referents.
Such a system is indeed attested! And not only that, it’s actually surprisingly common. Usually the category is called andative and venitive, for ‘going’ and ‘coming’ respectively (though I prefer ‘translocative’ and ‘cislocative’). Here’s an example from Komnzo (Döhler 2018):
Yfathwroth.
They hold him away.
y- fath -wr -o -th
3SG.MASC.α- hold.EXT -ND -AND -2|3NSG
And one from Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (Oto-Manguean, Anderson 2017):
Rata rsily rityug Lia Petr gyia.
Every morning Petra goes and cuts flowers.
rata rsily r- i- tyug Lia Petr gyia
every morning HAB-AND-cut Miss Petra flowers
Many languages have even more elaborate systems, distinguishing many different directions beyond just ‘coming’ and ‘going’. For instance, Yagua distinguishes ‘upriver’ and ‘downriver’ directions (Payne 1997):
Sąąnaa suutiimuníí.
Wash him/her downriver.
sąąna -a suuti -imu -níí
2DL -IRR wash -DR -3SG
While Southern Pomo has an exceedingly large array of around 15 directional suffixes, which may be applied to verbs of motion (Walker 2013):
ʔapʰ꞉alméčʼin
climb down from above
ʔapʰː -alamečʼ -Vn
carry -DIR -SG.IMP
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1355 | Lemmata in a prefixing language
I'm developing a heavily prefixing language, and I'm trying to work out a lemma/citation form for my verbs. However, nearly all forms of the verb have a prefix. For example, the verb "to go" has the stem m(a), but the standard infinitive is um, the first-person singular standing conjugation is irim, and the participle is ënda.
Obviously, the latter is wholly unsuitable as a lemma because it has a tendency to set off a number of phonological processes that can cause the stem to get lost, I don't really want to list words under any of these forms in my dictionary, because if I do, I'll end up with all of my verbs listed in the lexicon under "u," "i," or "e."
You could just list them under the stem in that case. If you can easily reconstruct the infinitive by a simple rule, then that would be the easiest way. There is no law that states that you always have to put the infinitive as the main dictionary entry. It's only common practice in most Western languages because it suits the way they work.
Another possibility would be to look at how other languages deal with this issue. For example, Indonesian verbs also tend to have prefixes; I'm not sure what they do in the dictionary. In Arabic, I believe the root is in the dictionary, ie the three core consonants from which the other forms are derived.
Just do whatever works for you: it's your language after all!
It's possible to use the infinitive as the citation form / lemma in your dictionary, but have collation rules specific to your language.
For example, if um is the infinitive, you can have it sorted under the m section in your dictionary.
Collation in Tibetan works this way and prefixes don't influence the collation order, but there's the further complication that Tibetan orthography is non-phonemic and the prefixes aren't pronounced anymore. Here's another source describing collation in Tibetan and there's a NativLang video on YouTube that covers Tibetan historical spelling generally.
You can also pick an inflected form arbitrarily, like the first person standing form, maybe, and use that as the head entry. You can then add entries for common forms like the infinitive and participle and have a cross-reference for the first person standing form. Latin entries on Wiktionary, for example, use the first-person present singular as the citation form.
I always think it weird when people write “amo = to love”.
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1219 | How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?
I'm trying to design a conscript for my conlang Atili and would like to create punctuation in order to deliminate sentences and transcribe limited prosody. However, I don't just want to create new symbols for the full stop, comma, colon, semicolon, etc. I am especially cautious of non-terminating punctuation and how it can be used differently from in English.
I'm aware of distinctions like the Oxford comma and Spanish inverted punctuation, so I know that punctuation is not universal. How do other languages use punctuation differently from English?
In fact, each language has its own punctuation rules that have to be learned. German is very different in its punctuation rules from English (relative sentences always require a comma, dependent clauses are separated from the main clause by a comma, but no "Oxford comma" and no comma after sentence-initial adverbials. Studying the rules of punctuation for some non-English languages should give you an idea of how things can be regulated differently.
