id
stringlengths 1
7
⌀ | text
stringlengths 1
10.4M
| source
stringclasses 1
value | added
stringdate 2025-03-12 15:57:16
2025-03-21 13:24:26
⌀ | created
timestamp[s]date 2008-09-06 22:17:14
2024-12-31 23:58:17
⌀ | metadata
dict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
386 | How does one express "want to want" in toki pona?
For example, "I do not want to want opium"
For example, this doesn't work, it is a yes-no question!
mi wile ala wile e ijo nasa
Do I want a drug?
? Do I want not-want a drug?
The positive doesn't seem to work either
mi wile wile e ijo nasa
* I want [in a wanting manner?] a drug.
mi wile ala e ni: mi wile e ijo nasa.
I want not <obj>-this I want <obj>-thing crazy
The same principle as in "I do not want to drink water."
mi wile ala e ni: mi moku e telo.
I want not <obj>-this I drink <obj>-water
While I assume OP does not require it, I personally would appreciate it if you could add some form of gloss to the answer so someone not familiar with the language can appreciate the structure as well and learn something from this question.
The question centers on the word ”ala”, which is used as a negation, but it can also be used to pose a question, as in “sina wile ala wile X?”, do you want or not want X? That's why the attempt to say “mi wile ala wile X”, I want to not want X, can be interpreted as the question “Do I want or not want X”. The answer given uses the word “ni”, this, as a way out of the problem, by saying “me wile ala e ni: ni wile X”, I do not want this: I want X.
I think you can express something like this as (101). If we imagine a speaker addicted to using their smartphone, they might say something like this.
Mi wile ike e ilo toki. (101)
1sg want bad D.O. tool speak
I think to want badly in English would map to wile mute, since you're talking about extent rather than making a value judgment.
Making a value judgment and describing wanting something as egodystonic are not exactly the same thing, but they are similar, at least when talking about oneself.
mi wile e ni: mi wile tawa.
I want this: I want to go.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.826834 | 2018-03-01T20:27:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/386",
"authors": [
"0x3",
"Guillaume Vauvert",
"Martin Milan",
"PapaFreud",
"Raj",
"Sascha Baer",
"WillRoss1",
"ZGorlock",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1275",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1276",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1277",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1285",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1472",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3121",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3220",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/488",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"نور"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1099 | Are there any sites you can use to develop an online course for your own conlang?
Creating a conlang is usually only half (or less than half!) of the necessary effort: someone has to be able to learn it, unless you want to keep it as your own private secret code.
I use Duolingo to learn various languages, and it does of course have an Esperanto course on it, as well as Klingon and High Valyrian. However, it is unlikely that it will feature many more Conlangs, especially not one that you will develop yourself.
Now, it is of course not feasible to re-implement all of Duolingo's features, but I was just wondering if there are any apps/websites that you can use to develop an on-line course for your own conlang (it has to be fully automated, with no human teaching involved).
Is there something along the lines of Duolingo available where you can create your own courses?
Apparently folks can do this with Memrise, as evidenced by the Sajem Tan lessons.
There's been talk that I found on Duolingo forums, but if they're at all serious, they probably won't allow "dabbling". You'd need a serious effort to make and maintain enough lessons for people to actually learn a language.
I notice they have several toki pona courses...
Elon.io lets you make your own lessons and courses. It spaces your repetition of each word/phrase based on how often you have been getting it right. It provides computer pronunciation options based on real world languages, as well as statistics on your set of words and performance.
Don't worry, necrobumping isn't a concept that really applies to the SE network. Questions regularly get new answers years after they were asked, and this one's only a month old!
Good to know! Thanks for your help.
The Elon terms of service only allows use by those who reside or are situated in the Milky Way, so it's not universally applicable.
Try using YouTube.
Advantage- There are a lot of people on YouTube that could see your course.
Disadvantage- This is a double-edged sword. You may not get many views since there are so many people and your video could get lost among the sea of videos.
Another platform is Udemy.
Advantage- It gives you look and feel of an actual course, and if you get 1000 people on Udemy for a $10 course (let's say it's a 50/50 split between you and Udemy) you get $5000.
But you need 1000 subscribers AND 4000 hour watchtime (your subscribers need to be interested and you can't be just another YouTuber they subscribed to) just to start making ads. And those ads pay when someone clicks on them.
Disadvantage- Let's be real, many people just want the freebies. And even if someone is interested in your course, Udemy is probably having some discount for your course.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.826994 | 2020-02-12T16:50:58 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1099",
"authors": [
"Jetpack",
"Mark Giraffe",
"Oliver Mason",
"Pylyp Lebediev",
"Ruben",
"Vir",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1559",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3475",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3476",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3520",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3581",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/527",
"jose_castro_arnaud"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
385 | From known languages, what are the expected features of a Generation Ship Language?
Pandorum is a generation ship movie. Generation ships are a fairly big sub-genre of sci-fi where people live for many generations in a ship while travelling to a distant star.
The movie Pandorum did not use a conlang at all, despite the ships residents devolving into a tribe of "primitive" natives. What sort of features would we expect to find after 1000 years of travel in space, using real world island languages as a guide?
I disagree. The only "feature" is that it would have diverged from the parent language significantly.
Or perhaps that the parent language would have diverged from it, if you go the way of Icelandic's conservatism.
Are we assuming that the original inhabitants of the ship only spoke one language, or several languages? I'd imagine that one lingua franca would be used initially, but I'm not sure.
@HDE226868 The movie shows a multicultural ship crew. One of the actors was Vietnamese martial artist, but I don't recall him speaking. Everyone in the movie spoke ordinary English of course.
How many people in the ship? This would affect significantly what happens on board - not only linguistically.
The idea that language would not change over 1000 years of travel in space is absolutely ludicrous. 1000 years ago was before Middle English existed. Massive amounts of language change can occur over such a long period of time. Even very conservative languages change significantly over such a long period of time. No language will remain unchanged after 1000 years. Based on natlangs, it's more likely than not that the language will not be mutually intelligible with its predecessor after 1000 years.
How exactly the language changes depends a lot on the details of the situation -- how multicultural is the ship? What is the lingua franca of the ship? How are other languages viewed relative to the lingua franca? If there is enough of a divide in where different languages are used (such as if everything for official purposes is in English but a great number of native, say, Spanish speakers speak Spanish with their families at home), you may end up with diglossia arising. If there are significant numbers of multilingual people on these ships, you can bet there will be a lot of borrowing from minority languages into the dominant language, at least in less formal contexts. As in real life, there may be stigma against using such borrowings.
Honestly, language change in this situation won't likely differ that much from language change anywhere else. A conlanger has a lot of freedom in how they want to deal with the diachronics in this situation. The only real difference is that you don't have any chance of outsiders suddenly arriving and bringing with them waves of loanwords. ...Well, at least, you probably don't.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
It's worth noting that widespread literacy, availability of written materials and public education are capable of greatly slowing down rates of change in the standard language. Additionally, if the generation ship's inside are designed with an ecology (as some SF ships are, like Bernard Werber's Le Papillon des étoiles or Léo's Centaurus), you can't reasonably expect a shrinking of vocabulary about nature. Basically, in a 1000 years I'd expect changes, of course, but I'm not sure we have the comparison levels to characterize just how much chances are likely to actually occur because the rates of change of standard languages over such long periods of time (presuming no "dark age" occurs somewhere along the line) are currently simply not really known.
Case in point: literary French and English from 300 years ago are still pretty comprehensible today (Voltaire's first play was presented that year, Dafoe' Robinson Crusoe is from 1719...). Go to three hundred years before that and you're firmly in Middle French/English, which are definitely rather different beasts.
True, but it's not terribly difficult for a modern, fluent English speaker to learn to read Chaucer. It takes some work, yes, but it's easier than learning a dead language from scratch.
Modern Icelandic speakers can apparently read the sagas from over 800 years ago.
@RobertColumbia It's not terribly difficult to read, but that doesn't mean you could hold a conversation with Chaucer if you met him. A lot of spellings didn't change while the pronunciations of words and their use both syntactically and semantically did. Further, Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales less than 700 years ago -- 1000 years ago would be nearer to the time of Beowulf, which I guarantee a modern English speaker cannot read without learning the language from scratch.
If, however, you had a recording of Chaucer that was used to routinely to instruct students and movies based on actors contemporary to Chaucer performing TV shows and movies based on Chaucer, and documentaries about life in Chaucer's time shot by Chaucer's contemporaries, the whole argument changes.
Vocabulary Changes
New words
The vocabulary can be expected to contain a few new terms or simpler ways of describing certain things that might be seen a lot or might be new, such as new star systems, stellar formations, etc. The words for some of these terms might already exist but shorter terms and compound nouns might come into play to make everyday speech in the Generation Ship a bit simpler.
Lost words
In addition to new terms being added to the vocabulary, some terms may go out of use and become lost from the vocabulary; for example, certain things that might only be seen on a planet (like a tree for example, or a mountain). Terms for those might be lost because they would likely not be used very often if at all. Once the ship arrives and these concepts are explored again, new terms might develop, though they might be similar if the terms are created based on modifying and combining existing terms (tree might be "tall bush" and mountain might be "giant mound", for example).
There is no justification for claiming that the phonetics or grammatical structure would not change over time in this situation because "there would be no reason" for them to change. That's not how language change works. Honestly, almost nothing in this answer reflects how language change functions in natural language.
@Sparksbet Hm I suppose you're correct. Would my points about the changes to vocabulary make sense or should I delete?
Your vocabulary change ideas do make some sense, though I think it likely that many of those words would stick around for metaphorical meanings
@Sparksbet Okay, thanks. I suppose that would make sense as the words may be used in situations even when the exact meaning of it is not represented ("strong enough to move a mountain", though that's more of a hyperbole, but I understand your point), but I believe my point holds that at least some words may go out of use or at least become very rare to see around.
Yeah, that's understandable! Your edit removes my problems with this answer.
My guesses would be that it evolves towards one of two extremes:
less morphology, fixed word order - this is what happened to English. Dropping cases and most inflections, but having a stricter word order to compensate for the loss of morphological markers.
more morphology, freer word order - not sure if that actually is realistic. It's harder to invent new inflections than to drop them, and unless there is a flourishing poetry scene (perhaps to battle boredom), there wouldn't be too much reason for making word order less strict.
Most languages seem to navigate a path between those extremes, but that would mean it'd just become a different language altogether.
Looking at some real-life examples is tricky, as Latin -> French/Spanish/... for example had lots of interference from other languages and external events. In general I would think the language becomes simpler. It's a closed community, so changes can spread quickly and are not a hindrance to understanding. The environment is fairly static, so you don't need complicated phrases to refer to things.
One aspect would be communicating with the ship's computer (assuming a natural language interface) or texts. But you could think that a 'priest' class develops which does that communication and preserves the 'old' language. A bit like the Vatican with Latin.
Word meanings would probably change, as there are many words but only a limited number of things that need to be named; words would probably be re-used, or acquire new additional meanings.
Some things that won't change are the underlying distributional laws of language. There will still be a number of high-frequency short words that make up most of the active vocabulary. Zipf's law will still apply. The relationship between phoneme inventory and average word length will also remain: fewer phonemes will result in longer words. Short words will be more polysemous than long ones. But overall language will adapt to it's purpose, communication, in the given environment. If there are no trees, then the word tree might suddenly refer to an antenna. Or grass might be used to mean "an area of metal flooring that is slippery when wet".
Yes. A Canticle for Leibowitz.
More or less, the generation ship language will be a natural evolution of the languages brought in by the first generation (their common language probably being something similar to L2 English).
Some things will be spacy: They need a new system of orientation in 3D space with lack of gravity or artificial gravity at work, directions like up, down, east, north, west, and south are no longer meaningful. They will also develop some slang with respect to parts of their space ship and forget all the vocabulary about geographical features on earth.
EDIT: The space ship is probably operating with an air pressure that is significantly lower than on earth, corresponding to an altitude of 1000 or 2000 m. In this case, the space ship language may acquire ejective consonants (For a correlation between altitude and ejective consonants, see Caleb Everett's work "Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065275 )
A generation ship is a small society that is technologically advanced but stagnant. It's a society that depends on ancient wisdom to survive. Their material and intellectual resources are very limited compared to the civilization they came from, so the rate of scientific and technological advancement will be slow. Most of their efforts in those fields must go into maintaining a sufficient understanding of the ship and the science behind it to keep the systems operational.
For similar reasons, most of the entertainment the people consume will be from the civilization of their origin. Some new entertainment will be produced, but in limited quantity and with lower production values.
Because of limited resources, I would expect that everyone on board would be bilingual. There would be an everyday language that would drift and evolve, as others have already discussed. There would also be the ancient language of entertainment, higher education, and operations manuals that would remain static by necessity.
Bilingual people tend to mix the languages when talking with each other. This would make the evolution of the everyday language different from what we have seen on Earth. Because the original language would still be in active use, the everyday language would sometimes drift away from it and sometimes be influenced by it.
I'll assume here that the generation ship in question's mission is a resounding success: the inhabitants were not attacked by huge insectile aliens that enslaved them all; the Computer did not rise up and shut out its erstwhile masters, leaving them to fend as best they could in a decaying piece of technology. No, society not only survived but thrived and the people who set foot on their new homeworld have at their command all the accumulated knowledge and technology they brought with them.
In this scenario, there will, I think, actually be very little change in the language spoken on board the generation ship. Whatever interlanguage the first generation brings aboard (likely English) will be the language of general communication among all the inhabitants of the ship. Education will be carried out in English, though programmes will be in place to teach "ancestral" languages brought on board as well. And of course, the homes of firstgen folks will resound with their own native languages.
As subsequent generations are educated (in English), familiarity with other languages will fade. Since this project, while still Earthbound, brought together the best and brightest and well educated to begin with, their level of comfort with English will be high regardless of their cradle tongues. Because running a generation ship requires a huge commitment in education (sciences, mathematics) & experience (astrogation, complex technological subsystems), communications skills will be highly prized. Just as with Modern Standard American, the nature of life & culture aboard ship will tend to keep a fairly strict standard language in place. We're basically looking at a situation where everyone is highly literate and most likely cross-trained in several disciplines ánd certainly likely trained in one or more "traditional" crafts, artforms or skillsets.
This is not to say that jargon won't arise or that English will all of a sudden stop borrowing words from other languages! Far from it. By the time we get to journey's end, I'd speculate that lastgens will be quite able to understand the recorded speech and song of firstgens and that their languages will be not much different at all.
As a European scientist in Japan, I greatly disagree with the idea behind the third paragraph. Just because people are very smart and excel in at least one academic subject does not mean their understanding of English is good or they are confident using it.
No worries, and I understand where you're coming from! Thing is, on Earth, we can have a dozen countries with highly educated scientists etc that don't speak English well. In a project like this, the onboard community really doesn't have that luxury. Everyone needs to be able to communicate at a high level of competency. Regardless of the languages people bring aboard, there will likely be some kind of convention interlanguage. I chose English as the most likely. It could be French or German or Japanese. Whatever it is, that's the language everyone's going to be speaking by journey's end!
Others have mentioned that vocabulary for things not seen in space might vanish, and @HyperNeutrino mentioned that new terms might arise if the ship reaches a planet.
New terms might come into existence as metaphorical references to things that the colonists were familiar with on the ship. Just like we refer to "folders" and "files" on a computer or speak about "surfing" the "net" (using older terms to metaphorically refer to newer things that needed terms), generation ship colonists newly landed on a planet might refer to a land vehicle as a "shuttlecraft" or "capsule", call their political leader a "captain", or refer to the death penalty as "being thrown out of an airlock" (even if the actual means of execution becomes something else). Today we sometimes refer to uploading files as "posting" them. Our colonists might rediscover physical message boards but refer to posting notes on them as "uploading".
There could be a wider cultural effect too that expands to include both linguistic and non-linguistic features. If colonists are used to a shipboard timekeeping system that is detached from astronomical phenomena, or that is based on astronomical phenomena only visible from elsewhere in the universe, they might continue using it after landing on a planet despite the presence of astronomical phenomena that could be used to construct a calendar. Consider how the Apollo astronauts on the Moon continued to use Earth-based timekeeping metrics even though they could have adopted some sort of "Moon time" based on the cycle of the Lunar day and/or the apparent rotation of Earth in the sky. This sort of phenomenon could cause holidays to "rotate" throughout the seasons of the new homeworld in a similar way that dates defined in Earth-based lunar calendars (e.g. Ramadan) can occur in any solar season. Perhaps the new colony world has a year that is half that of Earth, so Christmas now comes every other northern hemisphere winter, or the year is twice as long as Earth's, so the colonists celebrate Christmas at the beginning of winter and again at the beginning of summer.
See Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky for some examples of how this might look.
The particular circumstances on a generation ship will work in several directions. Some accelerate language change, some slow it down.
Accelerating: Language is used to create identity. The first, most important and biggest tribe are the ship's crew and passengers (if such a distinction is made). They will start to set themselves apart through names for themselves versus the planet dwellers.
Within the ship, different sub-tribes like engineers, gardeners, educators etc. will create respectively continue to develop their own slang in order to set themselves apart from other groups. The urge to set themselves apart is greater because the ship packs many people in a comparatively small space, creating a need to draw virtual borders.
Accelerating: Groups with lots of spare time (which I suppose our space travelers will have) generally devote some of it to developing sophisticated tastes, fads and fashions, thus creating in-groups; their language evolution is interacting with these identity functions. Individuals who are unable or unwilling to speak "their slang" (and wear their hair cut, and posture ...) are marked as "not belonging to them". To a degree this happens in every generation of teenagers. But we can see that also on a larger scale in the development of the aristocratic French, or the fast-paced development of the politically correct speech in the United States.
Slowing down: There will be constant communication between all individuals of the ship through some kind of publications and messaging as well as personal conversation, given the necessary physical proximity and the need to cooperate during the mission (no group will be able to isolate themselves). This will ensure that there will continue to be a single lingua franca, fads and fashions not withstanding. Some people may learn and teach other languages for scientific, identity, hobby and nostalgic reasons, but they all will be competent in the main language. An important driver of the evolution of this language will be the slang of the youngsters, as always.
Slowing down: The generation ship will probably communicate via radio with the planet they came from; but most communication will be internal, partly because after a while communication with the home planet will not be real-time any more. The generation ship will form an isolated, small community. Such communities, like the Amish in America or the German settlers in Romania, are known to preserve customs and language longer than the bigger communities thy split off of. We can assume that the ship receives entertainment from the home planet, like music, movies and written prose. Thus they will keep in touch with the language on the home planet; whether that ongoing contact is sufficient to keep the language on board from running its own course I don't know.
I recently read an interesting essay – wish I could remember where – saying that the more insular a language community is, i.e. the less likely someone is to converse in that language with a stranger, the less it uses syntactic complexities such as relative clauses, because you don't need to clarify your context if your interlocutor already shares most of your context.
If that's true, the effect is likely to show if the ship's population stays within a small multiple of the Dunbar limit. Such simplification might in turn allow word order to become more free, I think.
I found a (rather new) publication on this theme, namely
McKenzie, A., & Punske, J. (2020). Language Development During Interstellar Travel. Acta Futura, (12), 123–132. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.3747353
The publication is rather high-level invoking analogies to the Polynesian explorers, the Malagasy language, and the Balkan Sprachbund.
I became aware of this by the following blog post:
https://diaryofdoctorlogic.wordpress.com/2020/07/09/resolution-read-week-28-space-travel-and-language-change/
I'm sort of bemused that every answer I've seen has seemed to overlook the rather large elephant in the room.
Data is among the cheapest, most storage efficient things you can carry. Plugged into my computer at this moment is a 512 GB thumb drive. It is, in its (thick) protective case, 50mm long, 20mm wide, and 10mm thick.
This is a generation ship, made by a technologically advanced culture. Let's assume, for simplicity and practicality's sake, that everyone is fluent in one common language. Just for the hell of it, let's say English. And so, to keep people entertained, not only written material is provided but recordings. Lots and lots of recordings. Music. Movies. Documentaries. Learning material. TV shows.
Assume they provide the material in 720p resolution, so not quite full HD but better than standard. You'll get about 3.5 hours per gigabyte. Rounding off at 500GB of data, my perfectly ordinary thumb drive has a capacity of roughly 1,750 hours of audiovisual recordings. That's over 10 weeks of video. That's every Marvel Cinematic Movie released so far repeated 35 times. That's 2,500 "one hour" (ie, 42 minutes) North American television episodes. On a single drive.
There is a box beside my desk that is abut 100x150x300mm in size. I could stick about 450 of my thumb drives in there. That's 225,000GB, or about 787,500 hours of video. That's ninety years of video. All in something the size of a small box easily picked up by one hand.
So, one thing we could safely assume, if no one is trying to censor the material for some reason, and putting aside the stability of storage media, since if we're talking a long duration ship and everything is still working is probably a mostly solved problem, the people on board may well have access to a ridiculous amount of recording of people talking, and they're going to grow up with it.
There's not going to be any argument over how people talked a 1000 years before. No equivalent discussions over whether someone pronounced vici as "veechee", "weechee", "veekee" or "weekee" because they will know. They'll know about different accents and how people pronounced vowels and consonants and how the written was different from the spoken because they can literally see and hear it first hand. It is what they will learn from because they grew up with it, just as their parents learned it, and their parents, and their parents.
Everyone proposing the language will radically change in this scenario, how?
You can't use a historical example of how much a given language has changed over a few centuries to make your argument because you are ignoring the fact that audiovisual recordings fundamentally alter how people communicate and never existed during the time spans your examples are going to cover. You can't cite historical precedent regarding language change because there isn't any. The situation we've been in over the last century and a bit in terms of communication is entirely unprecedented in the history of the freaking planet, let alone our species.
I don't think that the preservation of audio records will keep language from changing. The spoken vernacular on the space ship will soon develop an accent different from the "classical pronunciation" of the historical records. One can compare this to frozen pronunciations in religious languages with detailed prescriptions.
I grew up watching movies made between the 1930s and 1950s. I always wondered about their funny accents. Modern Japan in this century has mass media & the older generation likes to complain about how much language has changed.
I'm not saying accents won't change (if due to fashion, if nothing else), and there may well be changes in slang, but people are speaking as if the language will be incomprehensible after 1000 years, and no one can explain why that would be.
Within a millennium or two, even this will happen. Classical Arabic and Sanskrit are both incomprehensible to the speakers of their descendent languages without special education.
Those speakers do not have access to recordings of speakers of the original language. Seriously, why are people not comprehending the difference this makes?
Both for Classical Arabic and Sanskrit there are detailed prescriptions on how to pronounce each letter in those languages, and trained reciters of the religious texts are present delivering that classical pronunciations to the public. Nonetheless, Arabic vernaculars and modern Indoaryan languages have evolved to be different from that.
Short Answer
The language used on a generation ship would change very little over the course of the journey despite its 1,000 year duration.
Long Answer
Contrary to widespread conventional wisdom, language drift is very modest over long periods of time in the absence of specific environmental or language contact experiences the cause a language to change over time.
One of the best historical comparisons is the Icelandic language. It is almost unique in experiencing very little language contact or mass migration for a very long period of time. (In contrast, for example, Old English arose from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a linguistically Celtic and Latin speaking island, and Middle English arose as the main modification in the wake of England's conquest by a French speaking Normal elite and England was extremely involved in contacting other civilizations globally as part of its diplomatic, trade and cultural interactions with Europe and as a result of its global empire.)
Iceland was an uninhabited island (hence not subject to any substrate influences unlike many other colonists) settled in the historic era by colonists who spoke a single shared language fairly close to "Old Norse" (the proto-language of the Germanic languages), who had a total population similar to that of a generation ship.
Somewhat more subtly, Iceland's colonists were looking for economic opportunities, rather than constituting a cultural minority fleeing persecution in their homeland the way, for example, that the Puritan colonists of New England were, so they were not motivated at the outset to intentionally set out to put linguistic and cultural distance between themselves and the speakers of their original mother tongue the way that early Americans deliberately attempted to distinguish themselves linguistically from England to assert a distinct cultural identity. The Iceland situation of a group of people not committed ideologically to putting cultural distance between themselves and their ancestor population would likely also be true of the people on a generation ship.
The descendants of the original colonists of Iceland remained in constant communication with each other ever after, just as generation ship residents would, although this did break up from a single community into about a dozen or so chiefdoms that were substantially autonomous from each other and had distinct identities although they did retain a very thin form of island-wide weak government. So, tribal divisions, per se, do not distinguish a generation ship from Iceland.
And, Iceland received almost no significant waves of migration prior to the recent past, so it has never had a large community of outside language learners to influence its linguistic development (just as would be the case in a generation ship).
While Iceland wasn't as isolated from other people as generation ship would be, for a period of time roughly equal to the length of a generation ship journey prior to the introduction of telecommunications, Iceland was very isolated from the rest of the world, and the vast majority of what little contact it did have with the rest of the world from visiting ships was with people who spoke the closest linguistic relative of their language in the world. So, it did not have any languages from which to borrow words, and it was not subject to any areal effects from neighboring languages in a significant way (apart from Danish rule whose effect is noted below).
Icelandic is by far the most linguistically static of the Germanic languages, with the only significant change being a change in pronunciation that arose during a several century period of Danish rule, a country that speaks a closely related by different language derived from Old Norse. A generation ship would not experience this outside influence and would not need to develop a new written language as Iceland did.
As Wikipedia explains (at the link above):
The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD.
Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved
orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland
from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise
the historical works and the eddaic poems.
The language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old
Norse. The Dano-Norwegian, then later Danish rule of Iceland from 1536
to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic (in contrary
to the Norwegian language), which remained in daily use among the
general population. Though more archaic than the other living Germanic
languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th
to the 16th century, especially in vowels (in particular, á, æ, au,
and y/ý).
The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard
established in the 19th century, primarily by the Danish linguist
Rasmus Rask. It is based strongly on an orthography laid out in the
early 12th century by a mysterious document referred to as The First
Grammatical Treatise by an anonymous author, who has later been
referred to as the First Grammarian. The later Rasmus Rask standard
was a re-creation of the old treatise, with some changes to fit
concurrent Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of k rather
than c. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used
much in later centuries. Rask's standard constituted a major change in
practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of
je and the removal of z from the Icelandic alphabet in 1973.
Apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not
changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts
were written on vellum. Modern speakers can understand the
original sagas and Eddas which were written about eight hundred years
ago. The sagas are usually read with updated modern spelling and
footnotes but otherwise intact (as with modern English readers of
Shakespeare). With some effort, many Icelanders can also understand
the original manuscripts.
Also, usually new vocabulary is developed in response to new topics of conversation. Since the environment would change less and there would be fewer new things on a generation ship than in Iceland over the same time period (in part, due to a generation ship's lack of trade with the outside world that Iceland had) one would expect there to be less innovation in vocabulary on a generation ship than there was in Iceland. Still, as noted by @Hyperneutrino one might expect words that residents of a generation ship have no reason to use to be lost early on from popular speech (although presumably written sources would still preserve the old words for those so inclined, as a generation ship's residents would not be illiterate and written languages stabilize spelling and prevent old words from dying completely), and there would be a few new words developed over time.
Another clue with which I have first hand experience, which corroborates the example of Iceland, is the development of motherland languages in immigrant communities. For example, the dialect of Korean spoken in Korean immigrant communities in the U.S. that formed shortly after the Korean War is much more similar to the dialect spoken at the time of migration than the dialect of Korean currently spoken in South Korea, notwithstanding the fact that there have been many visits to South Korea and there has been access to modern Korean television and music in that time period in the U.S. Small, relatively isolated communities are simply much less linguistically innovative than large communities that are strongly connected to neighboring communities that speak different languages.
In summary then, it is likely that the language of a generation ship would be extremely static over a period of approximately 1,000 years, because generally speaking it would be in conditions very similar to those of Iceland which historically has had an extremely static language over a similar time period under similar conditions. And, several of the factors that are know to have led to the modest changes between Old Icelandic and Modern Iceland over that time period would be absent on a generation ship.
Icelandic has been far from static though. Its phonology has changed greatly since Old Icelandic. Most of its vowels have shifted; long vowels broke into dipthongs and vowel length is now determined by stress rather than phonemically. Consonants did funky stuff too, and basically none of it is encoded in the writing system. The conservativeness of Icelandic is often very overstated; and on top of that it’s also undergone a culturally driven “reversal” to “proper icelandic” words, trying to replace loanwords with native coinings. One can say it’s been artificially turned older by this process.
@Adarain I think that there is a good case to make that the phonology changes are due to Danish influence during 300ish years of Danish rule. And, I suspect that most communities undergo waves of culturally conservative shifts from time to time. A generation ship's people might do that as well as some point in time.
@ohwilleke - I think there is a better case to make that phonological changes are rarely due to external "influences". On the contrary, they seem to be overwhelmingly internal. Just look how loan words are always pronunciated according to the phonology of the borrowing language.
@Luis Henrique By their very existence loan words are an external influence. And changing the pronunciation of them has a practical value, especially if it contains sounds that aren't present in the host. Like a lot of English people I can't do the Welsh ll, for example. That's entirely different to me waking up tomorrow and pronouncing "chair" as "shayeer".
@LuísHenrique Many phonological features, such as the use of tone in a language, are areal effects that cross-language boundaries and are not obviously substrate effects.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.827266 | 2018-03-01T19:24:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/385",
"authors": [
"Abhishek Pokhrel",
"BlokeDownThePub",
"Gabe Oscar",
"Geoff Nixon",
"HDE 226868",
"Harish KM",
"Jan",
"Jan Vaňhara",
"Joshua Hedges",
"Keith Morrison",
"Lacey Foote",
"Luís Henrique",
"MWB",
"MatthewMartin",
"Myo Ko Ko",
"Ollie",
"Peter - Reinstate Monica",
"Robert Columbia",
"Rodrigo de Azevedo",
"Sandra",
"Sascha Baer",
"Simo Kivistö",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sparksbet",
"Ullallulloo",
"V2Blast",
"curiousdannii",
"elemtilas",
"g_let",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/116",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1272",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1273",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1287",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1288",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1289",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1290",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1292",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1297",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1310",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1314",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1350",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1351",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1352",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1383",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1386",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1391",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1564",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/177",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/27",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/300",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/322",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/343",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/35",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/369",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3767",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3993",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4103",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/73",
"hyperneutrino",
"mdaniel",
"ohwilleke",
"plannapus",
"prash",
"Олег Мареев"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
205 | What is the key to realistic inventories
Shy of simply recreating or stitching together natural languages' phonological inventories, what is the solution for making a naturalistic conlangs' inventory naturalistic?
Look at natural languages. It doesn't have to be totally a priori to be inspired by certain elements of other languages.
You should think of phonology in terms of distinction. You have to distinguish certain consonants and vowels from others, and you have to figure out the best way to do that.
A realistic inventory has spread out places of articulation, often symmetrical. It's much easier to make a distinction between spread-out consonants that between consonants that are articulated similarly. That's why this is a really common inventory:
Front Central Back
Close i u
Near-Close
Mid-Close
Mid e o
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open a
And this is unheard of:
Front Central Back
Close i u
Near-Close ɪ ʊ
Mid-Close ɘ
Mid
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open
You should always make sure a language makes distinctions that are spread apart, e.g. /p t k/, rather than distinguishing three types of t-sounds /t̼ t ʈ/ without also having a distinction from /p k/ (unless for some reason you're making a language to be spoken by aliens without lips, for instance). There's also no reason to have only three consonants /p d kʰ/; you should either have only one set (such as /p t k/), or have a set for each of them (i.e. /p pʰ b, t tʰ d, k kʰ g/).
Every rule has its exceptions, but this is true of most natural languages, and you should use this as a starting point.
(Some more details can be found in my answer on Linguistics, from which I copied some of the examples)
A quibble: it's not all that strange, I would think, for redundant details of articulation to be asymmetrical, so a language with only three stops happens to realize them as [p d kʰ] (though I suppose this is sensitive to phonotactics), even if they're written /p t k/ and native speakers don't notice when foreigners say [p t k]. At least it's not nearly as weird as [p b kʰ].
In addition, inventories should be remotely gridlike. That is, if a series of phonemes of one manner of articulation occurs (let's say /p t k q/), then a similar series is likely to occur at another (e. g. /ɸ s x χ/ is more likely to occur than /θ ʒ h/).
This is an example of what not to make. The article shoehorns the inventory into a grid, but you should notice that there are a lot of gaps. This is a somewhat more realistic inventory.
Of course, ANADEW, and some more
There are some websites providing phoneme inventories of natural languages, among them:
A very simple interface to the UPSID database
PHOIBLE Online
The WALS survey also has several chapters on phoneme inventories, including data about the size of the inventories and about the distribution of rare segments and the absence of frequent segments.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.829878 | 2018-02-08T20:29:07 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/205",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"CHEESE",
"Carlos Zamora",
"Christian Rau",
"Ella Starbrook",
"Janven Yong",
"Jarno",
"Leather Kilts",
"Pawana",
"Sascha Baer",
"Tesserae",
"feedc0de",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/100",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2751",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/659",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/660",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/661",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/662",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/667",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/678",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/695",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/699",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/715",
"medukrin"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
226 | Is there an existing constructed language that once was dead?
That means, are there any such conlangs that exist today but were once declared as dead or not in use by any community?
Since conlangs by their very nature don't start out with any speakers, and in most cases the author is not immediately a skilled user of the language, conlangs tend start out dead, and so under this definition almost any conlang with a speaker community would technically once have been dead.
However, going by "dying" as having a community, then losing it, reliable data is somewhat hard to find, as a small remainder of a community (which could be as little as two individuals' private postal correspondence) can be very hard to locate especially in pre-internet days, though it seems that Idiom Neutral, published in 1902, once had largely fallen out of use, but has recieved a recent revival by enthusiasts in a couple of internet usergroups and blogs.
My answer is a little biased, but I can speak for the history of Solresol. Solresol was invented in the early 1800s, grew in popularity over the next ~70 years, even after the death of its creator, and then (apparently) abruptly died out in the early 1900s, despite supposedly being at the peak of its popularity. There were only a few brief mentions of Solresol throughout the 1900s in books about universal language attempts. Then, in the 1990s, someone started a mailing list discussion about Solresol through reading one of those books, and the community has been slowly growing ever since, with a desire to further develop and promote the language.
Gufferdk makes a good point that it's difficult to prove the "death" of a conlang. There is no known documentation of Solresol being in use through most of the 1900s, but I cannot prove that more private communication did not exist.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.830150 | 2018-02-09T06:30:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/226",
"authors": [
"Braian Coronel",
"Lee Robinson Petzer",
"Sektor",
"Yıldız Cantürk",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/718",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/719",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/720",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/721",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/743",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/748",
"ta5een",
"zslayton"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
548 | Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona?
In Toki Pona, the small word o has several meanings.
In the official book Toki Pona: The Language of Good, it says
The particle o has three uses: (1) after a noun phrase to show who is being called or addressed, (2) before a verb to express a command or request, (3) after the subject (and replacing li) to express a wish or desire.
The question is whether a sentence like ”my friend, come here” (using jan pona mi 'my friend', kama 'come', ni 'here') should be jan pona mi o, o kama ni or jan pona mi o kama ni. Or perhaps those phrases are both acceptable? In that case, are they used interchangeably, or are there different use cases or styles?
It seems there are Toki Pona speakers with different opinions on this. Who are they, and what are their arguments?
The book by jan Pije and jan Lope says:
We've learned how to address people and how to make commands; now let's put these two concepts together. Suppose you want to address someone and tell them to do something. Notice how one of the o's got dropped, as did the comma.
jan San o, ... - John, ...
... o tawa tomo sina! - ... go to your house!
jan San o tawa tomo sina! - John, go to your house!
Although one of the "o"s is usually dropped, you don't have to, especially if it adds a certain emphasis to something or has some poetic value in a song etc, or maybe if you're calling someone first, making sure they're listening, then continuing. It's just not often done. So for general purposes, yes, drop an "o".
The advantage of just leaving two o's is that you have one fewer rule to make people learn.
Merging o's might sound better especially if o o is something that sounds wrong in your mother tongue. Sandhi, the rules for pronouncing and changing pronunciations of words at barriers is undefined in toki pona- no one with any clout ever definitively said anything one way or the other. Instead, we will get people doing what they do in their native language.
Merging the os is most common method I've seen, but they are mostly interchangeable. Using one o indicates one sentence (My friend, come over here.), while two os are used to split the sentence (My friend! Come over here.). In general, if it is clearly one sentence, you can just merge the os, but if there is a break between the two portions, separate them into two sentences and duplicate the o
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.830344 | 2018-04-17T20:27:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/548",
"authors": [
"Abzi Academy",
"Scared Life",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3805",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6442"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
433 | How to keep track of a language?
At the moment I have my fictional language written down in a notebook, but as the vocabulary increases its becoming harder and harder to find words.
I am adding new words all the time, so writing them in alphabetical order doesn't last long.
How can I keep a track of this language and still be able to find the words I need?
Edit: I have seen this question has been marked as a possible duplicate, but it is different as I am also open to paper-and-pencil methods.
Possible duplicate of Are there any good programs out there to help when constructing languages?
Frankly, I really can't see doing this 'by hand'; I think that things will get out of hand much too quickly - as you've seemingly discovered. If you insist on a 'by hand' method, the best I can suggest is a box of index cards, one word (or word stem) per card. But even that gets a bit tough to manage after not really very many words.
One way, while working on paper is to divide things into multiple sheets, making sure to have plenty of extra space at the bottom of dictionary sheets, or alternatively grouping things via e.g. semantic field to not run into the alphabetisation issue to quite the same extent (though this can have the issue that the semantic field of some items might not be easily determineable).
You can also use a computer program to manage your vocabulary, which offers the benefits of easy searchability and ordering. A simple spreadsheet program of your choosing is enough to work in a lot of cases, and otherwise there is the possibility of using actual vocabulary management programs. There are several free ones availible, both conlang-specific ones such as Polyglot (which also has a bunch of other functionality for organising a bunch of other conlanging-related stuff) or one developed for natlangs but still useful for conlangs, such as SIL FieldWorks (which is quite powerful but has a bit of a learning curve).
To add to Gufferdk's answer, Mark Rosenfelder in The Language Construction Kit (online version) mentions the use of index cards (as professional dictionary makers used to do in the past) as well as a technique with two-columned pages:
You can keep a dictionary in alphabetical order by maintaining two columns and just writing in one. New words get placed in the second column. When it starts to get unreadable, it’s time to make a new edition. Index cards work too, with less rewriting.
If you don't mind sharing your lexicon with the entire world, there are also free online services such as ConWorkShop or Anthologica where you can manage your own dictionaries.
In my experience (which admittedly is somewhat old, so things might have changed), CWS' dictionary management tools had a bit of an issue where they to a significant extent encouraged (not explicitly, but in the way they were designed) making what is commonly known as relexes, and not particularly well-suited for those situations where one word, either conlang or metalanguage(English), corresponded partially with a whole host of words or phrases in the other.
With pen and paper: Use index cards
You need two sets of index cards, one ordered alphabetically in the conlang, the other ordered alphabetically in your native language.
You can use index cards of different colour to retrieve, e.g., roots or basic words.
The index cards take up some space, but 10k of them are still managable.
One of the easiest ways is a simple document in your favorite word processor:
hawarççomtar, [hawarçç- +omtar] n.C. dancer
hawarrôs, [*wel-] n.N. the will, desire; attachment
hawartomar, [wartam < *wert-] n.N. spiritual awakening, spiritual awareness
hawatam, [*wed-] D vb. sing
hawatar, [*wed-] n.N. poison, medicine; saga
hawatôs, [hawatam] n.N. song
hawecam, [*aug-] D vb. add; grow (mid)
hawehham, [*aukwh-] A vb. cook something (w. acc.); cook for someone (w. dat.)
Whatever etymological or grammatical information you feel like adding can be easily inserted. It's easy to insert new words or simply add them to the end of the list and have the software sort the whole thing alphabetically.
One great advantage of doing it this way is that it's a trivial matter of formatting for print should you ever desire to have a printed copy of your dictionary or grammar book.
If you're going to do it with a computer, it'd be better to use one of the tools designed for the purpose. If, for whatever reason, you're going to insist on doing it with an office suite, I'd use the spreadsheet program, not the word processor, as most spreadsheets these days have at least rudimentary database management capabilities, such as sorting and filtering.
De gustibus. I prefer using the word processor for the simple fact that I don't have to deal with a spreadsheet. I happen to like looking at a page, be it dictionary or grammar or texts, that looks like a book: all nicely formatted and print ready. I've never needed any sorting and filtering any fancier than a simple word search, so don't need the functionality that the spreadsheet offers. And the spreadsheet lacks the style, layout and formatting capabilities that I need.
I use multiple sources for Lortho. For the most part, my notes are all kept on Google Docs and its lexicon is stored in Google Spreadsheets. For the display portion of the language I use three different websites: Linguifex, FrathWiki, and ConWorkShop. In addition, I created a challenge on Twitter and Instagram called Lextreme2018 which keeps track of all my new lexemes for the year and the progress of Lortho's script. As I add a new word with the challenge, I also make it a point to add the new word in both the Google Spreadsheet as well as on ConWorkShop. That way I have my dictionary stored in two separate places should one decide to go belly-up.
I would suggest recording them in an Access Database or something of the like. You can make a table for each part of speech.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.830675 | 2018-03-06T17:58:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/433",
"authors": [
"Dawn Alberino",
"Gufferdk",
"Jaewoo Kim",
"Jane Dough",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"NPN328",
"Smi",
"curiousdannii",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1406",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1408",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1415",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1416",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1418",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1426",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/145",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398",
"shabunc",
"user1406"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
404 | Are there any examples of artificial creoles of natural languages?
I remember reading somewhere of a creole-ish artificial language of two (possibly more) natural languages. In the text (I do NOT remember where it was) only one creole (I'm using the term loosely here, without regards to native speakers) was mentioned, without any usage/examples.
Are there any examples of constructed languages that are specifically designed to be creoles (again, with a very loose usage of the term creole here) of natural languages?
Additionally, Lang Belta, which is the constructed creole spoken on the science fiction television show The Expanse.
Can you provide a link please?
@Zacharý added one
More of a pidgin experiment than full fledged con-creole, but worth a mention anyway: Viossa. Being made by conlangers, it likely has somewhat more elaborate grammar than most pidgins though (such as a morphological passive marker and a lot more adpositions than you’d find in most. Source: am co-creator).
Holy crap, that seems interesting. Originally I was looking for a Creole of two or three languages, but this is just as interesting!
I mean it could be a creole... all you need to do is find a young child and only speak Viossa around it!
Sorry, I meant creole-ish, in the manner of development of the language. Rather than native speakers.
To name a few:
Da Mätz se Basa: High German.
Old Piscean: British English.
Kjā: Yoruba.
Cheyoon: Mandarin.
Al Mastizu: a creole of English, Spanish and Arabic.
Al Mastizu seems most like the one I remember seeing. To bad none of these projects seem to be alive (tell me if I'm wrong)
Cheyoon appears to be alive: most recent edit was last June. Of course lack of recent webpage updates don't mean a project is dead.
Well, from ~2007 or something ... we can assume dead
Assume project death at your own risk! Just because a web article isn't updated doesn't mean the author isn't still working on it!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.831138 | 2018-03-03T00:03:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/404",
"authors": [
"Adalynn",
"Alexmiller",
"Aven",
"Chris Henry",
"Hasan Bublee",
"Jesse Adam",
"NatusPella",
"Rain",
"Sascha Baer",
"Spark",
"Sparksbet",
"Taylor S",
"TheOnlyMrCat",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1317",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1318",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1319",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1320",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1325",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1327",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1329",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1330",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1374",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1379",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1380",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1382",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/326",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"paulrt",
"tfzrch"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
466 | How to "Naturalize" a Conlang?
Many conlangs that I have encountered have an “artificial” feel to them–all conjugations and declensions are perfectly regular, stress rules for speaking are rigorously adhered to, and so on. Obviously, changing that (e.g., introducing irregular conjugations or declensions, variant stress, etc.) is necessary to make the language feel more natural, but is it sufficient? What other ways are there to make a conlang less “artificial”?
This is a very important question. Even if it may be somewhat broad in the possible scope of answers, it asks for solutions to a common problem, which is worth giving an answer to - hence me having written a novel and not a one-liner as a response :). The question will undoubtedly come up again if we close it now.
There is one big point here that really ties it all together:
Languages have history
Any conlang that wishes to look naturalistic therefore needs to emulate history as well. I’ll show in what ways history can manifest with a bunch of examples from different areas.
Orthography
Almost no language with a history of writing has a fully regular orthography. Even if there are regular writing reforms, some aspects of the orthography will just be considered “part of it” and stick. English is of course a very extreme example of this, but you don’t need to take it that far. German for example generally has a rather regular orthography. But the digraph ⟨ie⟩ represents a long /iː/, reflecting that in the past (and in some dialects until the present) there was a diphthong /iə/ in German, which became to be pronounced that way. It also has two separate graphemes for the phonemes /ɛ eː/, namely ⟨e ä⟩, reflecting whether the sound originates from a fronted /a aː/ or not. On top of this, there are some segments which have unpredictable pronunciation: word final -ig for example is pronounced /ɪç/ instead of expected /ɪk/. In short, unless your writing system was designed very recently by linguists, it likely shows leftovers from the past. In the most extreme cases, writing systems can lag behind centuries (English, French, Tibetan), but even if they don’t they can preserve some old features.
Morphology
Most languages with inflections show some degree of irregularity among them. This can manifest in many degrees, from almost entirely regular (Swahili has only one class of six slightly irregular verbs, one of which is suppletive in the present tense) to a basically complete lack of predictability (Navajo verb stems have defied any attempts to find rules for their inflections thus far. There don’t seem to be distinct paradigms, every verb does its own thing!). However, these irregularities are not random. To show what I mean, compare these two sets of declensions. The first two are latin singular nouns (in an less traditional order), the second two made up on the spot.
NOM filius rēx kwero tulya
VOC filiī rēx kwerap tulte
ACC filium rēgem kweruf tultsu
GEN filiī rēgis kwerim tulne
DAT filiō rēgī kwerx tulum
ABL filiō rēge kwert tulwo
Two things should stick out:
The Latin forms of rēx show two distinct stems, those ending in /k/ (rēx, where the spelling hides the fact that really it’s rēc-s) and those ending in /g/ (all other forms). Looking a bit closer, we can see that the /g/ appears exactly before those forms with a vowel in the suffix. Intervocalic voicing (which accounts for /k/ becoming /g/) is a common sound change and applies here.
While in both languages, some of the affixes seem to be unrelated, there are still patterns: nominative takes -s, accusative takes -m, genitive has an -i in the suffix… If we added other paradigms into the comparison, even more such patterns would arise, indicating that they really originate from a much more regular system that got changed up over time by various factors like sound changes. In the made up language, on the other hand, the affixes are entirely random, and this causes the irregularity to look more unnatural than if everything took the same affixes.
Phonology
Consider the Japanese consonant inventory. It looks something like this (omitting allophones):
m | n | ɴ |
p b | t d | k g |
| s z | | h
| r | |
| j | w |
What this table does not show however is that /p/ is significantly rarer than /t k/. Why would that be? Simply because many instances of that sound somewhat recently shifted to what is /h/ in modern Japanese. In other words, a sound change caused a significant imbalance in the distribution of sounds. If one were to simply generate words with a word generator, not paying attention to the history of the language, all sounds would show up with similar frequency.
Vocabulary
If I give you any word, you can probably find several alternative ways of expressing that meaning. “big”, “tall”, “large”, “spacious”, “gigantic”… they all have different connotations, sure, but in the end they’re all descriptions for roughly the same thing - objects which take up a big fraction of your field of view when near them. Meanwhile, many conlangs will have a dictionary entry like gwop adj “big” and that’s it. Adding synonyms, especially ones with subtly different meanings allows you to greatly affect the way texts read (in a positive way).
At the same time however, often complicated words are derived from simpler concepts. This naturally has the effect of making them longer, causing a variation in the lengths of words - many short words with a few longer ones in-between is a common pattern. But if you simply create a new root every time you make a word, you won’t get that - and your hypothetical speakers will have to remember every single word without help, even ones they barely ever use.
I could go on and on and list things in every category of linguistics I can think of, but in the end it all boils down to this:
Irregularity in languages either preserves older, then-regular systems in now untransparent ways (English verbs are another great case study for this) or are the creation of sound change messing with regularity. The former is the reason why common words tend to be less regular - if you commonly hear a word it’s easier to preserve its original form and remember the irregularity once it has arisen. In the case of Navajo I mentioned above, curiously it seems to be that first sound change caused irregularity, and then the native speakers applying analogy caused the whole system to become even more irregular. See the paper I linked above for some hypotheses on how that worked.
Now, onto the actual question: Assume you have a conlang already, and it lacks history and is entirely too regular. “Sterile”, one might say. What can you do? I’d like to present you two options:
Invent a history for your language. Sketch out how your verbal system may have looked in the past and see if you can lead that to some interesting irregular forms or alterations. Come up with some sound changes that may have led to the current state of the language. You don’t have to do this in great detail, but obviously (as always with conlangs) the more effort you put in, the better it will look.
