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121 | How would having a logographic writing system work in a conlang?
Creating a logographic writing system for a language can quickly become overwhelming; having a different symbol/image for each word can quickly become overwhelming; it’s why Sequoyah switched to a syllabary instead of a logogram. The more words there are in a language the more symbols there have to be.
However, there are historically successful uses of logograms - for instance, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese (when it first started). I’m not aware of any modern natural language that actually uses a logographic system as its primary writing system, though.
How would a conlang use a logographic writing system after the language grew to any extant? Would it be possible to create a conlang that actually uses a sustainable logographic system?
Any reasons for the downvotes, folks? Input would be appreciated, I'm sure.
The problem with pure logographies is that languages tend to have a significant amount of morphemes, be these bound or free, that mark relatively abstract concepts, such as posession, the roles of NPs, etc., and some abstract words are rather hard to draw symbols for. As such, a purely logographic system cannot really deal with natural languages to their full extent, and therefore pick up "impurities", not just out of convenience, but out of necessity, since without them they are generally at best mnemonic aids and not a full (or almost full) representation of the spoken language. If you want a pure logographic system to be realistically viable for your conlang, going the oligomorphemic route, like Toki Pona, is probably the most reasonable, as the low number of morphemes reduces the strain of learning a large number of symbols, as well as the issue of coming up with new ones for new or rarely written-about concepts, since morphemes are a closed class, and the necessarily relatively general meaning of these morphemes means that it would likely be relatively straightforward to represent the majority of them with mostly intuitive iconography.
The Tangut script is an example of a more pure logographic writing system, with only 10% of the characters having a phonetic component. The Tangut script was created in 1036 by one person, apparently a priori but inspired by Chinese, and used until to 1502. So far, 5863 characters are known, excluding variants.
Tangut characters are extremely complicated, but they're probably unnecessarily so. Blissymbolics, which is an ideographic writing system with much simpler characters, has over 5,000 official symbols.
After creating a couple hundred root characters, I feel like you create a character for a new word in a couple of seconds by combining the meaning of existing characters. If Toki Pona can build a full vocabulary with 120 morphemes, you should be able to do the same with a logographic writing system.
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833 | How do you call a "stillborn language"?
And by "stillborn", I mean a dead language that never really lived to begin with: a modernized version of an archaic language frozen in time, or an all-out archaic language (with archaic grammar and vocabulary), but with modernized pronunciations (and all the vowel shifts and consonant shifts applied). Like Classical Latin, which was probably never spoken in daily life (in contrast with Vulgar Latin).
Or just simply a language that is based off an actual natural language, but highly stylized and artificial, having had diglossia with its parent-language since the start, never having been an actual spoken language at any point in history.
There is the term "Plansprachenprojekt" (used by Detlef Blanke in his book "internationale Plansprachen") for conlangs never leaving the design board.
@SirCornflakes Those Germans have a word for everything!
You're describing a couple different and not totally related things with different terminology used for each:
Classical Latin is an example of a literary language, a language used not really in speech but used to communicate through writing.
Modern Standard Arabic, one of those artificial languages based off of a natural one but not really being a spoken language. It's very frequently affected by diglossia, and not really used in natural settings. It's usually referred to as simply a standardized lanuage, and also qualifies as a literary language.
Hebrew as spoken in daily life in Israel would qualify as the first type you described, a modernized version of an old language that was resurrected after death. It would be referred to as a revived language.
Modern Hebrew isn't frozen though, and will naturally change over time as all spoken languages do.
@curiousdannii You're not wrong. I don't think there's any real term for a language that undergoes nearly no change, and Modern Hebrew is basically the only good example of a revived ancient language that is actually spoken by people. Liturgical Latin could be an example of a language frozen in time
Icelandic is also fairly controlled (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_Icelandic), with the intention of preserving it in a supposedly better state. (I'm not going to attempt any puns using "frozen" here).
Oh yeah, I completely forgot about that. (I guess their attitude towards linguistic change is rather chilly).
I gueess "literary language" is in fact the best word, for a dead language that was never even alive to begin with (or rather, was never really spoken by the masses, only used as a written langauge for literary or liturgical reasons).... or, we could just call it a conlang? :P I stylized conlang based off a natlang? :P
I mean, if you think about it, given how the real descendant of spoken Old Latin was in fact Vulgar Latin, and how Classical Latin was never really spoken by anyone as a native langauge (being a literary language) - with some stretch, you could actually claim, that Classical Latin was in fact a CONLANG!
@StephanusTavilrond Classical Latin may have been a conlang. It is unlikely that it evolved just by ordinary people talking. The problem is that we do not know exactly how it did evolve: did the literati deliberately create the rules and deliberately select features from a variety of dialects to make a new, regular, language (which I would count as a conlang) or did it evolve naturally amongst a group of literati from a range of linguistic backgrounds and a penchant for regularity (which I would call a natural language)? We do not know and there is no clear boundary.
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42 | Is the Voynich manuscript written in a natural or constructed language?
The Voynich manuscript is dated to the early 15th century.
It is a medieval handwritten book of almost 250 pages, and even today the text cannot be understood. It has become quite famous, and it is recognised as one of the main unsolved problems in the history of cryptography.
Can we tell whether it is written in a natural or constructed language?
There are other possibilities: It can be a cyphertext, or it can be no language at all (being an elaborate hoax).
There's no evidence to say that it is a constructed language.
The idea was investigated in detail by John Tiltman, a British army officer who specialized in cryptography. The possibility of the Voynich manuscript being a constructed language was brought to his attention by William Friedman, an expert on the manuscript. Friedman confided to Tiltman, after decades of work on it, that he thought the writing could be a form of "synthetic universal language", and so the cryptographer expanded his investigation in that direction, writing a paper on the theory.
The basic premise behind a "synthetic universal language" is to use characters to represent certain logical ideas; by chaining together letters, you can create "words" that describe more complicated principles. By adding the appropriate prefixes and suffixes, characters can be quite powerful. Tiltman noticed that some of the patterns in the words fit this type of design. However, the evidence for this sort of construction was not strong enough, and Tiltman's analysis of the frequency of the occurrence of certain letters did not support Friedman's hypothesis.
Tiltman also traced the historical origin of a "universal language", to determine if such an idea had been bounced around early enough. However, this proved difficult, and Tiltman found no concrete examples prior to the mid-17th century. This is two centuries after the Voynich manuscript was written - sometime in the 15th century - and so if the manuscript was indeed written in a universal language, it would predate these universal languages by two centuries.
Tiltman noted
It was clear that the productions of these two men [Wilkins and Dalgarno, two early proponents of universal languages] were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution. When I was
attempting to trace back the idea of universal language, I came upon a printed book entitled The Universal Character by Cave Beck, London 1657 (also printed in French in the same year). Cave Beck was one of the original members of the British Royal Society and his system was certainly a cumbersome mixture.
Beck's writing claims that the idea of a universal language goes back to the 16th century, but this still places it many years after the manuscript's origin. The idea of synthetic universal languages, though perhaps relatively widespread in the 17th century, simply was unknown in the 15th. This was a strike against Friedman's theory. If the Voynich manuscript was a synthetic universal language, it would have borne no relation - in time of conception of structure - to later examples.
The universal language route is of course not the only possibility; constructed languages can take many forms. However, it was possible the most promising option, and research into it went nowhere. Friedman's claim remains unsupported, and, to my knowledge, no further academic analyses have been done. We certainly can't rule out the theory that the Voynich manuscript is written in a constructed language, but we have no reason to believe that it is.
We don’t know. It is written in an unknown script, by an unknown author. We don’t even know whether it is even in any language at all, or just random scribbles. Any attempts to connect it to a known language (such as Latin) have failed thus far.
You're absolutely right, but this answer would benefit from some citations or links to further reading, just so that it can be easily verified.
Hope springs eternal. This article points to one recent lead in computational linguistics. original article here
I've read that some work has been done on the script, indicating that there are patterns, even if we don't know what they are referring to.
I have a copy of V.M. (a book èvery glossopoet should have!). I'm frankly of the opinion that, considering the size of the book and the cost of the materials in it and the cost in time to produce the work, it can't just be 240some pages of random nonsense. It's too expensive and would be an incredible, inconceivable waste of resources if it were just a meaningless & private toy of some overly rich maker.
Each page of vellum requires a relatively labour intensive process to make. Inks have to be made. Each page has to be hand written and hand drawn. Some pages are really large fold-outs. Almost every page is decorated in some way. That's a lot of work for it be nothing at all but a pretty conversation piece!
This doesn't really address the question of whether the manuscript is written in a constructed language or a natural language.
The linked article indicates that it's Hebrew. Clarified links.
In fact, the link indicates that the manuscript is written in an anagram cypher that they claim to have decrypted into Hebrew. But they only give some short text bites, no longer passages yet.
BTW, I have some experience with the kind of statistical methods they use, and those methods tend to produce seemingly good text from utter gibberish, e.g., doing OCR correction of French texts into English.
Real fun is their decryption of the first sentence (after some spelling correction and Google translate into English): She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.
Interesting source, but the article itself notes that "according to a native speaker of the language, this is not quite a coherent sentence." It really says something more like and the priest made for her man to him to his house and upon me his men the commandments (which is unsalvageable gibberish). The methodology is also flawed since it relies on a "hypothetical non-standard orthography of Hebrew" which has never existed.
Heh. Yep, but one more halting step along the road towards figuring out what this thing actually is!
@elemtilas, have you ever seen some of the ridiculous things rich people will do just because they can? Spending an inordinate amount of resources on something that is in any practical sense useless or pointless, is a standard method of bragging about how rich you are. You're making an argument from incredulity to dismiss the possibility.
@KeithMorrison I am not dismissing the possibility, but it is an extremely remote position to hang one's hat on given the realities of creating such a thing in that time. In the 21st century, even a not so wealthy person can do as well. And we have at least two modern examples to look up to! (Book from the Sky & Codex Seraphinianus)
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2219 | What are examples for the use of reduplication in conlangs?
I have the feeling that the potential of reduplication is underexplored by conlangers. There are lots of fancy possibilities for reduplication; the above cited Wikipedia article describes them in detail, but see also Is C₁VC₂-C₁- reduplication attested? on the Linguistics Stack Exchange site.
So I want to hear of examples of reduplication in conlangs, ranging from descendants of Latin retaining some reduplication or even making it productive again, to a posteriori language using reduplication for some interesting effect.
Here's an example, Kerno, a fictive Romance language located in Cornwall, inherits some reduplication in the perfect tense. It often adds an optional -s- to the replicated part of the verbs. Examples taken from the Annex of the grammar are:
doc (or doy), dar, dedai, doú
istam, ystar, stet(ai), ystú
currem, currer, coscorrai (or cocorrai), cursú
ferrim, ferer, tetulli, latú
spondu, isponder, spepondai, isponsú
mordu, morder, mosmordai (or memordai), morsú
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1581 | How to know if a language is constructed or natural?
Imagine you get access to a rather long book for which the following is true:
It is written in an unknown language with an unknown script.
We can't rely for whatever reason on the fact that the language of the book is not in Ethnologue.
The book came with no translation, and no known dictionary of the language exists.
Given all the above is there a way to say if the language of the book natural or constructed? How should one approach determining this based only on the content of the book?
Do we know that the book is written in a language at all, and not in a secret code or being an elaborated hoax? The Voynich manuscript is such kind of a riddle.
You may find this question and its answers inspiring: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/q/42/142
@jk-ReinstateMonica yes, the difference between this question and Voynich manuscript is that we know that it is a language, not a cypher/hoax.
Unknown language and unknown script is a very hard combination to draw any conclusions. Even with a substantial amount of text we are usually lost in making sense of that.
Things become a little bit better when we have some clues on the script like
words are separated somehow
we know the principle of the script (alphabetic, syllabary, ideographic)
In this case we can try some statistical methods on things like word frequency and word length (does the language follow Zipf's law?), trying to identify morphemes, especially inflectional ones, trying to infer syntactical features, and compare that to natural languages.
But, unless the language is very schematic and unnatural in its construction, we will probably be unable to give a decisive answer to the question natural or constructed.
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1609 | What is a good way for a speaker of English to get started learning Toki Pona?
I am interested in learning Toki Pona. As a speaker of Toki Pona and English, what would be a good learning path for someone that speaks primarily English and has a moderate amount of knowledge about linguistics? Are there specific methods that are particularly useful for learning Toki Pona as an English speaker?
Cross-site relevant: What resources are there for learning Toki Pona? A Google search also comes up with a number of possibilities.
I used /dev/urandom's course, which is structured as a series of 13 lessons. Each lesson introduces 10 new words, some aspect of the grammar, and concludes with a series of English-to-tp and tp-to-English exercises using the words that have been introduced so far.
As it happens, 10 new words is also Anki's suggestion for how many new things to introduce per day. Each day I put the lesson's 10 words into flash cards (using the "basic with reversed card" type so it'll quiz me on both tp-to-English and English-to-tp translation) and then used Anki to learn and review them.
I'm told the 12 days of sona pi toki pona course uses the same structure, though it's not the one I used myself. The o kama sona e toki pona course was similar, but has been deprecated by the creator; an old version can be downloaded from that link, but be warned, it's remarkably difficult to use on modern browsers (and also the author no longer recommends using it).
(Posting a separate answer so it can be voted up or down separately.)
If you prefer a book rather than a lesson series, there are the classic lipu pu ("Toki Pona: the Language of Good") and lipu ku ("The Toki Pona Dictionary") by Sonja Lang. These are the original authoritative references on the language.
There's also an unofficial book by B. J. Knight, which has the advantage of being free.
Chatting with other toki pona users! It helps you learn much faster than many courses. Just learn the basics (this cheatsheet is a good resource), then find a community of toki pona speakers! Personally, I recommend kama sona ("to study"), as it's very welcoming to new learners.
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2162 | How would you write this modified version of the ring inscription in the Black Speech?
One ring to rule you, one ring to find you
One ring to bring you, and in the darkness bind you
I love you
Gopinadh
The only things Tolkien ever wrote in Black Speech were the ring inscription, a single further sentence, and some five further words. Except for "them" in the ring inscription, no pronouns are known, and neither is the verb "love". So, this is impossible to translate.
Is your sweetheart a masochist?
I guess if Black Speech had the verb “to love”, it would have only the meaning “to eat eagerly” or “to consider edible”.
Black Speech is mostly reconstructed, and there are different versions of it. This is my attempt at translating it, using the Shadowlandian dialect -- the beginning is mainly the standard Ring motto, but with the object pronoun changed to 3rd person singular (instead of plural).
One ring to rule you,
Ash nazg durbatlat,
one ring to find you,
ash nazg gimbatlat,
One ring to bring you,
ash nazg thrakatlat,
and in the darkness bind you;
agh burzumishi krimpatlat.
I love you Gopinadh
Brogbizg lat, Gopinadh
I hope this is useful!
"Reconstructed" doesn't really seem accurate seeing as a huge number of the morphemes here are entirely absent in Tolkien's writings. Instead Neo-Black-Speech is a conlang distinct from but consistent with Tolkien's Black Speech sketch
also should that read: "Brogbizglat" instead of "Brogbizg lat"?
@Tristan Yes, "reconstructed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here... there are various versions that are kind of extrapolated from the few attested Black Speech sentences. The separation of lat is arbitrary; it could also be all separate: izg brogb lat; So yes, brogbizglat would also be possible.
the other instances of an 2sg object pronoun have it written joined to the verb though, so having it separated seems somewhat inconsistent (although ofc that is the only finite verb, whereas the others are infinitive, and ofc languages can distinguish in how they treat object pronoun clitics between finite and non-finite verbs, just as Spanish does e.g. finite "te amo" vs infinitive "amarte")
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2081 | Is there a good reason not to reverse the letters and in Shavian?
In the Shavian alphabet, the letter makes an f sound and makes a "v" sound. It seems reasonable that these two letters should be reversed, since looks like an f. To stay consistent with the pattern of voiced/unvoiced letters in Shavian, the would then have to be raised and would have to be lowered, but this would just make look even more like an f.
Indeed, there is a good argument (in my view) for reversing these letters, which I outline below. Since Shavian is very carefully constructed, this doesn't seem like something the designers would have overlooked. Therefore, I think it is fair to ask, Is there a good reason that these letters were not originally reversed when the Shavian alphabet was designed?
Arguments for reversing the sounds of and (and raising while lowering ):
Visual similarity of (raised) with f. (Such similarity seems to have been a low-priority goal of Shavian, e.g., = c, = g, = s, = z, = i, = o.)
The proposed change would keep the pattern for voiced/unvoiced pairs intact.
The proposed change would make the / pair more consistent with the / pair, since then and would be true mirror images of each other, both being aligned in the same way (and a similar claim holds for and ).
observation that probably means nothing: the most common word in the English language with an "f" in it is "of", which is pronounced with a /v/
evidence for the implied hypothesis above: "of" was often abbreviated to (Shavian) "v" in written texts
Your own link to the copy of the Wikipedia article on the Shavian alphabet explains:
Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet. It should be:
at least 40 letters;
as phonetic as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to phonemes);
distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply misspellings.
and
The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall, deep and short. Short letters are vowels, liquids (r, l) and nasals; tall letters (except Yea and Hung ) are voiceless consonants. A tall letter rotated 180° or flipped, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing the corresponding voiced consonant (except Haha ). The alphabet is therefore to some extent featural.
/f/ is a voiceless consonant, and therefore a tall letter; the corresponding voiced consonant is /v/ and is therefore a deep letter that is the /f/ rotated 180°. To make the Shavian /f/ look more like the Latin 'f' would weaken criterion #3 above, and in fact it is likely that your comment about visual similarity being a low-priority goal may be wrong, to the extent that (and this is just a guess on my part) visual similarity may have been a low-priority anti-goal.
But note that my proposed change is not just to reverse and , but also to raise and lower , which would make them consistent with the pattern you discuss in the last paragraph.
Per criterion 3, as the goal was to "avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply misspellings," it seems that this is accomplished with or without my proposed change, since glancing at Shavian text, one would never think it is just misspelled words using the Latin alphabet.
The creators were, after all, comfortable with the similarities = s, = z, = i, = o. But it is possible they were going for a compromise between having some similarities with Latin letters while also being clearly distinct from it. Still, I don't think this really explains why they wouldn't have adopted the proposed change.
@WillG - The only way you're going to get a definitive answer is to ask George Bernard Shaw, and unless you've got a way to send the question back to before his death in 1950...
@JeffZeitlin Wasn't it designed posthumously, and only carries his name because it was his money?
@JeffZeitlin Of course, the point's moot because the actual designer - Ronald Kingsley Read - is also unavailable for comment, having died in1975
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2039 | What sounds work best for an underwater language spoken by crab people?
Currently I am working on a species of crab people who live semi-aquatic life styles, and I would like their languages to do two things:
Be easy to understand underwater
Be based somewhat on their biology
For the biology point, I have only so far excluded fricatives, as they have no nasal cavities. Their mouths are mostly human, with tongues and lips. I am currently trying to find what sounds would travel best underwater, and if there are any other noises I should exclude entirely or make them struggle to pronounce due to unfamiliarity.
I am new to conlanging as a whole so I don't really have anything good that I have been using as research beyond the IPA page from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet).
Well, the most important question of all is: What exactly do their mouths look like? You already noted they do not have nasal cavities (and I suspect you meant that nasals, not fricatives, are impossible for them to pronounce), but do they have a tongue, or rows of teeth, or lips, for example?
Get inspiration from underwater life forms on earth: Whales "sing", dolphins "whistle", and other animals use smacking or clicking sounds for communication.
I am thinking Dolphins and sonar, loud sharp noises that travel far even underwater. Maybe clicking noises with their tongues, maybe popping noises made by pursing lips and blowing air.
If it is what I am suspecting and the reason they are called 'crab' people is because they have distinctive claws of some kind then definitely include snaping their claws at least for emphasis. If they have human hands as well as claws you can have an amusing side note where a foreigner snaps with their fingers in an attempt to communicate and the crab people(s) are shocked because they only use their claws to make the louder noises so they didn't know finger snapping was possible.
Also if like crabs they have more then 2 pairs of limbs and some of them have fingers, you could always go for sign language. The crab people could also have antennae which could lend a hand signaling wise. You could also have the crab people make like bees/ants and dance to communicate, especially if they have pointy pod things for feet then crabs tap dancing to tell a story would be pretty interesting.
Depending on how alien and or crab like you want the crab people to be having the ability from other underwater creatures like color changing and light flashing could be an option (the language could even be mostly silent between crabmen).
You also haven't mentioned if magic is a factor, you could always explain talking underwater clearly/unimpeded away with special spells or abilities like having the crabs all share a hive mind or a psychic connection to a crab mind internet.
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2040 | Subordinate Clauses In OSV
So, I'm working on my very first conlang, which happens to be OSV (object-subject-verb word order). But I seem to have run into something of a roadblock. How could I handle clauses such as, for example, 'the bird sings when the sun rises'? I'm considering adding some kind of marker or even creating some sort of word hierarchy, but I don't want to wind up with anything excessively complicated. Again, we're dealing with OSV here. Any advice for a struggling amateur here?
Note: "the bird [S] sings [V] when the sun [S] rises [V]" is already in OSV order!
In general, clauses like "when the sun rises" are called adverbial clauses, and their position is not fixed by the OSV type - you could put them at any position in the sentence. As for marking, note that there is also already a marker "when" present!
Adjuncts (which is "when the sun rises" here) can usually be placed anywhere in a sentence. Using another example with an object, the following are possible:
When the sun rises, a song the bird sings
A song when the sun rises the bird sings
A song the bird when the sun rises sings
A song the bird sings when the sun rises
They all sound a bit weird because English is not OSV, but are probably valid in a poetic context... Toki pona always puts temporal adjuncts at the front of a sentence. If you allow free variation, it's probably a good idea to impose a relative order (place before temporal before manner or similar), which is common in natural languages. But otherwise you have free reign -- it's your language!
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2042 | How to develop partial reduplication diachronically?
I want a daughter language of some proto-conlang to develop partial root reduplication for consonant initial roots as a productive and mostly regular morphological feature (the precise value it marks is unimportant here). The re-duplicated part would be the first consonant of the root, with an additional vowel which could be in vocalic harmony with the first vowel of the root. To give some examples:
kɔt -> kakɔt
lim -> lelim
mostly like the ancient Greek perfect tense. I suppose the historical development of such a feature involves a great deal of analogical leveling, however I wonder how far one can get simply by regular sound changes.
A possibility would be to have some initial clitic (marking the grammatical feature I am interested in) disappearing and triggering gemination of the initial consonant of the following word by vowel deletion and regressive assimilation, then separation of the geminate by vowel epenthesis, e.g. with a clitic ne:
ne kɔt > *nkɔt > *kkɔt > kakɔt
However, he last step seems quite un-naturalistic by virtue of a geminate integrity principle. Do you have any idea on how to design a reasonably naturalistic evolution leading to productive partial reduplication?
I'm not sure how plausible a geminate integrity principle can be (at least not in absolute) given the many well-documented processes in PIE to break apart geminates (most clearly the insertion of an *s between two dental stops, after any assimilation in voicing. Clearly then PIE cannot have considered geminates to be integral
The last step (inserting an epenthetic vowel) is exactly what Mycenaean Greek did in writing, in the Linear B script. The script, being syllabic by nature, did not have a convenient way of transcribing consonant clusters, and the geminates were written by repeating the CV syllable. Thus your kkɔt would be written T¹ (ko-ko-T²) in Linear B. Now you can posit a long and rich literary tradition, based on a prestigious dialect that developed the geminates while other dialects did not and the prestige shifted to other dialects later on; and/or the pronunciation diverged from the orthography and a "dictionary reading" became the norm, pronouncing the fictitious vowel (kind of what happened with Literary Czech (re)introducing the /i:/ vowel instead of /ei̯/ by virtue of using the letter "ý" in the orthography)
¹) The way of writing the word final -t is unimportant for this question - Mycenaean and Cypriot scripts diverged on this.
²) Incidentally, this happens to be one of the most vulgar words in Slovak. Just a coincidence, I guess :-)
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162 | Where do the words in Láadan come from?
Láadan is a language created as an experiment in seeing if a constructed language designed specifically for women could better express the views of women better than natural Western languages.
As explained in @RaceYouAnytime's answer, in Láadan there are several different words for different types of love, for example.
The language has many affection words, for example, of love.[...]
a love for inanimates
áayáa mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome
áazh love for someone sexually desired in the past, but not anymore
ab love for one liked but not respected
[...]
oham love for that which is holy
sham love for the child of one’s body
Excerpt from the above mentioned answer. Parts have been left out ([...])
for brevity
How were these words created? Were they created arbitrarily or did they have an inspiration/something they were based on?
Everything in this answer is taken from the website of the Láadan language (link to the page). I am by no means an expert, but this is directly from the mouth of Laáadan's creator. The following quote contains pertinent excerpts of the article, parts of which I have put in bold:
Another goal I had for Láadan was that it should be as easy as possible to figure out what a particular word or morpheme means just by looking at it...I wanted the language to work like a Tinkertoy® set works, so that people could take the pieces and fit them together easily to make larger forms. For example: the Láadan word for “bee” is “zhomid”; that word is made from “zho” — the Láadan word for “sound,” and “mid” — the Láadan word for “creature.” The meaning is transparent from the word’s parts.
First, however, I had to construct the most basic elements of the language — the words/ morphemes that are called “roots” and can’t be taken apart into smaller meaningful pieces. When linguists begin working with a language for which no grammar or dictionary is available, they ordinarily start with a set of roughly 100 very basic words made up of items like “eat” and “sleep” and “food.” I followed that practice, and began by constructing a core vocabulary of those basic words; when I had those done I began adding additional roots that I felt were needed. Sometimes I can explain to some extent how I chose a particular shape for one of those words; much of the time I can’t.
For example… I can explain that I chose “oódóo” for “bridge” because when pronounced its tune makes the shape of a humpback bridge. I can explain that I chose “rul” for “cat” because the purring of a cat sounds to me like “rulrulrulrul…” But the choice of “ana” for “food” and “ina” for “sleep” was arbitrary; I have no explanation for those choices other than that I tried to give them a shape that could easily be combined with other morphemes. For any constructed language that isn’t based on some existing language, the hardest part will always be putting together the inventory of roots.
An update to the Láadan dictionary shows that not all of the words were created by Suzette Haden Elgin (the creator of Láadan) but all that are not roots in and of themselves--roots which seem to have been created rather arbitrarily--can be figured out from these roots. For example, in the dictionary I linked, the word for beaver is "eduthemid." This contains the rood for animal, "mid," and some other root, I presume "eduth." I do't know what this means, but it was constructed in this way so that someone who knew these roots but did not know the word could discern that it means beaver.
The original creator of Láadan made a couple of arbitrary roots that could then become a lexicon through a logical process of morphology, with help from multiple other people.
I don't know how to add comments to other answers, but this is just to say that 'eduth' means 'engineering' (because beavers engineer their dams and lodges, presumably) and is itself constructed from the prefix 'e' meaning '-ology' or 'science/study of', and 'duth' meaning 'use'.
Although Láadan is an a priori language and therefore does not derive on the whole from existing natlangs or other conlangs, it has a few loanwords from both:
buda/óobuda/óobudahá (a buddha / the Buddha, Buddhism, Buddhist) -- Sanskrit
Muhamad -- Arabic, 'Muhammad'
Thóra/óothóra/óothórahá (Torah, Judaism, Jew/Jewish person) -- Hebrew
wísha/wíshahá (wicca, wiccan)
Zheshu/óozheshu/óozheshuhá (Jesus, Christianity, Christian/Jesusist) -- Aramaic/Latin, 'Jesu'
sháam (psalm)
Arahanesha/Aranesha -- Arkansas
emeth (to clown) -- based on famous clown Emmet Kelly's name
mathom (knick-knack, useless object) -- a Tolkien conlang
shé (with regard to) -- French, 'chez'
théle (television) -- ancient Greek 'tele'
thera (Terra)
anahelilith (feminist angel) -- Greek/Akkadian, the character Lilith from the Apocrypha
modem -- English, 'modem'
shenéedera (metaphorical sister, one who shares not only hearth and home but lover and child-loving) -- Mercedes Lackey fantasy works
Sources are laadanlanguage.org and laadanlanguage.com and some words were contributed by others than SHE.
I'll lastly note that Suzette attributes partial inspiration for the phonology and phonotactics (particularly the 'lh' phoneme) to Diné, and the comparison mechanism to Kumeyaay.
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521 | How would the grammar of a conlang develop as a creole from other languages?
Assume that the backstory of a conlang is that it developed from a set of other languages. In other words, speakers of these (different) languages were living in the same area and were communicating with each other and from this a new language emerged, a creole.
In such a situation which aspects of the original languages would be inherited by the new languages? Obviously the vocabulary would be somewhat mixed but what happens with the grammar? Would the easiest concepts prevail? Would it be necessary that one of the original languages would be dominant in some sense or could they have an equal influence?
I edited this to explicitly mention creoles, is that what you meant? If a language has done more than just borrowing vocab but borrowing grammar, then I'd call that a creole. Only thing is that that doesn't apply to Urdu to my knowledge.
@curiousdannii Thank you for your edit and your comment - I removed the reference to Urdu since what I am really interested in is a creole.
I would think that it relates to the power structures behind the language communities, and to their relative size.
This can be kind of observed with English after the Norman invasion. The basic English grammar still remained Anglo-Saxon (as the majority of the population spoke it), and the main influence of Norman French (the powerful but small elite) was in the vocabulary. There are a few instances (eg putting some specific adjectives after the noun, as in president elect or times past) where French structures were adopted.
I would think that vocabulary is more a conscious choice, and Norman power made people adopt French words, but the grammatical structures being more sub-conscious meant that they were harder to change.
Another issue is how closely related the origin languages are. Obviously, while Norman French and Old English are different families, they both share the Indo-European ancestry, so are not that radically different. Compare that to, eg the Philippines, where there is a great language variety, and Asian/Polynesian languages clashed with Spanish/English in the colonial period. Here is one creole, Chavacano, which apparently has mostly Spanish vocabulary (so that it is classed as a Romance language), but their grammatical structures are generally similar to other Philippine languages (Wikipedia).
So it seems that power drives the vocabulary, but quantity of speakers determines the grammar.
Note: Of course Middle English is not a creole, but I was talking about the general process of language change in the face of interaction between language communities here. Also, the Anglo-Saxons still retained most of their vocabulary, but the Norman influence was manly on words, not grammar.
Yes, the vocabulary of a creole would be mixed, though it's likely that one of the parent languages provides most of the words. I concur with the previous answer to also look at English, since it does a few interesting things going on.
Another interesting language in that regard is the historical lingua franca, Sabir (a pidgin, and as such the precursor to a creole).
Creoles tend to have fairly simple grammar, losing some of the complexity of their parent languages. I'm not sure if necessarily the easiest concepts prevail, but in general, the more rare and complex it is, the more likely it will be lost.
I suggest learning about different natlang creoles to get a basic understanding of the processes, similarities and differences based on the languages involved; you can find a list on Wikipedia that should get you started.
On the more technical side, here is a PDF by McWhorter, and this article on Pidgins and Creoles by Baptista should also provide some more insight.
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144 | What is the oldest known constructed language?
Historically speaking, what is the oldest known constructed language that we are able to determine with historical evidence?
That really depends on how you define conlang (see this answer)
The oldest language whose creator set out to actually invent a language (as opposed to Pāṇini, who wanted to create a classical standard out of an already extant language) was probably Lingua Ignota. The formerly brilliant Langmaker website had an article on it (now accessible through the Wayback Machine). It was made in the twelfth century, predating another early conlang, Balaibalan, which was made somewhen between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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546 | Could a language with no voiced fricatives exist?
I am working on a language and I am trying to bring it down to seventeen consonants. One of the ways I am trying to do that is by removing all voiced fricatives. Is this even reasonable?
A friend and I were working up a language for rubber-suit aliens that were genetically engineered to not have audible voices. The language we worked up had no voiced consonants whatsoever.
'course you can! Toki pona doesn't have any.
I'm looking for real ones
Old English at some point had no voiced fricatives. They were allophones intervocalically, and by borrowing from French we got /v/. The further imbalance and loaning gave us all /v z ʒ ð/.
According to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), a large database of various world languages' structural properties gathered from descriptive materials like grammars, around a third of the surveyed languages have a voicing contrast in plosives but not fricatives, and another third have no voicing contrast in either plosives or fricatives. Based on this, it seems that by raw numbers you're more likely to have only voiceless fricatives than you are to have both voiced and voiceless fricatives.
There are even languages with no fricatives at all. The UPSID sample contains 31 of them, making 6.8% of the sample.
FUll output of my UPSID query:
The 'fricative' sounds do not occur in these languages:
Language (sounds)
ALAWA (26)
ANDAMANESE (24)
ANGAATIHA (21)
ARRERNTE (30)
AUCA (21)
BANDJALANG (16)
BARDI (24)
BORORO (20)
BURARRA (21)
DERA (17)
DINKA (32)
DIYARI (25)
DYIRBAL (16)
EKARI (15)
GARAWA (22)
GUGU-YALANDYI (16)
KALKATUNGU (23)
MALAKMALAK (19)
MBABARAM (24)
MURINHPATHA (25)
NASIOI (13)
NGARINJIN (24)
NGIYAMBAA (18)
NUNGGUBUYU (23)
PANARE (25)
WARAY (21)
WESTERN DESERT (20)
WIK-MUNKAN (18)
YANYUWA (32)
YIDINY (16)
YOLNGU (23)
These 31 languages are 6.87% of all languages in UPSID.
Querying for languages without voiced fricatives gives "These 222 languages are 49.22% of all languages in UPSID". So the absence of voiced fricatives is a quite common feature of natural languages.
How many of those 31 are Australian?
@AntonSherwood: Clicked through the sample, to my surprise there 8 non-Australian languages, and the Australian ones are distributed over several families (not all Pama-Nyugan)
Sure. A lot of languages don't distinguish voicing in fricatives. This doesn't necessarily mean that fricatives in such languages will be unvoiced, but most of them will probably do that.
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633 | Syntactic word that carries no meaning - is there a name for that?
Is there a name for words that exist purely for syntactic reasons and carry no lexical meaning?
Reason:
Some forms of sentence in my language don't have verbs, but information such as tense and mood are indicated by affixes on the verb. So, in cases where you need to modify the verb, a meaningless verb fills in; the verb carries no meaning on its own, existing just to hold affixes.
Example:
Here is a sentence without a verb. No verb is used for just applying an adjective to a noun. Adjectives are applies directly to the noun.
Mopifa-di-mopi
Life-(adj-on)-wood
The wood is alive.
But (for example), past tense is marked by a suffix on the verb so it needs a verb to attach onto; ta "stands in" for the absent verb, giving -to (past tense) something to attach to.
Ta-to mopifa-di-mopi
(null)-(past) life-(adj-on)-wood
The wood was alive.
"Ta" is the word I'm talking about.
The correct answer to this depends on how the words function syntactically, as well as what exactly you mean by "no meaning". Could you perhaps give us an example sentence (ideally with a gloss) of one of these syntactic words? That might make it easier to give you good answers.
di in your example would be a preposition (as on is in English), not an adjective.
@OliverMason Not necessarily; could be an adjectivalizer or attributive marker or something. It seems to be attached to "life" to me, anyway, so it seems more like a postposition if anything.
@Sparksbet It is an adjectivalizer.
I am not aware of a generic term covering all instances of function words without meaning, but only some specific cases. The pronoun it in phrases like It's raining or It seems that ... is called a dummy pronoun, pleonastic pronoun, or expletive pronoun.
Extending from this example one may call the particle ta in the question a dummy verb.
The technical term for it in those constructions is "pleonastic it" (Lappin & Leass 1994)
Added pleonatic pronoun. I am not sure whether some of the term is really the term, I have heard dummy pronoun definitely very often.
I hear "dummy pronoun" more often than "pleonastic it" -- although both "pleonastic pronoun" and "expletive pronoun" are indeed alternate terms for the same general concept.
One general term would be function words; these are words that do not carry any lexical meaning, but are used to link content words together and clarify their relationships (eg in the case of prepositions or conjunctions).
It is indeed difficult to see exactly what you have in mind without any examples; other possibilities would be particle, which is eg used in Japanese to mark certain grammatical features (such as 'direct object').
Some people use the term empty verb for the auxiliary in phrases like to have/take a shower, where you could just use to shower directly; here you can add the tense feature to the auxiliary as in She had/took a shower.
As an aside: there are no words that "carry no meaning". If a word has no meaning, it is redundant, and would not be there at all. In linguistics you distinguish between lexical meaning and functional/grammatical meaning: the former you would find in a dictionary definition, whereas the latter is not always easy to put into words, as it describes relationships between elements in and structure of a sentence.
Update after example: Hard to say. A particle usually doesn't change its form (at least in English and most other natural languages I know), so the fact that the marker -to is attached to it would rule that possibility out in my view. That would leave empty verb as the most likely option, but then it is not really necessary when the marker is not used. I guess it would still be my preference, though.
Particles are definitionally never inflected, so yeah, OP's example would not be a particle. "Empty verb" seems like good terminology, but I'm wondering if this might just end up serving as a copular verb in the end?
« there are no words that "carry no meaning" »
—
I'm not so sure about that - "ne" in French seems like a good candidate of a word that carries no meaning.
@celticminstrel If it carried no meaning, why is it there? Meaning is not just semantic meaning, though, but could also be pragmatic. A word must have a purpose, otherwise we wouldn't use it. In linguistics 'meaning' has a slightly broader definition as just 'lexical meaning'.
@OliverMason - My assumption is that it used to have meaning, but at some point that meaning was lost and it became a functionless relic. This is probably why some dialects actually drop the "ne" altogether - while in Paris you'd say "Je ne sais pas", in Quebec you'd instead just say "Je sais pas" (if I understand correctly).
A common term for such a word would be auxiliary. An example from the Australian language Walmajarri is ma-rna-n-ta-lu, where ma is the auxiliary to which the suffixes are attached. However as your word is used for carrying the TAM (Tense/Aspect/Mood) suffixes another term is copula. Copulas are often verbs (such as the English be) but not in all languages.
For a natlang I would strongly warn you that just because you haven't yet identified a meaning for the auxiliary, you shouldn't assume that it does not has one. As you're making a conlang you can declare that it truly has no meaning whatsoever, but do realise that makes it rather unnatural. In natlangs it's extremely uncommon to say something without it meaning something. For example, in Walmajarri the ma auxiliary is one of two auxiliaries, which communicate different modality or information structure meanings. Unless the auxiliary is very short (in which case it could be analysed as epenthetic or just an allomorph of the tense morpheme) then if naturalism is at all a design goal it should carry some semantic or pragmatic meaning. This gives you an opportunity to think of something interesting and perhaps even unique for your conlang.
Unless I'm massively misunderstanding what OP's question is, neither auxiliary or copula seem like accurate terminology for what they describe. At least, there isn't enough information to say for sure that what they've got is an auxiliary or copula (and since they describe it as occurring in sentences without verbs, I feel auxiliary is unlikely). Could be a pro-verb or something else entirely.
@Sparksbet What they're describing isn't naturalistic, so of course no terminology will match perfectly. But a pro-verb seems way wrong to me as it clearly has contextual/pragmatic meaning. And although many people use auxiliary as a subtype of verb, the sense I'm using it as is just as a non-verb syntactic marker, as its used in describing many Australian languages such as the example I give.
I don't see how you can jump to the conclusion that what they describe is not naturalistic with how little detail they've provided. It could well be a very naturalistic copular construction, for instance. Obviously pro-verbs do carry meaning in context, but given that I don't expect everyone who posts here to have much linguistic background, I'm not going to assume they mean exactly what I'd mean by saying "it has no meaning". They could just mean that it doesn't provide any lexical content (which is often what laymen mean when they say "no meaning").
This word is acting as a copula. It is entirely reasonable for the copula to be omitted in some contexts and not others. For example, Hungarian requires zero copula for third-person constructions in the present tense (the second item here is ungrammatical):
Róbert öreg ∅.
Robert old COP
"Robert is old"
* Róbert öreg van.
Robert old COP
"Robert is old."
But uses the normal copula "lenni" (highly irregular) in the past tense:
Róbert öreg volt.
Robert old COP.PST
"Robert was old."
I have heard the term "Proverb" used to describe the word "do" as it is sometimes used in English, and that seems to be something you're trying to achieve here.
Example:
Q. "Did he go to the store?"
A. "He did."
In this case, "did" is used to refer to "go" in the previous sentence, analogously to how a pronoun is used to refer to a noun. I hope this is what you're looking for? It's a bit more specific than function word
Reading this question I had the exact same thought: "The English 'do' is sort of empty when used as an auxiliary verb, and relates to verbs sort of like pronouns relate to nouns". It feels striking that I've never learnt this before!