I also learned that Russian and Kyrgyz and probably other languages have more ellispis-type multiple punctuations like !.. and ?.. and even !?. and ?!..
And than there are creative extensions to punctuation like the interrobang ‽, its inverted counterpart gnaborretni ⸘ and lots of proposals for an Irony mark.
I recall one of the members of the localization team for the Ace Attorney series mentioning that they had to figure out when and where to delete ellipses (...) from the Japanese text when translating to English -- both use them, but Japanese uses them way more and using them the same amount in the English would feel weird. So even where the rules aren't very different (afaik ellipses are allowed pretty much anywhere in both languages), usage can differ in notable ways. A lot to think about!
Never seen ?!. or !?.. But sometimes ?.. !.. ?!!
Armenian is one of examples of modern language that has its own punctuation which differs quite noticeably from the Western one, which is nowadays widely adopted (of course, with variations).
Here's are some noticeable differences:
Armenian question mark (՞) is placed on the stressed vowel of the word in question rather than at the end of the sentence, for instance: "Ինչպե՞ս ես:"
Armenian exclamation mark follows the same pattern.
There's a separate punctuation mark used to indicate a pause that is longer than that of a comma, but shorter than that of a colon.
Punctuation is not universal. Chinese and Japanese didn't used to have punctuation, nor apparently did Latin and Ancient Greek. So I'd say that's the first thing to consider: your proto-script needn't have had any punctuation at all. But over time, scribes found that it was a pain in the backside to write long continuous strings and just figure out by context where sentences end and begin. How they choose to delimit those sentences* is up to them.
Maybe writers split up sentences using a vertical bar or a slash, or a middle dot like the interpunct used in Japanese and Chinese, or some other kooky character. Maybe sentences are grouped using something similar to brackets at the start and end. Or maybe ancient authors actually drew a circle or line around each sentence to delimit it from the next (it never had to be practical!) Future authors realised that, if all they wanted to do was tell where one sentence ended and another began, all they had to do is draw a circle around every other sentence.
(So you might have a paragraph like this.) Where every other sentence is uncircled. (And the next sentence is circled again.) Imagine that these brackets are circles.
Punctuation within sentences is, again, up to you. It's perfectly possible that your script's writers never decided that they needed to split up clauses using commas, separate lists using colons, or mark speech using quotation marks etc. Maybe they mark speech separately with an underline, or a dotted line. Or maybe they write using different coloured inks depending on type of sentence being written.
Maybe, instead of little marks, your proto-script could have fully-fledged characters without any spoken value, but which are used to delimit clauses in the same way as commas are. Of course, over time these might have reduced and transformed into a small, easy to write character - in much the same way that Simplified Chinese emerged over time because some scholars somewhere were too lazy to write out 麗 every time, and went with 丽 instead.
The point is: free yourself from all constraints about how your writing should be written. Start with a blank canvas if you like, and add in features as you see fit. Think about your proto-script and how the first scribes might have written things down - then think about how later writers would have abbreviated those forms and made them shorter, simpler and easier. As Artifexian says: Iterate, Iterate, Iterate. Write down random scribbles and see how they pair with your script.
These are just a few random ideas. I hope some of them help.
* I don't know how your language works, but you might not even need to separate sentences. Maybe just clauses, paragraphs, or "logical ideas".
I don’t believe any writing system would circle paragraphs — as you say, it’s too impractical, and writing systems tend to evolve in the direction of practicality (as you yourself reference with your 麗→丽 example). On the other hand, Thai and related scripts write spaces between clauses rather than between words, which is a much simpler implementation of the same idea. Also, you say that a script ‘could have fully-fledged characters … used to delimit clauses’ — I seem to remember that Chinese did this at one point, but I can’t find the reference now.