Make your language the history. If you don’t mind your end result potentially looking vastly different from what you have now, you can decide to move the current state of the language into the past. You may have to make some changes to vocabulary to keep it in line with technology, but otherwise there’s not really any difference between a modern language and a “proto-language”. Then, you can track its changes through history in great detail, and in doing so introduce its natural flavour. No one has to know that the proto-language you worked from was unnaturalistic (but you’ll have to live with that knowledge. Just remember that you have to start somewhere, you can’t derive every conlang from the first utterances of mankind).
As a footnote, I’d like to make a book recommendation: The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. In this book, Deutscher discusses (in a very accessible manner) exactly what this question boils down to: how and why did languages become the way they are - messy and irregular and oh so complicated. I believe every conlanger should read this book, regardless of level of experience.
Dammit, I can only upvote this once! :)
Excellent answer! But if irregularities are the result of changes in former regularity, where does this former regularity come from? Shouldn't there be some forces that create regularity, too, besides those that destroy it?
Funny you speak of forces of creation and destruction, which are exactly the terms Guy Deutscher uses :) Of course regularization happens as well: for one, freshly acquired morphology (via grammaticalization) is generally very regular, because it originates from sequences of words. But existing irregularities get levelled out by a process called analogy - basically, speakers occasionally forget to make words irregular if they don’t hear them very often, and instead apply a more common rule, perhaps based on a similar-sounding word.
Stupidly small nitpick - vocative of filius is filī, not filiī.
Easy. Apply analogy and sound changes—see a few natural examples at Index Diachronica, a list of sound change types at Wikipedia Sound Change, and also David Peterson (maker of Game Of Thrones's Dothraki) on youtube— to your conlang, and make it replace (not evolve from) the unnatural language. These two elements automatically create irregular conjugations/declensions.
This field of linguistics is diachronics or historical linguistics (I prefer the former).
Every natural language has more or less loanwords. Adding some loanwords to your conlang adds to the naturalness.
So how do loanwords differ from the original words, after all it is a conlang and the loanwords are constructed, too?
Let the donor language have a different phonology and different phonotactics, than the loan words stick out by their shape. You may choose a classical precursor of your actual language as the donor language (We see borrowings from Latin in French), or an unrelated language. Also the loan words may have a different stress pattern preserved in your conlang.
The loan words may also have unusual endings or prefixes not occurring naturally in your main conlang, or show different mechanisms of word formation and derivation.
If you want to go a little further, the loan words even may exhibit loan inflections (just as some English loaned plurals such as hippopotami or cherubim do).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.831346 | 2018-03-13T18:16:06 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/466",
"authors": [
"Arsalan MGR",
"Camion",
"ChefAirik",
"David Delavari",
"Ethan Bierlein",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"Luís Henrique",
"Rythmomachy",
"Sascha Baer",
"cunninglinguine",
"edem",
"empyrical",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1493",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1494",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1495",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1496",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1501",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1503",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1504",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1505",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1510",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/177",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/608",
"qxzsilver"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
635 | How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?
As something of a follow-on to my question about “naturalizing” conlangs, I’m looking for any information - actual tools would be nice, too, if available - for “borrowing” from one conlang into another in a realistic manner. There would be a number of subsidiary questions for this, some of which I include here:
Assuming that I’m borrowing from sourcelang to destlang, should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form (ignoring issues of orthography relative to different writing systems)? By destlangize, I mean things like…
Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?
Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?
Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?
What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow?
What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?
(At the suggestion of a commenter, I wish to make it clear that I am interested in this issue primarily with respect to “naturalistic” conlangs and natlangs.)
Too short to be an answer, but if the more prestigious sourcelang is to destlang, the more of the pronun/writing is kept (as a rule of thumb).
Should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form?
In natural languages, borrowed words are almost always "destlang-ized" to some degree, but it won't necessarily always to the same degree. Even within the same language, often some borrowed words will be more integrated into the language than others. The more recently a word was borrowed, the more speakers of the language will treat it as a "foreign" word and be willing to make exceptions for it, but as its use becomes more and more common, speakers will inevitably begin to treat it as a native word if it doesn't fall out of use.
Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?
Sometimes, sometimes not. There are examples of both in natlangs.
The English verb "to google" has been borrowed into many languages, and it seems to typically conform to the conjugation patterns of those languages. Even in Japanese, a language with a famously closed class of verbs, borrowed "to google" as a verb ググる(it may have become a verb after being borrowed as a noun, but either way, it's quite remarkable).
Yet it's also possible for exceptions to be made. This happens with some English noun borrowings (most English speakers won't try to pluralize edamame or Pokémon with English plural morphology), but not with others (many English speakers will pluralize zucchini as zucchinis, and you'll pretty much never heard zucchino).
In my experience, verbs are more likely to take on the native conjugation patterns than nouns are native declension patterns, but I don't have any data to back that up cross-linguistically. A borrowed word is definitely more likely to be conjugated or declined like a native one the longer it has been in the language (the pedantry about pluralizing Latin borrowings in English is an exception to this, but that's more because of the social prestige associated with having studied Latin).
Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?
This really is a case-by-case thing. If the language uses a completely different writing system, almost definitely, but sometimes the orthographical conventions won't be the same as native words. Japanese uses katakana for borrowings, for instance, and English borrowings from Japanese and Chinese tend to follow whatever romanization scheme was most popular when they were borrowed, even if the pronunciation is pretty opaque. For instance, the Chinese word 道 was borrowed as "Tao" in English based on older Chinese romanizations, even though the Chinese word now romanized as dào and the English derived word "Taoism" is more often pronounced /ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm/ in English (though a spelling pronunciation /ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm/ has arisen due to this).
Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?
Almost always yes. While sometimes educated speakers or upper-class speakers will try to pronounce a borrowed word with its "original pronunciation" rather than its borrowed one ("gyro" is a good example of this), even those pronunciations are almost always somewhat changed to fit the destlang's phonology better, and often they aren't even closer to the pronunciation in the sourcelang. How exactly the word is altered to fit the destlang's phonology depends on the particulars of the borrowing situation, however.
What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow? What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?
I've combined these questions because I feel there's a lot of overlap in the answers. Often, words are borrowed to fill a semantic gap in the destlang, which is why words for new technologies are so often borrowed (think of how many languages borrowed the word "television"!)
Borrowings are also often used to refer to the "versions" of certain things from the part of the world that speaks that language -- consider how anime, a generic word for all animation in Japanese, was borrowed into English as a word for a style of Japanese animation, or how English borrowed "chai" from the Hindi/Urdu word for tea, चाय (cāy) / چای (ćāy) to refer to tea with certain spices based on Indian recipes.
Also, sometimes words are borrowed because they carry some social value seen attractive by the speakers of destlang. Maybe destlang speakers think sourcelang sounds refined and sophisticated, and so upper-class destlang speakers borrow words from sourcelang to sound fancy. Of course, this sort of situation depends on a lot of social and sociopolitical factors wherever the languages are spoken.
A very complete answer! Nicely done!
"Pokemon" not getting a "normal" English plural is easily explained by the fact there are so many examples in English of existing words that don't do it either: in my dialect of English, deer, fish, moose, elk, buffalo, caribou and other such words don't change between singular and plural. "Pokemon" is treated the same way. In a language where the rules for distinguishing between singular and plural are stricter, that might not be the case.
@KeithMorrison Despite English's number of irregular plurals, native English-speaking children still consistently apply its regular plural morphology to nonsense words (see: the Wug test). The fact that English allows irregular plurals similar to this no doubt contributes, but without any influence from its native morphology I highly doubt it would be assigned this irregular plural morphology. But yeah, it's not necessarily going to carry over that way in all cases in every language!
@Sparksbet, the sourcelang morphology has an influence, sure, but what I'm saying is that English finds it easy to accept identical singular/plural forms because there's already so many examples, especially for words for animals (which Pokémon could be categorized as). On the other hand, in Turkish, the plural of "Pokémon" is "Pokémonlar", exactly what one would expect the plural in Turkish to be.
@KeithMorrison I'm simply using Pokémon as one of several examples in which sometimes sourcelang morphology influences destlang morphology - of course not every language will use the same morphology for loanwords from the same source, and in the case of very recent loans like "Pokémon", there may even be differences between speakers (my grandmother definitely says "Pokémons"!) But I think the Japanese examples serve as well as any when it comes to the influence of sourcelang morphology; perhaps I'll include some Latin loan plurals as additional examples when I have time to edit.
There are a few words in Esperanto that are arguably borrowed from Ido; examples include olda "maljuna, malnova" and kurta "mallonga". With respect to the subquestions: These words didn't need any changes, they already blend perfectly into Esperanto. The borrowings from Ido still are in a niche position in Esperanto and live mainly in the poetic register.
Of course Ido (as a fork of Esperanto) shares a lot of vocabulary with Esperanto, but this is due to inheritance and not borrowing.
I also remember vaguely that some of Tolkien's Elvish words were borrowings between Sindarin and Quenya, but unfortunately I don't have an example at hand. This would be a "constructed borrowing" between conlangs, adding to their naturalness and their diachronic depth.
Esperanto and Ido are somewhat outside the area of interest/intent of this question; neither language does - or was intended to - seem like a 'natural' language - they are most definitely, by design, artificial languages specifically intended as interlanguages. The Quenya/Edhellen cross-borrowing would fit into the area of interest/intent, but I'm less interested in extant examples than I am in process.
@JeffZeitlin you might consider specifying in your question that you're interested in how borrowing works in natlangs and naturalistic conlangs, if that's specifically what you're interested in.
@Sparksbet - A good point; I suppose I assumed that that would be understood since I explicitly mentioned my previous question about 'naturalizing' conlangs, and indicated that I considered this a 'follow-on'.
One thing you may want to consider is how the sourcelang word reached the destlang. If the word was spread through literature to the destlang speakers, then it may be spelled the same as it is in the sourcelang but pronounced according to the pronunciation of the destlang. If the word is spread through oral communication then it may sound like the sourcelang but be spelled differently. One example would be ray (or rai), a Spanish word descended from the English ride as in I got a ride home.
Another thing you may want to consider is the possibility of usages that sourcelang speakers may consider "incorrect". An example of this would be the French word le parking, which means car park in English. In the case of "incorrect" usage the important thing to consider is which social societal group naturalized the word and in what context. If the word was naturalized by academics, then it may continue to be pronounced and used the same way it is in the sourcelang (as in the cases of many Latin words used in English). If it was naturalized by non-linguists in normal social contexts, then it may be naturalized with spelling errors, mispronunciations, and odd usages (consider le shopping in every day French).
An addition to Sparksbet's excellent answer I'd add one tool to your armamentarium:
DENATURALISATION of BORROWINGS
Sometimes foreign words borrowed a long time ago from L1 become naturalised in L2 only to become denaturalised again in later times. In other words, the legitimately L2 word becomes more like the antecedent L1 word.
Case in point, PEKING. English borrowed this city name centuries ago and happily naturalised it (as we tend to do sooner or later with every word we borrow!). But recently, you've probably noticed an odd spelling "BEIJING". For some strange reason, this word has de-evolved from its naturalised form to something approaching a modern Mandarin pronunciation-spelling of the name, rather than the English pronunciation of the name.
This doesn't always happen. Thus far, we continue to pronounce Baile Átha Cliath as DUBLIN; Moskva as MOSCOW; and Krung Thep Maha Nakhon as BANGKOK.
Peking was borrowed based on older romanizations of the word. Beijing is based on modern pinyin romanization, and it too has been nativized to some extent (replacing t͡ɕ with d͡ʒ, for instance). Referring to that as "de-evolution" is problematic. Rather, it was re-borrowed because of sociopolitical factors as China regained international prominence.
De-evolution with respect to English: the former nativised form has been replaced with a newer foreign form. No worries, though! It too shall be assimilated. After all, that's what English does best! (We can see this happening, for example, with the increasing use of "beijing duck", rather than the older "peking duck".)
"Peking" really isn't any more nativized just because it's based on an older spelling pronunciation than "beijing" is. De-evolution really isn't a good word to use here -- it carries negative connotations in addition to not really being an accurate description.
I think there are better examples for this process, I can think of the words debt and doubt that acquired their b's due to it.
@Sparksbet Thank you for your opinion! We don't agree on the negative connotation aspect, but as far as a mechanism of borrowing goes, I think it stands as well as any of the others mentioned.
@jknappen Yep, chalk these up under "learned borrowings". Yet another way for one invented language to borrow from another.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.832375 | 2018-05-20T17:59:52 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/635",
"authors": [
"Duncan",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"Keith Morrison",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sparksbet",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
681 | I'm constructing a language with some rather hard-to-produce symbols. Computer or paper?
My constructed language has 26 English letters and 30 special characters (plus four different accent marks.) The characters are slightly abstract. The closest I've gotten to producing them is with LaTeX/MathJax (Which offers a wide enough range to produce most of them.) As I go along building vocab/conjugation lists, I've hit a roadblock where I want to write a word down, but it has a symbol in it that I can't reproduce well on whatever sticky note app (or Word!) that I'm using.
Is there any good platform for me to be able to build these lists on, or do I have to do it on paper?
I would recommend using a transliteration into ASCII or something similar which can be more universally used if the correct font is not available. For example, Esperanto uses some uncommon diacritics (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ), which are not always available. As a result people write them by using the letter 'x' which is not used in Esperanto: cx, gx, ux, etc.
Using digraphs or trigraphs you should be able to represent your extra characters; another option would be to append digits, as in a1, a2 for different variants of the letter a.
If your system is unambiguous (like the Esperanto convention), then you can easily convert between it and a proper representation including all the characters.
Note: in German, the umlaut characters are often represented by appending an 'e': ü becomes ue. This is not unambiguous, as there are valid combinations of u followed by e which are not ü; an automatic back-transliteration is not possible. This is something you need to look out for.
Transliteration is not really an answer to what this question is asking.
@curiousdannii It is. It allows you to write down words in an extended script on a computer when there is no appropriate font present.
Right, but the answer to that is to explain how to make a new font, not to transliterate it. If the OP wanted transliteration they would have said so.
@curiousdannii There are many platforms where you cannot use your own fonts, so having a transliteration is a safe and portable way to write down words in an unavailable script, rather than having to use paper. So even if you can make your own font, you might still not be able to use it in a particular editor you have available at a given time. As the OP did not mention transliteration I assume they didn't think of it, and thus offered it as an alternative to creating your own font.
While this lies on the edge of not being an answer, it is useful and I will use it for when I have to jot down a lot of my major notes. +1, and thanks for the idea!
My inclination would be to simply create a font for my language's writing system, and then use that font in whatever application I'm using to build my dictionary or text corpus. You can then use e.g., Word's autocorrect or an additional program like AutoHotKey to change easy-to-remember/easy-to-type sequences to the specific character from your font - for example, if your writing system has a glyph for the sound represented in English by the digraph ch, you can set up autocorrect or AHK to change ch to whatever your glyph is.
There are many font editors out there; the ones that I would recommend at this point (for Windows; I don't do a lot of language development on other systems) would be FontForge or any of FontLab's font-creation tools (TypeTool, Fontographer, FontLab Studio, or FontLab VI).
Well, LaTeX is a great platform for writing anything, and you already seem to use it to some success. So I suggest using LaTeX and creating pdf out of it for distribution.
What helps in the long run is creating a font with all the special characters for your conlang. TeX and LaTeX come with a reasonably usable font creation program called METAFONT, but the so created fonts are only usable in the TeX universe—which may be sufficient for you. I have successfully created fonts with METAFONT, and our partner TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange has a lot of people that are willing to help with METAFONT.
Does Metafont work well with custom unicode characters?
@curiousdannii: Yes and no. TeX and METAFONT are pre-Unicode technology and their approach to character sets is very different than Unicode's. A font is restricted to 256 glyphs. For larger character sets, you need more fonts and select the font for the respective characters. Even 8bit TeX can handle Unicode input and map it correctly to the fonts using macros.
You may want to look into getting Fontlab or Fontographer. You can design your fonts in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator and import them into the font software. From there, create ligatures that can do this.
The good thing about ligatures is that in a search, you can search for the individual letters. For instance, if you use "æ" for "ae" then you search for "ae" and not the ligature.
Sure, there's a learning curve, but it may be better in the long run. Not only will you have your ligatures, but you'll have a font for any texts you create. You can also export to a woff font for web use.
+1 and welcome to Conlang, Krakoom! If you have a moment, please take the [tour] and visit the [help] to learn more about the site. You may also find [meta] (which requires 5 rep to post on) useful. Thanks for the answer, and have fun!
Is Fontographer still available? — FontForge is free.
Apparently not. The last release was in 2013. For some reason its name is stuck in my head!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.833348 | 2018-07-08T16:54:18 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/681",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"FoxElemental",
"Krakoom",
"Oliver Mason",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/633",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/744"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
615 | Does Volapük contain any elements (order, participle, etc) not present in its European source languages?
Volapük was designed back in the 1800s to be a 'world language', but at first glance, it appears to the layman (me) to just be a mixing of Romance languages, English, and maybe High German. Are there any new ideas or concepts that were presented in this conlang, or were all of its rules simply derived from these parent languages?
It incorporated the aorist from Classical Greek, if I remember right. Ho
The Volapük panoply of mood suffixes contains distinctions that were familiar to its audience through classicising education, but I think it fair to say they weren't in the immediate source languages: the optative, jussive, and potential moods as suffixes don't correspond to what German or English or French does morphologically; nor does giving a suffix to the apodosis of conditionals (if... then). In fact, while the optative is Ancient Greek and the jussive is Sanskrit, the potential in Europe is limited to Finnish, and the apodosis suffix seems to be completely made of whole cloth.
I'll add that, as with Esperanto, a lot of the compounding was schematic and not inspired by natural languages; the notorious example of lu- "derogatory prefix" is probably the most obvious (bien 'bee' > lubien 'wasp'; vat 'water' > luvat 'urine').
Wow. If anyone collects books on Volapük from when Volapük was a going concern, it would have to be Nick Nicholas! Or are there books less than a century old that cover the features you've mentioned here?
I did photocopy a book from the library, but I remember reading this in later descriptions. And confirmed in Wikipedia. I'd forgotten about the apodosis suffix.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.833776 | 2018-05-10T18:18:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/615",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"Nick Nicholas",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/435"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
685 | Which IPA phones can be made and understood underwater?
I have a human culture that gradually develops an underwater civilisation. They still require mouth and nose breathing and will be living in air bubbles, retaining traditional phones. They do spend a lot of time swimming around and I want them to be able to communicate through water as well. Modified and new underwater phones will develop over time etc.
What I'm interested in and haven't been able to find an answer to is, of our current available phones, which ones can be made, heard and understood underwater?
let's work off the idea that there is no breathing equipment in the way of these vocalisations. Free diving.
Before I start constructing modified sounds and augmentations etc I would like to know what I can keep of our current soundbank. What do I have to throw out completely. I may ask a later question on constructing/modifying new sounds for underwater languages.
I understand that humans hearing underwater is affected by bone conduction, skipping the first 2 ear bones. We will be able to hear much higher frequencies and from further away, although direction will be hard to discern. I'm still reading up on all of these features but just wanted to say I was aware of these various facts. For the purpose of this question, I'm just focused on using current known sounds underwater.
I am aware of this answer on wb.se.
"IPA phones" are not a thing. The IPA is a writing system for phones; the IPA did not bring any phones into existence.
Also, if they spend a lot of time swimming around while holding in air, why would they want to talk? It would dramatically waste the amount of breath they have.
From reading the answers to the Worldbuilding SE you reference, I would draw the following conclusions:
anything unvoiced goes out of the window. So no /f/, /p/, /k/, /t/, /s/ etc. They are pretty useless, as they are predominantly in the higher frequency ranges (especially the fricatives) or very short and without much energy (which would be provided by the glottis). And higher frequency sounds travel less well in water.
consonants in general are either short (plosives) or prefer higher frequency bands (fricatives), so apart from /r/ and /l/ (and possibly /v/, /z/) would not carry well underwater.
vowels seem best suited. And looking at the frequency characteristics, those with lower formants seem slightly preferable, so /u/ and /o/, and the back /a/: vowels produced at the back of the vocal tract. The fronted vowels (/i/, /e/, frontal /a/) would have a higher frequency component again.
So in summary I would think a vowel-based phoneme inventory might be best. This inventory could be supplemented by some approximants (/l/, /r/, /j/, and /w/). Which is weird, as consonants usually carry most information in natural language!
Compare:
Whch s wrd, s cnsnnts sll crr mst nfrmtn n ntrl lngg!
i i ei, a ooa uuay ay o ioaio i aua auae!
What about clicks and affricates etc? Might not be able to tell them apart but could still make use them of them in general...if they work underwater that is.
@EveryBitHelps Clicks might work. I have to admit my answer is rather Euro-centric in the phoneme inventory it presupposes. Affricates have the fricative frequency issue again, though /d͡ʒ/ might be feasible as it's voiced.
@EveryBitHelps In natlangs, clicks are produced by sucking in air with your tongue, rarefying it between two points of closure, then releasing the front point of closure to make the click sound. Given the acoustics involved, I'm thus not sure it's even possible to makes clicks underwater unless you're, like, a dolphin or something.
@Sparksbet I was sort of imagining a dolphinese end result :D Good to know about the clicks. Will work on it when creating news sounds.
Unfortunately, if your creatures have a human-like anatomy, dolphin-speak might not be doable -- we're not really sure how dolphins make the sounds they make underwater, and our current hypotheses rely on dolphin-specific anatomy.
It is possible to make some clicks with purely internal air movement, not requiring any ingress of air through the mouth--and indeed even with the mouth closed. This is easier with clicks articulated further back, so you might get by with palatal and velar clicks (produced by using the tongue to rarify air in the front of the mouth, compressing it in the back, and then releasing a closure), and glottal pseudo-clicks (ingressive glottal stops) which rely on decreasing lung pressure compared to the oral cavity.
A while ago, someone on reddit tried to test this experimentally (using a bathtub). Here’s what they found:
Vowels
Overall, these were the hardest to distinguish (at least personally). The most striking vowels were /æ, i, u/. /a, o, ɑ, ɒ, ɔ/ all seemed to blend together, losing distinction. The same happened to
close-mid and open-mid center vowels as they too blurred. The front
close vowels also blurred, as did the back close and close-mid vowels.
Tone definitely helped to distinguish sounds, and you can really play with vowel length. It's eerie to hear your voice carry underwater
and not dissipate as quickly. You can also factor in uvular trilled
vowels. With tone these sound very unique.
Consonants
I found it most easy to distinguish /p, t, k/ from their ejective counterparts, but not voiced /b, d, k/. Like the vowels, most of
the fricatives (labial, dental, and alveolar) blurred together. You
can distinguish this amorphous group against /ts'/. Retroflex
fricatives merged with /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. As you farther back the
consonants begin to get indistinguishable from vowels. The other
consonants followed suit, at least to my ears. Nasals were all
identical. Clicks were not possible, unless you want to inhale
and choke on water.
reddit post
Now of course this isn’t exactly hard science, as it’s all based on the perception and articulatory skill of one person. Still, it provides intersting data.
This is excellent. Thanks for sharing. I am curious about a two person experiment. As this person knew what sounds they were making, they may have a slight bias on what is actually understandable. Obviously you can't fit two people in a bath...underwater at least...but would be interesting if two people could recreate this experiment in a swimming pool etc. Find out what the second person can actually hear and understand.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.833961 | 2018-07-12T09:50:40 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/685",
"authors": [
"EveryBitHelps",
"Logan R. Kearsley",
"Oliver Mason",
"Sparksbet",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/714",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/84",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/849",
"ubadub"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
674 | Is there any importance of "dots" while constructing alphabets for a language?
In English, there is a little dot over small letters of i and j. I am not sure what that dot signifies to - pronunciation or sound.
In Gujarati, Hindi and Sanskrit languages, there happens to be dot over letters which signifies to sound "-n" for example Ganga written in either of three with dot over "Ga" alphabet sounds "Gan".
Is there any importance altogether to have such notations? Why? How do you add the same while devising grammar rules for a constructed language?
It's just a part of the shape, like the crossed 't'. No special significance. Letter shapes are usually completely arbitrary, with the possible exception of Hangul.
Dots and dashes make a language more compact - one letter with only a tiny modification can correspond to more than one sound. And Arabic is a pretty good example of what you can do with dots. E.g. one could devise a language where the same letter is a vowel when there's a dot on top, and the [other type] when the dot is on bottom.
Fun fact: Two of our punctuation signs (exclamation and question mark) have dots that are part of their design and don't carry any meaning. !?
In English, the dot does not carry meaning. It's just part of the lower case letters i and j. There is no dotless base form. Note that the letters i and j aren't dotted in every font or variant of the Latin alphabet. Notably, there is no dot in Gaelic type.
Turkish, on the other hand, does distinguish between dotless I/ı (representing the phoneme /ɯ/) and dotted İ/i (/i/).
Historically, the tittle was added to improve legibility. In late medieval blackletter, the letters i, m, n, and u were basically all made up of vertical strokes, minimum basically was ııııııııııııııı. So a dot was added to i: ıııiııiıııııııı.
Dots can be used for a variety of purposes: Inuktitut syllabics (a constructed script for a natural language) use dots to indicate vowel length, while the Hebrew abjad uses them as vowel marks (niqqud), so does Tengwar. In Arabic, they are used to distinguish letters that have come to otherwise look identical (i‘jām).
Dots are an easy way to derive one symbol from another.
As jknappen has already said: it's up to you what you want to use dots for in your script or if you want to use them at all.
A thing you might want to consider is the medium your script is supposed to be written on. Dots can be easily produced with ink on paper but they are harder to carve in wood where you might want to use a short line instead. Of course, if it is meant to be mainly printed or displayed by screens, reproducibility is much less of a concern.
You are the one who constructs the writing system, so it is your choice whether you assign some "meaning" to dots.
There are constructed scripts with dots carrying some meaning:
In Tengwar one, two or three dots above a consonant denote different vowels following that consonant (there some other markers for more vowels)
In Kelen a dot below a vowel denotes the length of the vowel
I'm currently not aware of a constructed scripts where some dots are just part of certain letters (like in the Latin alphabet i and j) without adding information to a dotless base form.
Dots (and diacritics generally) have been used in writing systems for several reasons:
To mark vowels
In abjads and some abugidas, consonants are written as large characters, and vowels are written as diacritics around the main characters, frequently a dot or dots, but also dashes and other small marks.
One option for a con-writing system which I haven't seen before would be to swap this, and have the vowels be the main characters, and the consonants be indicated by diacritics.
Sound modifications
Diacritics are used in some writing systems to indicate some sort of sound modification, such as voicing, lenition/fortition (turning a stop into a fricative or vice versa), vowel length, or tone.
To increase the character inventory
If a language borrows a script from another language, it might not have enough characters for all of its phonemes. One common option is to use diacritics to make more characters. This is common when languages adapt the Latin script, such as in French or Vietnamese.
Or because of language change, the writing system may no longer be adequate if new phonemes arise. One option is to add a mark to an existing character. (This is probably actually the origin of all of French's diacritics.)
To improve legibility
Diacritics can be used to improve legibility, which is the origin of the dot of "i" and "j". Some languages also use diacritics to distinguish homophones.
To mark syllables
The diaereses is used to indicate that two adjacent vowels are to be pronounced separately, as in the name Noël.
This is not a complete list. The Wikipedia page for diacritics gives a thorough look at what writing systems for conlangs use them for.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.834453 | 2018-07-04T11:25:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/674",
"authors": [
"Gallifreyan",
"Oliver Mason",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/704"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
774 | Organizing a lexicon in a logographic writing system
A little background before my question: I am an amateur in mid-development of a logographic writing system, not necessarily a whole language with phonetics. As I develop, I don't so much care about grammar, at least not yet. The language is heavily context-based, it requires you to have foreknowledge of the concepts it conveys, and ideas portrayed in the writing system are to be implied by the reader. It's memory-intensive, so you can't quite analyze it like, say, English, and determine its meaning through some roots or affixes.
In a nutshell, virtually no grammar. No specific way to order your ideas, just implied context.
Ideas are distinguished by category: nouns, verbs, adjectives. (That should be used as a dominant identifier for the question yet to be asked)
Okay, that'll probably do it for background. My question is this: Is there an advantageous method to sort and organize characters of a logographic system, specifically for dictionary look-up? (Given the properties I mentioned above.)
My current method is just sorting by the kinds of ideas. Ex.: In the verb category, I may sort verbs whether they describe positional things, e.g., to be underneath, or motional things, e.g., to run, etc. For nouns, a similar system may be employed (haven't reached this point yet), as well as for adjectives.
However, I imagine that such an approach would/could create confusion. (Is an ice cream cake a cake or an ice cream? Why?)
Certainly, there must be other options I'm not seeing. This question, for example, seems to brush the idea just a smidgen, but it is centered largely on computer programs for organization. For this, I should specify that I am working entirely on-paper. Computerization is not an option quite yet. I am strictly searching for methods for organizing a kind of lexicon, entries similar to those arrayed in an English dictionary.
I know this is ancient, but I have to say: noun, verb and adjective are grammatical constructs. If you sort by that, you inherently add a grammar. Sure, there is an underlying structure of entity, action, description but it doesn't always hold. Where do states like "be underneath" go? By your paradigm, it's a verb and therefore an action. But states are more like descriptions, and indeed that is how English treats the concept of "underneath" - note that the English verb is compound, the copula "be" plus an adjective complement.
Having a dictionary ordered by theme or idea is a good thing and it can carry you a long way in the design of your writing system.
For a more systematic approach, you need a way to order your logograms. Chinese sorting may be an inspiration for you. They identify a "radical" in each character, and than order by radical + number and order of additional strokes. The approach has the advantage that simpler characters (with fewer strokes, and probably more frequent usage) come before more complex ones.
The number of "strokes" is an interesting idea, hadn't considered it before. It may be an effective method for some, but by the way which my logograms are designed, characters of similar meaning may be separated by obnoxious distances. "Radicals" also seem to be present somewhat in this writing system of mine, but I think that particular approach will be quick to break down once I expand further into the nouns (there are a lot of those in our world). It's good to know I was on the right track to begin with, though. I'll look more into your link and perhaps a wiki page or two on it.
After reflection, organizing some of the characters by their radicals may be practical. But this won't work for many, many more characters—only a subset, likely in the verbs.
I am inclined to believe—after having looked into Chinese sorting—that the answer lies somewhere in the nature of the definitions themselves, not the nature of the characters. However, this approach would work one-way. Knowing (in English) what idea you want to find will help you locate a character, but knowing a character and not its English definition will lend you nothing. I suppose this is what I'm really trying to mediate. Surely, there's a middle ground between the two, however, it seems that a middle ground can only be achieved if you modify the nature of the characters.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.834845 | 2018-09-19T14:51:47 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/774",
"authors": [
"BenjaminF",
"No Name",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3397",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/817"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
776 | What's the purpose of vowels and consonants?
Other than making words easier to pronounce, is there any purpose to having the letters divided like this? Should they or a similar concept be added to a constructed language?
Vowels and consonants aren't concepts so much as physical realities - any language spoken with a vocal tract will have sounds produced by varying constrictions on the vocal tract. But see this question What reasons would there be for not having a human conlang with only vowels?
This is somewhat similar to "what's the purpose of odd and even numbers".
Looking at the sounds produced in human languages we can distinguish two different ways of articulation, one where sound waves are produced by the glottis, modulated in the vocal tract through opening of the jaw (open/closed) and position of the tongue (front/back), but otherwise pass through unrestricted.
The other type of sound does not depend on the glottis (whose action is optional), and an airflow is generated coming from the lungs, passing through the vocal tract; but this time, there are constrictions at various places of articulation, which modulate the frequency spectrum of the resulting sounds to produce significant differences. Depending on whether the glottis is active, these sounds can be classified as voiced or unvoiced.
The former are called vowels: they are always voiced, and are defined through the positions of jaw and tongue. The latter are consonants, and are defined through the place of the constriction (glottal, dental, labial, ...), the nature
of the constriction (fricatives, stops) and whether they are voiced or unvoiced.
As it happens, you kind of need both kinds of sounds in a language to make it pronounceable. Just like you need odd and even numbers to do maths.
You can see this in syllables: a syllable has to have a vowel as its central element, and is surrounded by consonants. You can have different syllable structures: CV, VC, CVC, etc., and depending on language some structures are more common than others. But this is more of an emergent feature than some deliberate decision.
The purpose of vowels and consonants it to make up syllables. We just call the most prominent part of the syllable "vowel" and the the other sounds grouped around that core "consonants". Some sounds can be on both sides: There are languages where the liquids (l, m, n, r) can act as vowels, and some short vowels (i, u) can act as consonants usually named "glides" and given separate IPA symbols /j, w/.
For spoken languages produced the usual way, having vowels and consonants is a natural thing. But there are even natural languages without vowels and consonants: The sign languages around the world don't have an equivalent to this distinction.
Oh good point about sign languages - they completely slipped my mind, but they are entirely relevant.
In sign languages might it be useful to contrast finger movements with arm movements?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.835274 | 2018-09-20T01:12:48 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/776",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
767 | Should Auxlangs have metaphors?
Auxlangs are meant to be easily learnt/understood by the entire populace of the world, no matter their native language. So, they are constructed to be unambiguous and it's reference should have a one-to-one mapping to worldly objects/concepts.
Doesn't having metaphors undermine the whole point of Auxlangs? I mean a metaphoric phrase can have different meaning in different contexts, which leads to ambiguity.
I'm not sure how a human language, natural or constructed, could prevent metaphors.
In case of auxlangs, by deliberately preventing it's usage. It is difficult to control a language if the user group is too large but for a small speaker community, maybe we can have a rule book of sorts.
You can't prevent metaphors because human language is metaphor. Take a look at your own statement: preventing the usage of metaphor. So the abstract concept of METAPHOR is equated to a physical OBJECT that can be used.
Theoretically you can eliminate metaphor, yes, but you are working against human nature itself.
Certain metaphors are exceedingly common and embedded in the very grammar of many languages (although their exact expression may vary), so in that regard, avoiding metaphor is extremely difficult because it's somewhat an inherent part of the human psyche. Either you will subconsciously integrate some of it, or your users will inevitably create some. Grammaticalization typically originates directly in widespread metaphor.
Your etymologies and extended meanings (because even in an auxlang, creating a root for every meaning is downright exhausting: there's a reason most auxlangs borrow at least part of their vocabulary!) are usually going to be metaphorical in some ways, whether from real languages or from otehr roots. Indeed, "metaphor" is an example: etymologically, the meaning is "carry over, transfer".
Examples
Up is good, down is bad, quality is possession (hence the use of "have" for qualities and actions), individuals are samples ("a human has two eyes" is metaphor: you don't mean a specific human!).
Time is a major source of metaphor in this regard. Time usually moves from back to front. Movement is the key word: verbs of movements are extremely common expressors of time relations!
The body is space: using body parts to generate locatives is also a very common feature cross-linguistically, found in languages as distinct as Hebrew, Nahuatl and Swahili. The fact that virtually all languages in the world use body-relative directional (in front of, behind)... except for the aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr, well known for using only absolute directions.
Fabrication is causation: the use of verbs meaning "make, create, fabricate" as causative auxiliary is a common metaphoric transfer of the idea of creating an object to "creating" an action in something else.
Metaphors are based on shared cultural understanding. Here is one often quoted example of a metaphor from Shakespeare's As You Like It:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances ...
Understanding this metaphor relies on the concept of 'theatre' being shared among the speakers. If you assume the word for 'stage' exists in your language, then that might indicate that this would be the case. So it depends on the reach of your language. In most cultures that regard themselves as 'civilised' you would probably find that something like theatre and plays exists, so this particular metaphor should be fine.
However, some metaphors can be so specific that even native speakers cannot understand them: He kicked the issue into touch. Unless you know about rugby, you are likely to not have a clue what the speaker is on about.
As you cannot really regulate the content of your language, but only vocabulary and syntax, you cannot stop speakers from using metaphors. It is the responsibility of the speaker to make sure they are understood by their target audience, so avoiding metaphors or culture-specific expressions/assumptions is generally a good idea, but it has to come from the speaker, not the designer. And the speaker will probably realise that very quickly when they fail to make themselves understood.
A conlang/auxlang is only a tool -- you cannot control how people use it.
If an auxlang did not have metaphors, it would soon acquire them if the auxlang in question were used as the world's second language. I doubt that there exists any community of sapient life forms that could not make comparisons between things, beings, and forces that happen to be dissimilar.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.835520 | 2018-09-14T05:01:19 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/767",
"authors": [
"Keith Morrison",
"Krutik Desai",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/808"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
797 | How can I explain the origin of the dual number in my Slavic-influenced East Nordic conlang?
The language I am creating is derived from East Norse and heavily influenced by Slavic. It has a quite complex grammatical structure - for example, it has not only taken over the two additional cases from Russian but also developed several own ones.
One unique aspect is the dual noun form, which is avaliable for describing things that usually occur in complementary pairs. There are dual-only nouns for things that only occur in the described pairs (such as a romantic couple) and dual forms of ordinary nouns in “natural” couple forms (a pair of shoes, the poles of a magnet, my eyes - not two houses or a couple of road signs). Some features are either identic to either singular and plural. A part of the pronouns - most notably all second-person pronouns - are however unique (somewhat similar to the dialect of Bavarian spoken in Munich).
I am wondering how I can “trace back” such a development. According to my knowledge, (correct me if I am blatantly wrong) neither East Norse nor Old East Slavic had the aforementioned features, and just “inventing it by accident somewhere around 1100” would sound like a too handwaved explanation.
Does your question include the new cases in "aforementioned features" or is it solely about the dual?
Solely about dual for the scope of this question, but it would be good if the explanation also fit the cases.
Both Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic had the dual grammatical number. So you could just say that your conlang retained it the whole time. Alternatively you could say that it lost it and then subsequently borrowed it again from one of the Slavic languages which retained it.
If you were after a specific source, Old Church Slavonic could be ideal because it could have a wider influence than other Slavic languages through its religious prestige status. If the religious traditions of the Slavonic Orthodox churches were very highly valued by your conlang's speakers then that would help to explain why the dual number was retained by them even though the other languages of the region had lost it.
I think (correct me if not) the Indo-European dual was not the kind of dual OP has in his language, so loss and borrow is probably be better to explain the change of usage than full retain.
Yes, that’s a good idea. Actually, Medwedia (my country) is Orthodox, so OCS influence would probably happen no matter what.
@Richard How would it be different?
@curiousdannii I think borrowing the dual has a higher probability of entirely changing the usage than retaining it has. Of course, I could be wrong here.
I think taking the dual retained in old Indo-European languages is a good idea. However, if your language is settled in Skandinavia, you could attribute it to contact with an Uralic language.
While the dual was lost in some (e.g. Finnish), dual pronouns are present in Sami languages that go pretty far south and have been in that region for a long time. After that, extending the usage of the dual to nouns would be a far easier natural development.
Additionally, that contact could explain the cases your language developed, as Uralic languages all have complex case systems (depends on exactly which cases you have though).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.835881 | 2018-10-08T19:50:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/797",
"authors": [
"Cecilia",
"MedwedianPresident",
"R. Emery",
"Taylor Gill",
"Wezl",
"WinterSue",
"Yash Padhi",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2618",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2619",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2620",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2622",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2623",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2627",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/566",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/864",
"user246064"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
610 | ConLanging w/ Raspberry Pi?
Is there any coding/program that can be used in raspberry pi for creating a language? Like the ability to create a dictionary with sounds? Or an interactive creative process to start making words and meanings?
As the Raspberry Pi supports both Linux and Windows, probably most of the programs listed in the other question could be run on it.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.836154 | 2018-05-05T12:25:38 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/610",
"authors": [
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
83 | How much of Tolkien's "black language" exists?
What samples or knowledge do we have of the black speech created by Tolkien? Having read a decent amount of the legendarium (Silmarillion, LotR, Hobbit, Children of Hurin, and some of the Lost Tales) the only occurrence I am aware of is the inscription on the one ring.
Am reading through LotR now, and have just finished H, Lost Tales, R, FG, etc. so the memories are still pretty fresh.
The Ring verse is the longest bit of Black Speech, followed by Grishnákh's bit of invective towards Ugluk. Other than that, there's only a couple individual words (like snaga, slave and ghash, fire) to be found.
Tolkien himself wrote as much in a letter (No. 144) to a reader of page-proofs (presumably of LotR): ...[Black Speech] only occurs in the Ring inscription, and a sentence uttered by the Orcs of Barad-Dur and in the word Nazgúl.
A related query on the Black Speech.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for! (It really sounds like I need to get ahold of a copy of Tolkien's letters.)
You're welcome! Yeah, the The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Humphery Carpenter in 1981) is a real treat. I found a copy in the local used book shop a month or so ago. There are several on Ebay now, and you can probably get through Amazon or etc. Looks like it will be very illuminating indeed! Though I was terribly saddened to read his thoughts on the ultimate resolution of the long search of the Ents for the Entwives. :(
Yes, I read that - I'd kind of figured that was something like what happened, and it'd feel wrong for it to have happened otherwise (besides, the old things are "dying out" of Middle Earth) - but the Ents are one of my favorite characters in the books and it was sad to know, and have it stated.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.836218 | 2018-02-07T00:34:43 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/83",
"authors": [
"Aporia",
"DLosc",
"Gleki Arxokuna",
"Theo Campelo",
"auden",
"betseg",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/112",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/248",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/249",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/250",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/263",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/969"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
82 | Are there any grammatical aspects which do not have parallels in natural languages?
In Describing Morphosyntax, Payne uses a number of diagrams for visually explaining aspects and what they say about actions relative to time.
Payne outlines the following, all of which occur in natural languages.
Perfective
[-----] He wrote a letter.
Imperfective
<-----> He writes letters.
Perfect
-----|x He has come from Aqaba.
Pluperfect
---|DC---(now) I had entered a congested zone.
Completive
>-----| She finished working.
Inceptive
[-----> She began working.
Continuative/progressive
>-----> He is writing letters
Punctual
x He sneezed.
Iterative
>-x-x-x-> He is coughing.
Habitual
<-----> He drinks.
Are there other Aspects that do not appear in natural languages which have been invented for conlangs, and could they be represented with a similar visual diagram?
Are Imperfective and Habitual supposed to have the same diagrams? (I'm not familiar with the book referenced in the question.)
I'd like to ask, do (naturally formed) SLs count? These can have many aspects unknown to most natlangs, but I wonder if any aspect isn't naturally formed in spoken languages. EDIT: Also, could answerers explain how they discovered that information?
Lojban has so-called superfective (using za'o), but I don't know if its also used by natlangs or if it is an aspect at all.
Well, y'know, ANADEW and all that, but...
As far as I know, there is no natural language with a grammaticalized antiperfect aspect--i.e., an aspect where the time of the action is after the reference point, rather than before.
Present Perfect: "He has come."
Past Perfect (pluperfect): "He had come."
Future Perfect: "He will have come."
In each case, the event occurs before the reference time defined by the tense. In the case of future perfect, this may or may not be before the present.
An antiperfect flips that around
Present Antiperfect: "He is going to come." / "He is about to come."
(approximately)
Past Antiperfect: "He was going to come." / "He was about to come."
(approximately)
Future Antiperfect: "He will be going to come." / "He will be about to come." (approximately)
The various English paraphrases all have some extraneous additional implications (e.g., "He was going to come" implies that he didn't actually, "about to" implies that the action is nearby) that are not inherent to the antiperfect aspect, if it were grammaticalized. The important thing is that the action occurs after the reference time, but not necessarily after the present. Thus, just like a future perfect action could have occurred in the past, a past antiperfect could occur in the future.
These all seem more like tense+aspects than aspects
Would that not just be a prospective aspect, or perhaps a relative future tense?
@L.L.Blumire Present Perfect is a tense+aspect. Perfect is an aspect, which can be combined with any tense. Similarly, Present Antiperfect is a tense+aspect. Antiperfect itself is still just an aspect, which can be combined with any tense.
@Adarain Yes, prospective is pretty much a synonym for antiperfect, just as retrospective aspect is a synonym for perfect aspect. Nevertheless, I have yet to meet a natlang that actually has a grammaticalized prospective aspect. (Although a little Googling now indicates that maybe Basque has one? Like I said, ANADEW and all that.)
@LoganR.Kearsley The English perfect is not really an aspect, but a different kind of temporal construction. Aspect is about the internal temporal structure of events, which the perfect does not communicate (in English at least). Also what's ANADEW?
More on relative future here. It may be that some languages do grammaticalise it, but it's not perfectly clear for now and depends how you analyse it. Even English may, in phrases like "I will be going to eat."
@curiousdannii The question itself and the wikipedia article on grammatical aspect both disagree with you. You may have a good point that perhaps the perfect shouldn't be analyzed as an aspect, but as long as the question itself lists it as such, similar types of constructions are fair game for answers.
@GypsySpellweaver It's neutral in connotation. Just a reminder that there is no end to interesting stuff you can find in natlangs, and their version of whatever-it-is is probably more complex and less tidy than yours.
I suppose it's mildly positive in naturalistic circles, since if a natlang already does it, you know you're justified in using it.
Past Antiperfect: "He was going to come." - Portuguese - and I suppose several other Romance languages - has this; your sentence tranlates as "Ele viria". But we don't call it "past antiperfect"; we call it "futuro do pretérito" - future of the past. Which raises another issue: the way one classifies the grammatical categories of a language is not neutral, and a foreign linguist can see, and classify, some feature very differently from a native speaker - or even a native linguist.
And so, what a conlanger thinks is a unique feature of his or her language may well exist in a natlang, under a very different label.
@LuísHenrique I have heard "future of the past" used to refer to the subjunctive mood in many cases (since it is often constructed that way). Just to be sure, is the Portuguese example genuinely an instance of a realis-mood aspect, or is it more modal? And if it is genuinely aspectual, is it possible to use that structure in the present and future tenses as well, with the appropriate interpretation?
@LoganR.Kearsley - Portuguese has a quite complete (though in huge part now obsolete) mood-tense system, that distinguishes tense from mood quite well. So we have a complete subjunctive, with three tenses - imperfect past, present, future. They are used in combination with indicative tenses; the subjunctive past is used in conjunction with the indicative "future of the past", to form sentences like "se todo mundo gostasse de amarelo, o tinta azul seria mais barata" - "if everyone liked yellow, blue paint would be cheaper".
This made older grammarians to consider forms like viria and seria a separate mood - the conditional. Somewhere between the thirties and the sixties of the 20th century, such view was abandoned in favour of the classification I described before - the "future of the past". So as we see, such constructions could be considered a matter of aspect - the "antiperfect" you mentioned in your answer - or a matter of mood - the "conditional" of the ancient grammarians' take - or a matter of tense - the "future of the past" of modern grammar.
So, it is complicated - certainly Portuguese/Brazilian grammarians have not considered it a matter of aspect. But I don't see why one could not do it; after all, Portuguese grammar classifies its (non-composite) pasts as "perfect", "imperfect", and "pluperfect", but the latter two could easily be analised as "present of the past" and "past of the past" respectively.
And so, within an artlang that is built with a fitting conculture, the way we analyse those forms could be different from the way the fictional grammarians in that conculture analyse them. The other point is that most languages have very incoherent mood/tense/aspect systems, and conlangs will probably replicate that, either intentionally, for increased realism, or because the conlanger mimicks his own language(s) system, unaware of their contradictions and confusions...
@LoganR.Kearsley What you're calling "antiperfect" is typically referred to as prospective aspect.
@Sparksbet See the preceding discussion. Yes, I am aware of the "prospective" terminology, but as long as everyone prefers "perfect" to "retrospective", I prefer the corresponding "antiperfect". Pick one pair or the other, but keep 'em consistent!
And since I have yet to meet a natlang that actually does have a fully grammaticalized and productive prospective/antiperfect aspect (although apparent Portuguese might be an example with a non-traditional analysis), I don't mind changing the terminology.
This is one of the reasons I (and many others) prefer "retrospective" to "perfect" in the first place (among others). In any case, "antiperfect" is a term I have never seen used by a linguist.
@Sparksbet Well, I can't fault you for that opinion. But, now you have seen it used by a linguist. :)
StackExchange does not, as far as I'm aware, count as part of the body of linguistic literature XD
@Sparksbet True, but that's moving the goalposts! You didn't specify that you wanted to see it in the literature, just that you hadn't seen it used by a linguist.
lol, if you ascribe everything a linguist does in their free-time as done "by a linguist," I guess, you're right ;P
This is three years late, but I believe that the Latin future periphrastic (future active participle + esse 'to be') maps onto this pretty exactly. It also makes me think of the alternative imperfect subjunctive forms of esse: these would usually go essem, esses, esset, etc., but the forms forem, fores, foret, etc. also exist with exclusive reference to future-in-the-past.
Morotuncanian has some verbal aspects that I rather doubt appear in natural languages of the primary world.
Sedative and Excitative verbal aspects. The former aspect expresses the nature of the action, through time, as calming and steady in nature. The latter aspect expresses the nature of the action, through time, as unsteady or agitated in nature, but not to the point of being considered iterative or incessant.
bollahcctuerayas er som huomuram le ciwamauroyas : aa : bollahccendayas hasto curelloram le ollaloyas.
Youth fidgets whilst age naps.
Or, literally, "Are sitting agitatedly with the earth the younglings while are sitting calmly, majestically towards chair the elders."
Which parts of that sentence are the sedative/excitative markers? And how do they relate to the internal temporal structure of the verb?
