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1304 | What tools are there to make this alien language?
Probably already been asked before but here goes.
Stevefan has traveled through some sort of trans-dimensional breach made of handwavium to another dimension where the inhabitants don't speak English. What tools are there on the internet that could help me form this language?
I want to make the spoken language for these aliens based off of Spanish and something similar to Spanish, close enough together that if you know Spanish you can kinda-sorta piece together the general meaning of the sentence. I could try to do something like the Minions from Despicable Me did where they alternate language every few words, but that doesn't feel very alien to me, just confusing.
As for the written language I'm not too concerned about, it just needs to be a glyph based written language. If you know of a little-known language like this I could just use Google Translate for that so I'm not too worried there.
We have an SE dedicated to constructed languages, have you considered post this there?
@L.Dutch-ReinstateMonica, because im kinda trying to make my own language, or at least combine two existing ones.
I won't bother to reply to the "what tools" question, or to the utterly meaningless "hierogliphic-ish" part, but I might try to give an answer for the "based on Spanish" requirement. The question is, do you know Spanish, or would it be a waste of time? (There is no Spanish-like language written with hieroglyphics or anything which could pass for hieroglyphics. That was easy. In fact, there is exactly one logographic writing system in current use, and that is the Chinese Hanzi; the number of old dead languages which used logographic writing system is also very small.)
@AlexP, i do know some spanish, and I was kinda meaning that the written and spoken language would both be different. i dont need a glyph based spanish dialect, just a glyph based language and a spanish dialect which i will merge into my alien language
Let's take modern Spanish Spanish and apply some nice natural sound changes to it, together with some plausible alterations to the spelling rules, and see what we get.
To begin with, let's take a Spanish text on which to apply the changes, so that in the end we have an example of Alien Spanish, with the goal of ascertaining that it is at the same time Spanish-like and alien enough. The chosen text consists of the first ten articles of the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as given by the Spanish Wikipedia:
Los hombres nacen y permanecen libres e iguales en derechos. Las distinciones sociales solo pueden fundarse en la utilidad común. La finalidad de toda asociación política es la conservación de los derechos naturales e imprescriptibles del hombre. Esos derechos son la libertad, la propiedad, la seguridad y la resistencia a la opresión. La fuente de toda soberanía reside esencialmente en la nación; ningún individuo, ni ninguna corporación pueden ser revestidos de autoridad alguna que no emane directamente de ella. La libertad consiste en poder hacer todo aquello que no cause perjuicio a los demás. El ejercicio de los derechos naturales de cada hombre, no tiene otros límites que los que garantizan a los demás miembros de la sociedad el disfrute de los mismos derechos. Estos límites solo pueden ser determinados por la ley. La ley solo puede prohibir las acciones que son perjudiciales a la sociedad. Lo que no está prohibido por la ley no puede ser impedido. Nadie puede verse obligado a aquello que la ley no ordena. La ley es expresión de la voluntad de la comunidad. Todos los ciudadanos tienen derecho a colaborar en su formación, sea personalmente, sea por medio de sus representantes. Debe ser igual para todos, sea para proteger o para castigar. Siendo todos los ciudadanos iguales ante ella, todos son igualmente elegibles para todos los honores, colocaciones y empleos, conforme a sus distintas capacidades, sin ninguna otra distinción que la creada por sus virtudes y conocimientos. Ningún hombre puede ser acusado, arrestado y mantenido en confinamiento, excepto en los casos determinados por la ley, y de acuerdo con las formas por esta prescritas. Todo aquel que promueva, solicite, ejecute o haga que sean ejecutadas órdenes arbitrarias, debe ser castigado, y todo ciudadano requerido o aprendido por virtud de la ley debe obedecer inmediatamente, y se hace culpable si ofrece resistencia. La ley no debe imponer otras penas que aquellas que son estrictas y evidentemente necesarias; y nadie puede ser castigado sino en virtud de una ley promulgada con anterioridad a la ofensa y legalmente aplicada. Todo hombre es considerado inocente hasta que ha sido declarado convicto. Si se estima que su arresto es indispensable, cualquier rigor mayor del indispensable para asegurar su persona ha de ser severamente reprimido por la ley. Ningún hombre debe ser molestado por razón de sus opiniones, ni aún por sus ideas religiosas, siempre que al manifestarlas no se causen trastornos del orden público establecido por la ley.