I didn't mean to imply that any of my suggestions were practical or realistic - I was just trying to throw many ideas out there in the hopes that OP found some of them interesting, or at least gave them some ideas of another way to go with their script. Said that, I think it's fair to say that the first writing systems may not have been exactly founded on practicality - the complexity of hieroglyphics, Mayan script and Chinese characters for one. Hieroglyphics evolved into a new script simply because of that impracticality.
So it's entirely conceivable that a nutty scribe from another universe (whose languages don't have to be written in a similar way to ours, of course,) could have thought about circling sentences, paragraphs, clauses or blocks of thought. It caught on for a while, but eventually writers found it tedious and just scratched curved arcs on the corners of each sentence, like our quotation marks. Anything's possible, right?
OK, good points. (I still think circling whole thoughts is just slightly too impractical to be used, but now that I think about it, we certainly have analogues on our world, e.g. cartouches.)
It's quite correct that punctuation only really became at thing after the printing-press. So it's be perfectly natural to go without it in many fictional settings. Even so, even though it was anachronistic, I worked on this question for my own last conscript because I enjoyed it.
I read what I could to find all the "functions" performed by every punctuation mark I could find. Then I picked which functions I wanted for my language.
I added one: a sentence-opener mark, in place of capital letters. For the river-inspired conscript in question, this mountain mark's slight angling helps orient the reader to the "river's" direction, too.
I remixed some: splitting the functions of semi-colon; combining em-dash, colon, and quotation under the function "hard parenthetical"; ending sentences/rivers with the "hard parenthetical" "cataratct" is an exclamation.
I left one out: questions are indicated by a clitic already, so there's no question mark.
In my opinion, my punctuation system relexes even less because many punctuation functions are done by how you write the thoughts with respect to each other, like rivers' tributaries. Information encoded by the angles of clauses isn't exactly punctuation, but perhaps it will suggest more possibilities for using text without relexing.
I could have relexed even less, I feel, because there are more nuances and "functions" languages could express by punctuation, though I don't know a language that does. Cantonese has grammar particles doing interesting tasks. English uses prosody for many expressions, and we write this with italics and such. I am sure other languages have features like these. Grammatical nuances like these could be done by punctuation in writing. It depends on what the bare sounds themselves leave ambiguous.
Setting other languages aside, have you found some ambiguous sentences in your conlang? Every language's rules leaves ambiguity somewhere; you just choose where. Perhaps your language has ambiguity in novel places, and so in the less expressive writing media would need a novel mark.
You could also have not-exactly-punctuation symbols. Consider where you might have a culturally important mark like $, or a short-hand mark like &. Culturally important information, short-hand: other common marks are surely potential hiding categories of punctuation job in front of your face :) In my conlang, the first time you mention the name of a god in a conversation or chapter or whatever, you have to use a respectful prefix reserved for this purpose. That "piety function" could have been done by a punctuation instead of morphologically. Some cultural quirk like that in your setting could have a punctuation mark in print :)
Hope one of these ideas helps!
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1176 | What is reduplication used for in natural languages?
According to WALS Feature 27A, 278/368 languages surveyed have productive full and partial reduplication. Chapter 27 gives the following example of partial reduplication in Pangasinan:
báley "town" -> balbáley "towns"
And this example of full reduplication from Sahaptian:
té:mul "hail" -> temulté:mul "sleet"
But what is reduplication often used to express?
WALS Chapter 27 describes a number of functions for reduplication. All examples below come from chapter 27 unless otherwise noted.