-tuer- is the agitative marker, -end- is the sedative marker. bor- (here elided) is the gnomic / universal present tense marker. These are among the stative aspects (like incessant vs approximative aspects) and thus describe the nature of the action itself rather than its temporal domain.
Why do you think these should be considered aspects rather than manner adverbs?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.836422 | 2018-02-07T00:25:17 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/82",
"authors": [
"Adrian Seni",
"Anonym",
"Brythan",
"Darlene EIsenberg pI",
"Duncan",
"Fred Qian",
"Ilmari Karonen",
"Isaac",
"L. L. Blumire",
"Logan R. Kearsley",
"Luís Henrique",
"MicroservicesOnDDD",
"Mohammed Sherif KK",
"Sascha Baer",
"Sparksbet",
"ThePopMachine",
"User that hates AI",
"Wilko",
"Xilexio",
"ancalagon6913",
"curiousdannii",
"dw0391",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/109",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1162",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1231",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1373",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1486",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/156",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/177",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/243",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/244",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/245",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/258",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3605",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/417",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/481",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/550",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/552",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/553",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/554",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/84",
"lee"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
399 | Consider an isolated, close-knit community; which characteristics is their language likely to have?
For the sake of concreteness, let's say my low-tech conculture is living in a few villages on a smallish island in the middle of the ocean (Pitcairn Islands comes to mind).
Basically, this would mean that no adult ever has to learn their language, and that everyone knows everyone else to some extent.
Can one make predictions as to how the language would more likely look? Such as:
Would it have a "large" phoneme inventory?
Would it tend to be heavily inflected or analytical?
Would there be a large number of irregular inflections?
Would there be a well-developed system of expressing consanguinity?
Lastly, would the size of the settlement(s) matter much? The difference between a single village or a dozen in regular contact, say.
Derek Bickerton and John McWhorter both have studied pidgins and creoles. A general observation is that communities that have to deal with other communities who don't speak their language, but still have to communicate resort to using pidgins, creoles which are simplified, grammatically speaking. McWhorter says English lost it's complex grammar when Vikings arrived and couldn't deal with the complexity.
On the other hand, island communities that don't have to deal with other people can tolerate arbitrarily complex grammar since children have a spectacular skill for acquiring their first language as compared to adults. So as an isolated language accumulates difficulties, there is no pressure to make them go away, they just get added to the pile of obligatory complexities.
Another feature of Island speakers in specific is they are more likely to use a "towards the shore/away from the shore" as a grammatical marker, ref "When "North" Isn't Actually North: Geocentric Direction Systems"
EDIT:
Large phoneme inventory. Chinese, a lingua franca has a small inventory and a small inventory of syllables. Rotokas has a small phonetic inventory. Someone would have to graph this to see if there is a weak relationship.
Inflections (really, any morphology), irregular forms (lexicalizations), culture-specific complexities-- I'd predict more of all of these for an isolated language. Proving it to satisfy skeptics would take a few academic papers. English's "2nd cousin twice removed" system, is complicated, but English is a lingua franca. Hard to say beyond generalities.
+1 for the link to Leah Velleman's blog post
There are a lot of hypotheses and conjectures floating around the linguistic community regarding typological features (like phoneme inventories, inflecting or isolating type etc.) and size of the speech community.
However, almost none of these conjectures is currently backed up by real world data (and, on the other side, real world data are often unavailable to evaluate such conjectures).
The linguist David Nettle argues that language evolution is faster in small speech communities, but this is also not a generally accepted point of view.
And last, but not least: Never underestimate the influence of diachronics. Many linguistic features correlate very well with either the language family or with arealic features. So the starting language will have a long time influence on the language of the isolated group.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about languages spoken by a small community in isolated islands are the Polynesian languages, like Maori, Hawai'i and Rapa Nui. They have simple phonetic inventories and little to no inflexion, but have a huge array of particles that denote aspect, mood, tense, emotion, etc.
However, at the same time we can look at Papua New Guinea, where there are hundreds of languages spoken by isolated communities. PNG is a bit "problematic", though, because there are so many types of languages there, from analytical to polysynthetic, from small to very large phonemic inventories. It's kind of a linguistic hotspot, really.
My advice for you is to check out Polynesian languages but also take a look at some PNG cultures. They can offer some insight you won't get anywhere else.
Good luck.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.837174 | 2018-03-02T18:18:27 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/399",
"authors": [
"Arbiter Elegantiae",
"K Ami K Ami ",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sophia Shira",
"Tony",
"Uzair Khan",
"dfgdfg gfdgdfg",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1303",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1313",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1315",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1316",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1401",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"jgc"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
221 | What is an overview of sound changes?
One of my works-in-progress is a language called Proto-Oreadin. As the name suggests, it is a proto-language, which eventually I am hoping to expand into a family of languages. Currently I have a completed phonology, most of the grammar, and I'm beginning the lexicon. My plan to create these daughter languages is by using the zompist.com sound change applier app to evolve the words of my language into multiple daughter languages, and then apply semantic shifts, borrowings, and other pieces of worldbuilding context—but that's a separate issue.
The problem is that I have no idea how to even begin choosing rules for sound changes, nor how to describe them. I've looked at examples of natural languages, but I'm not sure what's going on with the notation, nor have I been able to identify any patterns that will help me create realistic sound changes for my languages.
How are sound changes notated?
What are the general categories of sound changes?
I don't see how this can be made less broad. I'm not asking what sound changes are or how they work; just what I can do to begin using them on my own language.
@curiousdannii I'm simply asking people to inform me on correct notation of sound changes and common patterns in real examples. That doesn't seem too broad to me. If that was unclear from the question please tell me and I will edit it to bring this out more. I think both answers have done a good job answering my question without leaving too much out.
Hope this edit helps :)
Two different questions only mildly related = too broad.
David Salo's book A Gateway to Sindarin contains a reconstructed sequence of 248 changes from proto-Eldarin to late Sindarin, which might be useful as a collection of examples of such shifts as well as illustrating notation.
To answer part a), the basic syntax of the notation goes like this:
[before] > [after] / [context]
The part after the slash gives the situations in which the sound changes occur. For example, the hypothetical spirantization of [b] to [v] intervocalically could be notated as follows:
b > v / V__V
This rule indicates that b becomes v when surrounded by a vowel (V) on each side. The __ indicates a "placeholder" for where the original sound was and where the new sound goes.
Some other common notations are # for word boundaries and [+feature] or [-feature] to indicate the presence or lack of a certain feature respectively. For example, final-obstruent devoicing in e.g. Russian could be
[+stop][+voiced] > [-voiced] / __#
where the __# means that the stop in question (__) is at the end of a word (#).
As for b), the best way to get an idea for what kinds of things generally happen in languages is honestly probably just by reading about lots of different languages and seeing what tends to happen. Some of the most common general processes are:
Lenition, probably one of the most common sound changes, in which a "softer" sound becomes a "louder" sound. (There are some general rules that determine what this actually means, although it can vary between languages). A few examples are intervocalic flapping in many English dialects (/bɛtər/ → [bɛɾɚ]) and the pronunciation of /b, d, g/ as fricatives or approximants, roughly [β, ð, ɣ], in most contexts in Spanish.
Assimilation is another frequent sound change. This occurs when features of a given phoneme are influenced by the phonemes around it. For example, in English and Spanish, /n/ becomes [m] before bilabials and [ŋ] before velars (e.g. <rainbow> [ɹ̠ʷejmbow], <concordar> [koŋkoɾðaɾ]).
Similar ideas are umlaut and vowel harmony, in which vowels change depending on other vowels in the word. Remnants of Germanic umlaut can be seen in English, e.g. foot/feet, and vowel harmony is prominent in e.g. Turkish, where all of the vowels in a word have to harmonize (for the most part) so that affixes have several different forms (for example, the genitive suffix is [in] after front unrounded vowels, [ɯn] after back unrounded vowels, [yn] after front rounded vowels, and [un] after back rounded vowels).
While there are general patterns, it's also important to note that some sound changes seem completely illogical and random, and just... sort of happen. The most infamous examples are the ruki rule, where [s] became [ʃ] but only after [r, w, k, j] (?), and strangest of all, Proto-Indo-European *dw to Armenian erk (???). So you really have a lot of room for creativity here, while still being able to be naturalistic.
Just as a comment, umlaut and vowel harmony are really just subsets of assimilation.
*dw to erk was not just one change, of course. I think I've seen a reconstruction of the sequence of shifts, most of them not out of the ordinary. (Wish I knew where I'd seen it!)
@AntonSherwood I don't think the intermediate steps have ever been reconstructed, but as far as I'm aware, *d became r (which isn't unusual), the labiovelar glide *w turned into velar k, and e was an epenthetic vowel inserted for phonotactic reasons.
@AntonSherwood this article has one such proposal: https://www.academia.edu/6375253/Feature_metathesis_and_the_change_of_PIE_dw_to_Classical_Armenian_rk_Diachronica_2013_
I guess this forum really isn't set up for the kind of intense assistance & interaction you really need. Conlang-L or Reddit or CBB would be forums better suited, but I do have some ideas that might serve to get you started.
Since it seems like you've got a handle on the basics and are really asking for a directional nudge, I'd suggest the following:
Make a short list (maybe a dozen) of Proto-Language words and sort them by various characteristics: words that begin with a voiceless stop; words that contain a voiced stop followed by a syllabic liquid; words with an accented long vowel root.
Pronounce one of the words over and over and try "permutations in the phonetic neighbourhood" like CWADRUT CWADRUT CHWADRUT CHWADHRUT CHWAAHRUTH HWAARRUS HWAARUH HAWARƏH HAWWAR
Make a note of how certain sounds are "eroded" or, I guess more properly, how they evolve. [kw] relaxes into [hw]; [dr] > [ðr] > [r]; as the final syllable weakens, the accent shifts towards the word head; as the accent shifts towards the word head, medial long vowels become shortened.
Sit back in astoundment how you've just discovered several sound change rules!
If you don't like that progression, try another one.
Kind of a simplistic exercise, but it's a good method to start. Eventually, other rules you discover are going to intersect and sometimes abrogate another law. Sometimes two parallel dialects run along slightly different tracks.
Sometimes dialects are "behind the times" when compared to others, and this will launch you into the wonder world of diachronics. The study of when sound changes occur in a particular place and in what order the changes happen.
And of course, you're considering a whole family tree, so you're going to need to do this exercise multiple times. You might find that two or three daughter lineages kind of align in certain ways. For example, *cwadrut yields hawar in language A and qewarro in language B and kawrs in language C but shwuntz in language D and shhwandaras in language E.
As you examine other words, you notice that ancestral [k-] remains [k] or becomes [h] (both palatal sounds) in several languages, all of which are at the eastern end of this proto language's continuum; while most of the languages where ancestral [k-] has become [ʃ] are all in the west. A nice geographic split (that may or may not actually mean much), much like that which exists within Indo-European languages.
Stolen from this answer by sumelic on linguistics: There is searchable version of the Index Diachronica that allows to search for some sounds and explore postulated and observed changes of that sound. The notation used is the same as in @Doorknob's answer above.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.837627 | 2018-02-09T02:02:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/221",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"CHEESE",
"Doorknob",
"Ed. Brill",
"Gallifreyan",
"Ichrak Mansour",
"Jaliya Chirantha",
"Jan",
"Pat Myron",
"Samake",
"Sascha Baer",
"Trikaldarshiii",
"Tristan",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/100",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/116",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2711",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/696",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/697",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/698",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/704",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/705",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/722",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/723",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/724",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/79",
"Óscar Andreu"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
79 | Languages where the part of speech of a root is "fixed"?
By way of introduction, this question is about a quirk of Esperanto, but there is a general conlang question at the end, I promise.
In Esperanto, every root has a natural grammatical part of speech, much like how nouns have a grammatical "gender" (or noun category) in many other languages.
For example, "ŝoveli" means "to shovel". It is naturally a verb. The same root with a noun ending, "ŝovelo", does not mean "a shovel". Rather, it is the noun-of-the-verb, that is, it refers to the act of shovelling. To refer to a shovel, you have to say that it's the tool of the act of shovelling, that is, "ŝovelilo".
Similarly, "humana" means "humane". It is naturally an adjective. The same root with a noun ending, "humano", does not mean "human", it is the noun-of-the-adjective, that is, "humaneness".
This was an interesting design choice, and one that's puzzled me. For an Esperanto speaker, this is something you have to learn about every root, like noun classes in many IE languages.
Are there any analogues to this in natural languages, or is this a device that has been used in other conlangs?
If you are referring to a noun behind an adjective/adverb, I would say that in Italian normally there is always a substantive behind them that shares the same root (e.g. bello/bellezza, beauty/beautiful). The substantive could be collective/abstract, but still is a substantive. (Notice also that bello is used as adjective and substantive, so I can say il bello dell'aula to mean the most beautiful person of the classroom (which could also be sarcastic).
As for natural grammatical part of speech, I would say that grammatical parts of speech aren't natural, but concepts introduced from grammar when studying languages and their similarities.
That's a very good point.
I'd rather say it is a quirk of English that roots and even complete words don't have an assigned part of speech and that you can verb a noun and noun a verb without applying any derivational morphology. In inflecting or agglutinating languages part of speech is pretty overt by the affixes a word carries and changing the part of speech can only be done by derivation. It is also quite normal that a root is either verbal or nominal.
For the case of Esperanto, see also this question in [esperanto.se]: https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/questions/2785/do-esperanto-lexemes-have-base-types-or-are-there-neutral-roots
This is pretty common in natural languages. Think about English words -- most of them have an inherent part of speech and require derivational affixes to change that. "Anger" is inherently a noun and requires "-y" to become an adjective, whereas "excite" is inherently a verb and requires "-ment" to become a noun or "-ed" or "-ing" to become an adjective. This sort of thing is incredibly normal in natlangs -- the reason it seems a bit abnormal in Esperanto is that Esperanto derivation is far more productive than even derivation-heavy natlangs, leading to irregularities in these sorts of changes being much more noticeable.
Also, as an aside, because "human-" is inherently adjectival, you would not say "humano" to mean "humane-ness", but "humaneco" (source). Adding the "-eco" suffix, meaning "the quality of" or something to that effect, is necessary for adjectival Esperanto roots. This is the very reason why Esperanto roots are said to have inherent part of speech, and it's a large part of why the "-eco" suffix exists in the first place.
Esperanto roots principally can basically form nouns/adjectives/adverbs and adverbs (and are not words themselves):
Endings:
-o noun
-a adjective
-e adverb
-i verb, infinitive
Roots and derived words:
naci- "nation" - 'noun' root
nacio = nation
nacia = national
nacie = nationally
naciigi = nationalize, suffix -ig' = make ~
pens- "thought" - 'verbal' root
penso = thought
pensema = thoughtful, suffix -em' = inclined to ~
pensi = think
pensado = thinking (the ~, noun), suffix -ad' = act of (repeated) ~ing
hom- "human men/women" - 'noun' root
homo = human being
homa vivo = human life
homaro = humanity, -ar' = collection, the collection of humans
human- = humane - 'adjective'
humanisto = humanist, -ist'
humaneco = humanism, the quality of being humane, -ec' = ~ity
humanismo = humanism, the philosophical movement
So actually the endings do not always guarantee a meaningful word, and the same
for suffixes. Suffixes come into play. The hard thing is to know whether the root
refers to a noun/adjective/verb. And for a verb whether it is transitive or intransitive.
Weird in Esperanto is that the root itself is not used; say as noun/adjective/verb. It consistently requires an ending, despite the root often having an identifiable category. National languages have the same usage problems (roots not being flexed to every category),
but do not have this redundancy of endings. For that they have ad-hoc pseudo-suffixes like -al and -ive.
One might argue that Chinese and English often do not make a distinction between parts of speech. The English success can either be noun or verb.
However Esperanto was made similar to the European languages but clear.
Note for a conlang one cannot simply drop then noun ending and assume every root to be a noun. You would then have to determine whether always a noun is present.
The exceptions to non-standalone roots are prepositions, numbers and such.
kun = with, in company of; a word, "preposition"
kuna = common, communal
kune = together
kuniĝi = come together, -iĝ' = become
tri = three, a word
trio = trio, group of three
tria = third
trie = thirdly
trioblo = threefold, -obl' = multiple
triono = a third 1/3, -on' = fraction
triope = by three, in threes, -op' = group of ~
Sorry if this answer is a bit Esperanto heavy, but a conlang might benefit from this nice system. How about just -a for nouns: scola, biblioteca, bulgaria?
Not using the root itself isn't that weird: in essence, it's similar to a Semitic root system where the root itself isn't used (and usually isn't even pronounceable) and requires additional vowels and consonants in order to determine its parts of speech and defintiion. The standard example is the root K-T-B, which means the concept of writing. Kitab (book), naktub (we write), maktabat (library/bookshop), and so on.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.838239 | 2018-02-06T23:54:32 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/79",
"authors": [
"Andrew",
"Duncan",
"Keith Morrison",
"Pseudonym",
"Sachith Nanayakkara",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"avpaderno",
"clem steredenn",
"emont01",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/130",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/216",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/217",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/247",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/92",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/924"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
140 | Which constructed language has the largest body of literature?
Which is the constructed language which has the largest body of literature, including both works that have been originally created in that language as well as works written in natural languages which have been translated afterwards?
According to magazine author Arika Okrent in "Discouraging Words" from Failure Magazine (July 21, 2009), it's Esperanto. She writes,
What is the most widely used invented language?
Definitely Esperanto, which is ironic because when you say “Esperanto,” most people say, “Didn’t that die out in the 1920s?” Or, “Esperanto? That failed utopian project?” But in terms of invented languages, it’s the most outlandishly successful invented language ever. It has thousands of speakers—even native speakers—and that’s a major accomplishment as compared to the 900 or so other languages that have no speakers.
That's not hard to believe either. According to Esperanto.net,
Professor Sidney S. Culbert of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, has done the most comprehensive survey on language use ever attempted. He has conducted interviews in dozens of countries around the world and tested for "professional proficiency", i.e. much more than just "hello, please, goodbye".
Based on this survey, Prof. Culbert concluded that Esperanto has about two million speakers worldwide.
Obviously, this doesn't quite answer your question, since it was specifically about published literature. However, according to this answer on the Esperanto stack, there are probably around 200 novels that were originally published in Esperanto, along with 400 volumes of short stories - and that's in the fiction category only. There's a list of Esperanto libraries on wikapedia, some of which have thousands of works in them.
Very likely Esperanto.
If you don't consider Sanskrit and Hebrew to be conlangs, your best bet would be Esperanto literature, with over fifty books over at Project Gutenberg alone.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.838956 | 2018-02-07T20:29:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/140",
"authors": [
"CalvT",
"EKons",
"Ed Carreon",
"Federico",
"Lorentzeus",
"Taekwondavide",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/425",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/426",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/427",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/428",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/429",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/482"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
50 | How to say right and left in Toki Pona?
As we know, Toki Pona is a quite minimal language and it sometimes not easy to come up with a word we use everyday in English. The problem is that I cannot think of a non-culture-specific and easily understandable way of saying right and left.
How to say right (and left) in Toki Pona as those words are not a part of the official dictionary?
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a translation request, which I would like to consider off-scope
@Adarain Should this question be closed as well then? https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/12/what-is-lightness-in-the-black-speech
@Adarain Also this: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/29/how-would-you-say-good-morning-or-hello-politely-in-klingon
Voting to leave open as this isn't a standard word in the toki pona dictionary.
@Zyerah It depends on what you mean by general, but I'd say that it is a general question of how one would say "left/right" side in a Toki Pona conversation so that the meaning is obvious to all the participants.
Relevant meta post: https://conlang.meta.stackexchange.com/q/30/35. We haven't decided yet that these questions are off-topic; I don't think that we really have a case for closing this.
If you could provide a reason why this is particularily interesting or difficult translation that would be a fine question, but I don't like it at all as it stands. It would appear that toki-pona runs into similar problems with almost any word.
One popular proposal that comes up in a lot of discussions on this topic is to base it on the direction of the official writing system (i.e. Latin characters). Thus "poki open" for left, and "poki pini" for right. However, there is still no real consensus on how to say "right" and "left", so these expressions might not be understood by everyone.
I have to vote for poka open for left, & poka pini for right. They don't cause any more problem than anything else. poka wawa is a bad idea right-handed people would assume that meant right, but that makes it confusing for left-handed people. Because the sun rises (open) in the East & sets (pini) in the West, we could make "poka suno" East & "poka pimeja" West. "poka kon" could be North, & "poka ma" could be South.
@ben poka suno and poka pimeja would generally not be understood by people to mean left and right. their literal translations are "a lit/sun hand" and "a black hand". as it stands, poka pona for right hand and poka ike for left are two fairly common phrases already in use, based on a lot of romance languages using words similar to bad and good for left and right
@Zackbuildit777 That's not what ben is saying. They're saying poka suno/pimeja should be used for east/west, not left/right
Building on the answer by thrig: one could say poka pilin (side with a heart) for the left side and poka pilin ala for the right side.
It should be rather neutral and understandable as it is based on biology facts instead of culture-specific ideas.
What about those with the heart on the other side?
@Mithrandir The article says that people usually don't expect the heart to be on the other side. Good catch, though.
poka pilin ala would parse as (poka pilin) ala, or zero/not feeling hand. you would either need a pi particle to regroup it (as in poka pi pilin ala) or you would use a different word. also, pilin as an adjective almost always means means "feeling _" or "emotion of _", not heart. instead you should use the word olin, which in pu can mean either love or it can mean heart.
People have come up with quite a few extra words some of which are used to some extent on discord. 'soto' is left & teje is right. several of the words are just joke words but some like 'linluwi' - netwowrk/internet (len), & lanpan -take/grab (kama jo) are useful.
soto, teje, and linluwi are all pretty rare words, but lanpan is somewhat common.
poka pi lawa musi (The side with the artistic brain) poka pi lawa nanpa (The side with the reasoning brain. Might work.
If only it were true.
left sinister in latin right dexter so pona
luka and Pali luka for right and ike Luka
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.839158 | 2018-02-06T22:16:40 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/50",
"authors": [
"Arka Ghosh",
"Carmeister",
"HDE 226868",
"Mateusz Piotrowski",
"Mithical",
"No Name",
"Primo Captial Real Estate LLC",
"QB kyu",
"Sascha Baer",
"Splendge",
"Stefan Hein",
"Theodore",
"Toby Bartels",
"Tsundoku",
"Zackbuildit777",
"ben",
"caconyrn",
"hippietrail",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/110",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1294",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/149",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/150",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/151",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/184",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/185",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/282",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/32",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/327",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/330",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3397",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/35",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4339",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4365",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5731",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/759",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/85",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/972",
"iro",
"zefciu"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
56 | Has any conlang ever replaced the use of a pidgin?
I've read that being a simple, yet more expressive, substitute for a pidgin language is one of the possible applications of Toki Pona.
In situations where people from multiple languages come together they need to be able to communicate with each other. Pidgins are introduced or developed in these situations, but there is a limited scope to what can be said in pidgins. Over time, pidgins creolise into full natural languages. I would like to know if a language like Toki Pona (or a similarly minimal conlang) has ever successfully replaced the use of a pidgin to allow more to be said, rather than letting the pidgin creolise naturally.
@curiousdannii They don't count from what I understand as they are not conlangs and they are (or were at their beginning) less expressive than Toki Pona would be. I'm asking if conlangs are used to replace pidgins in order to give a certain group better means to communicate.
@curiousdannii Haven't I already said that in the question? I'm asking about languages replacing a pidgin due to its bad expressiveness. It doesn't make sense to replace a pidgin with another pidgin so my question considers pidgins off-topic in a way. On the other hand, you are clearly trying to explain something to me. May I ask you to clarify your doubts about the scope of this question again? :) Thank you!
It's just that the question asks if any minimal languages have ever solved real world problems. And the answer is that every pidgin has done so, the problem of not being able to communicate. You really should ask whether any minimal conlang was used to surpass the inadequacies of pidgins by replacing the community's use of pidgin, rather than the natural creolisation of the pidgin.
@curiousdannii You are right. Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me. I'll update the question in a minute!
I submitted an edit, hope it helps. Feel free to change it further!
@curiousdannii It sounds much better now. Thanks!
Basic English is minimal in that it limits the number of words in the language (though not as extremely as Toki Pona). It was intended to be an international auxiliary language (although it never really caught on).
The language was used in 1945 in order to quickly teach Chinese sailors to understand naval orders. This was reported at the time in a Time magazine article (paywall beyond first two paragraphs; the reference to the article comes from Wikipedia).
This answer was written to a previous version of the question
It is still fine though.
Yep. How reconstructed/engineered modern Hebrew replaced Yiddish and Judesmo. Both can be considered as pidgins, from German and from Spanish, with lithurgic Hebrew vocab. And modern Hebrew is definitely a conlang.
Yiddish is certainly not a Pidgin. It is a High German language (making it closely related to Standard German and southern German dialects) which has been influenced by various other languages, but shows none of the characteristics of a pidgin (such as low expressiveness, non-rigid grammar or a low vocabulary count). It is a language like any other and calling it a pidgin is not only inaccurate but insulting. (I am not familiar with Judesmo but I assume the situation will be similar, a glance at Wikipedia confirms this). And that “definitely” is a strong statement too, tho I won’t dispute it.
@Adarain what exactly makes it insulting? pidgin is just a way some languages are coming into existence. Even if Yiddish is not a pidgin (with what I tend to agree with) - claiming that it is is not insulting at all. I might be wrong, it might be right, but it's not insulting.
It's not like pidgin is an indicator of stupidity or whatever.
@shabunc Pidgins, pretty much by definition, are not full languages. They’re more ad-hoc, have less vocabular and less established rules than languages. Saying Yiddish is a pidgin essentially means you believe it satisfies this criteria, which is a value judgement comparable to e.g. claiming “chinese doesn’t have grammar”.
@Adarain when pidgin has started to be used and did not died out it's pretty quickly evolves. Claiming that something has creole/pidgin origin is claiming that something has creole/pidgin origin, no less, no more. There's a Middle English Creole hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis - again, it might be wrong, it might be right, it doesn't offend and shouldn't offend English speakers.
@shabunc Stating that something originated as a pidgin is very different from stating it is one. The former is, indeed, a perfectly reasonable claim to make. The latter is not, in this case.
@Adarain I also recommend this article - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0192-4
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.839517 | 2018-02-06T22:34:24 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/56",
"authors": [
"Draconis",
"Ethan Cannoy",
"JMP",
"Janos",
"Kaz Wesley",
"Mateusz Piotrowski",
"Maya",
"Sascha Baer",
"b a",
"christianbundy",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/161",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/162",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/163",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/214",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/268",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/269",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/271",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/58",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/593",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/85",
"jokour",
"shabunc"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
66 | Is there a practical lower limit to the number of morphemes required in a language?
Many conlangers have tried (and occasionally succeeded in) creating oligomorphemic¹ languages. What are the most minimalistic successful attempts?
From this, can we extrapolate a lower bound?
¹also called oligosynthetic, a bit of a misnomer in my opinion
Outside of Toki Pona, there haven't been any "majorly" successful attempts at making an oligomorphemic language — as far as I know. While derivational and inflectional morphology could be done away with (and its information load transferred to syntax I guess), the question is how many semantic morphemes is too few before a language becomes incomprehensibly vague.
I'm guessing the theoretical lowest lower limit is the set of 63 semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see also Goddard's Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 2010). Wierzbicka and Goddard propose that you could theoretically explain almost all necessary concepts by building up from this set of primes, and lacking ways to express some of them will leave you incapable of expressing at least a subset of all possible topics.
I would consider Vahn to be a successful attempt in that it has been successfully used both for complex translation challenges and also has been taught to another person and used for extensive personal communication. Source: L. L. Blumire, personal communciation
Vahn has 33 clearly non further segmentable components, 36 usually components that are not usually segmented in analysis. Whether or not you wish to count this as a lower bound of morphemic content, or simply on mnemonic content, is a large matter of debate when it comes to the whole contept of Oligomorphemic languages.
NSM now has 63 primes. The very first version of Wierzbicka's thinking had 14 (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=SF-9zsbBxWIC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=lingua+mentalis+number+of+primes&source=bl&ots=xWV6QHS4mj&sig=0Rv6cc1kKtQ8EfuJPNkO5X3LCck&hl=el&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi0vaSdp__ZAhVoiFQKHXVJBCkQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=lingua%20mentalis%20number%20of%20primes&f=false), and she's been gradually expanding it ever since. Note though that a design criterion for NSM is conversational usability (applied generously), rather than mere semantic primitiveness.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.839992 | 2018-02-06T23:21:07 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/66",
"authors": [
"Benjamin",
"L. L. Blumire",
"McDonnough",
"Nick Nicholas",
"Sascha Baer",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/109",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/189",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/190",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/191",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/212",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/261",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/435",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"inconveniently_nonexempt_bee",
"neelsg",
"waxwing"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
690 | What are sounds that I have to include in my phonology for it to be naturalistic?
Additionally, are there any such things as hierarchies, where if I want to include one sound, I should also include another?
No, even among natlangs there are no true universal sounds. The closest would a low /a/ type vowel, which 98%+ of natlangs do have, but not all. Note that this is in terms of phonemes, not allophones. Other very common phones include the stops [p/b], [t/d], and [k/g], as well as one or more nasals.
When creating a conlang, a minimum of two to three vowel phonemes or three consonant phonemes (with more consonants if there are few vowels and vice versa) would be expected for a naturalistic phonology. The natlangs with the smallest phoneme inventories have on the order of around ten to twelve phonemes, however analyses of such languages are usually controversial. Such languages also often have tone or phonemic length, which does make it harder to compare languages and harder to come to consensus on what should count as 'smallest'.
Abkhaz has only two vowels, but it makes up for it with a big consonant inventory. Piraha can be analyzed as having as few as 10 vowels and consonants. Since Wikipedia seems to contradict you on those two points, the answer might be better if you added a citation for what you wrote.
@ba Thanks for the pointer on Abkhaz. I did an edit that I think accounts for the claims about Piraha.
In general, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, and /a/ are phonemes found in almost all natlangs (but certainly not all).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.840192 | 2018-07-14T18:19:29 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/690",
"authors": [
"b a",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2636",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/58",
"ittykitty"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
329 | What is the difference between tense and aspect?
Many conlangs contain tense, some contain aspect as well or instead, and much of the recommended reading for conlangers assumes that you know what tense and aspect are and what the difference between them is. What actually is the difference, and how would a word or morpheme be classified as a marker of one or the other?
When discussing tense, aspect, and mood, it's important to distinguish a given language's grammatical markers from the abstract concepts being described. Thus, linguists use the words temporal reference and aspectual reference to describe the abstract ideas being described, while the words tense and aspect are reserved for when such reference is marked grammatically.
The simplified explanation for tense and aspect usually given is that tense describes when an event occurs and aspect describes the internal temporal structure of an event. However, this doesn't give a ton of easy answers to "is this grammatical form marking tense, aspect, or both?" Formal semanticists actually have a relatively simple framework for how temporal reference and aspectual reference are defined, the basic concepts of which can be helpful when designing your conlang's own tense/aspect system.
The Neo-Reichenbachian Model
Imagine a timeline:
Earlier Later
<-------------------------------------------->
Now, imagine there are two spans on that timeline (the fact that they're spans is important -- nothing is truly instantaneous). The time when you make an utterance is called the utterance time (or UT), and the time that you're talking about is called the topic time (or TT).
Temporal reference describes the relationship between the TT and UT. Past temporal reference is when the TT precedes the UT; future temporal reference when the TT follows the UT; and present temporal reference when they overlap.
Past:
<-------------------------------------------->
|--TT--| |--UT--|
Future:
<-------------------------------------------->
|--UT--| |--TT--|
Present:
|--UT--|
<-------------------------------------------->
|-------TT-------|
This seems pretty intuitive -- if the section of the timeline you're talking about precedes the time you make the utterance, you'll use the past tense; if it follows it, you'll use the future; and if they overlap, you'll use the present. Simple, right?
But what of aspect? Well, aspectual reference isn't as transparent at that. To describe aspectual reference, we'll need to pick out a third span that timeline -- the time when the event being described actually happened. We'll call this the eventuality time (or ET).
"But wait!" you might object. "Isn't that the same as the topic time? If I'm describing something that happened, surely the time I was talking about is the same as the time that it happened." However, there is a difference, and it's exactly this difference that gives rise to aspectual reference. Consider the English past perfect in a sentence like the following:
Yesterday he had gone to the store.
The English past tense includes past temporal reference, and we've established that this means that the topic time is before the utterance time -- something which is explicitly confirmed by the temporal adverb "yesterday" giving us a more specific topic time. But when does the him-going-to-the-store happen? Probably not yesterday, right? Well, this is because perfect† aspectual reference is when the eventuality time precedes the topic time -- aspectual reference describes the relationship between the eventuality time and the topic time. It for this reason that the past perfect is used by English speakers for the past-in-past.
Past Perfect:
<-------------------------------------------->
|--ET--| |--TT--| |--UT--|
But you can also have the present perfect, right? Well, let's combine our descriptions of the present tense and the perfect aspect and see what we come up with.
Present Perfect:
|--UT--|
<-------------------------------------------->
|--ET--| |-------TT-------|
Here, the topic time and utterance time overlap, which is why you can't say something like "Yesterday he has gone to the store." However, the eventuality time precedes the topic time, so you're describing an event that happened in the past in relation to the present. And indeed, this is how we see the present perfect used in English.
This is far from the most interesting thing aspectual reference can do, however. Let's discuss the popular aspectual references, perfective and imperfect. For those who don't know, perfective and perfect are two different things. Perfective is often described as simply viewing an event as a point on a timeline, and imperfect as viewing it as a span. How do we define this as a relationship between eventuality time and topic time?
Well, a simple way people do it (ignoring a few other related thorny semantic problems that few here will care about) is by defining the perfective as when the eventuality time is contained within the topic time and the imperfect as when the topic time is contained within the eventuality time.
Past Perfective:
|--ET--|
<-------------------------------------------->
|-------TT-------| |--UT--|
Past Imperfect:
|--TT--|
<-------------------------------------------->
|-------ET-------| |--UT--|
This results, at least formally, in the same sort of perspective shift we try to intuitively describe as changing the event from a "point" to a "span".
Note that tense and aspect vary between languages a lot, and even related languages can't be counted upon to have the same semantics here. After all, the French passé composé, while very similar in form to the English present perfect, does not share the same semantics (it's more of a perfective). Additionally, while a given language's system of tense and aspect will often combine a tense and an aspect in a certain inflection (such as the perfective past tenses in many European languages), this doesn't mean the two are wed cross-linguistically.
In fact, I hope this answer has given some conlangers the tools to try and invent their own tenses, aspects, or combinations of the two that they haven't themselves encountered cross-linguistically. Be creative!
In short:
Temporal reference is the relationship between the utterance time (when you say something) and the topic time (the time relevant to the discussion at hand).
Aspectual reference is the relationship between the topic time (see above) and the eventuality time (the time when the event being described actually occured).
Tense is the grammaticalization of temporal reference.
Aspect is the grammaticalization of aspectual reference.
Things called "tenses" in natural languages (as well as in conlangs, to be honest) are often conflations of tense and aspect (and sometimes even mood, but we're not here to talk about that).
†When I refer to perfect aspectual reference, I'm actually more specifically describing what is known in semantics as the existential perfect. Perfect forms in English and many other languages include other types of perfect aspectual reference (universal, resultive, etc.) that differ subtly in their semantics, and other aspectual and temporal baggage as well; this is, however, probably not particularly interesting or relevant to most people here at this moment.
@Jan I will gladly edit to make it more clear if possible, but in order to do so I need to know what exactly lost you.
That would be a good idea! I'll add them when I get the chance
@Jan Tense is the relationship between TT and UT, aspect is the relationship between TT and ET. Present perfect in English is present tense (which is why you can't add "yesterday", as that would put the topic time in the past -- "I had spoken to her yesterday" is just as wrong to me), but perfect/retrospective aspect, which means that TT and UT overlap and ET precedes TT. Whereas with "I had spoken to her yesterday", the TT precedes UT (hence the past tense) and the ET precedes the TT still further. I will try to think of ways to edit the post to make this clearer.
@Jan it's worth noting that this is very dependant on the language -- natlang perfect aspect is p much always more complicated than simple retrospective aspectual reference as I've described here -- and often crosslinguistically but especially in European languages, the perfect forms gradually expanding in scope to describe situations like that you described (and often eventually replacing the perfective forms), so you're not too far off. It's just that this isn't the case for English (at least not to my knowledge -- possible that a dialect out there does it).
Your rewrite makes your explanation of aspect much less helpful IMO. Your diagrams aren't very clear either - perhaps you could use images instead? And it would be better to describe the perfective and imperfective as their own phenomenon before introducing the past perfective.
@curiousdannii Linking to images and forcing readers to click on them to see the visual aids seems like it would only further impede understanding. Especially considering they would be virtually identical in form, as there's nothing in your comment to help me figure out what about them is unclear. Additionally, as I only added information and expanded the explanation in my edit, I fail to see how I made it less helpful. If you have any concrete or actionable suggestions to improve the readability or informativeness of this answer, I will gladly take them.
@curiousdannii Also, as far as I can tell I did explain imperfect and perfective aspect before introducing the past perfective. The only difference between a timeline for tense-less imperfect and perfective and the timelines I provided for the past imperfect and past perfective would be the absence of the UT timespan, so including both seems rather pointless given that I've already established what the past tense is. If you think it would be easier to understand if I replaced these timelines with the plain imperfect or perfective though, I can do so.
I think the equals signs and vertical bars aren't very clear. I'm not sure if the equals sign is meant to indicate equivalence or not (I'd expect yes for the present perfect but not for the aspect examples.) You don't need to make anyone click on images! Just embed them directly. And I do think it would help to just present the perfect and imperfective by themselves, and before introducing the perfect too. And one last thing, why not "event time" rather than "eventuality time", as "eventuality" sounds like it could be referring only to the end of the event, aka terminative or cessative aspect.
@curiousdannii The perfect is simpler than the perfective and imperfective, and also a better illustration of the difference between topic and eventuality time, which is why I explained it first. The timelines are visual aids, not equations, so the equals signs were meant to make the timespans look visually distinct rather than blending them together. I can look into embedding images later, but as it would be quite time-consuming to do so, it may not be for some time.
also, "eventuality" is the term used in formal semantics to refer to both states and events, which is why that period is called the eventuality time rather than the event time -- being too specific is not a good thing. Not super relevant for non-linguists, but it's why the name is how it is.
@Sparksbet I'd say it's better to present the perfect afterwards because it combines tense and aspect. I would introduce the categories as pure categories first. (So maybe I should just write my own answer.) If "eventuality time" is the common term then you should keep using it.
@curiousdannii The existential perfect aspectual reference described here is no more a combination of tense and aspect than the perfective or imperfective. Cross-linguistically perfect forms are often conflations of tense and aspect, but I'm describing the aspectual reference itself, not those forms. And unlike the perfective and imperfect, English has unambiguously perfect forms in both the past and present, making the disconnect between topic and eventuality time more clear. If you think you can write a better answer, by all means do so! I'm interested in seeing what you provide.
When I said "aspect" just then I meant the semantic category, which I think is what you mean by "aspectual reference".
As I said in my first paragraph, the difference there is important to avoid confusion like that. The aspectual reference I describe, the (existential) perfect, is also sometimes called the retrospective (which, tbh, I'd prefer, since "perfect" and "perfective" being different annoys me, but "perfect" is simply more common and familiar). It is a type of aspectual reference and can be paired with any temporal reference. It is not tied inherently to a particular temporal reference. After all, I show examples in two mutually-exclusive tenses!
Hotkeys's diagram edits are much clearer :)
Great expansion! +1
The difference is that tense refers to the time an action (or state or phenomenon) happened:
I was slim.
I am fat.
I will be fatter.
while aspect refers to the way an action (or state, or phenomenon) develops along time:
I eat sushi. (habitual)
I am eating sushi. (continuous)
.
I used to eat sushi. (habitual)
I ate sushi. (perfect)
I was eating sushi. (continuous)
.
I will have eaten sushi. (perfect)
I will be eating sushi. (continuous)
I don't know if someone has a complete list of possible aspects, but here are some possibilities:
The action was/is/will be finished (perfect)
The action is/was/will be ongoing (continuous)
The action is/was/will be continually performed (habitual)
The action is/was/will be going to start (inceptive)
The action is/was/will be intermitently performed (iterative)
That's the difference. Now comes the confusion - because that is what languages do, they confuse tense and aspect, in incoherent and incomplete systems that fail to either integrate or clearly separate those features.
One first source of confusion is that many languages operate not only with the simple distinction between tenses as outlined above - past, present, future - but also with dependent and independent tenses. For instance, I may say
I used to eat sushi when Susan introduced me to Javanese food.
I am eating sushi while the president threats nuclear war against North Korea.
I will be eating sushi when they bring the wine.
in which one action is past, present or future regarding the time of the speech (Susan introduced me to Javanese food in the past, the president is threatening nuclear war in the present, they will bring wine in the future) while the other (me eating sushi) happens in the present - not the present regarding the time of speech, however, but the present regarding the other action.
And while this may be a source of confusion by itself, it expands to a further level of confusion because the interaction between dependent and independent action often has implications on the aspectuality of each of them. For instance, I say
I eat sushi. - or
I am eating sushi.
it is understood that these are different aspects: in the first sentence, I am saying that I do habitually eat sushi, not that I have a dish of sushi in front of me. In the second sentence, however, I am saying that I am actually eating sushi in the moment I am talking, so the sentences are not synonim to each other.
But if I say
Go there and stop the president from doing bullshit while I eat sushi. - or
Go there and stop the president from doing bullshit while I am eating sushi.
the phrase "eat sushi" loses its habitual aspect, and turn into continuous, and the sentences are effectively synonimous.
The there is the confusion that Sparksbet remarks, between "tense" as a grammatical form, and "tense" as a reference to actual time. As she says, "tenses" as grammatical forms are used to denote a mix of tense references and aspectual references.
Furthermore, while the tense and aspectual references can be several, their grammaticalization, or lack thereof, is much more constrained. For instance, neither English, nor any other Western European language that I know has verb inflections for iterative or inceptive aspects. They instead use either syntactical devices, or morphological derivation - and those often vary weirdly from lexical item to lexical item. Let's take for instance Portuguese:
Eu como sushi (habitual)
Estou comendo sushi (continuous)
Estou beliscando uns sushis (iterative) (where a different verb is used to make the aspectual reference)
Eu bebo uísque (habitual)
Estou bebendo uísque (continuous)
Estou bebericando uísque (iterative) (where a morphological derivation of "beber" is used to make the aspectual reference)
So, probably no natural language has a coherent tense-aspect system; the fact that some tenses seem to imply some aspects when put in relation to others probably means that, for reasons of economy, grammatical "tenses" will be used irregularly, given internal or even external context.
Could it be possible to build a conlang with a complete and coherent tense-aspect system? Perhaps, but I would say such coherence and completeness are only going to survive as long as the language is not effectively used by a human population.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.840337 | 2018-02-17T20:48:23 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/329",
"authors": [
"American UnderGods",
"Brendan",
"Brian",
"Doe Joe",
"Eleshar",
"Frédéric Grosshans",
"Jan",
"Muhammad Hasham",
"NDT",
"Seth McCauley",
"Sparksbet",
"Xuesong Peng",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1095",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1096",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1097",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1098",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1099",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1103",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1137",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1139",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1148",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1150",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/116",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1161",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"魔大农"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
187 | On what license Lojban can be used?
Given the fact that inventor of the Loglan language started to claim his copyright on the language's components, and Lojban is basically a successor to Loglan, on what license Lojban is published? Can it be freely used without any limitations?
Logical Language Group, Inc. retains the copyright, but grants permission to copy, redistribute, and create derivative works from the official book, under conditions such as attribution and a requirement to include a permission notice identical to the one below.
Copyright © 1997 by The Logical Language Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this book, either in electronic or in printed form, provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this book, provided that the modifications are clearly marked as such, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this book into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation that has been approved by the Logical Language Group, rather than in English.
The contents of Chapter 21 are in the public domain.
From the Boring Legalities section of the Lojban Reference Grammar
The Formal Grammar (chapter 21) is in the public domain, as the above license says.
Do they address the issue of being derived from Loglan?
@curiousdannii Apart from the name "loglan" which they say is generic, I don't see any reference to the legal status of the relation between Loglan and Lojban
Note that copyright is claimed strictly on the book, and other concrete creative materials. The language itself is not subject to copyright--or at least, has not yet been shown to be subject to copyright in US courts, and is generally assumed not to constitute a fixed creative work that could be copyrighted.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.841442 | 2018-02-08T14:48:44 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/187",
"authors": [
"Carduus",
"Ethan Bierlein",
"Karina",
"LindaJeanne",
"Logan R. Kearsley",
"Ryan Cridelich",
"b a",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/58",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/607",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/608",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/609",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/617",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/658",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/84"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
29 | How would you say "good morning" or "hello" politely in Klingon?
Klingons from Star Trek aren't very polite, and the language developed for them reflects that - they don't exactly have many polite ways to say things. The closest think I've found to a polite greeting is "Nuq'nuh", which translates to "What do you want?", which... isn't very polite, IMO.
Is there any way to approximate a polite greeting in Klingon?
Incorrect about Marc Orkrand creating the Klingon language. James Doohan created the language. He created it for Star Trek the Motion Picture for the Klingon Battle Sequence with V'ger. This was the very first time we ever heard the Klingon language. Doohan also created the Vulcan Language again for Star Trek the Motion Picture. Prior to this we NEVER heard any alien languages we only heard English the excuse given was the universal translator a convient way of cutting production costs and time for the what today would be a very low budget show. My source of this information is from Doug Drexl
Doohan didn't "create" the language, Doohan made up some gibberish that sounded sufficiently alien. Okrand created an actual grammar and vocabulary.
This answer is based largely on my copy of The Klingon Dictionary (written by Marc Okrand, who created Klingon), which is reliable and good if you need a quick translation from English to Klingon or vice-versa. I'm going to cover most of the same ground as rotaredom's answer, just in more detail.
The book notes that there aren't really any greetings in Klingon; they're simply unnecessary. Klingon as a language is somewhat utilitarian in its application, and exchanges typically start with a straightforward statement or query by one party. Saying the Klingon equivalent of "How are you doing?" when you just want to figure out the new ship's departure time is simply wasteful. One answer to your question, then, would be to simply avoid a greeting. The less you talk, the less time you take up. That said, if you want to truly greet someone, you have two options. . .
Choice 1: Be utilitarian.
This utilitarianism is why all Klingon "greetings" are just introductory phrases. "nuqneH" is the one that seems to be commonly used, as rotaredom said. Its translation is "What do you want?" "Nuq" itself can be treated as an interrogative sentence on its own, simply meaning "What?"1. It can also be used as the start of a sentence, such as
nuq legh yaS
which means
What does the officer see?
Additionally, "neH" is used as a form of "to want" (though it also used as an adverbial, to mean "only"). Therefore, we have the compound "nuqneH", properly an exclamation that stands by itself as a sentence.
Choice 2: Use an honorific.
The Dictionary notes that "neS" is the only honorific suffix in Klingon, used as part of larger words. For instance, "qaleghneS", coming from "qa" ("you"), "legh" ("see") and "neS", translates to
I am honored to see you.
This states a fact, and gets to the point. It may be used towards a superior, but this is not mandatory, and I don't think it's commonly used. If you wish to open the conversation with an inquiry, "HIja'neS" (which includes "HIja", normally used as an affirmative) can work. Its translation is
Do me the honor of telling me [about something].
Again, use this when asking a superior something, but only if you really want to be respectful.
Miscellaneous
Though I have yet to see any of the following used as a greeting, I imagine you could modify them to create some sort of opening remark.
"bel" is the verb for "to be pleased", so when greeting someone, you could conceivably say "jIbel" ("I am pleased", with "jI" for first-person). Likewise, "Quch" is the verb for "to be happy". Using "jIbel" or "jiQuch" to indicate satisfaction upon meeting someone is a possibility.
"maj" ("Good") or "majQa'" ("Well done") are exclamations used as praise. You could use these - preferably "majQa'" - when welcoming an inferior who has successfully completed a task, like blowing up an enemy spaceship.
"toH" is another exclamation, meaning "Well!" or "So!" You would use this in, for instance, a sentence like
Well! I didn't expect to see you back alive.
1 Appending "Daq", to make "nuqDaq", yields "Where?"
According to klignonwiki.net, there isn't an exact equivalent, but you do have a few options:
nuqneH: It's the only word that could literally be called a greeting, but literally it means, "What do you want?" It's possible as a conversation starter, though. (Also indicated by kli.org.)
qavan: Litterally, "Salute." It's actually the imperative, meaning that it could come across sounding like an order. It's a possibility, though, similar to the Greeks who greet one another with the imperative form of "Rejoice!"
qaleghneS: Literally, "I am honoured to meet you." It was used by Riker in The Emissary.
All in all, probably the best supported one is nuqneH, which kli.org states is the Traditional Greeting.
How reliable is klingonwiki.net as a source?