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1042 | What setting for the dropoff rate in a language generator will produce a natural English phoneme distribution?
In creating an ancestral lang for a hard-fantasy world that is based on the language of your home, you first have to understand that language. And for an impatient worldbuilder like me, the Vulgar Language Generator seems the best place to go. Click the "English" choice, and you automatically get the following consonant clusters:
Word initial: b bɹ d dj ʤ f fj fɹ h j k kj kw kɹ l m n nj p pl pɹ s sm sp st t tɹ ʧ v w ð g gɹ ɹ ʃ ʍ θ θɹ
Mid-word: b bl d f ft fɹ h k l ldɹ lm ls lw lɹ m mb ms mθ n nd ndɹ nl ns nt ntɹ nɹ p pl s st sʧ t ts tw ʧ v w z zn ð ŋgl g ɹ θ
Word final: b d dz ʤ f ft k ks kst kt l ld lf lp lt lvz m md mz n nd ndz nst nt nʧ nz p ps pt s skt st t ts ʧ v vd z ð ŋ ŋk ŋz g ɹ ʃ θ
Vowels: aɪ aʊ eɪ i iə iː oː u uː æ ɑː ɒ ɔ ɔɪ ɔː ə əʊ ɛ ɛː ɜː ɪ ɪə ʊə ʌ ʊ
And there are some things in English that came naturally before knowing about it, like affixes, sound-verb-object and adjective before noun.
However, there are some things about English that I know nothing about, like its dropoff rate. Vulgar defined dropoff rate as follows:
Phonemes are ranked by frequency from left (most frequent) to right (least frequent). Medium makes the frequencies slightly more even than fast. When using equiprobable, phonemes can be custom weighted by writing =multiplier, eg: p=10 makes p ten times more common than a phoneme without a weighting.
Vulgar gives us choices for our phonemes: "fast", "medium" or "equiprobable" for dropoff rate and "naturalistic ranking", "natural with randomness", "alphabetical" or "previous" for how to arrange the phonemes. Which of these choices matches English in real life?
Can you please explain what the problem was with my edit? The question title should ask an actual question. This does not.
Well, for one thing, titles are capitalized.
My edit started with "What"... is that not capitalised?
The WHOLE title is not capitalized. Titles NEED to be capitalized.
Oh, you mean title casing. Well that's not true, look at any other question here. It would also not be a valid reason to reject an edit (and if it really mattered to you you could always change it to title casing. Why haven't you done that now after Sparksbet's edit?)
If you're wed to the idea of using Vulgar to make English nonsense words, the best idea would likely be to manually set the dropoff rate using "equiprobable" and custom weights, as it's unlikely that any of the default options precisely match English text. If you can find out what the rate of occurrence of different English phonemes is, putting them in manually in this way would almost definitely be more accurate than relying on the defaults.
I don't have any resources that list explicit measures for the rates of occurrences of various English phonemes on hand, but they likely exist; I'll certainly edit some into this answer if I find any.
Note that by synthesising vocabulary using a tool like Vulgar Lang, you will not even approximate English even when using the same distributional laws for phonemes. You will get a lot of words that could be English, but are just unused, you get known words but with other meanings, and you don't get morphology or syntax at all.
Of course, "naturalistic ranking" is the best approximation, all other rankings lead to feelable statistical distortions given your conlang an engeneered touch.
As an alternative I suggest looking at the questions and answers under diachronics: Start with real life English and apply systematic changes to the sounds and the grammar. For an example using projection of current trends into the future, you can look at Futurese.
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631 | Is there a middle-written language?
Real languages
I am aware of several types of writing systems.
The first one would be left to right and a prime example is English and also most of other languages, no matter if they use letters or other symbols.
Another type would be right to left, which can be seen in Hebrew writing:
As you can see, the text in the image selected by me for illustration, a digital user interface of a Hebrew keyboard, is right bound.
In the above image you can see Japanese text, which is traditionally read from top to bottom in either horizontal direction, in which I mean that both existed, not that you can read one text both from right to left and left to right after going top to bottom.
Constructed languages
Now I am wondering whether there is a constructed language that reads from the middle. I am pretty sure that there is no traditional language that does this, hence I am attending here.
Let me just create a concept here for you to understand. In such a language above rows would have the same meaning. In that case it is read horizontally, but from the middle, so that it does not matter if something appears on the left or right side.
Another example:
You might be able to understand what I mean by saying "middle-written", i.e. you always start in the middle.
Conclusion
I think that a language like this should be really interesting and maybe useful, thus I am curious whether or not a constructed language written quite like this exists.
I think the SETI institute once dealt with the idea that aliens having lateral eyes (like parrots, or doves) would read from the centre to both sides. But I can't find any material on that any more.
The best possible approach to a writing system "from the middle" is probably a text spiralling outwards.
One famous artefact, the Phaistos Disk, shows a spiral layout of the text, but is is unknown whether it should be read inwards (most scholars prefer this) or outwards and the writing system is still undeciphered.
Your graphical samples suggest a symmetric progression of symbols to the right and left—I think this is unrealistic because lazyness and economy of writing will soon lead to the abandonment of one of the symmetric halves, leaving either right-to-left or -left-to-right writing.
This is an interesting system, though to me it seems like there is still a left to right tendency in the spiral.
The text spiraling outward is simply standard one-dimensional writing bent into a curve, no different really from boustrophedon.
I've heard an argument that the Phaistos Disc may not be a real written document with a specific meaning, but a board game.
There is something about language, which seems so obvious to us humans that it is rarely stated: Language is encoded in a linear, one-dimensional fashion.
The words you utter (and the sillables in those words; and the phonemes in those sillables) form an ordered sequence in time. Imagine e.g. dicating a table to someone else: You have to pick a certain manner of saying each item in the table (e.g. "each row after one another" vs. "each column after another") You have to come up with a map (and agree upon with your correspondent!) from the two-dimensional paper to the one-dimensional verbal language.
Now, picking a direction of writing is perfectly analogous to drawing a curve (a line) on your writing material. There are many different ways you can do such a thing, the ones that natural languages use have a tendency to be sensible by virtue of being simple to write down, and not too ambiguous to read.
Some examples (with no claim to completeness):
left-to-right (see e.g. Latin script)
right-to-left (see e.g. Arabic script)
top-to-bottom (see e.g. Japanese)
spiraling inwards, both clockwise and anticlockwise
spiraling outwards, both clockwise and anticlockwise
in the manner of the furrows a plough makes; (also with arbitrary starting directions, and perhaps vertically instead of horizontally)
Unfortunately, I did not quite understand your own examples, as they seem to violate that basic rule of being linearly encoded and not redundant. You can of course come up with orderings like "975312468" or "864213579"; which can certainly be described as "reading from the middle in a horizontal way". The problem with those is that it feels very cumbersome to write or read in such a fashion, as your eyes have to skip around way too much.
Boustrophedon seems like the exact opposite to "middle written" because it is very practical for reading and writing because you never have to jump with your writing hand or eyes. For me, writing from the middle in a symmetrical way should force "equality". It does not matter which way you read. I like that because I think that horizontal directions do not matter, but vertical do because of the way our eyes are positioned in our heads. I think that such a language could never be based around practical traditional writing. It would always be digital or calligraphic.
”Language is encoded in a linear, one-dimensional fashion” - this doesn’t strictly apply to sign languages: while there is obviously still an important time component to speech, multiple signs may be made at the same time (or overlapping in time) on occasion, the spatial dimensions are made full use of (rather than e.g. always signing in the same location); furthermore things like grammaticalized facial expressions occur parallel to actual signs.
Some of Trent Pehrson's ornamental scripts (for conlangs) fit this description somewhat, in that they lack a sense of formal arrangement and can be organised in very creative ways which sometimes appear to focus on a central hub. Trent is a gifted calligrapher and I urge you to check out examples of his outstanding work: http://idrani.perastar.com/ISMS_orthography.htm
Maybe start here: http://idrani.perastar.com/orthography/ksatlai/eikiyo.html
I have designed concentric systems, where an utterance is written beginning with a central shape, enclosed in another shape, enclosed in another shape, and so on. Both Mayan glyphs and Jonathan Gabel's Mayan-inspired Sitelen Sitelen script for writing Toki Pona use enclosure to some degree, though not to the same extent as my example, which produced interesting but unwieldy heavily concentric text objects. (I started to think about making 3D realisations where the text would be read by cutting through the object and reading it in various ways sort of like tree lines.)
Recently I started work on a hub-and-spoke type script with no attached spoken language, where sentences are conceived of as wheels with different areas of the wheel being reserved for different syntactic roles, using a small glyph set of symbols whose meaning alters depending on its position in the wheel. These spokes can have spokes of their own. These sentence wheels can be combined around a central hub to create multi-sentence texts: the central hub contains emotional information about the writer's attitude towards the meaning of the text, and organisational information to help the reader decode the whole.
I also designed a phonetic abugida (originally for Pandunia, not that it needs or wants it!) arranged something like hangeul, with the oddity that words with more than three syllables are written with double glyphs which combine left- and right-facing halves: the left-most syllable cluster marks its vowels to the left, and the right-most syllable cluster marks its vowels to the right. The overall arrangement of each glyph is also bottom to top (I was sick of scripts assuming that you must always start at the top for everything...) See this bizarrely coloured example made in Pics Art of the Pandunia word 'musikosake', music bag, written first without vowels, and secondly with. The left-most half encodes 'musiko', the right-most 'sake'; m is at the bottom left, above it s, above it k; s appears again on the right, then k above it. Aesthetically the vowels are meant to look like bubbles floating upwards, and the letter shapes are designed so as not to impede the flow of the eye even though information is encoded on both sides of the main glyph.
This gave rise to the idea that words in a sentence should be arranged similarly, in balanced pairs or pyramidal shapes starting from the centre of the base. One could write on a square page by turning it lozenge-way, beginning above the middle corner-to corner line, writing from the middle first one way then the other, then going above, creating a pyramid fitting into the paper shape; then repeating under the line by turning the page upside down. Or by writing in upwards columns up to four glyphs wide, where the central or centre-left glyph is the first, aiming to keep syntactic groups such as phrases within one row of, at a maximum, 24 syllables. This would produce columns of glyphs read as 1, 12, 213, and 2134 depending on their weight. Whichever macroarrangement one might choose, overall its arrangement as a script is centrally focused in various ways, inspired by the central focus of each glyph.
I would say this has some precedent in various South Asian scripts such as Thai in which, whilst there is a firm left-right directionality in the flow of the syllabic characters, within each character there is a much more chaotic flow of information.
Rikchik's fascinating writing system is also arguably graphically 'middle-leading': https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/rikchik.htm
As to whether any natural scripts do what you're asking about to any significant extent, other than the example about re Egyptian hieroglyphs and the minor concentric features of Mayan about which I am no expert, I am not aware of any examples - which doesn't at all mean they don't exist.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written in any direction (LTR, RTL, TTB, BTT). On ornamental pieces and buildings, writing was frequently started at the center (e.g. the central temple gate) working outward in both directions. The best readable example I can show you is a replica of this writing style mimicked on the Memphis Zoo entrance:
You can derive the reading direction by checking in which directions the human and animal glyphs are looking.
Some of the hierglyphs are modern inventions for animals unknown to Ancient Egypt, but most of it checks out.
Since most text is by its nature sequential, then if you start in tthe middle you will have to go in some direction from there, hence the various suggestions of spirals, top to bottom, boustrophedon, etc. But all of these methods have a direction, even if that direction changes as you go along. Even in normal writing you could start in the middle, just by leaving the first half of the first line blank.
The only way I can see to avoid this directionality is to set off in two directions at once. You could print something along with its mirror image, but in practice you would read one bit or the other. You could divide the information, for example by printing the vowels on the left, right to left, and the consonants on the right, left to right, but this would be hard to read.
But there is one other possibility which might count: how about a parallel text. You could print the Koran (Q'uran) in Arabic on the left, with a line-by line translation in English on the right, or, similarly with the Hebrew Bible. I can't find any on the internet, but there must be one somewhere? Anyone interested in the translation per se would have to look at both sides to see how something was translated.
The "mirror image" system is what I illustrated in my question.
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355 | What are the defining traits of a Euro-centric conlang?
I know that a Euro-centric conlang is a conlang based mostly on Indo-European grammar, or more generally a conlang that is written from a worldview (conscious or not) that the "normal" language is Indo-European, but what are the traits of a Euro-centric conlang? What are the things that are a dead giveaway that the language is Euro-centric?
It could be a grammatical curiosity specific to Indo-European, or maybe something like a conlang being based around one non-Indo-European language feature as a kind of "gimmick" (although these are just unfounded speculation, seeing as I don't know the answer).
Note that eurocentrism is normally a pejorative term. I wouldn't expect it to be applied to conlangs, but rather people designing them who are showing a lack of awareness of anything that non-European languages do.
The term "Standard Average European" (SAE) pretty much covers it, and has been around since the 1930s. Haspelmath listed a number of typical "Euroversals" in a portion of the 2001 book Language Typology and Language Universals. These are listed in a more readable-to-laymen way in the wikipedia article on the subject. Haspelmath included as true Europeanisms (that is, features that are part of the SAE Sprachbund) only features that fit the following requirements:
Most of the "core" European languages possess it.
Nearby languages (Celtic, Turkic, etc.) lack it.
Eastern Indo-European languages (Armenian, Iranian, Indic languages, etc.) lack it -- this prevents us from merely calling it a feature of the Indo-European language family as a whole.
It is not found in the majority of the world's languages.
The Europeanisms identified by Haspelmath that fit this criteria include:
Definite and indefinite articles
Post-nominal relative clauses with resumptive relative pronouns
The (transitive) perfect formed with "have" plus a past participle
Experiencers coded as nominative subjects
Passive formed with a participle plus "to be"
A preference for anticausatives over causatives.
Dative external possession
Negation with negative pronouns and positive verb forms (e.g., "Nobody comes" instead of "Nobody won't come.")
Particle comparatives
Relative-clause based equative constructions (e.g., "tan Z como X", "so Z wie X", "as Z as X")
Subject person marking used strictly for agreement (i.e., the verb is inflected for the person/number of the subject but the subject cannot be dropped)
Different forms for reflexives vs. intensifiers
He also identified several other features that were common among this Sprachbund but were not as well-documented as the above, such as the verb fronting of polar interrogatives (i.e., turning "I have done it" into "Have I done it?" to make a yes/no question), an inflectional marker for the comparative, and several others -- these are also included in the linked articles.
Expanding on Sparksbet's answer, additional features, from the conlanging point of view as listed by Mark Rosenfelder in Advanced Language Construction (pp. 30-31), that tend to pile up on top of the SAE elements. While many of these are not particularly rare at all cross-linguistically, the overall combination (especially combined with actual SAE features), shines a brighter light on the "Europeanness" of a language:
(italics are my additions)
A phonology that explores little beyond European languages (usually German, French or Spanish with a few sounds swapped or added)
The "standard fantasy phonology" is English consonants + /x/ and (usually) Spanish vowels. Rosenfelder notes in passing elsewhere that English's vowel system is unusual, and most budding conlangers seem aware of that.
Six distinct pronouns with gendered ones for third person only and usually with object forms
Nouns paradigm with only singular/plural forms, and possibly case (usually 5-8)
Adjectives are either invariable or decline like nouns
Verbs conjugating by person (a single one, too) and number, with only three basic tenses (past/present/future) plus maybe a conditional or irrealis/subjunctive.
Modality involves auxiliary verbs
SVO word order + nominative/accusative alignment
Questions and negatives are formed with some sort of particles
The number system is decimal and the kinship system is eskimo
Even SAE languages have significant non decimal elements: dozens and grosses in English, vigesimal elements in French, and Danish...
I almost want to say that SAE means a decimal system with the exception of numbers from one to twelve. (Although the romance languages are more like one to sixteen.) While you are right about the vigesimal elements in French and Danish, they seem an oddity from a larger SAE perspective. A decimal system even exists in the nearby non-SAE language Finnish—I’m curious whether Swedish has any influence there.
Chinese, Vietnamese, and Quechua use decimal, so it's not simply a European thing (and it arose in India earlier, so there's that).
Yes, but adhering to a strict/absolute decimality in numbers (as I point out, multiple languages in Europe have nondecimal aspects to their numbers) on top of everything else reinforces europeanness (besides, Tom Scott—a linguist—argues in the linked video that Hindi practically has a base 60 system in practice).
Eh? I didn't hear anything about 60 in that video.
Besides the traits of Standard Average European given in Sparksbet's answer, another defining feature is the phonology and basis of the lexicon.
Eurocentric conlangs draw their phonology and their words heavily from well-known (and sometimes less well known) European languages. Depending on the preference of the authors, the words are based on Latin or modern Romance, English, Greek, or Slavonic languages. They also inherit a lot of European phonological quirks, e.g., in the selection of allowed consonant clusters both word-initially and inside words.
Features that are absent or rare in European languages (like retroflex consonants, tone, initial use of /ŋ/) are absent from Eurocentric conlangs.
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483 | Klingon: does anyone actually use pIqaD, or is the Latin transliteration sufficient?
Having just started the Duolingo Klingon course, I'm wondering if anybody is using the Klingon writing system (pIqaD) at all, or whether the Latin transliteration is always used?
As the characters look pretty hard to learn for someone with a Western background, I tend towards the transliteration only; I guess one issue is a cursive (ie handwriting) script, as the original characters seem hard to write by hand.
In general, the Klingon Language Mailing List (tlhIngan-Hol) sticks to the Latin. There is occasionally some discussion of pIqaD, but little of the extant tlhIngan-Hol corpus actually uses it.
Others have already answered this question, but if you want some examples of pIqaD in use, I can recommend:
@ pIqaD on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pIqaD
@ chaDQI's pIqaD calligraphy: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/klingonshodo/
just discovered that outlook translator supports PlaqD
The official Klingon orthography according to the Klingon Language Institute is the Latin transcription. It is what Marc Okrand, the language's creator, developed and uses.
The Klingon script used in from Star Trek: the Next Generation on, known as the Okuda script (Michael Okuda was the set designer for Next Generation), is used, but it's worth noting that while the sounds of Klingon have been mapped onto these letters, the movies and shows just put random jumbles of letters on signs and things (this may not be true of Star Trek: Discovery, however -- I've heard they may actually have translated the signage). It's also not the only Klingon script to have been used -- according to an article in HolQeD, the Klingon Language Institute's journal, the 1980 U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual (now out of print) featured a completely different Klingon script, though this one was a mere way of encoding English text rather than being mapped onto Klingon phonemes (Okrand did not publish The Klingon Dictionary until 1985, after all).
Given this sort of background, you can by no means take for granted that the Okuda script is the "real" Klingon pIqaD, even though it will be occasionally used to write Klingon. The Okrand transliteration is the only truly official orthography.
In any case, resources and activities written in Klingon are more often written using the official Okrand transliteration than with the Okuda script -- the Klingon subtitles on Star Trek: Discovery, for one example, are in the transliteration (can't make Unicode add new characters for such things, after all!) In general, you'll be fine with just the transliteration -- in fact, you may have an easier time, as the transliteration is easy to type. That said, no one will judge you if you use the Okuda script because you want the writing to feel less Terran or something.
"can't make Unicode add new characters for such things, after all!" FYI Tengwar is in Unicode, so technically you can :)
@meskobalazs - No, you can request that such be added; you can't compel them to accept the request. :)
In fact, Klingon was rejected from Unicode.
Unicode is a joint standard of the Unicode Consortium and ISO, which means National Standards bodies get veto. The German National Standards Body (I think) objected, and the objection was pretty much around bringing Unicode into disrepute. That was in the happy days before Unicode turned into an emoji dumping ground.
@NickNicholas: Yes it seems ironic that an actual language was rejected but the "pile of poo" emoji now has pride of place. Another word would be "sad" :(
@LightnessRacesinOrbit Another would be
(this may not be true of Star Trek: Discovery, however -- I've heard they may actually have translated the signage)
This is accurate. There is quite a lot of tlhIngan Hol written in pIqaD on Discovery, such as ornaments on the Sarcophagus ship and signs in the Orion district on Qo'noS. We've even been able to deconstruct parts of an Orion alphabet (used with English words) by comparing it to Klingon text on bilingual signs.
Tengwar is not in Unicode and the current issue given with both it and pIqaD is that copyright concerns.
pIqaD shows up here and there, but in my experience (which is 20 years old, but I haven't seen much to contradict it), its use is emblematic. People will put a word up here and there, and it will appear in T-shirts; but people do not read connected texts in it.
As is, pIqaD is indeed unwritable with a pen. I experimented in my time with ways of making it more writeable: see my handiwork at Klingonska Akademien, linked from the discussion of some pictures of pIqaD.
Thanks for this! It's a shame that it is pretty much unusable as a proper writing system. I find the transliteration rather unsatisfactory. It would be aesthetically much nicer to have a decent font to render texts in.
Mark Shoulson revived the proposal to encode Klingon in Unicode, in a 2016 document called “pIqaD (Klingon) and its Usage.” In it, he gives several examples, including a comic book, Star Trek: [Manifest Destiny] #1, translated into Klingon and printed almost entirely in pIqaD.
The most recent example I’ve seen of someone using pIqaD in a context that has nothing to do with Star Trek is that some fans of the pro soccer player Meghan Klingenberg, of the Portland Thorns, bring this banner to all her home games in Portland, Oregon (photo by Molly Blue):
The Klingon Wiki has a list of fonts that support Klingon, including several that encode it in the region of the Private Use Area standardized by the Linux Kernel, and later, the ConScript Unicode Registry and adopted by the Klingon Language Instutute. There are, additionally, several TeX packages not listed there that support Klingon.
The font downloads and some other support files are on this page, although you might not necessarily want to install the registry entries, It’s usable; I got this image in LuaLaTeX with the KAG pIqaD font, complete with kerning:
Here is the same template with the font Klingon pIqaD vaHbo’ by Mike Neft:
Source code, in case the template is useful:
\documentclass[preview,varwidth]{standalone}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\makeatletter
%% Use the ISO 639 language code tlh as an abbreviation.
\newcommand\@tlhfontname{pIqaD}
%% Because many Klingon fonts do not contain a Latin alphabet, take the ratio
%% of the height of the H in the main text font to either the Latin H of the
%% the pIqaD font if it contains one, or the Klingon H if it does not, and
%% scale the pIqaD by that ratio. This means pIqaD will match the height of
%% English.
\newlength{\@capheight}
\settoheight{\@capheight}{\normalfont H}
\newlength{\@tlhheight}
\settoheight{\@tlhheight}{{\fontspec{\@tlhfontname}
\iffontchar\font`H
H
\else
\symbol{"F8D6}
\fi}}
\newcommand{\@capratio}{\strip@pt\dimexpr 1.0pt *
\numexpr\@capheight\relax /
\numexpr\@tlhheight\relax\relax }
%% For symmetry with Polyglossia's \sanskritfont, \sanskrittext,
%% \devanagarifont, etc.
\newfontfamily{\klingonfont}{\@tlhfontname}[Scale=\@capratio]
\newcommand\klingontext[1]{{\klingonfont #1\relax}}
%% It's more consistent with LaTeX conventions to define strictly text-mode
%% symbols with names like \texttlhA than \klingonA, and this is a Very
%% Serious Project™.
\newcommand\texttlhA{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhB{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhCH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhD{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhE{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhI{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhJ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhL{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhM{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DA}}}
\newcommand\texttlhN{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DB}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNG{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DC}}}
\newcommand\texttlhO{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhP{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DF}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhR{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhS{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhT{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTLH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhU{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhV{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhW{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhY{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGlott{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhZero{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhOne{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTwo{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhThree{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFour{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFive{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSix{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSeven{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhEight{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNine{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhComma{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhStop{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhMumm{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FF}}}
\makeatother
\newcommand\tlhIngenbergh{\texttlhTLH\texttlhL\texttlhI\texttlhNG%
\texttlhE\texttlhN\texttlhB\texttlhE\texttlhR\texttlhGH}
% Could also directly insert the Unicode PUA characters.
\newlength{\nameWidth}
\settowidth{\nameWidth}{\tlhIngenbergh}
\begin{document}
\resizebox{\nameWidth}{!}{\texttlhMumm} \\
\tlhIngenbergh
\end{document}
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407 | Has any nation ever employed a constructed language in the military as code talkers?
Esperanto was once used in the US army to realistically simulate the language situation when training.
Has any nation ever employed other constructed languages in the military as code talkers?
From Wikipedia article:
Code talkers are people in the 20th century who used obscure languages as a means of secret communication during wartime. The term is now usually associated with the United States service members during the world wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages. In particular, there were approximately 400–500 Native Americans in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages. Code talkers transmitted these messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formal or informally developed codes built upon their native languages. Their service improved the speed of encryption of communications at both ends in front line operations during World War II.
Was Esperanto used by code talkers? That seems counter productive seeing as it was explicitly intended to be used by people from all around the world!
I think he means that Esperanto is not a code talker but a language that can be used as additional means of communication in the army, very much like a code talker.
Never mind—as I read here, they actually did as a training. During the first Universal Congress of Esperanto, they defined esperantisto as: "An Esperantist is every person who uses the Esperanto language completely irregardless of their reason. An Esperantist is not only someone who dreams of uniting humanity under Esperanto, ... An Esperantist is even someone who uses Esperanto for the most evil and lowly ways."
The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Esperanto and the article @DuncanWhyte provided is on an Esperanto Language Blog. Are there any more reputable sources regarding Esperanto's use for code-talking in the military?
@Sparksbet I found http://www.kafejo.com/lingvoj/auxlangs/eo/maneuver/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Official_use
@DuncanWhyte Both sites cite Esperanto as used for the enemy in fictional war games, not for code-talking. Re-reading the question, it seems like it says pretty much the same thing (although that may have been introduced by your edit?)
The Israeli military uses a relexification of Hebrew called "NADBAR", according to Conlang Wikibooks†. A relexification of a language remains the grammar (by definition) and writing system (in practice) but gains new words. Your first (semi-)conlang was probably a relexification of English or another language.
Many languages used in the military are not immediately conlangs; rather, they fall into the dome of cryptology and cryptography. Quote:
Some use the terms cryptography and cryptology interchangeably in English, while others (including US military practice generally) use cryptography to refer specifically to the use and practice of cryptographic techniques and cryptology to refer to the combined study of cryptography and cryptanalysis.
The military also uses (forms of) signed languages. Here are some common signals:
Common army signals (link instead of image, for image is too big and distracting)
†Note: (from comment by b a):
According to Hebrew Wikipedia, "Contrary to the popular notion, the goal of Nadbar is not concealing information" (so not really cryptography) See the corresponding English Wikipedia page for its use in the US military.
Note that I could not find much information on NADBAR. Also, said signed languages are not what many of us would count as a conlang because as I said, they fall into the dome of cryptology and cryptography, too.
According to Hebrew Wikipedia, "Contrary to the popular notion, the goal of Nadbar is not concealing information" (so not really cryptography) See the corresponding English Wikipedia page for its use in the US military.
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1897 | Are there languages where traditional verb features exist on nouns, or noun features on verbs, etc.?
I am looking at the sidebar on Wikipedia.
Are there languages which have "case" or "gender" or "number" or other "noun features" but instead of (or in addition to) being applied to nouns, they are applied to verbs, adjectives, or other word forms? Likewise, are there languages which have modality, person, or tense or other "verb features", but applied to nouns/adjectives/others instead of or in addition to verbs?
I am curious how broad these properties apply in natural and conlangs, and if you can have things that sit outside the traditional box.
I would not be surprised to find pairs of unrelated verbs, one reserved for animate and one for inanimate subjects (or objects), which are translated alike into most other languages.
OK, that sidebar reflects the features of the well-known Indogermanic languages (Latin, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit etc.). We see gender on verbs in Semitic languages and to a lesser amount also in some Latin and Romance contructions (e.g., Perfect Passive laudatus sum (m) vs. laudata sum (f) "I was lauded"). Although number is assigned to the nouns in the Wikipedia sidebar even the classical languages conjugate their verbs according to number.
While "traditional" languages only have gendered third person pronouns, many other languages also gender the first and second person pronouns.
You also could argue that the popular prefix ex- applied to nouns (as in ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend) adds some notion of the typically verbal category tense to the noun.
Gender and number are marked on verbs, sure, but they're properties of nouns.
The last paragraph reminds me indirectly of a joke in Kruko kaj Baniko el Bervalo, in which a controversy over a vowel in a verb form is extended to noun roots.
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1896 | How is it not ambiguous that the parts don't add up to the whole when creating compound words?
This question was sparked off a recent question: Are Sanskrit words more than the sum of the parts? I am serious when I ask, because as an outsider to Sanskrit, I would think the parts would add up to the whole, but they don't. Likewise, in English (as @Draconis pointed out), the word "fireman" has no notion of "fighting fires", but that's what it means.
So from a conlanging perspective, I have been fighting with this issue for probably a year. At one point I was thinking about wrapping noun phrases in affixes to let it be known:
This is a formal gray fox or gorilla ("large monkey" in the conlang), we are not simply describing a gray fox or a large monkey.
So it was either going to be:
a- [...noun phrase...] -wa
as opposed to just
[no prefix] [...noun phrase...] [no suffix]
So like a-gray fox-wa or a-large monkey-wa. Then I thought, maybe create words instead (bounding words), so form gray fox morf or form large monkey morf, but then things started to get long and verbose.
So coming across Sanskrit, and coming to this realization that in real languages, you can have words which mean more than the sum of the parts, that means I can say "large monkey" (without any extra words or affixes), and have it be known that "large monkey" is always talking about gorilla. This seems like how Chinese works actually, but I always thought that was kind of limiting or strange.
For example, in Chinese, "river horse" is "hippo", but if you want to talk about a horse of the river, you can't say the string "river horse", you have to say something else like "the horse of the river", otherwise you are talking about hippo. In Chinese, these words must be memorized and avoided, which to me that would cause errors, because say in year 1800 you said "The river horse was cool" (talking about a horse of the river), then in year 1900 "river horse" came to be defined as "hippo", then the old text would maybe be misinterpreted (you would have to take the day of writing and word origin history into account when interpreting, jeez!).
So I am wondering, how can you reason with yourself to determine that saying "fire man" in your conlang means "fire fighter" basically, and yet also be able to say the abstract descriptive "fire man" (meaning man of the fire, or other meanings based on context)? Is it okay to leave off my affixes (or extra words), and do like Sanskrit does and just have "fire man" mean "one who fights fires"? Rather than saying "a-fire man-wa" (which would be more unambiguous). How do I make sure that you can still talk about fire man as a general adjective thing, if this word takes up a specific meaning?
I don't get how to think through that and make sure the conlang isn't going to run into problems.
If words and phrases like "fireman" and "river horse" don't cause problems for speakers of English, Chinese, and Sanskrit, why would they cause problems for speakers of your conlang?
Fundamentally, all words have meanings by convention, and a learner of the language simply has to learn them. Even when the meaning of the whole does come straightforwardly from the meaning of the parts, how do you know that a "firefighter" fights against fire, while a "swordfighter" fights with a sword? The answer is that you've learned this as part of your knowledge of English. Similarly, you can't replace "firefighter" with something like "firekiller" that seems like it should mean the same thing: that's simply not the word for this thing.
Compound words exist because they're an easy way to make new words, and they're easier to learn than just a random string of syllables. But they're still words, which have to be learned as part of the mental lexicon.
As for ambiguity, since a compound word is made of specific pieces, you can get the literal meaning by just exchanging a synonym for one of those. Something like "flame fighter" doesn't have the fixed meaning that "firefighter" does.
Or you can use different syntax: in Latin and Greek, compound words remove the case marking from all components except the last one. In English, compound words are single words, so they take different stress patterns than a full phrase would: "ríverhorse" vs "ríver hórse". And so on.
TLDR: It is very ambiguous, with some regularity.
I struggle with the problem of ambivalence versus economy a lot. I have terrible memory, and I think I am much too afraid of ambivalence. In reality, such an awful lot is context-dependent, convention-dependent, semi-systematic, and it still works.
I think that the details are largely due to intuition, convention, and just day-to-day use. People need a word for someone who kills others. Killing-man, killer, murderer, dead-making-person, king of collecting heartbeats - whatever, one of them sticks. If there are two competing words, and both survive, they will likely mean something slightly different.
How do I know that a fireman fights fires, as opposed to lighting them? Only from hearing the word many times. There is some rule to it: I know that -man is often used for a "-doer" (because only men were allowed in the workforce in the past, I guess). I can make educated guesses. But ultimately, as a foreign speaker, I just have to learn it.
Indeed, many jokes work by misinterpreting those conventional meanings. "Haha, look how his head burns, he's a real fireman..." (it's a TERRIBLE joke, I know) - hahaha, how funny.
In a naturalistic conlang (for worldbuilding), I would try and find a few "compound schemes" like XYZ-doer, ABC-type-thing, DEF-abstraction etc., derive those from some root, and try not to copy too much from my own language. And I would have a few separate root-words for a concepts specific to that culture. Eg "free slave", a derogatory term for an employee - "money worker", a neutral term for the same, and "tidhi" - a term of endearment.
The meaning of "fireman" as "person who fights fires" is contextual. The only reason you immediately know what it means without having to ask for more a more specific context is that there aren't as many steam engines or coal furnaces around these days that require firemen (an equivalent term to the word "stoker") to maintain them.
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1755 | Denoting arbitrary ligatures when transcribing my script to Latin
I'm working on a written language where ligatures are important. Pretty much any letter could be joined to any other, and doing so could change the meaning of the word.
Too facilitate writing about this language digitally I'd like to transcribe it to Latin letters, but arbitrary ligatures are hard to write in a fluent manner. One idea that has occurred to me is to use some sort of diacritic to note that a letter should be joined to the next. Using a suitable editor (I use Emacs, enabling the TeX input method) this as is easy as pushing an extra key or two, and it can be done without interrupting the flow of writing. (Easy to write diacritics include t̄, ṯ, ṫ, ṭ, ẗ, t́, t̀, t̃ and t̂)
Question: Is there some method already in use to denote arbitrary ligatures, preferably denotable in Unicode?
Ideally, I would like to draw slurs above or below the letters, as is done in sheet music, but I haven't found a convenient method of writing this.
My current favorite is using a bar below a letter to denote that it should be tied to the next. It lo̱oks li̱ke ṯhis. I'm not sure though, as it might be more "logical" to underline both the conjoined letters, li̱ḵe ṯẖis.
The method needs to be able to denote ligatures with a̱ṟḇi̱ṯṟa̱ṟi̱ḻy̱̱ m̱a̱ṉy̱ ḻe̱ṯṯe̱ṟs̱.
A problem with this approach is that the under lines move around depending on the font used! If I copy some of my underlined text into the box where you can write an answer, the lines seem to move one letter to the right, and when posted they seem to be shifted more or less randomly. (You could try this to see for yourself!) Their position is nice and consistent when I write them in Emacs, but it would be nice to retain the option of exporting the text to some other format some day.
I've seen the method of using brackets, li[ke] [th]is, but I will be conjoining a lot of letters, and it sort of looks a bit clunky.
At this point I'm still open to diacritics, maybe some kind of brackets or perhaps even hyphens (lik-e t-his), or something completely different, I just thought knowing what others have done might help me to figure it out.
Choose a notation you like. Choose a font where it looks good. Use those wherever possible.
You describe a font issue that’s causing problems for your chosen notation. This should be possible to work around at the font level!
Literally any text might be formatted in an undesirable way by some font, rendering engine, or combination thereof. It’s just hitting you hard in this case because of the combining characters. These often have bugs that may only be apparent on combinations of characters that the designers didn’t expect to be used (“nobody ever puts an ogonek on a letter t!”), or with a particular combination of font and rendering software.
For what it’s worth, my system[1] doesn’t have the “shifting” you report: the underlines in “a̱ṟḇi̱ṯṟa̱ṟi̱ḻy̱̱ m̱a̱ṉy̱ ḻe̱ṯṯe̱ṟs̱” appear in the same positions in your question and in this text box where I’m typing. Well, almost the same: the font in this box is monospaced, and also larger than that elsewhere, so I can clearly see spaces between each underline where I’m typing. In contrast, the proportional font used in question and answer text loses these spaces between narrow letters (like “itr” and “ril” in arbitrarily).
Hence my recommendation. Wherever it’s in your control, you can use the font that works for you. If you choose a freely available font, you can recommend the font to readers to try and cover cases where it’s not in your control. And if publishing your transcriptions on the web, which is an odd mix of “in your control” and “not”, you could use a font from Google Fonts or similar.
[1]: I know my setup isn’t especially typical, though. I’m on Fedora Linux 36, and my browser (currently Firefox 107) reports the fonts I’m seeing as Liberation Sans for question and answer text, and Liberation Mono for the text entry box.
Some further thoughts: Unicode offers a wealth of combining characters. Some may serve your purpose better than your current choice, which is U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW.
For example, here’s U+0332 COMBINING LOW LINE instead:
“a̲r̲b̲i̲t̲r̲a̲r̲i̲l̲y̲ m̲a̲n̲y̲ l̲e̲t̲t̲e̲r̲s̲”
(This looks better to me, forming an almost unbroken underline. Almost: there’s a gap after the “m”, and the descender on each “y” pushes the line out of place.)
Some combining characters specifically tie two successive characters together. The most slur-like is U+035C COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW. This looks good for me in a monospaced font, but it turns into a bit of a mess with a proportional font:
a͜r͜b͜i͜t͜r͜a͜r͜i͜l͜y m͜a͜n͜y l͜e͜t͜t͜e͜r͜s … a͜r͜b͜i͜t͜r͜a͜r͜i͜l͜y m͜a͜n͜y l͜e͜t͜t͜e͜r͜s
Another option is U+035F COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON BELOW:
a͟r͟b͟i͟t͟r͟a͟r͟i͟l͟y m͟a͟n͟y l͟e͟t͟t͟e͟r͟s
(This isn’t so good in the fonts my browser is using, but it looks much better in my text editor, which is using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.)
There are also the Combining Half Marks, at least some of which are explicitly meant to be used to compose marks that span more than two letters. The trouble is finding a font that supports this properly! Another downside is that it can be fiddly to insert different characters for the start, middle, and end of your sequences.
This example uses U+FE2B to start each tie, U+FE2D for the middle, and U+FE2C for the end. To me, it looks okay, but not fantastic:
a︫r︭b︭i︭t︭r︭a︭r︭i︭l︭y︬ m︫a︭n︭y︬ l︫e︭t︭t︭e︭r︭s︬
I get better results with the “continuous macron” characters used by Coptic (U+FE24, U+FE25, and U+FE26), but they’re an overline, not an underline:
a︤r︦b︦i︦t︦r︦a︦r︦i︦l︦y︥ m︤a︦n︦y︥ l︤e︦t︦t︦e︦r︦s︥
Finally, markup may be more suitable than any character representation. For instance, a simple underline produces an unbroken connecting tie on most systems.
Consider adopting - or reversing - a convention that I have seen used in Catalan: “ll” is normally a digraph representing a single sound; there are words in which it should not be considered a digraph, but instead two separate occurrences of “l”. To indicate this, Catalan uses the interpunct (centred dot), “l·l”.
If, in your Latin alphabet transcriptions/transliterations, your ligatures are less common than isolate letters, use the interpunct to signal that the letters on either side are to be ligated (e.g., a·e is æ and ae is ae); if the reverse is true, use the interpunct to separate non-ligated letters (e.g., ae is æ and a·e is ae).
(The interpunct as a HTML entity is · or ·.)
For completeness, I'd like to mention that Unicode does support putting slurs over an arbitrary number of characters…in theory. Characters U+1D177 "begin slur" and U+1D178 "end slur" (or U+1D175/6 "begin/end tie") are mainly meant for use in MusicXML and similar formats, but they're characters like any other. In theory, you should be able to use them in text, to put a slur over your letters.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any font that supports that usage, currently.
One idea (roughly borrowing from the practice of transcribing cuneiform) is make creative use of capital letters: Use lower case letters for single letters of your conscript and capital letters for the ligatures. When two ligatures follow each other without an intervening single letter, place a separator, e.g., the middle dot ·, between the groups of capital letters.
If you want to use slurs (I like that idea) have a look at MusicTeX (you will have to fiddle around a bit with it to apply the slurs to letters instead of musical notes).
Hm. Interesting. I can't believe I didn't think of capital letters! Thanks! I'm not sure it will turn out to best suit my purposes, but it's promising. MusicTeX is also a good idea, but it requires compilation. Capitals are easier and could be used by anyone. I'll wait a few days to see if there's more answers, but this might end up the accepted answer.
In cuneiform studies, it's common to use "half brackets" to indicate a damaged section of the text.
You might find these less disruptive than full brackets, in terms of the overall flow of your text. The usual Unicode characters for this are top left corner (U+231C) and top right corner (U+231D), but depending on the font they may introduce an annoying amount of whitespace into your line: a⌜eio⌝u. And unfortunately, while there are several options for the right half that take up less space ("end of stimme" aa, "combining left angle above" a̚a), I haven't found any good options for the left half. For the image above I used LaTeX to override the font's kerning.