(Spelling change) Replace ce, ci with the, thi (as they are pronounced): nacen $\rightarrow$ nathen, sociales $\rightarrow$ sothiales etc.
(Spelling change) The acute accent indicates the position of the dynamic stress when it falls in a place other than where it's expected:
If the acute is on the last syllable before an n or an s, delete the acute and double the consonant: ningún $\rightarrow$ ningunn, demás $\rightarrow$ demass, razón $\rightarrow$ razonn. (It's not deleterious, since Spanish cannot have double consonants in that position.)
(Spelling change) Replace ñ with ny and ll with ly. (It could have been the chosen spelling, but wasn't.)
(Spelling change) Replace qu with k (or c, since by now we no longer have any possibilit of confusion); que $\rightarrow$ ce, aquellas $\rightarrow$ acelyas etc.
(Spelling change) Replace all is and us with y and w when they represent semivowels (also called glides, the less sonorous parts of diphthongs): igual $\rightarrow$ igwal, cualquier $\rightarrow$ cwalcyer.
(Spelling change) Delete initial and intervocalic h. (It is silent anyway.)
(Spelling change) Replace ge, gi with hhe, hhi, and then j with h:
ejecutadas $\rightarrow$ ehecutadas, ejercicio $\rightarrow$ eherthithyo etc.
At this point we have regular Spanish with a somewhat novel, but yet still consistent, spelling. Let's go and apply some natural sound changes:
Replace endings in -ad, -ades with -à, -ass. (Italian did it, for the singular; in the plural, Italian keeps -à unchanged.)
Delete final -o; in order to preserve the position of the dynamic stress, you must of course double the preceding consonant, as required by rule 2. (Romanian did it; we have lup for Spanish lobo, tot for Spanish todo etc.)
If the word ends in -wo, replace with -u.
If the word ends in -yo (at this stage of the modifications), replace the -o with -u.
If the final -o is the only vowel in the word, replace with -u.
Replace final -i with iy, final -e with i, and final -a with e. (Old French did the last one.)
Now do the plurals: replace final -os with -uy. (Romanian went even further, but let's keep it Spanish-y.) Replace final -es with iy. Replace final -as with ey.
(Slight, if any sound change.) Consistently replace vl and vr with br and bl, and elsewhere consistently replace b with v.
Finally, replace clusters of two occlusives (also known as stops) with the second one doubled, as Italian did.
At this point we have:
Luy ombriy nathen yiy permanethen libriy i igwaliy en derechuy. Ley distinthyoniy sothyaliy soll pweden fundarsi en le utilidà comunn. Le finalidà di tode asothyathyonn polítice iy le conservathyonn di luy derechuy naturaliy i imprescrittibliy del ombri. Esuy derechuy son le livertà, le propyedà, le seguridà yiy le resistenthye e le opresionn. Le fwenti di tode soveraníe residi esenthyalmenti en le nathionn; ningunn individu, niy ningune corporathyonn pweden ser revestiduy di awtoridà algune ci nu emani direttamenti di elye. Le livertà consisti en poder ather tod acelyu ci nu cawsi perhwithyu e luy demass. El eherthithyu di luy derechuy naturaliy di cade ombri, nu tyeni otruy límitiy ci luy ci garantizan e luy demass myembruy di le sothyedà el disfruti di luy mismuy derechuy. Estuy límitiy soll pweden ser determinaduy por le ley. Le ley soll pwedi proivir ley acthyoniy ci son perhudithyaliy e le sothyedà. Lu ci nu está proividd por le ley nu pwedi ser impedidd. Nadyi pwedi versi obligadd e acelyu ci le ley nu ordene. Le ley iy expresyonn di le voluntà di le comunidà. Toduy luy thyudadanuy tyenen derechu e colavorar en su formathionn, see personalmenti, see por medyu di sus representantiy. Devi ser igwal pare toduy, see pare proteger u pare castigar. Syend toduy luy thyudadanuy igwaliy anti elye, toduy son igwalmenti elegibliy pare toduy luy onoriy, colocathyoniy yiy empleuy, conformi e sus distintey capathidass, sin ningune otre distinthyonn ci le creade por sus virtuss yiy conothimyentuy. Ningunn ombri pwedi ser acusadd, arrestadd yiy mantenidd en confinamyent, exthett en luy casuy determinaduy por le ley, yiy di acwerd con ley formey por este prescritey. Todd acel ci promweve, solithiti, ehecuti u age ci sean ehecutadey órdeniy arvitraryey, devi ser castigadd, yiy todd thyudadann receridd u aprendidd por virtù di le ley devi ovedether inmedyatamenti, yiy si athi culpabli siy ofrethi resistenthye. Le ley nu devi imponer otrey peney ci acelyey ci son estrittey yiy evidentementi nethesaryey; yiy nadyi pwedi ser castigadd sinn en virtù di une ley promulgade con anteryoridà e le ofense yiy legalmenti aplicade. Todd ombri iy consideradd inothenti aste ci e sidd declaradd convitt. Siy si estime ci su arrest iy indispensabli, cwalcyer rigor mayor del indispensabli pare asegurar su persone e di ser severamenti reprimidd por le ley. Ningunn ombri devi ser molestadd por razonn di sus opinyoniy, niy awunn por sus ideey religyosey, syempri ci al manifestarley nu si cawsen trastornuy del orden públic establethidd por le ley.