@Randal'Thor good question: I don't know, but I'll add some more official sources.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.841648 | 2018-02-06T21:02:13 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/29",
"authors": [
"Freya Anderson",
"Keith Morrison",
"Rand al'Thor",
"TUSF",
"Vilike Morgenthal",
"Vincent",
"anonymous2",
"bb94",
"clinei",
"fi12",
"handan_toddler",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/12",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/19",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2749",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/295",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/308",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/582",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/81",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/82",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/83",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/94",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"k.Lee"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
266 | How do you pronounce the ":" in Wede:i?
Looking at the zompist page for Wede:i, I don't see any instructions on how to pronounce the ":" that we see in the name of the language and other places.
Am I missing something? How are you supposed to pronounce the ":"?
The phonology table shows it quite simply, it modifies the e to indicate that it is a long vowel. I don't know why the vowel table shows the dipthongs a:i and a:u but not e:i (or any others).
Note that although this may seem to be a common colon, the actual IPA diacritic is two triangles, flat sides on the outside: U+02D0 ː. But as the colon doesn't have another meaning in the IPA and it's much easier to type, a lot of people just use it instead.
Interesting. I've never seen that before.
I'm pretty sure it's because a:i and a:u are the only actual (long) diphthongs, e:i is read as two syllables (which is allowed because it's word final)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.842181 | 2018-02-11T08:27:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/266",
"authors": [
"AnthonyC",
"Black Rock Shooter",
"Gavin Lin",
"Kishore Prabhu",
"Mithical",
"No Name",
"Tanzanite Dragoness",
"circusdei",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1575",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/32",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3397",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/883",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/884",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/885",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/886",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/887"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
57 | How can syntactic ambiguity with pronouns be avoided?
Due to the way pronouns work in place of any particular noun (subject or object) in the sentence, this often leads to ambiguous grammatical constructions.
Take this phrase in English for example:
Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing
Do him and his refer to Adam (where James will help edit Adam's essay or give him suggestions) or James (where Adam is sending James an exemplar to help James see examples of good writing)?
How would ambiguities like this be avoided in constructed languages? I know a simple solution is to just eliminate pronouns from the language but is there an alternative solution to allow pronouns to be used unambiguously?
Here are three options you might want to consider:
Noun classes assign each noun a class (well known examples include the gender systems of Indo-European languages, and also the more elaborate systems of Bantu languages). Having pronouns agree with the noun class of the nouns talked about greatly helps reduce ambiguity, though it would likely not help in your specific example with two male human participants.
Obviation is the system of having two distinct third person pronouns, one (the proximal) referring to the most salient (important, topical) referent and one (the obviative) to less salient ones. In your example, likely Adam would be the proximal, and James the obviative. There are nice examples on the relevant Wikipedia article.
A third option, which is to my knowledge only attested in signed languages is Indexing. This is basically the human language equivalent of variables in programming languages: a new variable, usually a location in the sign space, is assigned to every important referent, and referred to by pointing at the location or otherwise involving the location during signing of relevant words. I believe Lojban does something similar to this as well.
+1, the idea of proximate and obviative pronouns was what I had in mind (without knowing the proper terms at the time) and I'm glad someone answered with that as one of the ideas. However, how would one avoid ambiguity in a sentence such as Adam gave James's father sleeping pills to help with his [obviative] stress? (it's a bad example, I know)? Does "his" refer to James or James's father?
@HyperNeutrino in that case ambiguity could be resolved by having either James or James' father (and the possessor) be proximal. In an isolated example like that this would be perfectly reasonable, assuming you don't have a problem with shifting the focus away from Adam, in a stretch of natural discourse, whether this would be reasonable or not would depend on various factors, such as which of the participants is already the established topic, etc. Such shifts can resolve a lot of (but not all) ambiguous cases if really necessary.
I like the recommendation of indexing. If you want to learn more about variables, mathematical logic or lambda calculus is a better place to start than programming languages. Popular programming languages have complexity irrelevant to the task. De Bruijn indexing in lambda calculus may be interesting.
In addition to the options mentioned by Adarain and Jan, various reflexives and reflexive-like operations can often be of use in dealing with such situations. English already has some reflexives, providing some amount of disambiguation, Danish goes a little further has a compulsory reflexive/non-reflexive distinction in 3rd person possessives, and while the specific example you mentioned doesn't work well in translation, a similarly problematic sentence "Adam sent James his essay" can be easily somewhat disambiguated with this system:
Adami sendte Jamesj sini stil
Adami sendte Jamesj hansj(/k) stil
It is possible for reflexive systems to be significantly more broad than this, rather than just referring to antecedents in the same clause, even if it's omitted via some other rule, e.g. in "Jonh saw Adam and shot himself in the foot", where there is no overt reference to John in the second clause, because it's been omitted due to subject coreference (such deletion rules, when constraints are put on them is actually another way of reducing ambiguity, I have relatively recently written a rather long forum post on this which goes into much more detail about them), it's possible to have "long-distance reflexives" which take antecedents outside of the clause.
In Mandarin, the reflexive ziji can refer to both local and non-local antecedents in some cases:
Zhangsan renwei Lisi kan-bu-qi ziji
Zhangsan think Lisi look-not-up REFL
"Zhangsani thinks Lisij looks down on selfi/j"
Certain things block this though, for example shifts in perspective:
Zhangsan renwei wo zhidao Wangwu xihuan ziji
Zhangsan think I know Wangwu like REFL
"Zhangsani thinks Ij know Wangwuk likes self*i/*j/k"
In Igbo, in complements of communication, entities that are coreferential with the source of information are marked by what is known as "logophoric pronouns":
ọ́ sị̀rị̀ nà ọ́ byàrà
he said that he came
"hei said that hej came"
ọ́ sị̀rị̀ nà yá byàrà
he said that LOG came
"hei said that hei came"
Gokana also has such a system, though the marking is on the verb, though the constraints on what can be coreferential are quite free:
aè kɔ aè dɔ
he said he fell
"hei said that hej fell"
aè kɔ aè dɔ-ɛ
he said he fell-LOG
"hei said that hei fell"
aè kɔ oò div-èè e
he said you hit-LOG him
"hei said that you hit himi
aè kɔ oò ziv-èè a gĩ́ã́
he said you stole-LOG his yams
"hei said that you stole hisi yams"
The wikipedia article on logophoricity goes into more depth.
It is also possible to have two different reflexives, requiring respectively local and non-local antecedents. Danish has a rather limited case of this in bare complements to perception verbs, where the two reflexives sig and sig selv which are usually either only different in level of emphasis or in complementary distribution, respectively require non-local and local antecedents:
Holger hørte Peter tale om sig.
"Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himi."
Holger hørte Peter tale om sig selv.
"Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himselfj."
Holger hørte Peter tale om ham.
"Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himk."
"4th Person systems" such as seen Eskimo languages are rather similar, though more general as they are used in all subordinate clauses are also another type of reflexive-like construction (the "fourth" person is often labeled 3R) and they are also used intraclausally in possessive marking. In all of these cases they mark that a participant or possessor is coreferential with the subject of the main clause (which is defined in terms of S/A despite the case marking being ergative). An example from Siberian Yupik:
esghaghyagu quyaaq
see:CNSQ:3s>3s happy:IND.3s
"when hei saw himj, hek was happy"
esghaghyamigu quyaaq
see:CNSQ:3Rs>3s happy:IND.3s
"when hei saw himj, hei was happy"
esghaghyatni quyaaq
see:CNSQ:3s>3Rs happy:IND.3s
"when hei saw himj, hej was happy"
In addition to all these various reflexive constructions, switch reference, the overt marking of whether the "subject" is either the same or different, either between two coordinate clauses, or a subordinate and main clause can also resolve some ambiguity. Take for example this pair of sentences from Hua:
ebgi-Ø-na korihie
hit-SAME-3sg.ANTICSU ran.away.3sg
"hei hit himj and hei ran away"
ebgi-ga-na korihie
hit-3sg.DIFF-3sg.ANTICSU ran.away.3sg
"hei hit himj and hej ran away"
Switch reference can only deal with one set of coreference though what exactly is tracked varies. In some languages, it is specifically the actor that is tracked, while others may track the topic or some other pragmatically prominent NP, or may even differ in what is tracked in the controlling clause as opposed to the clause recieving the marking. Additionally the marking may occasionally also be sensitive to changes in things like time, place, discourse coherency and/or reality status, and as a result, switch reference may fulfill may other roles than simply dealing with ambiguity. This paper, particularly chapters 5 and 6, goes into quite a bit of detail about the highly varied and interesting usage of switch-ref in Papua New Guinean languages.
In addition to Adarain’s answer, the ambiguity can also be resolved in an out-of-the-box way. For example, English can use the former or the latter in place of an inflected form of he to distinguish between the two cases. Languages like German go a step further and would just use this instead of the latter in most cases. These words do not replace pronouns, they just complement them. This gives the nice feature of preserving a possible ambiguity where it is intended for poetic or dramatic purposes while removing it entirely where clarity is desired.
Another out-of-the-box way is to restrict the way in which such constructions can be constructed. Trying to think of how German handles the situation I realised that the sentence translated directly is unambiguous in German:
Adam hat James seinen Aufsatz geschickt, um ihm beim Schreiben zu helfen.
The only way this can be interpreted is Adam helping James just by the way the grammar works. Adam is the sentence’s subject and the infinitive construction can only be tied to the subject. If you wanted James helping Adam, you need to work around by using a subordinate clause:
Adam hat James seinen Aufsatz geschickt, damit er ihm beim schreiben hilft.
For a conlang, it seems like one other way to avoid ambiguity that I do not see noted in previous answers is to have the language enforce grammatical rules such that a pronoun must always refer to a specific type of referent. That is, consider these four possible types of grammar rules (they may be other rules a language may follow):
A pronoun always refers to the last referent, any mention of a prior referent must be renamed. So in your example, the grammar would remove the ambiguity as such a rule would refer to James in your original example:
Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing
And if Adam was the intent, then it would need to be one of these:
Adam sent the essay to James to help Adam with his writing
or
To James, Adam sent the essay to help him with his writing
A pronoun always refers to the far referent when two referents are in view, and is left off when the near referent is intended. So of James getting help, no pronoun is used, and the sentence would roughly translate simply as:
Adam sent the essay to James to help with writing
But of Adam, the pronoun would be used:
Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing
A pronoun always refers back to a subject, never an object (which must be restated if intended). So of James:
Adam sent the essay to James to help James with James's writing
Though I suspect something like #2 for James might be stated as well; or the language would form such a statement to place the main player in the subject position in a passive construction:
James was sent an essay by Adam to help him with his writing
For Adam, it would be as you originally stated:
Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing
A pronoun always refers back to an object, never the subject (which is restated if intended). So of James it is as you already had:
Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing
But for Adam, it might be this:
Adam sent the essay to James to help Adam with his writing
Notice in that previous example by restating "Adam" as the object of "to help," it then put Adam in the most recent object position and allows for the "his" to then refer to Adam (who was also the subject).
So for some of these grammatical ways of reducing ambiguity, the sentence structure in the language becomes more important (which may or may not be desirable in the language one is constructing).
Here are some solutions, roughly in descending order of naturalness.
distance-specific determiners or inflections
topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic
switch-reference on nonfinite verbs
pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.
1 distance-specific determiners or inflections
You can solve this problem in a reasonably natural way using demonstratives or distance-specific determiners. This is similar to proximate and obviative pronouns, but not identical.
For instance, suppose all non-vocative uses of names require some kind of definite determiner. And suppose there are proximal and distal determiners ("this" and "that"). I'm also assuming that these determiners can form NPs without an accompanying noun, like in English.
then you could say something to the effect of
this Adam sent essay to that James to help that with that's writing.
There's a lot of variation in existing natural languages when it comes to contrasts in demonstratives. Some languages surface distinctions such as visibility (e.g. Malagasy) or audibility (e.g. Khaling, a Sino-Tibetan language from Nepal) or altitude/elevation.
2 topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic
The reflexive pronoun solution described above normally tracks co-reference with the syntactic subject of the matrix clause.
If that solution is not flexible enough, you can track co-reference with the topic instead and explicitly mark the topic in some way.
For example, suppose James is the topic and TOP is the pronoun that refers to the topic. Let the postposition/clitic は mark the topic of a clause.
to James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.
Or you could do something like the following if you want は to obscure the role of the topicalized noun.
James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.
As far as I know, no topic prominent natural languages actually do this.
3 switch reference on non-finite verbs
Switch reference marks whether the subject of a clause is the same as the previous clause or not. Suppose each verb is marked SS for same subject or DS for different subject. I'll assume utterance-initial words are marked with DS.
This requires some care in defining what exactly "previous clause" means.
Adam sent.DS essay to James to help.SS him with his writing.DS .
so in this sentence, sent.DS marks that sent is in an utterance-initial clause. help receives a same subject marker because help and sent have the same subject, sort of, and writing has a DS marker because James is writing, not Adam.
Getting the details right on how exactly you want pervasive switch-reference to work might be a bit tricky.
4 pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.
Suppose you have some forms consisting some constant + ona, which can refer back to a noun beginning with that particular consonant sound (or ona itself if the word begins with a vowel). Then you can do something like:
Adam sent essay to James to help JONA with JONA's writing.
the choice of JONA over ONA means that James is the one whose writing we're attempting to improve.
I was thinking about the ease of Blissymbols in this context ... although Charles K. Bliss never mentions the case, one could imagine that the person symbol can be followed by an index 4 (or even 5) ... allowing in all cases just one reading ... but with some problems for doing so out loud ...
There is a nice Facebook post from Blissymbols about pronouns at https://www.facebook.com/298159500318475/photos/a.298161243651634/1360473830753698/?type=3
... I made an archive for acccessibility : https://archive.is/PI4PY
I think, if you're using numbers, it'd be better to just start with he1, he2, he3, etc...A) because then you1, you2, you3, are possible as well and B) because it generalizes more easily to other languages.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.842314 | 2018-02-06T22:38:31 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/57",
"authors": [
"Adam_G",
"Cecilia",
"GDorn",
"Gufferdk",
"J.Past",
"Mats",
"Min4Builder",
"NVZ",
"Soner Gönül",
"TrEs-2b",
"beroal",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/145",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/165",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/166",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/167",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/182",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/183",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/27",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/293",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/394",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/410",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/566",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/995",
"hyperneutrino"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
176 | What are some reasons that constructed languages would want to have ambiguity?
As far as I know, most constructed languages have no syntactically or semantically ambiguous grammatical constructions. However, would there be any reasons that a constructed language might include certain potentially ambiguous constructions, and if not, why do many (or maybe most) natural languages have so much ambiguity, and why would that not be resolved in natural languages?
It's a hard to intentionally change a natural language. This is why there is ambiguity--because they have evolved in that way. So, having ambiguity in a conlang can make it seem more natural
"most constructed languages have no syntactically or semantically ambiguous grammatical constructions" This is most definitely not true. For example, many conlangs use a single word as a relativizer (as in "the apple that I ate"), which is certainly cause for ambiguity (there may be multiple potential locations for the trace). Generally, it would be very difficult to create a naturalistic grammar where every sentence only has a single parse (barring Lojbanic clause-terminators that basically amount to spoken punctuation).
If naturalness (being like a natural language) is a design goal, then a conlang can embrace ambiguity with no shame.
Efficiency. Most ambiguous sentences are understood well enough in the context they are uttered in, clarified either by prior knowledge, non-linguistic communication (body language, pointing, etc), or through follow up questions from the listener. When most ambiguity is not actually a problem, it doesn't need to be explicitly countered. To require a language to be completely and always unambiguous would require much more specific and cumbersome sentences, violating the cooperative principle.
Wordplay. Puns, double entendres, and garden path sentences are unlikely to be possible or productive without substantial ambiguity.
Regarding point 1, ambiguity would even be required, since as OP said, natural languages tend to have such ambiguity.
Garden path sentences aren't really necessary for a language, imo -- they're more of an interesting way to look at how we process language. A better example for point 3 would be things like Gricean reasoning, politeness, and other pragmatic phenomena, which often rely on ambiguity or at the very least vagueness.
@Sparksbet This question doesn't ask about necessity, just why you'd want ambiguity. Not all conlangers want wordplay, but if they do, then I think that implies ambiguity. I'm not sure what Gricean reasoning is, though Grice's maxims are part of the cooperative principle, maybe politeness too?
@curiousdannii by Gricean reasoning I meant those maxims and how you derive conversational implicature from them. You mention the cooperative principle in "efficiency", but I think its implications are much deeper and more related to wordplay -- if nothing is ambiguous, pragmatics basically ceases to exist. Regarding the necessity of garden path sentences, I merely meant that I didn't think it particularly advantageous to have garden path sentences in a language.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.843405 | 2018-02-08T14:14:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/176",
"authors": [
"CHEESE",
"CowperKettle",
"Cullub",
"Doorknob",
"Download Software Full Version",
"Masclins",
"Mika Feiler",
"Sparksbet",
"curiousdannii",
"errantlinguist",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/100",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/203",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/567",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/568",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/569",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/574",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/741",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/79"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
181 | Is Loglan still alive?
Loglan is a predecessor of the Lojban language. Is it still supported and actively used/developed, or is it a dead language?
Yes.
Loglan is continuously being developed and modified, as the website shows. There are new reports about changes to the language (and proposals to do so). The CEO of the Loglan Institute, Randall Holmes, has written periodic reports on the language; the one from 2015 shows that several speakers have proposed changes, including the addition of new words (see Appendix 9). For the most part, excluding specific major developments like the Great Morphological Revolution of 1989, the structure has stayed the same, but grammar and vocabulary continue to grow and evolve.
In terms of the total number of speakers, we have little to no data. My impression is that since the split, Lojban has become more popular than Loglan. The Lojban community is largely Internet-based, and perhaps 20-200 people use it in some non-negligible capacity. Loglan's userbase is probably smaller than that, although I don't know how small. It's clearly non-zero, but not by much - perhaps 10 or 20 people.
Now, the question of whether Loglan is dead or alive rests in part on how you define a "dead language". I don't think anybody has ever learned Loglan or Lojban as a native language; you could therefore argue that it was never alive in the first place. So I suppose the best answer to your questions is that yes, Loglan is still being used and changed, but it's not "alive" in the sense of most languages.
The Loglan Institute considers Loglan to be alive because of the constant grammar/vocabulary changes; they define a dead language as one that isn't evolving. Based on that definition, Loglan is indeed alive.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.843649 | 2018-02-08T14:38:34 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/181",
"authors": [
"Alaric33",
"Athos",
"Brandon Vout",
"CPHPython",
"Cubic",
"G0BLiN",
"Jessica Smith",
"Joselin Jocklingson",
"Konstantinos d",
"RubbelDieKatz",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1033",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3773",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/587",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/588",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/589",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/590",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/591",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/618",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/619",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/620",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/657",
"ricmarques"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
53 | Is the alien writing in "Arrival" really a language? Can we form custom sentences?
Here are few examples of words written in the alien language from "Arrival" (film):
Image source: Pinterest.
Does this alien writing have some logic in order to construct some custom meaningful sentences?
The reports from the Wolfram people about how a lot of the graphics were made in Mathematica should be relevant: http://blog.wolfram.com/2017/01/31/analyzing-and-translating-an-alien-language-arrival-logograms-and-the-wolfram-language/
Related video: Christopher Wolfram - The Code Behind the Arrival.
afaik the sentences are not actually nonlinear; the words seem to be put around the circle in an order similar to the English translation
The short answer: no, the language from Arrival is not a full conlang.
The logographs were designed by artists and designers, and, while some components of the logograms were assigned meaning, they did not define enough of its rules for it to be possible to make new symbols with definite meanings.
They did hire linguist Jessica Coon to consult on the film, and she annotated printouts of the logograms so the set designers would know what to put in the background and on the whiteboards (If I remember correctly, they consulted physicists for similar work as well). They also had Stephen and Christopher Wolfram provide some analysis and design the computer program used to analyze and generate the logograms in the film.
However, in the end, the movie was not for linguists or conlangers, so they did not design it as a fully fledged conlang—given that it's supposed to be a mystery they don't quite solve in the film, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
These articles might interest you if you want more information.
How Arrival's Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Alien Alphabet
'Arrival' nails how humans might actually talk to aliens, a linguist says
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.843836 | 2018-02-06T22:27:09 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/53",
"authors": [
"Axen",
"AzaleaGarden",
"CNG - San Diego SEO Agency",
"Dylan Turner",
"Henji",
"Hlengi Simelane",
"Magisch",
"R.M.",
"Vikki",
"durka42",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1176",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/155",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/156",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/29",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/30",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/503",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/504",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/570",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/571",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/572",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/742",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/820",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/821",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/899",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/943",
"kenorb",
"lee",
"mic",
"ngn",
"ninjalj"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
49 | Why are sign languages considered to be natural rather than constructed languages?
Linguists consider sign languages to be natural languages. Surely they had been invented/constructed at some point in time by someone.
So why are they not categorized as constructed, but as natural languages? And in what circumstances could they be considered to be constructed languages?
The history of sign languages is more akin to that of creoles than that of a constructed language which later gained native speakers. Consider the following two examples:
The grammar of Esperanto and a large chunk of its vocabulary was created, codified and written down by L. L. Zamenhof. People who were interested learned his language according to his rules and later passed it on to their children, creating the first native speakers of it.
The development of Tok Pisin is described as follows: Contact between English speakers and locals of Papua New Guinea gave rise to a pidgin, an incomplete and bare-bones not-quite-language that was just good enough to communicate - everyone would have spoken it a bit differently at that point in time. It became used more commonly and was passed down as a native language to children, creating a full-fledged language. At no point however did its speakers sit down and decide on what grammar Tok Pisin ought to have.
Now compare these with the case of the Nicaraguan Sign Langauge, the currently only natural langauge which we have actively seen develop. Deaf children of Nicaragua previously communicated with the people closest to them with improvised home signs and gestures (in other words they had at best something akin to a pidgin). When they were brought together in a new school for the deaf, they had the need to communicate with each other. The school encouraged use of mouthing or fingerspelling Spanish, but the students, who were not native speakers of Spanish failed at learning these skills. Instead, they started communicating by using their own home signs, forming a pidgin that developed over the following years and was taught to younger students who later arrived. Over time, the language developed complexities similar to what you would find in other signed languages - evidence that it had developed beyond the initial pidgin stage.
It is clear that the example of Nicaraguan Sign Language is much more similar to that of Tok Pisin than that of Esperanto.
Just noting that your history of Tok Pisin is incorrect. It developed on the plantations in Queensland and then went back to PNG, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands, which now have distinct dialects (and different names.)
@curiousdannii I paraphrased from the Wikipedia article. If you know it more accurately, please feel free to edit my comment with better information.
When I read your answer, I immediately thought, "Yeah, but what about American Sign Language?" One Wikipedia trip later, I have discovered that the story is essentially the same: Deaf students come together at a school for the first time and combine what they are officially taught there with their homesigns or local signing systems, forming a unique language. Fascinating!
The constructed versus natural language distinction is less of a binary opposition, and more of a continuum. There are many spoken languages as well that can partially qualify as 'constructed', including Standard Italian and Nynorsk. Every language to some degree has been modified by someone's conscious choice. A conlang is set apart largely by the degree of conscious choice that's been applied to it.
Signed languages, though they are relatively new on a linguistic scale, are not typically made up by a majority of constructed grammar rules and so on. The signs themselves are often consciously created (though just as often not), but the grammar around them is mostly generated spontaneously as the language is used more and more - rules begin to coalesce as people need to use their language in more and more circumstances. No one sat down and decided that in ASL, for example, you could set up a location as a pronominal referent and direct future signs toward that location as a way of referring to that pronoun. It simply happened - someone started doing it, what they were doing was sufficiently clear to get across, and then it was grammar. In a conlang, that grammar would have been the result of a conscious choice.
Honestly, spoken languages could have a very similar history. There's nothing that sets signed languages apart from spoken ones in this regard except their newness - we've watched sign languages come into being out of nothing, while all spoken languages are derived from some ancestor that's been lost in the depths of time. Spoken languages could have had an absolutely identical genesis, for all we know.
But Nynorsk isn't considered a spoken language :v it's only a written standard/skriftspråk — specifically, NN Wiki says [s]kriftspråk er språk som blir uttrykt eller representert av [...] bokstavar, gjennom eit skriftsystem, and further goes on to say [det nynorske s]kriftspråket er basert på nynorsk talemål, det vil seie dei moderne norske dialektane til skilnad frå gamalnorsk og mellomnorsk; one of the unofficial mottos of Nynorsk is specifically Snakk dialekt – skriv nynorsk!.
@Darkgamma It's still a 'spoken language' from the perspective of spoken versus sign. I don't think the fact that it's found primarily in written form makes it somehow fundamentally different from languages that are both spoken and written.
The very point is that Nynorsk isn't spoken, it's written. It's like saying Classical Chinese was spoken.
The basic explanation is that sign languages often emerge from home sign, meaning the system of gestures that emerges when a deaf child does not have exposure to a formal language while a constructed language is created by one person as a system of communication with new syntax and semantic rules. However, there is no language that has no constructed elements especially when dealing with numbers or words that are used for specific subjects. It is equally true that there are basic elements of language that are natural and required such as a basic set of concepts, the basic communication functions, and way to construct utterances with more than one word or gesture.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.844174 | 2018-02-06T22:09:33 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/49",
"authors": [
"Anmol Tomer",
"DLosc",
"Darkgamma",
"Gufferdk",
"J. Siebeneichler",
"PhoneixS",
"Pirate",
"Sascha Baer",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sjiveru",
"Tech Demis",
"Vanege EO",
"WhileTrue",
"curiousdannii",
"davneetnarang",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/143",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/144",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/145",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/146",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/147",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/152",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/157",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/22",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/248",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/37",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/544",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/545",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6150",
"user",
"user546"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
74 | How can we define words?
Even though the question seems trivial, it's still a hotly debated topic (as far as I'm aware). For example, in the Oxford Handbook for Polysynthesis, Fernando Zúñiga says:
Recent literature (e.g. Dixon and Aikhenvald 2002b) has emphasized the need to distinguish, in principle, between low-level units identified via phonological and prosodic rules (p-words) and those identified via rules of grammar (g-words).
Is this a meaningful distinction? What other distinctions are there? What languages present problems when the concept of word is introduced to them?
As linguists like to joke, the best definition of a word is "the thing you put spaces around."
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.844917 | 2018-02-06T23:41:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/74",
"authors": [
"Iroroghene Odafejirorosua",
"Slorany",
"Tim Post",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/206",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/207",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/208",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/448",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/624",
"mklcp",
"user511893"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
55 | Can Kēlen truly be considered verb-free?
It has been claimed that the conlang Kēlen, winner of the 2009 Smiley award, is supposed to challenge Greenberg's universal of always having a noun-verb distinction by eliminating verbs. In light of the fact that Kēlen has a special word-class called relationals, which are four predicating words that take noun phrase arguments, is it not more factual to analyse the relationals of Kēlen as a very limited and closed class of verbs? They do seem to fulfill the same function words called "verbs" do in other languages, and are necessary for predication — another domain typically reserved for verbs (even if we assume zero-copula).
It seems like those would count as verbs. It's also possible that it's not advanced enough to really be considered a human language.
”not advanced enough” would be bothering if it would prevent the communication of some concepts; I don't really see the point with "human language".
Using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a good baseline of what a human language can communicate, there are several core verbs:
Mental predicates: THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
Speech: SAY
Actions, events, movement: DO, HAPPEN, MOVE
Location, existence, specification: BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)
LA is clearly polysemous for THERE IS, BE (SOMEWHERE), BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING), and probably also marks PART in reverse.
NI probably covers DO and MOVE.
SE is even higher level, expressing the verb of give, as well as primes like FEEL and SAY.
So the claim that Kēlen does not have verbs is patently false.
There are in fact natural languages with even more restricted verb inventories than Kēlen, such as Jingulu, which has been analysed as only have verbs for go, come, and do. (I haven't seen an NSM style analysis of Jingulu, I wonder how they would see the verbs like THINK etc being expressed in Jingulu?)
(I had known about the first part before you posted your answer, but it was delightful to read the second; thanks!)
(Sorry for the late comment, but I just saw this question now.) Re Jingulu, the analysis with only three verbs is debatable. I personally think it would be more accurate to say that Jingulu splits verbs into two classes: a small closed set of inflecting verbs/auxiliaries, which carry inflections for cross-referencing, TAM etc.; and a large open set of uninflecting verbs/coverbs, which carry the semantics. Most verbal notions are expressed by modifing the appropriate inflecting verb by the appropriate coverb. This structure is not an uncommon one in the region.
@bradrn For many linguists, it is precisely the syntactic and morphological behaviour that determines what the word classes are. It's more a matter of preference what to call the coverbs.
@curiousdannii This is true, but the coverbs also behave similarly to ‘verbs’, e.g. they must be nominalised if used in an NP (Pensalfini 1997:138).
Relationals in Kēlen have no other purpose, so are verbs in all but name.
Kēlen is an engineering language, masquerading as an art lang. It doesn't have a history or proto-lang like some other art langs, so it is obvious that the relationals are a one for one replacement of verbs, but without any verb-like conjugation seen in english (e.g. run -> running).
Compare tenseless languages, which make use of other ways of conjugating the verbs (aspect or mood) or other words (verbs/adverbs/preposition). Kēlen uses both of those schemes.
Take the Kēlen relational word LA for instance
pattern
english equivalent
LA NP
NP exists, there is NP
LA NP LOC (NP)
NP is at a location
LA NP (ñe) NP
NP is (the same as) NP
LA NP pa NP
NP is/has/contains NP
In the examples the role LOC is performed by sū, which is a preposition. The Kēlen word ñe modifies the relational to be possessive rather than stative. The relations between verbs and relationals go on. It even has inflections for LA.
Why is this significant? It's because the relationals serve no other purpose that they have to be considered direct relations to verbs. For a comparison that shows how a word having multiple purposes could denote verblessness, see how Salishan Languages can be considered nounless:
Words with noun-like meanings are automatically equivalent to [be + NOUN] when used predicatively, such as Lushootseed sbiaw which means '(is a) coyote'. Words with more verb-like meanings, when used as arguments, are equivalent to [one that VERBs] or [VERB+er]. For example, Lushootseed ʔux̌ʷ means '(one that) goes'.
In natural languages, where words evolve in meaning over time, you can see meanings change over time. See how the words Be, Is and Am come about:
Old English bēon, an irregular and defective verb, whose full conjugation derives from several originally distinct verbs. The forms am and is are from an Indo-European root shared by Latin sum and est . The forms was and were are from an Indo-European root meaning ‘remain’. The forms be and been are from an Indo-European root shared by Latin fui ‘I was’, fio ‘I become’, and Greek phuein ‘bring forth, cause to grow’. The origin of are is uncertain.
- Google.
It should be possible to make a language where your verb is a primarily a noun/adjective/adposition but can be considered a verb only secondarily, as it's meaning changes over the imaginary history of the language. Maybe the word LA primarily means SEAT or GROUND (specifically a noun, not another verb). But when it's used with another word, it's meaning changes from the noun to a verb-like sense.
This way you could have a verbless language, where it's verb-like words evolved out of non-verbs.
But Kēlen has no such evolution of relationals, so they can serve no other purpose than to be one for one verb replacements.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.845021 | 2018-02-06T22:33:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/55",
"authors": [
"C4illin",
"Darkgamma",
"Elios",
"Winter",
"bradrn",
"curiousdannii",
"eefara",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/158",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/159",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/207",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2729",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/289",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/291",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/37",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4290",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/542",
"mklcp",
"unor",
"user958399"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
17 | Grammar concepts required for every conlang
Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?
For example, is there a list of such concepts available?
What are all the necessary grammar concepts? E.g. looking at real languages because I'm still quite new to the whole conlanging.. but e.g. the German language has 4 cases while the Russian language has 6 cases. Both are languages that exist and work, yet have plenty of grammatical differences.
Darkgamma's reply wasn't wrong, but I think it slightly misses the question.
One way of ensuring that your conlang is able to convey a certain meaning/feature is to grab a text and start translating it. If there is something in the original text you have trouble translating, try to find a way to work around it with the grammar you currently have OR invent a new construction to deal with it. In order to do the first one well you need a good awareness of your conlang's grammar. Another danger of this method is relexing the original, especially new vocabulary. Third option: Don't have your conlang be able to translate the challenging characteristic/expression of the text you're translating 'genuinely'. F.e. there's alienable vs. inalienable possession in the text you can simply translate it with the standard expression for possession in your conlang (assuming you do not have the distinction in your conlang).
You asked about lists. There are questionnaires used for typology which I think can be helpful for conlanging, but I don't know of anyone who has tried utilizing them. Here you can find a link to a collection of them.
It's important to pick the right text though. Depending on the background of the language—which could be non-human—a lot of concepts might not have to be supported.
Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?
The primary issue here is trying to find out what is necessary for a language to function; not even 'Chomskyan tenets' like recursion (or broader concepts like classifiers and numbers) seem to be obligatory, and language in essence seems to boil down to a glorified predicate machine with parts tacked on by Broca's area — and so, the answer is, for now, no: we'd very much like to see a way of doing this, and it would be truly groundbreaking in linguistics, seeing as it's a major focus point for many researchers in many fields of philosophy, linguistics, psychology and neurology.
This answer, as of now, seems to be more of a comment on the question than an actual answer to it. Maybe it's just your last statement though :/
It's a bit of an indirect answer — there isn't such a method, and we'd very much like to see it if it comes up; I edited the answer to clarify this
The way to make sure a language is detailed enough is by putting it to use. You have to write something in the language that the language was designed for in order to be able to tell if it works. For example, if you're writing an auxiliary language, you might want to see if you can express the Babel text or the Declaration of Human Rights (two popular texts for translation) to see if your language expresses them the way you intended. If you're writing a language for a fictional race, you could translate whatever kind of text that race produces.
No language actually requires a genitive case or a construct state (prepositions are an easy way to get out of either; but a constructed language can never be "wrong" even if it's very ambiguous, as long as the final product suits what you were trying to make). You probably would have decided sometime in the design process the most basic questions, like if the language uses cases. If for some reason you haven't, you will notice that this is missing when trying to write something in the language.
The reason this works is that it's impossible to write sentences without deciding on the essential features of the language. Writing sentences forces you to decide on word order, for example. Using sentences with diverse syntax and morphology can also help to determine if you left something out of the language.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.845480 | 2018-02-06T20:37:13 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/17",
"authors": [
"Bob says reinstate Monica",
"Christian",
"Darkgamma",
"Helmar",
"Jeff Frenkel-Popell",
"KarlM",
"RaceYouAnytime",
"Sai",
"dot_Sp0T",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/106",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/31",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/37",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/41",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/42",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/43",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/59",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/67",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/86",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/967",
"morgansbyers"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
174 | Does Lojban completely remove semantic ambiguity?
As a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language (Wikipedia), does Lojban also completely eliminate semantic ambiguity? If not, what are some examples?
Maybe edit to say colloquial, idiomatic Lojban, and not just the formal/official version? Oh wait, you're asking about semantic rather than syntactic. I doubt that colloquial Lojban is completely syntactically unambiguous, but they may not even be claiming semantic unambiguity. Good question still.
This quote from John Cowan on Wikipedia seems to indicate that Lojban does have semantic ambiguity: "Thus "heart pain" would refer to the literal heart and literal pain; what would be ambiguous would be the exact connection between these two. Is the pain in the heart, because of the heart, or what?"
Let's take an element of Lojban's grammar, and see if it's semantically ambiguous.
In lojban, tanru are basically two predicates in adposition. The first one semantically modifies the second one; and that's all.
Example:
{lo zdani gerku cu barda}: The house dog is big.
{lo gerku zdani cu barda}: The kennel is big.
Where {zdani} (roughly) means "home", {gerku} means "dog", and {barda} means "big (the rest is grammatical witchcraft, don't bother).
In the first example, {zdani gerku} is syntactically a tanru, and {zdani} modifies {gerku}. However, the tanru is primarily about {gerku}.
In the second one, it's the reverse. {gerku zdani} is also syntactically a tanru, but {gerku} modifies {zdani}; and the overall tanru is about {zadni}, not {gerku}.
However, it isn't possible to make assumptions about the overall meaning of a tanru. Though it's syntactically not ambiguous, it is semantically ambiguous.
I've chosen the english “house dog” and “kennel”, but it was just my intent, and english translates this way. Officially, it's not possible to infer the meaning from a tanru.
You can even read yourself in the last official reference grammar that “All tanru are ambiguous semantically.”
For a surer version:
{lo gerku poi ta'e zvati lo zdani cu barda}: The dog that uses to live at the house is big
{lo zdani poi zukte ke'a lo nu stuzi lo gerku cu barda}: The house that is aimed so that dogs could live in is big.
EDIT: added an explanation on how it's ambiguous, and the surer examples.
The example you've given here seems quite clear in terms of scoping and what modifies what, so why do you/the official reference grammar say that tanru are ambiguous?
It's not because it's the scoping the modifications are not ambiguous that the overall meaning is not ambiguous. Retaking {gerku zdani}, one can only be sure that 1) it's some kind of house (zdani) and 2) it's related to dogs (gerku) in some way; not that it's a specifically a kennel (it could be a pound or whatever in fact).
Good remark still, I've added an additional explanation.
Ah, gotcha. Well that ambiguity would exist outside of tanru wouldn't it? Or does each root only have a singular meaning (no polysemy at all), and you must compound roots to get further meanings?
As for the roots (i.e. the gismu), I don't remember any of them to have multiple meanings; but it doesn't mean some of them aren't vague, e.g. {remna} which means "human", while "ninmu", means "woman" and "nanmu" means "[male] man". I don't really see what do you mean by "further meanings": more precise or more vaguer (since the topic is tanru as a mean to vagueness)? In fact, though tanru are ambiguous, they are used and I would even say designed to still precise the meaning; a "quick 'n dirty" way to precise it, as i've shown, more precision require more verbosity.
But tanru can also be used to increase imprecision, e.g. by taking the word {co'e} (though not a gismu, morphologically speaking), which is just a generic predicate. By generic, it's totally generic, you can say {na co'e} or {co'e} (where {na} is a negative particle), it wouldn't matter since it's so generic and vague. The tanru {gerku co'e} is so even vaguer than {gerku} alone (a dog), since it means "a/any/all/some kinds of thingamajig related to dog [in some unprecised way]"
Despite the coldly logical, hyper-artificial appearance of the language, Lojban is actually designed to allow for evolution over time by human (biological?) speakers (just, in a way that can be parsed by machines without needing to rely on heuristics or special cases). Lujvo largely exist in order to capture the most common understandings of tanru that are in common use, and lexicalize them. gerku zdani could be a kennel, a pound, or even someone's house that was architected to look like a dog; but gerzda is specifically a doghouse.
@curiousdannii polysemy even in natural languages is a pretty subjective judgment anyway. For an extreme example, Japanese uses the same kanji in words for "minute" (duration of time), "understand", "1/10" (as well as measures that are 1/10 of various implied units), "percentage", "allocation" and "enough". A dictionary might give over a dozen glosses for the kanji itself. And yet it is really all the same core meaning: splitting into parts.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.845820 | 2018-02-08T14:07:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/174",
"authors": [
"Generic Bot",
"Johann Ashton",
"Karl Knechtel",
"Ketan Yekale",
"Noach MiFrankfurt",
"Snapsisy",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/207",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5605",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/561",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/562",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/563",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/758",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/760",
"mklcp"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
292 | Does Esperanto have any words that mean more than one thing?
Looking at the "about Esperanto" page, I see this line:
While he realized that a common language would not end the cultural barrier, it would enable ordinary people, not politicians, to have cross national conversations. To this end, he created Esperanto, a language that would be easy for most people to learn, due to it's logical, regular design.
Speaking from experience, one of the difficult parts of learning a new language is keeping different meanings straight for words that have different meaning. It's a little hard to bear at times how many words mean many things.
Does Esperanto, with it's "logical, regular design", have any homographs?
Also see this list of accidental homophones.
One also has to bear in mind polysemy: a word that might correspond to one concept in English might translate to two different words in Spanish or German. A classic example is “corner”, which can be translated to Spanish as either rincón or esquina, depending on whether one is talking about an “inside” or “outside” corner. I went to check how Esperanto deals with that particular word and found that eo angulo refers not only to both kinds of corners, but additionally also means “angle”.
So yes, Esperanto clearly has polysemies.
One such word is vato, which means both "watt" and "cotton wool.
Wikipedia says that
the physical unit "Watt" was first borrowed as ŭato, to distinguish it from vato ('cotton-wool'), and this is the only form found in dictionaries in 1930. However, initial ⟨ŭ⟩ violates Esperanto phonotactics, and by 1970 there was an alternative spelling, vatto. This was also unsatisfactory, however, because of the geminate ⟨t⟩, and by 2000 the effort had been given up, with ⟨vato⟩ now the advised spelling for both "Watt" and "cotton-wool".
In addition to the examples cited above, it's worth noting that due to Esperanto's extensive use of derivation and encouragement to use affixes as productively as possible, there is the potential for semantic ambiguity to arise. This occurs when a string that is an affix also occurs within a root word. For example, the suffix -em means "a tendency/propensity for...", deriving words like kompatema "charitable" and kompatemo "charity/mercifulness" from kompato "compasson, pity". However, what of a word like modemo? The root mod- means "fashion", so upon encountering this word you might assume it means "tendency to be fashionable" or something like that, but it's also a root of its own meaning "modem".
Now, realistically, this would be distinguishable from context, but then again that's the case for "watt" vs. "cotton wool" too. These sorts of weird ambiguities based on affixes are pretty rare anyway, and I don't think there's anything wrong with Esperanto having a few, but they aren't nonexistent.
Also, it's worth noting that when it came to "logical, regular design", Zamenhof was mostly concerned with avoiding irregularities in inflection and derivation. I'd argue he didn't quite succeed, but he definitely cared more about that than he did polysemy.
@ba I don't think adding a link to an extremely lengthy post is particularly useful -- perhaps providing an excerpt or (if possible) a direct link to the section with the examples you describe? It's not very helpful to expect someone to scroll down through.
I suppose it's better than nothing if a link doesn't work -- though I think it would be better if you included some of the examples in your comment instead!
There are some more examples of this here (Appendix W), like "acheto" ("purchase" or "contemptible little thing")
The selection of words in Esperanto tried to prevent:
homonyms, same sounding words: trajn/o = train, railroad, trejn/ist/o = trainer; but also poliso = (insurance) policy, politiko = policy, measure
word parts that could be mistaken as infixes; partly with artificial changes (kun - instead of kon* = with / in company, as many latin derived words start with kon (kongreso, kontraŭ)
synonyms, picking different words, if a word holds different meanings
false friends in other languages (tago = day - instead of deo*, dio = god, bona = good)
This makes Esperanto a more disambiguating language in some respects. It is not one hundred percent perfect, ŭato (= Watt) was (unsuccessfully) proposed to disambiguate from vato (= cotton wool). Or plumo = (1) pen (skribilo), (2) feather.
Homography should not happen in Esperanto: different pronunciations for the same spelling. However related are:
The rare letter/sound ĥ that often was reformed to k: ĥemio = kemio = chemistry; both forms valid.
The suffix -uj: franco = Frenchman, Francujo / Francio = France. This suffix was alienated as -ij* would be a phonetically too ambiguous combination for usage in Esperanto. However later in history an -i reform introduced a more "international" form, with its own problems.
The term homonym is usually used for words that are spelt the same and pronounced the same, and i think this is what is intended here. Homographs are spelt the same but pronounced differently and homophones are pronounced the same but spelt differently. Both of these shouldn't occur in Esperanto as there is an agreed pronunciation for each. However, to answer the question about homographs, which is clearly a part of the answer:
Various homonyms have been suggested already.
It is a feature of Esperanto, due to the origin of its lexis, that a lot of people know some of the words from their first language and there is always a temptation to pronounce these in the way more similar to that language. That means that wherever there are homonyms they may end up as homographs. To take vato as an example, people may pronounce this as in their first language, even if they are meant to pronounce it the same as the word meaning "cotton wool*.
The words plaĝo & strando both mean beach. Another example is kruro & gambo for leg. See this question. Plaĝo is from French plage. My guess is strando comes from the Norwegian word stranden meaning 'bay'. EDIT: According to wiktionary strand is from the Old English word for shore/seashore. Norwegian is a Germanic language, so stranden may have come from strand.
This is synonymy, not homonymy.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.846188 | 2018-02-14T08:22:03 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/292",
"authors": [
"4goettma",
"Federico Poloni",
"Jack",
"JustOneMan",
"Lourenço Dias Amador",
"MonadMania",
"QWriter",
"Quinn_Quinn",
"Radovan Garabík",
"Rodrigo Biffi",
"SanSolo",
"Shahriar1",
"Sparksbet",
"b a",
"bb94",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2663",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2668",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2669",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2744",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2745",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/395",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4422",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4424",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/58",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/973",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/974",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/975",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/976",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/985",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/990",
"mattdm",
"msh210"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
8 | "Turing-completeness" in conlangs
Programming languages & programs are often said to be Turing complete when it's possible to simulate any Turing machine with it.
I'm now designing a constructed language for my game and I want everything to be possible to say in it. How can I know if the language is "Turing complete", that is possible to say/describe everything using it? What would be the requirements for it? What words does the language need to have to be able to speak in it?
For now, everything I thought about:
It's possible to describe the past, the present and the future (ex. "I bought a car", "I'm buying a car", "I will buy a car")
It's possible to describe something (words?) (ex. "The cat is red")
It's possible to describe nearby area/terrain (ex. "There is a tree")
It's possible to describe plans (ex. "I want to buy a car")
Any more ideas?
I don't really understand your question: do you want how to prove Turing Completeness from grammatical feature like past or future? Or do you want to know how to make a Turing Complete language in general? For this latter case, it's trivially easy: just have an "if-then-else" condition and a mean to record information (e.g. your speaker in a conversation), or implement the SKI calculus, which is minimalist and so quasi cost-less
@prosopopee This site is not about programming languages and I'm not about asking how to check if a programming language is Turing complete
It has been said that languages differ less in what they can say than in what they must say: some grammars require you to specify (e.g.) the sex of the speaker, or whether an assertion is based on experience or hearsay, while other grammars let these things go unmentioned.
The best parallel for Turing completeness in human languages is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The NSM proposes that there is a limited set of basic semantic concepts which all human languages have, and which are not reducible to other concepts. They call these "semantic primes", because you combine them to get all other meanings, and because they can't be broken down. The list of primes, currently numbering 65, is a work in progress as new primes are proposed and evaluated, but after over 45 years of work on the theory the list has proven to be very reliable and new primes are only rarely proposed.
The NSM is a good guide therefore for judging whether a conlang is "complete" - whether it would be as capable for expressing human thought as any natural language. If a conlang has vocabulary items (they can be words, affixes, or phrases) for each of the semantic primes then I would judge it to be complete.
A language doesn't require grammatical structures specifically for expressing something to express it.
In Chinese, there aren't separate future and past tenses. At the same time, it's possible to describe the past, the present and the future. Auxiliary verbs like
要 yào "to want, to be going to" and many others can be used to describe what one would use the future tense for in English.
Grammatical constructs like "but" aren't necessary to convey meaning. We can use words like "caveat", "unfortunately" or "I'm afraid that" instead.
Languages reflect their culture. You should make your game's language reflect the culture that speaks it. If they value respect, add lots of ways of expressing deference, like Japanese.
If you went back in time to 1700s England and attempted to describe the different forms of RNA Polymerase, they would not have a robust understanding of what you meant.
A language is a shared context between the speaker and the listener. The common context allows them to communicate some subset of thoughts the human mind is capable of to each other. No language can communicate every thought- some languages have much less room for ambiguity than English, for example.
A good example is trying to communicate colors to a colorblind alien race. You can teach them about the human optical system all you want, but they will still not understand the sensation of color.
If you went back in time to 1700s England and attempted to describe the different forms of RNA Polymerase, they would not have a robust understanding of what you meant.: I don't think that's true. The language to describe and/or develop a concept of RNA existed back then: As we found it in the future, all materia is made of small discrete units of matter, each bound to .... While it's tough to find the point where to start, and even tougher to inject plausability, logically speaking, the tools existed. Even moreso, given we talk about it today, a path to this language must have existed
Let's first take note that no actual Turing-complete machine has ever been built, nor can one ever be built. Modern computers are good enough approximations for most purposes, but they are in reality just very large finite state machines. A true Turing machine requires infinite storage space.
The infinite storage space of the Turing machine model is mirrored in the (computationally equivalent) lambda calculus by the capacity to define an infinite number of arbitrarily-named variables. This suggests a natural connection to human languages: the potentially-infinite set of variables in lambda calculus corresponds to the set of words in a human language, while human grammars correspond to the reduction rules of lambda calculus. Transferring that back to the Turing machine model, the infinite storage tape of a Turing machine corresponds to the potential vocabulary of a human language, while the state transition rules correspond to a grammar.
So, the first thing you need to make a human language "Turing complete"--capable of referring to or describing anything that can be referred to or described--is an infinite vocabulary! That's clearly impossible, but like real computers approximate Turing machines, we can approximate a "Turing complete conlang" simply by ensuring there is some way to create new lexical items--either strictly by as-needed de-novo coinage, or oligosynthesis, or whatever other word-formation techniques you like--and then abstract away from the vocabulary and looking at the rules for how that vocabulary is used.