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1719 | sama pi or sama e?
I would like to say something like
These are the same as my house.
I'm not sure if this should be:
ni li sama e tomo mi.
or
ni li sama pi tomo mi.
My understanding is that you only use e for verbs acting on an object, and don't otherwise. sama does not seem like a verb that is acting on tomo mi. But I'm more used to this with ken and wile. For example
mi ken kepeken e ilo tu.
mi wile moku.
I'm not sure if it is natural to use it with sama especially when I would need pi to indicate that mi modifies tomo not sama.
What would be the "correct" option here?
An alternative way to phrase this which sidesteps this question is "ni en tomo mi li sama", which translates more directly as "These and my house are the same".
I would use
ni li sama tomo mi
Technically, according to Toki Pona: The Language of Good, sama is an adjective. So the overall structure of the sentence would be NOUN + li + ADJECTIVE (p.20). The adjective in this case would have a complement tomo mi, to be "like my house"
As you correctly say, e is only used with verbs, and pi only connects noun phrases, so perhaps sama pi tomo mi could be interpreted as a literal translation of "the likeness of my house", but it would be rather weird (and probably ungrammatical)
I agree with this assessment -- 'sama pi tomo mi' lexes fine in that I understand what the intended meaning is, but it's definitely not idiomatic in comparison to 'sama tomo mi.'
toki a!
mi jan Kasikusa
sina sona ala sona e ni: sama is also a preposition, at least in common use. You can use it as such. It thus might be said, as a translation of the English phrase "These are the same as my house", "tomo ni li sama tomo mi".
You could also phrase it as "ni li tomo sama tawa tomo mi", kind of like "these are the same house from the perspective of (/ compared to) my house".
I feel like I should mention too that toki pona doesn't really have a true correct or wrong way to say things. If I remember correctly (don't have my ku with me right now), Sonja herself said that any toki pona that makes sense to the speaker is correct toki pona. Think about which phrasing best reflects how you intuitively think about what you're describing, and pick that one.
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1384 | In compound words/suffixed words, does the stress change?
I'm creating a language where the stress is on the third to last syllable and I have a sound change where an unstressed short vowel at the beginning of a word is deleted. (so in 'a.ta.ra. the word vs (a)'ta.ra.ra. where the first vowel would be deleted) My entire language so far hinges on this sound change to be a thing please help?
This is really one of those times where the only viable answer is "it's completely up to you!"
Sometimes the stress changes, sometimes it doesn't. This depends on the stress rules of the language. In your case, I'd suggest that if you like that vowel deletion, then you should codify the rule to indicate that addition of a suffix that causes a shift of stress will also cause the deletion of unstressed short vowels.
If you don't address the rules regarding stress, then you'd leave yourself open to words like atárara remaining in the language.
This could give you some interesting consonant clusters word intially: tálipo > *talípora > tlípura. Nothing unusual there, really.
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1388 | What glyph to pick from alternatives in Kēlen script?
The Kēlen alphabet as given on https://www.terjemar.net/kelen/writing.php shows variants for some letters. Here is an example:
Are there rules on when to pick which form?
As far as I can tell, no such rules are mentioned anywhere.
However, the general orthography page only seems to mention one form for each letter, and those forms are also the only ones I can find in any Kelen word of the day entry I've looked at - granted, I haven't looked at all that many of them, so I may have missed some that use the alternate forms. It does, however, seem to me like those forms are the only ones in use.
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1407 | How to showcase a conlang?
How would one go about "Showcasing" a conlang, other than by works of fiction, like Tolkien? I want to have a way to share my language to the world in full, with outlined grammar and everything.
The traditional method of promoting a conlang was creating a booklet, often self-published and self-promoted by the conlang creator.
Nowadays, it is easier to set up a comprehensive website essentially containing the content of that booklet.
The content of the booklet or website typically consists of
A teaching grammar of the conlang
A vocabulary list
Sample sentences like you find in Teach Yourself a language books
Sample texts, often translations of well known texts into the conlang
Proverbs in the conlang
Frequently used sample texts include The Lord's prayer, the Tower-of-Babel fable, "The North Wind and the Sun", and the Declaration of Human Rights.
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1431 | First-timer questions for developing language families, been trying out Vulgarlang
I'm currently working on a project of mine, an overhaul modification for the game Victoria 3 and I'm digging deeper into the phase for making unique languages to represent portions of every continent/world.
I began for the longest just re-hashing what we have in real life, either using branches of a family or combining say, Pashtun and Japanese to create like "Nipponistan" for example. I don't have an issue with it, but when I got stuck coming up with more unique combinations or uncommon languages I stumbled upon conlang communities and Vulgerlang. Which seems to be controversial too.
I'm not that close to being a perfectionist so while I would love to uniquely customize my entire language in Vulgerlang, phonology, grammar, feels overwhelming. So I guess I've been more focused on just constructing an eligible language for appearance moreso, with the concepts I understand comprehensively, and appears to mirror what is in real life I desire.
---So, if I want to create a language family that appears English-esque, that spawned off an old empires language that is Tamil/Arabic, is it better if I start off basing my phonemes and the regular stuff off Arabic, or English?
---Do I lean towards removing the Semitic triconsonant in the new family, or do I remove more what defines an English/Germanic language and include some minor, moderate Semitic features?
---For my project, what would best visually communicate the differences between languages in a family group? I read that its mostly sound-based from our mouths with little other bits here and there mutated away from each other.
---I know its subjective, but how would you recognize a conlang that is good? That seems pretty realistic and capable of portraying many ideas and words?
Thanks for helping me out. I really enjoy this process, but I'm afraid of the amount of time I'm using of mine wandering aimlessly into it.
Welcome here, NagaPrince! You have quite a catalog of questions here, and it is better to ask every question separately. I suggest that you take the tour to this site and visit the help centre for more detailed advice on how to aks good questions.
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1441 | How to go about making a simple to speak (for English speakers) conlang?
I am new to conlanging, and would like to create a language which English speakers can easily learn. How would you suggest I go about optimizing it for English speakers? Which features should I choose to allow English speakers to learn it easily?
Be extremely analytic.
Definitely don't inflect nouns. Keep verb and pronoun inflections to a bare minimum, and rely on modal verbs and adpositions as much as you can in place of complicated syntax rules. English inflection is so degenerate that including more than three forms per verb will be hard for English speakers -- you have slightly more leeway with pronouns, which in English decline into five forms under three principal parts, but don't overdo it.
Keep the phonology to a subset of English's.
English has a lot of vowels, usually at least 10. While you probably shouldn't try to use all of them, keep to ones that are common in multiple dialects of English: /ə/, /ɪ/, and /ɑː/ for instance.
Avoid <r> entirely. You don't want to deal with differences between the English <r> and your conlang's and if it is the same as one possible English <r> then some other English dialects are going to run into problems with it.
Avoid intervocalic /VtV/. In American English, a regular sound change flaps /VtV/ to /VɾV/, but this is not so in all dialects, and thus may cause issues.
Start with "normal" English and restrict it by adding rules specifically crafted for certain communication situations - one widely used and successful example is the Aeronautical phraseology, which, despite the name is actually a controlled language.
The easiest sort of conlang for English speakers would be one where the grammar of English is maintained unchanged, and you just add or replace a bunch of vocabulary. If you add a lot of new vocabulary for new concepts you could consider it some kind of new dialect. If you replace existing vocabulary so that the existing concepts are referred to with new words, then that's a relexification.
One example is The Gostak:
Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.
But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.
Thank you. I am trying to make a language with a German-style gender system, but being as easy to learn for English speakers as possible. This is meant to help English speakers get familiar with grammatical gender, without the hassle of learning a whole new language. What category would this fall under?
Well, obviously plain English is the simplest language to an English speaker. You can simplify it it even further by restricting the vocabulary and get at designs like Basic English. Or you can aim at people with low competences in language or reading, for German there is Leichte Sprache in this domain, I am not aware of a special English in that domain (but very close to that is Simple English Wikipedia, the term Special English itself was used for the controlled language used by Voice of America.
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1558 | How to create realistic intonation?
How would one approach creating a conlang with a system of intonation, like English? Specifically for a naturalistic a priori conlang.
Some sub-queries I have are
What resources are there, if any, on creating intonation system?
What systems of describing intonation unambiguously in written text exist, if any?
As far as I know, there isn't a good system in the IPA for rendering intonation. One way to do it would be with a graph (e.g. using Google Sheets).
Intonation is rather complicated, and I don't know too much about it. I do know that most languages on Earth mark questions with a rising intonation (though certain British dialects have a sharp falling intonation instead). There are probably other near-universals regarding intonation too, which you could also use. But you might also be okay borrowing intonation patterns from natlangs, as long as it's not just one language.
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1459 | What CompSci concepts have been used in conlanging?
I am looking for things in the vein of the use of run-length encoding in representing arbitrarily large integers in a Haskell-based conlang.
An example might be tree data structure based punctuation in a writing system (Lispy), a language in which sentence ends are signaled not by structure but by an explicit stop word (like a C-style language's semi-colon), or a language in which there are labels (explicitly or implicitly) assigned to each sentence, which can be used to refer to that sentence (assembly or BASIC-like).
Could someone share some examples of how CS ideas are used in conlanging?
‘Haskell-based conlang’? Interesting; I’ve been pondering similar concepts for a while. Do you have any more information I can read about it?
The linked question has it: "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1395/how-should-my-conlang-enable-arbitrarily-large-integers-to-be-said?noredirect=1&lq=1"
Ah, thanks! Just FYI, Leksah has already been used as the name of a Haskell IDE.
Also, to answer the question, the major example I’m aware of is the stack-based conlang Fith. But I’d prefer to hold off on making an actual answer until I find some more examples.
Some examples of conlangs which use CS concepts include
Fith, as pointed out to me by @bradrn in the comments of this question. It is a stack-based conlang, similar conceptually to forth, or min. It is spoken by "a race of centaur-like marsupials" known as Fithians.
Shallow Fith, which is intended as a human speak-able subset of Fith, devised to allow Fithians and humans to communicate.
The conlang from this question, Leksah. It is a functional conlang, inspired by Haskell, which was created for a world-building project. Leksah has functions, which act similarly to verbs, a function application word, and literals, which act somewhat like nouns.
Edit:
I am in the process of creating an as-yet unpublished conlang with a system of pattern matching with pronouns.
For example, The red horse is friends with the black dog. The red <third-person pronoun> is much bigger than the black <third-person pronoun>, would mean that
The red horse and black dog are friends.
The red horse is much bigger than the black dog.
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1559 | What resources are there on tone system creation?
What resources are there on tone system creation?
Resources could include
Documentation on conlangs that have tone systems
Guides on tone system creation
Resources on tone in natural languages, for a posteriori naturalistic conlang creation
Artifexian has a decent pair of videos (#1, #2) on tones which discusses various types of tone systems, how they work in natural languages, how they developed there, and ways you could work them in to a diachronic approach to conlanging. I don't think it discusses conlangs that do have tone systems though.
The Wikipedia page for Four Tones (Middle Chinese) also does a decent job of discussing the evolution of tone across the Sinitic languages.
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1601 | What are auxlangs?
I often hear certain conlangs (e.g. Esperanto) referred to as auxlangs. What exactly is an auxlang? How can I tell if a conlang is an auxlang? What are some examples of auxlangs?
Auxlang is a short word for "auxiliary language", i.e., a language that is designed and promoted as a bridge language between people of different languages.
There are International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) aiming at the whole world as a target, and Zonal Auxiliary Languages aiming at a group of linguistically or culturally related people.
Examples for international auxiliary languages are Volapük, Esperanto, or Interlingua; examples for zonal languages are Interslavic or Afrihili.
According to Wikipedia, auxlangs are languages intended to facilitate international communication. Some notable examples include Esperanto and Interlingua. Of these, Esperanto is the most well-known and successful. Zamenhof created it in the 1880s.
Edit: As pointed out in the comments by @RadovanGarabik, these are only some notable examples of constructed auxlangs. See the comments for examples of natural ones.
By far more notable auxlangs are English, Latin, French, Chinese, Greek, to name just a few. Of course, these are not conlangs.
@RadovanGarabík, based on time period, of course. Looking at the world today, it's English and then anything else.
@KeithMorrison I'm sure there are regions where this doesn't apply. E.g. in Central and Eastern Europe, more people will be able to speak Russian than English, especially among the older population. But I agree that globally and among younger people it would probably be English.
@OliverMason, let's put it this way: if you were told you were going to be placed in a populated area chosen at random somewhere on Earth, and you were only allowed to speak in one language, what language would provide you the highest probability of finding someone who could understand you in the shortest amount of time?
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1450 | Attach noi/poi-clauses to a selbri in Lojban
In Lojban, what is the right way to attach restrictive and non-restrictive clauses to a selbri?
Consider the English example:
It is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose."
The phrase "the fourth-most populous" is a restrictive clause for "is city" (selbri "tcadu"). The phrase "after ..." is a non-restrictive clause for "fourth-most" (selbri "vomoi").
A naive approach would be:
accidental="la sandi'egos ce'o la sandi'egos ce'o la sanjoses lidne"
determiner="vomoi noi ${accidental} fi le nilxa'ugri"
phrase="tcadu poi ${determiner} la kalifornos"
But it doesn't work: one can't attach noi/poi to a selbri.
My current approach is to compound selbri:
accidental = "la sandi'egos ce'o la sandi'egos ce'o la sanjoses lidne"
determiner = f"ke ka {accidental} ke'e vomoi fi le nilxa'ugri"
phrase = f"ko'a ke ka {determiner} ke'e tcadu la kalifornos"
It works, but the noi/poi distinction is lost.
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1451 | How is Ido helpful in everyday's life?
Constructed languages such as Ido are easy but is there anyway it is helpful. Do they have any purpose in real life other than being an experiment?
Ido still has a small speech community, so by learning Ido you join that community and you can communicate with fellow samideanoj. Note that the community is small, probably eurocentric, and aging. You are engaging in a very special and rare hobby, I'd say.
Second, Ido is to a high degree mutually intelligible with Esperanto, so learning Ido will give you access to Esperanto, too. However, if you want to become an Esperantist, you should of course learn the original Esperanto instead.
No, I don't have time to learn useless language. I already understand a great deal of English and now I m learning Spanish. I was just trying to understand if they could be somewhat useful. No matter how easy a language may be. If no use it in real life, it is practically useless.
@Superhuman usefulness entirely depends on your linguistic environment - there are people that never find Spanish (or even English) useful, and if you study linguistics, any language knowledge will give you some useful information for your study. You can sometimes deliberately construct your environment to skew it towards certain language, but based on my completely unsubstantiated gut feeling, no, neither Ido nor Esperanto would be useful to you.
Note: the formulation of the question has changed after I submitted my response: originally it was about conlangs with Ido as a specific example. Hence my answer is not so much about Ido in particular, but conlangs in general.
Esperanto is widely spoken all over the world, and is thus practically useful for communication; less widely used languages either have their own enthusiasts' communities (eg toki pona). Other, more obscure languages won't have that.
But they can still be useful in a variety of ways:
expanding your horizon: learning a new language gets you to think in a different way (see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) from your native one. This is one reason toki pona was designed the way it was: the limited vocabulary forces you to shed aspects of meaning that are not essential for what you want to say. Klingon has a very lop-sided vocabulary, which again makes it easy to express some aspects, but hard to reason about others. This applies both to natural languages (through attached cultures) and constructed languages.
easier language learning: this is especially valid for Esperanto. A conlang is often more regular, so learners can learn about concepts of linguistics without worrying too much about exceptions to myriad rules. There is an actual programme (whose name escapes me) where Esperanto is taught as the first foreign language to school kids. This makes it easier for them to learn subsequent languages and they progress faster (even taking into account the additional time of learning Esperanto)
in-group communication: if you and your friends share an obscure conlang, you can use it to communicate in secret in public. Or you might find it easier to talk about a shared hobby (eg going to the extreme of jargon use by turning it into a language). Or you could write a secret diary in it.
more concise expression: in computing you have the concept of DSLs (domain specific languages). You can design a conlang which is suited specifically for a particular purpose (expressing emotions, describing inter-personal relationships, mathematics, etc). Natural languages are general purpose languages, but with a conlang you can hone in on areas that you are interested in, and ignore others. This again relates to linguistic relativity in a way.
game/recreational use: you can use a conlang as an 'exotic' language for NPC in games to make them more realistic. The player can then pick up the language (or learn it, if it is a more well-known conlang) and communicate with the NPCs. Or you could write songs in a conlang (who understands song lyrics anyway!) Or write poetry.
...
I personally found Esperanto easy to learn, and when learning other European languages you notice a cross-over in vocabulary. As I learned other languages before, it didn't really give me a better understanding of languages per se (I'd actually studied linguistics by that time already), but I can imagine that it makes it easier to acquire natural languages. I'm not familiar with Ido, so I cannot say anything specifically to that.
I'm not familar with either of them, I was just trying to understand to understand if they are useful in some ways.
I wanted to know if learning languages like that is not a bit like learning about Krypton planet from DC Comics. Based on what I found on wikipedia, it seems like ido is an improved version of esperanto so I thought it would be easier. May you please tell me in which country Esperanto is spoken.
@Superhuman Esperanto is spoken all over the world.
The only place where I've heard of Esperanto is on the web. Can you at least give me a country where it is spoken?
I have spoken it in the UK, and I personally know of speakers in France and Germany.
@SuperHuman "Can you at least give me a country where it is spoken?" — I am quite sure there are Esperanto communities in pretty much every country of the world. Maybe with the exception of DPRK and Vatican.
@Radovan What about Ido since my question was about the easier Ido language?
@Superhuman well, Esperanto has a vibrant (though slowly declining) worldwide community, a lot of literature, radio broadcasts, huge online presence... I am not familiar with Ido community, but I guess apart from a handful of enthusiasts and some literature it has none of that in any significant volume. And the only significant reasons why Ido would be easier (depends on what languages you already speak, of course) than Esperanto is more familiar vocabulary for Romance language speakers, and the lack of accusative.
@RadovanGarabík -- You can take the Vatican off that list. There is a rather active association of Catholic Esperantists and Pope Pius X was apparently rather in favour of the E-o movement. And the Vatican broadcasts in Esperanto as well several times a week.
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1452 | How to modernize a dead language vocabulary
This is an enthusiastic question: Currently I'm studying Akkadian for fun, but as it is a dead language, the vocabulary may have some missing words/concepts. For example, I didn`t found a word for "steel", or some mathematical terms (I'm a mathematician). How could I borrow some modern word to akkadian? Form which language should I look for? (hebrew? arabic?) How could the word be "transformed" to look akkadian?
Consider looking at what has been done with Latin and Hebrew to modernize their vocabularies.
I would read up on the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. As a bonus, Hebrew is in the same language family and you should be able to find plenty of workable techniques. You can also look at the (less successful) attempts to revive Celtic languages in Europe. בהצלחה!
Thanks all for giving hints and orientation.
There are several possible approaches here, and which you choose will depend somewhat on what your goals are for this project.
The simplest option would be to borrow the term as a loanword from a globally hegemonic language of today (likely English), making only the phonetic adaptations necessary to fit Akkadian phonology (e.g. you don't have any dental fricatives /θ ð/, so would need to replace these with some other consonant, e.g. the alveolar stops /t d/).
With this approach, you might have a word for steel as šaṭīlu- (š being the only coronal fricative, the a being inserted to break up the illegal onset cluster, and the unaspirated t being borrowed as emphatic).
You can instead choose to borrow the word from a language that was hegemonic at some point in the past, likely when the new technology was introduced. If you're doing this though, you need to be aware of the stage in the language's development you're borrowing into.
With this approach, you could do what Arabic and Hebrew did and borrow Middle Persian pwlʾpt' (pōlāwad), possibly as something like pūlâdu-, and then apply whatever sound changes would be expected to occur since the borrowing (if any).
You could also coin a word based on native roots, looking at the etymologies for the missing words in related or nearby languages (this technique was used a lot in the revival of Hebrew).
With this approach, your word for steel might be kûnu- (possibly phonemically kônu-, if there was an o phoneme) from the verb kânu "to be firm", following the same etymology as that of English "steel".
The other of your major choices is to look at the word in related languages, and construct what the Akkadian cognate would be, had the word existed at the Proto-Semitic stage (something that certainly would not have been the case here, seeing as Proto-Semitic predates the discovery of steel or most of mathematics by quite some time).
Unfortunately I can't use "steel" as an example here very well, because most of the nearby Semitic languages borrowed their word from Persian. Instead lets look at "equation". Here the Arabic word is مُعَادَلَة muʿādala, a verbal noun of a Form III verb. Form III verbs in Arabic (which promote the indirect object of a Form I verb to their direct object) do not have a direct cognate class in Akkadian, but the Gt-stem has the closest semantics in this case. The equivalent construction then might be something like tedāltu-.
As I say, which approach you should take depends on your goals.
Borrowing from a modern hegemonic language is probably the easiest if you just want to make it usable today, and aren't interested in some alternate history for the language where it survived.
Borrowing from a formerly hegemonic language on the other hand, is good if you are interested in that alternate history, and intend to apply various sound changes from the historical Akkadian to your present day form.
Coining the word from native roots also works well if you're not interested in alternate history, but is likely to make it harder for other people to learn. This method has historically been popular only when there is already a community who uses the language (in at least some contexts), rather than those where someone is trying to build the community from the ground up.
Constructing plausible cognates tends to make the most sense for accidental gaps in the lexicon where a word did presumably exist, in other instances it would be pretty unusual.
Languages adopt new words (in the sense you're talking about) four ways:
Immigration: simply borrow a word from another language, with some phonological changes if necessary to adapt it to the new language. English, as possibly the greatest vocabulary thief in history, does this all the time. Examples are too numerous to mention.
Adaptation/Evolution: you take an existing word from a related concept and either use it directly with a new meaning, or modify it a bit to differentiate it from the original word and meaning, or simply have the concept itself change over time. As an example, the word "toilet" made the transition "cloth cover for folded clothes" > "cloth cover for a dressing table" > "things related to dressing" > "washing (ie, thing you do prior to dressing" > "room where you wash" > "room for personal hygiene" > "the ceramic thing you sit on to defecate".
Metaphor: use a word or phrase that has some kind of metaphorical association with what you want to name. As an example, "steel" comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning something like "to stand fast" (ie, be resilient). A computer mouse comes from the shape and cord resembling a real mouse and its tail, as a more modern example.
Deliberate coinage: more likely a modern phenomenon, but it could happen. See, for example, "kleenex"
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1531 | How do I change the word order of this complex sentence?
I have an English sentence that I need to switch the word order of so I can translate it into my conlang smoothly, but the sentence is pretty complex and I’m not sure how to go about it. The sentence is “ I feel like he would like to try it after then.” I would like to switch the word order to SOV. Thanks in advance!
Inspired by what little I know of Japanese: “I {he {it try} then-after like-would}-like feel” (with two unrelated senses of ‘like’ unfortunately).
Perhaps the best way is to transate it into a different natlang, preferrably one with the intended word order.
While German is not your typical SOV language (what is typical, after all?), it is close:
Ich habe das Gefühl, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde. [1]
Note there are aready some idiomatic differences from English: "to feel like" is "das Gefühl haben", i.e. "to have the feeling", and the subordinating conjunction is obligatory (as in majority of European languages). Also note that "to try it" is kind of ambiguous in English.
To turn it into a better SOV sentence, let's rearrange the word order a bit:
Ich das Gefühl habe, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.
No longer syntacticaly correct German, but a good start for the translation. Also note that word order classification does not creeate hard constraints - especially in complex sentences, some constituents just like to stick together or to the clause boundaries[2]. So we can turn it into:
Das Gefühl habe ich, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.
which in fact is again better German (a bit poetic perhaps).
Remove pronouns as fit if your conlang is a pro-drop one, and you can start translating...
[1] corrections are welcome, this is just my best bet
[2] let's try the sentence in Slovak: "Mám pocit, že by to rád potom vyskúšal". (have-1P-SG feeling-ACC that-CONJ would-AUX it-ACC like-MSC then try-PAST). Almost perfect SOV, despite Slovak being prototypically SVO. Note that the "by" auxilliary particle turns the verb into a conditional, but it does not have to be next to the verb itself. And as a very happy pro-drop language, there are almost no pronouns left, and the word order is quite fixed (changing it would remain grammatical, but bring emphasis to different parts of the sentence)
Very well thought out answer, thanks a lot!
Presto Didgo Abbaca da Barabba Ortem Changeo!
“I feel like he would like to try it after then.”
I as if he would like to try it after then feel.
This example changes the main verb only, leaving the relative clause SV.
I as if to try it after then would like he feel.
This example makes the main clause SOV and the subordinate clause OVS.
I as if he to try it would like after then feel.
This one changes both the main and subordinate clause SOV.
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1575 | is it naturalistic for a language to change alignment like this?
I'm working on another conlang for my world and its evolution, and one of the defining qualities of its handling for transitive verbs in sentences is using nominative-accusative alignment, but switching sentence structure from SVO to VOS when doing so. what im wondering is if it could potentially make sense that a language that does this would switch from nominative-accusative to ergative-absolutive (on the idea of languages preferring context initial grammar rules) without changing the sentence structure again, and if so, are there any natural languages which have ever done anything similar?
VOS languages are rare, but frequent enough for some analysis. Combining basic word order and alignment in the WALS sample we find two languages with VOS and absolutive/ergative alignment, and only one language with VOS and nominative/accusative alignment. This is not enough data to draw statistical conclusions, but probably enough to justify a switch of alignment in your conlang as naturalistic.
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1555 | phonology design for a nonhuman species
I'm working on an alien species for a fantasy-ish world I'm making, and I recently started on making a language for them. For the most part, their consonant-making abilities are very similar to humans, but with one very key difference: alveolar plosives can only appear in affricates, and not by themselves, due to having their tongue operate with two muscles conjoined in parallel instead of meeting at a point, making all alveolar plosives (or any other similar consonants that involve pressing the tip of the tongue against something) be affricates. What I'm curious about is, with that in mind, would it be reasonable for such a species to naturalistically have all of (in xSAMPA) /ts s dz z tS S dZ Z/, or even have alveolar affricates at all?
additional question: if not, would it make more sense for the language to have only palatal consonant analogs, but not any alveolar consonants?
(also I'm not entirely sure this is the right stackexchange branch to go to for help on something like this, so if it would better fit on the wordlbuilding one or something, please let me know so i can move it)
Zackbuildit777, welcome to this site. Your question is perfectly fitting for this site and I'm sure it will attract some good answers.
@jk-ReinstateMonica thats good, because im likely going to also be asking similar questions in the future, since finding information about phonemic sounds for nonhuman species is even harder than it might first seem, due to the very little research scientists have into animals with similarly complex vocal communication methods as humans.
Those are some very good question!
On your first question, I'd say yes. In fact, there are natural languages that contain all these phonemes together! (e.g. Czech) Since your species does not have any alveolar plosives, one could even say that the affricates would be proportionally more common than in natural human languages (where they take a back seat to plosives) to compensate.
The one thing I'd recommend against is including voiced affricates without their voiceless counterparts; it is very rare for a language to have any voiced consonant without its voiceless analogue (this is also a language universal in the Universals Archive).
On your second question: That would be imaginable, but /s/ is among the most common consonants in natural human languages (9th most common acc. to Phoible), while /C/ is much rarer (similar for other alveolar vs palatal analogues), so I'd say lacking the former and having the latter would be rather unlikely.
Of course, this analysis is based on human languages; it's your species and language, and things could be completely different in whatever way you choose! (Like, if you want your aliens to like alveolar consonants less, maybe giving them shorter tongues, or putting their tongues further back, would be possible? I'm not an expert here, that's just a guess.)
good to know that it would likely reasonable for language evolution, as i have been told its extremely rare for a language to have an affricate without having the corresponding plosive and fricative also be phonemic.
@Zackbuildit777 Oh yeah, if you had asked about human languages, my answer would've gone more towards it being unlikely. But here, there's no plosive for the affricate to be subordinate to, so that doesn't apply anymore! (I'd still say /s/ is probably more likely to be phonemic than /ts/, but e.g. Hawaiian has /t/ and not /s/, so /ts/ without /s/ is surely good as well)
yeah, the language does have all the normal corresponding fricatives, the only weird thing is the affricates without phonemic corresponding plosives. thank you!
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1563 | Evolution of irregular declensions and conjugations from reconstructed proto-languages
In designing an artificial dialect of the Greek Language, most words and inflections have predictable patterns with a well-guessed/documented evolution which show the origin of the word's roots and stems. This makes it fairly easy to go back in time, change the evolution of the sounds or orthography, and use an existing vocabulary from the already existing Greek Language to create an artificial dialect.
For example, I could thus look at the dialectical declension of a word like σύ, and see that in the Genitive, Attic renders it σοῦ, Ionic σεῦ and others σέο, and infer that the root/stem is σε-, and that the contraction rules show that the irregular declension is σε-ο, then insert my own sound changes based off my own set of rules.
Likewise I can find out that σφᾶς is a normal contraction of σφέας or σφέανς with an irregular enclitic of σφε.
What I can't seem to do is take a root that is only used in the dual and transfer it to the plural. In the rare First Person dual, the pronouns used are (NA) νώ and (DG) νῷν. I want to make a plural pronoun using that root in the manner of Latin "nos" instead of ἡμεῖς (which possibly reconstructs from ἀσμέες or the likes.)
I can conjecture several possibilities based off a pattern, like (NADG) νῷ, νώς, νῷς, νῶν. But these have no real basis in the Greek evolution from its first ancestors to Classical Greek. I can't use σφεῖς or σφώ or σφωέ to trace a pattern without a good reason, because all of them seem to have their patterns traced from the evolution of ὑμεῖς, σφι, and νώ.
Where do irregular declensions come from, and how are they most authentically reproduced in a constructed dialect?
I am not a professional, so please give me some leeway if I have made errors presenting this question.
I know some fellow conlangers are much more proficient in Greek and its history than me, therefore I want to concentrate on some more general aspects of the question.
First of all, you are the conlang designer, so you always have the license to do what you want, even in a very naturalistic and diachronic framework.
Second, irregularities can enter a language in many different ways. Very frequent function words tend to acquire phonological simplifications like contractions that the majority of words don't show. One can see suppletion, i.e., the merger of different forms of different origins into one paradigm. One can see cross-borrowing between different dialects, adding to irregularities in sound laws.
Third, it is easier to work in a forward direction in time than backward or sideward (from one dialect to another at the same time). The outcome of sound shifts is usually unique (taking all constraints by the environment into account), but the progenitor of a given form often isn't. So just postulate a plausible progenitor and evolve it according to the rules you set for yourself. If you don't like the results, try another one. You can play around with this. And don't forget the first point: You are the conlang designer, you decide.
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1574 | If there was a group of perfect-pitched alien, who spoke in whistles, would humans without perfect pitch be able to learn that language of whistles?
Essentially, without perfect pitch, could someone learn a language that requires you to have the pitch perfect.
If perfect pitch is required, then someone without perfect pitch probably could not learn the language - but human ingenuity would probably end up developing a translator device for it.
@JeffZeitlin, great idea!
I think you'll need to clarify some things about your aliens: perfect pitch just means you can identify a "musical note" when it's played. It doesn't mean you can sing. Or whistle. My question is: what is the correlation between the high incidence of perfect pitch in that species and their capacity for language and also between langue and parole. As written, I see no reason whatsoever than a professionally trained singer couldn't join in that conversation.
@elemtilas, you’re right, I just didn’t know if perfect pitch was necessary to understand the language.
I think no one knows this answer for the general case because no one knows whether all people can learn perfect pitch. I don't think we know what causes this "talent" to say what are its limitations. There is evidence that some people can.
A 2015 study found that some adults can acquire perfect pitch for months. Presumably the initial study's methods are theoretically improvable and repeatable. If you can accept the sci-fi speculation that warp drive is plausible with effort, then surely you can accept the lesser speculation that perfect pitch is plausible with effort. If you want to make the solution more colorful, then maybe write that medically inducing some kind of synesthesia is easier than teaching conscious, full-speed perfect pitch ;)
I like that you brought scientific proof for me. Thank!
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1571 | How would a language of whistles work
The language consists of 3 different tones: high, medium, and low. There are trills (~), chords(=), neutral tones (-), rising tones (<), falling tones (>), and rising/falling tones (^). Would the combinations of the whistles make words, or would the collection of tones limit it to a 6 letter alphabet?
There's a literature on this which I have not read. As well as drum speech in West Africa, I various whistle languages around the world can operate at least like a shorthand for a shared spoken language. Suppose you could only whistle the vowels, tones, and prosody. Still you could make "Hello," "Come back," "Run," "Help" clear even for the novice. Perhaps extant whistle languages do even more!
If your speakers have or can learn perfect pitch, you can multiply a number of pitches, length, length of pause, etc. I am sure musical conlangers have worked up more inspiration :)
@Vir, Thanks, I hadn’t thought of pauses or length of tones/pause. The species I was going to make communicate (in a sci-fi book) would definitely have perfect pitch.
Yea! About lengths, even novice musicians can hear several fractions of a note, eh? If for instance everybody knew that any "letter" was going to be at least a half note, then quarter note combinations of your other elements could multiply your possible combinations once again, eh? So you could not just have 12 notes of the chromatic scale possible for each "letter", but 12*12=144 before you get into the "tone" you put on it, the variable spacing, etc: combinations overmatching combinations of English's ~26 letters. Give flavor by limiting this excess with "phonotactics."
Actually, with these elements discussed, you have so very much more "material" than you need just to make words, some others can indicate grammatical information: tense, case, part of speech, plurality...
Real-world "whistled languages" are generally adaptations of spoken languages, taking some aspect of the phonology (tone, prosody, sometimes formants) and conveying it through whistling. A lot of information is lost, but there's enough redundancy that native speakers can still understand—much like how English-speakers can understand whispering, which discards most information about voicing, or styles of singing that discard some formant information.
It sounds like that's not what you're looking for, though. The rest of the answer is built on the assumption that you're trying to make a language which is only whistled, rather than using whistling as a lossy way of conveying a spoken language.
Languages with very few phonemes exist in real life, so an inventory like that is plausible enough. If you want to figure out what the words would look like, I think this is a place where some basic information theory could be useful.
The core idea behind information theory is that you can consider a lot of different things (including a spoken language) as a series of discrete signals, transmitted one at a time from a source to a receiver, and then use some mathematical structures to analyze that. If you've got three tones and six contours, and each phoneme consists of exactly one tone and one contour, then you've got eighteen possible signals. Not knowing anything else about your language, this means you can transmit a bit over two bits of information per phoneme. Each English word generally conveys about eight bits of information (given context and such)—so completely ignoring phonotactics, syntax, and various other aspects of your language, you could theoretically encode the same amount of information as an English word with four phonemes.
Once you add those aspects in, the information load per phoneme will probably decrease somewhat (since all the signals won't be equally probable in all contexts), so I'd expect it to take about six of your tone-plus-contour phonemes to convey the equivalent of one English word. That sounds like a plausible word size to me.
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1648 | What parts of speech (nouns, adj., verbs, etc.) could be limited to make a language with fewer words?
Essentially, in the English language how many adjectives, nouns, adverbs, verbs, etc. could be combined to make the language possess a single word for a term. E.g. huge, giant, enormous, and big could all just go under big.
Remember that parts of speech are language-specific. Something that's an "adjective" in English probably isn't in Japanese and Swahili. Are you asking specifically about English words here, or do you mean something else with your categories (e.g. predicates, entities, etc)?
George Orwell proposed that this had been done to English to create Newspeak in his novel 1984.
The thing about languages is that they can all say the same things. If it can't say something, it hasn't come across the concept yet. And when it has, it will make up or borrow a word to fill the gap. As a result, there will always be at least one "open" class of words, "open" meaning it can accept new members, like the classes "noun", "verb" and "adjective" in English.
This is not to say that those particular classes must be open for all languages, just that at least one of them must be (or even a different one entirely, like prepositions, one of English's closed classes - although I don't know of any examples of that...).
In a language with a closed verb class, for instance, new "verbs" are one of the native verbs with a noun or adjective complement, basically "I do a run" or "I am a runner" instead of "I run". If nouns are closed, new "nouns" are a native noun with a verb or adjective complement, "one who paints" or "painting one" for "painter", for example.
That last example also highlights another way that word classes can be "closed": inflection and derivation. Consider the case of English adverbs. Under a very niche definition that I just made up (but probably already exists in some grammar somewhere), this is a closed class: The only way new adverbs show up is when a new adjective shows up, and the productive -ly suffix turns it into an adverb. New adverbial concepts either take an adjective and stick on -ly or take a noun and stick it into a prepositional phrase.
Side note: this is what Esperanto - the person - was trying to do with Esperanto - the language: turn word class into an inflectional paradigm. The problem is, he was inconsistent. A broso is a brush - a thing that brushes - but a kombo is an act of combing, not a thing that combs. This is not to say that this is impossible, but you do have to be careful.
With all that out of the way, there's another problem. Using your example: while big, huge, giant and enormous all denote (that is, mean) the same thing, they connote (that is, imply) different things. "Enormous" is bigger than "huge" is bigger than "big". "Giant" is around "huge", but also implies that what is big isn't normally big, and sees use as a noun (meaning giant human). If you want to get around this, you'll need inflectional paradigms to change connotations, and connotation is a much wibblier concept than denotation - and denotation is plenty wibbly, which is why we even have different words for different things in the first place!
But if you're going to ignore all of that, then what you have is a pidgin at best, and an Orwellian nightmare at worst.
This question is probably more suited for the English stackexchange, where it would be promptly closed (or at least that's my gut feeling).
However, there is a way to estimate the number: the (English) WordNet groups words into synsets, each synset having a precise, pinpointed meaning (and covers a lot of vocabulary). So, for each of the parts of speech, just divide the number of words (literals) by the number of synsets to get the ratio of "words per meaning". For example, adjectives have the ratio 1.62.
However, there is a catch: words often mean more than just one thing, English is especially (for a European language) rich in homonymy. So, e.g. the noun giant has 7 different meanings, some of them perhaps differing only slightly, but some of them meaning very different things. Thus if you are after a quantitative number, you have to account for this somehow (would you count giant once or 7 times?).
And of course, you are opening a Pandora's box, because the deeper (beyond what WordNet covers) you go into less frequent words and more specialized terminology, the more and more unexpected meanings will surface and the numbers won't tell you anything anymore.
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1592 | How do trade languages form?
I’ve read books (mainly Star Wars) that tend to have a species language (e.g. cheunh for chiss) and then trade languages that the greater part of a region also speaks (e.g. Minniesiat and Sy Binsti). That made me curious as to how trade languages form.
The linguistic term for this is Pidgin language and there is a lot of research to be found under this label.
@jk-ReinstateMonica Or, depending on context, it may be a lingua franca (or any of the other names), or a de-facto auxlang, or even a conlang originally created to be an auxlang (like Esperanto, Ido, and Interlingua)
There are a few different uses of the term "trade language".
One is a language that lots of different groups learn as an L2 (i.e. not as their native language) because it's useful for trade. For example, during the Roman era, people all across Europe and the surrounding areas had some proficiency in Latin; people in North Africa might speak Punic as their native language, and people in Iberia might speak Iberian, but they would both know enough Latin to do business with each other. Or, think about the role of English in the modern world.
These sorts of trade languages tend to come about when one group has enough social or political power that people across a wide area consider their language valuable to learn. I don't know much about Star Wars, but I can easily imagine the language of a Galactic Empire becoming one of these.
Another meaning of the term is a language variety that arises specifically for trade. In this meaning, it's something like a creole, with features of different languages combining together as people try to figure out a way to communicate across language barriers (and then pass the language down to their children). The "lingua franca" used across the Mediterranean during the Renaissance, for example, was probably one of these; people speaking Romance, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish ended up adopting words and pieces of grammar from the other languages in order to do business and ended up with an amalgam of all four. Or for another example, Arabic-speaking traders wanted to do business with Bantu-speakers along the east coast of Africa, and the end result was Swahili.
For this sort of language to arise, you need two or more groups of people with a strong need to communicate with each other, and without the sort of power differential that leads to one group's language being adopted as a default.
It's also worth noting that these two meanings aren't mutually exclusive: they're more like different points on a spectrum. When languages come into contact they always have an influence on each other; the question is how strong that influence is, and how intelligible the end result is to someone who only speaks one of the parent languages.
Essentially, the trade language is a bit of a mix of the 2+ languages that the 2+ parties speak.
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1589 | What is the second most elaborate constructed language up to date after Esperanto?
What would be the most elaborate constructed language today in terms of size of vocabulary, complexity of grammar, number of exceptions to the rules of the language, etc.?
If we exclude Esperanto, of course, which I suspect would be the number one on the list.