On nouns
Pangasinan uses reduplication to mark plurals:
báley "town"
balbáley "towns"
Ilocano uses reduplication on nouns to mark a distributive plural:
sábong "flower"
sabsábong "various flowers"
Ilocano also uses reduplication to turn nouns into reciprocal verbs:
bales "revenge"
balembales "to avenge each other"
Chukchi uses reduplication to mark the absolutive case:
jokwat "eider duck"
jokwajow "eider duck (ABS)"
Kayardild uses reduplication to turn nouns into adjectives:
kandu "blood"
kandukandu "red"
Yawelmani uses reduplication to mark associatives:
k'ɔhis "buttocks"
k'ɔk'ɔhis "one with large buttocks"
On verbs
Luiseño uses reduplication to mark the number of an inherent object:
lawi "to make a hole"
lawlawi "to make two holes"
lawaláwi "to make more than two holes"
Mountain Arapesh uses reduplication to mark carelessness on the part of the subject or agent:
su "to touch"
susu "to touch all over"
Luiseño also uses reduplication to turn a verb into an adjective:
lepi "to tan, soften"
lepélpiš "pliable"
Ancient Greek used reduplication to mark the perfect aspect (Ancient Greek Press Book Chapter 42):
γράφ "write"
γέγραφ "have written"
Tigak uses reduplication to turn a verb into a person who regularly performs that action:
giak "send"
gigiak "messenger"
On Adjectives
Turkish uses reduplication to mark intensity:
beyaz "white"
bembeyaz "very white"
Automatic Reduplication
Additionally, automatic reduplication is possible, where an affix requires reduplication of the root with no additional meaning. Chapter 27 gives this example from Ilocano:
singpet "behave" + agin-
aginsisingpet "pretend to behave"
In Austronesian languages it frequently marks repetitive or progressive aspect.
The reduplication of adjectives to mark intensity is also found to some extent in Swedish. E.g. "Den är lite lite för stor" - "It is ever so slightly too large", or "En hård hård knut" - "A very hard knot".
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1134 | Implications of secundative alignment
There are two different ways to handle ditransitive verbs like "give." For the purposes of this post, in the sentence "John gave Bill the ball," John is the donor (D), Bill is the recipient (R), and the ball is the theme (T).
Indirective
With indirective alignment, the theme is marked the same as the patient of a monotransitive verb and the recipient is marked differently (often with a dative case).
John-a read the book-i .
John-NOM read the book-ACC
John-a gave the book-i Bill-e.
John-NOM gave the book-ACC Bill-DAT.
"John gave the book to Bill."
Secundative
With secundative (or daechtycatiative) alignment, the recipient is marked the same as the patient of a monotransitive verb and the theme is marked differently (often with an instrumental case).
John-a read the book-i .
John-NOM read the book-ACC.
John-a gave Bill-i the book-e.
John-NOM gave Bill-ACC the book-INST.
"John gave Bill with the book."
What other grammatical features are likely to be affected by secundative alignment? What considerations do I need to make?
So, here are some of the implications of choosing secundative alignment. They aren't really strict implications so much as Stuff You Might Consider Thinking About™. I think the effects of choosing secundative alignment are pretty local overall and won't have cascading effects on your grammar. In my opinion, the thorniest issue here is dealing with valence-changing operations on verbs.
What do secundative languages tend to look like in the real world?
How does secundative alignment manifest itself in morphology or syntax?
Valence-changing operations
Relative Clauses
Real World Secundative Languages.
If you want your language to be naturalistic, I suggest taking a look at WALS to see what kinds of combinations of features are typologically uncommon. If you are not trying to make a naturalistic language, knowing what natural languages tend to do is a good way to spend your "weirdness budget" wisely.
This map marks the strategy used for the verb to give. This analysis could be misleading because it's possible for the verb give to use a different strategy from other verbs, but I think this feature is the best fit for what you're after of the available WALS features.
Looking at the map, my assessment of the broad areal trends is that Eurasia is dominated by the indirect object construction. The secondary object construction seems to be common in North America and in New Guinea.
The WALS Chapter for this feature provides some examples of the different types of constructions as well as a note about what other features commonly co-occur with secondary object marking, excerpt below:
...head-marking languages with verb indexing of two core arguments tend
to show the secondary-object pattern...
How does secundative alignment manifest itself?
Basically, there are four ways your language can manifest secundative alignment.
word order
presence of dedicated adpositions
case markers
verbal agreement
I think most of the real world secundative languages are secundative because the recipient in the verb to give or other similar verbs gets indexed in the verb the same way that a prototypical direct object would.