Continuing the analogy, the fact that there are two such radically different formulations for computation that are nevertheless provably identical in expressive power (the lambda calculus and Turing machine--and, in fact, even more different formalisms than that, like the SKI combinator calculus, NAND machines and the One Instruction Set Computer, etc.) suggests that there may not be any single simplest set of grammar constructs that make an abstract language "complete".
Empirically, however, if you put stock in David Gil's work on so-called IMA (Isolating-Monocategorial-Associative) language, the only necessary and sufficient requirement for effective human communication (or as he puts it, enough grammar "to sail a boat") is the existence of a generic "association operator"--a way to say "the things represented by these two sub-phrases are related somehow"--and literally everything else can be handled by pragmatics.
So, you need the ability to introduce whatever words you find that you need in a given situation, and you need at least one operator that can specify arbitrary relations between things (e.g., the generic English preposition "of")--which could have a surface expression as simple as juxtaposition. Everything else is sugar, that just makes figuring out the pragmatic details easier.
I think the infinite memory of a Turing Machine is more like the ability to say infinite words.
A language communicates ideas. If the set of ideas communicable by your language is large enough that it is adequate for any situation in your game, then it's good enough. No language is able to communicate all possible human thoughts; some conlangs (e.g. Ithkuil) try to expand the set of ideas that it can convey, but it is still not totally encapsulating.
Another thing to think about is conflation. For example, Toki Pona may be effective at communicating a wide range of ideas, but it often conflates or simplifies concepts (the lack of words for specific numbers being an obvious example of this).
"No language is able to communicate all possible human thoughts" All human languages should be able to express all thoughts, just not necessarily well or efficiently.
Language is reactive not proactive. No language should be expected to speak the ideas of humanity from 400,000 years in the future before the fact.
Think:
What features does a language you understand fluently have. Does your language contain that?
For example:
In English, we get plurals: apple , apples.
Does your language contain a way to use plurals?
In English, we have exceptions to cover things that feel incomplete, or "out of place": James's but James' We have leaves not leafs
Does your language contain exceptions to make your language feel "complete" and "tidy"?
it's up to you to think of other examples, but I think that these were some good guidelines to follow.
-1, this is a way of creating relexes, though: Chinese and Japanese get on just fine without marking for plurals, but English lacks the handy honorifics and topicalisation in Japanese.
Wrong: Chinese uses them, just in a different form 你,你們 @Darkgamma
I am well aware of 我们, 你们, 朋友们, and furthermore the likes of 这些, but these are not a productive system. The same happens in Japanese with some irregulars like 人々, and with pronouns like 私たち; these do not really constitute a grammatical system of plurality marking.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.846789 | 2018-02-06T20:16:49 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/8",
"authors": [
"Andreas Bergskaug",
"Anton Sherwood",
"Darkgamma",
"David Delavari",
"EngrStudent",
"Forral",
"Martin Schröder",
"MilkyWay90",
"Nick Craver",
"RedClover",
"Sebastian Mach",
"Taryn",
"Tsela",
"Xetrov",
"anonymous2",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1051",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1217",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/135",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/136",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1482",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/18",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/19",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/20",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/207",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/24",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/297",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/361",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/37",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/414",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/418",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5027",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/62",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/8",
"martin_joerg",
"mklcp",
"twiz",
"user3526"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
637 | Why is Romanian not a control language for Interlingua?
IALA Interlingua is a naturalistic romance-based conlang. There are six control languages (primary: English, French, Italian, and Spanish/Portuguese counted as one language "Iberian"; secondary: German and Russian) to determine the vocabulary of Interlingua. Romanian is not a control language.
Are there any statements (e.g., by the IALA or by Alexander Gode) why Romanian is not a control language of Interlingua?
I cannot find any statements by Gode or the IALA, but given that Interlingua is very VERY predominantly Western Romance, it seems likely Romanian was excluded due to the amount of influence the Balkan Sprachbund has had on it.
You cant choose every language so he chose some and left out others.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.847508 | 2018-05-21T14:06:17 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/637",
"authors": [
"Gabriel Tellez",
"Sparksbet",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3628",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
446 | Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
Are there known cases of borrowing of words from a constructed language into a natural language?
Words constructed arbitrarily in a natural language don't count here. For example, the Estonian word relv "weapon, firearm" coined in the 20th century (probably influenced by English revolver) wouldn't count.
I'm assuming language names do not count, even if the orthography is modified slightly?
Why not? The example of Danish volapyk is perfectly cromulent, IMO. It should of course function as a word in the language and not just a label to denote the respective conlang.
What about set phrases, like "valar morghulis" for example?
... when the set phrase really has escaped the narrower context of the fictional work it comes from, yes.
Do derivations count? Portuguese has esperantista - enthusiast or practicioner of Esperanto - for instance.
But language names are boring.
Does use in names count? The Elvish word palantír (literally far-seer) has been the name of at least two businesses.
Danish has borrowed the word Volapük (spelt volapyk in Danish) from the conlang of the same name, however unlike in the source where it means "world language", in Danish is has come to have the meaning "nonsense, unintellegible garbage", as in
Det er det rene volapyk! "It's all Greek to me (lit. it is the pure volapük)".
Esperanto uses Volapukaĵo to mean nonsense. (Tio estas Volapukaĵo.)
@kiamlaluno - thankfully, neither Esperanto nor Volapuk are languages with an army...
Used also in French, I believe.
The verb "to grok", having been coined by Robert Heinlein for his Novel Stranger in a Strange Land has gained significant popularity and is used with the same meaning as in the original language.
I am however not sure whether this meets the criteria of coming from a constructed language: To my knowledge the martians' language is clearly stated to be a full fledged language inside universe of the book, but "to grok" is one of the few (if not only) word to be given explicitly and there does not seem to be a full-fledged grammar or lexicon anywhere.
See also [1]; [2]
The most common one I can think of is yahoo, which was the name for brutish humans in the language of the Houyhnhnms from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The words Lilliputian and Brobdignagian have also entered the language from the same source, as have big-endian and little-endian, supposedly calques from the fictional Lilliputian language. Utopia is the endonym for the island nation of Thomas More’s novel, although it’s derived from Greek roots. Several of the portmanteau words Lewis Caroll had his characters from Wonderland or his other fictional settings say have become real words, for example, chortled. These might be considered words from an invented dialect. Munchkin, from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, has become both a dictionary word for a small person and a slang word for an immature powergamer. (Arguably, Oz has become a nickname for Australia.) Robot is another common word that might qualify: it was a trademark in the play Rossum’s Universal Robots, derived from Czech roots. None of these, however, were ever fleshed out into complete conlangs.
Another well-known example is Idaho, a made-up name that was passed off as a word from some Native language that supposedly meant, “gem of the mountains” even though the Natives did not mine or cut gems. As far as we know, a man named William Craig just invented it as a hoax. This was originally proposed as a name for what is now Colorado, but voted down in Congress after a blistering speech by Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, who said, “I do not believe it is an Indian word, [...] No Indian tribe in the nation has that word [...] It is a corruption certainly, a counterfeit, and ought not to be adopted.” No one has any idea where the word Oregon comes from, either, but certainly not any language native to the Pacific Northwest, so it’s only fair that Lane relented in 1863 when the name was re-used for the entirely different territory that still bears it today. There are many other stories of made-up foreign-sounding names becoming official, including Plano, Texas, which does not really mean flatland in Spanish.
To my surprise, I can’t think of a good example from Tolkien: Hobbit, for example, has become a name for the extinct species Homo Floresensis, but within the conceit of the novel, Tolkien used it as the translation from his conlang into English. Hobbit is an obscure Old English word that had been used occasionally before. Tolkien reveals in the appendix to Return of the King that it was an English calque for the actual endonym Kuduk in his conlang, meaning Hole-Dweller. Similarly, most of the other words in Tolkien that sound exotic were revived from Old English as “translations” from his conlangs, along with the obsolete plural forms elves and dwarves that he personally brought back. He might have a strong claim that the word orc today brings to mind his orch, translated from his conlangs into English as orc, but which is nothing like the sea-monster named Orc in the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, so the word should just be considered a homophone. The most familiar words from his conlangs themselves, not translated into English, would be the inscription on the One Ring. That is, unless you consider the English translations in the body of the text a conlang!
In Star Trek, the writers originally borrowed names from Western mythology, like Vulcan and Romulan, and later on, when they developed more serious conlangs for those species, came up with the justification that they didn’t really call themselves that in their own languages at all. However, loghaD gives the example of Qapla', from Klingon, occasionally used by SF geeks to mean “Success!” in English, although it would not be familiar to most native speakers. I’ve heard geeks drop words and phrases from many sources about as often, like grok from Robert Heinlein’s Martian and Bah-weep-graaaaagnah wheep nini bong from Transformers: The Movie.
Kryptonite, now used as a generic word for an Achilles’ heel, was retconned into the alien endonym Krypton, a combination of the names of the Adam and Eve-figures of the alien species, Kryp and Tonn, plus the scientific suffix -ite. That it’s a homonym of a different chemical element in English is, in-universe, a coincidence. This is of course from DC Comics’ Superman.
Murry Gell-Mann has said he took the word quark from a nonsense poem in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, where it could have meant many different things at once.
There are several other made-up words in science fiction that have become at least somewhat widely-known. Ansible, by Ursula K. LeGuin, has been borrowed by many other works of science fiction. Zeerust, from Douglas Adams’ The Meaning of Laff (which gave geographic names joke definitions) is actually used by some writers, particularly at TV Tropes, in the sense he gave it: the particular kind of datedness of something that tried to be futuristic way back when. Morlocks, from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, appears in some dictionaries as a generic term for feral people. At least one college gave freshmen an orientation course called “Finding your Patronus,” after the spell from Harry Potter.
It’s anybody’s guess where Biblical and other mythological names that have become dictionary words, such as Eden, cherubic, Semitic or siren, came from, but one possibility is that some were made up from whole cloth at some point.
Unless you are an especially fundamentalist member of the Latter-Day Saints movement (not the same thing as a member of the FLDS!), you consider Joseph Smith’s Reformed Egyptian a conlang that gave us such words as Deseret. If any example I mentioned is from a scripture you believe to be literally true, I respect your religious freedom.
One edge case: a barbarian originally meant someone who didn’t speak Greek, and who sounded to the Greeks like he was saying “bar-bar-bar.” There’s a joke like this in what might be considered a work of ancient SF, Aristophanes’ The Birds, where a foreign god speaks only in nonsense syllables that the picaresque heroes pretend to translate, and although none of them became words, the calque Cloudcuckooland did.
All of those are words in English, but you asked about loanwords from any conlang to any natural language. Someone else brought up the conlang Esperanto, which now has native speakers (although I’m not aware of any loanwords from Esperanto in natural languages other than the name of the language itself). Some other answers on this site have suggested that Classical Sanskrit or Modern Hebrew might be considered conlangs of a sort, which in the process of turning a natural language into a literary language more like what its compilers wanted it to be, created a new one. One might then bring several others up, such as Old Church Slavonic, Indonesian, Katharevousa, Guarani or Bokmål, although I certainly do not have the expertise to debate how to classify any of them.
At the risk of sounding too obvious, the word Esperanto has been borrowed into many natural languages, with the meaning of "universal neutral way of communication". See e.g. phrases like "mathematics is the Esperanto of natural sciences" etc.
Might want to also add how it is modified in some orthographies, French has Espéranto, IIRC.
I'm not sure if this would be considered a borrowing with that meaning, but rather a simple metaphor -- saying "souffle is the Dark Souls of baking" doesn't mean "Dark Souls" is a lexical item meaning "really challenging accomplishment" or anything.
The word Qapla' ("success") is listed as an English word on Wiktionary, which in essence means that it is regarded as an English loanword from Klingon. It has sparked some debate, but it has survived Wiktionary's verification process twice (once in 2007 and again in 2008), even after a specific policy limiting words from fictional universes was instituted.
I wonder if the Klingon insult petaQ may also attain a similar status at some point. Although hardly commonplace, I've seen people use it in social media, without reference to Klingons or Star Trek, and as a part of otherwise English sentences (rather than just as an isolated phrase, as is usually the case with Qapla'). They usually spell it differently, however, with variations including p'tak, p'takh, patak, p'tok and others.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.847614 | 2018-03-08T15:46:18 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/446",
"authors": [
"Adalynn",
"Anton Sherwood",
"IMP1",
"Luís Henrique",
"Sebastian Pilgaard",
"Shootforthemoon",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sparksbet",
"avpaderno",
"beroal",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/130",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1438",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1439",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1440",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1441",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1442",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1450",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1467",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/177",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/182",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/326",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"karthik",
"stopkillinggames.com",
"surfmadpig",
"user1442"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
465 | Use of string reversion in conlangs
I came across the Esperantido Universal where reversion of stems (e.g., mega "big" ⁒ gema "small", -a is the adjective ending) is used to denote antonymy. Are there other conlangs using this unusual and un-naturalistic device?
Hmm interesting. Limited reversal, called metathesis, does occur in many languages and sometimes with a grammatical meaning, but not whole words.
I thought there was a section in Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit setting forth a scheme in which the forms of a verb are distinguished (in part) by permutation; but can't now find it.
Ah here it is. Only the vowels move about. http://www.zompist.com/kebreni.htm#Verbs
Solresol actually reverses the syllable order of a word to denote an opposite meaning, though this occurrence is inconsistent through the creator's published dictionary. For example, fala means good, but lafa means bad, and falaredo means accessible, but dorelafa means inaccessible.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.848410 | 2018-03-13T17:23:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/465",
"authors": [
"Akhil Naidu",
"Anton Sherwood",
"Daemon Beast",
"Gary Lasko",
"Hášíl Páůďýál",
"Marianna Amirkhanyan",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1489",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1490",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1491",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1492",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1509",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
479 | Features of unlearnable languages
In this article about miniature artificial languages on motherboard.com experiments are described where children learn carafully designed miniature artificial languages. It is also said that children give up on learning "unlearnable" languages. A mentioned miniature artificial language is named "Sillyspeak" or "Sillysprochen".
What features of languages make them unlearnable? Is the full documentation of Sillyspeak available?
Possibly not about conlangs, but better in Linguistics SE, as the answer sought for is about language acquisition, which falls into the domain of linguistics more than conlangs.
Indeed I can ask it over there, too. But I wanted to introduce the concept of miniature artificial languages here, and this site also lacks question activity.
Fair enough. Such invented languages are often referred to as "experimental languages", and Sillyspeak seems to be just such a thing!
If you search for the researchers mentioned in the article, you can find some of their research papers. In those, they describe their methodology. In one paper that I looked at briefly, for example, they mention that they varied the consistency by making the placement of determiners random. (This is actually also mentioned in the Motherboard article).
Their research seems to be focused on finding out how children can learn languages, and what universal features of languages there are, so they up the difficulty of their experimental mini-languages by using rare elements, such as OSV word order (most (Western) languages use SVO). Discovery that some mini-languages are unlearnable is thus a side-effect of pushing the limits as to what are possible human languages. From a cursory glance at several papers I'd think that you can make a language 'unlearnable' if you add some random variation and choose a lot of rare grammatical features.
PS: in the Motherboard article they actually give a reason why no documentation of Sillyspeak is available: they want to avoid it 'escaping' into the wild, as its purpose is to be a completely unknown language to the subjects of the experiments.
Original Fith is a stack-based conlang (LIFO, reverse polish notation) and considered to be unspeakable in real-time since in order to speak good Fith you need to be able to remember more parts and recurse deeper than what is practically possible for a human. It also has a full set stack operators like "swap the order of the two last stack items" and *rotate the top three stack items".
I've seen a paper that children have a lot of trouble learning nonconservative determiners.
For instance, "every" is a conservative determiner because every dog is brown is equivalent to every dog is a brown dog – objects that are brown but not a dog don't count toward the truth of the sentence. In contrast, if we define equi dogs are brown as "the number of dogs is equal to the number of brown objects", then equi would be nonconservative because the sentence above is different from equi dogs are brown dogs.
(Interestingly, my conlang Jbl has nonconservative determiners; for instance, glsh is the equi mentioned above.)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.848647 | 2018-03-19T09:13:18 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/479",
"authors": [
"Duncan",
"Ergative Man",
"Kinetic Rootkit",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Stella Fabe",
"elemtilas",
"fukanchik",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1539",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1540",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1541",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1546",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
116 | Are there conlangs using constructed sounds?
Usually, constructed languages of all kind (naturalistic or not) draw their sounds from existing natural languages.
Are there conlangs with constructed sounds, i.e., sounds that do not occur in natural languages (or are at least very rare in natural languages)?
@ChrisF If you have an answer, please post it below. Comments do not have the feature necessary to vet or edit whatever someone might say here, so we do not use comments for answers or partial answers.
Vernor Vinge's story “Conquest by Default” features aliens who can voluntarily close their noses, allowing a stop ‘p̃’ and a fricative ‘ṽ’. (When it was first published, those characters were not readily available, so they were replaced with ‘%’ and ‘#’ iirc. I hope some reprint will restore the proper letters!)
Click consonants are rare in natlangs, but rather popular in conlangs, though despite this, given the existence of things like !Xóõ reality is stranger than most fiction in this specific regard. Language-game/conlang(?) turned actual spoken register Damin had several phonemes not seen in (other?) natural languages, such as an ingressive glotally interrupted unvoiced lateral fricative /ɬ↓ʔ/, an egressively released bilabial click /ʘ↑/ and stuttered bilabial trill /ʙ\ʙ/.
Searching for the various hypothetical combinations as well as ext-IPA sounds on google turns up a fair few instances of conlangs using sounds such as percussives, implosive fricatives, velopharyngeal and nareal fricatives, etc.
Outside of these humanly-possible, but non-attested outside of disordered speech phonemes, some languages made up for non-humans include sounds that are impossible for humans to make, such as this one spoken by a race of giants, including a special type of whistle-like sounds, or this one made for creatures with bird-like anatomy, differentiating between 4 different types of contraction of muscles in the throat overlaid with 5 different pitch contours.
There is a hypothesis that Proto-Human (a hypothetical first language from which all other human languages are monogenetically related) may have been a click language, which would actually make click languages more "natural" than non-click languages.
There's also the brilliant masterpiece kay(f)bop(t), which features
the dextral lateral click (a click made on the right side of the mouth)
the sinistral lateral click (a click made on the left side of the mouth)
the manual stop (a clap, which may only occur in morphemes pertaining to penguins)
the faciomanual click (a facepalm, which may only occur in function words)
(note that these aren't actually official names but come from the Conlang Critic video on kay(f)bop(t))
These are already stretching it, so I don't think kay(f)bop(t)'s phonemic hats could be counted as "sounds" per se.
(And yes, this is a joke language, but I couldn't resist a chance to mention it.)
It is probably challenging to distinguish dextral and sinistral clicks acoutically.
Yeah, I'd call the last two the bimanual percussive and the faciomanual percussive, respectively.
In Ithkuil, a geminate /h/ can be produced as a bidental fricative, a sound which is only attested in a single dialect of a single natural language.
hh
The geminated version of Ithkuil h is pronounced in either of two ways: (1) as a “bi-dental” fricative, in that the jaw is completely closed and the upper and lower teeth are in near-contact along their entire length; the resulting sound is somewhat similar in timbre to both a voiceless interdental fricative (as in English thin) as well as the English f-sound, however there is absolutely no contact by the tongue with the teeth or gums when pronouncing this sound; no IPA equivalent; or (2) as the voiceless pharyngeal fricative found in Arabic (spelled ح)and in various Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages. This second allophone should not be employed if the resulting pharyngealization distorts the timbre of the adjacent vowels to the extent that their place of articulation changes (e.g., the vowel û being made to sound like ô).
Didn't know that! To that list we can add Queranarran, which also has the bidental fricative. I'm not sure I'd consider it a "constructed" sound or not. I mean, it's a real sound and everything...
I recall some years ago, someone submitted a greeting for Conlangery that was a bunch of insect sounds. According to the conlanger it is meaningful, though I don’t vet greetings too thoroughly.
Also, in my earliest conlang, Yeltax, there is a harmonic tone, with two simultaneous pitches. It’s impossible for humans to produce in normal speech, as the aliens who speak Yeltax have a syrinx, which makes two base frequencies possible. (Note: I made that before I learned any phonetics, and now I think I’d want to think about the acoustics here to distinguish this from the harmonics we use for vowels.)
In general, though, most conlangers don’t make up too many sounds. Many of the gaps in the IPA chart are physically impossible, and it’s questionable that we’ve missed a major articulator. I think most of the true inventions will be for non-human languages.
Leaving behind sound, though, it could be said that Rikchik has a robust alien phonetics that was invented from scratch. Since the aliens have many tentacles for signing, and a very non humanoid appearance, their signs can’t be related to any of the features of signs in human sign languages. Once again, invented phonetics is probably going to be for aliens.
Old Entish is a possibility, though not really by direct attestation. The Professor says of Old Entish that it is "...slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the loremasters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing" (LotR Appendix F)
It is after all spoken by Ents and Huorns (sentient tree-like beings). Lots of deep, rolling hoomhomming and baruurundillanding, possibly with subsonic undertones.
I am currently working on a conlang making heavy use of:
-Interdentalized sounds, like what @J. Siebeneichler pointed out
-Fully Interdental sounds, where you literally have to bite your tongue
-A Rounded Schwa
-and a plosive that isn't quite a pharyngeal plosive but sounds like it as it requires the speaker to press the back of their tongue directly against the back of their throat.
Given, this language isn't really meant for humans, so many of it's other oddities are downright unusable to humans.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.848934 | 2018-02-07T11:12:54 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/116",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"Jasper",
"Marvin",
"Nicole Sharp",
"Robert Cartaino",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sofia Komarov",
"The Last Remnant",
"aDwarfNamedUrist",
"bb94",
"bjb568",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/265",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/344",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/345",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/346",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/350",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/355",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/363",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/393",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"vylycyn"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
352 | Was Tolkien aware of the Voynich manuscript?
Looking at the Tengwar script designed by Tolkien I feel a certain similarity to the unknown script of the Voynich manuscript: Many characters look very similar to others of the same script, and there is a restricted set of penstrokes used in the characters. Repetition of strokes is used to derive other characters.
So I am wondering whether the Tengwar script could be influenced by the script of the Voynich manuscript. Was Tolkien aware of the Voynich manuscript? Or, to the opposite, was Tengwar already designed before the Voynich manuscript was rediscovered and publically known?
This blog post in German about Tolkien's Elvish scripts does not mention the Voynich manuscript as potential source of inspiration.
Or, to the opposite, was Tengwar already designed before the Voynich manuscript was rediscovered and publically known?
The manuscript was rediscovered in 1912. Tolkien, according to Wikipedia, started developing Elvish in 1910 or 1911... before the Voynich manuscript was rediscovered.
There is at least one claim that he was aware of it, though, although it would have to be after he had already started developing the languages.
This is a transcript of a message sent to the Voynich mailing list, sent November 13, 2002:
Hello
I have "lurked" on this list for a while and finally have a comment to offer, albeit a very insignificant one.
I wonder if the fact that Prof. JRR Tolkien apparently had an interest in (or at least knowledge of) the Voynich Ms has been discussed or indeed is of any interest at all?
The thing is, a nagging feeling that I had once seen the VMs many years ago - long before my recent interest was sparked by that piece in The New Scientist - is resolved. I now recall it - and though the persons concerned having died long since makes my little anecdote mere hearsay and in no way veridical, I thought I'd forward it. An old friend, a retired military man with an amateur interest in codes and cyphers, once showed me a couple of not entirely distinct b&w copies of pages from a curious coded manuscript, which I now realise were a couple of folios of the VMs. I was not especially interested in them at the time, I think, but the reason that the incident made an impression was that he said that they had been given to him by Prof JRR Tolkien. At that time I had just discovered and was very much 'into' Tolkien so I was most envious of my friend's knowing him and pressed for details of the great man, though in the end I never achieved my longed-for personal introduction. So I now wonder if there might be any reference anywhere in the mass of Tolkien papers to our VMs, and is this of any possible slight significance? After all, JRRT knew a great deal about languages and artificial scripts of course and if he was interested enough to make and pass on copies to a friend, he might have devoted some time to the VMs himself. And the Voynichese script does have a Tolkien-ish look to it or vice versa: could it have influenced him?
(this was found through a link from CipherMysteries.com)
However, since his development started before the Voynich manuscript was discovered, I'd say that it's... kinda unlikely that he was inspired by it.
I think the languages are older than the scripts, and Tolkien had another script for the Elvish languages before Tengwar. Great quote, anyway, +1
Did a little googling and you're right, @jknappen, Tolkien used at least two other scripts before Tengwar -- sarati in the late 10s and Valmaric in the early 20s -- with Tengwar not appearing until the late 20s/early 30s. These scripts change and evolve into each other as Tolkien refines them over time, so it's still certainly possible Tolkien saw and was influenced by the Voynich manuscript during the decades he spent developing these scripts.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.849466 | 2018-02-21T11:18:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/352",
"authors": [
"Cesar M",
"Neeku",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sparksbet",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1171",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1174",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
284 | Are there any resources to learn Solresol available in English?
I've been interested in learning Solresol, as the idea of it intrigues me. But I haven't been able to find anything in English to learn it from (the original works on the language are in French, which I don't know).
I checked out sidosi.org, and it shows a couple of links to an English translation of the original grammar of Solresol, but one redirects back to the sidosi.org homepage, and one leads to a message saying the site has been retired from service. Other resources are also linked, and also turn out to be missing.
So are there any resources (preferably online) to learn Solresol from English?
@as4s4hetic If you have an answer, please post it in the 'answer' section below. Thanks.
sidosi.org must have a bug, but they also have another link if you click the [+] and the link that appears (probably as a mirror).
You can find many articles at SiDoSi (sidosi.org)'s resources page or at this tutorial on blogspot. Also, I'd recommend a translation of "The second major book about Solresol, written by the other major contributor to Solresol, Boleslas Gajewski," also at sidosi.org over here.
Note that SiDoSi (sidosi.org)'s resources page has an error that requires you to click the [+] and then the link that appears because the direct links don't work and redirect you. Else see the beta version, without broken links.
Sorry I missed this question. Many of the main links on Sidosi's Resources page are unreliable, but you can view the archived copies by expanding the info box for a resource (click the + to the left of the title), or clicking the "Show/Hide All" link near the top of the page.
Alternatively, there is a beta Resources page that hasn't been widely publicized yet, and it presents the resources in a much better format than before, with no broken links. It's only considered beta because this new version was coded from scratch, and there are a ton of new resources due to be added.
There are still many original French documents that haven't been translated to English (Sudre's book, for example), so the Solresol community as a whole shares in your struggle for English resources. Basically, there still aren't any good English resources for learning Solresol, but hopefully the ones that are available help.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.849748 | 2018-02-12T04:28:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/284",
"authors": [
"A.C",
"BJ Dela Cruz",
"Big Bean",
"ChilliDoughnuts",
"Duncan",
"Gabriel Diego",
"Ohio skateboarder . 7",
"Robert Cartaino",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1483",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1488",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/926",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/927",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/928",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/932",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/942",
"medavox"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
318 | How do Romance-based naturalistic conlangs deal with the different principal parts of a verb?
The Latin verb has four principal parts (e.g., ducere, duco, duxi, ductum) that are sufficient and necessary to create all inflected forms and derived words from it. As far as I know, no naturalistic conlang attempts to preserve the French passé simple and related tempora in other Romance languages; so we can drop this one. Usually, the differences between infinitives and present tense forms are also levelled out by dropping most of the Romance verbal inflections.
This leaves us with two principal parts, one for the infinitive, present tense and past tense, and one for the past participle (or at least for derivations from the past participle, in case that the participle is somehow regularised).
I remember that Edgar de Wahl even went further in his design of Occidental-Interlingue using a device called de Wahl's rule (the description in the Wikipedia differs somewhat from my presentation) in deriving also the infinitive and the present tense stem from the past particple, so his word for "to lead" is ducter. He isn't 100% consequent, but this adds a lot of regularity to his design.
How do other Romance-based conlangs deal with the principal parts?
Hope the expanded answer is more what you're looking for!
I answer first for two of my own invented languages, Kerno and Loucarian. Since the question is now broadened to invented IALs, I choose to add several additional sections: Interlingua, Sabir, Occidental, Romanal, Medial Europan and Lingua Franca Nova. Also, just so one can get a flavour of these languages, I append the Pater Noster in each.
Looking back at some of my old Romance languages, I don't think I paid much attention to the Latin principle parts as a system. As the languages evolve out of Latin and into their more modern selves, the systematic nature might fall apart or accrete new forms.
In Kerno, we can certainly see the survival of at least three principal parts for the regular verbs.
cantam, cantar, cantú (sing)
caru, carer, carú (love)
dormu, dormir, dormú (sleep)
It's not until we meet up with those good old irregular verbs that more principal parts seem to linger:
In the Grammar, there is actually a section that lists the principal parts of the irregular verbs (though for some unknown reason, I didn't call them such):
doc (or doy), dar, dedai, doú
istam, ystar, stetai, ystú
currem, currer, coscorrai (or cocorrai), cursú
llodu, lloder, llosès, llosú
ioc, ir, fu, eú
sentu, sentir, senti, sentú
So, four principal parts surviving.
a Phazeoir Nusteor que bias 'n y ceues;
foreth noef il tew nom;
gouenyes il tew camouils;
foreth fès la teva gouoluntáts
en lâ derra cuomo 'ny ceues;
danos-el osdia le nusteor panèn cuotidièn;
dimeti y nusteor dheuz
cuomo dimitemus ai nusteor dheutoeres;
et ne nus attrayer rhen al tentación,
mays eliveránus des val.
Loucarian takes its inspiration from Sabir and has a similarly reduced verbal conjugation.
amare, amando, amato
clevere, cleviendo, cleveto
ajire, ajiendo, ajito
pejeire, pejiendo, pejito
vidure, videndo, viduto
While not a principal part of the ancestral Reman language, modern Loucarian takes the present/infinitive, progressive/continual & past for its principal parts.
nemet sospeito pôdis IC cata maccareire; etti pejeto IC:
enamverver tim maccareire coudeiere ican:
jenì abba en samayam na
qedd al iccà nomon
sôppere al iccà noummen podeqc festinam
outtato wad al iccà alfas eim en al tir eim en al paradeisiam
cvercare tim adis nasser hotim al jenìm pountim cascoumênem
demetere tim al jenìn nobes eim nas demetere al jenìn namaderam
mire doucere nasser adis peirasmom
mire dê côire tim nasser ad injoudissiam.
Interlingua is an invented Romance IAL. From the I-a grammar article under Verbs, we can see exactly what has been done with Latin's principal parts.
All personal inflexion is stripped off, so there can be no "first principal part" as such. However, the Latin present stem remains largely intact, so the I-a present tense could continue to serve as first principal part.
The infinitive remains distinct.
The old Latin perfect stems have all been obliterated; the I-a past tense is formed upon the Latin imperfect (present stem), so there can be no "third principal part".
The Latin past participle remains in I-a.
One could say the principal parts of an Interlingua verb are:
parla, parlar, parlate
dice, dicer, dicíte
senti, sentir, séntite
Interlingua is not entirely regular as regards its verbal system. There are a few (unofficial) irregulars (thank Goodness!)
The principal parts of esser are:
es, esser, era, essite thus four principal parts.
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.
Sabir (also knows as Mediterranean Lingua Franca) was an actual, natural Romance IAL in use within the Mediterranean Sea basin from the middle ages onwards to about the mid 19th century or so.
It is well known for severe reduction & levelling of morphology in general. There are but two principal parts, both surviving from Latin:
parlar, parlato
fazer, fazeto
sabir, sabito
The present tense, imperative and infinitive are all wrapped within the immutable infinitive; the past and past participle are wrapped up within the old perfect participle.
There are a couple odd forms. For example, in the Pater Noster we find noi volir ki nomi di ti star saluti of which I (having no grammar of the language available) can only imagine to be a past participle of saluer. Why the -i termination and why not "salueto", I don't know. Obviously Sabir was not designed to level all irregularity. It evolved naturally and over a long period of time within a broad geographical region. Oddities are bound to survive / arise.
Padri di noi, ki star in syelo,
noi volir ki nomi di ti star saluti.
Noi volir ki il paisi di ti star kon noi,
i ki ti lasar ki tuto il populo fazer volo di ti
na tera, syemi syemi ki nel syelo.
Dar noi sempri pani di noi di kada jorno,
i skuzar per noi li kulpa di noi,
syemi syemi ki noi skuzar kwesto populo ki fazer kulpa a noi.
Non lasar noi tenir katibo pensyeri,
ma tradir per noi di malu.
Occidental is another invented Romance IAL. I really don't know much about it beyond a couple articles I've read online. Even so, we can easily pick out the remaining principal parts from a good sample text:
da, dar, dat
inducte, inducter, inductet
veni, venir, venit
As with Interlingua and Sabir, the morphology of person is eliminated, leaving only a present stem. Also, the perfect stem itself is eliminated. This leaves us three principal parts.
Patre nor, qui es in li cieles,
mey tui nómine esser sanctificat,
mey tui regnia venir,
mey tui vole esser fat,
qualmen in li cieles talmen anc sur li terre.
Da nos hodie nor pan omnidial,
e pardona nor débites,
qualmen anc noi pardona nor debitores.
E ne inducte nos in tentation,
ma libera nos de lu mal.
Romanal was another invented Romance IAL. I have again no reference grammar, but a perusal of a text shows some interesting morphology.
das, dar, dat
Forms like ne nos inducas and dimitta speak of the survival of Latin negative imperative and possibly imperative forms as well. Romanal is well worth the visit for the spiffy verbal conjugation alone!
Patro nostri,
qui est en cieles,
sanctificat estas nomine tui,
advenias regne tui,
fias volite tui,
sicut en ciele, et en terre.
Il pane nostri quotidiani das ad nos hodie,
et dimittas nostri debites,
sicut et nus dimitta debitantos nostri,
et ne nos inducas in tentatione,
sed liberas nos ex male.
Medial Europan was another invented Romance IAL.
It would seem, from the given text, that all distinctions of conjugation have been reduced to but one. We can see that the present tense and infinitive are distinct.
pintit, pintir
Un englo, un franco ed un deuto havit le taske pintir kamele. Le englo voyajit ad Afrike for studiir le kamele in tisui doimie. Le franco gidit al zoologi jarden, ed le deuto pintit on kamelo ex le profunde de sui psyke.
Lingua Franca Nova was also inspired by Sabir. Its verbal system is the most reduced respecting the old Latin principal parts. That is to say, there are no principal parts, the bare verb stem being used for all tenses, in conjunction with temporal particles.
leva
come
boli
Nosa Padre ci es en la sielo,
Ta ce tua nom es santida.
Ta ce tua rena veni.
Ta ce tua vole aveni
sur la tera como en la sielo.
Dona oji nosa pan dial a nos,
e pardona nosa detas,
como nos pardona nosa detores,
e no condui nos a tenta,
ma libri nos de malia.
NB: I deliberately left out Esperanto / Ido because, while their vocabulary is largely paneuropean, its grammar is not Romance. (I've read several sources that claim it is closer to Slavic grammatically.) Also, I leave out Novial for the same reason, only its grammar is much closer to that of English.
Great, a Romance altlang with a passé simple (here just called "perfect") including some nice reduplicating stems.
Something about reduplicating perfect on [latin.se]: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/606/which-verbs-have-reduplicated-perfect-stems
What about the Latin verbs in long e -ere (like movere, videre, docere)? Having an example of one of them would be nice. habere is probably not a good canditate, allthough it was perfectly regular in classical Latin it became irregular in modern Romance.
I think this is a little out of the scope of the question, which focuses on principal parts. That said, what actually happens to them will largely depend on the design parameters of the invented language in question. A quick shufty through the I-a dictionary shows friger, moner, mitter, vider, dicer: all -ē/ě- verbs have gone to the second conjugation. The situation in Kerno seems to shift -ě- verbs to the second or third conjugation somewhat indiscriminately: biběre > beveoir but dicěre > decker & morděre > morder & vidēre > wezer.
While international auxiliary conlangs based on Romance languages, such as the ones you're thinking of, typically get rid of most of the verbal conjugation, there are in fact naturalistic Romance-based conlangs that retain a multiplicity of verbal forms on par with French or Italian.
There is no reason why the evolution of the actual Romance languages can't be imitated by a conlanger if they so wish.
An example would be the Siezan language (created by a French conlanger that goes under the pseudonym "Legion" on the Internet), meant to represent what French would be if it were a bit more similar to the other major Romance languages. If you look at the section on verbs, you can find examples such as devre 'must, to have to' having dúi as its "indicative perfective" (or passé simple if you will), which correspond to the Latin principal parts debere and debui respectively. (You can compare this to the retention of Latin quaero ~ quaesivi in Spanish: quiero ~ quise.)
(Latin > Siezan)
debere > devre
debui > dúi
debuisti > dús
debuit > dú
debuimus > dumos
debuistis > dustes
debuerunt > duront
Note that, just as in the real Romance languages, new principal parts can also be formed elsewhere. The future form of Siezan falir 'to fail' has the irregular stem fodr- (fodré, fodrás, fodrá...) instead of the expected falir- (faliré, falirás, falirá...).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.849971 | 2018-02-16T16:56:54 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/318",
"authors": [
"Captain Cranium",
"JBH",
"Jens",
"Karen Hovhannisyan",
"Mario Quempez",
"Mikhail V",
"MoholyNagy",
"Nimesh Neema",
"Philippe Pons",
"Ruka",
"SEED Scans",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"angussidney",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1057",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1058",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1059",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1079",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1080",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1101",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1152",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1156",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1158",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1159",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1166",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1167",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1168",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1232",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1407",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"igordcard",
"qdinar",
"xcy7e"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
373 | Greek-based altlangs
The Wikipedia article on Artistic languages says in its current version
What if Greek civilization had gone on to thrive without a Roman Empire, leaving Greek and not Latin to develop several modern descendants?
But in the ongoing text no Greek based altlangs are mentioned.
What are examples of Greek based altlangs?
TAKE is Το Ἄνευ Κλίσι Ἑλληνική / Greek Without Inflexions. According to Ray Brown, "Graeca sine flexione" ... (considers) what Greek might be like if stripped of its inflexions in the manner similar to Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione... It should be pointed out that although Giuseppe Peano produced 'Latino sine flexione' as an international auxiliary language, I am NOT making a similar proposal for ΤΑΚΕ!
Outidic is a kind of IAL for the learned, statesmen & merchants alike.
These are both by Ray Brown of Conlang-L.
Èskova Linga
Engadinese is a Greek-Romansch graftlang.
Atlo Greek appears now to be entirely lost.
Rhaetian
There may be others...
Pity the TAKE site seems to be down; but if TAKE was inspired by Latino Sine Flexione, it'd have been an auxlang, not an altlang...
Ah, turns out it's a fictional counterpart to Latino sine Flexione, so it's an artlang auxlang.
@NickNicholas It's from an alternate history in which Peano worked from Greek?
@NickNicholas -- Definitely NOT an auxlang!
After a bit of searching, the only remotely Greek-based altlang I've found is Eressilian, which is mentioned only in the above Reddit post. It claims to be the result of the evolution of the Hittite language, after mixing with other languages in the region surrounding Asia Minor. These languages (notably Persian, Arabic, and Greek) mainly contributed loanwords, which were then modified and incorporated. Unfortunately, little information is given, and there's no substantial vocabulary list. The only supposedly "Greek" word given is adelphotés, which - matching sentences word for word - seems to have been turned into elelpulush. I haven't been able to determine its meaning or origin.
Some notes on Eressilian:
The Hittite language was an Anatolian language, which may or may not be "daughter languages" in the Indo-European family. A competing hypothesis is that it is instead a sister language family, developing separately, rather than a branch.
The modern Greek language is a Hellenic language, definitely Indo-European; Persian is also Indo-European, an Indo-Iranian language. Arabic, on the other hand, is an Afroasiatic language, not Indo-European. This means that there any purely Hellenic influence will be reduced.
Eressilian's notable loss of grammatical gender is likely a Persian influence, not Greek.
In short, Greek influence on Eressilian is largely only through loanwords, and is not shown in grammatical structures. It's there, but it's minor.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.851165 | 2018-02-26T17:13:20 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/373",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"Critta Kill",
"Jose Angel Sanchez",
"Lito",
"Nick Nicholas",
"Zuzka Houšková",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1237",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1238",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1239",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1240",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1241",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1246",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2691",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/435",
"lirtosiast",
"silver",
"user1237"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
517 | International Auxiliary Language created by a Japanese person
I remember some facts about an international auxiliary language (IAL) created by a Japanese person, but unfortunately I both forgot the name of the inventor and the name of the IAL. Can someone help me out?
Features that I can remember:
Created by a Japanese around the turn of 19th to the 20th century
Based on European languages (mostly latinate vocabulary)
Having a schematic and simplified inflection
When the author became aware of Esperanto he dumped his own IAL project and became one of the first Japanese Esperantists
I want to know the name of the author and (if available) the name of the language. Additional information is always welcome!
I have found the language again, it is named Zilengo and it was designed by OKA Asajiro in 1890. Apparently not much information about the language is preserved.
Assuming that the OP misremembered a few facts, the language may be Babm, invented by the Japanese philosopher Rikichi [Fuishiki] Okamoto (1885–1963) and first published in 1962. It uses the Latin script as a syllabary (which is not the same thing as using a latinate vocabulary) and has "some degree of analytic inflection".
I thought of Babm too, but its vocabulary is completely schematic, and the date is wrong.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.851423 | 2018-04-03T10:26:10 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/517",
"authors": [
"Nick Nicholas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/435"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
268 | Do any conlangs have verbs that change form depending on the object?
Are there any examples of constructed languages that have verbs with different forms depending on the object of the verb?
Especially after reading Circeus's response, I wonder if your question's wording couldn't improved to specify more clearly what you mean by "change", etc.? It seems like a very broad & general question!
Yes.
I am not familiar with any “well-known” conlangs, but a quick search reveals that Klingon verbs inflect for both subject and object. This is a phenomenon called polypersonal agreement and it is very common in natural languages, and so it is only expected that it would also crop up in several conlangs. Among them, for example also my own, for which I just yesterday put up a puzzle that involves decoding the verbal system here.
I cannot currently think of any examples of a language which inflects for only the object, but it’s a rather low-hanging fruit and I cannot imagine that it has never been done before.
CALS lists 9 conlangs where the verb only agrees with P in transitives, 20 where it can agree with either A or P, and a further 127 where the verb agrees with both A and P, though of the ones listed, the only really well-known one is Klingon, which Adarian also mentioned. Including Mark Rosenfelder's langs (which aren't in CALS) in the at least relatively well-known bucket, Wede:i and Old Skourene both inflect the verb for both A and P to different extents (though note that Old Skourene works on an ergative basis).
Of the languages that mark P but not A, most of them are listed as having ergative agreement and so presumably agree with S as well, however two of them, 'Yemels and Snahhian are listed as accusative, and so presumably has the verb agree only with P.
Interestingly enough, despite conlangers often liking to solve problems by throwing affixes at them, a complete lack of personal agreement is actually overrepresented in CALS, when compared to WALS.
Note on how to read that last graphic: the lefthandside represents data from WALS (natural languages) the righthandside from CALS (conlangs). The darkened area represents the difference between the left and right. Thus a large dark green area represents overrepresentation of a feature in conlangs based on the data in those two databases (which are both not representative to any rigorous standard)
Әřant has a change that, while it may not be what you're asking for, does fit the question in that depending on the animacy valency of the object, the verb conjugates differently:
men xshanni - - tassu han-ne!
it drop.2S.IMPER - - thou.2S INTERJ-hey.EMPH
vs
san xshannos - - tassu han-ne!
her drop.2S.INDIC - - thou.2S INTERJ-hey.EMPH
The person has a higher animacy valency, so requires a (slightly) more polite idiom.
I believe your question conflates two related, but crucially distinct concepts, patients (a thematic relation and semantic concept) and objects (a verbal argument and syntactic concept).
By conventional syntactic definition, if only one argument is being agreed with, that argument is the subject. In that sense, it's by definition impossible for a verb to agree only with an object.
However, the patient of a verb does not have to be its object! In ergative languages, it's generally acceptable to analyze that the syntactic subject of a transitive verb is its patient.
In summary: it makes no sense to say that a verb agrees only with its object, because it would causes that object, by definition, to be the subject, merely reversing the agency alignment of the verb (cf. English I like X vs. Spanish me gusta X).
I would like to see some citations here, you’re making some strong claims that do not agree with the definitions I am aware of, which define the subject as being either the S or A role of a clause. Dixon’s Ergativity has a whole chapter about how that notion of subjects still applies to ergative languages.
I have made no assertion whatsoever that "subjects [do not] apply to ergative languages". You are making the exact conflation I was pointing out in my answer. I have asserted that it's arguable that in ergative languages patients can be syntactic subjects of transitive verbs. What that means, simply put, is that in ergative languages, the case that marks subjects is often the absolutive, causing patients to be treated as subjects for syntactic purposes: who left in "he hit her and went away" is not going to be the same in Dyirbal as in English.
@Circeus Have you actually read Dixon? No such conflation is made, as Dixon (and a lot of other authors) use the term "subject" specifically to refer to an S/A grouping which have arguable universal linkages, and the term "pivot" to refer to categories controlling syntax in specific languages (which may then either be S/A, S/O, a mixture of those depending on context, or a relation not defineable in terms of syntactic roles (e.g. topicality)(though note that some authors, including Dixon, prefer not to call the latter a "pivot", and refer to such languages as "pivotless")).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.851547 | 2018-02-11T14:54:49 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/268",
"authors": [
"Arkenstein XII",
"Circeus",
"Clément Jean",
"Gufferdk",
"K. Harris",
"Riccardo Battilani",
"Sascha Baer",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/128",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/145",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/888",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/889",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/890",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/891",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/896",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/923",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/954",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/957",
"mlj",
"ncomputers",
"sourav saha",
"symmathesy"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
323 | Methods to avoid similarity in lexicons
When creating words I have often run into the problem that too many words sound similar even when I have allowed many different phonemes. Are there methods to avoid too much similarity between words, while making words similar enough to feel part on one language?
Natlangs all have lots of similar words, not to mention homophones and polysemy. Can you explain more why you think you've actually got a problem?
A modern approach to this problem is to generate the words automatically according to some formula describing allowed words. You can filter out words that are too close to already generated ones, but usually the randomness used by a computer program will be sufficient.
There are well-known examples of Conlangs with computer generated vocabulary. Loglan and Lojban used some vocabulary lists from natural languages as input for their vocabulary generating algorithm.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.851961 | 2018-02-17T01:59:26 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/323",
"authors": [
"Mike",
"Risky Mahendra",
"Tibor G. Balogh",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1083",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1087",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1242"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
107 | Is there a constructed language in existence that has graduated to "natural" status?
That is, are there any such languages in use today that are in use for day to day activities, or are formally recognized, etc?
By definition, a constructed language can never be natural. Although, it is an interesting question as to if a conlang became widespread and started to evolve naturally, how would it be classified?
As for becoming official, I'm pretty sure no conlangs are recognized by an official government, but Esperanto is pretty widespread, and there may be some communities where it is used in day to day life.
I think that Esperanto is the closest that will ever come to happening. As for what to call such a language, I'd just call it a "naturalised invented language". In so far as it got its start as the creation of one man, it is now in the L1 minds of a few hundred and the L2 minds of thousands more. It has regional and temporal variance. It grows and changes the way any natural language does. By definition, yes, E-o did not start out as a natural language, but I see no reason why it can't graduate into one.
Esperanto is the only artificial language I know of that has any native speakers.
For varying definitions of "conlang", yes:
The very most obvious example is Esperanto with a well-documented native speaker community. It has received limited official recognition, the most interesting of which currently seems to be PR of China's El Popola Ĉinio magazine and China Radio International in Esperanto. There are many more.
A less obvious example would be Classical Sanskrit, which was, arguably, constructed by Pāṇini, and is a Scheduled Language of India with some fifty thousand people speaking it in 1991; it is furthermore an official language of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and reportedly the language of the majority in a village called Mathoor. It is used across all levels of education across India.
A more controversial example would be Modern Hebrew, one of the few successfully revived language in modern times. The page on Wikipedia gives a solid overview of the situation, and is fairly unbiased. Of the three mentioned here, Hebrew is arguably the most successful "graduated" language — if you consider it a conlang to begin with.
There are other successfully revived languages, for varying levels of success. Hebrew is the most widely spoken one of course.
I'm not sure we can say "successfully" revived until they've healthily passed through at least a generation or two; Cornish and Manx are obvious examples. They've yet to graduate, but I consider them promising in all fairness.
Ahh, yeah that's a decent criterion.
It could be argued that if Modern Hebrew is a conlang, then so is Bahasa Indonesia. There is a very fuzzy line between constructing a language and updating/standardising a group of existing languages/dialects into one language.
In addition to the examples given by Darkgamma, Damin, an extinct ritual "register" of Lardil and Yangkaal, which in the traditional mythology of the speakers is considered a conlang, and believed by linguists to have been invented by the elders of one of the tribes, was in addition to ritual contexts also used in day-to-day life between initiated members of the tribe.
How much of a full language Damin is is debatable...