Esperanto doesn't come close to being number one in terms of complexity of grammar. Ithkuil laughs at that assertion.
@KeithMorrison that is why size of vocabulary, number of exceptions, and, most importantly, "etc" are all there in the question.
How can "etc" ever be the most important item on a list? If there are more important items than the ones you said, what POSSIBLE reason could there be to not list them first? Regardless, I'd say Ithkuil might not have many exceptions, but its grammar and phonology are incredibly complex, and its vocabulary still contains at least almost 1000 roots, producing 18000 stems of distinct meanings.
Size of vocabulary could be a discussion on its own and would be more objective. I don't see why Esperanto would be first in complexity of grammar or number of exceptions, and I have no idea what "etc." might include.
I'm inclined to close this as opinion based - "most elaborate" really isn't an objective description.
@curiousdannii that is why "most elaborate" is explained just after it - size of vocabulary, complexity of grammar, number of exceptions.
@Maksim But there's always tradeoffs between them, so how do you compare all those different criteria to determine which is the most elaborate overall?
My personal guess would still be IALA Interlingua which has an established language community and some tradition. It came with a rather elaborate dictionary right from the start.
But there are some contenders, Klingon driven by fandom with an active language community, and Toki Pona.
I am not sure about the status of the various projects of zonal Slavic languages like Interslavic—tracking and distinguishing all the ongoing projects with vexingly similar names and frequent renamings or synonyms is already really difficult.
Isn't Toki Pona designed specifically to be simple and minimalistic, i.e. not elaborate? (Not to say that the construction of Toki Pona was not an elaborate task; Lang's work is certainly incredible)
Sometimes, simple rules can create very complex systems, in terms of games I think of Go/Baduk/Weiqi compared to Chess. Elaboration is than the amount of theory and practice available, both Go and Chess are highly elaborate games. Judging from the Q&A to Toki Pona here, it has reached some higher level of elaboration already.
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1579 | Where do you start when you try to translate from an unknown artificial language?
The question is sparked in part by an article about Phyrexian language on Polygon.
Imagine you have a text written in a language that nobody knows. You might have some loose idea what the text is about, but that's pretty much all you know. You have no idea about the number of vowels/consonants (assuming they even makes sense for this language speakers), no idea of how the alphabet is built (and if there is even an alphabet, or a set of hieroglyphics), no idea of any grammar constructs and so on.
The question is: where and how do you start to make any sense what is written in this unknown language? What are the steps to do to translate the text from such a language?
To limit the scope of reasoning let's assume that:
The language is created by another human being.
The language is not a cypher of any sort.
No Rosetta stone is available (You don't have examples of text translated from this language).
In case of the Phyrexian language used in Magic: The Gathering, I believe it is just 10-ish cards written in it, all with English copies available. I guess those 10 cards are enough of a Rosetta stone to translate things. My question is more about what to do when there is no such Rosetta stone at all.
Thank you!
This is a rather hard question, the only script I know of that was deciphered without a bilingue is Linear B, and that was possible only because it turned out that Linear B was used to write Ancient Greek.
Let's get the negatives out first:
I believe this is truly impossible if the language is written in an idiographic script, or if you don't have a lot of written material.
Even then, it will obviously be impossible to discern the language's phonology; at best, if the script is alphabetic, you might be able to find out which letters are consonants and which are vowels/syllabic consonants, if you're lucky and the language has an easy syllable structure.
Also, you very very likely won't find out most of the vocabulary. At best, if you find a word commonly next to a picture of a tree, you could assume the word actually does mean "tree", and try to deduce the meanings of a few other words from that? (Or, as Chadwick did with Linear B, guess that a word is the name of a city) (Or, as Champollion did with Hieroglyphics, guess that a word is the name of a ruler/pharaoh, because it's written in a special way and repeats across documents)
Now, onto the positives though:
What might be your best bet to find out is actually the grammar of the unknown language! (Though still only in tiny bits) If your language is written in an alphabet or abjad, you got the jackpot, because then you can with super high probability (given enough material) identify common affixes in words, and likely identify different sets of words which use different kinds of affixes, which allows you to distinguish word classes. Given that verbs are usually rarer in sentences than nouns (English has a lot of helper verbs, but other languages don't necessarily), and particles are usually rather short, you can even identify word classes.
If you have a language written in a syllabary, this might well be possible as well, but will be harder. (Worse, though also better sometimes, the syllables might stretch across multiple parts of speech; see again the decipherment of Linear B, which relied critically on Alice Kober's insight that exactly this was happening, allowing her to identify syllables with common consonants/vowel contents, but afaik that only enables Chadwick's identification of some words as city names due to repeated consonants/vowels, e.g. ��� as Ko-No-So=Knossos)
Of course, all this is way way way way way WAY more complicated than this, might well not work at all, and is probably impossible if the language is polysynthetic or the script doesn't include spaces or the script is any more complex than just "alphabet" or just "syllabary". But at least, I hope I could give you some scope on the problem.
Wow, that was way more things to consider than I thought!
this seems like a similar problem to translating the Voynich Manuscript, which is a long text written in a still untranslated alphabetical writing system, where there are no translations of it written in any other languages, and it is seemingly unrelated to any other writing system. approximately zero words in it have been successfully translated, even though the book is full of detailed illustrations of almost everything it talks about. the main problem is that, with so little specific information on whats written, and with so little similarity to anything else, there isn't any convenient starting point for deciphering it. in order to translate something, you need to have a lot of information on what is being said. even with detailed drawings on many pages, there isn't nearly enough to figure out the individual words.
The short answer is, without some bilingual information, it's nigh impossible. I don't know of any language that was successfully deciphered without this.
But, the bilingual doesn't necessarily have to be very long! For Linear B, it was a few guesses at city names, like "Knossos". For Egyptian, it started with names of Ptolemaic rulers who were also known from Greek (Ptolemy, Cleopatra, etc). And for Phyrexian, we have some Phyrexian names translated into English and vice versa! The original decipherment hinged on "Elesh Norn" on a judge promo card, "Yawgmoth" in an illustration from a Dominaria card, and eventually the names of the other praetors and Tamiyo from the Neon Dynasty promos.
From these seven or so names, it's possible to work out how the writing system works, and from there start working at the language. In cryptography this is known as a "crib" (a bit of known information about the text you're working with) and just one or two words can make a world of difference.
The bilingual information doesn't have to be another language. In the classic SF story "Omnilingual", the breakthrough in understanding the alien language happens when the researchers find the remains of a university, and especially when they find a Periodic Table written in the language. Because they recognize the Periodic Table, they're able to translate the names of the elements.
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1587 | How to translate to Black Speech this sentence "Eye of the Sauron is always watching"?
How to translate to Black Speech phrase "Eye of the Sauron is always watching"? or more simply: "Sauron is always watching", or even more simply "Sauron is watching".
and how to write it in tengwar.
As I try to translate words: eye - hont, Sauron - Shakhbûrz. always - ûkil. watch - hon- , gon-.
I used Black Speech online translator: http://www.blackspeech.ru/los/index.php?page=5
But I doubt how to make full sentence from it. And How to write it.
I am not an expert in Black Speech, so I'm going to follow the information from the blackspeech.ru website.
The basic word order of Black Speech is SVO (subject-verb-object), as in English, so the subject is Sauron, the verb is watch, and there is no object. Adverbs (always) are to be placed after the words they modify, so we end up with
Sauron watches/is watching always
as the basic starting point. Sauron is straight forward,as there are no cases. With watch I would actually choose the translation tud-, as it has the sense of guard, which seems more appropriate here; in the third person singular this would be tudat. The adverb suffix is -arz, which gives us ûkilarz. So our sentence would be
Shakhbûrz tudat ûkilarz
With the Tengwar transcriber on the same site it would be rendered as
UPDATE: In case you want to say "Eye of Sauron", that would be the possessive ("eye Sauron-of"):
Hont Shakhbûrz-ob tudat ûkilarz
and
There are no articles, so it's either The Eye of Sauron or Eye of Sauron — there is no distinction in Black Speech.
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1671 | Can a lone superorganism develop an internal language?
I'm imagining a hypothetical lone organism on a planet. Something like Avatar, the movie's Eywa. I am envisioning it as a massive organism covering the entire surface of the planet but biologically one single coherent entity. It was always the only living thing in the planet. Language, to what I understand is a means of communication, be it chemical signalling between two rather un-intelligent, or sign language communication between chimpanzees or advanced vocalisation in case of humans - there are multiple entities in involved. This raises few questions, what would the alien's intellect, whatever it would mean for it be like ? From what I have searched from the internet, having a language is not a compulsion for having rational thought, so if presence of other entities is a roadblock, in having the urge to 'communicate' and thus develop a language, then communication can be entirely circumvented because there is only one organism here, still there could be rational thought. But even that would be a dubious scenario, would this 'internal language' be like human internal monologue ? There would also be important considerations involved here, being a lone entity will there be a concept of linguistic/ psychological 'I' and 'You' ? Will there be a concept of 'motive' ? What I'm asking it here and not elsewhere is because I'm more interested in investigating the evolution of linguistic artifacts in such a setting rather than psychological ones and I'm looking for answers discussing the questions I have come up with.
A lone, sentient being that has existed for a considerable amount of time but doesn't have an infallible memory would probably have invented a system for keeping information.
I think it does occur if chemical signaling counts. What is an endocrine system after all? Note that some hormones have different "meanings" to different animals, just as one sound or hand signal could have a different meaning in different languages.
Reminds me of the movie Arrival. At this point we can only speculate, so it’s tough to say. Perhaps as research on Cephalopoda and mycelium network communication grows, we can better answer this question.
Personally, I consider dreaming to be Homo sapiens innate form of communication. Also when the majority of us are taught our primary language during adolescence, our brain’s language centers are structurally changed.
However if we are to talk about a single entity then one may reason that Nature falls under that category. As a spiritual naturalist, I almost certainly believe that Nature does communicate but in a “language” that is nothing alike humanity’s concept of it. More… idk - body-language like. Energy, kinetic motion, is the common denominator at the root of my unsubstantiated viewpoint.
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2031 | Is there any conlang where syllables are inverse to word frequency?
Is there any conlang where the more common words are shorter, and the more syllables a word has, the rarer (in terms of occurrence) it is?
Frankly, I'd be surprised if there were languages where this wasn't case. Shorter words are easier to say and natlangs naturally make "filler words" such as pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and 'particles' - which basically means "any filler word that doesn't fit into one of the above categories" - shorter than the average word. And conlangers have noticed this, even if subconsciously, and make their words accordingly. Even Toki Pona does this, and it's words are two syllables max!
I have no data but I guess naturalistic conlangs like Interlingua and even the more schematic Esperanto have this property.
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1935 | Generate random alphabet or glyphs?
Is there a good program for generating a new alphabet or set of glyphs?
I found this which is a good start:
https://github.com/hmltn2/glyphgen/blob/master/script.js
https://undefinist.com/glyphgen/
I think it was part of a school project but the quality is excellent.
Or using AI? https://towardsdatascience.com/alphabet-gan-ai-generates-english-letters-589637068808
Hello, you might consider copying most of your question post into an answer for your question. Other people will still be able to answer, too.
Thanks. I might try to focus on an answer explaining the programming a bit more (when I understand it myself). I’m tryna understand Bézier curves a bit better, via JavaScript, and also “point groups”, using group theory to generate unique sequences of shapes. There’s this cool problem called the “Thomson problem” where you find the length between N equally distributed points in M dimensions. And you can also generate patterns as an optimization problem based on multiple constraints / cost functions using genetic algorithms or something called “annealing” Ill be learning next. Can do a write-up
Also the cognition of glyphs really interests me, how the mind parses, receives, processes, follows the shape, of a glyph. There was a painter Paul Klee who developed a whole kind of theory of visual “grammar” I think, it’s fascinated me for a long time, to know or understand it better.
Sure. Sounds like you'd be interested to make yourself a bibliography and post it as an answer.
What properties do the glyphs need to have?
You can pick the brains of AI art generators for styles and make variations. The one I tried for the purposes of answering this question couldn't do real writing correctly, which was good.
Here are some prompts, styles I tried at https://dream.ai/create
a scroll with strange writing, nightly v2
an unknown alphabet, in the style buliojourney v2
a sentence in Indus valley script, realistic
a sentence in Maya writing, realistic
a sentence in Mongolian writing, buliojourney v2
Wow. I’m blown away. I was exploring “point groups” in group theory, and Bézier curves, and genetic algorithms - like, algorithms to produce forms as sequences, possibly under constraints. I had forgotten about free-form asemic writing, (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing), which Dream.ai reminds me of
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1933 | Famous or memorable ways make sequences of numbers express something?
I was thinking about a way to memorize arbitrary sequences of digits by having the numbers actually represent a language, have a second meaning.
There are, presumably probably, infinite things the language of numbers could express.
One interesting property of this language unlike some human or programming languages is it is “total”: every possible arrangement of “letters” maps to an extension (its meaning, whatever the language represents).
I think there could be two primary focii in analyzing this.
One, the cognitive domain the arbitrary mathematical sequence maps to (sounds, colors, concepts, English words, other number sequences, shapes, or even all of the above?)
Two, the inherent mathematical structure or relationship between the sign and signified - is it the sum of the digits that determines its meaning? Is it a complex algorithm taking various functions on each incoming digit, individually? And so on.
I am just interested in any interesting number languages of any kind that have been developed in history. (Of course, we could start by thinking about ASCII-encoding and UTF-8, and maybe imagine how a base-10 encoding could map to some 10 fundamental elements of human communication, so as to always produce coherent, specific and meaningful concepts or sentences, no matter the choice of digits).
I personally like the idea of classifying all concepts by some well-known ontology and considering there to be 10 choices at each level. A level is like, a sub-concept in a hierarchy or taxonomy of concepts.
In other words, “178” could mean “crustacean”, because on level 1, we have 10 broad categories to classify all things in the universe as (exclusively or inclusively, I’m not sure if categories could overlap) - 1 is “life” - the next level subdivides life into types, so maybe 7 is “aquatic” - and then somehow 8 is the crustacean family. Another digit brings us more specific - 1785 is “Alaskan King Crab” (or something, for example).
The big difficulty with an encoding like this is that the functional load is distributed very unevenly across the syllables. If you miss the sixth digit/syllable, that's not going to affect much. But if you misunderstand the first digit/syllable, now the entire meaning has gone awry! For human communication, it's best to distribute this functional load as evenly as possible, because speech is a very noisy channel. So these encodings don't tend to be very practical as languages.
But you can find some conlangs experimenting in this direction. The most famous is probably Solresol, which encodes everything in base seven (so that it can use the seven steps of a major scale or the seven classical colors). The encoding changes depending on the length of the word:
One- and two-note words are the most common function words
Two-note words with repeated notes are verb tenses
Two-note words without repeated notes generally come in pairs; reverse the order of notes to get the other element of a pair (like fasol "why" and solfa "because", or sido "same" and dosi "other")
Three-note words are the most common content words
Three-note words with a pair of repeated notes are the most common
If a three-note word has a clear opposite, reversing the order of the notes produces it
Four-note words are other content words
The combination of the first notes, and whether or not the word has a pair of repeated notes, sorts it into one of 14 categories
Five-note words are types of plants, animals, and minerals
The 14 categories don't have a consistent system of subcategorization, but it's a start!
Wow, right on point, thanks.
What if the “load distribution” was a very specific object in the language, sort of like algorithms with checksums you can use to check if the message received was correct? Like, you take a “dense” language like Solresol, and apply a function to offset pre-calculated communication risk (ie, some mechanism to offset noise, various options, and to a precise, chosen degree). The language can state its own checksum formula in each message, maybe.
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1937 | Constructed language to minimize any interpersonal conflict?
Is there a conlang that tries to minimize interpersonal conflict based on a theory of how miscommunication can lead to strife?
What theory would it draw from?
For example, sometimes ambiguity of tone on social media can lead to misunderstanding and conflict, based on a misinterpretation of intention or tone.
Also, ambiguity plays a part - needing to provide context; acknowledge the other persons side, or have complete info before making judgments, not making assumptions; the need to be open, straightforward and transparent, without the ability to be sarcastic, condescending or patronizing; with a vocabulary of highly empathetically-twinged counterparts to some common words?
I've put some thought into this topic for some of the political elements of my world-building.
Let's take Non-Violent Communication for our theory.
In short, the idea is that if people can more comfortably and efficiently hear shared terms of the shared emotions and needs they experience, then they will more often be in a mood to voluntarily respond to the same. The goal is explicitly not to get people to do what you want, but to build understanding in shared terms.
This framework expects conflict in things like habitually interpreting others and telling them (directly or indirectly) how they feel or how they "make" you feel, in things like lacking a shared language for shared emotions and needs, and in things like spiking your "requests" with coercive responses or external rewards (which condition people to care about that reward, not to care about each other).
It recommends communicating via a cyclical process of 1) value-neutral observation of events, 2) statement of your own subsequent emotion where you are the cause of your own reactions (words like "mad" not words like "unimportant," which is a passive voice interpretation of the other party), 3) connecting your own experience to a shared human need (companionship, say), and 4) making a request (no coercion upon "no") for how you could meet your needs better and make life better. If your listener says no, listen for how they feel and what they need. Repeat this process to both refine your requests and make it easier to care about each other's internal and external well-being.
That's the theory.
A language could structure this with different grammatical structures for the four steps:
observation
emotion
need
request
Observation
For example, these could correspond to grammatical moods. In the observation phase, you might grammatically need to do things like to encode evidentiality more carefully, and you can conjugate for all persons.
Emotion
When using the grammatical moods for expressing emotion, suppose verbs only have conjugation for first person subjects, and you have to use quotation in the observation mood or something to reflect someone else's emotion. Moods can be limited in person in some languages: imperative and jussive (or was it hortative...) come to mind. The "prompts" of emotions might take the dative case to center the subject and predicate of emotion in the self (my conlang does this): "I anger toward it" instead of "It makes me angry." Perhaps phonological constraints somehow limit the verbs available to this part of the language, or else have some other way to prevent passive-voice pseudo-feelings like "I feel abandoned" (more an accusation or a metaphor than an emotion) here.
Need
Suppose there were noun classes for categories of needs, thereby fixing their number...
... Nah, I hope you might enjoy to continue brainstorming for yourself.
Some speculated limitations
You can't stop people from innovating your grammatical structures to go against your intention, and language does change anyway. You'd want to know more than I do about pragmatics and why some usage rules stick over time. You'd need the conception of needs, in particular, to make sense with the wider culture's notions of human nature and what's expected. You'd perhaps need some built-in nuances to play with or these formulaic constraints are going to get stale, because maybe every generation/social group will not cotton to speak exactly as people outside their set do forever.
Granting I do not currently believe language can minimize conflict in an absolute sense, I think a conlang could build some or other general theory of "conflict-reducing politeness" into its grammar.
I like that, thanks.
The genre of "logical languages", such as lojban, are designed to eliminate ambiguity as much as possible in every way (structural ambiguity, semantic ambiguity, tonal ambiguity, etc). But ambiguity still exists nonetheless. It's simply impossible to provide so much context and specify the meanings of your words so thoroughly that there's no possible alternate interpretation.
It is, as far as we know, impossible for a language to eliminate sarcasm and condescension. If the language is expressive enough to usefully explain concepts, then that explanation can be given in a condescending way. You can, of course, simply forbid this from on high: "if you're using this language to condescend, then it's not this language any more, it's some corrupted dialect". But that's probably not a useful way of minimizing conflict.
"designed to eliminate ambiguity as much as possible in every way" is not a fair characterization of Lojban at all. It really only attempts to eliminate structural ambiguity, and offers options to mark metaphor, sarcasm, tone, emotion etc. explicitly. And even then, that probably has more to do with the design goal that the spoken and written forms of the language should be able to reflect each other exactly. As for semantics: just no. The example from the linked answer shows a semantic ambiguity that was explicitly allowed for in the design of the language - it even says so in that answer!
@KarlKnechtel My point being that eliminating semantic ambiguity "as much as possible" is not very much at all! But Lojban did specifically try to have lexemes be vague rather than ambiguous, to use their terminology, so it was considered when defining the semantics.
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1763 | Roadmap for effective construction of a novel language
I have trivially dabbled in Esperanto, Klingon, and a few other languages. Now I want to build one, and not a distorted copy of an existing one. I want to make a non-junk constructed language.
Is there a decent guide for how to build a totally novel language?
What sort of approaches are used?
Could you point to decent books, or high-quality articles on the subject?
Are there classes on the subject?
I'm looking for a better start than insert-here for dummies. What is a high-quality start?
Don't bag on «blank» for Dummies; I've had occasion to use some of them, and they tend to be well-written and organized, and a good introduction to the basics of their subject matter. That's really all they are, though; once you've gone through them, you'll want something more advanced...
One good place where many a conlanger has started out is The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder. I first encountered it as an impressionable teenager, and I think it's hard to overestimate the mark it left in that young brain of mine.
It introduces the reader to topics from phonology to grammar, as well as the overall process of creating a language. It also comes with examples and concrete tips on how to approach a project, what pitfalls to avoid and more!
They all point to this as the foundation. That is where I am looking to go. Thank you.
In addition to The Language Construction Kit that @Edvin mentioned in his answer (and linked to), Mr Rosenfelder also has Advanced Language Construction, The Conlanger’s Lexipedia, and The Syntax Construction Kit; I have and recommend all four. ALC picks up where LCK leaves off; Mr Rosenfelder recommends using the Lexipedia to assist in building the vocabulary for your language, and SCK focuses on the syntax of languages and some of the problems involved in developing viable ones.
Good follow on, and I will look at them. Thank you.
The Language Construction Kit is where I got my start, but there's also The Art of Language Invention by David J Peterson (the creator of Dothraki, among others). This is intended less as a step-by-step guide and more as a discussion of everything involved in conlanging, written by an experienced conlanger.
Good follow on, and I will look at it.
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1796 | When basing a conlang on an existing language, how can I keep the essence of that language while making it unrecognisable?
I wanted the names in my fantasy world to sound like they came from a coherent language, so I found a language that on paper (via Google translate) looks how I want my language to sound. When I wanted a name, I translated a relevant word, then changed/added/removed letters to make a new word.
The problem I have is that the new words I’ve come up with still appear to mean something in that language: Google translate either still recognises the original word or else comes up with a translation to a different word. If I change enough letters that Google no longer recognises it as any word from that language, the characteristics of the language that I like end up disappearing.
I really don’t want the original language to be recognisable, because I don’t want anyone to think that the people in my fantasy story are in any way connected to the people who speak the original language. I would like it to be an inspiration, nothing more, nothing less.
How can I go about keeping the essence of how the language looks but moving far enough away for it not to be recognisable?
Just to explain, I accepted the answer that made the most sense to me as a beginner with limited knowledge of linguistics. Theodore's answer sounds like it's probably useful to someone with more experience but I wouldn't know where to start with defining phonology and phonotactics.
Maybe a massive consonant swap can help depending on the structure of the language you are starting with. David Crystal reports in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language a game where the Javanese 20 consonants (in Javanese order) are h, d, p, m, n, t, ḍ, g, c, s || j, b, r, w, y, ṭ, k, l, ñ, ŋ are matched in a mirror fashion, i.e., h and ŋ are switched and so on. This should make words and some of the character of the resulting language different enough to be not immediately intelligible, not even for uninitiated native speakers of the starting language.
The words seem to have a lot of vowels, but this is a logical idea. I shall experiment, thank you.
You could rotate phonemes within classes, e.g.: p → t → k → p, w → l → y → r → w, i → e → a → o → u → i.
@AntonSherwood, yes that's basically what I've ended up doing.
@Mousentrude I'd love to see the result someday.
Since you're only worried about proper names with a cohesive sound, and not a whole language with grammar and all, it might be fruitful to start with the definition of the phonology and phonotactics of the language you'd like to use as a model.
Pick valid words at random according to the phonology/phonotactics and plug them into Google Translate to see whether you've created a real word by mistake. Make sure to use "detect language" because you may have accidentally made a word in another language.
You could even use software or a web-based generator using your preferred phonology.
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1734 | Help, drowning in Dative---What should inform my conlang's exact usage of it? Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?
I am a native English speaker that wanted to make a conlang.... recipe for disaster, I know.
My language has Nominative, Accusative, Dative and Genitive. I was having difficulty internalizing how to use the Dative case and went looking for guides to help familiarize myself with it.
I found that languages differ in exactly how they use it and what can count as a Dative. I had previously tried to translate the phrase "the son of god is given," and realized that I didn't know weather "god" should be in the dative or not. The language treats "of god" in this case as an adjective. Since it's a noun shouldn't it have nominative marking, which is the "default" or should/could anything that's not nominative or accusative get shoehorned into dative marking?
So in summery:
-Does anyone have recommendations for resources that provide a better perspective on what datives can be like in different languages?
-What do languages tend to do when a word doesn't fit into any of their cases-- what does it default to?
-What if anything should inform my decision on how the dative is used?
Out of curiosity, what is your genitive for, if not for "of god"?
The names of cases are pretty arbitrary -- there is no law that a language has to have any particular cases.
Many inflected languages express functions through particular endings; for example, the actor of a given action, the thing/object the action affects, or the target of the action. As these are similar across languages, philologists are using the same names for these paradigms of endings, and call them cases, using the names from Latin grammar.
So the nominative indicates who executes an action, the accusative expresses the object or thing, and the dative the target. The genitive expresses possesion.
Now in English we don't really have cases (apart from pronouns), as function is expressed by word order or through prepositions.
The girl gives the dog a bone
The nominative is the default first noun group, and because give takes two objects, the dog is the 'dative' and 'a bone' is the accusative. But they're not marked. If you swap them around, you need to use a preposition:
The girl gives a bone to the dog
(You can also insert a preposition into the first example for emphasis: The girl gives to the dog a bone (and to the cat a piece of string))
So when designing your own language, you don't need to start off with cases a priori. Think about the functions you need to express, and then think of a way how to express them using morphology (word endings) or syntax (word order, prepositions/particles).
In your example, the son of god is given, one would call of god a genitive; German: "der Sohn Gottes", Latin: "filius dei" (note that English uses of, whereas German and Latin use endings). The son is nominative; as the whole example is in the passive voice and it is the subject. (It would be in the accusative if it was X gives the son of god).
So my advice is: if you're unclear about grammar, simply think of the functional relationships between the words. This is usually what cases express, and they are realised in different ways in different languages. If your conlang is not inflected, you use prepositions, otherwise endings. Whatever floats your boat... But don't get fixated on linguistic terminology from a specific language. Esperanto, for example, does not have a dative, but uses prepositions instead to express an indirect object (the dog in the example above), but the accusative for the direct object (la knabino donas al hundo oston, or la knabino donas oston al hundo)
As an example: give (as a conceptual act) has the following 'slots'
actor
object
recipient
When you use a word expressing the concept of giving, these are the slots you need to fill (some are optional sometimes). How do you distinguish the slot fillers from each other? This is where your word endings or prepositions as markers come in.
English absolutely has a genitive for (singular) nouns. The apple's seeds, the tree's fruit, the King of England's crown. It's just marked with an enclitic instead of a suffix.
@AndrewRay Yes, sloppy formulation on my part. What I really meant was cases marked through word endings.
Ask a Native Speaker
Seriously.
You can look in grammars and check out WALS and CALS, but really I'd suggest introspection. Let your inner native speaking guide show you how her language works.
For example, you've told us that "of God" (and presumably other similar phrases like "of wood" and "of England") is 'treated as an adjective'. What this tells me is that, leaving aside theological considerations and matters of scriptural exegesis & translation, properties like origin and constitution the like can't be nominal.
So, "of England" is always going to be "English"; "of wood" is always going to be "wooden". I'd suspect that "of God" is thus always going to be "divine" or "godly".
As you talk with her about her language, your understanding of how it works will improve.
This is but one way to create a language. There are other ways, too.
Perfectly good to use any case for this, but I will submit that if a particular case happens to fill this role, "dative" is probably not a great name for it.
Well, first of all, every language uses its cases differently. Even though both Latin and German have a "nominative" case, they're not used in exactly the same way. This means there's not really a resource describing what the "dative" means in different languages, because the name is really just a label; more often you'll find a resource describing what all the cases are like in one specific language.
The name "dative" comes from the Latin word for "give", because that's one of its most obvious uses: when you have a verb like "give" that takes three nouns, the third one usually goes in the dative. For the same reason, it's sometimes called the "indirect object case": conventionally, the first noun attached to a verb is called the subject, the second one is called the direct object, and the third one is called the indirect object.
But in Latin, that wasn't its main purpose. The real purpose of the dative case in Latin is to indicate who benefits from an action. The person who benefits from giving is the recipient, for example. But it's also used with verbs that take less than three nouns. The person experiencing an emotion is given in the dative (mihi placet "this pleases me"), as is the person making use of a thing (mihi nomen "my name"), and the person whose perspective is being referenced (mihi vidētur "it seems to me").
In Greek, on the other hand, the dative tended to indicate the circumstances of something. In Greek you can use the dative to indicate someone who was nearby during an event, even if they weren't directly involved, or the time or place where it happened. In Latin, other cases or prepositions are used for this.
To answer your explicit question, it is common for languages to have a "default" case when nothing else applies. In Latin this is the nominative; in English, the accusative. (Think about which form you use when there's no verb in the sentence: "who's there?" "me", not *"I".) But it's generally used when nothing in the sentence assigns the noun a different case. It sounds like "of god" here has a specific role it's been assigned—a modifier to "son"—and that role would normally give it a case. I don't know how the cases work in your particular conlang, but Latin and English would both use the genitive here (filius deī, "the god's son").
I'd like to focus on the second title question:
Do languages ever have a "miscellaneous" case?
Yes. Hindi's oblique case comes to mind. Subject and direct objects are very common, not very remarkable. They take the normal noun form/case. Hindi (re)marks miscellaneous nouns with the oblique, "Non-Subject-Non-Direct-Object" case. Hindi goes SOV:
I donations want.
I boxes want.
I donations boxes want.
Wait, what do you want, donations or boxes? What's the other one doing?
Do you want donations in boxes?
Donations of boxes?
Boxes of donations?
Boxes for donations...?
Whichever of these non-direct-object-nouns it is, Hindi marks it with the oblique (not-subject-not-direct-object) case AND then specifies what it's doing with a postposition (rain Spain in). Sometimes the postposition is implied (I 8:00 ate), but you can tell it from the direct object because it is still marked oblique.
Similarly, it shows up (that I know of) two other times nouns are doing something miscellaneous.
Mark a noun an adverb: I contentment watched. -> I watched contentedly.
It makes numbers not-literally: It's millions and millions [read: a lot] worth.
In conclusion, in this topic, you're used to English preposition and you're trying to tell when to mark nouns with specific cases. Hindi uses oblique case to split the difference.
First of all, I apologize for my English. My native language is Czech. This language contains seven cases: 1. nominative, 2. genitive, 3. dative, 4. accuzative, 5. vocative, 6. locative, 7. instrumental.
In the Czech language, the dative often expresses "the addressee of a verb with two objects". That's the definition.
To an English speaker, I would explain it like this: if I have a verb that expresses the "movement" of something to something, "to something" will be in the dative form. By the verb that expresses "movement" I mean, for example, to go, to run, to give, to lend, to send, to tell, to write...
Examples:
He gave the dog a bone. Dog is dative, because he is the addressee of the bone.
He explained it to me. "Me" is dative, because I am the adresser of the explanation.
I'll go to that tree over there. The tree is dative because it is the addressee of my future presence.
For inspiration, you can read something about Old Norse, it also uses four cases.
P.S. "the son of god is given", "god" is genitive.
P.P.S. A Word always fit into some case but the default case is nominative.
The dative is indeed a very diverse case, reading some teaching grammars of languages with a dative (e.g., Latin, Classical Greek, and German) or a preposition close to the dative case (Italian and French) can inform you about possible usages of the Dative.
An interesting thing are dative external possessors (as Haspelmath calls it), one of the common features of the Standard Average European sprachbund, see this question on Esperanto here and this question on esperanto.se, but absent from English.
For your question: God could be an external possessor in the sentence A son was given but this would not mean the same as in Christian theology where mankind is the external possessor of the Son of God.
At the end of the day, it is your conlang, and the dative will mean what you want it to mean. Test what sounds right to you.
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1847 | What's the best repository of spoken language samples with romanization included that I can use for inspiration?
I'll often scout the ILoveLanguages! channel on YouTube for inspiration for what aesthetic to use, because its videos typically display a relatively long sample with both spoken audio and a romanized transcription; this is useful for assessing whether an aesthetic I think looks cool on paper actually sounds as cool in practice.
But I have multiple problems with it as well. It very often seems not to have samples of many of the Caucasian, Ethiopian, Berber and Pacific Northwest languages I'm interested in - which is not helped by the fact that it seems like most of the older videos were purged a while ago? (Some languages from these areas, like Haida, Tlingit, Ossetian and Kabardian, seem to have had a video some time in the past, got deleted, but then got re-uploaded somewhere or by someone else?) The background music is distracting. Their relatively recent shift to summarizing culture as well as the languages, in the same video, means something like 2/3 of the content in any video is now irrelevant for my purposes. Smooshing multiple languages into one video (e.g. Chechen/Ingush, instead of just a seperate Chechen video and Ingush video) cuts up one perfectly good long-form sample into a bunch of unhelpfully short samples, and interlacing the different languages makes it unnecessarily hard to extract the desired information about just one of them.
I'm aware of a couple other sources of spoken language samples in a standardized format. Omniglot sometimes has spoken samples of the UDHR article 1 along with its transcription, but it's not consistently present, the transcription is not always romanized, and UDHR1 is just in general too short a sample. Wikitongues is good for having a large volume of long spoken samples that include some of the more obscure languages, but they have no transcription at all, romanized or otherwise, so it's rarely clear how to choose my phonology/phonotactics/shapes of my morpheme to be able to replicate the sound and feel.
Is anyone familiar with a better collection of the sort of long-form spoken samples with romanization that I can use for scouting interesting language aesthetics?
This is a very good question! Looking forward for answers ...
Romanization is the act of converting text from a different writing system to Latin script using a consistent method. As such, technically, if you have either a sound or text sample and a certain system designed for said language, everything can be transcribed (if it's spoken) or transliterated (if it's written). There will always be some trade offs and imperfections because the target language usually contains systems of distinctions that is incommensurable with the script of the reader's language. That's why transcription with deeper level such as IPA exists—limitations of the limited letters of Latin script greatly expanded with the use of any typographic glyphs (diacritics, various combinings, or any method to create new graphemes to represent some degree of detail) available and constructed in some way to explain the multitude of phones.
To answer the question, there are no list of such sites I know of (yet), although it'd be nice to know one myself. But if you don't mind doing a bit of work, there are standards organizations that govern most of the languages, and some documentations of them are available on the net. There are ISO, ALA-LC, PCGN/BGN, Yale's systems, and many regional systems available. Such documentations are useful to proceed to do any romanization with whatever source you have.
I hoard articles and a handful of grammar documentation of world languages, and my personal method is to read grammar books and study how they treat all the distinctive phones has proven useful. A bit much for a safari, but it gets the immersion right.
Not a wow answer, I know. Feel free to improve this, though.
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2156 | Extending venitives/andatives
I'm in the middle of redesigning the verb paradigm for one of my languages, and I'm confronted with the dilemma of knowing that I want a prefix that looks like this, placed there for aesthetic reasons, but not knowing what this prefix is supposed to actually do. I really like marking categories on the verb that evolve into ways to screw with tense or argument structure in really un-straightforward ways.
I've been toying with the idea of using this unassigned prefix to mark the venitive/andative, and I intuitively feel like that could evolve into an indirect object marker, i.e. venitive "towards here" > "in my direction" > "to me" 1.IO vs. andative "towards over there" > "towards that guy" > "to him" 3.IO. This feels like it should work, but WLG doesn't list it, so I'm doubting myself a little. Does this seem naturalistic? Would venitive > autobenefactive vs. andative > allobenefactive be more believable?
(And presumably you could also derive a 2.IO if these come from a 3-way proximity distinction system: proximal > venitive, distal > andative, but what would be the name for the thing medial would turn into?)
My main problem with this is that venitives/andatives are primarily a thing for verbs of motion, but indirect objects would presumably need to be marked on all sorts of verbs. This would require putting venitive/andative marking on non-motion verbs, but I don't know what would motivate extending venitive/andative to those verbs in the first place. Like, as an indirect object marker you could say something like e.g. "I bought flowers for her", but I'm basically positing that this evolved from an earlier *"I bought flowers moving in her direction", which doesn't make sense and I don't know why anyone would say that. So I don't know why the "moving in her direction" would get attached in the first place, and then how would it evolve into 3.IO if it's not there anymore?
How do real languages use venitives/andatives beyond just simply for verbs of motion? Is there another shift in meaning venitives/andatives can undergo to justify putting them on non-motion verbs? And bonus, if the verb can't simultaneously be using the affix to mark this alternate thing and indirect objects at the same time, then that's "screwing with argument structure in a really un-straightforward way"!
It is not uncommon for natlangs to use directional morphemes on verbs quite systematically, with very thin relations with their full meaning.
For instance, rGyalrong languages have sets of orientational prefixes, indicating up, down, upstream, downstream, eastwards, westwards,... motions, prefixed to a large number of verb forms, which take different forms depending on tense/aspect/mood of the verb they are attached to. Although they have their full meaning when used with verbs of motion, they also appear on non-motion verbs to convey TAM information, with one specific prefix being assigned to one specific verb with more or less clear semantic reason for that. For instance, the verb to eat takes the the directional prefix upwards in all past forms.
So a possible reason for your ventive/andative morphemes to appear on non-motion verb would be
The ventive/andative take different forms depending on TAM categories of the motion verbs (this could be the result of an earlier merging of morphemes)
They gradually loose their full semantic value and are later reinterpreted as TAM markers, and generalized to non-motion verbs.
It is also not uncommon for the ventive/andative to have quite large ranges of meaning, as many things can be interpreted (more or less metaphorically) as motions towards or away from the deictic here. To quote Gábor Zólyomi (An Introduction to the grammar of Sumerian, 11.3)
Apparently, the use of the ventive divides the deictic space into a “here”
and a “there” in Sumerian, and the association with the “here” may be based
not only on considerations of physical proximity. When the ventive refers to
neither the speaker nor the addressee, but to a 3rd ps. participant, then its use
seems to be extended metaphorically to function as an emphatetic deictic
element. Linguistic empathy is described as “the speaker’s attitude with respect
to who, among speech event participants (the speaker and the hearer) and the
participants of an event or state that he describes, the speaker takes sides with.”
(Kuno 1978: 174).
This use of the ventive is a logical extension of its basic deictic function to
refer to a “here-ness”, or “hither-ness”: its use therefore may imply emotional
closeness, an evaluative or subjective alignment between the writer or narrator
and the participant(s) of an event he describes.
In fact, the Sumerian ventive is so ubiquitous it was until recently labeled as a "conjugation prefix" without any clear value. So you do not necessarily need a strong motivation for generalizing it to non-motion verbs and large deictic range.
Incidentally, the Sumerian ventive also functions as a 1sg dative pronominal prefix, with the latter use having historically developed from the former, so there is indeed some "screwing with argument structure" in Sumerian resembling what you described.
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2188 | Transformed vs. untransformed objects
I had an idea to spice up the core argument cases in one of my languages: what if there were separate object cases for an object that undergoes a change of state, vs. an object that does not?
By this I mean that verbs would presumably split into two semantically-determined classes based on whether the object (e.g. "car") is materially different after the action takes place (e.g. "I painted the car red", "I hit the car with a sledgehammer", "I got the car dirty", etc.) or not (e.g. "I looked at the car", "I own the car", "I dislike the car"). The case of the object then depends on which of these two classes the verb falls in. Additionally, perhaps if a normally transformative action is counterfactual - either negative, or hypothetical, or simply irresultative - its object could be atypically marked with the untransformed case instead.
It reminds me of split S, except for applying to O instead of S. "Transformed" vs. "untransformed" seems to me like the intuitive name for this distinction. I'm aware it sounds vaguely like the Finnish partitive but IINM it is different in that, in Finnish, the partitive marks irresultative actions, i.e. actions that are not completed or are unsuccessful, but my "untransformed" case would be used even if the action is successfully completed, but just doesn't have a material effect.
I assume, because ANADEW, some natural language probably does this. I don't know what language that is though. Does anyone know what languages I should look up for inspiration?
Further - how would you even evolve this? Generalization of resultative or irresultative markers? Those normally evolve on verbs, how would they make their way onto nouns?
Another idea I had for the same language is that it could be secundative, not distinguishing direct and indirect objects at all. So the simplest explanation for where the transformed vs. untransformed cases could come from would be that they're a repurposed accusative (or absolutive) and dative case. But would that be naturalistic, does it make sense for a direct vs. indirect distinction to turn into a transformed vs. untransformed distinction? Or should I keep these two "screwing around with objects" ideas separate in two different languages?