This can occur in a language with no case marking. So, I give you the book might be something like
book.sg give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj
In this example, book bears no case marking but is clearly the theme.
The case marking strategy is covered in your example.
For word order, we can take an example from English.
I give you the book
you is the recipient, but occupies the position directly after the verb. In English you have a choice between using a preposition like to or for instead. If no such option existed, this would be a pristine example of syntactic secundativeness.
Note that the language can be partially secundative.
For instance, the following is possible.
you.sg.DAT book.sg.ACC give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj
In this example, the two non-agent arguments book and give receive indirect-object-style case marking, but the verb shows secundative alignment.
Valence changing operations
It is important to think about how the passive voice, if it exists, should behave.
Suppose we have a language with secundative alignment in its cases.
I.NOM you.OBJ book.INST give.PST
I gave you a book.
If you were to passivize the verb, which argument would be promoted to the agent? Would (101), (102), or neither be acceptable?
(101) you.NOM give.PSV.PST
(102) book.NOM give.PSV.PST
Do you have an anti-applicative voice that deletes the recipient and promotes the theme to primary object? As far as I know, anti-applicative voices do not exist in the real world, but applicative voice does exist. It's possible to allow this promotion without an explicit voice for it.
I.NOM book.OBJ give.ANTIAPP.PST
This situation gets murkier if the language is both ergative and secundative.
I.ERG you.ABS book.INST give.PST
I gave the book.
In this case, the antipassive voice would delete the absolutive argument and promote the ergative argument.
I.ABS book.INST give.ANTIPSV.PST
I gave the book (to someone).
Some ergative languages mark instruments and agents the same way.
I.ERG book.ERG you.ABS give.PST
In this case, the antipassive voice could potentially target either argument.
I.ABS give.ANTIPSV.PST
or
book.ABS give.ANTIPSV.PST
Relative clauses
Deciding how relative clauses in secundative languages should work might present some subtle issues.
Languages frequently have a limit on what kinds of arguments can be targeted by relative clauses.
You may want to choose to make only the agent and the primary object extractable, but not secondary objects.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between your antiapplicative and an instrumental applicative. Is there a distinction three that I've missed?
The main differences are whether the rest of the language is ergative or accusative, and whether the agent and the recipient are marked differently. The anti-applicative promotes a secondary object to a primary object in an accusative language. The instrumental-antipassive is just a sort of silly generalization of the antipassive voice that can target any argument, oblique or core, marked with the ergative-instrumenal case and promote it to an absolutive argument.
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1145 | Dealing with core argument loss from syntactic applicativization
If a language limits its relative clause heads to core arguments of a verb such that item 1 below is ungrammatical, it may become necessary within discourse to use an applicative to promote an auxiliary argument into object position as in item 2:
1) * 1 see Bill with the telescope that is on the hill
"I see Bill with the telescope that is on the hill."
2) 1 see-APP the telescope that COP on the hill
"I see with the telescope that is on the hill."
However, since this is getting done for syntactic reasons, it is not desirable to lose entirely the normal object. How can I reintroduce Bill to the sentence while maintaining the applicative construction that allows the telescope to be relativized?
I don't think there are any attested languages that limit the role that relative clause heads can have in the matrix clause. The accessibility hierarchy is a theory explaining the capabilities of various languages to produce relative clauses where the head has specific roles in the relative clause.
If we take your example and exchange the matrix and embedded clauses, you get the following examples. I'm changing the first example also to use a resumptive pronoun.
1a) *The telescope that I see Bill with it is on the hill.
2a) The telescope that I see-app is on the hill.
If you want to reintroduce the demoted argument Bill, you can use an adposition or a case. Suppose you reuse the preposition towards for this purpose.
2b) The telescope that I see-app towards Bill is on the hill.
One interesting choice would be to use neither cases nor adpositions.