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.852072 | 2018-02-07T02:39:51 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/107",
"authors": [
"Andrew Keeton",
"Darkgamma",
"Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'",
"IllogicalInterest",
"Joe",
"Nicole Sharp",
"Pseudonym",
"Rabash",
"RothX",
"Shahzeb Shommit",
"SpockPuppet",
"curiousdannii",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1000",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1001",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1018",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/126",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/265",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/314",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/315",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/316",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/320",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/37",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/92",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/999",
"this.srivastava"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
224 | What are some options for alternative contrasts in demonstratives?
Most languages contrast demonstrative in a "here/there/over there" distance system, with two to five grades (with some referring to the hearer's location too). I'm looking for a different concept for demonstrative contrast.
Does anyone have suggestions for me?
As the linked WALS chapter already mentions, a common distinction is to contrast near speaker/near listener/distal rather than a simple distance constrast.
One way to make such as system more "interesting" can be to add additional usages or shades of meaning to the different demonstratives, for example having one be a neutral term and the other one that is only used when specific focus on the distance is desired, or alternatively having a neutral demonstrative in addition to ones overtly marked for distance (the WALS chapter again already has examples of this, mentioning modern Hebrew and Lithuanian respectively). Korafe (TNG, Oro Province PNG) has a 3 demonstratives e, a, o in a speaker/listener/distal system which additionally serve the function of showing emontional evolvement of the speaker in utterance, with a "near listener" being the neutral default, e "near speaker" showing a great deal of involvement and o "distal" showing a desire of the speaker to distance and dissociate him/herself from the utterance1 pp.75-77.
Variables may be paradigmatically overlaid on top of a distance system, e.g. a visibility contrast as seen in Malagasy(Astronesian, Madagascar)2, or may supplement it, for example by having a 3-way proximal/distal/non-visible contrast. Other contrasts than visibility are possible, for example in Fore(TNG, Eastern Higlands Province PNG), which has a 5-way speaker/listener/proximal/medial/distal system, with proximal and distal further exhibiting a 3-way same level/above/below vertical relationship, for a total of 9 different demonstratives1.
Other than overlaying various such contrasts on a system there is also the possibility of instead having a large set of what may be called "positional stems", whith relatively specific semantics such as "up above", "on the beach" or "towards the Siberian mainland" which can then either be used as or derived into demonstratives. The various Yup'ik languages(Eskaleut, Bering Sea area) are an example of languages with a lot of these, and using various specialised and general nominal morphology allows forming demonstrative pronouns and adverbs with meanings such as "the ones up there" or "from the two entities upstairs/on the mountain", though I think there is a fair bit of variation in the actual meaning of the different stems between the different lects and langs. Section III.4 of this document covers them summarily as they are used in Gambell, St. Lawrence Island.
A somewhat similar in result but structureally different approach to this is exemplified by Nasioi(South Bougainville, Bougainville Province PNG), which rather than have a large inventory of deictic stems and a limited set of affixes instead has just one demonstrative stem a~e from which a large number of directional, as well as some nominalising and oblique affixes may derive different demonstratives such as a-un-toom-peto DEM-NOM-down.north-near.movement_toward"that down there, closer, ascending towards us from the north" or e-eʔ-dan-to DEM-INSTR-seaward-far "by going seaward far away (from us)"1.
An interesting extension of the visibility contrast is also found in Yup‘ik languages, where a distinction is made between objects taking up a large amount of ones field of view or are in visible motion versus rather small, stationary objects.
I can imagine a system that is based on size/importance instead of one based on near me/near you/distant. In this system, one demonstrative would point to the larger, more massive, more important, less recently introduced etc., another would point to the smaller, less massive, less important, more recently introduced target. Various degrees of intermediates could be thought of between these two extremes (but I think just one intermediate would be the most obvious choice.
More practical examples:
Two people talking about cars on a road. In a this/that system, one might say:
I like that huge car.
while pointing at one. In the system I’m imagining, that would turn into:
I like [Demonstrative-important] car.
without the need to point a finger. It would immediately imply the largest car to be seen.
A discussion about which colour a dress should be. A blue one was introduced first, a red one second and now we are looking at a green one.
I like [Demonstrative-intermediate] best.
Even though we may be looking at the green one and without turning any heads it would be clear that red is preferred. My train of thoughts here is that the first introduced object has been sitting around for a while in the discussion and thus acquired some sort of importance of the elder.
It can even easily be applied to people. Depending on what the culture of your conlang values, I can imagine both mere height or age/respect factoring into the decision which one of two people would get the important demonstrative. In Japan, if the choice is between the young, tiny professor and the older, larger secretary, the professor would probably be labelled with [demonstrative-important]. But going by age or size alone may make more sense in other cultures.
An interesting feature when applying it to people is that the demonstrative would change depending on who is a potential target. Comparing a teacher to their students would mean they receive [demonstrative-important]. However, if the headmaster is part of the group being talked about, the same teacher would suddenly be [demonstrative-intermediate] or [demonstrative-unimportant].
Of course, many more examples are possible.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.852369 | 2018-02-09T05:20:34 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/224",
"authors": [
"Juice",
"Mike Fleitz",
"Nagib Mahfuz",
"Sascha Baer",
"Watson",
"anna328p",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/708",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/709",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/710",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/745",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/746",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/752",
"xiota"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
342 | How does mood relate to tense and aspect?
Moods are often intertwined with tense and aspect. In fact, the triad is commonly referred to in linguistics as tense-aspect-mood or just TAM. Aspect and tense are relatively straightforward, but how does mood relates to them exactly?
(For tense and aspect in general, see this answer)
I'll summarize what Mark Rosenfelder says in Advanced Language Construction, pp. 146-156 (some of which referring back to Mood and Modality, F.R.Palmer 2001).
First we start with modality, which is concerned with the status of the proposition, i.e. "how true it is, and whether it's subject to obligations and intentions". In contrast tense (at its most basic degree, ignoring semantic expansion) is interested to whether it happens before or after now, and aspect with overall temporal relation (hence the possibility of contrast between tenses within a given aspect).
Rosenfelder describes Palmer's classification of modals like so:
Factual
Epistemic: speculative, assumptive & deductive
Evidential: reported, sensory & deductive
Deontic
External: obligative, permissive, commissive
Internal: abilitive & volitive
(Most discussions bundle all of the "factual" branch as one "evidentials" category because languages with evidentials tend to have only one of the two sub-branches, which is also why deductive is listed twice without being self-contradictory)
Basically working from that, a mood is what happen when modality bundles up with tense, and there it gets a little messy. Terminologically, Rosenfelder believes that indicative/subjunctive and realis/irrealis systems are separated more clearly by geography (specialists in given language families prefer one or the other) than grammatical reality.
In any case, realis/indicative applies protoypically to real events, irrealis/subjunctive to "less real" stuff. What is included in each category may vary considerably (future events and imperative may categorize in either one, for example, depending on individual languages). Conditionals are irrealis in virtually all systems, but in Indo-European linguistics are traditionally treated as a third mood separate from both indicative and subjunctive.
In practice, moods are often more of a semantic division within the verbal paradigm owing to the lack of a separate marker for them (in most European languages I'm aware of, for example). When an explicit irrealis marker exists, it often takes over separate marking for tense and aspect, that is, there will be no overt marking of the subcategories like future vs. imperative (both only irrealis) or past vs. present (both realis). Manam is such a language (how unusual this is is unclear from Rosenfelder's writing).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.852776 | 2018-02-19T15:22:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/342",
"authors": [
"Amerh AlOsimi",
"Antonio Jose Lousada Fazendeir",
"BMF",
"Hasitha Jayawardana",
"Tiago Campany",
"a-giant-squid",
"abbassix",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1130",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1131",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1132",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1133",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1135",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1259",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1260"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
659 | Which categories of inalienable possession have conlangs expressed?
In many natlangs a grammatical distinction is made between alienable and inalienable possession. Inalienable possession is used for things which are in some way conceptualised as being inseparable from their possessor.
Lévy-Bruhl (and then later Chappell & McGregor) identified that natural languages with a morphologically distinct inalienable possession use inalienable possession for four categories:
spatial relationships such as the ‘top’ or ‘front’ of something
physical parts, especially human body parts
kinship bonds
objects which are essential for a person’s survival
For the conlangs with inalienable possession, do they also use it for all four of these categories? Do any conlangs have inalienable possession for a type of nominal relationship which doesn't fit into any of these categories?
This is an list of languages question, which on this site means that multiple answers presenting different languages are allowed. However, if possible, do present as many languages as you can in a post. Conlangs newly constructed to answer this question are not allowed.
Chappell, Hilary & William McGregor. 1996. Prolegomena to a theory of inalienability. In Hilary Chappell & William McGregor (eds.), The grammar of inalienability, 3–30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1914. L’expression de la possession dans les langues mélanésiennes. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 19(2). 96–104.
Lojban differentiates between inalienable possession, alienable possession, and association: po'e, po, pe. But Lojban does so because its design aspired to typological completeness: it's followed the textbooks in its differentiation between alienable and inalienable possession. See http://www.lojban.org/static/publications/refgram_chunked/cllc/8/3/
"Something is intrinsically (or inalienably) possessed by someone if the possession is part of the possessor, and cannot be changed without changing the possessor. In the case of Example 3.5, people are usually taken to intrinsically possess their arms: even if an arm is cut off, it remains the arm of that person."
So (2) physical parts. (Lojban deals with (1) as a predicate relation, not a possession.) Not (4), as far as I know. Logically (3) kinship bonds should be inalienable as well, but those too are represented in Lojban as predicate relations. (In fact the expression of relations between entities through overt predicates diminishes the role of possessives in Lojban overall.)
Ithkuil, a conlang known for having way too much grammar, has nine possessive cases, at least in the recently (as of 2023) published "New" version. They are known collectively as "Appositive Cases" because "Possessive" is one of them, used for alienable physical possession, and "Genitive" is another, used for inalienable possession in your first, second and third senses. I'm not sure about the fourth. The closest that comes to it is the "Interdependent" case, which expresses the relationship between the complementary participants in an action, but that's hardly "essential for survival", now is it?
But these are not the only Appositive cases. There's also the "Proprietive", for the "legal" owner of an object, the "Productive" for an object's creator, the "Originative" for its origin, and the "Attributive" for an action or state's experiencer, all of which can be argued to be a kind of inalienable possession. The other two Appositive cases are the "Interpretive" for an entity's interpreter and the "Partitive" for a container's contents, which I mention for completeness.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.852999 | 2018-06-14T13:32:22 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/659",
"authors": [
"Craig Morrison",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5815"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
104 | By what criteria can we say that a conlang has a functional speech community?
On another question I commented that I doubted that if Lojban had a functional speech community that its purity would last very long.
By what criteria can we say that a conlang has a functional speech community?
Here are some ideas, which when taken together would give a good idea whether a language has a strong functional speech community.
If a conlang has thousands of fluent first language (L1) speakers, that would be clear evidence, but even Esperanto, the most spoken conlang, has only up to 1000 Esperanto speaking families. Ideally those L1 speakers are able to meet and speak with each other regularly.
Even if the speakers are second language speakers, if there are so many speakers that distinct dialects have formed (without that being part of the design from the beginning) then that evidence of language change is evidence itself of healthy speech communities.
If there is friction between speakers of the language and the language's academy or regulators then that shows the language is starting to take on a life of its own. If the language regulators have ever had to make concessions to the speakers, then that shows the speech community is healthy.
I'd lower the criteria significantly and already admit that a conlang has a speech community when it is used on some occasions for real-time face-to-face communications. By these criteria, even Klingon has a speech community.
Whether a speech community is functional or not is probably difficult to decide, I'd go for a kind of temporal criterion like having a speech community (as sketched above) for 30 years with no year left out. This is similar to the criterion biologists use to define an established new species in a certain area.
To some extent, the original question will depend on our understanding of "community". How small are we willing to take it? How functional is functional? I came across this post in Brithenig I don't know who the OP is (and don't think he created the language), yet we had a nice little chat in that language. If two random people online can have a chat in an invented language that neither of them made, then I might argue that "speech communities" are common, perhaps more common than we think.
"even Klingon"? Klingon is one of the most-spoken constructed languages and is generally considered to have one of the healthiest speech communities of any conlang -- any definition of a functional speech community that excludes Klingon for some arbitrary reason is not a particularly good one.
@Sparksbet I wrote "even Klingon" because Klingon was never designed to have a speech community.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.853370 | 2018-02-07T02:30:20 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/104",
"authors": [
"Glenn G",
"O'Fermah",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Sparksbet",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/309",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/310",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/311",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/313",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/512",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"jambrothers",
"leftaroundabout",
"user2567875"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
225 | How can boustrophedon writing systems be published?
Boustrophedon writing systems are ones in which the direction of writing swaps after each line.
At least one conlang is intended to be written as a boustrophedon (in that case vertically.)
Now if you manually typeset a document your could reverse the lines, but that doesn't allow for plain text boustrophedon writing, nor does it allow for reflowable text (such as on a webpage.)
Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon? There are multiple text direction control codes in Unicode, can any of them be used for boustrophedon text? Or has anyone proposed a control code to be included in Unicode, or designated one in a Private Use Area?
Or are there any other practical ways of publishing boustrophedon text (because a custom PUA code wouldn't be supported by most software) such as some kind of CSS filter for a webpage?
It was once proposed for CSS, but as use cases are very limited and the implementation would be rather complicated, there was no vendor interest and thus the idea was rejected. You might be able to do it with CSS+JS, especially with Houdini.
Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon?
From the unicode.org FAQ about bi-directional text[1]
The Unicode Standard does not provide formatting codes to signal boustrophedon text. Specialized word processors for ancient scripts might offer support for this. In the absence of that, fixed texts can be written in boustrophedon by using hard line breaks and directionality overrides.
I don't know of any online method of inputting reflowable boustrophedon text, however there seems to be a LaTeX package[2] availible that offers automation of the process at least in LaTeX documents, both for "regular" boustrophedon and the Rongorongo style where glyphs are rotated rather than mirrored, which would allow for relative ease of publishing pdf documents at leat.
I did not know that Rongorongo rotates glyphs! Neat!
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.853603 | 2018-02-09T06:14:30 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/225",
"authors": [
"AndriuZ",
"Ash",
"Crissov",
"EveryBitHelps",
"Extreme Coders",
"Krakoom",
"Logan R. Kearsley",
"cirko cirkoo",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/195",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/711",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/712",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/713",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/714",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/716",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/744",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/84"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
298 | How do languages manage to make sense with a free word order?
Many of the world's natural languages, and some conlangs, have a free word order, so that the words can be put in any order with it still making sense.
If they can't use word order to indicate the structure, what strategies do they use instead? Have any conlangs used strategies not found in natlangs?
is this question more suitable for https://linguistics.stackexchange.com?
There are three main strategies for indicating grammatical relations in languages with free word orders. It is common for languages to have more than one of these, and to my knowledge all free word order natural languages have either case or verbal agreement.
Case
Case refers to grammatical markers attached to nouns which indicate the noun's role in the sentence. Some languages have a very large number of cases, but in general you can expect such a language to have at least two cases: nominative and accusative, or ergative and absolutive. Here is an example from Walmajarri:
parri-ngu pa manga-Ø nyanya
boy-subj AUX girl-obj saw
'The boy saw the girl.'
parri-Ø pa nyanya manga-ngu
boy-obj AUX saw girl-subj
'The girl saw the boy.'
In Walmajarri ngu is the ergative case marker. Walmajarri has a null absolutive case marker, shown here as Ø.
Agreement
The second strategy is agreement, where markers are attached to the verb to give information about the subject and object. Depending on the language, these markers might indicate the person, number, or gender of each noun. Here's an example, again from Walmajarri:
nayili nya-ka-kyaka-ji-pila
north see-IRR-REDUP-1sgO-3dlS
'You two watch out for me in the north.'
Here the verb has two suffixes (actually clitics), -ji and -pila, which mean a 1st person singular object, and a 3rd person dual subject. While it is most common for these verbal agreement markers to be attached to the verbs, in some languages they are attached to other elements in the sentence. In Walmajarri the most common sentence form actually has these markers attaching to a modal auxiliary:
ngayirta ma-rnalu majurra kang-ka-rla
NEG AUX-1plincS matches carry-IRR-PAST
'We didn't take matches.'
Here ma is the unmarked modal auxiliary, to which -rnalu is attached, the marker for a 1st person plural inclusive subject. Matches is a third person singular object and so has a null marker.
Incorporation
The third strategy is incorporation, where a language productively forms compound words where the verb includes the object. English doesn't do this very productively - our compounds are more like individual set combinations. So in the verb babysit the object baby is incorporated, but the meaning of the compound is not obviously derived from its component parts. In incorporating languages this process happens productively with the components often keeping their normal sense. Here is an example from Nuu-chah-nulth:
maḥt'a-ʔa-mit-ʔiš čakup
house-buy-past-3ind man
'A man bought a house.'
ʔu-ʔaa-mit-ʔiš maḥt'ii čakup
Ø-buy-past-3.ind house man
'A man bought a house.'
Nuu-chah-nulth is called an obligatory incorporating language because if the object is not incorporated a dummy morpheme ʔu must be used.
Now while incorporation is used in many languages, we have to be careful about making generalisations as each language incorporates nouns according to its own rules. Some incorporate adjectives, and some don't. Or for example, in Nahuatl an independent noun indicates a specific event, whereas an incorporated noun indicates a more general or habitual meaning:
ni-c-qua in nacatl
I-it-eat the flesh
'I eat the flesh.' [particular act]
ni-naca-qua
I-flesh-eat
'I eat flesh' or 'I am a flesh-eater.'
A free word order conlang could require incorporation of all objects and not use either case or agreement, a typological combination that does not exist in natlangs to my knowledge.
It should be noted that in addition to relying heavily on one strategy, it's also possible to mix strategies is various different ways, relying on different strategies to back each other up. For example in Fore(Kainantu-Goroka(TNG), PNG), there is a hierarchy like this, where if each strategy fails, the one lower in the list can be relied on. I'm putting "case" in quotation marks, because the "ergative" case marker in Fore is not really a case-marker as much as it is an often optional and occasionally prohibited derivational marker:
Verbal agreement
Animacy
"Case"-marking
Word order
Point 2, "animacy" means that referents higher on the animacy hierarchy are interpreted as being more likely to be agents, as such the NPs in a sentence like aebá nanita: yaga: amiye he pig food 3sg:gave_to:3sg "he gave the pig food" can be freely reordered without a change in truth value, despite the fact that the verbal agreement is wholly inadequate to disambiguate the roles of the participants. Only in the few instances where the other strategies fail is word order a primary disambiguative device.
There are some languages where a primary disambiguation strategy is marking on the verb whether such a hierarchy a broken or not, called direct/inverse marking (this can disambiguate situations with two 3rd persons of equal animacy as well by considering e.g. topicality or obviation).
The way these languages do this is with inflections. Nouns, for example, can be declined to show cases, which tell the speaker things about what they are doing. Verbs can be used to show who the subject is, and the tense and mood and stuff. For example, in English we would say:
The boy loves the girl
However, in Latin (I don't know any other languages with cases well enough for this answer) we would say:
Puer puellam amat.
There's a lot of info here: the first word (puer), meaning "boy" is in the nominative case, meaning it is the subject of the sentence. Puellam, girl, is in the accusative, meaning it is the direct object. In addition, the verb, amat, has the 3rd person singular present indicative ending -t. In this case this isn't enough to tell us who the subject is, as both the nouns are 3rd person singular, but coupled with the nominative, we can easily figure out who is loving whom. Therefore, the same thing can be expressed as:
Puellam amat puer
or
Amat puer puellam
or any other combination you'd like, and the listeners or readers would understand because of the cases of the nouns. Latin has six or seven cases (depending), but some languages have more. Finnish has 15, Hungarian has 18; Wikipedia has a whole bunch of cases that appear, all to free up the word order.
Because of these, many prepositions can be omitted entirely, verbs can use inflections to show the subject and stuff.
Adjectives that modify nouns must agree in case with the nouns--so a reader can easily infer their meaning from what case they are in. Because of these, word order having any grammatical function is unnecessary and redundant.
As another example, my own conlang Simean has four cases. Here is a sentence with all of them:
Nuler loyile shuir edeï sefmou.
Translated, this is: "The soldier (Nominative) is giving the king (Dative) of the land (Genitive) a book (Accusative)." The verb, loyile, is the stem loy- plus the imperfect affix -i- plus the third person singular -le. If instead, we wanted to say "I am giving the king of the land a book," we could take out sefmou, soldier, and we wouldn't have to add in the word for I because of the verb inflection. Instead, the subject could be expressed through the verb. Instead of the -le we would use -ë, and the listeners would know what we were talking about--who gave whom what and all that.
Technically, any one of these words could be moved somewhere else--the only thing in Simean that dictates word order is convention.
@curiousdannii I added some explanation to the examples--is that enough or should I add in another example for verb orders, and maybe some adjectives or prep phrases?
Verb agreement generally means that any inflexional morphology attached to the verb will "agree" or harmoniously mesh with one or more other constituents in the sentence. To take the "amat puer puellam" example, the verb amat means "loves" and, like its English equivalent, is in the third person singular form. -s in English, -t in Latin. Puer means "boy". The verb is "in agreement" with its subject because it is third person, and the subject is neither the speaker (me) nor the interlocutor (thee), and it is also singular (-t) because there is only one subject.
@elemtilas I agree.
In Latin, the nominative and accusative forms of all neuter nouns are identical. Which makes me wonder how your sentence works when two neuter nouns are employed.
I don’t fully agree with your statement on prepositions. Finnish, as you noted a highly inflecting language with 15 cases, 6 of which are used to denote locational information, still has postpositions and quite a few of them. This is because pre and postpositions allow a much finer distinction of e.g. location (but also others). For example, asemalla means on or near the station and could be enough. But aseman vieressä (next to the station), aseman lähellä (in the area of the station) or aseman edessä (in front of the station) are much better at describing the exact location.
@Jan The issue with having two neuter nouns isn't that problematic, as most neuters are inanimate objects that are relatively rarely initiators of an action. As such neuters will be S or O most of the time, and in a number of situations where they are A, the O will not be neuter. The residual group of sentences can in most cases be resolved through context, slightly rigidising the word order, or if everything else fails, making the sentence into a passive, demoting A to ablative, which is clearly distinct from the nominative (outside of the 4th declension).
@Gufferdk The residual group of sentences are, of course, the interesting ones and your answer to them is more or less what I expected. (Incidentally, the same is true in German where in the absence of grammatical distinguishability between nominative and accusative and in absence of context to help it is usually not possible to switch object and subject positions while in general it would be.)
Apart from the morphological / grammatical angle, we can also understand meaning by context.
A mournful song sang the choir.
Except in the Land of Strange Tales, we know that choirs sing songs. Songs don't sing choirs. The inversion is startling when interjected into speech of ordinary pattern, but it's quite understandable. Even though we don't have morphological clues to tell us, we intuitively know that this sentence is not to be "read straight through".
Man bites dog.
Again, context informs our understanding. Here, the (seeming!) inversion is nòt used for poetic effect, but is instead the epitome of the ironically prosaic. In this case, the context is journalism and headline writing style and is a commentary on what is newsworthy.
Are there any free word order languages with neither case nor agreement?
Possibly not? From what I've read, it's difficult enough to even determine if there are any truly FWO languages to begin with. Nunggubuyu, an Australian language, (grammar here), seems to be pretty close to FWO, though seems to have nominal case mechanisms for delineating roles.
I’m not sure if your answer intends me to take ‘man bites dog’ literally but I was instantly reminded of this comparison of German news media (in German) by Katja Berlin.
I believe, yes, Mann beisst Hund.
The key principle to understanding what is being uttered or has been written is to know how to put the words into a structural context. This is often explained in simple terms using the W questions: who is doing something, what are they doing, how are they doing it, to whom are they doing it, when and where are they doing it, etc. In grammatical terms, these can be labelled as subject, verb, adverbs, objects, adverbials and more.
In some languages, quite a few categories are distinguishable a priori just by their ending. For example in Esperanto, singular nouns are marked with terminal -o, adjectives end in -a and conjugated verbs usually in -[vowel]s. Likewise, a general knowledge of the conjugation tables of Finnish often allows a quick and dirty rough estimate whether a word happens to a noun or adjective or a verb form. English is generally terrible at this distinction with a number of words being written and pronounced the same regardless of the category (see: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo).
However, what is mentioned in the paragraph above only accounts for the word type; if a sentence has two nouns we may not immediately be able to distinguish between the subject noun and the object noun without additional information. Thus, languages generally use one of two methods to clarify what exactly is meant:
The information is encoded in word order. This is often the rule for languages with rather low levels of inflection such as English or Chinese. In English, the following two sentences are different because of the different subject and object functions even though all the words are the same:
The man bites the dog.
The dog bites the man.
The information is encoded in inflection, prepositions, participles, suffixes and the like. While very likely all languages make use of this scheme partially, some do to a much larger extent than English; for example German or Finnish. In German and Finnish, the following two sentences with the same words but different order mean the same:
Der Mann beißt den Hund.
Mies puree koiraa.
Den Hund beißt der Mann.
Koiraa puree mies.
(I’m not sure if the second Finnish example is strictly allowed in that way; however, my Finnish course includes a similar precedence of an OVS sentence).
By marking the nouns according to case — and thus, according to their grammatic function — we have one clear subject (the agent, the man; nominative case in both examples) and one clear object (the patient, the dog; accusative or partitive case). Once the relation between the two is established like this, one is typically free to move the components around.
Other than using declension by case, modifiers can be placed around a word. In Japanese, that would be the particles が, は, を, に, へ and others. The word or phrase that precedes the particle が is understood to be the subject of a sentence, whatever precedes を is an object. In theory, this would allow the parts suffixed in that way to be moved around as seen fit. (Whether Japanese actually does that I do not know as my knowledge of it is still too basic.) Other options of the same general flavour include prepositions: in the house shows that the house is used to denote location and is not an agent or a patient of the sentence. Even in the otherwise relatively strict word order of English, adverbials such as that can be moved around to a certain degree.
tl;dr:
Languages that allow a more or less free word order will not rely on word order to assign syntactical roles. Instead, markers or modifiers of certain types will likely be used; cases and declension being a rather common choice.
Many languages, like Japanese and Korean, have particles added to words to show which part of speech they are. While word order is still necessary for these languages to make sense, a conlang might have grammar where each word's part of speech is not defined by their place in the sentence, but what particles are attached to the words. A similar effect could be achieved by using different pitches or different word forms to define a word's part of speech.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.853790 | 2018-02-14T23:06:13 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/298",
"authors": [
"Ashish Sharma",
"Bob",
"CHEESE",
"DannyNiu",
"Engineero",
"Froggos",
"Gufferdk",
"Hssu",
"Jan",
"Louie Lee",
"Prince",
"R Leisure",
"RAJA",
"SuuSoJeat",
"T. Athey",
"Tibe That Guy",
"as4s4hetic",
"curiousdannii",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/100",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1002",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1004",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1005",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1017",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1022",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1025",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1084",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1085",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1086",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/116",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/145",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2786",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2792",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/66",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/996",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/997",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/998",
"wanyun"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
535 | Is there a specific term for a constructed writing system purportedly used for a conlang but actually for a natlang?
Many constructed writing systems are purportedly used to write conlangs, but in reality are actually used to write English or another natlang.
For example, omniglot.com says that Kryptonian is "a transliteration alphabet containing symbols for each of the letters of the English alphabet. ... They just used this alphabet to write things in English in the comics."
Matoran has been called "similar to the English alphabet, being a simple substitution cipher".
And in Star Wars, Aurebesh is essentially the same, a different way of writing English, although technically it's actually "Galactic Basic". Apparently another script was also used to write Galatic Basic, called Outer Rim Basic, although there's very little information about it.
I'd consider these example to be a different kind of thing compared to something like the dancing men script from Sherlock Holmes as they're ostensibly constructed writing systems for other languages, whereas the dancing men script is explicitly another way of writing English.
In the conlang community, is there a specific term for this type of constructed writing system? Or should we just refer to them as "transliterations" or "substitutions"?
Please note that I am specifically asking if there is a term which excludes these categories:
new orthographies for natlangs (ex. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics or Deseret for English)
a new writing system actually used to write a conlang (ex. Tengwar for Quenya)
Omniglot has a lot of these; Simon calls them "con-scripts". Whether that's in any way a "recognized" or "official" term, I don't know, which is why this is a comment rather than an answer. I do think that if someone were to propose that this stack use that term 'formally', I'd support it. For writing one language in a script designed for another (e.g., writing English with tengwar or cyrillic), he also uses the term "adapted scripts".
@Jeff I thought "conscript" was used for any constructed writing system.
@curiousdannii "Conscript" is indeed used for any constructed writing system, in my experience. I'm actually not aware of a term for these, which is vexing, since I've had times when a term specifically for these would be useful. "Substitution cipher" is the most specific/accurate existing terminology that I've found so far ("transliteration" having a much broader meaning than just this), but it has the problem that it doesn't really convey that these are purported to be 'other languages.'
OK, it wasn't actually clear that you were interested specifically in scripts used to purport to be other languages, but which are actually simple substitution cyphers - in other words, you're distinguishing between these and the 'dancing men' on the basis of "self-story", rather than actual usage. Yes, 'con-script' is a more general term, applicable to both these and scripts devised specifically to write conlangs.
Incidentally, I tend to prefer to hyphenate 'con-script' in the meaning appropriate to this stack, and leave the unhyphenated 'conscript' to mean (roughly) 'someone who has been forced into [usually military] service' or the equivalent verb, 'force a person into [usually military] service'.
The word you're looking for here is neography. Etymologically, "new writing". This works for both natural languages (like English, which has at least one neography) as well as invented languages where someone has created a script for the language. Neography has the happy position of being not only a "real" word already in use, but far more aesthetically pleasing than "conscript". All the con- words (in my opinion) are ugly and, while I get the rationale (and was around for a couple of them's invention) I share the opinion of many that the neologism was an unhappy one that we're now stuck w
It sounds like something that would be used for writing a conlang though, like pIqaD for Klingon.
Piqad is indeed a neography --- an invented script for an invented language in this case.
I am specifically asking about invented scripts purportedly used for conlangs but actually used for natlangs. None of pIqaD, Inuktitut, Deseret or Queranarran fit what I asked for.
Then I think you might need to rewrite your question! You asked Is there a specific term for a constructed writing system used to write natlangs? Now you want to change your question by adding exclusions and so forth. I think the answer now is going to be NO.
I thought it was clear enough to start with given the examples I gave (I don't see how anyone would have misunderstood unless they only read the title), but I have indeed revised it now.
Well, I've read and reread your question, and I really don't think I'm misunderstanding anything. I'd still say the answer is "neography"! Doesn't really matter what purpose you put it to! You could certainly write English using Tengwar or Piqad or even Queranarran script!
I'm asking for a term for the subcategory of neographies used purported but not actually for conlangs. Just as conlang is a subcategory of language and artlang is a subcategory of conlang, of course you can refer to all of these scripts as neographies just like you can refer to Quenya as a language. But that doesn't make "neography" a term for a subcategory of itself.
@JeffZeitlin Instances in which those meanings could not be distinguished based on context alone seem like they would be incredibly rare.
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
@Sparksbet - Perhaps; I'll concede that it's a personal bias. I also prefer to explicitly include diacritics when I'm writing e.g., résumé (the document submitted for employment) vs. resume (continue a process after a pause).
I don't think there's already a word for this exact subset of scripts.
However, I think such a term would be a useful one -- we certainly have to refer to these sorts of scripts in the conlanging community -- and I think there are a number of options here.
1. Circumlocution
We could refer to these sorts of scripts in paraphrastic ways, like how you have in your question. "Transliteration alphabet" and "substitution cipher" both work for this purpose. However, I don't think this is a particularly attractive option, as these are long and rather unwieldy. Shortenings of these phrases end up being pretty ambiguous, as well. "Transliteration" in particular is usually used to describe completely separate things entirely, so using it in isolation to refer to these scripts would be confusing at best, and "substitution" is too vague.
2. Neologism
Since these sorts of scripts are really the neographic equivalent of relexes, we could also coin a new term like "relex" to refer to these scripts. Just spitballing, here are a few examples of the sorts of coinages that could work:
transbet (from "transliteration alphabet")
subscript (from "substitution script" -- though this word does obviously already have another meaning so that might not be desirable)
rescript (from analogy with "relex")
keychain script (because these sorts of scripts are easily used to sell keychains with people's names on them 'in another language')
There are any number of ways that such a term could be derived beyond these, but I feel that in order to have a term that describes this subset of scripts, some sort of new coinage is necessary.
Maybe something like faux conlang would work, focusing more on the language side of it than the writing. But that could also describe gibberish "conlangs" too.
Okay, so much for two possible methods of coining a phrase; but how does this answer the OP's question? To these, I'd add "organic consensus" (i.e., how we got saddled with "conscript" and "conlang" in the first place!) and "geniusly spontaneous insight", which is simply were someone who feels the need to Name something just comes up with a name.
If I ever finish my conlang, I'll make sure there are words for these in my lexicon ;)
I would call this a cipher. Dictionary.com's 6th entry for "cipher" reads, in part:
a secret method of writing, as by transposition or substitution of letters, specially formed symbols, or the like.
This gives us two requirements for being a cipher:
Secrecy
Substitution
Since this sort of script is ostensibly used to write a constructed language while actually just transcribing English (or another natlang), the requirement for secrecy is satisfied. As the conscript comprises symbols that stand in for Latin (or other natural script) letters or symbols, the requirement for substitution is satisfied.
Let's look at the examples of scripts you want to exclude:
Deseret: This is explicitly for the purpose of writing English and is widely published for such purpose and thus it fails the requirement of secrecy.
Tengwar: Tengwar are not primarily used to replace otherwise extant letters or symbols and thus fails the requirement of substitution
I think it would be pretty natural to call the dancing men a cipher though.
@curiousdannii Yes, under the traditional meaning of a term. But it's not uncommon for specific fields to have particular meanings that are narrower, broader, or different. Ask a botanist, for example, whether a tomato or strawberry is a fruit (a tomato is, a strawberry isn't), or a linguist whether "It is raining" contains an expletive (it does). Yet ask a lay person, and you'll get different answers. Thus a conlanger's definition of "cipher" needn't match a cryptographer's.
Are other conlangers actively using "cipher" with this meaning, or are you just suggesting it?
@curiousdannii I can't say what word others would use. This would be my pick. As elemtilas said, the best solution would be organic consensus, but that doesn't seem to have happened here.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.854929 | 2018-04-10T06:10:07 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/535",
"authors": [
"Domino",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"OpenAI was the last straw",
"Sparksbet",
"curiousdannii",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1092",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2609",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
838 | Do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?
In order for me to ask a higher quality question, I need to know, do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?
No. There are no rules, nor anyone who could set them.
Why didn't you just put that as the answer?
It depends on the definition, I think. A spoken language definitely needs sounds, other kinds of languages don't.
No, a conlang does not need any of it. You can construct a language based on gestures (a sign language) or on whistles, or on other signals transporting information. You can construct a Pasigraphy, i.e., a written-only language.
But for a more conventional design that meets our intuition of language, you will probably use sounds and words, and letters to write the language. It is up to your creativity to come up with original sounds and letters, but there is definetely no need to do so. Many conlang designs rely on sounds (and complete phonologies) that occur in natural languages, and use usual letters (mostly Latin, but also Cyrillic or other existing writing systems like Runes) for writing. The words of a conlang are most often original but I even can imagine a conlang without original words: Draw existing words for natural languages in an eclectic way or create a conlang closely based on a natural language or a group of natural languages. The vocabulary of IALA Interlingua is hardly original.
Even for pasigraphies, letters, per se, aren't required - consider, for example, languages like Chinese or Japanese, which use ideograms to represent words or syllables.
One more thing: an auxiliary language benefits from having recognizable and recycled script and vocabulary, but a language set in an alternate universe might stretch credibility if it happened to have the same writing system and vocabulary as one of earth's languages
As has already been said, the answer is, generally no. However, I’d like to look into it a bit deeper:
Letters
Many (most?) constructed languages are written with the Latin script, i.e. what I’m using right now to write this answer. However, many conlangers find the base set of 26 characters it provides too restrictive, and will make use of things like diacritics (áèñħ…), special characters used in some languages or the IPA (ŋß…) or letters from other alphabets (εφϑ…). This is a choice, and by no means a necessity. Some conlangers, in particular those creating languages for a constructed world, also like to invent entire writing systems and consider the representation with the Latin script (“romanisation”) merely a tool for easy representation online. Again, this is optional, but depending on your goals might be a good idea. It would not make sense to create a new writing system for an auxiliary language though, for example.
Words
There’s three ways one might interpret this question:
Do I have to make my words sound different (from English / any other language)? Certainly not: auxiliary languages often take heavy inspiration from existing languages, as familiarity makes it easier to learn a language. Similarly, if you want to toy around with grammar but don’t really care about the actual outcome, you might as well just use placeholder words taken straight from English and focus on what you really care about.
Do I have to make words which mean different things than the words in English/any other language? Here I am inclined to say yes. If you simply copy an English dictionary and replace all the words by other sounding words, then you’ve created what is called a relex. Whether relexes are considered conlangs or not is up for debate, in my eyes they are ciphers. However, there’s layers upon layers to this - is a conlang still a relex if you copy the lexicon but use completely different grammar? Perhaps not, but it’s not as interesting as if you also made a custom lexicon. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that doing so takes away most of what makes a conlang unique.
Do I have to follow the idea of having sentences broken down into words? Absolutely not: it’s actually surprisingly hard (read: an unsolved problem) to define the concept of a word in a way that works for every language. Look into the (just as loosely defined) concept of polysynthesis if you’re intrigued.
Sounds
Language doesn’t have to rely on sound. There’s sign languages as a primary counterexample that also shows up “in real life”, and on top of that, graphical (written only), touch based and many other kinds of languages have been created.
But let’s assume you’re going to be making a spoken language. Two questions:
Do I have to make new sounds? Well… no. There’s only so many sounds our mouths can make and most of them already occur in some language (and those that don’t, e.g. smacking ones teeth together don’t occur for good reasons), so it’s rather hard to even make new sounds. But if you’re making a language meant for aliens/sapient animals/whatever nonhuman you can come up with, then maybe you might want to. But many conlangers don’t bother, as it is really hard.
Do I have to make a new sound system or can I just use the sounds of English/other language? Same point as with the words above: You don’t have to, and if your goal is to focus on other parts of the conlang you might as well ignore it, but if your goal is to make a good, interesting and unique conlang, then… yea you should.
Summary
In short, what you do and don’t do depends entirely on your design goals. If you wanna toy with a particular grammar concept, then focus on the essentials. If you wanna make the new big international auxlang then keep things familiar to the target audience. If you want to make a natural looking conlang, then go all in and be creative.
Yes -- after a fashion.
The main issue I have with your question lies in the specific terms used: words, letters & sounds.
So far, the answers have gotten around these things by pointing out whistle or sign languages. And I agree: technically speaking, in a sign language, there are no words and certainly no sounds.
The reason the answer is actually yes, I contend, is because I am sure what you actually mean by "words" is "discrete meaning carrying units of language" and by "sounds" & "letters" you probably mean "some way to convey said meaning through an interpersonal medium of communication".
When taken at the broader level, of course, language has to have "meaning carrying units" and it has to have "medium of communication". Else, language ceases to have meaning.
I would say that yes, ever invented language must have "words" (whether those words are spoken, signed, thought or written) as tokens of meaningful communication; and they must have "sounds" (whether spoken by mouth through the air or sent via radio waves between antennae) as a native & non-technological way of conveying meaning.
"Letters" indicate a specifically technological advancement to communication via language. An invented language's culture does not need to be that advanced. And even if it were, it would not need "its own" letters. It could borrow either someone else's writing system; for example the way Persian borrowed Arabic writing. Even though Persians had been writing for centuries already.
“in a sign language, there are no words” is strictly wrong. Sign languages are not that different from spoken ones. The medium allows for some very interesting differences like signing two signs in parallel, or having the location of signing be relevant, but otherwise it’s much of the same. They certainly have words.
And, as I’ve mentioned in my own answer, the idea of “words” itself cannot easily be generalized enough to capture every single language. Most have some notions which correspond to “words”, but there may be e.g. differences between phonetic and grammatical “word boundaries” (which mostly align in European languages, or at least are subsets of each other)
A "word" is a spoken token of meaning. And by extension, a written token. Sign languages use "signs". Which is why I shift away from terms specific to spoken or signed (or whistled) languages by reducing those terms to "discrete meaning carrying units of language".
That is an overly restrictive definition. There is no difference between expressing a word through mouth or hands. An really, a “sign” is much more of an analogue of a phoneme, or perhaps a morpheme.
Okay. We can disagree on that!
Yes and no. Every language spoken by humans has its own way of dividing the universe of possible speech-sounds into a few dozen phonemes, and its own restrictions on how phonemes can go together to make syllables and words (phonotactics).
If the language is written, there must be a way of mapping phonemes (or syllables) to characters.
But you're not required to make any of these different from those of all other languages!
You're not required to define the phonology first; likely it will not settle down until you're well into composing sample sentences and think “hm, that consonant-cluster or this diphthong doesn't fit the intended flavor.” Similarly, you might make a full grammar and dictionary in Latin script (or Cyrillic or hiragana or ...) before deciding that your fictional culture needs its own writing system.
Just to be a pedant: you can also map meanings to written symbols, as is partly the case with Egyptian hieroglyphics. While some of them represent sounds or sound combinations, others (eg the determinatives) have no sound vaue and only indicate meaning.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.855745 | 2018-12-04T03:18:32 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/838",
"authors": [
"Aidball",
"Cecilia",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"John_Sharp1318",
"Jonas Gabriels",
"MrRaghav",
"Oliver Mason",
"Reza Ulkarimjoy1234",
"SVill",
"Sascha Baer",
"Shubham Deshmukh",
"Spammer",
"Terpomo",
"b a",
"curiousdannii",
"detectives spain",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2733",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2734",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2735",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2736",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2737",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2738",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2739",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2740",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2742",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2748",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5519",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/566",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/58",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/967",
"morgansbyers",
"plu"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1087 | What list of words do you use when creating a language?
What word list do you use when creating a language? Is there a conlang word list?
P.S I know that this question is kinda subjective, but I think that it will be quite useful for conlangers.
You might want to check out This question on [worldbuilding.se], which is essentially a "cross-site duplicate".
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.856472 | 2020-02-01T15:21:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1087",
"authors": [
"Andrew",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3453",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1013 | How common are reflexive pronouns in natlangs?
I'm working on the pronoun system of one of my conlangs, and I can't find any resource that can tell me how commonly reflexive pronouns occur in natural languages.
Is a reflexive something I need to add to be naturalistic? And if it isn't is there a specific reason/way a lack of reflexive pronouns occurs?
Unfortunately, WALS does not provide a simple answer to this question. But this chapter of WALS is related and has interesting food for thought: https://wals.info/chapter/47
Generally speaking, you need a reflexive pronoun of some type if not having one causes ambiguity in who did what to whom. Assume English had no reflexives. "I tossed the ball to I" and "You tossed the ball to you" (assuming singular "you") are quite understandable as one person tossing the ball to themselves, thus no reflexive needed. "She tossed the ball to he", acceptable. But suppose you had "She tossed the ball to she", and it's been previously established there is more than one woman present. Did person A throw the ball to Person B, or did she toss the ball up in the air and caught it herself? There's no way to tell. An example like that is why German only has a distinctive reflexive in third person; first and second person don't have that same ambiguity.
You can get rid of the reflexive entirely if your verb system, to use one possibility, allows a given verb to indicate if it takes a direct or indirect object, or if it does not. Let's say that English verbs used the affix a- to indicate the verb is ditransitive (it has both a direct and indirect object) and no affix to indicate purely transitive (it only has a direct object).
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She a-threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.
Under a system like that, English wouldn't need a reflexive pronoun because the verb would make it clear whether the subject was performing the action on themselves, or using themselves as the indirect object, or whether something else was the recipient of the action. One could argue the affix a- is similar to the single Icelandic reflexive pronoun that's used for everything.
In Inuktitut, verbs that are are equivalent to English intransitive verbs use one suffix attached to them to indicate the subject:
pisuk to walk
pisuktunga I am walking
pisuktutit You (singular) are walking
pisuktuq He/She/It is walking
Specific verbs, equivalent to transitive verbs, use a different set of suffixes that indicate both subject and object:
qukiq to shoot something
qukiqtagit I shoot you
qukiqtara I shoot him/her/it
qukiqtarma You shoot me
qukiqtait You shoot him/her/it
qukiqtaanga He/she/it shoot me
qukiqtaatit He/she/it shoot you
qukiqtanga He/she/it shoot that other he/she/it
Here's where the reflexives come in: if you don't use the second set of suffixes, but instead use the first set, then the verb becomes a reflexive: the subject did something to themselves.
qukiqtunga I shoot myself
qukiqtutit You shoot yourself
qukiqtuq He/She/It shoot themself
Attaching the suffix that goes on intransitive verbs onto a transitive verb turns that verb into a reflexive.
So, if your verb conjugation allows that sort of thing, then you can get away with not using reflexive pronouns. The verb indicates it.
On the other hand, if your verb doesn't allow you to do that, then you need reflexives in order to remove the ambiguity when you get into situations where it's not clear who is doing what to whom.
Another way: go back to that first English example I used. Suppose English had multiple third person singular pronouns, such that you didn't just have "she", but "she-1", "she-2", and perhaps more. Then what does the example look like?
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-2." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-1." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.
No ambiguity. The context makes it clear that Mary is she-1 (Mary had the ball, she-1 threw the ball, therefore Mary is she-1, so Susan is she-2).
A third option is context. You might have a language where you do need to gather more information in order to determine what's going on.
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan threw it back." - Mary obviously threw the ball to Susan.
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan then asked for the ball." - Mary apparently didn't throw the ball to Susan, since Susan asked for it after it had been thrown and caught.
So, three possible ways to get away without reflexive pronouns. So it's not a matter of how common or uncommon it is, but does the grammar of the language allow you to get away without them, or is it necessary because there's no other way of providing the same information?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.856530 | 2019-08-24T00:29:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1013",
"authors": [
"Linn Browning",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3797"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
941 | By what means might the roots "let" and "ly" mean the same thing in a naturalistic conlang?
I apologize for how this question may be perceived. I am casually learning linguistics with no curriculum. I can understand that this question may have many possible answers, but I am not quite sure how else to ask this question. I can also understand if all that may be provided to me is some resource on lists of natural ways languages evolve.
Basically, I've come up with two place names, "Yallet" and "Helverly". I'm trying to create enough of a naming language that would allow me to create names that seem to occur naturally in the setting.
Both Yallet and Helverly are locations, and so I was wondering if there was a way for the root "let", meaning town, to conceivably evolve to "ly".
Can this evolution happen naturally? If so, I would happily read on such transformations. If not, I would be very appreciative of an explanation as to why it would not be a natural evolution.
It is a two-step process, and both steps are very natural and frequently encountered in natural languages. The steps may occur in the other order as well, but the order here deems more common to me.
Loss of the final stop let -> le. This occurs very often, French is a prominent example of this because the final stops are preserved in writing, but lost in pronunciation (with some exceptions when there is a following vowel).
A vowel shift le -> li, in this case a raising. Again, this step is very natural because /e/ and /i/ are neighbouring vowels in the vowel diagram.
These two steps use your assumption that let is the older form that evolves into ly. A more sophisticated construction could assume a common ancestor for both forms, e.g., lit that evolves to li by the loss of the final consonant and to let by lowering the vowel.
EDIT: As you are generally interested in sound laws, there is a resource named Index Diachronica that lists a lot of sound changes collected from many sources.
Ah -- you said the same thing as me while I was writing my answer! :)
In fact, the "-ly" suffix in English (daily, yearly, northerly) comes exactly this way. The "-ly" comes from Old English "-lic", in which the vowel was pronounced as "i:". So, loss of the final stop then a vowel change, shortening in this case.
It is very uncommon for phonemes to just disappear into thin air as part of a specific bu systematic sound change. Usually one sound changes into another, or leaves some sort of effect on neighbouring phonemes as it disappears. If the sound is weak anyway, such as a /w/, this might explain its disappearance in Greek, as illustrated by oenology (from Greek oinos, originally woinos) related to English wine. The only example I know of a stop disappearing is the p in Proto-Celtic. One process is compensatory lengthening where you get a bit more vowel in place of the consonant.
So the -lic in @KeithMorrison's example may have been /i:k/ some of the time but it was basically on a journey from /lik/ to /i:/. Another example is I for German ich. This is described here. So I would say it is more likely that the two steps would be related, rather than the inherently less likely circumstance that two completely separate changes would just happen to occur in sequence in the same situation.
Phonemes are lost all the time. Greek lost all terminal stops, and English lost word-initial stops in front of /n/ (knight, gnat, etc) and, /t/ is lost if it's between a fricative and a nasal (or /l/) without any other corresponding alteration on the surrounding phonemes: "Christmas" is an obvious example.
In order to see whether -let and -ly are related, there are several options:
One of them is the 'original' morpheme indicating a settlement, and the other one is derived from it. Maybe the /e/ in /let/ was pronounced [i:] at some point, and then the /t/ dropped.
They both have a common ancestor, maybe /ley/. In distinct geographic regions it ended up being pronounced differently, and so it developed into distinct /let/ and /ly/. Or some clerk mis-spelled it /let/ by accident and it stuck.