Not exactly that, but some food for thought (Phillipine languages do it mostly on the verb): Symmetrical voice
These are called the theme and patient thematic relations.
Theme: undergoes the action but does not change its state
Patient: undergoes the action and changes its state
It's very plausible that a language would use different cases for these two roles, but I don't actually know any natural languages that do so. This question was actually asked on Linguistics.SE, but it has no answers, just one comment suggesting Finnish.
Note that "direct" vs "indirect" objects are mostly just terms of traditional English schooling. I never actually learned them either in school nor in my linguistics degree, and I can never remember which is which. I'd recommend avoiding them, and if you're making your own language you could use clearer terms, even just the actual thematic roles or the cases.
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2173 | Evolving tense from a tenseless proto-language
I'm trying to come up with a verb system as confusing as Georgian, where expressing TAM involves the combination of many affixes whose individual meaning has been lost to time.
I want the daughter language to be able to conjugate for a distinct 1) present, 2) future, 3) aorist (=perfective past), 4) imperfect (=imperfective past), and 5) perfect. Georgian can conjugate for all of those and more, and as far as I understand, Proto-Kartvelian is thought to have been tenseless, only marking aspect - so it's surely possible.
So, here's my starting point. Let's say that in the proto, verb stems were all default perfective. But taking PIE as an inspiration, let's say it could express perfective vs. imperfective vs. stative. Then you'd need a way to derive imperfective and stative forms. Let's say the stem is rendered as a noun/participle and then appended suffixed with the copula (-> stative) or "go" (-> imperfective).
Okay, so, 3 aspects... but 5 conjugations that somehow need to get squeezed out of it. Which conjugation does each stem turn into?
The perfective stem could yield either the aorist, or the future,
the imperfective stem could yield either the present, or the imperfect, and
the stative stem could yield either the present, or the perfect
For at least two of the pairs here, there's two different things it needs to yield. What is supposed to cause them to evolve to be marked differently?
I've sort of given up on using the WLG for TAM ideas because it's so incomplete; The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca, 1994) is more comprehensive. What does it suggest? Present and imperfect can both derive from the imperfective, great, but how to differentiate them if I'm trying to derive both simultaneously? Future can evolve from "to be" - wait, I was already using that - or from "to go" - wait, I was already using that too!
The thing I keep coming back to is something like the PIE augment, which marks the past tense deriving from a word for "then; at that time". But that breaks the initial goal of the individual affixes' meaning being impenetrable! The augment you can definitely pick out and say "this particular part is what makes it past tense". That's just not how Georgian verbs work and I'm trying to pull off something like Georgian.
But I'm kind of out of ideas. How do languages starting only from aspect, manage to differentiate them into a variety of morphologized TAM conjugations?
Okay, so, 3 aspects... but 5 conjugations that somehow need to get squeezed out of it. Which conjugation does each stem turn into?
I think part of your issue is that your process isn't really how languages develop - they don't skip from neatly encoding a single TAM category to a messy fusional system or paradigm with gaps.
What happens is a long process of grammaticalisation. All languages can express all the meanings of tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality; what distinguishes them is which categories are grammaticalised, and how.
For example, English is a tense-prominent language, with all verbs being either PAST or NONPAST. We have one aspect affix (-ing), and a bunch of auxiliary verbs for modality, voice, and the future. But unlike modality, evidentiality is pretty much completely non-grammaticalised, you use true content words rather than function words.
So I'd suggest you try modelling the process of grammaticalisation:
First determine how people would express tense using content words.
Then reduce the morphology, and do some phonetic erosion. Turn words into clitics, and then into affixes.
As you're reducing your morphology, you'll see some sounds that are more likely to be dropped, like liquids and semivowels, whereas stops are more likely to be kept. (But of course other phonological changes might occur which mean the stops change or drop off too.) Or a dropped sound could result in an effect like palatalisation.
Perhaps one marker gets reduced to a single vowel, which itself could be lost depending on the vowels of the aspect affixes or roots. Now you have an explanation for why some stems don't distinguish between tense differences that other stems do.
Just because there is a gap doesn't mean that speakers won't want to be able to make that distinction some times. What will they do? They'll use content words! And the cycle begins again. For example, English lost its second person singular pronoun thou. But sometimes you need to be clear whether you're referring to one or many, so people would say things like "you all". In some English varieties that has been grammaticalised as y'all, though it's still considered informal. But who knows what will happen in the future!
For extra realism this cycle should be happening for each grammatical category at the same time, but in different stages. (Actually even for different forms within the one category.) If your tense forms are being cliticised, then maybe the modality forms are only at the auxiliary stage. Meanwhile people need/want to be able to express evidentiality or some different types of aspect that the grammar doesn't currently distinguish, so some semantic bleaching of their respective content words is happening...
It would be fun to implement that as a computer program :)
The evolution from Pre-Proto-Indo-European (the language reconstructed by internal reconstruction from Proto-Indo-European, the language reconstructed by the comparative method from the Indo-European languages) to Old Irish is a good illustrative example (with illustration along the way from Greek and Latin) of one way to do this.
Pre-Proto-Indo-European has two conjugations, with each verb belonging to just one of the two classes: eventive (which has both active and mediopassive endings) and stative (which has no voice distinctions).
Early on, the eventive verbs develop a set of imperative endings through unclear means, but they are clearly closely related to the previous "indicative" endings.
At some point, lexical aspect (aktionsart) develops among the eventive verb, with some verbs being felt to be imperfective, and others perfective.
The imperfective eventive verbs then start being marked with the hic-et-nunc "here and now" particle (-i in the active and -r in the mediopassive) when describing present tense events.
We have now arrived at the situation we see in Proto-Indo-European. Imperfective verbs have two sets of endings, a "primary" set for present tense events, and a "secondary" set shared with perfective verbs for past tense events.
Now we start to interpret the previously lexical aspect distinction as inflectional with what was previously various methods of deriving verbs of one lexical aspect from another as ways of inflecting a single verb.
The imperfective verb gives the present and imperfect "tense" (both with "present" or imperfective aspect), the perfective verb gives the aorist, and the old stative is reinterpreted as a perfect.
At this point, other derived verbs become grammaticalised giving subjunctive, optative, and future "tenses". The original sense of the subjunctive and optative is unclear, and these were likely grammaticalised at a very early stage (at the latest only shortly after Proto-Indo-European itself), but the future is derived from what was previously a means of forming desiderative verbs (i.e. verbs with the sense "to want to").
Now we have the following:
Present (active & mediopassive voices; indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative moods)
Future (active & mediopassive voices; indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative moods)
Imperfect (active & mediopassive voices)
Aorist (active & mediopassive voices; indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative moods)
Perfect (indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative moods)
By applying aorist endings to the perfect stem, we can then form a pluperfect (as in Greek & Latin). By applying future endings to it we can form a future perfect (as in Latin), and by applying imperfect endings to the future stem we can form a conditional (as in Old Irish).
Around this stage, Greek produces a genuine passive (as opposed to mediopassives) in certain tenses with a new suffix, possibly derived from a reflex of *dʰeh₁- "to do". Greek also introduces the augment from an earlier particle, explicitly marking past tense verbs as such (essentially the opposite of the earlier hic-et-nunc particle).
Meanwhile Italic & Celtic reinterpret the mediopassive as a true passive (with the deponents left behind as a relic of the earlier sense). Italic then replaces several of these forms with new ones formed by suffixing the stem with a reflex of *bʰuH- "to become".
Italic & Celtic also then merge the perfect and aorist, with some verbs (all of them in Italic) taking a new set of endings formed from combining both sets of endings.
Then, to get to Old Irish it's a process of accreting as many clitics as you can:
Conjunction
Relative Particle
Negative Particles
Object Pronouns
Perspectivity/Augmentation (from a prepositional preverb but now giving either a retrospective/perfect or potential sense depending on the tense of the verb)
Lexical preverbs (often without well defined semantics themselves)
Subject pronoun (the nota augens)
At this point you have a verbal complex containing up to 12 different elements which can occur in many (but not all) combinations with many elements having little in the way of obvious semantics of their own, but only really making sense when the entire complex is considered as one.
It starts looking a lot closer to Georgian than the more typically Indo-European Greek and Latin seen earlier did, and much more so than the Pre-Proto-Indo-European we started with. In fact, David Stifter, a specialist in Old Irish has gone so far as to describe it as polysynthetic (although in doing so he does use a broader definition than is typical).
I'd recommend reading his grammar of Old Irish (or his chapter in the Celtic Languages volume from the Cambridge Languages Survey) for a fuller account of Old Irish and its derivation from earlier Proto-Celtic, as well as Willi's Origins of the Greek Verb for an account of the development from Pre-Proto-Indo-European up to the typical Indo-European level of Greek and Sanskrit (but also Proto-Celtic).
The key point here is that you've got a lot of time. You don't need to derive everything in one go, but can instead do so in many stages, and even use essentially the same process multiple times (note the use in Greek of both the hic-et-nunc particle and the augment), especially if the sense of the earlier process has been lost.
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2221 | Split condition for nominalization pathway used only in certain verbs
There is a construction I would like to formally incorporate into one of my language's verb system, which involves rendering the main verb as a noun, which is then possessed by the participant that was previously the agent, and then re-incorporating it into a verb phrase as the complement of an auxiliary.
e.g. "He sleeps" -> "his sleeping is" or "I'm gardening" -> "my gardening is" or "you're getting dressed" -> "your dressing goes-along".
With "do" as the auxiliary I intuitively feel like you could derive a causative from this, if the possessed noun is made the object of the auxiliary instead of the subject: "he does my washing [of clothes/dishes/car etc.]" > "I make him wash/launder". As sort of an extension of the phrase "to do one's bidding".
What I like about this possessed nominalization strategy is that it causes the subject to be rendered as an oblique (genitive) argument, and I'm a sucker for quirky subject. You can even imagine how this could give rise to a change in morphosyntactic alignment (and I'm also a sucker for wacky morphosyntactic alignment), e.g. if this genitive subject becomes the norm for intransitives, you could see an erg/abs parent language give rise to a tripartite child language. Or if the ergative morpho-phonologically resembles the genitive, you could get a pattern that looks a lot more nom/acc, yielding split ergativity.
What I'm not sure of is what this sort of construction would probably be used for. I kind of want to make it the norm for specific tenses for specific verb classes so I can wring some ridiculous TAM-class-based split ergativity à la Georgian out of it. But I don't know which tenses/aspects or which specific verb classes because I don't quite grasp what pragmatic goal would motivate the nominalization step to begin with.
The only thing I know for sure is that it's a known antipassive construction (Andrea Sansò, Where do antipasssive constructions come from?, 2017), so maybe a voice thing? Mood? Focus?
What would this nominalizing pathway realistically get used to encode?
I think that the term light verb captures the point of this question. Specially, Iranian languages are infamous for their use of Light Verb Constructions, an this is a recent research paper on Light Verb Constructions in Iranian where you may find more inspiration for your conlang. Example 8a of that paper even includes a possessor as an agent.
Thanks to Petra Steiner for giving some useful hints here.
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2235 | Evolving mood and aspect from the same auxiliaries?
I know for one of my languages I want there to be a realis vs. irrealis distinction in the verb paradigm - but I'm not entirely sure how to get there.
In Routes towards the irrealis (Andrea Sansò, 2020), Sansò says that irrealis markers can arise from a number of auxiliary verbs, such as "to go" and "to be".
(I... do not really understand his explanation for why these would yield an irrealis meaning - yes, he explains that e.g. "to go" would first yield an itive/distal meaning, and then that distal yields a optative-desiderative, but that second step feels like a non sequitur; why would a distal yield an optative? But, sure, I'll accept it.)
The problem this causes is that I was already using those same auxiliary verbs to derive aspect - e.g. "to go" for imperfective (which turns into the present), and "to be" for stative → perfect aspect.
Hmm... maybe it could be both at once? The construction including "to go" could be both imperfective (→ present) and irrealis? But then I still need a way to express the realis present. (And, you know, irrealis in all the other tenses/aspects)
Enter an idea from Kabardian - explicitly marking verbs realis, and assuming irrealis if not:
After inflectional tense comes mood, which can be either the various mood suffixes or any non-finite morphemes. Moods denote affirmative declarative, negative, irrealis (including optatives and hortatives), interrogative, and imperative (for the jussive see (199)). Kabardian appears to be unique in the world in having a distinct mood mark for simple positive declaratives (in all but the present active tense), /-ś/ (perhaps underlyingly /-śa/ (225e)). Absence of this affirmative creates a neutral irrealis (220h) (Dumezil 1975: 101, §35), or a simple interrogative (220i).
-John Colarusso, A Grammar of Kabardian (1992), p.125, section 4.2.7.4.2
I don't know what a realis marker could evolve from. Intuitively, probably a resultative marker or something. But again, I was already using a resultative marker to derive an aspect, this time perfective aspect (→ aorist past). cf. The Evolution of Language: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World (Bybee et al., 1994), Section 3.7.
I mean honestly, having some tenses be default-realis and others be default-irrealis seems kind of cool; I'm just getting confused how to pull it off without getting in my own way and interfering with the existing origins for verbal aspect, as I currently am.
What do?
You could just use "to want" for an irrealis - it's a pretty basic concept and what you want to be true isn't necessarily true
There's also the fact that English uses "to be" for both the passive voice and the progressive aspect. The difference? The form of the main verb - the passive uses the past participle and the progressive uses the present participle
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1149 | Four vowels, with no /i/ sound. Is it possible?
My vowel phonemic inventory would be just /a/, /e/, /o/ and /u/ with no /i/ sound. Is this possible or not?
Of course it's possible, how could it not be? If you mean would it be natural, you need to specifically ask that, it's not assumed on this site.
Vowels behave like monopole magnets or strangers in a lift. If you put three strangers/magnets in the vowel chart, they will 'repel' and end up in the corners (Arabic has three vowels, in corners: /a i u/). This doesn't mean it's impossible: it could be "about to happen" (see Andrew Ray's answer) or a "stable equilibrium" could be reached without /i/ (Marshallese /a ɜ ɘ ɨ/, see bradrn's answer). Another rule about vowels is that they are slightly 'repelled' from the center.
This would be very unstable in a human language. For an example of what happens when this vowel is missing, let's look at English's Great Vowel Shift. One of the first things to change was /i:/ becoming /aj/, leaving it without /i/. Within less than a hundred years, /e:/ had migrated to take its place.
In your specific case, I would expect /e/ -> /i/, /a/ -> /e/, and /o/ -> /ɒ/ in fairly short order.
This is because vowels like to spread out on the vowel chart and become more distinct to improve understanding. Because of the limitations of your mouth making it difficult to have highly fronted low vowels, the general rule is that you will have more high vowels than mid or low vowels. Your vowel system violates this universal (with more mid vowels than high vowels).
While this is a good point, it is assuming human biology, and of course not all conlangs are for humans.
@curiousdannii Fair point. I've edited my answer to clarify that it is only applicable for human languages, such being the only ones I know anything about.
@Duncan For a three-vowel system /a e o/ I would expect it to go to /a i u/, but OP posited a four-vowel system /a e o u/, which I am anticipating would go to /e i ɒ u/. I don't mention /u/ since nothing happens to it.
For a constructed language, this is definitely possible. It is not a natural choice but not completely unseen in natural languages, according to PHOIBLE 92% of the sampled languages contain the vowel /i/.
A vowel system of /a e o u/ would certainly be unusual and unstable, and appears to be unattested, but lack of /i/ is certainly attested. Marshallese, for instance, has the thoroughly strange vowel inventory of /a ɜ ɘ ɨ/ (though [i] is present phonetically, as an allophone of /ɨ/). Kalam has a vowel system of /a e o/ (though [i] is again present phonetically, as an allophone of /j/). And, depending on which website you trust, Hixkaryana has either /a e ɨ o u/ or /æ e ɯ ɔ u/.
you could, with conlangs you really can do anything. it doesn't need to make sense.
however you should probably ask yourself what your goal is with that.
if you're going for naturalism, /i/ is one of the most universal sounds crosslinguistically, a language without /i/ is practically unheard of... even languages that don't have an /i/ in the inventory will usually have it as an allophone of something.
of course, nothing is stopping you from making a naturalistic lang with no /i/ still... it would be a weird trait, but overall, hardly any real life language is 100% naturalistic, and they tend to have strange quirks. even if this one is one of a kind, if you are going for naturalism in other areas, it could probably be passable.
if you want to make an auxlang, then again, lack of /i/ would be strange given it is easy to pronounce, and seen in practically all languages.
if you want an artlang and you simply dont like the sound of /i/ then there's not much otherwise stopping you. the same if your language is for a non-human phonology.
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1172 | Should I include morphology in my proto language?
Most, if not all natural languages have some form of morphology, such as noun case or poly-personal agreement. However, these features are usually evolved from prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and require time for them to appear. This was my original route for creating languages, to create proto languages without morphology and then to evolve them later on. I then started researching proto-indo-european and proto-afroasiatic, and I found out they had morphology such as noun cases, even though they were supposedly the original languages for their regions.
The main question is: Would it be naturalistic to insert morphology into proto-language(s)?
I am not at all certain why you would assume that protolanguages must have no morphology. PIE is just a language like any other before or since. If we review the relevant article, the Font of All Knowledge explains that morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.
Whether your language has affixes, adpositions, or some other means of distinguishing roles all of that falls under morphology. Thus, I'd argue that it is "naturalistic" to insert morphology into your protolanguage. After all, it's already there! Else, your daughter languages most likely wouldn't have the concept at all. (And that kind of speculative invented language would be very interesting indeed!)
Standard examples, consider Latin & English:
john bit the dog
the dog bit john
the dog bit john
john bit the dog
johannem momordit canis
canem momordit johannes
canis momordit johannem
johannes momordit canem
Morphology tells us how the words are related to each other. Just because English got rid of almost all of its endings doesn't mean we did away with morphology! We just tucked it away somewhere else, in this case, word order. This is why Latin can put the agent or the patient before the verb, but English, except in unusual circumstances, can not. We expect that whatever noun comes before the verb is the agent, be it the dog or be it John.
Morphology has even been proposed for Nostratic, the protolanguage from which PIE descended.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Afroasiatic (PAA) are just the earliest ancestors we can reconstruct with reasonable certainty for their respective language families. That does not at all mean that they were the first languages of their regions or the earliest languages that existed.
They didn’t materialize out of thin air. They, too, had ancestors and were influenced by neighbouring languages that didn’t leave any other trace. Humans probably had been speaking for (at least) hundreds of thousands of years at the time of PIE (possibly somewhere between 4500 BCE and 2500 BCE) or PAA (possibly somewhere between 16000 BCE and 10000 BCE) and there are proposed larger families and attempts at reconstructing proto-languages that would group language families like Indo-European and Afroasiatic together (e.g. Nostratic), though they are controversial.
Unless time-travel gets invented, we will never know how exactly the first language(s) came to be and what they were like, if they were immediately fully-formed or if they lacked features we now consider universal (possibly subordinate clauses?). Maybe they weren’t even fully oral but rather gestural with accompanying sounds.
That does not mean, however, that your proto-language cannot be the first language of its world. If that’s what you want to create, it’s up to you to speculate what a language like that could be like. The origin of language is so uncertain that anything plausible can be counted as naturalistic.
If you just want to create a naturalistic proto-language for a family of languages, that isn’t the(/a) first language to exist, there really isn’t any difference to creating any other naturalistic conlang.
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1255 | Are there any successful conlangs using information density as a design goal?
I'm interested in the idea of a conlang which could be used to create extremely information dense statements - such that, for example, a single word could be built up from morphemes to express a complete sentence. It would probably be a highly agglutinative language, similar to Eskimo-Aleut languages.
Are there successful* examples of conlangs which have been created with this principle in mind? I'm interested in seeing how other people might have applied this principle in creating another language.
*When I say successful: I'm aware of fictional examples like Speedtalk, where each phoneme is meaningful, and has incredibly complex and subtle distinctions. I don't consider that successful, because it's far too complex for anyone to reasonably learn. Japanese verbs can be informationally-dense in the way that I mean in terms of its inflectional morphology, e.g. the single word 行かせられたくなかった (ika-se-rare-ta-kuna-katta) can express the complete sentence "[I/he/she/they] didn't want to be made to go," using inflectional morphemes.
NB: I'm incredibly pleased to see that there exists a Conlangs SE. I hope that I can make a meaningful contribution through my question to support this site's beta.
Relevant: Fictional language "SpeedTalk"
I did acknowledge Speedtalk in my OP :). I don't consider it to be a successful informationally-dense conlang for the mentioned reasons (in addition to the fact that it's not a real fleshed out conlang.)
Wups, sorry; missed the reference to it in your question. :)
No worries at all! :)
Answering this question is tricky. As you obtain higher and higher levels of information density, you have to sacrifice some naturalism or some simplicity in order to get there.
Marking the point where you've sacrificed too much naturalism or simplicity to be learnable is a judgment call.
Short answer:
Possibly guaspi, but it's obscure.
One famous example of this is Ithkuil. Parts of Ithkuil are reasonably naturalistic, such as its phonology, which is less complex than Ubykh or Chechen (which also has a large number of vowels). Other parts are not, such as the very fine-grained case distinctions or how meanings are organized into roots, which is more complex than the system of triliteral roots in Semitic languages that it is based on.
Is Ithkuil learnable? I really don't know. My guess is no but I don't have proof.
An example of an informationally-dense written language is Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is not a conlang, but it was written centuries after it stopped being spoken and uses a heavily abbreviated style where nearly everything that's pragmatically inferable is dropped.
If you want to make an informationally dense conlang, Classical Chinese is a good starting point. It has pervasive zero marking (although you can optionally mark possessors and relative clauses with an overt marker) and the reconstructed roots are monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic.
One possible example of an intentionally information dense language is guaspi, a tonal derivative of lojban.
I don't know whether lojban is considered learnable or not and I don't know whether to consider guaspi successful or not, but efficiency is one of its stated goals.
Gua\spi is efficient. Words are short, and extensive defaults on
articles and modal cases eliminate the majority of structure words.
In my personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, a human can speak "informal" lojban riddled with logic errors and this should count as speaking lojban.
Closing remarks:
Looking at some of these examples reveals an important design decision that creators of an informationally-dense language face: whether to allow the speaker to drop things that are pragmatically inferable and how to account for that when evaluating how well their language achieves its goals.
For instance, suppose a language has very specific tenses that are marked on all verbs or person marking on all verbs. Tense information is frequently recoverable from context, as are pronominal arguments. If information is recoverable from context, does the language get any points for encoding it directly, however efficiently it may do so?
The other answers have pointed out eloquently why information density wouldn't work as a design philosophy for a conlang, but I'm accepting this answer because you've provided examples of conlangs which have nonetheless tried.
There is a general trade-off between two aspects of any encoding or language: redundancy versus information density.
If you have an information-dense language, that means there won't be much redundancy (as every symbol has a distinct meaning). This makes for efficient communication in perfect conditions, but as soon as there is any noise (in the widest sense of 'noise'), communication could get disrupted. If any symbol is changed during transmission (ie misheard, or dropped), then the meaning of your message will change in a way that cannot be recovered. It would also require perfect production, ie no typos or other mistakes, as they would all change the meaning. Because there is no redundancy, you cannot even recognise a typo, as it would simply be another, different, word. That of course is in the extreme case only. Imagine you numbered all the words in your dictionary and would simply transmit a sequence of numbers.
Another aspect of information density is not in the language but the texts created in the language. Any text requires shared context between author and recipient for the receiver to be able to interpret the message. Anything not shared between the sender and receiver needs to be contained in the message itself. So even if your language itself is very information dense (or redundant), your messages don't have to be the same.
There is probably a natural limit for information density in human languages. If every letter you write has an impact on the meaning of your message, you need a huge cognitive effort to create it (either when learning the language, or when writing a text in it). And similarly, the receiver needs to spend a lot of effort into decoding/understanding your message. So while it is space efficient (you get away with shorter messages), the time efficiency is pretty poor. And if your message content gets lost in the process, you need to re-transmit, which adds to that as well.
For those reasons languages tend not to be on the extremes of density (or redundancy). And any conlangs that would go there, would be hard to use. So it doesn't really make sense to have this as a design goal for a language.
To use an example, consider the sentence "This is atypical behaviour for Susan." Accidentally omit a single letter so it reads "This is typical behaviour for Susan" and you've completely inverted the message.
I could see a dense language being spoken by alien androids for that reason, but then again they would probably prioritize a language that is easy to parse and non-ambiguous, not necessarily dense.
@KeithMorrison You also only need a slight hesitation or different stress after the a to make it a typicial...
@OliverMason, good point, and pronouncing the a as [ɑ] or [ə] (how I often pronounce the article a) instead of [e] would do the same thing in my dialect.
This is a really good answer, and I would accept this as well if I could. You've explained elegantly why information density isn't a good criteria for a conlang.
To use your example from Japanese: ika-se-rare-ta-kuna-katta Yes, all one word. A word of 10 syllables, 6 morphenes. What, precisely, is the advantage over "didn't want to be made to go" (8 syllables, and 8 morphenes)? It only works if you decide that "word" is the most basic unit to measure against, but "word" can be a very arbitrary concept.
In a 2010 paper, a study was done looking at the "information density" of speech; that is, given the same text translated into multiple languages, so everyone is conveying the same information, how long would it take a fluent speaker of that language to transmit that information, speaking at a normal cadence (and using multiple speakers to get an average, of course). As part of that process, one step was determining how much information was conveyed per syllable. They used Vietnamese as a baseline, arbitrarily giving it a value of 1.00. If a language conveyed the same information in more syllables than Vietnamese, it would be lower than 1 (you need more syllables to communicate the same information). English was 0.91. Japanese was 0.49. In other words, you needed nearly twice as many syllables to communicate the same thing in Japanese as you did in English, Mandarin (0.94), or obviously Vietnamese (1.00).
When you compare speaking rates (how fast those syllables are spoken), it turns out that most languages are about the same when it comes to transmitting information per time, between 0.9 and 1.1 (Vietnamese again being 1.00). Except Japanese, which although having easily the fastest speaking rate of the languages tested, because of the extremely low density of information per syllable, they had the lowest rate of transmission by far, at 0.74.
So Japanese is significantly less information dense than many other widely spoken languages.
You see the same thing in other agglutinative languages. Just because a given language can pack more information into a single word doesn't mean that it will necessarily be shorter to communicate. I work with Inuktitut translations all the time, and I just pulled up an example I've dealt with:
The Proponent intends to conduct a mineral exploration program including drilling, sampling, magnetic surveying, and mapping.
The Inuktitut translation is:
ᐱᓕᕆᔪᒪᔪᖅ ᐅᔭᕋᖕᓂᐊᕐᕕᒃᓴᖅᓯᐅᕈᒪᒐᒥ ᐱᓕᕆᓇᔭᖅᓱᓂ ᐃᑰᑕᖃᕐᓂᖅ, ᐲᔭᐃᖃᑕᕐᓂᖅ ᖃᐅᔨᓴᒐᒃᓴᓂᒃ, ᓇᐅᒃᑯᑦ ᓂᐱᖓᓂᖃᕐᓂᖏᓐᓂᒃ ᓄᓇᐅᑉ ᐃᓗᐊᒍᑦ ᐅᔭᕋᖏᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓄᓇᖑᓕᐅᓂᕐᒥᒃ.
Which transliterates as:
Pilirijumajuq ujarangniarviksaqsiurumagami pilirinajaqsuni ikuutaqarniq, piijaiqatarniq qaujisagaksanik, naukkut nipinganiqarninginnik nunaup iluagut ujarangit ammalu nunanguliunirmik.
Obviously the English is much more concise simply based on inspection even though it has more words. Now, an argument can be made that the English has some terms which might require a longer word to explain it in Inuktitut, so that's a fair argument. So here is a more "common language" example from the Government of Nunavut's website (https://livehealthy.gov.nu.ca/en/health-topics/injuries/preparing-hunt-land):
Telling someone at home where you are going. Even if you are going
out on the land for just a few hours, you should tell at least one
person at home the names of all riders and passengers, where you are
going, and when you plan to come back. If you do not return in time,
this person will be able to send for help.
And here is the Innuinaqtun version:
Uqaqlugu kimut humungauliqtutin. Aulaaqhimanahuaqtillutin ikituni
ikaangnini, uqaqtukhauyutin atauhinaugumi inuk aimavingni kitkut
aulaaqatiniatatin, humungauliktutin, humi utiqnahuaqtuninlu.
Uttinngitkuvin mikhaatigun, tamna inuk ikayutikhangnik
aullaqtittniaqtuq.
The Innuinaqtun is 21 words compared to the English 67. If, however, you look at the syllables, there's 109 compared to English's 73. English clearly has the higher information density per syllable. Just because the average word is longer doesn't make the language more information dense.
Part of the issue with Inuktitut, just as with Japanese, is that the number of possible different syllables is limited due to the phonotactics of the language, which means you have to use more syllables to compensate for the limited inventory you have. Standard Inuktitut has at most 210 possible syllables. Japanese has, depending on who you ask, about 400 possible syllables, so you could have that number of possible one-syllable words. With English phototactics, for "standard" English, you have about 316,800 possible one-syllable words (there is about 9,300 in use).
The reason for this difference is the number of consonant clusters allowed and the ridiculous number of vowels in most English dialects.
tl;dr summary: to have a more information dense and still practical language (so you allow some natural redundancy and not have so many near-homonyms that mininterpretation due to missing something is a constant problem), you need a language with a lot of possible syllables and phonotactics that allow those syllables to be used or combined into sufficiently many distinct morphenes, however you put those morphemes together or not in any kind of language, whether isolating or agglutinative.
I really wanted to accept all three answers. Both yours and Oliver Mason's answers have explained eloquently why information density as a design goal is impractical, but I like your examples in particular. I accepted Gregory Nisbet's answer because it answered the direct question, but you answered the XY problem better.
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1281 | Where should I start planning my grammar?
I'm about creating my first conlang grammar, I know a few general characteristics yet I don't truly know where or how I should start to outline it. I only have messy pieces of informations about. From your experience, what could you advise me?
It would probably be a good way to start with the features you want to express through grammar. Many features can be expressed in different ways, lexically, through morphology, or through syntax. For example, 'subject' could be done through a particle, an affix, or through the position in the sentence.
You first come up with the list of features, and then you look at the inventory of forms in the grammar. Do you want a complex morphology? English, for example, marks very few features through morphology (plural for nouns, 3rd person singular for verbs, tenses, …) and a lot through word order or by adding auxiliaries.
The inventory will define the shape of your language; you can also start with that and then assign features to it. But be clear what kind of features you want to be able to express – not every possible distinction needs to be expressed in language. Do you want to mark the gender of the subject in the verb? Perfectly possible, but probably not very useful, unless your language is for a very gender-segregated society.
Obviously, the more features you want to express, the more complex your grammar will be. As an extreme example, toki pona pretty much only uses word order and a few particles to distinguish between subject/verb/object, and ignores number or gender markers. In Esperanto most work is done by the morphology, which encodes the role in the sentence, gender of nouns, number, and even a range of semantic relationships (eg "room where you do a particular action").
It's probably best to start at broad strokes and clean up the detail later. The first question you should ask yourself is "Do I want to have an analytic, agglutinative, fusional, or polysynthetic language?" This will decide whether your language will be making sentences by putting a lot of words together in a specific order (like English or Mandarin), putting a bunch of affixes on a moderate number of words (like Korean or Navajo), putting a few very specific affixes on a moderate number of words (like Spanish or German), or stringing together a large number of component pieces to make a few very specific words (like Coptic or West Greenlandic).
Next, you should ask "Should my language be primarily head-initial or head-final?" A head-initial language will probably have Verb-Subject-Object or Subject-Verb-Object word order, put auxiliary verbs before matrix verbs (e.g. have gone), use prepositions (e.g. at home), put adjectives after the nouns they modify (e.g. house new), and mark the start of a relative clause. A head-final language will probably have Subject-Object-Verb word order, put matrix verbs before auxiliaries (e.g. gone have), use postpositions (e.g. home at), put adjectives before the nouns they modify (e.g. new house), and mark the end of a relative clause. Of course, as these examples show, you don't have to pick one exclusively, but nearly all languages are predominantly one or the other.
Third, you should ask "Should my language be primarily head-marking or dependent-marking?" A head-marking language will be more likely to use polypersonal agreement instead of case marking, mark possessa instead of possessors, and have adpositions that agree with their referents. A dependent-marking language will be more likely to have case marking, mark possessors instead of possessa, and have demonstratives and adjectives that agree with their referents. Again, you don't have to go all in here, but you should lean either one way or the other.
For these last two especially, it's very helpful to learn which word is going to be the head of a given phrase. For example, the head of a sentence is the verb, the head of a noun phrase is the noun, the head of an adpositional phrase is the adposition, the head of a possessive construction is the possessum, etc. These aren't really intuitive (at least to me), so it's best to just memorize them.
Knowing these three things right from the start will help you avoid some of the most common typological pitfalls that will make your language feel clunky to use. But choose carefully, because these choices will end up so ingrained in the language that it will be a royal pain to try to change them later. From here, you can move to making more specific decisions, like what grammatical distinctions you actually want to make, and how specifically you're going to make those distinctions.
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1284 | Has anyone tried learning and speaking Kesh?
The book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K Le Guin is an anthropological account of the Kesh, a people that "might be going to have lived" in future California. It includes short stories, songs, poems, recipes and sacred texts of the fictional people; but relevant to the question is the section at the end of the book which contains the script, numerals, and punctuation of the language, as well as an extensive glossary. I don't think there are any details on grammar written there, but there are example sentences in different places in the book. So, my question is, is there anyone that has tried to learn this language or studied it much? And, if so, what is it like?
I have the novel, but haven't yet read it, so can't say that I've tried learning Kesh.
I used to (and may still) have the cassette tapes that came with some work about the Kesh. As I recall, it was recordings very much as you describe for the texts: songs and lore of various kinds. As I recall it was a pretty sounding language. I think this is it.
I think it's therefore safe to say sòmeone has tried to learn it! Well enough to record it, anyway!
Yes, they have that on CD now. Two of the songs on the disk, "Quail Song" and "The Willows" are also in the book. I love the book... Perhaps I'll try learning the language
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1287 | Will I be able to read texts written in all Romance languages simply by learning Interlingua?
Interlingua's official site claims that speakers of all Romance languages will immediately understand the language on paper when first exposed to it. Is this true? Can I really understand Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and French simply by learning a conlang?
If it is true, then why isn't it more popular?
That implies it is a subset of the Romance languages. Even if their claim is true, that doesn't mean that learning Interlingua could make you fluent in the Romance languages.
It sounds plausible for reading comprehension—already with the knowledge of Latin it is possible to get the rough contents of a text written in a Romance language, and Interlingua is closer to modern Romance than Latin. However, don't expect to get the fine points and there are notorious false friends than can carry you astray. Unfortunately, I have no data from serious studies, therefore only a comment.—PS: Listening comprehension or active language production are totally different things in this respect.
It sounds to me that it's the other way round: as a speaker of French or Spanish, you can understand Interlingua on paper.
Having studied a couple of Romance languages (plus Esperanto), I can read Interlingua and make some sense of most other written Romance languages, but by no means all of them.
On their site it says:
Millions understand Interlingua "at first sight". Speakers of Romance languages especially understand Interlingua immediately and almost effortlessly. Ideal for traveling!
So it's the other way round: if you speak a Romance language, Interlingua will make sense to you because it contains many elements (eg vocabulary) from these languages. This does not, however, mean that you can necessarily understand any Romance language after learning Interlingua, though I assume there will be some benefit going both ways.
Yes. And also No.
Interlingua is certainly a "simplified" Romance language and much of the lexicon is shared with other Romance languages. But not all Romance languages are made alike. Romanian is pretty divergent. Sardinian is pretty conservative. I believe Interlingua has more in common with the "central" Romance languages, standard Italian and Spanish (Castillian).
I'm sure a speaker of Italian or Castillian would have as little difficulty with Interlingua as they would have had, a couple centuries ago with Lingua Franca. I think if you were to learn Interlingua to a high degree, you would find relatively straightforward Spanish and Italian texts to be comprehensible.
Let's find out for ourselves!
Interlingua
Nostre Patre, qui es in le celos,
que tu nomine sia sanctificate;
que tu regno veni;
que tu voluntate sia facite
super le terra como etiam in le celo.
Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,
e pardona a nos nostre debitas
como nos pardona a nostre debitores,
e non duce nos in tentation,
sed libera nos del mal.
Portuguese
Pai nosso, que estás no céu,
Santificado seja o Vosso nome.
Venha a nós o Vosso reino.
Seja feita a Vossa vontade,
Assim na terra como no céu.
O pão nosso de cada dia nos dai hoje.
Perdoai as nossas ofensas
Assim como nós perdoamos a quem nos têm ofendido.
Não nos deixeis cair em tentação,
Mas livrai-nos do mal
Mozarabic
Padre nuoso dal ciel
sanctificadu sia al teu nomne
venga a nos al teu reynu
ed faya-se al tua voluntade
ansi en al tierra quomo en al ciel.
Al pane nuostru de cada dia da-nos-lu huoi
e perdonad-nos al nuostras offensas
quomo nos autrossi perdonamos al qui nos offended
ed non nos layšes cadere in al tentatzione
ed liberad-nos dal male
Castillian
Padre nuestro que estás en el Cielo,
santificado sea tu nombre,
venga a nosotros tu Reino,
hágase tu voluntad en la Tierra como en el Cielo,
danos hoy nuestro pan de cada día,
y perdona nuestras ofensas,
como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden,
no nos dejes caer en la tentación,
y líbranos del mal.
Catalan
Pare nostre, que esteu en el cel,
sigui santificat el vostre nom;
vingui a nosaltres el vostre regne;
faci´s la vostra voluntat,
així en la terra com en el cel.
El nostre pa de cada dia doneu-nos avui;
i perdoneu les nostres culpes,
així com nosaltres perdonem els nostres deutors;
i no permeteu que caiguem en la temptació,
ans deslliureu-nos del mal.
Languedocien
Le nostre Paire që ess eïs cels
sanctificat sia lo teus noms
avenga lo teus regns
et sia faita la tua voluntas
sico ël cel è ë la tera
è dona à nos ôi lo nostrë pa që ës sobrë causa
è perdonna à nos lès nostrès dëoutès
aissi co nos perdonan à nostrès dëouteïrès
è no nos amenés en tentatio
mes delioura nos dël mal.
French
Notre Père qui es aux cieux,
que ton Nom soit sanctifié,
que ton règne vienne,
que ta volonté soit faite
sur la terre comme au ciel.
Donne-nous aujourd'hui notre pain de ce jour.
Pardonne-nous nos offenses,
comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés.
Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation,
mais délivre-nous du mal.
Anglo-Norman
Li nostre Pere, qui es ciels,
saintefiez soit li tuens uons;
avigne li tuens regnes.
Soit faite ta volonte, si comme ele est faite el ciel,
si foit ele faite en terre.
Nostre pain de chascun jor nos donne hui.
Et pardone-nos nos meffais,
si comme nos pardonons a cos qui maeffait nos ont.
Provencal
Paire nostre, que iest els eels;
ton nom sia sanctifficat.
A nos veng-a lo teu reg-nat.
En la terra faelia sia quo el eel voluntat tia.
Lo pa nostre cotidia liuei nos dona dieus de ta ma.
Remet so que nos te deuem,
quo nos als autres remetem.
De temptacio nos deffen,
ens delivra de mal.
Italian
Padre nostro che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo Nome,
venga il tuo Regno,
sia fatta la tua Volontà
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione,
ma liberaci dal Male.
Sicilian
Patri nostru, ca siti nnô celu,
Fussi santificatu lu nomu vostru.
Vinissi imprescia lu regnu vostru,
Fussi faciuta la vostra Divina Vuluntati,
Comu nnô celu, d'accussì nnâ terra.
Ni dati sta jurnata lu nostru panuzzu cutiddianu,
E ni pirdunati li nostri piccati,
D'accussì niàvutri li pirdunamu ê nostri dibbitura.
E mancu ni lassati a cascari nnâ tintazzioni,
Ma ni scanzati dû mali.
Sardinian
Babbu nostru k’istas in sos kelos,
santificadu siat su nòmene tou,
benzat a nois su regnu tou
e fatta siat sa voluntade tua
comente in su kelu gai in sa terra.
Su pane nostru de dogni die dàdenolu oe,
perdona a nois sos peccados nostros
comente nois perdonamus sos inimigos nostros,
e non nos lesses ruer in tentatzione,
ma lìberanos dae su male.
Romanian
Tatăl nostru care eşti în ceruri,
sfinţească-se numele Tău,
vie împărăţia Ta, facă-se voia ta,
precum în cer aşa şi pe pământ.