Now, this is still sufficiently Spanish-y for a Romance speaker to be able to go through it, albeit slowly. It may or may not be sufficiently alien...
If still not sufficiently alien, continue sound changes:
Replace intervocalic r with rh and intervocalic s with r (Latin did the latter).
Replace s between vowels, or at the beginning of a word before a wovel, with w (Greek did it).
If still not alien enough, you may want to go through some chain shifts (as in Germanic for example).
Excellent answer. Another option that comes to mind to add to the ‘alien’ feel would be switching up the usage of prepositions. They’re notoriously hard to translate no matter what source or target language you’re working with, and such a shift may be sufficient to throw most Romance speakers for a loop when they first read it.
If you need to have your language loosely based on another language, you're very limited in how you build it. You need it to sound familiar but different to native speakers of that language. There isn't a lot of ways to accomplish this, you need to keep your changes small. My advice would be to prepare "find and replace patterns" for the vowels and a few common words, leave most of the consonants as is, and just run them over the text and use that as a starting point.
Eg. I've chosen a really simple replacement map: A->E. E->I, I->O, O->U, U->A. I'm ignoring diacritics because I'm a heathen but you could take steps to ensure hard vowels remain hard and soft ones remain soft - especially at the end of words where they could add an extra syllable. Anyway:
We come in peace, take me to your leader
In Spanish is
Venimos en paz llévame con tu líder
Becomes:
Vinomis in pez llivemi cun ta lodir
That should sound sort of familiar to Spanish listeners, but also kind of alien, and you wont be able to understand it in entirety first time.
(1) Spanish most definitely does not have the same vowels as English. Not even close. Not even remotely similar. (Spanish has five wovels, English has between 15 and 22, depending on who counts and how they count.) (2) Your circular replacement of wovel letters would wreak havoc on the Spanish spelling conventions. (3) Those acute accents are not meaningless decorations. (4) The result would be extremely unnatural. Look for example at the last two words, ta lódir: as a Romance speaker, don't you feel something fishy about them?
@AlexP 1) https://www.spanishdict.com/guide/spanish-vowels 2) Spelling is not an issue as per OP. 3) I didn't say they were meaningless, I said I was a heathen for ignoring them even. 4) Some things would be unnatural, alien even. That's the point.
A site which begins with the idiotic assertion that Spanish has the same five vowels as English should be closed immediately and never reopened. They probably mean to say that Spanish has this in common with English that it is written with a variant of the Latin alphabet. Which I would suppose that everybody already knew.
@AlexP What are they then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Vowels says there is only the same 5 as English. We're trying to scramble pronunciation but keep it recognisable vowels are the easiest and simplest places to attack.
English has between 15 and 22 vowels, depending on who counts and how they count. I've never ever seen a description of English giving less than 15 vowels. From where do you get five? I would be most happy if there was a variant of English with only five vowels, because I could then map them cleanly on Romanian vowels. And anyway, let's count to eleven: part, pan, cup (3 for Spanish a), pet (Spanish e), pit, peace (2 for Spanish i), lot, thought (2 for Spanish o), put, soon (2 for Spanish u); and letter with no Spanish counterpart.
You have a few options:
They actually speak Portuguese, which although being similar to Spanish, is sufficiently different and incompatible to make them mutually unintelligible.
The alien dimension was actually a rural area in Paraguay, possibly even an indigenous area, and its inhabitants speak Spanish as a second language and not fluently, with an accent, vocabulary and grammar strongly influenced by Guaraní (an indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay).