2c) The telescope that I see-app Bill is on the hill.
Since the embedded clause already has a subject and obliques can't be relativized, that forces the interpretation of Bill as an oblique.
Aha. That's where I went wrong. Somehow I'd got it in my head that syntactic applicativization took place in the matrix clause. Now that you point out that that isn't the case, it seems so obvious.
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1195 | How can I talk about weather without expletives?
In English, it is necessary to use a syntactic expletive ("it") when talking about weather:
It is sun-ny.
EXPL COP.3S sun-ADJ
Pro-drop languages can easily avoid the explicit expletive by excluding it (Spanish):
Hac-e sol.
do-3S sun
But in this Spanish example, there's still an implicit expletive subject. How can I completely avoid using expletive subject when talking about the weather?
In russian "идет дождь"="goes rain"≈"the rain is going"...
Here are some ideas haven't been listed yet
Allow nouns denoting weather phenomena to form clauses by themselves
Use an existential construction
Make the subject a location
Use an all-purpose weather verb
Weather noun clauses
If a normal transitive clause looks something like the following, then a weather clause can just be a noun by itself.
student-NOM book-ACC read-past-3sg
the student read the book
Here, the noun appears in the nominative case, which tends to be unmarked cross-linguistically.
rain-NOM
It's raining/was raining/will rain
This way, it can be modified with adjectives just as it normally would be.
many/much rain-NOM
It's raining a lot/It's pouring/It was raining a lot/...
Use an existential construction
Ceqli, or at least an old version of Ceqli from years ago, uses an existential construction.
baran hay
rain exist
Make the subject a location
I think this is similar to Circeus' example, but I can't tell whether it's identical or not. If it's identical, I'll remove it.
Locative subjects are perhaps uncommon or unattested cross-linguistically, but in principle nothing stops you from making the weather verbs intransitive verbs whose subject is the location where the weather is happening.
Here-NOM rain-past-3sg
It was raining here.
Spain-NOM principally plain-LOC rain-pres-3sg.
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Lit: Spain rains mainly at the plain.
So the few references I can find to locative subjects are mainly things like this, which describe locations moving to or appearing in the first position in a clause rather than verbs whose subject position has a locative flavor.
All-purpose weather verb
Have a verb that means to be the weather, and use it with the name of the weather phenomenon.
Rain-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's raining.
Snow-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's snowing.
Cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg
It's cloudy.
Cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg-NEG
It's not cloudy.
This has the advantage of making questions about the weather resemble their declarative counterparts.
what-NOM weather-pres-3sg
How is the weather?
how-much cloud-NOM weather-pres-3sg
How cloudy is it?
There are also language with impersonal verb conjugation, and of course, nothing prevents a verb from being used only in the impersonal. Nahuatl has an impersonal voice, but because it's only used with verbs that normally have animate subjects, its weather verbs function much like Spanish's, ironically enough.
In my own conlang Mfalen, weather verbs function as descriptors, so one says the equivalent of "X is raining" (i.e. It's raining on/in X) the same way one says "X is cold" or "X is windy" (or indeed, "X is red").
In russian:
The sun is shining — Солнц-е свет-ит. (Sun lights)
It is raining — Ид-ет дождь-ø. ("Goes rain"≈"The rain is going"
Hungarian avoids expletive subject when talking about weather by using an appropriate non-expletive subject. To say that it's sunny in Hungarian, you say
Süt a nap.
bake.3S the sun
"The sun is baking."
To say that it's raining, you say:
Es-ik az es-ő.
fall-3S the fall-N
"The rain is falling"
In this sentence, eső is used as the word for rain, but is in fact transparently derived from the verb esni, to fall, thus the sentence could actually be translated as "The falling thing is falling!"
Of note, however, this latter example can be shortened to just esik, "it falls," though the implicit subject here is az eső, "the rain," and could therefore still be considered non-expletive.
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1164 | Is it reasonable for numerals to behave like verbs?