Pâinea noastră cea de toate zilele,
dă-ne-o nouă astăzi
şi ne iartă nouă greşelile noastre
precum şi noi iertăm greşiţilor noştri
şi nu ne duce pe noi în ispită
ci ne izbăveşte de cel rău.
Classical Latin
Pater noster, qui es in caelis;
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
adveniat regnum tuum;
fiat voluntas tua,
sicut in caelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie;
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris;
et ne nos inducas in tentationem;
sed libera nos a malo.
@DestructiveWolf - What kind of French do you speak that this one is so horribly incorrect? Anyway, this one accords with official resources, though does not appear to contain the "new translation" of the penultimate petition. Do be aware that there are different dialects / forms / languages of French and quite possibly different formulations of the same prayer. I'd appreciate it if you could cite a link to the version you use, so I can review it!
Oh, didn't know that Sicilian is so different from Italian.
@VictorVosMottor - Tyranny of the National Language! Yeah, I think most people (in the US, anyway) aren't even aware that the national languages in European countries aren't the only languages spoken in those countries. There are dozens of local languages & dialects (including some Greek) natively spoken in Italy. My plan with this answer was to present it as a kind of "language continuum"; I could easily have added scores more entries if I were to get into regional & local dialects!
No. Of course you won’t. You don’t just learn a language by staring at it. Like everything, learning a language takes time. I would recommend learning one of those languages.
You'd understand the gist, but it would be mainly from recognizing vocabulary roots - Interlingua isn't the best option for learning to read Romance languages due to its grammar being different from them. In my case I know Esperanto and I seem to understand just as much Italian and Neolatino as someone who knows Interlingua. I think Neolatino Romantica (Romance Neolatin) seems better than Interlingua for your purpose and will explain why.
The Latin-derived vocabulary in Interlingua is essentially identical to that of Neolatino. However compared to Neolatino, Interlingua has "replaced" a lot of its Latin vocabulary and Romance grammar with that of Germanic and Slavic languages, rendering Interlingua less effective for comprehending actual Romance languages.
At first glance, Interlingua seems practically identical to Neolatino:
Interlingua: Ma con interlingua io pote comprender ca. 6-70% de neolatino.
Neolatino: Mais con interlingua (èo) poto comprèndere ca. 60-70 % de neolatino.
Esperanto: Sed kun (l')interlingua (mi) povas kompreni ĉ. 60-70% da neolatino.
English: but with interlingua I can comprehend circa 60-70% of neolatino.
However when you dig deeper into it: The majority of Romance languages say stuff that sounds like "I speak the French" or "These are the my children" or "I wash the hands (=I wash my own hands)". Romance languages have grammatical gender as well as stuff like the verb ending telling you which person (he, we, they, me...) is doing the action, and their adjectives match in gender and number with their nouns, among other things. In phrases like "It's raining, it's snowing" they don't use the word "it".
Neolatino Romantica basically follows all of the above Romance rules, as it is solely based on Romance languages. In contrast, Interlingua is partially based on Germanic and Slavic languages, so it has no grammatical genders, doesn't match adjective number with noun number, uses "the" and "it" like English, has removed the personal endings from verbs, has removed several Romance verb forms (tenses and moods) entirely, and some of its vocabulary has been replaced with that of languages which aren't Romance ones. It also has some extra grammar which exist in Germanic languages like Swedish (reflexive pronouns etc) which don't exist in the same way in Romance languages.
So while you would be able to get the gist of many Romance texts with Interlingua, you would still be missing out on key information due to Interlingua lacking in Romance grammar. In the sense of learning Interlingua specifically to read Romance texts, it wouldn't be drastically more beneficial to learn Interlingua over another semi-Romance language such as Esperanto, because in both cases you would be mainly just coasting by due to recognizing vocabulary roots.
As an example, in Italian and Neolatino since verbs have specific forms for if "I, you, they..." are doing the action, you use the verb form alone and don't write the pronoun. Interlingua doesn't have this function, so when reading an Italian sentence via Interlingua you would be able to understand what the verb meant but not have any clue about who is doing the action.
So I feel like you would be able to get the gist of Romance languages with Interlingua, but that there are better options out there, including Neolatino.
As for why Interlingua is not popular - it is pretty popular for a constructed language, Windows 11 even has a keyboard layout available for it in the default Windows keyboard language options. The reason why it's not hugely popular is probably due to a few reasons which I commonly hear when people justify why they won't learn (or even hate) Esperanto, another constructed language. These are also reasons I hear for why people don't learn any second foreign language (other than English) during my work as an ESL teacher:
Schools, media, etc don't raise us to MacGyver language. Even dialects and sociolects are often frowned upon and made fun of in the media. People often see language more as social status than as what it really is - a tool for communication. When I was a kid in school, I got points off on my American essays for writing "colour" instead of "color". In a world where language is seen as communication, colour would have gotten full points. Interlingua is running on the completely opposite principal, "language is not social status, it's for communication".
In being an "international language", people see Interlingua and similar languages as trying to replace English. Most non-native speakers these days spend 9 to 12 years in school learning English as a foreign language and continue learning it in adulthood. They are not only raised to think English has the best school, salary and business opportunities, but also that if they don't learn English they are a failure. They then see their 9-12 years of struggle as a badge of honor. At the same time, if they aren't very proficient in English, they believe they need to learn English first before anything else. So that kind of person would immediately ignore Interlingua because they believe English is superior.
There have been many academic studies which prove stuff like learning a simpler constructed language such as Esperanto causes the poorest of language students to rise to perform at the same level as the best-performing ones when learning a subsequent natural foreign language. And that learning a language with an easier orthography than English drastically improves the reading/writing ability and will to learn of native English speaking kids.
Thus languages like Interlingua would be fantastic to teach in schools as preparation for learning natural foreign languages like Spanish, and also as side study to improve English grammar skills. So we would assume languages like Interlingua could be promoted as such and be actually implemented in American schools, especially considering things like the USA's trend towards Spanish bilingualism, and many pockets of the USA having stuff like French Creole minority language groups.
However a major issue is that educators usually need to get explicit permission to teach a language and they also need to be state licensed in the specific language they will be teaching. It's extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, to even get licensed to teach a Native American language. One of the national tests you can use towards licensing, or in some cases college credit for language studies, is called ACTFL. This test lacks not only all constructed languages, it even lacks languages which historically had huge populations of speakers majorly influenced American culture, such as Yiddish. So there is no way to get licensed in Interlingua and you also can't get college credit for it. Stuff like these kinds of licensing and educational policies drastically reduce the amount of people who are going to hear about Interlingua or consider using and promoting it.
Seam to me you are reversing something that is not so reversible:
if may be true that who speak one or more Romance languages can easily
understand interlingua, is not exactly equal the reversed path; then is sure
interlingua is popular and useful.
Consider also learning Latin and some Spanish (also ancient Greek is nice... but hard, I know both in ex. and are very useful).
Latin is compatible with interlingua's learning and is useful to understand also very many terms, that are influenced by English and 'slang', in all languages; also the languages, you listed, are Latin-based except, perhaps (I'm not sure), Romanian.
Romanian is Latin based as well, just with centuries of influence from Slavic languages.
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1912 | What are mandatory words groups a language have to have?
I'm creating Merovian (meroo) constructed language since about 2004 and I have yet to settle down on standartisation. Merovian currently has 5 word groups and "other words".
Noun
Verb
Adjective
Science/Field of study/Work industry
Executor/Noun conjugated in a way that refers to the agent who's doing the thing non represents
Other words are broad, catch-all category that includes items such as: and, if, me, you, us, also, etc.
Is there a word category I absolutely must have?
Klingon (tlhIngan-Hol), which was created by a linguist, claims to have only nouns, verbs, and "chuvmey", with chuvmey covering anything that's not a noun or a verb.
Curious: why is "Science/Field of Study/Work/Industry" a whole category separate from "Noun"? Also, why is "Executor/Noun" also separate from "Noun"? It looks a lot like an agent noun.
You are correct. It is an agent noun. I was already "translating back to English" from my creation. The difference is, say you have a noun "wood" - you can add a suffix thus rendering a woodworker (agent) or forestry (field). The intention here is to decrease necessary words to describe the thing/agent/field into one word as that is one of the most common structures all languages have anyway. A real example: ariket (architecture, planning), ariketer (architect, builder), ariketeo (architecture, science). This is meant to be as antithesis of immense synonyms virtually all languages have.
Word
You can get away with having only one category, and this has been done before. I won't claim to have read very deeply into how it works, but Tom Breton came up with an invented language in the 1990s that works at least as a proof of concept that you can get away with making a language that has only nouns in it. Technically, in addition to all of its nouns, he uses four grammatical "operators", which are punctuation marks, but those could easily be replaced by nonce words.
Check out this ancient relic of an invented language in all its ur-internet glory here! --- ALLNOUN.
It seems to be generally agreed that all languages have "nouns" and "verbs"—or if you prefer, some way to refer to entities and some way to refer to predicates.
Everything else is optional, or can be covered by one of these categories. Treating pronouns as a subset of nouns, for example, is quite common. In Swahili, many English adjectives are expressed with nouns instead: to say that something's green you use -a kijani, literally "of leaf". Same for most prepositional phrases: "the cat is in the box" is paka iko ndani ya sanduku, "cat is-located interior of box". Akkadian uses nouns for most English determiners and quantifiers: "all the kings" is šarrū kalû=šunu "kings, entirety of-them". In Mandarin, most English adverbs and prepositions are expressed with verbs, sometimes called "coverbs": instead of doing something "for you", you attach the extra verb phrase bāng nǐ "(and) help you".
The hardest things to reduce to either nouns or verbs are small grammatical markers, like "and" (a conjunction). But some languages do without these entirely: in Ancient Egyptian, for example, there's usually no explicit marker of how one sentence connects to the previous one. Others, like Biblical Hebrew, mark this on the verb instead of using a separate word.
So, is there any language that has only nouns and verbs, and no other categories? Probably not. I certainly can't think of any. But for any category other than nouns and verbs, there's some language that doesn't have it. So the answer to "is there any other category I absolutely must have" is no. Every other category can be done without.
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1785 | Is there a language whose every sentence is a command?
I am building a conlang that is heavily based on the Haskell programming language, and I was thinking about how sentences work. Let me call this conlang Jeksa for the moment.
Jeksa models every sentence as an action to modify the real world — Haskell's RealWorld, aka the state of the IO monad.
Then I found that every sentence is a command, at least under this model. In addition to usual imperatives, declarative sentences are commands to let them know, and interrogative sentences are commands to let them tell. To demonstrate:
[Usual sentence] One plus one equals two.
[In this model] You gotta know that one plus one equals two.
[Usual sentence] Does one plus one equal three?
[In this model] You gotta tell me whether one plus one equals three.
[Usual sentence] Who told you that BS?
[In this model] You gotta tell me who told you that BS.
To paraphrase, declarative sentences are attempts of modifying the listener's knowledge, and interrogative sentences are requests to fetch the listener's knowledge.
However, I've never seen a natural language that actually goes well with this model. Is there any?
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1821 | Is it natural that "future possibility" is a separate tense?
I had some thought on how tenses work in my conlang. Eventually, I built a model and defined the tenses accordingly. But before showing that model, let be introduce the most basic tense in my conlang:
Tautological tense. This "tense" states that the sentence is an absolute truth independent to time.
Example English sentence: "One plus one equals two."
The usual partition of time is Past, Present, and Future. But there is a problem. Since "present" is a single timestamp when taken literally, almost no statement will hold "at the present" and no other time.
So my model makes partition of time differently. It's History, Progress, and Prospects. That gives some more tenses:
Simple past tense. This tense states that the action in statement has happened before.
Example English sentence: "I went to swimming."
Present progressive tense. This tense states that the action in the statement is in progression.
Example English sentence: "I am going to swimming."
But unlike the history or the progress, there is a distinctive feature about the prospects. There is no guarantee how the future will become reality. In other words, I should treat the future as a multiple world, hence the plural "prospects". (You can compare this model to the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.)
This gives two future tenses:
Universal future tense. This tense states that the action in the statement will happen anyway.
Example English sentence: "I will go to swimming."
Existential future tense. This tense states that the action in the statement might happen in the future.
Example English sentence: "I might go to swimming."
But I wonder it's natural to give such distinction in the future tense. Is it?
Sidenote: There isn't going to be a simple present tense in my conlang. My conlang cannot just state "I go to swimming." However, my conlang can state "I go to swimming everyday." because the adverb "everyday" takes the quotient of time by each day. That enables the present progressive tense usable.
FYI, as a native American English speaker, "go swimming" sounds much more natural to me than "go to swimming".
What Solomon Ucko said, the "to" particle is not used with -ing forms, only the bare form
IIRC, it is not uncommon for languages to employ the future tense consistently in irrealis mood.
Instead of "tautological", the usual name for that in linguistics is gnomic aspect. Lingála, for example, has this type of marking.
Similarly, your "historical" marking is usually called perfective aspect, indicating that something is over and done with. The opposite, the "progressive", is also called imperfective aspect, from the Latin for "unfinished". Many languages have a basic distinction between perfective and imperfective rather than past and present (as in English): you find this in many Slavic languages, and also many Semitic languages.
As for your future, this is not uncommon: the marking used for hypotheticals and possibilities is usually called the subjunctive mood. This one is also found in Lingála, as well as Latin and various others. This name comes from the fact that, in Latin, it's often used in subordinate clauses; an alternate name that better describes its meaning is irrealis mood, from the Latin for "not a fact" (the opposite is realis, "a fact").
To address the "future possibility": Spanish subjunctive mood is used to describe possibilities, attitudes or wishes. Historically, future subjunctive was very much alive, but has almost completely disappeared from contemporary language (and the subjunctive itself, past or present, is slowly being eroded away as well.)
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1948 | Is it possible to prevent vowel shift?
The English Great Vowel Shift made a huge discrepancy between English pronunciation and English orthography. In perspective of conlang creators, that's something that should be prevented.
It seems like, if a language has a considerably many number (more than 5 or 6) of vowels, a vowel shift is going to happen (gradually) anyway. I'll take Korean as an example. ㆍ and ㆎ were lost, ㅐ [aj], ㅔ [əj], ㅚ [oj], and ㅟ [uj] had become [ɛ], [e], [ø], and [y] respectively, the difference between ㅐ and ㅔ is disappearing, and ㅚ and ㅟ are becoming diphthongs.
Currently, the conlang I'm making has 10 vowels: A [ɑ], Ä [æ], E [e], È [ɜ], I [i], Ì [ɯ], O [o], Ö [ø], U [u], and Ü [y]. This vowel structure doesn't quite seem to be stable either. [ɜ] seems likely to clash with [ɑ] or [ɯ]. A way of preventing that clash is adding a suprasegmental to [ɜ] to become [ɜ̃], [ɜ̰], [ɝ], etc. But I don't want to let that happen either. So I'm seeking for an external way of preventing it. Is it really possible to prevent every vowel shift?
No, you can't prevent these things, as they happen through usage. Unless nobody speaks your conlang -- in that case it would never change. But the timescales involved probably mean that you won't live to see it anyway.
What timescale do you want to prevent vowel shifts on? Ten years, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand?
Why should glossopoets seeks to avoid disjoint between orthography and pronunciation? This doesn't make sense!
I would be more worried about [ɯ] clashing with [u], honestly.
As you are asking for an external way of preventing vowel shift, here is a suggestion: Design some texts (religious text, spells, whatever you want) that must be preserved in their pronunciation exactly. Your constructed culture has written down exact pronunciation rules for those preserved texts, and thus keeps the vowels of those texts fixed.
Of course, in any natural scenario this leads to a split between a vernacular (with all kinds of sound shifts) and the ceremonial language that is conserved over time, similar to the roles of Sanskrit compared to Modern Indo-Aryan languages, or the role of Latin compared to Modern Romance languages.
I'm skeptical about its efficacy. Without sound recordings and without expert linguists, vowel sounds are going to drift, and nobody will be able to tell they're drifting. Modern Latin has many pronunciations that are hard to understand for people who learned Latin from a different tradition.
I'd argue that Latin is not a good example, as Ecclesiastical Latin largely follows Italian in its pronunciation. I don't think Sanskrit is any better an example. Certainly, the educated use of Latin and Sanskrit did not prevent any kind of change in vowel shifting in any descendant language.
Sanskrit is a particularly bad example because there are actual writings from around 700 BCE in late Vedic Sanskrit debating about how words written in earlier Vedic Sanskrit would have been properly pronounced.
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2105 | Is it natural to declare laterals and rhotics as a fortis/lenis pair?
I've sought for justification for the phoneme inventory of my conlang, but finally, I think I found one, at least for consonants.
순음 Labial
설음 Coronal
반설음 "Semi-coronal"
치두음 Front Sibilant
정치음 Rear Sibilant
아음 Dorsal
Fortis
P [p]
T [t]
L [ɭ]
C [t͜s]
Q [t͜ɕ]
K [kʰ]
Lenis
M [m]
N [n]
R [ɻ~ɽ]
Z [z]
J [ʑ]
G [k~k̚~g]
This classification of consonants is due to the medieval phonologists of Chinese and Korean. And the orthography is quite consistent to the pinyin. The syllable structure is (C)V(C), where the coda is lenis if present.
What I'm unsure about is the so-called "semi-coronal" consonants, as which Sejong The Great classified. Though Korean puts the lateral and the rhotic as the same phoneme, namely ㄹ, I decided to declare them as different phonemes because I wanted some "symmetric" structure for my conlang.
I think Sejong himself would've been convinced, but what about phonologists of medieval Chinese languages, or those of any other languages with strict fortis/lenis pairs?
Are you asking if it's phonologically natural—that is, if you'd expect a lateral in a leniting environment to turn into a rhotic, or a rhotic in a fortiting environment to turn into a lateral—or if it's natural for someone describing a language (especially in mediaeval times) to group them this way?
@Draconis The latter.
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2141 | Attempt to define verb inflection that is phonologically featural
My native language is Korean, which has a featural script, namely Hangul. Though my conlang isn't going to adopt Hangul, I came up with one question of curiosity: "Can there be a featural grammar?" So here's my attempt to build one.
For suppose I had a phoneme inventory like this:
Labial
Coronal
Dorsal
Nasal
M [m]
N [n]
G [ŋ]
Plosive
P [p]
T [t]
K [k]
Fricative
F [f]
S [s]
X [x]
Approximant
V [ʋ]
L [l]
(null consonant)
My idea was to let the last coda of verbs indicate tense. Here's how each manners of articulation would render featural:
Approximant: These consonants are sonorants; the airflow is constricted most weakly. As such, verbs ending with such a consonant shouldn't offer much aspect. This is the gnomic aspect.
Fricative: These consonants have continuous airflow. As such, verbs ending with such a consonant have imperfective aspect.
Plosive: These consonants have the airflow stopped. As such, verbs ending with such a consonant have perfective aspect.
Nasal: These consonants let the airflow bypass through nostrils. As such, verbs ending with such a consonant are dedicated for the irrealis mood.
And as for places of articulation, the airflow hits the articulators at different times. As such, they shall correspond to tense. Dorsal for past, coronal for present, and labial for future.
As a consequence, if English were to incorporate these features, example sentences in the present tense would look like this:
"One plus one plus equals two." → "One plus one equalal two."
"I drink beer every day." → "I drinkis beer every day."
"I have become drunk." → "I becomeet drunk."
"I might love it." → "I loveen it."
"Please teach me." → "Please teachen me." (Imperative is a kind of the irrealis mood)
It becomes interesting in other tenses. Here are some examples:
"I was who in charge of it! Why did you do it instead?" → "I beex who in charge of it! Why you dook it instead?"
"This will explode soon. You shall let them escape!" → "This explodeep soon. You letep them escape!"
"If I were him, I would never do such thing." → "If I beeg him, I never doof such thing." (Counterfactual conditionals are indicated by the past tense because it refers to an alternate history. Here, the conclusion ends with -of because it's an evident future in the alternate history.)
"If such dream would become true..." → "If such dream becomeem true..."
Finally, when the gnomic aspect is given the past tense, it indicates that the truth became untrue, and when the gnomic aspect is given the future tense, it indicates that a false factoid will become a truth. I don't think such aspect has a direct English equivalent:
"The infinity bee a taboo to think about." (Nowadays, mathematicians have various ways of handling the infinity.)
"There existiv some nonempty sets whose cartesian product beel empty." (This indicates that, for some reasons, mathematicians will cease to believe in the Axiom of Choice.)
I don't think this "featural" grammar is natural, but I think I can incorporate this grammar in the purpose of an artlang anyway. But are there better options, especially for the aspects?
This makes me think of Celtic mutation!
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2155 | Is there a good natural reason for a language to declare infinite cardinalities as "plural" and finite cardinalities as "paucal"?
Nowadays, mathematicians have a number of ways of dealing with infinities, prominently the notions of cardinalities and ordinal numbers. As such, I wondered whether we would incorporate such notions into our natlangs.
When listing cardinalities by order, the most remarkable "leap" is between finite cardinalities and infinite cardinalities. As such, I'd consider it natural to treat finite cardinalities as "paucal" and to treat infinite cardinalities as "plural".
Of course, our current English distinguishes only zero/one/two-or-more, but would any natural language gain a reason to declare infinities as a separate grammatical number? If so, what would such reason be?
I wouldn't expect that in a natlang, no.
When a language has a mandatory marking that goes on every noun (or verb or etc), it's always something that's frequently important or useful to distinguish. It might be important semantically (number marking), or syntactically (case marking), or it might add useful redundancy (gender marking), but it always serves some kind of purpose. If it didn't, people wouldn't go to the extra effort!
And infinities just don't come up very often in day-to-day life. It's not very often that we have to distinguish between "finitely many books" and "infinitely many books", and when we do, "infinite" or "infinitely many" is an easy enough modifier to use.
If you wanted a marking like that to evolve naturalistically, you'd need people to be making a distinction between "finitely many cups of coffee" and "infinitely many cups of coffee" often enough that it's worth incorporating that distinction into the noun itself.
I think this question is posed from the wrong perspective.
It is of course perfectly possible to describe a system of grammatical number that distinguishes between finite and infinite cardinalities, but describing those grammatical numbers as paucal and plural respectively would be perverse given the definition of paucal as "referring to a few of something".
Instead such a number system would be better described as having two grammatical numbers: finite and infinite (each of which could be further subdivided if you so chose, e.g. with finite having singular, paucal, plural subnumbers, and infinite having countable and uncountable subnumbers etc).
As Draconis notes, this system would not be naturalistic, as infinities do not occur in every day life and, to the extent they do, are not distinguished from sufficiently large finite quantities (obviously the point at which the quantity becomes sufficiently large depends on what is being measured). The only reason this would evolve in a natural language is if people are regularly dealing with genuine infinities and distinguishing them from even arbitrarily large finite numbers (perhaps the culture ascribes set theorists an almost religious importance).
Of course, not all conlangs need be naturalistic, and in a philosophical language inclined towards certain kinds of mathematics for instance this could certainly be an interesting feature to include despite the lack of naturalism.
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1841 | Is there a general strategy to build vocabulary for chemical elements?
I continued building vocabulary for my conlang, and now I'm trying to name chemical elements.
Here's the concept: The major speakers of this conlang are angels, and some of them have lived for a long time. Some have lived since when ancient Greeks lived, and as such, I imagine my conlang to incorporate modern theories of chemistry to ancient alchemical concepts, prominently the theory of 4 elements; earth, water, air, and fire.
So here is the sketch.
Earth-like elements:
The composition of the earth's crust gives a way of vocabularizing some elements. I name these elements earthlings, which are:
Second earthling = Silicon(Si)
Third earthling = Aluminum(Al)
Fourth earthling = Iron(Fe)
Water-like elements:
Though water itself is a compound, the salt in the sea water is what to be called waterlings. Those are:
First waterling = Chlorine(Cl)
Second waterling = Sodium(Na)
Third waterling = Magnesium(Mg)
Fifth waterling = Calcium(Ca)
Sixth waterling = Potassium(K)
Air-like elements:
Earth's atmosphere gives some elements as well:
First airling = Nitrogen(N)
Third airling = Argon(Ar)
Fire-like elements:
There is only one element that is worth to be called fireling. It's oxygen(O).
Furthermore, since water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, I subtract the oxygen to acquire hydrogen. Hydrogen(H) is disfired water.
Others:
So what about other elements? I put infra-/sub-/hypo- prefixes to subtract periods, and put ultra-/super-/hyper- prefixes to add periods (similar to Mendeleev's "eka-"). For examples:
Hyposecond earthling = Carbon(C)
Hypothird earthling = Boron(B)
Superfourth earthling = Osmium(Os)
Hypofirst waterling = Fluorine(F)
Hyposecond waterling = Lithium(Li)
Hypothird waterling = Beryllium(Be)
Ultrafirst airling = Phosphorus(P)
Subthird airling = Helium(He)
Hypothird airling = Neon(Ne)
Ultrafireling = Sulfur(S)
Hyperfireling = Tellurium(Te)
Question:
Yet still, I have a majority of elements uncovered. How should I name the rest? Is there a general strategy, or are they gonna be arbitrary choices?
To make any kind of sense of this question, what do you mean by "angel" in the context of a non-human creature in your world?
@elemtilas There had been a few refinements of my worldbuilding. Actually, this question is outdated. In the current sketch, angels have been a thing since the birth of Newton (also an angel).
i guess what I'm getting at is what is the nature of these angels? That would help in understanding why they would use such a system as you describe, which to me is sounding much like a system one might find in an old style philosophical language.
@elemtilas The nature of these angels are that, each of them is a guardian of a specific branch of science (whether natural or social), and will fight for defending the science. The targets are usually pseudosciences, though scientific revolution is a thing. (Einstein would let Newton retire, for example.)
This system of element names has one major flaw: it's anthropocentric in all the wrong ways.
Yeah, the angels making this language up are trying to communicate with us plebeian humans, but the angels themselves aren't human and I imagine they are trying to get us to break free of the shackles of Earthly life (if they aren't, why are they trying to be so precise? Just keep us in the dark ages with straight-up alchemy). This system is tailor made to apply only to our own planet, and will be useless once we leave.
Worse, the Western Four Element schema is just that: Western. The East Asian civilizations of the time (and still to this day in traditional medicine) used the Five Phases.
It would be far more useful to emphasize the Periodic Table first, and get us plebeian humans asking the right questions. Why is the part of the air we breath called the second chalk? Because it is the chalcogen in period two. Table salt is composed of the second halo and the third soda. The second chalk combines with the prime element in a ratio of 1:2 to form water. The sun transmutes the prime element into the first noble.
In general, the system works like this: Name the columns, number the periods. Hydrogen gets special treatment because it can behave as if it belongs in column I, IV or VII. The transition metals and the rare earth metals will also need special treatment because the columns get muddled together so deep into the Periodic Table.
And if you really want to keep the classical connection, the four elements do map rather cleanly to CHNOPS, the elements of life: H and O compose water, P and S are both associated with fire, and C and N spend most of their bio-cycles in the air, with the trace metals like Fe and Ca as earth.
Fire, Earth, Air, and Water are fairly common in native traditions in North America, at least, sometimes in combination with a fifth (Spirit, as far as I can tell, being used by at least some groups). In Buddhism, there were the same 4, Hinduism had the basic 4 plus "void/space". Chinese, leaving out "air" and adding "wood" and "metal" is really the odd one one in the world, generally speaking.
@KeithMorrison Then I stand corrected
For having a notion of a chemical element at all, you need to know a solid amount of chemistry (real chemistry, alchemy known for millenia isn't enough here). With this background, the theory of the ancient four elements (specific to the Classical Greek culture and its successors) is just anachronistic. Modern chemistry informed element naming would use some of the following features
Number of protons/electrons. This is a blunt but straightforward naming scheme giving us names like unnilhexium for element 106
Use periods and/or valency groups. This allows for some creativity (we like it in conlangs) but becomes difficult with the Lanthanides and Actinides
BTW, Fluor is a fireling to me, in Flour atmosphere everything burns (almost, OK).
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1322 | Is there any general rule for constructing a word? Example: "q" or "w" should not end a word, something like this
I am developing 4 conlangs (sparish, old sparish, elvian and barrish (need a new name)) for a story which is used by humans of Spar, Northern Sparian, Elves/Aspian, Barrians of south respectively. I have no knowledge about developing language whatsoever, I have learnt some few things from youtube and google(youtube was much helpful). I have the constants and vowels that I want to use in my language, but I am facing trouble with the letters.
The sound of "q". I don't understand how to pronounce any words that have "q" in it. According to IPA pulmonic consonant chart (with audio), it sounds like /ka/. So how should I pronounce a word like "qakt"
Are there any kind of rules for word building? Like a word should never end with certain letters, or shouldn't start with certain letters.
I want these languages to sound and feel as natural as possible. I am asking because some of my created words exist in one language or the other, and I want them to be as distinct as possible.
Moreover, I want sparish to have a word like "re(letter)". This letter helps them to in poetry, its intonation depends upon the letter that is placed inside the bracket, but it does not feel write when you pronounce it. Can anyone help me with it too?
How to Create a Language
How to Create a Made Up Word
Conlang Case Study
How to Make a Language
Artifexian (channel)
How to Create a Language
Yes, there are but they are language-specific. These are called phonotactics. They are well explained in the book of David Peterson "The Art of Language Invention"(E-book download link). Actually, these rules include:
structure of a syllable. E.g. in Hawaiian language closed syllables are impossible. So words like "heck" are not allowed. ;)
stress. The Finnish language always stresses the first syllable.
What consonants/vowels can be combined. "st" is quite common in English but not in Hungarian. But "ts" is quite common in Russian but not in English. But on the other hand Russian allows "st" too.
there are many other things. I suggest reading this article on Wikipedia.
P.S. I'm not good at linguistic terms in English, sorry for possible wrong use of words ;)
Also: minimum word length; allowed initial/medial/final consonants; vowel harmony; sesquisyllabicity; and so on and so forth.
@bradrn yeah. There are just too much stuff so I wrote the first things I came up with.
Of course; you could probably write a book on this topic! (And I’m sure that many have been.) I just tried to suggest some other things that I see as reasonably common and/or relevant to the question.
@bradrn ohk thx. You mean I should edit my answer out?
I don’t think that’s necessary; I simply intended to add some additional information to supplement your answer. (Also, I’m finding it difficult to understand what you mean by ‘editing out’ your answer: if you mean that you should delete it, then no, of course you shouldn’t do that!)
@bradrn I meant I should add something like this: "also (thanks to bradrn) there are...".
You can do that if you want to include my suggestions, I don’t mind at all. (I’d call that ‘editing in’, as it happens — ‘editing out’ would be removing something from the post. English directional particles certainly have some strange connotations…)
Yes, there are various rules to the structure of words, this is a mix of syllable structure and phonotactic rules. These, however, are not universal, but rather, are language-specific, as mentioned above.
For example, in Japanese, it is a Open Syllable language, but it can have -n or -m serve as a Coda. But no other consonant can act as such.
無限 (Mu-gen)
月讀 (Tsu-ku-yo-mi)
This is quite universal in structure in Japanese, CV or V, and CVC2 only when C2 is -n or -m.
You can simply set these rules, but it is more complicated if developed naturalistically, where it is based around specific phonological changes that lead to this consistent rule emerging.
(Side note: asking multiple questions at once is not recommended here. I see that @VictorVosMottor has already given a good answer to your question (2), so I will restrict myself to answering (1).)
The sound of "q". I don't understand how to pronounce any words that have "q" in it. According to IPA pulmonic consonant chart (with audio), it sounds like /ka/. So how should I pronounce a word like "qakt"
The sound /q/ is a voiceless uvular plosive. By contrast /k/ is a voiceless velar plosive. We can compare the two:
They are both voiceless: produced without vibration of the vocal cords.
They are both plosive: produced by blocking the mouth and then releasing it.
They differ only in their place of articulation. /k/ is velar; that is, it is produced with the tongue touching the back of the soft palate. By contrast, /q/ is uvular; that is, it is produced with the tongue touching the uvula. (Another way to think about it: /q/ is produced towards the back of the mouth compared to /k/.)
So, to summarise: /q/ and /k/ are very similar sounds, except /q/ is slightly backer than /k/. Due to this similarity, it is not surprising that they will sound the same to you if your native language does not distinguish the two.
It seems like 2 questions, but it is actually one. I realised that there have to be rules for constructing words when I was building the word "qakt". it is quite difficult to pronounce that word, but I had to be sure. Therefore, I posted them as 2 different questions, maybe someone can actually pronounce that word.
@Gurkirat The fact that you had to list your questions separately to cover them fully is evidence that they are two questions, at least from the perspective of how Stack Overflow works. No-one can deny that they are related questions — they both relate to phonology — but they are still two questions.
@Gurkirat It may also interest you to know that phonotactic rules often have little, if anything, to do with ease of pronunciation. For one thing, people vary in how they pronounce words — e.g. I find /qakt/ very easy to pronounce, while you find it hard. Also, languages readily forbid easier words while allowing more difficult ones; a good example is Halkomelem, which allows words like /txʷstχʷás ʔal̰/ while disallowing words like /áʔa/.
That a lot for sharing that piece of information. For the future, I will remember the rules.
Do you any more points for how I can make it more naturalistic. Since the people of Spar continent are all humans, and when we go through there history, they are connected with the Earth.
@Gurkirat In what areas do you want to make it more naturalistic? There are lots of different ways in which a conlang can be made more naturalistic in its phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and lexicon… I couldn’t possibly list all of them in a comment!
It would be hard to say since I am really new in conlanging, but with my present knowledge, I have only thought about phonology, semantics and lexicon. What will you suggest me to increase my knowledge?
@Gurkirat I did it by learning more about linguistics. If you haven’t read them already, a good place to start is Mark Rosenfelder a.k.a. zompist’s books. Past that, I’d suggest reading lots of reference grammars as well as finding books on linguistics. r/conlangs has a nice list of resources as well.
Thanks a lot bradrn. I will definitely read and watch them. And for some reason, I can mention you in the comment. Thanks once again
You’re welcome @Gurkirat! Hope you find those resources helpful.
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1392 | History of world language
If we look at world history—I am speaking a little vaguely, since it is not possible to be completely accurate. The human race began from a single region, as you can see in the bottom image.
What kind of effect did these migrations have on language?
The first humans that were in Africa had to use some kind of language for communication, and when these people migrated from Africa to European regions, the migrants created new languages. Now, what I am wondering, since they were not expert linguistics, the languages that developed in these regions must have some kind of influence from their predecessor.
If we look at the languages that exist today, they differ greatly from other regions—here I am talking about the root languages (I am not sure "root language" is the right word here, if someone knows the right word then please edit it.), like Latin, Sanskrit, etc.
So how did these changes occur? The reason why I am interested in this is, I am creating cultures from languages, you can say the influence of language on culture. The first language, Vietrian, splits in two to create Old Viereian and New Vietrian. The basic difference is: "old" is used for spells making, and "new" is used for communication, this also vague since it is a five-page long difference. New Vietrian was enchanted so that the listener listens to it in their mother-tounges. This new language was passed down as "Zirian". From Zirian, every language emerges, except for Necromancers and Elves.
You haven't included Neaderthals or Denosivians(sp?),
No language (present company excluded) is created. All languages change over time, and as parts of the same language get separated geographically (or socially), they diverge. At some point they have diverged so much that they become separate languages (after having been different dialects/sociolects of the same language).
In fact, there are no 'languages': all there is is the capability of an individual to transfer mental phenomena/thoughts into speech, and the reverse capability of transferring speech back into thoughts. This is negotiated by individuals, and if they can successfully communicate, they speak the same 'language'. My speech changes when I always speak with the same group of people, and when I then meet someone from another group I haven't seen for a while, communication might be more difficult, as we use different words or pronounce words differently.
Some languages get preserved, mainly for ritualistic reasons: if you believe that your words invoke magic, or address a deity, you are careful about not changing this, as the words might lose their power. This relates to your 'old' variant. A writing system also helps to ossify a language, so Latin and Ancient Greek still exist (but notice how modern Greek and all the Romance languages have evolved from them).
Languages are commonly traced back to proto-languages (like indo-european), but a lot of this is conjecture, and made difficult by the lack of evidence (spoken variants are not usually preserved over time).
So languages differ if they are isolated from each other. Geography is a strong factor, so mountain villages often have their own dialects. Similarly with islands (though trade would then link them up again). Social class is also important: if peasants don't talk to knights or aristocrats, their language (sociolects) will grow apart. A writing system (if there is sufficient literacy) might slow that down, especially use of different words, while purely spoken languages would diverge faster between separate groups. Isolated countries are also different from countries that are well-connected with their neighbours. Shared culture also preserves linguistic coherence.
On the other hand, social factors can also play a role: you might want to imitate a higher-prestige sociolect, and your language then changes as well. Many learners of English want to speak with a British accent, but are mostly exposed to American English through films etc, so they might speak a mixture of American and British English. These might then become different dialects and eventually languages (though English-speaking cultural domination would preserve some cohesiveness here).
So there are plenty of options for you to decide how and why your languages diverge, based on the civilisation you want to model.
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1439 | Setting a signature Phonetics
A year ago, I became fascinated by conlanging. So I set out to create one for my soon-to-be-completed world, but no matter what I came up with, the words sounded like English. It feels like I am just copying an existing language. After a bit of reading and watching videos on Atriflexian, I developed a little idea about phonotactics but never got around to my original problem.
Italian, Spanish, French, German, English... each of these dominant languages have common roots, but one will not confuse one language with another. Is there some concept that I might be missing?
One thing you should definitely try as well is changing stress. French, e.g., stresses the last syllable most of the time, which makes a lot of difference.
Maybe it is just an English accent in your pronunciation or imagination of the conlang? Despite being your own creation it is a foreign language to you.
Look at the vowel system of each language, and you will see striking differences between them:
Italian: Seven pure vowels
Spanish: Five pure vowels
French: Seven vowels plus rounded front vowels plus nasal vowels
German: A lot of different vowels (actually nine basic vowels plus rounded front vowels plus shwa)
English: A lot of very strange vowels: Back unrounded vowels and shwa even in stressed and long syllables, lots of diphthongs, relative rareness of pure, non-diphthongised vowels
So, doing something with the vowel system will make your conlang acoustically different from the major European languages. Not only the set of chosen vowels but also their relative frequencies play a role, making /i/ or /u/ the most frequent vowel in your conlang will make its sound very exotic.
‘shwa even in stressed and long syllables’ — are you sure? I’m not aware of any English dialect with [ə] in stressed syllables. I myself have [əː], but I wouldn’t call a long vowel ‘schwa’. Also, it may be worth emphasising the huge differences in consonant inventories and phonotactics between these languages: English has complex syllable structure, vowel reduction and /θ/, French has stress-timing and resyllabification into predominantly CV syllables, and so on.
Well, in this case it is just a terminology difference, I mean [əː] (or a similar sound) when I talk about a long schwa.
@jk-ReinstateMonica the basic problem that I have— which you have also mentioned in your answer— is I am not so good with stress and tones, that's why I have a problem with Hindi (my regional language). Is there anything or tips that could help me better understand this?
I guess some practice in foreign languages is a method that helps a lot but it is tedious and time consuming. Choose a language whose sound you like and start learning it, at best with a native speaker as a teacher.
The selection of allowed consonants (and their frequency of occurrence) can also affect the sound of the language; a language with a high percentage of sibilants and fricatives will have a different sound from one that has a high percentage of stops and gutturals.
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1677 | For a strict SVO language, how do you handle complex sentences?
All of the SVO example sentences I see are very basic, such as this from Mini:
[subject] i [verb] a [object]
Tu i manja. You eat.
Man i bibe a vasa. Someone drinks water.
Bobi i vasa a veji. Bob waters the plants.
However, in English at least, you can have very complicated sentences and I'm not sure how to start going about mapping the number of edge cases, and how the patterns can boil down to this SVO system?
Just off the top of my head:
I keep wanting to start reading that big book after I sit down for lunch in the middle of the park late some days, just before my usual walk where I causally make my way across the forest.
Where is the SVO here? What is the acronym for this sentence? Or sentences that are just as complex or even more complex, or even simpler yet with many verbs and nouns and adjectives scattered about?
This is a sentence that is just as complex or even more complex, and others are even simpler yet with many verbs and nouns and adjectives scattered about if you know what I mean.
The first sentence is like:
I [S] keep [V] wanting [V] to start [V] reading [V] that big book [O] after [...?] I sit down for lunch in the middle of the park late some days, just before my usual walk where I causally make my way across the forest.
I don't see how you say a language is SVO and have complex constructions like this? Are they nested somehow? Are they chained instead? Or some combination? I don't get it.
If my examples break the SVO mold, what is an example of a strict SVO sentence in some language, which involves much more than just "I love apples" type sentences (obviously-SVO)?
To take it slightly more generally, how can I go about deciphering an arbitrary sentence into something like these acronyms? If I say "my language is strictly SVO", what does that mean about all the possible sentences I can construct, how do I figure out all the possible patterns that exist?