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1337 | What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?
What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?
I'm curious as to if there are any full existing conlangs that allow you to do arithmetic or mathematical manipulations from a conlang perspective.
The closest that I've found for this is this set of short clips on YouTube, Inventing a Number System. But I'm curious as to if there might be more examples, especially examples that have a mathematical grammar of some sort.
(Note: I do apologize if this post is a bit fuzzy, as the idea is still kind of fuzzy in my mind. This is also my first post to this forum. I can revise the post if needed.)
Thanks.
When you say mathematics, are you also including advanced language aspects that mathematicians use to formulate theorems and proofs, or would you like to focus on just words and grammar concerning counting and arithmetic?
You might find Lojban and other engineered languages interesting.
@EdvinW I think I'm more interested at the moment in something more specific like counting and arithmetic, but I would also be interested in more advanced features of mathematics as well. I would love to expand out into more abstractions, such as summation notation, and maybe even mathematical induction and functions. My interest is mainly in describing arithmetic and mathematics itself in a human language-like way versus a general purpose language like Lojban. Lojban does look promising though. This does get me to realize that I need to be more specific with what I want to accomplish.
Is lojban the type of thing you might be looking for?
Mathematical logic and set theory has their own domain-specific language. See, for instance, Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, a common axiomatization of set theory.
There's a language based on stack-based programming languages (like Forth) that eliminates syntactic ambiguity called Fith. The name is a deliberate pun on Forth.
FrathWiki
2019 Smiley award page
Fith grammar (archived)
Basically, when parsing the language you have a stack of objects that you have to keep track of, as well as some global state like the default number that can be explicitly changed.
The idea of layering a human language on top of a Forth-like grammar is flexible enough that you could extend Fith or make radically different design decisions without losing some of its nice properties.
That's rather a "programming" than a "mathematical" conlang ;)
I consider programming a type of math, but opinions may differ.
IMHO programming is not any kind of math at all, they are related though.
This looks really cool. I'll definitely look into it. Thanks.
Slightly tangential, but Richard Feynman invented his own mathematical notation (mostly trigonometric functions), as mentioned in his autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!":
While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didn't like the symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, "sin f" looked like s times i times n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square root sign. Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left -to-right reflected so that it started with the horizontal line with the value underneath, and then the sigma.
He stopped using his notation when he inadvertently slipped into it when discussing some math with his friend, because he realized the need for a common (even if inferior) notation.
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1444 | Does a constructed language need an ontology?
I am very confident my implied premise is valid. There is no sense in trying to construct a language without a complete list illustrating the semantic relationship of the anticipated words.
I have not invested any time into understanding the modular construction of sound that I seem to be seeing as the focus of the questions posted here, but it would seem that the number of modular sounds might equal to the number of items in the collation format for the ontology.
Seem reasonable???
Constructing an ontology first is one approach to language construction, and it leads to so-called philosophical languages or a priori conlangs. This approach was especially popular in the 19th century, before more natural conlangs like Volapük and Esperanto appeared.
Naturalistic conlangs are most often constructed without an explicit ontology and have semantic irregularities of all kind.
I guess it's similar to Intelligent Design vs Evolution. An evolutionary approach has the advantage that it is more flexible and can adapt, whereas an a priori ontology might not be complete and leave gaps in the language.
What are some examples of 19c philosophical languages? The Wikipedia article implies that the craze peaked well before 1800.
@AntonSherwood: I think of Solresol especially.
We can read ontology a little more broadly, but it's hard to do so without getting into worldbuilding. Generally the division between meanings (e.g. bend vs. fold vs. break, in French your knees don't bend, they fold, also the love-like distinction of English) can be considered of an ontological nature, and quite often these are strongly informed by the specific cultural history that lead to them
The distinction between "cooking" and "baking" derives from how historically in Europe these were the remits of different people working in different places. It is quite artificial when you really look at it, and other languages use the same work for the heating of bread (or bread equivalent) and meat.
An ontology is useful to figure out where concepts are classified by the speakers (e.g. what counts as a flower, what counts as art, what counts as crime, as a bird, as a bug?). Even on a grammatical level (what is dubious or unreal enough that it qualifies for the subjunctive?) Otherwise, you're really just relexifying your mother tongue.
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1747 | Could [j] and [ʎ] coexist in the same language as distinct phonemes?