They are unrelated, maybe coming from different languages historically.
You would be most interested in 1 or 2. Language often changes to make things easier to pronounce, so think about how you would pronounce a word in a lazy or sloppy way, slurring the sounds, so that it is still intelligible, but not exactly as it was spelled. And then think how you would write it down.
In the past, spelling was not normalised, so differences like you describe can easily crop up. It was only (in the West) with the emergence of dictionaries and printing presses that spelling really mattered.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.857131 | 2019-05-08T23:47:31 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/941",
"authors": [
"David Robinson",
"Keith Morrison",
"Oliver Mason",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/869"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
862 | Famous a priori auxilary languages?
Most auxiliary languages I know of, especially Esperanto, are primarily a posteriori—that is, their vocabulary or grammar are derived from other existing languages, and most are fairly Eurocentric. While many might have a priori grammar, but not vocabulary, I have yet to see another language that is entirely a priori—not derived from other languages. Do any such languages exist? Note I am talking about languages designed to be an international auxiliary language.
I would say this is very hard, as we all speak language(s), and that limits our imagination somewhat. If you come up with a new language, you are bound to fall back on what you know already. Otherwise you might end up with a language which is unlike any other, but doesn't actually work as a language.
@OliverMason By that definition every conlang would be a posteriori, except for things like Europan. But that is not how those words are usually used. For example, my own main conlang has a lot of derivational morphology (inspired by Greenlandic), verbs have inherent lexical aspects affecting affixes (inspired by PIE) and the syntax features an absolutive pivot (inspired by Dyirbal). But both the lexicon and the complete grammar is entirely self-made with no relation to existing languages. Everyone has inspirations, that doesn’t make it a posteriori.
Short answer: I've never seen or read a description of what you're seeking.
Long answer: What you're seeking is a most unlikely beast, reason being...
Generally speaking, auxiliary languages seek being completely or nearly completely a posteriori for reasons of simple expedience. Common design goals of an auxiliary language are ease of learning and simplicity of use. These goals are best met when vocabulary and grammar are familiar to the target audience. This is why Interlingua and Esperanto are considered "easy" languages to learn and have gained considerable user communities, with Esperanto boasting a small community of native level speakers.
What you're describing, a completely a priori invented language is most usually the domain of the artistic language, the engineered language and the philosophical language. With the exception of the philosophical inventors, most glossopoets are not interested in propagandising their languages as auxiliary languages. Occasionally a philosophical language inventor will propose his language as a means of general communication, but this is usually done from a position of ignorance as to how language works (accomplished auxiliary language proponents are usually quite well aware how language works in the wild!).
Auxiliary languages tend not to be classified as a priori simply because they impose layers of difficulty that run contrary to the usual design parameters of the genre. However, it can potentially be argued that a priori invented languages can become auxiliary languages after a fashion and if the appropriate stars align. For example, it may be that Klingon has seen some use as an ad hoc auxiliary language if, for example, two groups of Star Trek fans who do not share a language in common other than Klingon happen to meet at a SciFi convention.
Needless to say, even if there were an actual auxiliary language that is classified as purely a priori, it certainly isn't famous. Otherwise, we'd know about it!
There are various "a priori" constructed languages, though they are not as successful as "a posteriori" languages have been.
They include:
Spokil
Ro
Kotava
Solresol
Babm
Blisssymbols (Written, ideographic language only)
Nal Bino (modification of Volapuk)
Sona
We will have to go back some centuries in time to find a language like this. Since the success of Esperanto (and, to a lesser degree Interlingua, Glosa, and Toki Pona) it seems to be clear that an auxiliary language has to be naturalistic in some way to catch on. Nowadays, a priory languages (e.g., Loglan and its forks) are only designed with other purposes.
With this in mind, probably Solresol (1817) is the most famous a priory auxiliary language.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.857532 | 2019-01-25T01:42:41 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/862",
"authors": [
"Ankit Agarwal",
"Journeyman Geek",
"Oliver Mason",
"Rimi Sharma",
"Sascha Baer",
"breeda1",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2797",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2798",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2799",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2800",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2803",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"کسری کوهستانی"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
919 | How many unique sounds does the average conlang have?
At the moment I have 90 unique vowel/diphthong sounds that use tonal and length distinction in my conlang. In addition I've chosen 14 consonants, making my total of unique sounds 104.
I don't particularly want to drop any of them, but this seems a lot higher than the usual amount of unique sounds in a language. High enough to consider a more selective approach maybe.
I do want the language to have more vowel sounds than consonant, but how many unique vowel sounds does it have to have to be considered above average?
I've edited this question to bring it on-topic here, though you could do with editing it again. It's not really clear if the average you want to learn about is for natlangs or conlangs.
This question seems quite subjective and should be closed (in my opinion).
I speak Finnish, which is one of the more vowel-oriented languages. Considering the 8 vowels, diphthongs, double-vowel (long) sounds... there's probably 2-3 dozen vowel sounds. 90 not only feels like overkill, but I wonder how effectively anyone could distinguish that many sounds. It's like asking someone to involve all the sounds in 5-6 U.S. dialects all at once.
If you have ninety vowels (including diphthongs), I'd say your invented language is already above average. English is probably at the higher end of the vowel spectrum with twentyish; but there are plenty of languages with far fewer (as few as two or three!).
Since your title question references invented languages specifically, you might consider trawling the CALS to find an approximation. Not every invented language is listed, so naturally the data & results can not be seen as accurate.
90 different vowels sounds a lot, but you include tone as a distinguishing feature. I don't know how many tone/length distinctions you have, but some natural languages have 6 tones. This brings the number of different vowel qualities down to 15 which is still a large number, but in the range of natural languages (German and Norwegian are in that range).
14 consonants is a rather moderate size for a consonant system.
For more information on consonant and vowel inventories of natural languages you can consult the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures specially chapters 1 and 2.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.857965 | 2019-04-05T20:56:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/919",
"authors": [
"MilkyWay90",
"Nunius",
"Rory Alsop",
"Tom Patterson",
"Waleed Khalid",
"curiousdannii",
"helsy",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1217",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2964",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2971",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2972",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2973",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2975",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3062",
"m123"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1157 | Naturalness and Intuitiveness of marking tense and aspect in the negative but not affirmative
I'm wondering about the naturalness and intuitiveness of marking tense in negative clauses but not affirmative ones. I'm also wondering whether a language with this hypothetical feature would be better analyzed in a different way.
By naturalness I mean how likely it is that a feature like this might evolve somewhere in a real language, and how stable it would be if it did somehow evolve.
By intuitiveness I mean how hard this feature would be to acquire and use correctly in a second language.
The idea is that neither tense nor aspect is marked in the affirmative, but they are marked in the negative.
For instance, let's suppose we have a tense-aspect inventory as follows
past -- covers all past events
recpast -- covers the recent past, subset of past
rempast -- covers the distant past, subset of past
present -- the present
actual -- covers the past and present
future -- the future
gnomic -- covers past present and future, also used for non-temporal denial
instantaneous -- refers explicitly to the topic time
Suppose we have a language that uses a negative verb, like Finnish, to negate predicates. Let's make it slightly more general than the Finnish negative verb and have it function as a negative copula of sorts as well.
book.ACC read.1sg
I am reading the book, I read the book, I will read the book &c
book.ACC read.NPAST.1sg
I did not read the book.
book.ACC read.NRECPAST.1sg
I have not read the book recently.
book.ACC read.NREMPAST.1sg
I didn't read the book a long time ago.
book.ACC read.NFUT.1sg
I won't read the book.
book.ACC read.NPRES.1sg
I'm not reading the book right now.
book.ACC read.NGNOMIC.1sg
I never read the book and never will.
book.ACC read.NACTUAL.1sg
I have not read the book before and am not reading it now.
book.ACC read.NINSTANT.1sg
I did not read the book at the particular time in question.
Let's further suppose that nouns can be marked the same way as verbs when they function as predicates.
Bob.NOM nobleman.3sg
Bob is a nobleman.
Jane.NOM queen.NPRES.3sg
Jane is not queen right now.
The thing that distinguishes this idea from simply having lexemes with meanings like not yet is that the choice of the instanstaneous negative marker is more marked than and less frequent than the range negatives.
Pragmatically speaking, a speaker would be expected to use the negative morpheme with the broadest scope that is consistent with their knowledge.
I don't think this is likely, but I don't have any evidence to back that up.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.858169 | 2020-05-09T21:09:56 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1157",
"authors": [
"Ant",
"Justin neilon",
"OpenAI was the last straw",
"Solosoli",
"Trang Oul",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2609",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3621",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3622",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3623",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3626"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1017 | Are suffixes in Ido agglutinative?
I was thinking what is the correct way to say "Little princess" in Ido.
(EN) Little princess - Little (indicates the "size") Princess (descendant of some royal crown and that descendant is female).
(ES) Princesita - Princes (root), -it- (suffix for "litte"), -a (indicates female gender).
We should translate as in english like "Mikra princino"? or in the Spanish way like "Princetino"?
If Ido suffixes are agglutinative, is there a particular order? "-et" suffix for little "-in" for female... we could get "Princineto".
Longer strings of suffixes are very ordinary in Esperanto, so I would assume they're acceptable in Ido.
After a research, I finally found this example which explains this.
si quieres decir una perra (adulta) pequeña, el orden adecuado es entonces perra+pequeña = hundineto. El orden contrario es poco natural y hace dudar al que oye la palabra hundetino = perrito hembra
So the valid ones for Little princess are:
1. Mikra princino = "Little" + "female descendant of some royal crown"
2. Princineto = A female descendant of some royal crown who is little.
"Princetino" would be like:
A little descendant of some royal crown who is female.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.858376 | 2019-08-26T18:50:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1017",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1036 | Are there any free online conlang creation tools?
I was wondering if anyone knows of any conlang creation websites that are free to use.
I know this sounds silly but I have little experience to go on as for creating a custom language.
There are some syntax "toys" online, eg http://www.zompist.com/gtg.html. This will help you write a (formal) grammar of your language, but you will need a good understanding of Generative Linguistics to use that.
Otherwise, what else do you need instead of pen and paper? Maybe a spreadsheet to enter vocabulary? There are so many choices to be made on so many levels that it is not really possible to automate much of it. It's not as if you would enter a few characteristics into a form, press a button, and out comes a conlang :)
There is the Vulgar fantasy language generator, which allows a small language to be generated for free, but requires a subscription for more substantial languages or advanced controls.
That used to work, but for whatever reason, it won't let me accept PDFs anymore.
@JohnWDailey - You can always just print the displayed page to a PDF driver... When I try to save as PDF (without being logged in), it tells me that I have to sign up (which means paying).
We all had little experience to go on when we first started making languages!
I'd actually recommend that you NOT make use of a conlang recipe resource. What you end up doing is little more than making an invented language like how the recipe writer makes an invented language.
This just defeats the purpose of the art of glossopoesy.
Instead, I'd suggest you take what experience you've got, little as it may be, and just do the hard work of language invention. Sit down with pencil and paper and doodle words and phrases thereon. Come up with some basic rules (for word order, for syllable structure, for grammar). Get yourself hooked up with a good language invention community (Conlang-L for example) and begin the learning process.
I know you are probably not still wondering, but I use https://conworkshop.com, if that helps.
Hallo No UhUh, welcome to this site. Can you describe a little bit what can be found at the weblink you posted?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.858486 | 2019-10-07T21:34:44 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1036",
"authors": [
"3555",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"JohnWDailey",
"Rag Doll",
"Simon",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Spammer",
"Tiểu Bạch Dương",
"golf69",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3304",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3305",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3306",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3308",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3310",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3311",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3318",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/878",
"owengall"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1000 | Which sounds could a lipless humanoid produce?
In my world, I have a race of humanoids who speak a language called Gé̃kt, which is derived from various Eastern Iranian languages such as Khotanese, Ossetian, Yaghnobi and Bactrian with a dash of Persian (a Western Iranian language) thrown in for good measure. However, these humanoids lack lips and I have no idea how this traits would affect their speech.
For reference, here are Gé̃kt's constants and vowels.
Consonants: pʰ p p' b f v m w tʰ t t'd tsʰ ts dz s z n r rr l ṭʰ ṭ ḍ ṭsʰ ṣ ẓ ṇ ṛ tsʰ tṡ dż ṅ y kʰ k k' g x y ṅ h q qʷ m t͡s t͡sʼ d͡z t͡ʃ t͡ʃ' d͡ʒ χ χʷ ʁ w j ɫ
Vowels: ι [i] ο [u] ε [e] α, ο [ə] ο [o]? α [a] ει, ι [iː] ο [uː] η [eː] ω [oː] α [aː] e æ o u ɨ ɛː ɔː
What sounds may they use to communicate?
At first sight, it seems that it is impossible for the lipless humanoids to produce any sounds that involve the lips in their production, this concerns the following groups of sounds:
bilabial consonants: pʰ p p' b m w
labiodental consonants: f v
labialised consonants: qʷ χʷ
rounded vowels: o u ɔ
But: There is a known art, named ventriloquism, where replacement sounds for those sounds that require visible lip movement are used to produce understandable speech. Maybe the lipless humanoids can cope with this and even learn to produce the Gé̃kt's sounds using such techniques.
An easy fix for /w u o ɔ/ would be to replace them with /ɰ ɯ ɤ ʌ/
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.858699 | 2019-08-05T04:24:19 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1000",
"authors": [
"abaccarat1xbet5",
"b a",
"blackjack1xbet5",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3201",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3202",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3229",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/58",
"jan Emon"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1028 | How would I make an efficient, written, language while still providing the least ambiguity that is reasonable?
I plan on having some ambiguity for stuff like wordplay (and to make the language feel natural). By efficient, I mean the language takes up little space on the document it is conveying information on.
The idea is the language would be "alien" or "magical" as I am planning on using this language I am making in my game for magical symbols. I plan on eventually adding a spoken equivalent of it later, but I am not concerned about that now. It is also going to be part of the lore of my game, so the naturalness of the language helps a lot (so it can have a history to it).
The wordplay can be used to have magical mishaps from using a similar, but wrong word. The last thing I plan on adding is since it is a magic based language, I only need to have one symbol per word.
The idea behind the grammatical structure would convey:
Subject, Verb, Action. I would then use adjectives to modify the meaning of the subject, action, or verb. However, I don't know if I am going to include articles in the languages, but that depends on how I make the characters for the subjects, verbs, and actions.
This is not meant to be a romance language as its purpose is for use in spells and potion recipes.
I guess what I am asking for is how to make the language use grammar and structure that can be read and written efficiently. How would I make grammar and language structure that can be read and written efficiently?
If by "efficiency" you only mean least characters, then what sort of answer are you looking for other than "invent a logographic writing system"?
I assume by "Action" you mean "Object"? An action is usually expressed through the verb.
First a in this form brand new fact from natural languages: All natural languages are of approximately the same efficiency despite their quite noticeable differences (some languages are spoken at a rather fast pace in syllables per second, but than the information content of a syllable is lower than in other languages that are spoken more slowly). The reference is Christophe Coupé, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu, and François Pellegrino, Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche and they give a value of 39 ± 5 bit/s.
So you can expect that a naturalistic constructed language will fall in about the same range; maybe somewhat less efficient, because it is difficult to get things just right by construction that have been optimised by language evolution over a long time.
For completely symbolic languages, look up the term pasigraphy and take a glimpse on some systems that have already been invented.
Pasigraphy is perfect for what I need. Looking at the example of Blissymbols for the sentence "I want to go to the cinema.", I can definitely see creating something like that for my language. Now, I just have to figure out how to use ligatures to add modifiers to my characters. :P
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.858837 | 2019-09-24T00:23:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1028",
"authors": [
"Alexis Evelyn",
"Kassandra Sarabia",
"Oliver Mason",
"Puma",
"Spammer",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1369",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3278",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3280",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3281"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1029 | International Language
I was reading International Auxiliary Language, but I don't like their setups.
Because, mostly, they use Latin alphabets!
And that, my friends, cause confusions!
No matter what the letter was intended to be pronounced, EVERY country (especially those use uses Latin alphabets such as English, German, French, Spanish, etc.) WILL pronounce it in their own way!
'J' is pronounced 'h' in Spanish, 'z' in French, 'y' in German.
Many country also have different pronunciation for 'H' and 'R'.
Other than that, many countries are even "incapable of" pronouncing letters such as 'RR' in Spanish or 'Ü' in German!
Due to those drawbacks, the invented language bound to be less efficient than it was intended to be!
So, I was thinking, is there a way to overcome such drawbacks!?
First of all, the most obvious approach is to find a set of alphabets that "Nobody had in common"! At least, find those letters that are used by "only one country"! Such as some letters in Greek alphabets (As far as I know, Greek are the only country that use Greek alphabets).
Second, I think it's better to divide that alphabets into 2 group. First group are those letters that "every people in every country know how to pronounce". I think it's good to base it on Japanese, because Japanese has the least amount of pronunciations as far as I know. I believe they are the easiest language to learn pronunciation-wise.
This group of letters build up the "basic and conceptual words", where all other words are the "combination product" of these words. You can think it as the "building block" of the words.
Thus, I think it's better to make the words "a word a syllable" such as Chinese. And 1-syllable words made from the "Basic letters" are the "building block" of the words. More complicated words are the combination of these "basic conceptual words". Such as "Refrigerator" are actually "Electronic Ice Box" in Chinese.
I also think it's better to make the letters "phonetic"! 'A' is always pronounced 'a' NO MATTER WHAT! Unlike English, 'A' has 2 million ways of pronunciation!
The second group of letters are those pronunciations that "All the countries in the world that COULD EVER MADE! I know this might sounds like far fetching, but the idea is "Easy for everybody to learn such language. And for those who are familiar with the language, it will be easy for them to learn EVERY LANGUAGE"!
You can think it as "The first group letters are the intersection of the pronunciations of every language, and the second group are the union of the pronunciations of every language".
And the second group of letters are only used for those more advanced, probably grammatical, concepts. Which is "Unnecessary for basic conversations but critical for literature".
So, my question is:
Are such ideas feasible? What's the ups-and-downs, pros-and-cons of my ideas? Did I miss something? What else should I pay special attention to?
"Are such ideas feasible? What's the ups-and-downs, pros-and-cons of my ideas? Did I miss something? What else should I pay special attention to?" This is all very broad and is mostly asking for opinions. Can you think of any ways to make your inquiry more objectively answerable? Otherwise this is likely to be closed.
One solution is just to use IPA. Then it's simple and unambiguous what the sounds are.
@curiousdannii Yes, that was my thought as well! :)
@curiousdannii Could you do me the honor and help me out!? I'm kind of at lost here! Appreciated!!!
@PiggyChu001 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPA_chart_2018.pdf
@curiousdannii I'm familiar with that chart, I just don't know how to "rephrase my question so it's NOT opinion-based". Could me be so kind and point me to the right direction!? Appreciated!
Unfortunately you have written an opinion piece and you ask for more opinions. This is not the way this question-and-answer site is designed to work. Take the tour of this site and look in the help center for help about asking questions.
You might get a better response at https://www.reddit.com/r/conlang/ , which tends to more freeform discussion.
'j' can be pronounced as [ʒ] by french speaker not as [z].And in spanish it is [x] not [h].
You seem to be confusing sounds with their representation in writing; similarly, countries and languages are not equivalent either.
There is an inventory of sounds that are used in human languages; though most languages only use a small portion of it. If you are aiming for an international language, you should probably select those sounds that are common to most or all languages. I believe that toki pona comes close to that.
Representing these sounds in writing is a completely different matter. Because different languages use the same letter to represent different sounds, your best bet might be to make up a completely new alphabet; then you don't have any pre-conceived notions of pronunciation to struggle with. On the flip side, everybody then has to learn the letters and how to pronounce them, which makes your language harder to learn.
In your question you also touch on morphology: that is a whole different field, which you should probably put in a separate question.
So, to summarise:
each language has an inventory of sounds it uses, these are called phonemes.
phonemes are represented in writing by letters; this is not a 1:1 mapping, and also
depends on accents and dialectal variation.
Letters can have diacritics (such as the dots on top of the ü) — these usually make them separate letters from the base form.
the letter-phoneme mapping is arbitrary; there is nothing inherent in the letter that determines how it should be pronounced.
In general I would recommend that you read up on some of the concepts of linguistics, as that would make it easier for you to express what exactly you want to achieve.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.859084 | 2019-09-24T06:33:50 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1029",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"Existential_Quantifier",
"Lewis Searle",
"Oliver Mason",
"PiggyChu001",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Spammer",
"USERNAME GOES HERE",
"Vladimir Krasnopolski",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1247",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1370",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3282",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3283",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3284",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3285",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3288",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1049 | Simplified Version of IPA?
In IPA, the sounds of many symbols are so close that they are indistinguishable to me! For example, [bʊk], [ɓʊk], or [βʊk]. Even though they do have some minor differences, but all a listener like me hears is "book".
So is there any "Simplified IPA" where they contain all possible pronunciations but yet omit all those phonetically indistinguishable symbols?
They're not indistinguishable at all, and anyone trying to learn a language which distinguishes them will either learn them or never acquire the language to any fluency.
The reason that all the different characters for “the same sound” exist is because they’re not the same sound, and trained linguists/linguistic researchers can hear the difference. Any “simplified IPA” wouldn’t be a true “IPA”, and would not be able to accurately represent the difference in sounds; you would end up with the present situation where the spelling of words in a language not suited for the alphabet being used does not accurately reflect the actual pronunciation of the word (for example, Spanish vaca, cow, which some people hear as though it should be spelled baka, because neither b nor v in the Latin alphabet is an accurate representation of the sound used).
I totally understand, but is there any system for the "regular people" (not trained linguists/linguistic researchers)!? Because some differences in IPA are truly "too minute"! One really could never tell the difference "without training"!
Any system for the "regular people" wouldn't be "universal" in the sense that IPA is; you'd simply end up with Yet Another Not-Quite-Accurate Transliteration Convention. You might as well pick a dictionary that doesn't use IPA (virtually any dictionary aimed at users below the collegiate level would be a good candidate) and adopt its system for representing pronunciations.
Another possible source for an alternative pronunciation representation system might be to look at phonetically-based systems for teaching children to read, such as DISTAR or the Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet [Wikipedia link] [Omniglot link], or any of the alternative systems listed on Omniglot under the headings "Alternative spelling/writing systems" or "Phonetic Alphabets".
OK. Is there any statistic research on the IPA usages!? Maybe I could pick some "most often used" alphabets for my language.
If you're looking for a transcription system for a conlang that you're creating, just make one up using whatever alphabet (or subset thereof) you're comfortable with, and which distinguishes between the various sounds of your conlang. For example, if your conlang has the sound represented in IPA by [β] but not the ones represented by [b] or [ɓ], there's no real reason not to use the glyph b to represent it, if that makes it easier to write out the language or to document it.
THAT is the problem! I wish to create a language that "contains" all possible pronunciations, but not SO minute! Imagine I create 3 "different" words with [bʊk], [ɓʊk], and [βʊk], my user WILL think "WTF IS YOUR PROBLEM!?". THAT'S why I try to omit those alphabets that could be "considered the same".
If the language contains all possible pronunciations, then the full IPA is the only possible solution. If you don't want to deal with the minute differences between e.g. [β], [b], and [ɓ], then your language doesn't actually contain all possible pronunciations, and you can simply choose one of the alternatives to represent whichever sound your language does have.
OK, let me ponder over your comment and see what I can come up with. Thanks!
@PiggyChu001 PHOIBLE has the most common segments cross-linguistically: https://phoible.org/parameters
If you're notating a language that uses [β] or [ɓ] but does not distinguish it from [b], that is, if there are no words such that changing one of these consonants to the other changes the meaning of the word (perhaps because [β] occurs only between vowels and [b] elsewhere), then for most purposes you write them all as /b/; so that is a “simplified IPA”. This is called broad transcription, written with slashes to distinguish it from narrow transcription using brackets. A famous example: English /p/ includes both [p] and [pʰ], which are distinguished in many languages including Zulu, Hindustani, Mandarin.
No language makes phonemic distinctions between all pairs of phones represented by distinct symbols in IPA; but every symbol exists because some language contrasts it with others.
There is SaypU, which tries to creates a universal phonetic alphabet for all languages with only 24 letters, many of which can be used to represent slightly different sounds in different languages.
"a" in SaypU can represent /a/, /æ/, and /ɑ/, depending on the language. "y" represents /j/, /ʎ/, and /ʝ/. "w" represents both /w/ and /ɥ/.
I’m not entirely sure this qualifies as a ‘universal phonetic alphabet’ by any means. What happens, for instance, in a language which distinguishes /a æ ɑ/ (e.g. Äiwoo), /j ʎ/ (e.g. Warlpiri, some Spanish dialects), or /w ɥ/ (e.g. French, Abkhaz)?
@bradrn, you use diacritics (a, ä, ã).
Thanks for clarifying! Do the diacritics have any consistent meaning within SaypU, or are they used in an ad-hoc fashion? I’d call it a ‘universal phonetic alphabet for all languages’ in the former case only.
@bradrn, They don’t have any consistent meaning.
In that case, I wouldn’t call it a ’universal phonetic alphabet’, since it can’t specify the exact phonetic details of every sound in the same way IPA can. If anything, I’d say it’s a standardised set of mappings for romanization purposes, similarly to e.g. the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.859523 | 2019-11-19T12:38:51 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1049",
"authors": [
"Duncan",
"Galactic",
"Itsuki Ookami",
"Jeff Zeitlin",
"Laman",
"Naturalske Universum",
"PiggyChu001",
"bradrn",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1370",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2729",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2848",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3351",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3950",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/398",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3989"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1229 | How to distinguish [i] from [iː] in Cyrillic
Renglish/Рэнглиш (not mine)
is an adaptation of Cyrillic for English. Most of the sounds seem ok, but how would you normally differentiate [i] in bit from the [iː] in beet using Cyrillic or would they both just use 'И'?
The sample text they give is:
Ал Хйюмън бееингз ар борн фри энд еекўъл ин Дигнити энд Райтз. Ђей ар ендауед ўић Реезън энд Каншънс энд шюдд якт тъўордс ўун ънуђер ин ей Спирит ъв Бруђергхюд.
In the Latin alphabet that is:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal declaration of human rights)
I know some characters are very differenṭ from their normal sounds, like я for 'æ' instead of 'ja' & ц for dʒ instead of 'ts' (стяк ексчэнц would be 'stack exchange'.) I use џ instead of ц for dʒ. I thought about using ы for [i] and и for
I previously posted this in the Linguistics community but was told this was a better fit.
If ы is otherwise unused, it seems like the best fit here to me. It certainly seems at least as close a match as some others you've accepted (e.g. ц for dʒ)
One potential obvious answer would be to use double letters for long vowels like Mongolian does. (And e.g. Finnish does in the Latin alphabet.)
This adaptation seems to use either "ее" (as in "бееингз" beings or "еекўъл" equal) or "и" (as in "фри" free) for /i/ and "и" (as in "ин" in) or "ъ" (as in "Каншънс" conscience) for /ɪ/. In particular, the word "Дигнити" dignity uses "и" for both sounds.
It seems this transcription has retained a number of etymological spellings, such as the retention of certain silent letters, like the second "е" in "ендауед" endowed or the "ъў" in "тъўордс" towards, the use of "с" and "з" seemingly interchangeably for word final /s/ and /z/ ("Райтз" rights and "бееингз" beings vs. "Каншънс" conscience and "тъўордс" towards), and the distinction between stressed ("у" as in "ўун" one or "ей" a) and unstressed /ʌ/ ("ъ" as in "ънуђер" another).
Here is a chart of how English vowels are spelled in your sample:
VOWEL LETTER SAMPLE WORD POTENTIAL CYRILLIC SPELLING
TRAP э (энд) трэп
я (якт) тряп
BATH
PALM а (ал) пам
LOT
CLOTH а (Каншънс) клађ
THOUGHT
KIT и (ин) кит
ъ (Каншънс) кът
DRESS е (ендауед) дрес
STRUT у (ўун) струт
ей (ей) стрейт
ъ (ънуђер) стрът
FOOT ю (Бруђергхюд) фют
FACE ей (ђей) фейс
GOAT
FLEECE ее (бееингз) флеес
и (фри) флис
GOOSE ю (Хйюмън) гюс
PRICE ай (Райтз) прай
CHOICE
MOUTH ау (ендауед) мауђ
NURSE
START а (ар) старт
NORTH о (борн) норђ
FORCE о (тъўордс) форс
NEAR и (Спирит) нир
SQUARE
CURE
COMMA
LETTER е (ънуђер) летер
HAPPY
According to the omniglot page the plural form of words uses з instead of с to distinguish plurals from singular words ending in 's' to avoid confusion. 'er' & 'ed' are ер & ед but otherwise the ə (schwa) sound is ъ as in 'хйюмън'.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.860035 | 2020-07-09T01:44:43 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1229",
"authors": [
"KiWu",
"Why It",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1312",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3855",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3857",
"jastako"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1153 | Name of a group of languages with has "less is more" property
Is there a name of a group of languages that try to remove instead of adding things?
Examples:
Newspeak: reduces words (e.g. bad will be ungood (prefix "un" meaning not), eliminate expression that are not "good" (more here
the Sij: according to author it has 10 word (or at least morpheme).
So in other words makes a language that (one or more):
is less complex
has less word
has less tenses
just "less" of something
I have only found term "Micro (artistic) language" in the wiki but it was deleted. Here is the last version that mention it. I am not sure if such term is even used.
These languages could be called minimalist conlangs. This term has been applied to languages like Toki Pona quite regularly, as a Google search will bear out. The term has also been used to describe a number of languages on the CBB, such as Sint and Nomadic.
The same word can be applied to parts of a language, e.g. Davush on CBB refers to their Shiruitoan language as having a minimalist phonology.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.860453 | 2020-05-08T19:44:56 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1153",
"authors": [
"Alex Lamson",
"Chandra Kiran Pasumarti",
"Emil",
"Thomas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3608",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3609",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3610",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3611",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3612",
"n49o7"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1141 | I'm creating a constructed language. Does this type of conlang exist?
Is there a type of conlang which tries to combine and simplify French and English?
(Few word examples)
I- Mi
You- Vu
We- Nu
This- Di
That- Do
Who- Ve
What- Ku
No- No
Note:- This language is not just French and English combined. It also makes up similar sounding or entirely different words.
I know I've heard of a language like this, but I can't remember what it was called. Obviously, that doesn't mean you can't make your own.
Yeah, I'm going for an 'ancient but evolving', 'simplistic but not too simplistic' language spoken by humans in an earth-like environment but with different geography and history.
Probably something similar already exists. Languages of this type are called somewhat despectively Euroclones in the conlang community and the field of such languages is pretty well trotted out, though most designers prefer English-Spanish blends with simpler phonology over English-French blends. Euroclones are often marketed as International Auxiliary Languages by their respective proponents.
For the personal pronouns, Ido looks like a good match.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.860564 | 2020-05-01T11:34:15 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1141",
"authors": [
"Aryamaan Goswamy",
"OpenAI was the last straw",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2609",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2616"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1251 | Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible?
I and other people are making a collaborative conlang. It features mood/evidentiality contrast. There are 4 moods:
Indicative
Imperative
Optative
Conditional
There are also 6 evidentials:
Direct
Hearsay
Egophoric
Gnomic
Inferential
Dubitative
The problem is we disagreed whether Imperative/Optative/Conditional (i.e. Irrealis moods) are compatible with evidentials. I feel they are incompatible, but the other conlangers think they are.
Seems to me that irrealis is itself a kind of evidential. But my understanding of either is very shallow.
The most prototypical evidentials are a class of verbal affixes. They are not commonly tenses or moods of their own (though they can be). As such, they are not structurally incompatible with the irrealis/conditional, and ultimately it really depends on what exactly that mood is being used for by a language.
In Quechua, counterfactuals (If I had hooves, I'd be a horse) use the irrealis marker -man, but cannot (as I understand it anyway) take evidentials, but a statement of probability (She may be at school), which also uses the same marker, definitely can.
Irrealis statements about future events or hypotheticals, on the other, can also reasonably be said to be semantically unsuitable to use evidentials: in I will try to feed her some soup, the "feed her some soup" subclause is not really a statement you can really describe the source of the information (unless you have a dedicated evidential for that case, but natural languages don't). Nonetheless, WALS notes that some languages do:
Because evidentials are used to describe the speaker’s involvement with events, they tend to occur in realis contexts, especially in past tense situations. Nevertheless, evidentials do occur in what can be described as irrealis situations. Example (9) from Barasano (Eastern Tucanoan; Colombia; Jones and Jones 1991: 116) shows an interrogative evidential, and (10), from Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Daghestanian; Georgia; Holisky and Gagua 1994: 180) shows an evidential with a future event.
How about imperatives?
I think that evidentials, in natural languages, have as a prerequisite that the statement must be able to bear a truth value. Futures and questions can conceivably be thought to have a truth value, but counterfactuals or orders can't. Of course, this is about natural languages. No one can stop you from having evidentials in imperative statements if you so choose. It just won't feel very humanlike.
Remember that "grammar is born hungry" (attr. to W. Annis). While evidentials probably won't mix with the conditional mood in an additive fashion, they may produce other non-combinatorial meanings. So ("if" + conditional + direct) might be a normal condition, while ("if" + conditional + hearsay) might end up meaning that the scenario is especially unlikely, and ("if" + conditional + inferential) could indicate that the scenario would be bad.
Similarly, evidentials could be added to imperatives more directly to indicate the knowledge on which the command is based. (imperative + inferential) could be a normal imperative, while (imperative + direct) implies authority and (imperative + hearsay) indicates that you're passing down a command from your superior.
Wikipedia mentions that the same particles that indicate evidentiality are not infrequently also used to indicate mirativity, modality, tense, or aspect, though it doesn't give any examples, so take that with a grain of salt.
Of course it's also absolutely possible (or even probable) that certain combinations of modality and evidentiality are simply disallowed in your language. I would be very surprised if all 32 potential combinations of modality and evidentiality in your language were permitted (for example, a gnomic optative seems pretty contradictory to me).
I think it could be argued that some of your evidentials may be compatible with some of your moods.
Expressing something hoped hoped for or wished for (optative) seems it might pair nicely with the dubitative marker, perhaps expressing unlikelihood. It would also pair naturally with the direct marker, as, obviously, the speaker has direct knowledge of that which she hopes for!
Conditional seems to be compatible with hearsay, gnomic, and perhaps inferential markers.
Imperative, I think, subsumes direct evidentiality to the exclusion of the others. It would be a pretty poor general who commands his men "Charge-I think, maybe?"
I think it could also be argued that evidential marking of those other moods would be redundant, because obviously the source of information regarding a command is the one who issues the command! Perhaps evidential marking in those instances could be put to other uses?
Sorry that I can't accept more than 1 answers.
Imperatives could take other than direct evidentiality, and you give a good example that could be phrased another way "We should charge, I think." It's stating an imperative that implies uncertainty about whether it's the right thing to do, or inviting dissension or argument. So, essentially, "We're doing this unless someone has any better ideas."
@KeithMorrison -- Sure, though that isn't imperative. At least in English, should is the modal expressing obligation or advisability. As such, I think should + verb could very easily accept several of those evidentials.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.860674 | 2020-08-06T02:54:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1251",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"Circeus",
"Isteak_Nobin",
"Jenny",
"Keith Morrison",
"Salmon_of_Wisdom",
"TheLeanest",
"Xwtek",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/128",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2752",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3900",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3901",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3902",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3907",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3908",
"olpa"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1402 | What is the minimum number of words needed for a conlang?
What would the minimum number of words needed for a conlang, while still being able to speak with about the same level of information passed as a natural language?
If you're asking about a naturalistic conlang, then this question has answer already. But I'm a bit confused by the tags you used - you talk about natural language, but tagged it with unnatural-features.
No I want it be able to be able to express the same as a natural language not that this is one.
@GabrielTellez In that case pick a natural language that is close to your conlang and take that as a guideline.
It's really impossible to pick a specific number, like "you need at least 3,427 words to make yourself understandable", without making such claim look ridiculous. The easy rejoinder --- "well, my invented language can make itself perfectly understandable using only 3,426 words: so there!" --- only serves to demonstrate the somewhat absurd nature of the argument.
That said, minimalist invented languages are a thing! (And so are maximal...)
We could look at a couple historical examples of both kinds of language to see what answers our fellow language inventors and natural cultures have come upon:
Basic English is a good starting point as it's an old project (nearly a century old) and is what the Simple English version of Wikipedia is based on. Basic English seems to get by with 2000 words or so.
Toki Pona, on the other hand, a philosophical language rather than an international auxiliary language or an artistic language, makes do with about 120 root words. In the article, it's noted that speakers have to resort to combining these root words in order to get their meaning across when they wish to communicate anything that isn't, strictly speaking, minimalist in nature.
Esperanto has somewhere between 2500 and 5000 basic roots, but again, combining roots allows for greater understandability.
At the other end of the spectrum, English probably exceeds a million words. And even then, we are as prone to forming compound words as anyone else!
Analysis:
I'd argue that that actual answer to your marquee query is NOT ENOUGH BY HALF.
Obviously, 120 words is far too few to really properly communicate anything but the uttermost basics in the most simplistic terms. 2500 is not enough either, because speakers of languages with so few root words end up relying heavily on affixes and compounds to improve communication. And lastly, I'd argue that even a million words is not nearly enough! Even with a million words, English speakers make use of affixes, compounding, abbreviation and we're sprathingly good at just plain making up words on top of everything else.
Does anybody actually use Basic English? The criticism I have heard is that English speakers speak the full language anyway, so won't bother, and learners would prefer to learn "full English", as it's both more useful and more prestigious. So it seems more like a philosophical exercise to me.
@OliverMason -- I'm sure there are some educators who use it, or some form of it. I'm neither supporting nor denigrating BE as useful of course! Except in so far as determining a potential range for the question at hand. So, it was useful for something!
I hope you didn't interpret this as a criticism of any sort! I was asking merely out of interest. AFAIK it also highlighted a basic problem with just counting words, if all words have multiple meanings/uses. For example "have" and "get" -- what do they actually mean ;)
@OliverMason -- Not at all! It is an interesting diversion. As a tool for immigrants, I can see how it might be useful for a very short period of time -- 2 or 3 months max -- just to get used to the language and learn some basic and useful vocabulary. Ultimately, long term use will just be a handicap and a disservice to most ESOL folks in my opinion.
It depends on your definition of 'word'.
Tokin pona has 120 word forms, but they are routinely combined into compounds which express more specific information. In Esperanto, as elemtilas said, there are roots which are combined into words — effectively similar to toki pona, only with no spaces in-between:
English: queen
Esperanto: reĝino (-in- indicates 'female')
toki pona: jan lawa meli ('person' 'lead' 'female')
English has a single morpheme, Esperanto has three morphemes, and so does toki pona. But both Esperanto and English have one word, wheras toki pona has three. So the question of the number of words is not really all that meaningful, as it depends on the structure of your language.
The real question is how many morphemes you need, but even then it's difficult. In toki pona you can combine morphemes to form bigger elements, and each morpheme arguably has a whole range of meanings; from the context you choose the one that is most likely. The word lili means little, small, young, etc. so you cannot know whether jan lili is a young person or a small one. You will typically know from context.
So when thinking about vocabulary size there are several aspects to consider:
Language structure: do you have self-standing morphemes that are combined to phrases (like toki pona), morphemes that are stuck together in compound words (like Esperanto), or single morphemes that express multiple meanings at once (like English king: 'ruler' and 'male' vs queen: 'ruler' and 'female'). If — like Esperanto — you stick to one basic meaning component per morpheme, then the gender of the ruler would have to be expressed in a different morpheme (or it could be omitted altogether). The same also applies to verbs and tenses, pronouns, etc.
Specificity: How accurate do you want your language to be? If you want to be able to express exact meanings, then you need different morphemes. In English there are many words such as Earl, Duke, Count, Margrave, etc. which in toki pona would just be jan lawa ('leader'). Toki pona is good for epics, where such distinctions are not relevant, but if you want to write a detailed history of the Norman conquest, then maybe choose a different language.
Target domain: It also makes a difference what you want to use your language for. If it is an intergalactic lingua franca to be used for trading, then you'd need to be specific about prices and descriptions of objects, but not so much about family relationships. Klingon famously has a vocabulary dominated by words related to fighting and killing, so it might be hard to write a love poem in it (though not impossible). A general purpose language needs to be able to express a wider range of meanings than a domain-specific one.
Overall complexity of your language: How many cases do you have? How many numbers? Grammatical genders? Any such feature needs to be expressed in some way, which could result in more words. If you have singular/dual/plural, you might need three pronouns I, us-two, and us-more-than-two. But you could choose not to have that at all and simply use us-any-number-from-one-to-many. Hawai'ian has a different set of pronouns to distinguish between us all, including you and us all, but not you. If you have a politeness system based on relative ages, then you might want to distinguish between you-who-is-younger-than-me and a more polite you-who-is-older-than-me
Aesthetics: you can make do with one word for move-from-A-to-B. And one word for ingest. But any story you write will quickly become very boring, as you will use the same word over and over again. So you want synonyms to introduce some variation (see the remarks about Klingon above). The more synonyms you have, the more words. They're not strictly necessary, but make your language more pleasant to use. In AI, the opposite is actually used to make it easier for computers to handle events: you have a small set of semantic primitives for the basic events (movement, transfer of objects, etc). But you wouldn't want to read such representations for fun.
To summarise: The right number of words for a conlang is how many you need for it to work, given the purpose and structure of the language. It is a bit of an irrelevant question, really, because you won't know that you have enough words until you're happy that your language is usable. And even then, new words are likely to develop over time. In my view, number of words is not a useful metric when developing a language, unless you want to use it as a constraint (as in toki pona).
Toki pona, like many minimalist languages, also cheats in that in order to effectively communicate you need to learn concepts that are expressed by specific word groups, in effective treating the entire phrase as a single word because you can't remove any part of it without referring to a different concept, similar to the way removing a phoneme can utterly change the meaning of a single word. It would be the same as eliminating the word "blizzard" and replace it by "snow storm". Sure, one less word, but you still need to learn what "snow storm" means.
@KeithMorrison True -- but if you don't know what it means, you can always synthesise it. Like replacing "snow storm" with "solid cold water rain with strong wind". Might be harder to understand for someone who has to decode it first, but still possible.
Does "solid cold water rain with strong wind" mean a blizzard or a hailstorm? Two very different things but both someone will come across on moderately normal basis (depending where they live). And humans being humans, phrases that long to explain something that's a reasonably normal thing that people will routinely run across will either collapse into a novel word (thus increasing vocabulary) or will co-opt a word from another language (thus increasing vocabulary), especially if you have to distinguish it from something else that the same words could describe.
If you want to be able to distinguish between a blizzard and a hail storm (which I have never had the need to do so far...), then I suggest toki pona is the wrong language to use. Just like I wouldn't want to write legal or academic texts in it.
A blizzard isn't likely to smash windows and can last days. You're unlikely to freeze to death in a hail storm which typically only lasts a few minutes. But the analogy can be extended to other things in other circumstances: a minimalist language can't stay minimalist in order to be useful.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.861058 | 2021-07-01T00:59:26 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1402",
"authors": [
"78757875",
"Akbarali",
"CosmicGiant",
"Gabriel Tellez",
"Keith Morrison",
"Oliver Mason",
"Txska",
"curiousdannii",
"elemtilas",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/114",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3628",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4332",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4336",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4345",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4346"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1379 | Has anyone made image based languages?
This is my first visit here. I have been writing machine/computer languages for about 8 years now. I am completely self taught and use my own tools. I have many languages that I have completed that work wonderfully.
I have a program that I use with each language that translates in real time. Everything works nicely. My languages are around 56k words each. I use a combination of Excel and various custom tools to generate the languages.Language creation is not a easy process, but it is fun.It takes me about 4 hours to create one from scratch. I believe what I am creating is more like machine languages? I am certainly not knowledgeable about how to properly create languages as most on here. Its just a fun obsession.
Lately I have been into creating image languages. Languages based on images. I was curious if anyone has ever made a image language? How did you do it? Did you create your own custom font to go along with your language? Did you program a translation tool or app? What have you experimented with?
This is kinda the package I build with my languages. I even experimented with a meme language. A silly language using 500 of the most popular internet memes in .jpg format. With a tool to translate to and from English. It would be cool if others are doing stuff like this.
Related questions: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/944/how-to-describe-a-purely-symbolic-writing-system and https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/781/are-there-any-unspeakable-languages/782 and https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/774/organizing-a-lexicon-in-a-logographic-writing-system
This is only an answer to the first part of the question
I was curious if anyone has ever made a image language?
Yes, there are such languages. They are called pasigraphy or logographic writing system, and the most successful among them is Bliss symbolics (also known as Semantography) by Charles K. Bliss.
I am not aware of automated translation tools or other tools helping in creating pasigraphies.
There is a esoteric programming language (neither a conlang, nor a mainstream programming language) called Piet, whose source code is in the form of pixel art. Maybe it can inspire you.
If you can accept emoji as sort-of images standing for names, maybe adding conventional images (or other Unicode characters) to serve as verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, can work.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.861710 | 2021-05-22T20:38:28 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1379",
"authors": [
"Cerbrus",
"DaCuteRaccoon",
"Gilruin",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"decentdave",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4277",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4279",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4310",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4311"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2195 | A conlang without adpositions (would this system work)?
Wondering if this sort of system would get rid of adpositions:
The cat is on the table.
the cat on-be the table.
She walked through the park.
she through-walked the park.
They sat under the tree.
they under-sat the tree.
She quickly looked at the blue sky.
she quickly at-looked the blue sky.
She saw deep-blue. (saw [adjective])
The book on the shelf is mine.
the book that on-be the shelf is mine.
That is, there are 3 types of sentence objects:
actions (verbs)
objects (nouns)
designs (adjectives/adverbs, features/manners/aspects/etc.)
The statements like "on-is" means "be" with a feature/manner/design/aspect of "on". So it is similar to adverbs.
Is it possible in such a way to get rid of adpositions entirely?
How many real world languages don't have adpositions? Do they "not work"?
@curiousdannii I don't know, are there any?
It's not hard to look up: https://wals.info/chapter/85
@user181917 Mandarin is listed as no dominant order, meaning it has both prepositions and postpositions. I don't really know anything about Chinese grammar, but the Wikipedia article discusses both prepositions and postpositions many times.
Fun fact: Proto-Indogermanic, as reconstructed, does not have adpositions, see Schleicher's fable for a short sample text how it works.
The thing you're describing isn't really "not having adpositions". What you have is a robust system of applicative constructions - a type of valency-increasing operation in which an oblique object (e.g. the object of an adpositional phrase, like "under the tree") gets promoted to direct object. And they typically evolve in exactly the way you've done - by moving the oblique object marker (adposition, case marker, etc.) off of the oblique object and onto the verb itself.
I don't know of any natural languages off the top of my head that have taken applicatives to such an extreme as to eliminate adpositions as a separate word class entirely, but I don't think there's a theoretical reason why it couldn't be done. It's not that different in spirit to having a very robust system of locative cases like Hungarian, just that you're marking the verb instead of the noun.
It's not that applicatives aren't an interesting idea - but I just don't understand the preoccupation some other conlangers have with eliminating parts of speech. The grammatical relationships they mediate still have to be expressed somehow, so you inevitably end up inventing something that performs the same function, but is just called by a different name. You're still communicating spacial relationships, so you might not have "adpositions", but you do still have adpositions, in a sense.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.862000 | 2024-08-20T04:48:45 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/2195",
"authors": [
"Lance Pollard",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2990"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1545 | How to decay (remove) vowel harmony system by conlang evolution?
So I have a Back vowel harmony system in my conlang, where front and back vowel cannot occur in the same word. Now that I am evolving my conlang, How can I decay the harmony system giving space to more morphological vowel diversity?
A constant annoyance for vowel harmony are borrowings from languages that don't have it. So let your conlang be in contact with another conlang without vowel harmony and borrow words from it. Make sure that the words cannot be regularised without creating homophones. Once the vowel harmony is perturbed, it may be dissolved entirely.
In addition to loanwords as raised by JK, you can also have consonants colour neighbouring vowels.
Consider a language where /i/ & /u/ form a harmonic pair with no word containing both, and that has the consonants /c/, /k/, & /q/ (amongst others). Let's also include some nonce words nutaculu & saqimi, and a suffix -fi/fu.
You might then have /c/ front an adjacent /u/ to [i], and /q/ back an adjacent /i/ to [u]. This would mean that our nonce words would be pronounced [nutacilu] & [saqumi]. At this point, the colouring is allophonic, so people would likely still understand the underlying forms of these words as harmonic, and would likely still take the expected suffixes -fu & -fi respectively.
If we lose the opposition between the dorsals now though, we have [nutakilu] and [sakumi] with no obvious trigger for why the anharmonic vowels appear. If enough of these oddities build up, at some point remembering all the exceptions to harmony becomes untenable, and the system will collapse.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.862195 | 2022-03-31T10:55:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1545",
"authors": [
"CT Psychic spam",
"Spammer",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4828",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4830",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4832",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/4861",
"kirogasa",
"romanvolak"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1467 | Finding Sentence Structure in VSO
I'm making a Conlang, and this conlang uses a Verb-Subject-Object Sentence Structure. I'm trying to convert part of the poem "The New Colossus" into the Conlang, but I'm stuck trying to figure out which parts of the poem are which.