How familiar are you with theories of syntax?
Not familiar really.
The short answer is that SVO is shorthand for "the subject comes before the verb, and the object comes after". It doesn't mean that every sentence is specifically only three elements. But a full answer will involve covering basic syntax.
Do you have any works I could check out which describe what I need to know in a concise way?
Stack Exchange sites are more for problems and solutions than giving book recommendations. But you may want to read about subordinate clauses which are what allows English sentences to run on for so long.
"If I say 'my language is strictly SVO'" then everyone will know it's an artificial language. Humans love playing around with language. Creating a strict language just means someone will break the rules sooner rather than later.
The problem sentence has two very different kinds of complexity. The stacked infinitive verbs can each be considered the object of the preceding. A temporal relative clause can be considered an argument of the verb, but I think more convenient/flexible to treat it as similar to Japanese topic-wa.
The short answer is that "SVO" is shorthand for "the subject comes before the verb and the object comes after". It doesn't mean that every sentence consists of exactly three components.
But for the long answer…
To understand this, you'll need to know the basics of theoretical syntax. The gist of it is that words in spoken language always come in a linear sequence (that's just a universal constant of how spoken language works), but mentally, these word-sequences seem to be processed recursively—more like a tree than a list. Sometimes words that are next to each other can be manipulated as a whole unit, and sometimes they can't:
This box of chocolates may have been opened.
See [this box of chocolates]? It may have been opened.
*See [of chocolates may]? This box it have been opened.
The standard explanation is that "this box of chocolates" is a single unit in the tree (a single node and all its children) and "of chocolates may" is not.
Phrase-based syntax (as opposed to dependency-based syntax) tends to model this behavior with a context-free grammar, which you're probably familiar with from CS. (If not, you'll want to read up on this.) You can imagine "SVO" being an example of a context-free grammar rule:
S → N i V a N
And then the nonterminals N and V handle all the details of noun phrases and verb phrases, with their appropriate modifiers. For example:
[This] i [is] a [a sentence that is just as complex or even more complex]
All the complexity would be handled by the N (noun) nonterminal, which would have a recursive rule that lets you stick a whole clause into a noun phrase, and so on. How do you stick sentences together? Well, there's another recursive rule for that:
S → S Conj S
Conj → and | or
And it turns out this works fairly well. The actual rules used to describe English (or any other natural language) are incredibly complicated compared to this toy example, but quite a lot of English syntax can be modelled this way, with CFG rules.
A slightly more sophisticated version doesn't stick the subject and verb and object all on the same level, because syntactically, verbs and objects seem to be stuck together more tightly than verbs and subjects (read up on "constituency tests" to learn more about this). So you could instead say:
S → N VP
VP → V N
Or if you wanted your language to be SOV:
S → N VP
VP → N V
And now suddenly the grammar produces "this a sentence is" instead.
The full details of phrase structure syntax take at least a semester to properly explain. But if you want to explore this theory further, I recommend Adger's "Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach", which walks the reader through building a model of English and does a good job of justifying a lot of the theoretical assumptions behind that model.
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1724 | Ways of having the equivalent of -ed (past participle) or -ing (present participle/gerund) in conlang?
You can turn verbs/nouns into adjectives using participles like this:
The big-eyed monkey.
The jumping spider.
The loved rabbit.
However, I don't think these structures exist in Chinese, for example, so I would imagine they would just be said sort of like this:
The big-eye monkey.
The jump spider.
The love rabbit.
It doesn't quite get across the same meaning though. So how would a language outside of English say these sorts of things? Do they have their own participle/gerund forms, or do they just leave them off, or do something else? Wondering if you need to be this specific or can just leave them off.
Every language has ways of turning one category of word into another. For turning verbs into adjectives, for example, English has very regular active participles (-ing), slightly less regular passive participles (-ed), and some much less regular derivational processes (-able).
Other languages do it differently. Ancient Greek loves its participles and can express all sorts of things like "belonging to the people who have finished ___ing for themselves" in a single word. Swahili on the other hand doesn't really do participles at all; instead it uses relative clauses, turning an entire clause into a modifier ("a living person" → "a person who lives").
English often lets you turn one category into another without any special marker, because our syntax is very strict and that generally shows what category you mean ("you can verb any word"). Languages with less strict syntax generally don't allow this because it gets confusing. As a rule of thumb, strict syntax correlates with simpler morphology, and lenient syntax correlates with more complex morphology.
What about analytic languages like Chinese/Vietnamese/etc., do they do like I'm describing or how?
@Lance My experience with Chinese is fairly limited, but I believe the syntax indicates what role something plays in the sentence. A verb appearing in certain positions is the main predicate, and appearing in other positions it's a modifier to an entity instead.
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1726 | Do all words derive from one word form, or can one word form have many similar meanings in different parts of speech?
I am basically getting to the crux of my assumption in the conlang I am working on. That is, treating every word as a "base", which can be realized into either a verb, noun, or adjective, or 2 or all 3 of them at once. But the more I play with this, the more I am starting to think that every concept has a "base" in one of these 3 word forms, not more than one. Is that correct? Or are there cases where a base concept can be both a verb and a noun at the foundational level, or an adjective and a verb or adjective and noun at the basic level?
For example, "frail" is an adjective at the base, there is no verb, and the noun is basically frailty "frail state". The closest verb might be "to be frail".
And then "tree" is a noun at the base, with "treeify" being a derived verb (to be tree-like, or grow like a tree), and it doesn't have an adjective form.
But "calm" is both a verb and a noun seemingly at the same time. I don't mean just because in English the verb and noun use the same word, I mean the "calm state" and the "calm action" seem like both base forms of the word. But maybe not, maybe the noun is the base, and the action is to "create/make calm". So that would be evidence that there is indeed just 1 word per concept at the base.
Or "gallop", is the action or the object the base, or both?
I can only really think of words where there could be 2 bases, but thinking further it seems like one base and the other derived.
This would mean that everything is either a noun, verb, or adjective at the base, and can be extended to other word forms. I guess you have to also include a particle as the base word form, or like prepositions, so that would give you 4 word forms at least. But I am mainly asking about words that are nouns, verbs, and/or adjectives. Can they be more than one simultaneously, or must it be just one word at the base?
This question is really very debatable from the perspective of linguistics. Some lingusitics frameworks posit category-less roots, others would posit roots with strict inherent categories. Of course not all languages have adjectives, so there definitely isn't a universal three way division. But it does seem like all languages are based on both substantives and predicates, entities and events, or nominals and verbals.
If it's debatable, can you summarize the debate? For languages "without adjectives", they still require the use of adjectives implicitly, so I would say adjectives are also fundamental. Like "big thing", the adjective is "big". It is a fundamental thing unless I am missing something.
@Lance They're a fundamental category in English, but other languages don't necessarily have a separate category of "adjective". Some philosophers propose that everything can be reduced down to entities and predicates as the two fundamental classes of meaning (plus Boolean truth values), and indeed all languages seem to have "noun-like things" and "verb-like things", but beyond that it depends on the language.
A lot is coming down to me not understanding how languages without adjectives work. Wondering what some good resources are to learn about languages that lack adjectives.
My latest thinking on it.
@Lance That sounds like you're more interested in philosophy than linguistics. I'd recommend reading up on formal semantics and semantic typing, which classifies everything in language as an entity, a boolean, or a function on those (for example a predicate is a function from an entity to a boolean). Terms like "adjectives" aren't about the true nature of reality or whatever, they're about how people use words to communicate.
Yeah I'm starting to realize just how much I assumed action = verb, object = noun, type = adjective haha. Linguistics is more about the role words play in a sentence structure I guess. But it's important to know the possibilities in linguistics for making a conlang! I added more to Tune describing what I went with.
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1727 | How to tell what feels good in terms of sentence structure (like we do in English)?
I am basically finished with the first draft of the conlang, having figured out how to handle nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, gerunds, participles, particles, and other features from English and Chinese and a few others. Mostly stuck with what feels to be SVO structure, but generics are stacked before the main specific noun/verb, so instead of "crea-tion", it is more like "result create". But similarly it follows "big tree" (generic first).
However, now I'm wondering how to make the language "feel good", like poetry. How does that even work?! Not how to make complex Shakespeare-like sentences, but how to just do regular sentences and make sure they don't feel "clunky" or, like in English, ungrammatical. What does that even mean to "feel ungrammatical". Is it a statistics-based thing, where we get a bunch of sentence templates in our brains, and if it doesn't fit the template it feels "out of place"? I wonder how languages with highly flexible word orders work then, like Latin (I guess). It seems people say even those languages have "preferred" word orders, so maybe it is also a statistical thing as to what feels good.
Is there any research on this topic? I am wondering what the next steps to take are to make sure things "sound good" (I know that is subjective, but at the same time, it's kind of not, many in English agree that certain phrases "feel weird"). After browsing through examples in a variety of languages from around the world, it appears that things can be said in almost any way imaginable, with word orders covering every permutation pretty much, some with more detail, some with less, etc.. So I'm not sure how to tell if it feels good.
How does it even work in natural languages? Does it just take a lot of speaking and refining it so we create statistical patterns basically? How much work would it take for a conlang to have that natural feel?
This is the field called "syntax": the study of how words are put together into sentences. The simplest explanation would be that every language has rules for this, but what those rules are, and how flexible the results are, varies from language to language.
If you're interested in the theory, I recommend Adger's Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach, which you can find online. There are a lot of different theories of syntax out there, but I've found Adger's explanation of his version of minimalism compelling and also understandable.
I'm aware of syntax, but does the book go into what "sounds good" and how it works?
Based on your question, it sounds like by "sounds good" you mean "is considered grammatical", and in that case yes the book does go over it. Much of the book is dedicated to building a theory of English syntax that explains why some sentences are grammatical and others are not.
350 pages, wha'! It looks like a great read tho!
@Lance Be warned, syntax is in my opinion the most theoretically complicated area of linguistics. If you find yourself bouncing off Adger, there are other introductory texts out there. But Adger attempts to explain all of English syntax in his book, which most don't. (He doesn't necessarily succeed, but the goal is there.) He also claims a lot of aspects of his theory are true for all languages in the world, which I somewhat doubt, but they're still good for conlanging.
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1814 | Theoretical way to limit terms in a conlang while also allowing for distinguishing similar concepts/things?
I am working on a conlang (took a little break). I would like to limit the number of "terms" (single words, either 1 or 2 syllables) to less than or equal to 10,000. Given the word-formation rules of the language, there are about 5,000 single syllable words possible, and a few hundred thousand 2-syllable words. But you find some sound better than others, so pick less than that. Maybe up to 20,000 terms...
But the human brain (in my opinion) starts to get lost after 10,000 terms. If you are a native English speaker from the US, just try learning about Chinese cities and historical figures and their works, or Arabic world cities and historical stuff... There are thousands if not tens of thousands of new terms (multi-word terms even) in each category. I don't think it's easy for one human to branch out and learn the details of 20 different cultures like this, that would be over a million terms I would imagine. So hence I think 10,000 would be good enough to learn the entire language.
But then names of things like people or places become more intense.
Thomas the apostle
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī
United States of America
Byzantine Anatolia
Isaac Newton
Heraclitus the Elder
You would have to start doing things like:
Twin the sage of jesus. The twin the sage of the one who was anointed.
United States of the New World.
So you start getting much longer names, sort of how my limited "popular" view of stereotypical Native American naming might work, with "Wildhorse" or "Dark Cloud" or something like that. I would imagine you would start calling things "Temple Wolf of the Central Desert Pyramid Land" and stuff like that.
Then I imagine a child story.
Temple wolf of the Great Central Desert Pyramid Land went to eat the red fruit of the big tree. Temple wolf of the Great Central Desert Pyramid Land's friend, Temple Wolf of the Great Western Forest Pyramid Land, lived on the other side of the world. So one day Temple wolf of the Great Central Desert Pyramid Land and Temple Wolf of the Great Western Forest Pyramid Land met up to build the Great Network of the World. First, Temple wolf of the Great Central Desert Pyramid Land did x, then Temple Wolf of the Great Western Forest Pyramid Land did y...
So we have two "people" in the story:
Temple wolf of the Great Central Desert Pyramid Land
Temple Wolf of the Great Western Forest Pyramid Land
These are short names even. We might get more complex, with 3 or 4 "of's" and 4-5 nouns per noun phrase.
The old temple cloud wolf of the black rock area of the great central desert pyramid land.
Part of my question is, how in stories do we distinguish between all the characters? Usually all of the characters have different full names (first and last). But if it's history, many people might have the same name (Pliny the elder, pliny the younger, etc., or king henry VII or whatever). But in historical settings, we don't have that many similar names it seems, unless someone was talking about Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby and Bill Bryson and Bill X in the same story.
But the main part of my question is, what are the key approaches one can take in a conlang with a limit of 10k terms, for creating sorts of names or identifiers?
I was first thinking of doing an intro sequence for each new term, but then using a shortened version for each. So our story might become:
Desert One, Temple wolf of the Great Central Desert Pyramid Land, went to eat the red fruit of the big tree. Desert one's friend, Forest one, Temple Wolf of the Great Western Forest Pyramid Land, lived on the other side of the world. So one day Desert one and Forest one, met up to build the Great Network of the World. First, Desert one did x, then Forest one did y...
That is basically coming up with a "contextual alias" of a longer term, using a shorter term which will be used in the current context/setting of the writing or speech. But you could even just use the alias at first, and introduce them over longer periods of time.
Desert One went to eat the red fruit of the big tree. Desert one was also known as Temple Wolf, in their home in the Great Central Desert Land with the pyramids. ...
Those "identifying facts" could come at any point in the communication.
I think coming up with these "contextual aliases" would work, and would be better than adding 100k "terms" to the language. Say the comparison is between:
100k terms, combined in 1, 2 or 3 compound terms (like United States of America), giving 1 million complex terms.
10k terms, combined in 1, 2, or 3 compound terms (like Desert one), giving 1 million complex terms. Where these terms are "aliases" to longer more descriptive terms.
I just wonder what are the pros and cons of each approach (these being two approaches to the problem of how to disambiguate things with only 10k terms)?
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1830 | Do we have any conlangs which are "primitive" languages?
We have minimal languages with few words, like Toki Pona, and I have made a rough language with about 4000 words which covers most of what you would need to say as base concepts (4000 base concepts), as an extremely rough estimate. Then you combine these things to get the millions of specific concepts, roughly speaking. But these languages, as far as I know, have "modern" grammars roughly speaking.
In doing a conlang, and thinking of languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, or even Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili, you always want to make it speakable like a "modern natural language".
I have a line of imagination whereby I'm thinking that early in language evolution languages might not have been fully formed into "natural" languages like they are today. Instead they might have been, well, for lack of a better term, "primitive". By primitive I mean, they would have lacked subtle grammatical concepts and may not have even had "words" for highly abstract concepts. In thinking briefly about it, words like even "move", "make", "do", etc., these are all extremely abstract. Actions like "jump", or "sleep" or "climb" are easy to point to, as are comparing things to get adjectives like "red", or objects like "tree" and "leaf". So there is potentially a long gap in language development between realizing we need words for the abstract concepts to make it easier to talk about things, and when we just had things for the obvious concepts (things/features/actions which you can easily point to, for example).
In addition, I try and think how they could have even come to the idea of creating chains of sounds (like words), and it seems that would be a long evolution. Maybe they started realizing they could make individual sounds ("mm"), then two-sound chains ("ma"), then further 1-syllable sounds, then to two syllable sounds. Who knows. But in guessing, I would like to build a conlang which takes 1 syllable words and sequences them into a thought, without making it flow smoothly like a modern natural language.
Are there any languages like this (conlangs, creoles, etc.)? Any sources of inspiration I should take a look at?
What I'm imagining is something like:
Tree. Climb. You. Me.
Tree. Climb. You. Me.... Eat. Fruit... Take. Nap... Then. Walk. There (gesture point).
Well, really, "take" is an abstract concept. So it would be like "Nap" instead probably.
The order of the words seems like it would be more fluid rather than fixed (English is more fixed word order). You would talk slower because you need to let an imagination sink in for each word stated (in the listener), since all this is new.
Tree (point to tree, pause for a few seconds)
Climb (gesture climbing, pause for a few seconds)
You (point to you, pause for a few seconds)
Me (point to me, pause for a few seconds)
etc..
I don't have a better way of thinking about how a "primitive" language might look. I don't mean it needs to be choppy and stereotypically "caveman-like", but that's what it seems like I'm saying. But no, I am trying to say something where each word has magical meaning, which you have to ponder to understand, and use other associations and gestures to get the meaning of the speaker, before there are grammatical niceties like adpositions and such (assuming English in this example), or affixes.
Are there any conlangs like this which I could look at? If so, knowing a quick example of how it works would be helpful. If not, what about creoles or pidgins, how do they compare? If nothing comes to mind, how could you string together concepts without modern natural language grammatical niceties, in your imagination?
Based on natural human languages, if there's any general trait of "primitive" languages, it's probably that they're more complex. Simplification of cases, tenses, etc over time seems quite common. What you're describing seems more like a pidgin, which can indeed be quite simple, but as soon as people start learning them as a first language they instantly gain in complexity and sophistication.
@curiousdannii if what you were saying is true, then it would be a snap of the fingers to teach chimpanzees or other animals how to speak. I feel like you are intentionally ignoring the fact that there is a huge gap learning-wise (evolutionarily too) between voice-sound-making and primitive word stringing together. Once you get to stringing words together, then yeah maybe it can jump easily to "modern natural language", but I'm asking about the first to second phase transition here, not the second to third (as I've outlined).
No, I was saying that our evidence of human languages shows that so-called "primitive" languages are just as complex as "modern" languages, if not more so. If anything I'd posit that perhaps their morphological complexity was simplified to compensate for a gradual increase in vocabulary/semantic complexity, though I have no actual evidence for that of course.
I don't know of any attested languages that work this way, constructed or natural. Humans are very good at finding ways to communicate, and if you put children together with no exposure to outside language, they will invariably come up with something complex and sophisticated with a full-fledged grammar. Look at how pidgins turn into creoles*, for example, or the origin of Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN)*. Indeed, some linguists (most famously Noam Chomsky) point to this as evidence that language is innate, and humans have a built-in "universal grammar" mechanism in our brains to make this work.
If you want to find a "primitive" language like this, you're going to have to look back tens of thousands of years at least, which means we're firmly in the realm of speculation. But you might find Ljiljana Progovac's work interesting; she analyzes certain "fossil" constructions that are remarkably consistent across living languages, looks at how they compare to early stages of infant language development (like the "two-word" stage), and speculates about how people might have once communicated using only these constructions.
Her basic thesis is that the first stage of communication was assigning names to things and actions ("tree", "run", "eat", etc), then stringing two of these together to express actions on objects ("I eat", "eat plant", etc; notably, she points out that most languages allow these sorts of two-word constructions where the noun is either the subject or the object of the verb, so a "turncoat" turns his coat but a "turntable" is a table that turns). Eventually, the next step was using one of these two-word constructions as a component in a two-word construction, introducing recursion to the system. She speculates that this would have been an evolutionary benefit since it would make someone better at insults, which could be used to resolve social disputes in a non-violent way (and thus not injuring other members of the group).
This is, again, very speculative. But it might be an interesting foundation for a conlang.
* These examples aren't entirely uncontroversial: there are a few different theories out there about how creoles form, and some linguists believe there was outside intervention involved in ISN. But the general consensus—and what we teach our introductory linguistics students—is what I've said here.
There is of course the Pleistocenese, somewhat plausible artlang meant for the Neanderthals. In many ways it breaks our preconceptions, it has no separate phonemes (word=morpheme=syllable≈phoneme), all the "words" are uninflected monosyllabic units, there are no regular word classes, no higher grammatical abstractions (the syntax is a patchwork of irregularities). The language is on one hand rather complicated for a modern human to learn, on the other hand quite incapable of conveying elaborate philosophical ideas (evenif you somehow added the vocabulary).
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1956 | How are separable verbs / phrasal verbs avoided in languages?
Phrasal verbs are common in English. What do other languages (natural or conlang) do to avoid this feature? That is, how can they say the same things without having this feature?
From a broader linguistic point of view, phrasal verbs are the exception and their absence is the norm. So other languages don't "avoid" them, it is more natural to ask, how do speakers of Germanic languages can cope with such beasts.
I can't understand the purpose of this line of inquiry. If for example a conlang contains the morphological equivalent of aufstellen, and you want it to work like "ich aufstelle etwas" rather than "ich stelle etwas auf", why not just... say that that's how it works? How is there any question about "avoiding" separable verbs, you just... don't separate them.
Well, a phrasal verb is a way of conveying some sort of verbal meaning. So instead of using a phrasal verb, you can just use a verb. Instead of "pick up", you can have a verb "take"; instead of "back down", you can have a verb "retreat". And so on.
Some languages, like Latin, have a set of affixes that you can attach to verbs to derive new ones, and this is how they make all the verbs they need to express various meanings. Other languages just have a lot of verbs in their lexicons.
Seems to me that verbs like re-treat and pro-ceed and per-ceive, which we know mainly from Latin but are common everywhere in IE, differ from English phrasal verbs only in their inseparability, and German verbs show the softness of the contrast, if I understand right: the particles of German phrasal verbs become prefixes in non-finite forms. So if I were OP I'd be looking for non-IE answers.
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1986 | How to say complex sentences in Lojban (understanding the basics of gismu)?
I finally delved into Lojban, and it is great so far! I don't fully understand yet, but getting closer. There is this list of gismu totalling 1342 items. Each one is linked to a page such as cmima, where they say the mathematical function such as that one:
member; x1 is a member/element of set x2; x1 belongs to group x2; x1 is amid/among/amongst group x2.
Or basti:
replace; x1 replaces/substitutes for/instead of x2 in circumstance x3; x1 is a replacement/substitute.
The examples I've seen so far are basic:
ko'a dunda ko'e ko'i - He, gives it to her.
How do you insert long and complex phrases in each slot, basically? I only see 1 word per slot so far.
How would you say:
[x1: The grumpy old man] gives [x2: the unbelievably brown and dry paper] [x3: to the mean and tired old lady]
Where can I find more information on how you construct these larger "phrases" to fill in the slots of the gismu? Or how would you explain how to write such a sentence?
As a newcomer, this information is seemingly missing from the introductory material.
Check out a tutorial like la karda.
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1471 | What are some key languages which don't have distinctions between me, myself, and I?
I am working on a conlang and would like to treat "I" or "me" or "myself" as one thing, "me", as a noun I guess. Are there languages that do this, that don't have these distinctions? If so, what are some key examples? As a bonus, what are some things they do instead, or where can I look for more information?
I want to say something like:
me - see - tree
me - see - the - tree
But have it sound, well, not so caveperson like. So wondering if other languages do this, and how they can "cope" without these distinctions/features.
I think it only sounds 'caveperson-like' because it is wrong in English. In a foreign language that wouldn't be the case, eg (assuming you don't speak German): Mich sehen den Baum. Sounds cave-like to me, but probably not to people who don't speak it.
There are many languages without case distinctions on their pronouns. Mandarin, Japanese, and Arabic are some especially prominent examples (although Arabic does have special clitic pronouns that can be attached to verbs to mark the object).
To someone who speaks one of these languages, the lack of case does not sound at all cave-man-ish.
To add on to Tristan's answer, most Bantu languages also lack case.
In Swahili, for example, mimi can mean either "I" or "me", yeye either "he" or "him" (or "she" or "her" or…), and so on. Word order makes the relationship clear: objects come after the verb, subjects come before. So even ignoring agreement marking, it's clear that mimi ninapenda yeye means "I love him", not "he loves me".
Swahili also allows pronouns to be incorporated into the verb itself, as an alternate way of indicating subjects and objects. For example, in ninampenda, the ni means the subject is first person singular, and the m means the object is third person singular: again clearly "I love him" rather than "he loves me".
English has a few lingering relics of case marking on pronouns, but if you look at nouns, it should be clear that they're not really necessary. In a sentence like "the scientist loves the engineer", there's no case marking at all, but it's completely unambiguous who's the subject and who's the object. The fact that we still have different forms for "I" versus "me" is more a historical accident than anything that actually carries functional load.
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1473 | How do you write a language without the word "to" preceding verbs?
I am working on a fantasy language and am perplexed by the true meaning of the word "to" in English, at least when it appears before a verb, as in these sentences.
I want to go somewhere.
I want to go to eat
I want to go play
I want to go skating
I'm not sure if you can "stack" more than two verbs together ("to go to eat", or "to go play"). If you can, it would be cool to see examples. But then the main question is, how do you write these sorts of sentences in a language without "to" (essentially stacking verbs). Do you just leave out "to" altogether, and just put the verbs one after another, or are there some particles involved, etc.? What if you can stack 3+ verbs in a sequence, how does that work in languages without "to"?
Actually thinking more on it, it appears I am stacking 3 verbs (want + go + eat), and you could make it 4 with "would" (I would want to go eat). But can it get any larger? (Tangent question, main question is how to do it for arbitrarily long verb chains in a custom or natural language).
"I want to go to eat tonight" is a perfectly valid construction, and works exactly the same in, for instance, French. "Je veux aller manger se soir."
Most (?) of natlangs do it differently, not by using this "infinitive prepositions". To have some real life examples:
if there is an (morphologically marked) infinitive, it is often used in this case: Slovak "Chcem ísť niekam" (want-1P go-INF somewhere) and "stacking" works as expected: "Chcem ísť jesť" (want-1P go-INF eat-INF). English is in fact also in this class (but the infinitive is marked with a "preposition").
if there is no infinitive, you can kind of assume the second verb to be a subordinate clause and use whatever you do for subordinate clauses: Bulgarian "искам да ям" (want-1P that-CONJ eat-1P).
As for the "would", that word is kind of overloaded in English, but in this case "I would go to eat" it is a conditional and that one is usually expressed differently (note there is no "to" following), either by a dedicated verbal inflection (if your language has them), e.g. Italian "andrei a mangiare" (go-1P-COND to eat-INF), where the "a" is a preposition required by the verb "andare", or a separate conditional particle. Slavic languages often do both, e.g. again Slovak "Išiel by jesť" (go-3P-COND would-COND eat-INF) where the "go" is conjugated as if in the past tense (common form for the conditionals) and the "by" is an uninflected conditional particle (I switched to the 3rd person, because 1st person requires an auxiliary verb and that would unnecessarily complicate the sentence).
The to in English marks an infinitive, which is often used as a verb complement:
I plan to eat a burger.
Another way of expressing the same relationship (that your intention is to eat someting) would be
I plan eating a burger.
(That sounds a bit odd to me, though, as plan would probably be used more often with a to-infinitive rather than an ing-clause). This almost sounds to me like me planning while I am eating.
If your intention is not just to eat, but to go somewhere to eat, you say
I plan to go (out) to eat a burger.
You can add some modality, and say
I would plan to go to eat a burger (if I had the time to do the planning).
Basically you're adding more features to your verb group.
The question now is, what do you want to express, and then you need to think about how to do that. You seem to be coming from the other direction, trying to replicate the form/structure and not the function of English verb constructions.
I would think of what you want to say:
semantic content: this is done by choosing a particular verb (eat, go, plan)
pragmatics: be judgemental/evaluative (talk/chat/gossip/converse/...)
modality: how likely is it? Do I have to do it? Am I abble to do it? In English you use modal verbs for that (can, would, should, must)
tense: when does it happen? Past, future, present? This is done by modals (will) or morphology (planned, ate, went)
link with subject/object: for redundancy, do you want to have shared features between the subject or object and the verb? I eat, but she eats. You could be inventive and have the verb agree with the object (*I eat a burger, *I eats two burgers)
...
You don't need to express any of this (apart from the semantic aspect) through the verb. You could have separate words that signal any of these, or use word order: if the verb is before the noun, then it means you disapprove of what happened, if it is after, you're fine with it (that would be an odd example, but hey, it's your language and you can do what you want to).
Or you could have affixes that you attach to the words (which is like regular past tense markers in English).
Some verbs (and nouns) take complements, eg anything related to planning/thinking. Or other verbs that relate to actions: I'm waiting to start, or I'm waiting for Godot to arrive. So for longer verb groups you're probably looking at having such verbs at the beginning.
So the length of verb groups really depends on what you want to put into it.
Was it really necessary to point out that it is anglo-centric, that's kind of a rude thing to say. Obviously I have a bias, I live in California!
@LancePollard It was not meant to be rude, I was just pointing out that this is something that occurs in English, but not necessarily in other languages. I apologise if you felt it was offending you.
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1478 | How to handle denoting the noun in a sentence when there are noun-modifiers present?
I am working on a conlang and considering ways to denote a noun in a sentence. It's easy to handle single-word nouns (translating from English), because, well, they are one word. An example of a single word noun is "tree". In my case, I just prefix them with a. But it gets more complex when you consider more complex multi-word nouns. Some examples include:
The big old tree.
The big old oak tree.
The tree leaf forest.
The dirt path.
The dirt path area.
The town grocery store.
All my examples are where there is a main noun at the end, and everything else comes after the The (it prefixes the noun). But I'm sure there are examples you could come up with where everything else comes after (or surrounds) the key noun, I can't think of any off the top of my head for English.
The first one consists of what are traditionally called adjectives I think. As big and old are just simple adjectives. Adjectives are known as "noun modifiers". In my foobar (fake, for demonstration purposes) conlang, adjectives are prefixed with u, so it makes it easy: ubig uold atree. Cool, that should work...
But then it gets more complicated. "Oak tree" is a type of thing. You could say "oak" is an adjective, but is it really? I don't know for sure.
Then it gets even more complicated. The phrase tree leaf forest should probably be written tree-leaf forest, but when speaking you don't denote hyphens, so there's that. But all 3 of these words themselves (standalone) are nouns ("tree", "leaf", and "forest"). So do I mark them as noun-after-noun, or a bunch of adjectives followed by a single trailing noun. That is the key question I am asking, is it the pattern (in English or any other language), that the noun is either by definition or by some principle a single word (like the trailing forest in tree leaf forest) and the rest are adjectives? Or how should we think of this?
The phrase dirt path area has the same exact problem. What is to be a noun, what is to be a noun-modifier? Because "old" and "dirt" are very different, "old" on its own is an adjective/noun-modifier, while "dirt" on its own is a noun ("old path forest" vs. "dirt path forest"), shouldn't they be distinguished in some way in theory? By that I mean, grammatically classified differently?
In the last case, "grocery store" is the noun, so there is a case where actually, it's not the trailing single one-word noun that should be marked as a noun, it is the 2 word phrase "grocery store" that should be marked as a whole noun. But preceding "grocery store" is "town", which is also (standalone) a noun, but in this case acting as an adjective. But really, "grocery" is the "type" of store, so store is the noun, and grocery is the adjective.
I'm sure there are cases where the noun is 3 words, but I can't think of any ("coffee shop" is 2, "full moon", or perhaps 3 would be "assistant state secretary"). Oh but then you have "assistant state secretary Jane Doe". In the first case you have "secretary" as the trailing noun ("assistant", and "state", being adjectives I guess?), but in the second one "secretary" is now an adjective? And "Jane Doe" is the noun?
Basically the question is, what counts as a noun when there are other seemingly-"modifiers" present around the noun, and what counts as a modifier?
From your questions it looks like you're creating a modified version of English. I would suggest having a look at some other languages for inspiration and to broaden your horizon: toki pona would be a good one, as it's small and quite different from English. Klingon has different word order and some interesting morphology. Both of them will give you some good ideas for your own creation.
What you call "multi-word nouns" are usually called "noun phrases". It is a peculiarity of English (but not uncommon; isolating languages tend to do this, see Chinese) that you can stack nouns into a noun phrase, with a head and the rest of the nouns as modifiers.
Inflectional languages tend to mark the part of speech of words, and there is no ambiguity between adjectives as modifiers (often in grammatical category agreement with the noun), and a noun (in the appropriate case, usually genitive or an equivalent). In the former case, you can often turn a modifying noun into an adjective by an appropriate morphological derivation.
I'm sure there are cases where the noun is 3 words, but I can't think of any
Grave sex scandal - one interpretation considers grave to be an adjective, the other one a noun (and conveys a rather macabre meaning).
To turn it into a concrete example, in Esperanto grava seksa skandalo would be ADJ-ADJ-NOUN, but you could also use (somewhat stiff) grava skandalo de sekso ADJ-NOUN-NOUN_GEN (lit. grave scandal of sex); the macabre meaning would be covered in seksa skandalo de tombo (sex scandal of (a) grave), or using the usual morphological process to turn nouns into adjectives, tomba seksa skandalo. Although Esperanto speakers would likely exploit the agglutinative properties of the language and use seksskandalo if it were not for the difficult -kssk- consonant cluster.
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1481 | How to break out of the English mold when creating a conlang (specifically in regards to word modifiers)?
I am working on a conlang. I have to some degree (i.e. a little bit) studied the grammar of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, and know Spanish relatively well in comparison from school, though my main language is obviously English. By "study", I don't know all of the grammatical structures of these languages, but I get some of the basics and have gathered inspiration from them. I have decided I like Chinese (Mandarin) and Vietnamese for the "atomicity" (analytical language), where every word is an atom and there are no word conjugations or the like, even for things like making it past tense ("wanted" vs. "want" in English).
But such an atomic/analytic language comes at a cost, you have an extra word for very common things like the past tense of a verb. So I am making some of these common things be turned into a suffix. But it turns out, just by making tenses, plurals, and a few other things into suffixes, it is already starting to look a lot like English or Spanish. Also, I learned from Hebrew that they have the definite article (like "the" equivalent) prefix every word if you have a complex noun. I think that is repetitive, so I like the way English does it just saying "the" once at the beginning of a phrase. Now, Chinese doesn't use "the" at all, they omit the word entirely. I don't really like losing that extra information (even though in theory you can regain it from context, but I don't know Chinese well enough to see how this really feels omitting the word "the"). So I am opting to have the concept of "the".
Sanskrit has way more verb and noun inflections, but I want to keep most of the words atomic so I don't do anywhere near as many as they do.
That gets us through the words pretty much.
After all of this, we are left with sentence structure. I like the idea of SVO rather than VSO or VOS because SVO seems like (in principle) it flows from one thing to the next, like a programming language. You start with the subject, it "pipes" into the verb as input, and then you pipe in the object from the other side. I mean technically with "piping" you might think "SOV" might make more sense, but splitting the subject and object with a verb means it's easier to distinguish between them. But this is, again, like how English (and Spanish and Chinese) does it. So it seems like I haven't even looked at other languages to mix it up and not be so "English-centric".
So then my sentences are basically like English in the end (since I have "the", "a", and SVO, with a few word suffixes):
<the> <tree> <fall> <down>
However, this gets to the main question. The last real big piece is how to deal with noun modifiers ("adjectives") and verb modifiers ("adverbs"). In English, they appear all over the place in the sentence. Sometimes they appear before the word ("the tree actually fell"), sometimes after ("the tree fell down"). Sometimes both ("the tree actually fell down"). That is for adverbs, but for adjectives too ("I see the *big tree", which I guess is an attributive adjective, vs. predicative adjectives which I can't think of an example of adjective appearing after a noun).
So I am wondering, what are all the ways these "inspiration" languages (in terms of my project) handle adjectives/adverbs ("modifiers")? Are there any languages which greatly restrict their placement in the sentence to only one position (either before or after the noun/verb)? If so, what are some examples in either Chinese, Vietnamese, Sanskrit, and/or Hebrew (or all 4 of them), of if they don't have that feature, what is a language that does (with an example)? If there is a good conlang which demonstrates it, that would be an interesting comment too.
Basically I am trying to not make this language feel like "I just slightly modified English". I thought about the word/sentence features of many other languages and feel I like this structure I have landed on the best so far, but there is still room for improvement and getting better/more influence from these other few languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Sanskrit).
In the long term, learning another language reasonably well is probably the only way to get a "real feel" for how things can sound natural or not in other languages. That's a very ambitious project though, and there are easier things you can do that take you a long way!
Separate what to say from how to say it.
For instance: Being a native English speaker, you are accustomed to having a definite article in your language, as you like being able to separate "the cat" from just any other cat in every sentence. Fine. You know what you want to say. If you want your language to seem more exotic, ask yourself if the way the English language expresses this feature is the only way, or if you could come up with something else.
My native language is Swedish, and we also make the distinction between definite and indefinite. We don't have a word like your "the", however, but instead use different endings to convey the same meaning. Much like English does with the plural. Consider the following translations from English to Swedish.
"cat" -> "katt", "the cat" -> "katten", "cats" -> "katter", "the cats" -> "katterna"
When I started learning English at school I was faced with this strange structure (the English "the"), but the underlying concept was familiar. I could thus relatively seamlessly translate one construction to the other. If my native language had not had the same distinction it would likely have been much harder.
You mention that you know some Spanish, and though definite articles work the same you could observe differences from English there as well. One is that pronouns are not necessary in a Spanish sentence, since this information is expressed in the verb endings. "Voy a comer" translates readily to "I'm going to eat", but take a look at the two sentences and you'll find they are very different. The Spanish one has no pronoun. The English one has the unit "I'm", which could either be interpreted as a pronoun and a verb not present in the Spanish one, or as a unit corresponding to Spanish "soy". Then follows the word "going" which has the same basic meaning as Spanish "voy", a word that is used in the translation, but in a completely different form. You could translate "voy" to the English unit "I'll" and make the whole sentence "I'll eat", but even then that doesn't constitute an exact word-by-word translation as the word "a" would have been taken out.
So: How could you express your desired distinction between definite and indefinite? One way would be to keep the article, but place it after the noun instead. You could use suffixes, like Scandinavian languages, or why not prefixes? Word order? Keep this particular feature the same as in English, but change something else? You have lots of possibilities!
The same procedure can be used for other things you want your language to express.
A comment on SVO word order:
Are you really sure your interpreting this as the most logical word order has noting to do with English being a SVO language? Couldn't you just as well argue that verb-first structures are "more like programming" in that you first state a function and then its inputs? And if not, wouldn't your comparison to piping fit better with OVS word order? If I tell my terminal to "ls | grep .pdf" it first gets the list of files, the "object", and then feeds this to grep, which could be seen as either the subject or the verb, which filters out the lines containing ".pdf".
Perhaps you'd be interested to see how other languages do things here: https://wals.info/ .
If I do not overlook anything, then all the features you are thinking about are discussed here with examples from throughout the world.
Without being exhaustive of the topics you mention, here are some examples that this site covers your questions.
Now, Chinese doesn't use "the" at all, they omit the word entirely. I
don't really like losing that extra information
Chapters 37 and 38 discuss ways of marking definiteness and indefiniteness (English 'the,' 'a').
If you wanted to skip having a separate word to show definiteness, you might read how some languages use 'one' or 'this' to do the jobs.
Distinct from doing this job with any dedicated words, one strategy you may not have considered is reordering or omitting grammar elements to indicate definiteness. Turkish distinguishes 'a' from 'one' with word order "I saw [one] red [a] car," changes the noun case to do what 'the' does in "I saw the car," and lets the absence of {a, this, that} to indicate "the" in "Car was red."
Using omission and word order, you can also come up with something which is not explicitly related to markers of definiteness per se. If I understand the Ngiyambaa (Pama-Nyungan; New South Wales, Australia) example of doing without a 'the,' folks usually indicate 1st and 2nd person, so could indicate 3rd person by omission; therefore, when they do mark 3rd person, it also means 'the,' even though this marker's explicit job is not being a definite article.
So I am wondering, what are all the ways these "inspiration" languages
(in terms of my project) handle adjectives/adverbs ("modifiers")? Are
there any languages which greatly restrict their placement in the
sentence to only one position (either before or after the noun/verb)?
I do not see that this is discussed explicitly as the topic of a chapter, but there are 19 chapters on word order, 7 on syntax for noun phrases, and 31 more on either simple or complex clauses.
Here is one on Order of Adjective and Noun. On its (or any) map page, on or below the map you can search up each of the languages you want to see. I don't think that Sanskrit is included in any of the surveys, though.
I have often satisfied "What are all the ways..." questions there. It can help you be aware of how English does things so that you can pick the English way only when it does stand out to you in comparison.
Lastly, if you'd like some food for thought from somebody who has worked on similar goals of breaking out of his English mold, I can tell you how my conlang does some of these things in not-English ways.
Otherwise, altogether, I can definitely tell you there are still possibilities for you to enjoy discovering :)
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1498 | How do conlangs/natlangs have prefixes suffixes and not get them jumbled up?
When thinking how to build a conlang system of prefixes/suffixes, I get stuck right at the beginning: how do you prevent clashes within the prefix/suffix/base system?
By that I mean the following. Say you have these prefixes:
a
an
ani
amo
am
ami
amo
ach
acho
Then say you have these word "bases":
ma
man
mother
noise
nose
norm
match
cheek
chim
chin
aman
amish
achy
norma
macha
And you have these suffixes:
chum
ma
ama
amo
ana
vana
chana
I just picked random ones for demonstrative purposes. These will come into conflict in the following scenarios:
a + amish = aamish?
an + noise = annoise?
am + macha + ama = ammachaama?