I am aware that adjectives can pattern like verbs in some natural languages. Is it reasonable for numerals to do the same? Thus
Some balls four.
There are four balls.
Fouring the balls were orange.
The four balls were orange.
Of course, my conlang has more interesting verbal forms than we have in English. Is something like this attested in a natural language?
One clear-cut example of a language that treats many things like predicates, numerals included, is Khoekhoe.
Khoekhoe marks many kinds of predicates the same way, including numerals. The paper argues that all three of the open word classes (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in Khoekhoe can be analyzed as primarily predicates and non-predicative usage requires more morphology, specifically person-number-gender (PNG) affixes. Nominalizing stuff with a PNG clitic is extremely productive in Khoekhoe.
Here is an excerpt from page 3 of 21 from Predication and NP Structure in an
Omnipredicative Language: The Case of
Khoekhoe by Michael Hahn.
Khoekhoe is an SOV language. The V slot may be occupied by a word from
any of the three open word classes: a verb (1a), an adjective (1b), or
a noun (1cd). Both commons nouns (1c) and proper nouns (1d) can be
used. Even deictic elements (1e-f), numerals (1g), and possessives
(1h) can act as predicates. While the choice of the TAM marker depends
on the predicate, the syntactic behaviour of the different predicates
is entirely parallel:
Here are some examples from the paper.
1a) saa=ts ge ra |khii
you=2ms DECL TAM come
You (m) are coming.
1b) om=s ge (a) kai
house=3fs DECL TAM big
The house is big.
1c) saa=ts ge (a) gao-ao
you=2ms DECL TAM king
You are a king.
1d) saa=ts ge (a) Petru
you=2ms DECL TAM Peter.
You are Peter.
1e) om=s ge (a) nee.
house=3fs DECL TAM this
The house is this one.
1f) tii=ta ge (a) saa
I=1sg DECL TAM you
I am you.
1g) tara=di ge a !nona
women=3fp DECL TAM three
The women are three.
1h) om=s ge a tii
house=3fs DECL TAM mine
The house is mine.
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1167 | How typologically unusual is using postpositions in an otherwise head-initial language?
My conlang is predominately head-initial (SVO, n-adj, mostly suffixing), but has postpositions because I'd though that the noun was the head of an adpositional phrase. Wikipedia, however, says that the adposition is the head.
So how unlikely is a language with postpositions that is otherwise head-initial?
Such languages are uncommon but not unattested. However, they are more common than prepositional SOV languages and are present in a number of unrelated families around the world.
This WALS map shows us that in general, the order of object and verb and adposition and noun phrase is very highly correlated. In the map, postpositional VO languages are the group with the third highest number of total languages, but they are less than a tenth as common as the most frequent types.
Postposition / OV 472
Preposition / VO 454
Postposition / VO 41
There are some parts of the world such as West Africa where there are many SVO languages with postpositions. There seems to be a cluster of them around Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. I think the languages in question are proven or suspected to be Niger-Congo languages. The westernmost group of these languages has both VO and OV languages as well as some intermediate types like SOVX languages and postpositional VO languages.
Another example of a postpositional VO language is Finnish. I think Proto-Uralic is generally reconstructed as having verb-final word order. However, many of the modern groups of Uralic languages have SVO word order.
There are a few cases of languages with verb-initial word orders with postpositions. One such example is Yagua. Yagua is an interesting case because the verbs are very highly inflected, but the nouns are not.
I think I'll stick with postpositions then. That's not too rare for me to go to the trouble of changing it.
Are you aware of the World Atlas of Linugistic Structures (WALS)? Combining three chapters of WALS into this combined view I found 21 languages in the sample with the combination NA/SVO/Postpositions. Among the languages are Guarani and Ewe. On the other hand, NA/SVO/Prepositions has 229 languages in the sample, showing a strong typological tendency for consistence.
Thank you for reminding me of the combined view, but my language is SVO, not SOV.
Sorry, there was a typo, the number are for SVO languages.
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