Specifically, I'm stuck trying to find (and convert to VSO) this part;
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
If someone could assist me with finding and converting the structure here, it would be great.
This sentence is in the imperative mood, so there is no subject (it´s implied to be the addressee). The verb is give, me is the indirect object (the target of give), and the rest of the sentence is the direct object.
The direct object is a complex noun phrase, with masses being the head, a set of determiner/adjective groups (your tired etc) as pre-modifiers, and a post-modifying clause yearning to breathe free. This could be interpreted as a relative clause with who are being omitted for poetic reasons.
[Note: I have labeled the possessive pronoun your as a determiner here, as it has the same function, and cannot be used at the same time as another determiner.]
UPDATE: It has occurred to me after Anton´s comment that there is also a slightly different interpretation of the direct object possible. Instead of it being a single noun phrase with the head masses, it could also be a list of three different groups of people:
give me your tired (people)
give me your poor (people)
give me your huddled masses
This is ambiguous, so it really depends on how you read it. The adjectives tired and poor could in that interpretation also act as nouns.
So the direct object could either be a single noun (masses), or an enumeration of three. But this does not affect the overall sentence analysis otherwise.
Are you saying that tired, poor, huddled all apply equally to masses? That never occurred to me!
@AntonSherwood Yes, it´s an enumeration of adjectives. For poetic reasons they all have your in front of it; you could equally well say "give me your tired, poor, and huddled masses" (but that doesn´t scan as nicely). Actually, see update.
I don't think it's ambiguous at all: the context should make it clear it's talking of the poor, the tired, and the huddled masses (ie three groups). And given the way English orders its adjectives, they usually follow the order opinion > size > physical quality > shape > age > colour > origin > material > type > purpose. "Tired" is a physical quality, "poor" is an opinion, and "huddled" is a shape. So, if they were all adjectives, they should be "poor tired huddled masses", not "tired poor huddled masses". The latter just sounds wrong.
@KeithMorrison I had in mind applying all three adjectives in parallel, not in series as it were; your tired masses and your poor masses and your huddled masses are distinct though likely overlapping groups – as they are also in your preferred analysis (and as I had been reading it all these years).
@KeithMorrison The structure is ambiguous, but the context usually resolves any ambiguity. However, I would interpret this different from you, in that all adjectives refer to the masses. Because of the repetition of your the usual order of adjectives doesn't apply, so while you are right in your analysis if it was simply a list, I think here it works differently. It might be resolved either way in the full text, however.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.862338 | 2021-12-01T19:15:46 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1467",
"authors": [
"Anton Sherwood",
"Keith Morrison",
"Oliver Mason",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/301",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
2007 | Is there any conlang that implements Reichenbach's tenses?
In Reichenbach's theory of tense three time points, namely the Speech time, the Event time, and the Reference time, an abstract time point from which the event is viewed, are used to classify the tenses, and this analysis introduces some new tenses compared to a traditional grammar like the Posterior Past and Posterior Future.
Is there any conlang that implements the Reichenbach tenses? If yes, which one?
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.862599 | 2023-09-05T10:01:55 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/2007",
"authors": [
"Idėjų Startas",
"Nandasia Ball",
"Spammer",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6486",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6488",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6489",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6511"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
180 | Why learn constructed languages?
I understand why create conlangs - they are sometimes needed for world of a book or game.
But... why learn them?
If most people in the world know normal languages and speak them, we can communicate with them using existing languages. There is no problem with talking with someone without knowing his language, because nowadays a lot of people in the world speak English, which is kind of an international language.
I couldn't find a real reason why. We don't talk with characters inside books or movies. We do eventually talk with in-game characters, but they rather speak a normal language, not a conlang. If they don't do so, then we can still understand what they want to say, because games often add some kind of translation, if creators of the game want the player to understand the message.
Is learning constructed languages ever necessary? What are the possible reasons of learning a conlang?
EDIT: I don't think this is opinion based. I'm not asking "why do you learn conlangs?" I'm asking for the most common reasons why people learn conlangs, not for opinion.
I don't think this question is option based, because it's asking for the most common reasons why people learn conlangs, not for opinion.
But unless there's been some kind of survey, potential answers are going to have to be opinion-based or guesses at other people's opinions on why it would be beneficial for them to learn a conlang.
Related: When do people learn languages?.
@eefara Do you have any suggestions how can I fix the question?
Obviously it's not necessary to learn conlangs. You'd be better off changing it back to what you had before, because this is a useless question now.
I don't understand why all those downvotes. For me, this is a fairly good question and I'm doing my best for it to be good. As a side-note, this was one of the upvoted example questions.
I think it's possible to answer this without opinion. Reasons to learn conlangs come directly from the different types of conlang and the reasons they are created. Whether or not it's a good question, it should not be closed.
@labela--gotoa I'm not sure; I feel like this question could go either way. I don't think there's going to be a "definitive" answer to the question because it's so broad, but (as current answers have show) it might be beneficial to others to see some very general reasons. I'll rescind my downvote but remain critical of the question.
I cast the fifth close vote, as Too Broad. There are numerous reasons for people to learn conlangs, and I can't think of a way to make this question any narrower.
The problem with this question is not the question, but the messages which are coming with it. First, the phrase "normal language" just offends language fans. Second, it is implied that a constructed language is needed only for a game, a book, or a movie. Obviously, Ludwik Zamenhof played video games a lot.
An unordered set of potential reasons:
Showing off. I know something cool that you don’t. For some, that is the reason to learn Latin but for others that may be the reason to attempt to learn e.g. a language from the Lord of the Rings. It can easily have a vast impression on fans of the franchise.
Cosplay. This is especially true for languages appearing in games/movies/etc. For many cosplayers, the prime goal when cosplaying a character is to mimic them as perfectly as possible. Of course, if you’re mimicking e.g. Eragon after he has learnt the ancient language, you want to at least be able to produce meaningful sentences (unless you’re explicitly aiming for mishaps like the one in the underground city — but arguably that requires even more knowledge). If you’re cosplaying Arya, that is even more true.
Creating a franchise that uses a conlang. If you want to make extensive use of your conlang while writing a series of books like A Song of Ice and Fire, getting it right at later stages is much easier if you have some basic understanding early.
Just because they can. For some people, picking up a language is extremely easy so they may just want to do it for intellectual stimulation.
Jan's answer covers most of the reasons to learn conlangs. I just want to add more on why people create them, which should illuminate why people learn them.
You say you understand that people create conlangs for the "world of a book or game." This is the case, but there are many other types of conlangs. Conlangs can be created as a linguistic experiment, an attempt for people to speak more logically, as a language intended to become universally accepted (arguably the most famous conlang, Esperanto, is for this purpose). They can be created to add spice or realism to a world, like Dothraki, Klingon, Quenya; they can be just for fun, or a secret language to speak with your friends. You can even make a language for only women, so they can communicate on an equal footing with men.
But then why do people learn conlangs? Well, it depends what type it is. Maybe you just want to because you can--or maybe you genuinely believe that it is the only logical way to communicate. Or maybe you're a huge fan of Star Trek and you want to speak klingon. Or maybe you just want to be able to communicate with your siblings without your parents understanding.
The great thing about conlangs is that you don't need to care about them unless you're interested. They don't affect your lives unless you want them to.
The above answers didn't rely resonate with me. I will try to explain why i started to learn a constructed language called lojban.
1. Better Meaning extraction for human-computer interaction
I want to build AI's and talk to them like real humans. The problem i'm facing is how to convert my English from speech to - text form - then into meaning - so that the computer can take different programmatic actions depending on that meaning..
And i want to do this with complex thoughts - not "Cortana close the light" type of commands. That is easy to do it in English already.
English and most other languages is not well suited for easy parsing of meaning. The amount of ambiguity in any non trivial phrase is enormous. Exponential complexity is a big problem. We humans solve it by putting things into context - and also trough lot's and lot's of experience.
And even so - we sometimes misunderstand each other.. Keep in mind that we are very smart. Computers are kind of dumb at this point.
Building this context and this experience in an AI is almost an inapproachable task. Building the context is even a bigger problem then parsing the relations between words. It's called an AI hard problem. Only big companies like Google and Microsoft have the resources to approach a problem of this size. Cortana is mostly pre-scripted answers at this point (feb 2018). Is not the real deal.
Now if you have a constructed language like lojban - you have at least 2 big benefits:
the speech to text conversion happens very easily - because lojban has no phonetic ambiguity. Words are typed the way they are pronounced. Is a 1 to 1 mapping. I don't need to understand what you meant in order to know for certain what you said.
the grammar is very congruent / precise - and is said to have zero exceptions - this makes parsing and meaning extraction easier by orders of magnitude. Ambiguity is still an issue - but a manageable one.
In English - we extract meaning and solve ambiguity by relying mostly on statistics. We garter billions of phrases - and based on that we infer what is the most probable meaning of a phrase. We do this with models based on neural networks - that are black boxes for the most part. Point is - grammar rules are not that useful in English. When you debug your program - you can't clearly see why a certain chunk of text was summarized to a certain phrase. You can use your human intuition - and you can agree or disagree with the summary - but if you disagree - you can't easily inspect the decision that the computer took at each step.
Introduction to the parsing problem is a good place to start. The production systems are more advanced then this.
In lojban, by contrast things are simpler: there are only verbs(selbri) and nouns(sumti) - actually is more like - functions and arguments to those functions.
One can heavily rely on rules - and that is enough to get the meaning out with a very high accuracy. And in principle is scalable .. phrases, paragraphs, pages .. hole speeches, hole books, the entire Wikipedia - a web of meaning..
So this is why i'm interested in it. A web of meaning - as opposed to a web of data. Right now computers can see the data - but they can't see the meaning.
2. Answer to questions the way an Expert would do it
Another even more interesting use-case for a constructed language is it's ability to provide a sufficient and universal representation of knowledge that is easy to query by computers. We are interested in getting useful answers from big amounts of unstructured data.
Google is trying to do this for ages. You still get bad results even for easy to answer questions. The way an expert answers a question - is different from google.
We need more of that expert answer. This is almost always true for complex questions.
You want the answer alone not 10's of articles that might or might not contain the answer - articles that you need to read yourself.
And this situation is primarily because 99.9% of human knowledge is represented as text - mostly in English - which is very hard to parse, and query in a meaningful way.
So one way to solve this - is to have all this knowledge in a system that is easy to query by design. And this is what constructed languages can potentially offer. And i don't mean sql databases - is way better - is in the computation itself. The way we humans do it internally - the computers will be able to do it as well. We are still a far cry form that - but i think this direction is promising..
3. On a personal level. Language might affect the way you think.
This is best express by watching an awesome movie like Arrival. or by reading articles like this.
If lojban were to be our default language instead of English - i think our entire civilization we would have been centuries more advanced that we are now - not just technologically - but in general.
I'm just learning this stuff myself. But hopefully this allows you to see that there are much more practical applications - with very serious consequences then just: "you look more smart in front of your friends" - that is not something would convince me to get trough the struggle of learning a new language.
Yet there are people that don't struggle that much - for them the other reasons might make more sense.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.862681 | 2018-02-08T14:36:38 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/180",
"authors": [
"Alejandro Hernández Valle",
"CHEESE",
"CanProgram",
"HDE 226868",
"Ira Black",
"Nicolas Gosselin",
"Pete1187",
"RedClover",
"Unsigned",
"Victor S.",
"beroal",
"curiousdannii",
"dampkwab",
"eefara",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/100",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/159",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/182",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/30",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/35",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/584",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/585",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/586",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/606",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/616",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/621",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/622",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/626",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/663",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/676",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/8",
"kenorb",
"nkr",
"user33375"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1 | Were Tolkien's Elvish languages based on known natural languages?
I'm a great fan of Tolkien's books, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. One thing I have always wondered about in his books though, is whether the Elvish tongues were actually fully new languages. Were they totally constructed as it were from scratch, or was Tolkien patterning them after some European / other languages that were actually in use (or ancient languages out of use)?
Wasn't there more than one "Elvish" language in the Tolkien legendarium? Quenya, Sindarin, and several others too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvish_languages_(Middle-earth)
@Randal'Thor good point, but I would assume if he based one off of a particular language or a set of languages, the others would be too, though of course I could easily be mistaken.
Tolkien took inspirations from lots of existing languages. His inventions bear much resemblance to those languages in phonology and in syntax, but less obviously so in vocabulary.
Ken's answer already presents the two best known languages (Finnish and Welsh) that gave rise to Quenya and Sindarin, but they were not all.
Actually it[Quenya] might be said to be composed on a Latin basis with two
other (main) ingredients that happen to give me 'phonaesthetic'
pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is however less consonantal than any
of the three. (Letters)
A Latin student can easily recognize the shared stress rule between Quenya and Sindarin in the Appendices.
In longer words it falls on the last syllable but one, where that contains a long vowel, a diphthong, or a vowel followed by two (or more) consonants. Where the last syllable but one contains (as often) a short vowel followed by only one (or no) consonant, the stress falls on the syllable before it, the third from the end.
Words in Quenya that begin with ps-, ks-, I think, show some Greek influence.
ksaráre psare súle
Telerin's phonology is again "of an approximately Latin type"(PE19).
And there is Danian "in general a Germanic type", Ossiriandic - Old English, East Danian - Old Norse, Taliska - Gothic, West Avarin - Irish, West Lemberin - Finnish, East Lemberin - Lithuanian (ibid.). Most of the dialects mentioned here only exist in the Comparative Tables though (or remain unpublished).
As mentioned on Wikipedia, it was modelled on Welsh and some other Norse languages:
Sindarin was designed with a Welsh-like phonology. It has most of the same sounds and a similar sound structure, or phonotactics. The phonologies of Old English, Old Norse and Icelandic are also fairly close to Sindarin and, along with Welsh, certainly did have an influence on some of the language's grammatical features, especially the plurals (see below).
Interesting. Any official sources for that?
Sorry, I have to downvote. Wikipedia doesn't include any sources or citations for this paragraph, and there are far better sources to use for information about Tolkien's languages.
Just to notice, Welsh is not a Nordic language, so "Welsh and other Norse languages" seems to be something like an involuntary confusion.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.863740 | 2018-02-06T20:08:45 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1",
"authors": [
"Adam Lear",
"Aleksandr Kovalev",
"Henry WH Hack v3.0",
"Luís Henrique",
"Rand al'Thor",
"Robert Cartaino",
"Sjiveru",
"animuson",
"anonymous2",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/12",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/177",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/19",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/21",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/22",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/3",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/70"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
33 | How does Láadan aim to express the views of women more than natural Western languages?
Láadan was created, according to Wikipedia, to try an experiment in seeing if a constructed language designed specifically for women could better express the views of women better than natural Western languages:
Láadan is a feminist constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women.
How does the language aim to express this difference? What differences make it better for women to express their views than in natural Western languages?
What steps are the creators of Láadan taking to make sure that women can express themselves better in Láadan than in natural Western languages, that it will be different from those natural languages?
I am not an expert on Láadan but I was also researching it in the context of feminist communication. This is what I found based on that research.
The idea behind creating Láadan as a "feminist" language was to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to see if natural languages were biased toward expressing male communication, but the language's creator, Suzette Haden Elgin, was unable to prove or disprove the hypotheses she set out to study because of low adoption of the language. As far as I can tell, even Elgin remains uncertain on the effect of these approaches to facilitating feminine communication.
The distinctive characteristics that strike me are
It is a tonal language - This seems to have been very deliberate in the development of Láadan. Does this facilitate feminine thought with particularly more clarity than non-tonal languages? I am not sure, and I couldn't find any reputable research indicating whether or not that is the case, but I suspect that when the language was being developed by Elgin she did not make it a tonal language by accident. Since her hypotheses about the implications of Láadan on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis remain unconfirmed, we probably don't know for sure.
The language has emotional context markers. This is presumably meant to aid in the expression of subtle emotional context to avoid ambiguity that leaves a dialogue open to interpretation and reliant on context clues.
-d anger marker
-th pain marker
-li love marker
-lan celebration marker
-da joke marker
-di education marker
-ya fear marker
The language has many affection words, for example, of love. Like the other aspects, whether this is truly a facet that favors female communication over male based on empirical evidence is unclear to me, but it certainly satisfies many widely accepted assumptions about differences in male and female thought. However, it should be noted that many of these assumptions are widely challenged today. Perhaps men desire more nuanced emotional communication as well but suppress this impulse for cultural reasons.
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
ad love for one respected but not liked
éme love for one neither liked nor respected
am love for one related by blood
ashon love for one not related by blood, but kin of the heart
aye love that is unwelcome and a burden
azh love for one sexually desired now
oham love for that which is holy
sham love for the child of one’s body
These text examples were taken from this online PDF resource.
None of those things are inherently more feminine and masculine. Are Chinese and Vietnamese better for women to express themselves than English just because they're tonal? And if it's a language for women to express themselves, shouldn't they not need to explicitly communicate emotional cues, as only men have problem picking up the cues? (As the patently false stereotype says.)
@curiousdannii I generally agree with you on all of that.
Yeah, I wasn't disputing your answer at all, just expressing my bewilderment at the whole idea of a language "for women".
Do you happen to know if it categorises things differently, like the opposite of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things? To me, that's the kind of default masculinity I'd expect to be reversed in a female language.
@curiousdannii that's a good question, I do not know the answer. I remember that the word for "woman" can also mean "person" so in that sense I think it sort of tries to reverse the way a plural group of people is generally masculine.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.864029 | 2018-02-06T21:22:07 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/33",
"authors": [
"Ben N",
"Jon Ericson",
"Pleiades",
"RaceYouAnytime",
"avpaderno",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/130",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/137",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/41",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/97",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/98",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/99",
"stardiviner"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
6 | How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there?
I've seen several variations of Tolkien's Elvish around, with different names, such as Sindarin and Q(u)enya.
How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there, and how do they differ from one another?
It depends on what the definition of ‘are’ is. How many did Tolkien develop in detail? Two. How many did he develop in less detail? About five, I think. How many are attested with at least one word? About a dozen. How many are said to exist in the fictional world? Somewhat more than that.
In this article, it is mentioned:
Primitive Quendian (language of the Elves in Cuiviénen)
Avarin
Various Avarin languages (some later merged with Nandorin)
Common Eldarin (the early language of all the Eldar)
Quenya (the language of the Ñoldor and the Vanyar)
Quendya (also Vanyarin Quenya) (daily tongue of the Vanyar: closest to archaic Quenya)
Ñoldorin Quenya (also Exilic Quenya) (the "Elven Latin" of Middle-earth)
Common Telerin (the early language of all the Lindar)
Telerin (the language of the Teleri who reached the Undying Lands)
Nandorin (languages of the Nandor — some were influenced by Avarin)
Original language of Greenwood the Great
Original language of Lórinand
Sindarin (language of the Sindar)
Doriathrin (dialect of Doriath)
Falathrin (dialect of the Falas and Nargothrond)
North Sindarin (dialects of Dorthonion and Hithlum)
So a good many dialects exist. However, we cannot exactly count how many there are, because it mentions "various" and we don't know whether there is a hierarchy of languages that have branched off somewhere else. However, we can confirm there are at least 17 dialects of the Elvish.
Where does Ilkorin fit?
It's a tough question, and one that may be impossible to answer. There are tons of references all over the internet, such as Wikipedia (whose sources look decent on this one), Wikia, and a half dozen others I looked at. Basically, though, it looks as though the consensus is that the Elvish tongue is divided into Eldarin (the tongue of the elves during the March) and Avarin (the tongue of the Avari, a group of elves who never started on the migration to Valinor). The Eldarin tongue was divided into Quenya (language of the Vanyar) and Common Telerin (the third elven tribe to take the Great Journey).
The Quenya was divided into Quendya (the daily tongue of the Vanyar) and Exilic Quenya (tongue of the Noldor, such as Galadriel), while the common Telerin was divided into Telerin (language of the Teleri of Valinor), Sindarin (language of the Teleri of Beleriand), and Nandorin (language of the Nandor).
Counting them, you would have at least a dozen, give or take a few for dialects off of the ones I've listed.
The Avari dispersed (and were not well documented), so the number of their languages is unknown.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.864471 | 2018-02-06T20:14:57 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/6",
"authors": [
"Adam Miller",
"Anton Sherwood",
"Ari Brodsky",
"Be Brave Be Like Ukraine",
"David Chris Hawke",
"Ghanima",
"HDE 226868",
"Rand al'Thor",
"The Mattbat999",
"Tim Pederick",
"Zakaria Acharki",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/12",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/13",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/14",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/337",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/338",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/35",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/358",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/39",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/44",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/45",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/54",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/72",
"rzyns"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
169 | Can a conlang be used for machine-machine communication?
On Wikipedia page we can read that constructed language is devised for human or human-like communication. Given the fact, that there are already some constructed language examples for human-computer communication such as Lojban, can constructed language be created by humans for machine-machine communication? Or it won't be a constructed language anymore?
One example could include a Droidspeak code (the fictional language spoken by droids).
Don't understand why this question was downvoted. Just because the answer is 'no', that doesn't mean that it should be downvoted.
Yes, but why?
Constructed languages would be better for machine communication than natural languages because languages evolve based on how people use them but machines have some difficulties learning how to interpret those changes. With a fully constructed language, the machine can understand exactly what things mean because all of the rules and details are well document and not allowed to change through natural processes.
However, machines already communicate by sending data in specified formats; why would using a constructed language be beneficial in any way?
One can say such languages already exists. Famous examples could be JSON or XML.
@labela--gotoa Hm that's a very good point, thanks for the comment!
Rick Morneau has a conlang designed to be suitable as both a machine translation interlingua and as a medium of communication. And two Facebook AIs apparently spontaneously constructed their own mutual language. FWIW.
While it would technically be "possible" to design a human-modelled language for a computer, it's impractical; machines already communicate using sets of binary symbols, so to speak. Applications on a computer, for example, use an application binary interface (ABI) to relay information and call functions (etc etc) from one another. As there are many different ABIs that may or may not be mutually compatible, you can say that there already are several machine languages in active use, and many more extinct ones (by merit of their machines no longer being in use).
I've always seen such interfaces call API's (application programming interface).
There is a constructed language, ROILA (RObot Interaction LAnguage) designed for human–robot interaction. I see no conceptual problem in using this language for robot–robot interaction as well and I can imagine the use of such a language instead of electronic impulses as a requirement for some challenges in robotics like football playing teams of robots.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.864740 | 2018-02-08T13:50:14 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/169",
"authors": [
"Angew is no longer proud of SO",
"Broken Pipe",
"Duncan",
"IRTFM",
"Jessica Tiberio",
"Mercurialfey",
"Rainbacon",
"RedClover",
"aBilal17",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/27",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5048",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/531",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/532",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/533",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/535",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/560",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/564",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/8",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/844",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/850",
"hyperneutrino",
"nmogk",
"sphennings"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
48 | What is the difference between an Isolating and an Analytic language?
These two terms appear to be used nearly interchangeably to refer to languages with little morphology. However at the same time I sometimes see them contrasted with each other, but cannot identify a pattern.
Isolating languages do not use inflectional morphology, i.e., using affixes or other manipulations of roots to create words--all words are seperate, and none contain multiple morphemes. Vietnamese is an isolating language.
Here's an example: the word snowman. It has two morphemes: snow- and -man, and therefore has a morpheme-to-word ratio of 2:1. Or take Spanish corremos, we run, which has three corr-, -e-, and -mos, for the word, present tense, and person/number. (Please correct me if I am wrong--I don't know Spanish), so its ratio is 3:1.
In an isolating language, this ratio approaches 1:1--words stand alone and cannot be separated (hence "isolating.") So, these concepts--"snowman" and "we are running"--would take multiple words to express, as each one would contain only a single morpheme. Isolating languages have no inflectional morphology and no derivational morphology.
However, analytical languages are a broader category; they have a low morpheme-to-word ratio as well, but--and here's the big but--they can have a derivational morphology. This means that while "we are running" would still be multiple single-morpheme words like in an isolating language, the word "snowman" could be a two-morpheme word.
Thus, isolating languages are actually a subset of analytic languages. Analytic languages cover languages with no inflectional morphology and a low morpheme-to-word ratio, while isolating languages have all that and no derivational morphology.
This is mostly good, except for saying that analytical languages have no inflectional morphology. English is usually considered an analytical language, and it of course still has inflectional morphology. Analytical languages are the languages where the dominant strategy for conveying semantic structures is syntax and stand alone words.
When I've seen a clear distinction made here, it has been the following:
Isolating languages have a very low morpheme-per-word ratio
Analytic languages have little inflection
However, this distinction is not made very consistently, so they're often used interchangeably. I have also seen a different distinction made, where analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio and isolating languages have a morpheme-per-word ratio of 1:1, though this one is less common in my experience. The fact that even with this distinction isolating languages end up being a proper subset of analytic languages only makes this problem worse. This has its origins in the definition of "synthetic", the category both of these are typically contrasted with, since it's used both as a description of languages with a high morpheme-per-word ratio and as a description of the superset of terms like fusional and agglutinative, both of which describe languages with lots of inflection.
In practice, conlangers seem to make too big of a deal out of these sorts of labels. They're there to be descriptive, so it's not a problem to discard them when they aren't, and they're often far less informative than most who use them think.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.864975 | 2018-02-06T22:04:20 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/48",
"authors": [
"Brendan Schlagel",
"Dan Parson",
"EDEN HOME 全方位居家安老服務",
"Mr. Ramble",
"Olivier Simon",
"PapaFreud",
"Shadow Wizard",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/139",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/140",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/141",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/200",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/488",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/627",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6499",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/907",
"sevenorbs"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
207 | Why is the Lord's Prayer so common as a translation?
I'm an amateur conlanger, but I've seen multiple instances of people using the Lord's Prayer as a test or a way of showing off a translation of their conlang. I've even done it a couple times myself.
Why is this such a common practice among conlangers?
I'd recommend everybody The North Wind and the Sun instead, which is increasing in usage and better for presenting 'everyday' usage.
It is a long standing tradition to use the Lord's prayer as a sample text for illustrating natural languages, for instance, the mid-16th century Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster contains the Lord's prayer in Finnish as an illustration of the Finnish language.
It has the advantage of being available in many languages, including otherwise ill-documented or dead languages.
Its disadvantages are the religious bias and the fact, that some very marked constructions tend to occur in this text (in German, there is a relative clause in the second person singular ..., der Du bist im Himmel, ... a really rare beast).
In addidition, the Greek source contains a word whose meaning is not securely known, namely the word ἐπιούσιος (epiousios), for more information see this answer on linguistics.se.
It is also probably also a tradition, since Christianity was a whole lot bigger and more popular a few hundred years ago, and therefore became a common practice.
Apart from the historical usage that Sir Cornflakes brings up, the Pater Noster is simply a short, relatively straightforward, universally well known text. Probably the other most common text is the Tower of Babel story. Again, short & straightforward. Perfect texts for the glossopoet whose language is not yet all that robust either lexically or grammatically. This one also touches kind of near to the heart of all glossopoets.
I don't see any particular religious bias in either text, so that's a ymmv (and anyway, not a good road to go down, please). As for that 2s relative clause in the German translation, of course, the same kind of rarity is in the English text. Good exercise for the nascent invented language! And good exercise for the glossopoet, having to think about and sort out curiosities of grammar right from the start!
Christians are quite firm in their beliefs and as such many pray the Our Father (Pater Noster) with great devotion. I would be very surprised if a Christian liturgical celebration did not recite the Our Father at their Sunday services. I know many who recite this prayer before meals.
Given the popularity of this prayer, I am not surprised that it is so commonly used as a translation tool. Even some private schools will pray the Our Father before class and that in turn will be said in the language of the class being taught: Pater Noster for Latin class and the Notre Pere for class in French.
It would be interesting to see if some Christian high school would recite the Lord's Prayer in Elvish in a Constructed Language course if one exists.
The Quenya translation is by J.R.R. Tolkien (published in Vinyar Tengwar #43).
Átaremma i ëa han ëa,
na aire esselya,
aranielya na tuluva,
na care indómelya
cemende tambe Erumande.
Ámen anta síra ilaurëa massamma,
ar ámen apsene úcaremmar
sív’ emme apsenet tien i úcarer emmen.
Álame tulya úsahtienna
mal áme etelehta ulcullo.
Násie.
As one can see the Our father is short enough to be memorized over a very short period of time and this prayer has immense value for a certain percentage of the population.
With all due respect let us remember that the Lord's Prayer was taught by Jesus Christ himself. For those who believe that is huge.
I'm not sure where you get the impression that all Christian liturgical traditions recite the Lord's Prayer every Sunday service -- as someone raised in a Christian tradition, I have literally never recited it verbatim at such services (though we were certainly taught it when I was a young child). While it is a very important prayer and is recited quite frequently in some traditions, I would hesitate to make such sweeping claims about all Christian traditions -- simply saying that it is an important and influential prayer in the Christian tradition would be sufficient and more accurate.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.865240 | 2018-02-08T21:26:12 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/207",
"authors": [
"Abhijeet Melkani",
"Amazon Dies In Darkness",
"CJ Dennis",
"Dodezv",
"DukeZhou",
"Duncan",
"Joel Joseph",
"Kent",
"Shalvenay",
"Sparksbet",
"The Mattbat999",
"groove",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/13",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/215",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/52",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5500",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5629",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/664",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/665",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/666",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/677",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/694",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/753",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/754",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/755",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/756",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/971",
"tox123",
"user270950",
"港豐找換 Kong Fung Exchange"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
244 | What are common origins of accusative case markers?
What are the primary way(s) accusative case markers can develop?
The primary way of development of oblique case markers seems relatively straightforward, with attachment of adpositions (which can already be considered "case markers" under some definitions and which can in turn come from nouns or verbs) on the noun, then possible generalisation onto all elements of the NP as agreement. Ergative cases are a little less straightforward, but they very frequently have an oblique double function, hinting at origins such as reinterpretation of passive constructions or the generalisation of usage of e.g. instrumental or ablative case markers as markers of unexpected agency (e.g. via the occasional omission of agents in sentences like "[the man] opened the door with the key").
The emergence of accusative cases seem less straightforward to me though, and while reinterpretations of antipassives are a readily availible source that doesn't to me seem like a plausible origin for the majority of accusative markers, nor does it provide a way to go from no case marking to accusative (which seems like a thing that should be able to happen), and I'm not aware of any similar broad tendency of oblique double-function as seen in ergatives which could otherwise hint at origins. As such I particularly would like to know what oblique cases could reasonably be extended to accusative, and under what circumstances the original extension (from which further generalisation could be done) may occur under, and additionally if there are any reasons accusatives seem to have fewer double functions (even if this is just a result of me looking in the wrong places).
Isn't this more about linguistics than specifically about conlangs?
@CHEESE it's relevant to conlanging in that I'm currently working on a trying to derive one conlang from another and my protolanguage doesn't have case-marking but I would like the descendant to have it, and I've messed around with ergativity for a while, so I want to take a bit of a break from it with something relatively accusative. If this question isn't fit here one the basis of not being specifically conlanging-related then this one: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/158/how-do-tones-disappear-from-a-language which was quite well-recieved isn't relevant either.
This is merely a marginal answer and I’m sure there’s a lot more data that might prove valuable, but in multiple Romance languages (at least Spanish and Romansh) the preposition a has developed into an accusative marker for particularly animate objects. This preposition derives from Latin ad “to(wards)” and is in both languages somewhat equivalent to English to or at in usage (in Romansh it is commonly used to mark the dative as well, as in French).
In general I would not be surprised to see allative or dative adpositions turn into accusative markers, there is quite a bit of overlap in the meanings (compare “I hit towards you” and “I hit you”).
Kuteva et al's The World Lexicon of Grammaticalization is the go-to academic source for this sort of thing.
The Second Edition lists four sources for the target PATIENT:
ALLATIVE: ways of marking motion towards can develop into marking for patients.
Qiang: -ta developed from being an allative marker to being a patient marker
Tibetan: -la used both allatively and as a patient marker
Spanish: a, originally directional, then marked dative objects, and then direct objects that are animate nouns (especially individuated human nouns, poper nouns, and personal pronouns)
Arabic: li- (classically) & *la-& (in some modern vernaculars) for certain direct objects (restrictions vary between dialects)
Imonda: -m developed from a direction marker to an optional object marker but compulsory in [+HUMAN] object-subject relations
Lezgian: -z "to" as a nominal suffix > -z as an experiencer object marker
They say there may be two pathways here, one via RECIPIENT, and another that goes to EXPERIENCER. They also note that there are grammaticalization pathways leading to ALLATIVE, so there will be multi-stage paths going via ALLATIVE.
Note that ALLATIVE should be understood in the broad sense here of ways of marking motion towards (including adpositions), and not solely to an allative case.
GIVE: verbs for giving can produce markers for patients.
Qimen Hui: fã¹¹ developed from "give" to a differential object marker
Southewestern Mandarin gěi is both a verb meaning "give" and an object marker
The Xiang Dialects: use the verb pa³ as both a verb and object marker
Seems to be fairly common in Sinitic, but no examples listed outside Sino-Tibetan. They note that GIVE > RECIPIENT is pretty common, so this may be a multi-stage process.
RECIPIENT: marking for recipients (e.g. dative markers) can produce markers for patients.
Maltese: human definite direct object generally receive the otherwise indirect object marker lil, indefinite human direct objects also sometimes receive it (but rarely), and inanimate direct objects never do regardless of definiteness.
Arabic: dialectal la- "to, for" is a dative preposition used to mark certain direct objects.
Hindi: the postposition ko "to" is used to mark animate direct objects.
Dolakha-Newari: the dative case marker -ta developed into a patient marker.
Old English: him was the dative 3rd person singular masculine, but in Modern English him is accusative/dative (likewise Old English hire and Modern English her)
Spanish: a (see under ALLATIVE)
Balti: la > -la
Dhimal: e:ng > -e:ng
Gurung: lai > -lai
Tamang: ta > -ta
Kupwar Kannada: dative postposition was extended to mark human direct objects due to contact with Urdu and Marathi
This typically involves contexts where there is a definite human referent to the patient, with it only later becoming generalised.
TAKE: verbs for taking can produce markers for patients.
Medieval Chinese chi "take, hold" > chi instrumental preposition > chi patient marker
Classical Chinese bă "take hold of" > Mandarin Chinese bǎ, an object marker
Chinese jiang "take", "hold" > jiang a preverbal object (theme/undergoer) marker
Formal Hakka, SOuthern Min, and Cantonese: jiāng "take, lead" > jiāng, an object marker
Shanghainese Wu nɔ⁵³ "take, hold" > nɔ⁵³ an object marker
Korean kaci- "take, have" > (ul)kac(i)ko, (ul)kacie which is an emphatic accusative
Proto-Timor_Alor-Pantar *med "take" > Kamang me, Fatalkuku =m, -m a postposition encoding the displaced theme in a construction with a "give" verb.
Kalam d "take" marks instrument or patient objects in specific contexts
Engenni tọu "take" > object marker
Vagala kpa "take" > object marker
Ga kɛ̀ "take" > kɛ̀ an acccusative case marker
Twi *de "take" > de an oject marker
There are also examples from pidgins and creoles, and it's well documented in Sinitic.
Note that the ALLATIVE & GIVE sources seem to also go via RECIPIENT, so really it seems that just the RECIPIENT and TAKE routes are independent.
In Addition, ALLATIVE & RECIPIENT can themselves develop from some other sources, listed below (in case you want more multi-stage options):
ALLATIVE can develop from: ARRIVE, GO TO, SEE
RECIPIENT can develop from: ALLATIVE, BENEFACTIVE, GIVE, A-POSSESSIVE (attributive possession "of", genitive case, associative or connective, as opposed to "belong"-possession or "have"-possession which are both predicative possession markers)
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.865606 | 2018-02-09T18:17:53 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/244",
"authors": [
"Abdulmonaem Albaqlawi",
"CHEESE",
"Cody Rutscher",
"Gufferdk",
"c0ns0le",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/100",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/145",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/804",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/805",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/806",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/811",
"user202331"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
117 | Which constructed languages have been used to write scientific articles?
One of the most interesting aspects of Interlingua is that during its early days there were a number of scientific articles published in it. This is in contrast with most other constructed languages, which are primarily used to publish things that are of interest only to their own communities.
Have other constructed languages been used for that purpose?
This seems like a list question to me, and therefore too broad. Do you have any way to make it less broad?
Maybe this question would be better if it only asked about auxiliary languages like Interlingua or Occidental. Also would articles/papers about linguistics be considered "scientific articles that aren't of interest only to their own communities"?
I don't see a problem with question that may result in lists of languages. We have a similar tag on [linguistics.se]
@jknappen We let those questions slide because collectively they form a language typology, similar to WALS. This site may also decide it wants to allow questions to form its own sort of typology, but for now I think we should follow the general rule that list questions don't fit the SE format.
Even on linguistics I doubt this would be accepted as it's much more a trivia question about languages rather than analysis of languages or building an inventory of languages which fit some narrow criteria.
@curiousdannii I'm not convinced. This question is clearly answerable, and the (potential) answers add some value for later vistors of SE.
@curiousdannii Of course, this particular question would be off-topic on linguistics.se, because it is more about the speech community of conlangs and not about linguistic aspects of them. But linguistics.se is a different site ...
The Occidental magazine Cosmoglotta occasionally published scientific articles.
In the 32nd publication of Cosmoglotta, a "supplement" was added to the magazine, stating that it was "necessary to use the language not only in linguistics articles". The first "scientific article" appears in the 33rd publication of Cosmoglotta, which published an article about Wegener's theory of continental drift. The publications that follow also contain articles about biology and physics as well as philosophy, economics and politics.
Esperanto is not only used to write scientific articles but there is also a scientific journal published in Esperato, namely Science Revuo.
See also Where can I read interesting articles about science in Esperanto? over at Esperanto.SE.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.866120 | 2018-02-07T11:30:42 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/117",
"authors": [
"Ajnatorix Zersolar",
"Hannah Obranovich",
"Mithical",
"Nikola Stojanovic",
"PrincessEev",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Tobias Kienzler",
"as4s4hetic",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/32",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/352",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/353",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/378",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/391",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/392",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/5232",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/66",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/970",
"jansegers",
"rorymonroe"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
456 | How do I do interlinear glosses for a conlang?
Already, in the meta there are discussions about if people should gloss their sample text. I find their argument persuasive that foreign text without a gloss is useless without several thousand hours of study of the language in question.
The professional linguists are using the Leipzig Glossing Rules.
Should we expect Leipzig Glossing Rules to work for all invented languages?
How does one handle grammar that may not match up with the "standard abbreviations"? Lojban comes to mind, since they as a community reject that grammatical classes in Lojban have any counterpart in natural languages.
Conlang audiences are just as likely to be an amateur audience, unlike the readers of linguistics academic journal. Is there a better way to gloss for a popular audience?
Should we expect Leipzig Glossing Rules to work for all invented languages?
No, not all of them, but the set of languages for which they will not work is exceedingly restricted. Basically, just ask yourself "can my language be written in a primarily linear format?" If so, the Leipzig Glossing Rules are for you. If it is carried by sound, you can gloss it. That right there covers very nearly every language that has been asked about on this site so far. If it's a manual sign language, there's still an exceedingly good chance that you can gloss it. If it's a fully-2D non-linear writing system, the alterations you will have to make to the conventions to make it work then become sufficiently large that it would no longer make sense to call the result "Leipzig glossing". But those aren't exactly common.
How does one handle grammar that may not match up with the "standard abbreviations"? Lojban comes to mind, since they as a community reject that grammatical classes in Lojban have any counterpart in natural languages.
Exactly the same way the professionals do: by providing a glossary of your non-standard abbreviations.
Conlang audiences are just as likely to be an amateur audience, unlike the readers of linguistics academic journal. Is there a better way to gloss for a popular audience?
That depends on what you are trying to communicate to that popular audience. In some cases, a full gloss may not be needed, even for a professional audience. A simple set of parallel translations demonstrating the effect of a straightforward morphological or syntactic alternation, for example, may be sufficient for its purpose. But in the general case... I don't think so. Leipzig glosses are intended to be easy to understand, and they succeed at that about as well as it is possible to do in most cases.
It's wise to give a glossary for all abbreviations, even the ones you feel are standard, because there're enough non-standard uses of abbreviations in glosses out there that someone is sure to be confused if you don't, whether through your fault or there's. It's a simple step which makes it safer for everyone.
Since
It's really hard to conceive of a human language whose grammar and syntax are truly outside the bound of what exists in natural language (despite Lojban fanboy statements to the contrary) to the point that the Leipzig rules can't be used for it.
The Leipzig rules already are already designed to handle human languages, and human languages can get pretty ridiculous already.
I don't see what's the problem. You don't have to go the strict way either, you can be as specific or as generic as your example needs to be, but the Leipzig rules are always a good place to start.
Besides, people are more likely to argue about the terminology (i.e. which abbreviation you're using, again as in your own Lojban example) or what words to use to gloss something than about the application of Leipzig proper.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.866442 | 2018-03-11T15:11:43 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/456",
"authors": [
"Aezyc",
"Fadavi",
"Sam",
"Yarden Gan",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1469",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1471",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1473",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1474",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2597",
"user28437"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
278 | Is there any research on the efficacy of intentionally designed linguistic relativity in conlangs?
Toki Pona is a language designed to shape the thought process of users. So is Loglan: According to Wikipedia, "Loglan was originally conceived as a means to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought."
Has any research been done on how well these languages (and others with similar aims) achieved their goals?
To gauge how well these languages have achieved their goals, we really need to quantify what exactly achieving those goals would entail, and what steps along that path we would consider progress. What constitutes success for Toki Pona or Loglan? A world of people thinking differently? A small group of speakers who have improved the way they think substantially based on learning the language? Without knowing that, we cannot say whether these languages have achieved their goals.
Additionally, when looking for research into linguistic relativity, the place to look would be linguistic research, and we're unlikely to see much research into Toki Pona's or Loglan's influence on the minds of their speakers. Why? Well, strong Sapir-Whorf is pretty much a settled question in linguistics -- the vast majority of the field agrees it's not the case -- and weak Sapir-Whorf is more likely to be tested on natlangs for many reasons, not least of which is the number of potential subjects. Even the most popular conlangs have much smaller speaker communities compared to most natlangs, and so even if conlangs and natlangs were equal in all other ways when it came to this research (and from a linguist's perspective, they really aren't), it would be far harder to gather subjects and conduct research for the conlangs.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.866708 | 2018-02-11T23:53:04 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/278",
"authors": [
"Cyclic3",
"KNTRO",
"Mike B",
"dozenprinceli",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/910",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/912",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/913",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/946",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/950",
"user319258"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
1953 | In logical languages, what is the relationship between subset relations and the Axiom of Choice?
I will use Lojban for this example, but any logical language with similar relations could be examined; this should be portable to other Loglans, at least.
{cmima} relates sets to their elements; it can be glossed as "is an element of" and represents elementhood. Note that {cmima} is a binary relation.
In contrast, {steci} also relates sets and their elements, but it is a ternary relation. {steci} relates a set, one of its elements, and an extensional property of that element. Some definitions of {steci} imply that there is an entire subset of the given set which contains only the elements which have the given property.
Now, Lojban has the feature that some components of a relation may be omitted, deleted, ignored, or removed. If we remove the first place of {steci}, which relates extensional properties, then we are left with {cmima}. In this sense, if {steci} is defined as a primitive relation, along with removal of components, then {cmima} may be defined from {steci}.
With all of that background out of the way, does {steci} imply the Axiom of Choice? Suppose that we provide {steci} with a set and an element of that set. Then, the various extensional properties of that element are choice functions which select the element (and possibly other elements) from the set. This looks like the Axiom of Choice!
This is an old question within the Lojban community, and I'm curious about what the wider conlang community thinks. This can be moved to a more technical forum, I suppose, but I'm not sure which one would be more appropriate.
My guess: It doesn't.
Sketch argumentation: {steci} allows you to talk about choice functions, but it does not guarantee that the thing you are talking about is actually a well-defined choice function, think, e.g., of the smallest element of an open interval as subset of real numbers. In other words: You can formulate sentences in Lojban that aren't true. You can lie in Lojban (as well as in any other language), and you can utter things that aren't even lies but complete nonsense.
{steci} does really do what it says on the tin. I'm not asking about arbitrary Lojban utterances; I'm asking about the semantics of particular selbri. Suppose I had asked whether {mlatu} always refers to Felidae, and you replied that people can lie and say things like {mi mlatu} "I'm a cat;" that's not what I was trying to understand.
The fact that there is a three-valued predicate steci implemented in Lojban does not make any assumption that it can always be satisfied, as far as I can see. Therefore the pure existence of that predicate implies nothing about the Axiom of Choice (my point of view).
And, by the way, as far as I understand the math behind that, you don't need to invoke the Axiom of Choice when you have an explicit Choice Function, you need AoC only in the absence of that.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.866877 | 2023-07-16T15:22:31 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/1953",
"authors": [
"Book Desert Safari",
"Corbin",
"David Manson",
"Olandelie",
"STC Japan Import Brand New Car",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Wangana",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/198",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6272",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6303",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6307",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6308",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/6444"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
894 | How to develop a detailed, realistic a posteriori conlang?
Background
To begin, I’ve been conlanging ‘properly’ for around two to two and a half years now and have been into it for far, far longer. However, I have yet to create a conlang that is truly in-depth, detailed, and realistic. I soon want to begin that process. I am confident in my knowledge of linguistics and have at least a basic knowledge of most areas and a more in-depth knowledge of others (none the less, I am still an amateur of linguistics, of course).
The current situation
At the moment, I am in the very early stages of planning – I’ve yet to decide on the final concept which I am going to develop. My ideas currently on the shortlist are:
A Celtic language spoken on a (fictional) island nation off the north-western coast of Ireland with North-Germanic influence due to interactions and mixing with the Norse people throughout history.
A Turkic language spoken in a (fictional) nation in the Southern Caucasus with influence from Georgen, especially on the phonology and vocabulary side.
A Uralic language spoken in Eastern Finland and the Karelia/Murmansk regions with Slavic influence.
Of these ideas, I am currently most drawn towards the first bullet-point, however, choosing the scenario of the conlang is not the crux of the issue. That is the issue of creating an in-depth and realistic, believable a posteriori conlang. I want to create a language that has detailed and believable phonology and grammar.
My questions to you
What is your advice on creating a good a posteriori conlang in general?
How do I effectively develop a conlang with as much detail and depth as possible?
Thank you very much for any help or guidance.
Take a look around the site you may find some good stuff in relation to some of your questions. Enjoy!
Hello and welcome to the site! I had to remove the third question because it absolutely doesn't fit the Stack Exchange Q&A model. Even now this question is still rather broad. If you could make it more specific that would be better.
See also this question and its answers: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/812/how-do-you-model-language-changes-with-wave-theory-areal-developments
Let me know if it works out, I could definitely use an Irish Scandinavian and Viking inspired conlang for a PC game I am in the very very early stages of developing
Let me know if you don't mind sharing. I really could use a made up language like that.
So, you are going to create an altlang (a naturalistic language living in an alternate history of the the world). First, define your starting point (easiest for the first scenario: Old Irish or proto-Goidelic is a suitable starting point for this one). Look at the real world descendants from that starting points (Middle Irish and Modern Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelish) and what changes happened to them. You can create variation by retaining some archaic features, applying changes from different descendants, or applying changes in different temporal order to create a new artificial Goidelic language. You may also throw in some original changes not occurring in the known Goidelic languages. Keep a timeline of those changes—the changes will apply to loan words as well!
Than decide on the influence of the other language: Are there only borrowings of words, shall it influence syntax (e.g., the order of noun and genitive or noun and adjective, shall the basic word order change?), are there new phonemes added to the phonology?
Decide, when the influence happens, does it happen only once, are there several waves of influence. Note that the other language changes over time, too. Your conlang may preserve archaic words from the donor language that have fallen out of use or have undergone sound shifts there.
Put everything together and enjoy the result!
Have you looked at Brithenig or Wenedyk? These were generated by applying to Latin the sound shifts that affected Welsh and Polish (respectively) over the same period. You could start with early Irish and apply Scandinavian sound changes.
Of course there would also be lexical and syntactic borrowings; those are less systematic by nature, and so can be governed more by your taste. Do you know the concept of Sprachbund?
On another hand, aren't there natlangs with at least some of the features you want? Scandinavians ruled parts of Ireland; Russia rules over some Uralic peoples; there are Turkic languages adjacent to Georgia — I would expect some influence.
Thank you very much for you answer! Early Irish with Scandinavian Sound changes seems like a very interesting idea. Regarding your last point, to an extent yes I suppose so, however I’m aiming for even more of a North Germanic influence.
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T13:24:23.867118 | 2019-02-24T11:29:17 | {
"license": "Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"site": "conlang.stackexchange.com",
"url": "https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/894",
"authors": [
"Brad",
"Dr. Shmuel",
"James Hanvey",
"Sir Cornflakes",
"Spammer",
"Tomsk",
"curiousdannii",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/113",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/1387",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/142",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2898",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2899",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/2900",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/497",
"https://conlang.stackexchange.com/users/771",
"ultralegend5385"
],
"all_licenses": [
"Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
],
"sort": "votes",
"include_comments": true
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.