The point is, some of them won't be able to combine:
If one ends with a vowel and the other starts with the same vowel (or even a vowel at all), and you don't have long vowels, then what do you do?
If one ends with a consonant and the other starts with the same consonant (and you don't have long/geminate consonants), then what do you do?
I am vaguely starting to imagine a system where you have two forms to each prefix/base/suffix, so like:
If ending in a consonant, it can end in a sibilant/fricative like s or f, or a nasal like m or n, so you have pairs like "mas" and "mam", and you pick one depending on the following word chunk you are working with.
If ending in a vowel, and the next begins with a vowel, you put a y or w between. So a + ama would become "awama".
Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.
How do natural languages (or conlangs for that matter) deal with this problem? Like in Sanskrit, or Latin, I see these sorts of prefixes/suffixes like my examples, and yet somehow the system seems to work (I haven't studied enough examples in each language though to know how/why it seems to work). What constraints do they place on the system? Etc. How do they create a prefix/suffix system that just works?
I ended up making all prefixes/suffixes/bases have to start/end with a consonant, and to combine you join with a vowel. That means for extra syllables, which I would like to get rid of. So instead of "kan" and "van" combining to form "kanavan", for example, I would like to just do "kanvan". Or even better, just have things that don't start/end with consonants, like "ka" and "an", and have them be, I don't know, "kan" or "kawan". How do you accomplish such a system? What are the range of possibilities which you can use (taking inspiration from natlangs or conlangs the like)?
It looks like sanskrit uses sandhi for this?
Through usage. If something turns out to be confusing, it is changed. For example adding an n to an a- prefix if followed by a vowel etc. I guess that's the hazard in language design: you would have to simulate the fine-tuning that occurs naturally.
over-reacting, overreaching, posttraumatic, etc. these all have the same consonant at the joining position.
Some ambiguity won't be a problem. In isolation, it might be, but in context these will be disambiguated easily. "They're looking at their car overe there" -- three words pronounced the same, but most people won't confuse them. I wouldn't worry too much about your system, just try it out and see how it works in sentences.
Well, the question I’d ask myself in this scenario is: why exactly is it a problem to get words like “ammachaama”? After all, English has words like “cooperate” and “unneeded”, and it seems to be doing fine.
If ending in a consonant, it can end in a sibilant/fricative like s or f, or a nasal like m or n, so you have pairs like "mas" and "mam", and you pick one depending on the following word chunk you are working with.
This is called "allomorphy" and it's quite common. For example, in Ancient Greek, the negative prefix is /a/ before a consonant (asymmetric, atheism) but /an/ before a vowel (anemia, anorexic). Inuktitut, a famously agglutinating language, has a lot of allomorphy rules.
Usually this sort of thing results from some sort of phonological pattern. The negative prefix in Greek came from PIE *ṇ-, which historically became /a/ in certain environments and /an/ in others. But by the time of Plato, it no longer seems to be a part of the language's phonological system; it's just a quirk of this one prefix.
If ending in a vowel, and the next begins with a vowel, you put a y or w between. So a + ama would become "awama".
This is called "epenthesis" and it's one type of phonological process, which is also quite common. The difference between this and allomorphy is that these phonological processes seem to happen at a different level; it doesn't matter that it's specifically the prefix a- being used here, it just matters that two /a/ phonemes ended up next to each other, and that's not allowed.
Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.
Sure, but natural languages have a high degree of redundancy, so losing a couple bits of information here isn't a problem.
How do natural languages (or conlangs for that matter) deal with this problem? Like in Sanskrit, or Latin, I see these sorts of prefixes/suffixes like my examples, and yet somehow the system seems to work (I haven't studied enough examples in each language though to know how/why it seems to work). What constraints do they place on the system? Etc. How do they create a prefix/suffix system that just works?
In Latin, at least, only the last phoneme of a prefix ever gets changed when it attaches, and there usually isn't much functional load on this last phoneme. This makes sense, because if the assimilation had ever created an unacceptable ambiguity, speakers would have found some way to fix that (by, say, ceasing to use one of the ambiguous prefixes).
So when we do occasionally see a high functional load on the last phoneme of a prefix (ad-esse "to be present" vs ab-esse "to be absent"), the system must have some way of keeping them distinct; in this case, ad-esse is able to assimilate in forms like assum "I am present" and affuī "I was present", while ab-esse is not (absum, abfuī). If it didn't, speakers would have found, created, and used workarounds over the centuries.
Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the
head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.
This happens in natlangs all the time. Consider French: the overabundance of silent letters at the ends of words means, for example, chien (dog) and chiens (dogs) are pronounced exactly the same. The language gets around it through the articles; you know that "le chien" is "the (male) dog" and "les chiens" is "the (male) dogs", thus in this case the difference is indicated by the difference between [lə] and [le].
And in some cases, it can get ridiculous. Consider the conjugations of the present tense "to run":
je cours (I run)
tu cours (you run)
il court (he runs)
elle court (she runs)
ils courent (the males run)
elles courent (the females run)
Every single one of those verbs are pronounced exactly the same, [kuʁ]. The only way you can differentiate them in speech is by the pronouns. Except, well, il/ils is pronounced the same, as is elle/elles. So there is, just from isolation, no way for someone to differentiate between "he is running" and "they are running".
So, what can you do? Well, context. Sometimes it's clear what you're talking about. Sometimes you have to add words to make the context clear: "Ils courent" (They are running) vs "Louis, il court" (Louis, he is running). Sometimes you can use other adjective which may have different words for male/female or singular/plural. All the normal tricks languages use.
ADDENDUM
I just realized, with my example of the conjugations of "courir", that it provides a good example of how someone trying to understand the linguistics of another language could get it really wrong from a limited sample size. We know French is written that way because of its historical development, and that it conjugates the verbs for different persons, and has gender and number coded in the pronouns, which the written language maintains. But if French wasn't written down (or it was written in a script that was strictly phonetic), and you only had a small sample size, you might come to the conclusion that the verb "to run", koor, wasn't conjugated in the present tense, and that French didn't differentiate between singular and plural in the third person.
Similarly, if you only had the written text, you might think that my examples above were pronounced je koors, too koors, ill koort, ell koort, ills koor-ent and ells koor-ent (or maybe koo-rent).
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1494 | How do swear words work in real languages?
How many swear words should you have in a conlang, and how are they designed? What is their purpose really? And should any other "regular" words be constructed out of them? Like if "bar" was a swear word, then "foobar" was a goose or "barfoo" was a house, is that a problem? Also, what are swear words actually, do they have a consistent meaning across cultures?
No, they don't have a consistent meaning across cultures. Tabu is a prominent feature of every culture -- there are things that one doesn't do, and everybody knows what they are. And some of the tabus have language attached to them. There are different kinds, depending on what the culture's like. 200 years ago, American English swear words were about God and the devil; now they're about sex and bodily function. The culture has changed.
Another thing you should research is why do people swear. I find a lot of swear words are short, plosive words, like "fuck" or words that can be drawn out, like "shit".
As jlawler mentioned in a comment, every culture has "taboos" (also sometimes spelled "tabu", borrowed from Polynesian). The term usually refers to objects and actions that are somehow culturally forbidden or repulsive, but it can also refer to concepts and words.
What words are taboo varies a lot by culture. Nowadays in American English they tend to refer to sex and bodily functions (fuck, shit, ass, slut). In other, usually older varieties of English, they had more to do with religion (damn, hell, bloody). In Classical Latin you would swear by a god or a demigod (one of the most common expletives is usually translated "by Hercules"). In some long-ago ancestor of English, the Proto-Indo-European word for "bear" seems to have become taboo, which is why we say "bear" (possibly from a root for "brown", possibly from a root for "wild animal", there's not a consensus) instead of some cognate with Greek arktos.
The one constant, though, is that there'll always be some sort of taboo (both culturally and linguistically). If you're inventing a conculture, decide what they consider forbidden. If you're tying your conlang to an existing culture, look at what words they swear by. But in a natural language, there will always be something that's considered offensive.
Swear words can be indeed a problem for the rest of the vocabulary. German once had a whole wealth of verbal compounds with the prefix after-. They fell out of usage when the noun After "anus" became widely used a medical term. The process behind this is called taboo.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "can be indeed a problem for the rest of the vocabulary". What do I then do about it? You've just pointed out a fact that there might be a problem, but no solution. Please help, thanks.
Well, I think the example in the answer is clear: Once the prefix falls under taboo, all the prefixed words are replaced with newer synonyms, in the case of this example another prefix, nach-, occupied the now free semantic space.
Swear words can mean different things in different cultures & languages. I speak English as my first language, where most of our swear words are known as "potty language" & for good reason. Most of the English swears are about sex or the body.
In French, the language of my dad's family, a bunch of the swears are evangelical. I'm not sure that's the right word. What I mean is that most curse words are about the church. Now there's an interesting point to be heard there! What do we call swears? "Spitting oaths"? Promises basically. Using the Lord's name in vain.
Using the Lord's name in vain does NOT primarily mean "oh my god lol", it means "I swear to God" or when you put your hand on the bible in a courtroom & say "I swear to speak the truth" or whatever. If you keep your word, then good for you. It is "bad" when you swear on the bible or God's name & then break your promise/oath. So that might be why French swears are often religious. Similar to the religion argument, bad words are often called "curse" words.
I recommend watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU comedy sketch & I think he has done a few more acts about curse words too.
I had read a book series (Codex Alera) where they use "crows" as a swear word. I think this is because crows are a motif throughout the books & might have some sort of special power, which means that they always end up on battlefields, feasting on the carrion & fallen friends. I believe Carrion & Maggots might also be swears. "Crows take it/you" means "god-damn it/you". They even just use "(oh) crows" to mean "(oh) heck/shit".
They use "Bloody" (as in "bloody crows" to mean "holy shit/smokes/cow/crap" or "bloody/fucking hell") which is a word used in this world. Bloody is used as an intensifier.
In relation to the religious swear/curse words, they also say "great furies" as in "oh my god". The furies are basically (pokemon crossed with spirit guides crossed with the concept of animism) who give powers to the owners like bending in ATLA. The great furies are like the spirit who lives in the mountain & his wife the storm/wind/bad weather on top of the mountain. So they can swear by the Great Furies as the folks on earth say "I swear to the Fae" or "God help me".
Another concept to consider is slurs. Slurs are usually based on or used against marginalized communities. (Black people & any marginalized racial/cultural/ethnic group; down syndrome, autism, learning disabilities, & other mental illnesses, neurodivergencies, & disabilities; Romani/Roma (this one is actually a huge issue bc I know people named the G slur); trans, gay, otherwise queer, & intersex; etc.)
So to answer your questions:
How many swear words should you have in a conlang,
You only really need one or two source words, but you can use as many as one curse for every noun, verb, & adjective you invent. You could also choose a source category (religion, sex, even smth like plants or careers). Having a category might be able to limit you to a degree.
and how are they designed?
I believe they usually come up naturally. Maybe through mistakes. Maybe some teen afraid of sexual maturity tries to desexualize things by thinking of different words (like "feet" in the bible, or maybe pull smth out of ur ass like "hawthorn berries") & then they accidentally pavlov themself into sexualizing hawthorn berries & now hawthorn berries are a euphemism for sex. As mentioned with the crows, they could be related to undesirable topics like death. In cultures where nudity is natural I would assume that sex swears are less common. (They sexualize people less in those cultures than cultures where modesty is the norm. Typically. I'm generalizing.) So if sex is a taboo topic, swears would be about sex. If death is a taboo topic, then swears about death would be more common. If the taboo topic is malicious magic, then curse words might actually be about curses! Slurs have more defined or easily assigned sources. Swears can be considered a subset of slang. I also had a thought while answering one of the later questions: Things that used to be ok are now slurs because the people are still hated. "coloured" used to be the correct term, but since society still hated POC it stopped being a proper term. "L**e" used to be the used term, but it is a slur, so people started using "handicapped", but that term also started feeling offensive & now "disabled" is the correct term. It is in part due to inaccuracies in language I suppose. Like how "hermaphrodite" is a perfectly useful term for hermaphroditic animals but is not an accurate term for humans (with disorders/differences in sexual development or who are intersex). This is more slur based than swear based though.
What is their purpose really?
Their purpose is to emphasize. I don't usually swear, but sometimes, sometimes there is a situation that really warrants an oath. Promises (swear to god) are used to create honesty & binding. As in they are bound to their word. I think swears are also used as catharsis or emotional indicators. You use swears when you're angry, when you're courting someone, when you're really really excited... They are for emphasis, usually emotional. That's my opinion at least! My experience is my own.
And should any other "regular" words be constructed out of them? "Like if "bar" was a swear word, then "foobar" was a goose or "barfoo" was a house,"
I think maybe the other way around? As a mentally ill baker I deal with the term "retarded fermentation" because the word "retard" (the e is pronounced like "look") means "late". Tardy. I mentioned I speak french lol. A retarded fermentation is a fermentation (in sourdough) that takes extra long to develop more flavour. Slow. Late. When this term applies to a person, it means they are "mentally slow" I guess. Which is kind of true. You know how your brain is not fully developed until age 26? A ton of mentally ill/neurodivergent people don't finish brain development until age 30 ish. I think that it is more likely that words (that have related words) turn into slurs. Whether or not the related words are considered slurs is really a societal/cultural thing & can depend on the worldview of the people. Sam hill versus damn hell? Idk. One last thing to note: Basement is not a sexual word even though it has "semen" in the spelling.
is that a problem?
It depends. I said it was a cultural thing. If you use a slur in a hockey name (Like the new york n*****s or smth) then yes that is a problem & a slur! If the word "semen" is in the word "basement" then no that is not an issue, they have different etymologies. For things like "retarded fermentation"? Well that's a touchy one. I dislike the term because the source word is now used as a slur, but it was chosen for its accuracy. Maybe changing it to "Fermentation retardé" would be better because it has a different pronunciation & placement & maybe that would be enough. For words like "asshole" to mean "anus" I would say that yes it is still considered a swear word because the first part, "ass" is used because it is a dirty word for bum. "pussy hair" would also be considered like that because it is the hair of the swear word, unlike pubic hair which is a perfectly fine term. So in general I would say it depends on how the words relate & how society reacts.
Also, what are swear words actually,
I feel like I answered this ok throughout this answer. A swear word is a word with a connotation of unprofessionalism that is used colloquially to add emotional emphasis. Although the connotation of swears/swearing can change throughout cultures & time.
do they have a consistent meaning across cultures?
Ah yes I just answered this! They do not have a consistent meaning! From my experience they have the connotation of rudeness & emphasis, but to other cultures they can be related more to spiritual impurity or the keeping of promises. They almost definitely have even more meanings in other cultures & languages. What is considered a "bad word" might not be what we consider "swear" words or "potty" mouth.
I hope this helped!
"Basement" isn't a good example because "semen" is only in there as an artifact of the spelling, not pronunciation (you don's say "bay-semen-t"). If the spelling were "baisment" or "baysment" or "baesment", you wouldn't even make the connection. It's like the old joke that there are three English football teams with obscenities in their names: Scunthorpe, Arsenal, and Manchester Fucking United.
@KeithMorrison: But because of the spelling, it's vulnerable to the "Scunthorpe problem" in which a computer program automatically censors an innocent word that happens to contain a "rude" one. I've heard that it's a common annoyance for people who live in Penistone, Lightwater, and Clitheroe.
@KeithMorrison Yes that was my point. Sorry it was unclear.
In Chinese, the most common insults are directed at a person's family, such as: "fuck your [insert relative]!" or "his mom!" is used as a general exclamation. It's not very common to say "fuck you" to a person, you would direct it at who you believe is their closest(?) relative.
(I believe this is also shared by other languages from cultures influenced by Confucian ideas.)
Also I noticed a lot of the other answers mentioned how profanity is based on a culture's taboos but I'm wondering if this is more of a eurocentric perspective because using people's relatives as insults isn't exactly a taboo.
Another thing that may be worth mentioning is the Chinese equivalent of "fuck off" is "roll away!" which also not a taboo.
As a native Chinese speaker, I agree with most of this answer except the last one. "Roll away" is kind of taboo because you're supposed to just walk away. Overall, this answer does say a lot about cultural differences. Thus, +1.
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2116 | Can the suffixes of an agglutinative language include morphemes which are also part of the base verb/noun word forms?
One thing that makes it hard to imagine how agglutinative languages could work is how they can handle when the suffix is also included in the base verb/noun word forms.
So say we are translating "I went to the store" to an agglutinative language. According to ChatGPT, we have:
Turkish: "Mağazaya yürüdüm."
"Mağazaya" means "to the store." mağaza is "store".
"Yürüdüm" means "I walked." yürümek is "to walk", so it appears "yuru" is the base.
Finnish: "Kävelin kauppaan."
"Kävelin" is the first person past tense form of "kävellä," which means "to walk."
"Kauppaan" means "to the store."
So say that instead of mağazaya, where ya indicates "to", that "to" was "za", then we would have "mağazaza". But then say we had a word "mağa", which means "tree", and then we say "to the tree", we say "mağaza". But that means store.... How do you deal with this situation?
It seems to me you would have to build an optimization function to take every affix in your lexicon, and every root or base noun or verb, and figure out how everything relates to everything else. An enormous undertaking, an optimization / fine-tuning function so to speak.
But how can you solve this without having to do that brute force sort of approach?
I start by creating suffixes:
da, ma, pa, pi, mi, si, do, mo, vo, and 30+ more
And then I create root verbs.
dara, dada, dapa, disi, etc..
Now I combine them.
darada, dadada, dapapa, dadapa, disisi....
Now, given I don't limit my verbs to just 2 syllables, I might have also these roots:
darada, dadada....
Well I can't have those as roots, because it will conflict with the dara+da and dada+da I already have!
I don't see a way to solve this problem, so you don't run into this ambiguity. Can you please shed some light on how to look at this problem, and potentially how to solve it when creating an agglutinative language? Thank you.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78172626/algorithm-to-figure-out-how-many-base-words-you-can-create-given-a-small-and-c
Well, some ambiguity is unavoidable. This is specifically morphological ambiguity, where there are two or more distinct ways of breaking a word down into pieces. The famous example in English is "unlockable", which could either be parsed as (unlock)-able, able to be unlocked, or un-(lockable), unable to be locked.
In English, and other languages in general, people just live with it. If some particular ambiguity gets bad enough to become a problem, one or more of those words will fall out of use and get replaced by others. But language is a system that can handle quite a lot of ambiguity without breaking down.
Good to know. Can you add/elaborate on how a conlang can go about avoiding tons of ambiguities in creating an agglutinative language? See my SO post for context.
https://www.frathwiki.com/List_of_self-segregating_morphology_methods
Another example for accidental ambiguity which involves different morphemes is does, which is either the 3rd sg of do (do + e + s) or the plural of doe (doe + s); but in practice this doesn't really pose a problem in English. Similarly, there won't be a problem in your example, as it's obvious what is meant: "I go to the tree" or "I go store"; only one of them is a correct sentence.
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1987 | How does the Lojban "logic" of limiting gismu to very specific argument structures not run into problems?
Looking at the definitions for the many gismu, we find things like bakri:
chalk; x1 is a quantity of/contains/is made of chalk from source x2 in form x3
Why limit it to just x1-x3, why not x1-x30? Just joking, but how did they land on these seemingly arbitrary models of relations/actions?
I can construct a sentence about chalk which has many more than 3 parts:
[x1: foo] bakri [x2: made from limestone] [x3: from the beach] [x4: that evolved out of the geological processes from the ocean] [x5: in the form of a slab] [x6: located at the top of a cliff].
Just making stuff up, but couldn't it be said that these gismu/verbs could take way more arguments than they are showing/allowing? Why did they limit them the way they did? What was their thought process or motivation? How did they know the language would "work" with such limitations/decisions on what x arguments to include in a gismu?
Basically, I don't understand why/how they landed on the number and structure of the arguments to each of the gismu, and looking for some insight on how it doesn't break down.
By "break down", I mean like my example, I can show for every gismu more or less arguments than alloted. I can come up with a million other example hypothetical gismu with other argument structures. So why did they land on these as the final ones with their final structure?
Part of it is because Lojban has only five strong vowels (not counting the schwa), which limits the number of FA particles (the ones that label arguments so you can change them around) to five. But even then, most gismu have only two or three arguments, and follow a specific generalized pattern to make the vocabulary easier to learn. Bakri follows the "stone" pattern - x1 is STONE from source x2 in form x3.
Also, chalk is gypsum - not limestone - and always "evolved out of the geological processes from the ocean", so those two arguments would always be the same and thus clutter the structure. And location isn't really fundamental to an object in the way source and form are and if you really need it, has it's own gismu ("stuzi", I think)
How can I improve my answer?
First, it's worth pointing out that some selbri, notably {du}, do permit more than five arguments. Five is the maximum for gismu due to the FA series ({fa}, etc.) which only has five members; if gismu routinely accepted more arguments, then they would not be easily addressable.
Lojban is meant to combine six different source languages, each with their own cultural history, into a single synthetic vocabulary. As a result, we have a ready source of parameters from each source language. When a source language contributes a verb for a gismu, it also may contribute a subject, an object, and more; these are candidates for gismu arguments.
That all said, there are two kinds of "break down" or "problem" that we might want to consider, and Lojban has tools for addressing both of them.
First, as you've mentioned, it seems like there are dozens of arguments that we might want to add to a selbri in order to augment the described relationship. We can do that with modal place structures, as described in CLL, chapter 9. The classic example from CLL is {viska sepi'o lo kanla} "seeing with my eye;" the modal compound {sepi'o} "using a tool" is a conjugation of {pilno} "x1 uses tool x2 for purpose x3." The exact semantics of modal phrases are not specified, other than that they involve the particle {jai}; see CLL for nasty details.
The second kind is irregularity within the vocabulary. My favorite example involves animals. There are dozens of words like {danlu} "x1 is an animal of species x2," all with a regular two-place structure, and all are subrelations (in the mathematical sense of "binary relation") of {danlu}. So, for example, {mlatu} "x1 is a cat of species x2" is a subrelation of {danlu}, and {cinfo} "x1 is a lion of species x2" is a subrelation of {mlatu}. However, some gismu have extra places, like {tirxu} "x1 is a tiger of species x2 with coat markings x3," and this causes a lot of sophistry around the nature of big cats. If we were to remove the third place, with {tirxu fi zi'o}, then we obtain a subrelation of {danlu}.
I like how the subrelations for animal-type gismu map onto biological taxa. That is very good design.
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1955 | To limit or not to limit vocabulary in a conlang, what are the possibilities?
I have a list of ~4k words in my conlang, which I've boiled down from English concepts to what I would call the "base list" of words. In theory, everything can be built upon these words. I mean, in theory, everything can be built upon 1's and 0's, so there is a tradeoff in readability/speakability and the size of the vocabulary. But I'm trying to balance human's memory capability and not have too many words. Like I've heard experts know 100k words in English max, but there are millions of English words. Etc..
Then I'm thinking, in English there are names of people and places which are completely made up words / sound sequences. I was driving down the freeway and seeing all kinds of names of streets which are not meaningful words or human names, but you could still pronounce them. This adds to the "vocabulary" a lot.
I'm wondering if you can avoid this explosion in vocabulary (human / place etc. names). For example, in English, "common plant names" are not used anywhere else (Toyon, Yarrow, etc.). Same with those street names.
How do other languages handle it (natural or conlangs)? Are there natural languages which don't have made up sound sequences which fit into the rules of the language? I am imagining Native American stereotypes like "Dark Horse" for a person's name (where the words have standalone meaning), instead of "Tom Sawyer" (which words don't have any standalone meaning). Do any natural languages avoid the problem of adding thousands / millions of words like this, which are otherwise meaningless?
I know the definition of word is fuzzy and varied / hard to define across languages. I know it Turkish and other agglutinative languages you have infinite word possibilities, so not really thinking like that. I am imagining more for an analytic style language like English or Chinese or Vietnamese, whether conlang or natlang, how you can avoid the problem of introducing meaningless identifier words which would increase the size of the vocabulary drastically.
Language vocabulary partitions into modules, and modules in turn are basically words describing systems. What you're trying to do isn't to "reduce" the number of vocabulary (such a move would be illogical: more words are always better, unless you were trying to do something malevolent like Newspeak from George Orwell's 1984), rather, what you are trying to do is figure out the base words for each of the modules that make up a starting point language (most likely English in A.D. 2023 in your case).
Every language—at least every language that's expressive enough for useful communication—has some way of adding words to the lexicon to refer to arbitrary entities. It's simply not feasible to communicate otherwise. Even toki pona, with its deliberately restricted vocabulary, would let me adapt my username as something like jan Lekone.
This doesn't mean speakers necessarily know them as part of their mental lexicon. I certainly don't know every name ever used in English and I'd wager you don't either. But if someone comes up to you and introduces themself with a sequence of sounds you've never heard before, every language allows you to associate that sequence with that person.
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1981 | What exactly is meant by gerund words in English, and how to translate them into this conlang?
I have a conlang with a very simple grammar. All words are "base words" and start and end with a consonant, and there are 5 vowel suffixes to convert those base words to the 5 forms of words (to simplify a bit):
-i: actions (verbs)
-e: manners (adverbs)
-a: objects (nouns)
-o: features (adjectives)
-u: prepositions and conjunctions
All actions and objects can take preceding modifiers which don't have a suffix, only the head action/object/feature has a suffix.
I'll just make up some words to keep it simple for this post, but following this pattern. There is a word reC meaning "progress/progression", and it is used as a modifier to actions/verbs, like mek ("make"). "I" is suq and "food" is fud. "Be" is vut. So "I am making food" is basically "I be [progressive] make food", and it might be like suqa vuti reC meki fuda.
I am hugely biased coming from English, so at this point my language closely reflects English's use of things like prepositions and various word forms, but I'm alright with that. But my problem is with "gerunds", which nothing seems to describe what gerunds "mean", only that they are verbs converted into a noun form using -ing. Like "computing is fun". This is different from my "making" in the last example, but how is it different, what does a gerund word actually mean? How can you break it down or distill it into a set of abstract atoms?
It is not "progression" the gerund is talking about...
Is it the "state" of performing the action or something?
What is it exactly?
Then, I can say "Making food is fun", and it be a gerund, but I can't use reC because that is for progression. What is the essence of gerund basically?
My best guess so far would be to say (assuming fun is fan):
reC mek fuda vuti fano
That is, it gives a hint at progression, but it treats "making" as a modifier on "food", and the whole thing is a noun phrase.
Does that make sense? Or what would you do, how would you treat the gerunds in a simple system like this?
You can think of a gerund as a nominalisation of a verb, including any objects. So to cook a meal would turn into a gerund, cooking food. (Obviously you can also leave out the object, and cooking could be gerund on its own).
Functionally it is similar to an ininitive clause:
To cook food is fun.
Cooking food is fun.
Technically it describes a process, but as a nominal element, ie it can be used in a sentence where you would use a noun otherwise.
This is different from the progressive form as in your making food example. There you still have a subject (I) and the verb form is am making. With a gerund you don't have a subject (which is why a gerund is a non-finite form, like the infinitive), because the gerund is the subject. Cooking is fun is different from Me cooking is fun.
You could indeed express that with reC meki fuda; that is pretty much analoguous to English.
Blatantly plagiarising my own answer to a similar question on esperanto.se:
The English gerund (or the -ing form) is a strange beast because it conflates three historically different forms in one. The difference is still preserved in other Germanic languages like Dutch or German
The nominalised infinitive (German das Tanzen, Esperanto danci)
The present active participle (German tanzend, Esperanto dancanta)
A deriviative noun (German -ung, not available for tanzen, but for other verbs, e.g., drehen "turni": die Drehung "turnado")
In Latin grammar, only the first thing is called gerundium.
And Modern English is again special in using the gerund to form the progressive aspect of verbs. The gerund is becoming more frequent over time in English, we probably haven't seen yet its climax.
For a conlang you probably want to separate the different functions of the heavily overloaded gerund.
This still doesn't explain what a gerund word means. It says what it is, but not what the pattern of "meaning" is for the words that are gerunds.
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1990 | How many tense subcategories are there across languages, or conceptually?
I have this:
That is 3 tenses, but a total of 4 5 4 = 13 "subcategories".
This boils down to more abstract concepts such as continuity and completeness. This is a nice table:
Could there be 16, 24, 32 different configurations, beyond my 13? If so, what are they at a glance? What is the general framework for thinking about all of them, taking cross-language thinking into account?
This is starting to sound like a broken record, but if you want to understand the diversity of how the world's languages handle these things, you really need to look at something other than English.
@Draconis I am looking into languages without full immersion, I don't have time to fully learn a new language, there is too much else to do in life. So I have to find shortcuts. Closest I will get is learning Chinese, extremely slowly over the next 10+ years.
If I could, I would learn Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Arabic at least, but that's totally unrealistic it would take at least 5 years to become any good at any of them in my experience, doing alongside the rest of life's tasks.
You don't necessarily need full immersion, just proper study. If you're trying to create a conlang while only knowing English, the result will always be basically a reskin of English (a "relex"), since you haven't internalized any other way of doing things besides the English way.
Do what everybody else does: start with linguistics 101, then read up on syntax and morphology, and see if you can get your hands on reference grammars, not teaching grammars. Try interlibrary loan, or check out LCS's library. Finally, there's linguistics papers. Check scihub for those.
There are a lot of different things you can mark on a verb, including tense (setting a sort of temporal reference point), aspect (the relationship of the action to that reference point), mood (the relationship of the action to objective reality), and evidentiality (the source of your knowledge of the action). Some languages have these as separate, independent categories that you can mix and match; others have a certain fixed set of combinations you can choose from.
In Ancient Greek, there are three tenses (past, present, future) and three aspects (aoristic, imperfective, perfective). The aoristic aspect treats the action as a single point; the imperfective aspect indicates that it happened for a long time or was repeated or habitual; the perfective aspect means the aspect is over and done by the time of the reference point and the aftereffects are what matter. Present perfective, for example, corresponds to English "he has eaten" (so he's no longer hungry now): you're talking about the present, and what's relevant are the aftereffects of something that's over and done.
Almost all of these combinations of tense and aspect get their own special marking, though a couple are combined: present aoristic and present imperfective, for example, look the same. (Latin has the same set of three tenses and three aspects but combines them differently; in Latin the past aoristic and present perfective look the same, in Ancient Greek they don't.) But Ancient Greek also indicates mood—is this a real event, something possible, something hoped for, something commanded to happen, etc?—and in some of these moods, tense is not marked, only aspect. Commands, for example, only have aspect, not tense.
In Lingála, there's tense, aspect, and mood (no evidentiality), but only certain combinations are possible:
Present, future, recent past, distant past, ultimate past (something that's happened and can never be undone)
Imperative (commands), habitual (something that happens over and over), imperative habitual (something that should happen over and over)
Subjunctive (something that's possible), gnomic (something that is eternally and universally true)
There's no such thing as a habitual subjunctive, for example; it's just not one of the combinations that exist.
In Hittite, there are only two aspects and no tense. You indicate whether the action has been completed or not, and that's it.
In English, you can combine aspects ("she has been working out" is talking about the aftereffects of something happening for a long time), but can't combine moods or tenses (*"she might can did that"). Syntactically, there's only one slot for the tense and mood, which is traditionally called the "T" or "I" position, but multiple slots for the aspect.
I don't understand why you'd want/need to encode "the source of your knowledge of the action" into a special form, why not just use extra words... Maybe that's what they do
@Lance Why would you want/need to encode the time of the action into a special form, when you could just use extra words like "previously" or "tomorrow"? That's what Mandarin does. There's nothing fundamentally more natural about what English chooses to encode than what other languages choose to encode; you're just more used to it.
Actually, there can be a lot more tenses than the usual three, and also languages with no tense at all or only two tenses (past and non-past or, more rarely, future and non-future) exist. The Wikipedia article on Grammatical tense has some examples of additional tenses like Remote Past, Remote future, Hodiernal Past, Hodiernal Future (Past/Future, but today).
The subclassification inside the tenses are known as Grammatical Aspect, again, the languages of the world provide more possible aspects beyond English's simple, continuous, and perfect aspects. Examples of other types of aspects are completive and incompletive (denoting the completion or non-completionof an action), inceptive (beginning of an action), prospective (preparation of an action), and habitual Grammatical aspect is different from Lexical Aspect or Aktionsart that is determined by the semantics of the verb.
Finally, linguists often consider Tense, Aspect, Mood as an intertwined system of grammatical categories to be viewed together. These categories may be incremented by Evidentiallity and Polarity.
Postscript: You also may want to look at Reichenbach's theory of tense, introducing new tenses like the Posterior Past and Posterior Future.
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1639 | How to safely import loan words in a conlang?
Some examples of loan words:
Human names like "Paul" or "Bhavya".
Proper nouns like "White House" or "United States".
Using any word at all from the other language ("which" from English, "the", etc., even if the conlang doesn't have these words). Basically this might be like how we use syntax highlighting (<- like that) to designate "code" when doing software documentation.
What I am wondering is what are the different ways you can "safely" import these words into another lang? Say you have the word bin in your conlang, which is a taboo/swear word for example. Then when you import/use an Arabic name like Aktham bin Sayfi, technically that might make an impression of the swear word, even though it would be used out of context. Then in English, we have the word "bin" (container), which when used in a conlang sentence like "I closed the bin" (mea closa tha bin), where those first 3 words are theoretical conlang words and the bin is English, like saying "Give me back my perro" and we know that it is being used (Spanish perro).
What I was thinking of doing is wrapping each foreign/import word in an opening and closing sound, like i-<word>-o or something. Then it would be like i-barak-obama-o, but that seems like it would be a lot if you used multiple loan words one after the next.
Then there is the question of, do you change the pronunciation or use the native pronunciation? Sometimes you hear Spanish (Mexican) speakers say "I lived in Méheeko" rather than the regular "Mexico". But other times, like when we pronounce Arabic or Hebrew words like "Israel", we just say it with an American accent.
Or instead of adding affixes or manipulating pronunciation, you could come up with a completely new name (like Chinese does, which I think partially solves the problem of things meaning weird things, like I read with CocaCola initially was phonetically translated and meant something strange like "bite the wax tadpole", which they changed to be "happiness in the mouth").
But in my case, I have a conlang which only has words in these patterns (c = consonant, v = vowel):
cvc
ccvc
cvcc
cvcvc
cvccvc
ccvcvc
cvcvcc
There are about 500 cvc, 1000 ccvc and cvcc, and 100k cvcvc, 300k+ 6-sound. But maybe only 20k of those will be used. I am picking all the "good sounding" ones to be real words at first, and then the less-good sounding ones are left over. I don't want these necessarily to be used as names, they would be the least-pleasant sounding words. So I am not really sure how to handle generating the names. But you mix this with the problem of importing foreign words, and I might have "paul" mean "past tense" in the conlang, then you import "Paul" the name and it reads initially as "past tense", which is less than ideal.
So what are the techniques you can use to "safely" import foreign words (and do things like importing foreign names)? Figuring out how to name things within the language is a separate problem, but importing foreign "people" names and proper noun names just seems hard to do, and I'm not sure what a clean approach would be.
Maybe I should be taking inspiration from Chinese mostly.
When you mention things like syntax highlighting, are you talking about distinguishing the loans in writing or in speech?
Possibly relevant: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/635/how-can-i-make-my-conlangs-borrowings-naturalistic
Also possibly relevant: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/466/how-to-naturalize-a-conlang/
You should make a distinction between loanwords and names; the former can be adapted to your conlang morphology, whereas the latter can easily be marked with intro/outro markers, or remain unchanged.
Sometimes "imported" or "foreign" names are marked by orthography; for example, non-Japanese names written in Japanese use katakana, even when the surrounding text is all hiragana and kanji.
@Draconis I was talking about both, but mainly focusing on speech. But sometimes we only have orthography as a hint, like with syntax highlighting was my main thought.
What I am wondering is what are the different ways you can "safely" import these words into another lang?
In natlangs, the one overarching purpose behind everything in a language is to communicate. If some aspect of the language is getting in the way of this, then evolutionary pressures will remove that obstacle over time.
Homophones, in general, don't seem to pose an obstacle. English-speakers are generally fine with the fact that "dam" (block the flow of water) and "damn" (mild profanity) are pronounced the same, because they're used in such different contexts; even when there's an actual ambiguity, like a frustrated engineer shouting "damn this river!", it's a source of puns and humor more than actual confusion.
And the same is true when they involve loanwords. The loanword "junk" (a type of ship, going back to Chinese 船) is pronounced identically to the native word "junk" (trash, worthless things) but actual confusion is rare. And if a problem arises, you can just add another word to disambiguate it, calling it a "junk ship" or the like. Some people consider this redundant, but it happens all the time with loanwords: "chai tea", "naan bread", "miso soup", etc. Some conlangs, like toki pona and a handful of others inspired by it, require this: loans and names have to be used as adjectives, not nouns, which means they're always attached to a native noun showing what sort of thing they are.
Then there is the question of, do you change the pronunciation or use the native pronunciation?
In natlangs, it generally depends on how speakers see the word. At first, generally, the word will be seen as thoroughly foreign. It will be written in italics*, imitating the original orthography when possible, and people will do their best to imitate the pronunciation (and usually not succeed, because every language's phonology is different). It won't inflect in any way or combine with other morphemes.
Eventually, if the word catches on, it'll be naturalized and incorporated into the language more thoroughly. It will be adapted fully into the surrounding phonology and morphology and not seen as something distinctly different from the rest of the language.
For example, look at some Japanese loans in English. Ukiyo-e and gaijin tend to be italicized and pronounced with particular care, and people don't tend to say *gaijins for more than one. But dojo and shogun can be pluralized like any other English word (dojos, shoguns) because they've been more thoroughly integrated into English. This difference can show up more starkly in languages like Latin and Greek, which have more mandatory inflection on both nouns and verbs; it tends to be very clear which foreign words are treated as foreign and indeclinable, rather than being adapted to the rules of the borrowing language.
* This is an English convention, not universal.
Or instead of adding affixes or manipulating pronunciation, you could come up with a completely new name (like Chinese does, which I think partially solves the problem of things meaning weird things, like I read with CocaCola initially was phonetically translated and meant something strange like "bite the wax tadpole", which they changed to be "happiness in the mouth").
This is because of the writing system, not the language. Chinese is written logographically, which means you can't write a foreign word without referencing existing morphemes.
"toki pona and a handful of others inspired by it" ah that's key, that would be an interesting case to study.
@Lance toki pona is an interesting case study in terms of minimalism, though do note that it's an artlang—it's meant as an art project, to experiment with what can be revealed by putting your thoughts into a different framework, rather than as a useful means of communication. (If people actually learned it as a native language, it would immediately acquire a lot more words and phrases with fossilized meanings.)
Toki Pona, a rather-successful minimalist conlang, has a (IMO) really nice process called tokiponization.
The steps are these:
If possible, it should be avoided. Simply translate things like "White House" or "United States".
If that is not possible, find a "head noun", which goes in front of the loaned word. This can be any noun.
Then, the word itself is "tokiponized", which is basically just changing pronunciation.
Examples:
Paul -> jan Pali (jan is a noun meaning person)
Bhavya -> jan Bawiwa
White House -> tomo walo ni (a phrase meaning that white house)
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1705 | Why have words for above/below top/bottom but not left/right front/back?
I am working on the directions and spatial stuff in a conlang currently, and wondering why conceptually we have words for the y-axis, but not the x-axis or z-axis?
above/on top of (that one isn't a word for some reason)
below/under
top
bottom
But we don't have words for these:
beyond the right side (like above/below)
beyond the left side
beyond the front side
beyond the back side
on the right side (like top/bottom)
on the left side
on the front side
on the back side
We have right/left/up/down/forward/backward, but for some reason in English at least we don't have simple words for this. Why is that, is there some fundamental reason? Do any languages, conlangs or not, have words for these sorts of things? Wondering what the spectrum looks like.
Top/bottom are like because of gravity pulling everything "down". So you can stack on the top, or put below. But put to the right side of, there's no force of gravity tugging in that direction, so maybe that's why?
We have an absolute frame of reference for up and down (namely which direction gravity pulls), but no absolute frame of reference for left and right. What I consider to be "left" as I type this is almost certainly not the same direction you consider to be "left" as you read it.
We do have words like "behind", using relative directions. Swahili treats "on top of" (juu ya) and "in front of" (mbele ya) the same way it treats "beneath" (chini ya) and "behind" (nyuma ya); Latin has a single word for "in front of" but no single word for "behind". It's really just a historical accident that English has a single word for some of these and needs multiple words for others (we used to have "before" but it's seldom used with that meaning now).
Using relative directions for horizontal things is not universal, though. Some indigenous languages of Australia use absolute directions for everything, with basic words for "north of", "south of", "east of", and "west of" (or equivalent in their coordinate system).
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