As the title asks, could [j] and [ʎ] coexist in the same language as distinct phonemes? I imagine one would merge with the other or some other mechanism forms to make each more distinct. If the speakers had hearing exceeding that of humans, would this feature be more viable? Just a thought of mine.
Sure. Italian does this. For a minimal pair, aglio /aʎ.ʎo/ "garlic" vs aio /a(j).jo/ "tutor". (There's no phonemic distinction between /jj/ and /j/ in Standard Italian.)
Such a distinction is pretty common across Romance languages, and a distinction between /ʎ/ & /j/ is preserved in Italian, Occitan, and most of the languages of Iberia (this latter phoneme is also often transcribed /ʝ/ in some languages). Spanish itself is unusual amongst the languages of Iberia in having mostly lost this distinction (with both undergoing yeísmo, merging /ʎ/ into /ʝ/), although lleísmo (with the distinction) is still the official standard in Spain itself, and preserved in some dialects (especially when spoken by people who speak other languages of Iberia).
Going through PHOIBLE, the vast majority of languages with a /ʎ/ also have a distinct /j/. There were 94 distinct languages with /ʎ/ in at least one listed inventory, of which only something like 7 languages (Ayacucho Quechua, Jungle Inga, Kabuverdianu, Liko, Pampanga, Paraguayan Guaraní, Serbian) didn't have a /j/ listed in at least one inventory. That's >90% of languages with a /ʎ/ also have a distinct /j/. From that, if it's natural to have a /ʎ/ phoneme, it must be natural to have distinct /ʎ/ and /j/ phonemes.
90% makes me think there's a bit of bias in naming here—if you see a single palatal approximant, you're probably more likely to name it /j/, even if it's often lateralized.
that's true, and fits with the usual caveats with PHOIBLE. That said, seeing as /j/ is less marked than /ʎ/ we'd expect it to occur more often and given how common it is as a phoneme, we'd expect most languages with a /ʎ/ to also have a /j/ even if there were no specific correlation
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1753 | I need help with understanding perfect, perfective, perterite, and pluperfect
After reading the definitions of perfect past, perfective past, preterite past, and pluperfect past, I am confused as to what their distinctions are. They all are past tense forms indicating a completed action. Some of the articles I read even said there is overlap in their usage. Should I worry about these distinctions?
Thanks for the green check! As a friendly word of advice though, it it customary to wait a while before marking an answer as accepted, at least 24 hours after you post your question. It's very possible someone might have an even better answer to your question, and if an answer is already checked this might dissuade them from taking the time to post. We have users all around the world, and 24 gives everyone time to be awake and hopefully off work (spending every free waking hour at this stack, of course :P ) It's totally fine to uncheck mine for a while, if you want to try your luck!
@Edvin Thanks! I am new to StackExchange and internet forums.
All the times you mention are in the past, but many languages, including English, care about more specific aspects of this past.
In a nutshell, preterite past describes things that happened, perfect past describes things that were happening, while pluperfect past describes things that had happened. Perfective past, the way I've seen it used, is synonymous with preterite past.
There is also the present perfect, which also describes the past.
Because I think the more "complicated" forms are easier to explain, I'll go through them in reverse order.
Let's say you are telling about something in the past that happened around the time X.
Present perfect doesn't care about X at all, but just denotes something took place before the present. If you tell me you have met the pope, there's no way for me of telling when this occurred without further questions. Sentences "I have studied the mysteries." or "Have they eaten?" are not concerned about precisely when these things might have happened, just that they were in the past.
Pluperfect past, also called past perfect, tells you what happened before X. Consider "I had just left the house." or "They had seen this many times before.". These sentences don't take place at the time you left your house or when they saw whatever they saw, but after. We use this to give background information.
Perfect past goes on to describe what happened during the time X, to set the stage if you will. In the sentence "I was walking in the park when the phone rang.", the walking happens in the perfect past.
Preterite past describes things that happened right at the time X. In the sentence above, the phone rang in the preterite past.
So to answer your question:
You should worry!
Or rather, you should think about whether to worry or not!
Some languages take great care not to confuse these concepts, some have just one verb forms that cover all the pasts. The English "I walked in the park when the phone rang." might work in some dialects or varieties of English, but to my (admittedly foreign) ears it sounds a bit off, or maybe old-fashioned (?).
English basically have three verb forms, exemplified by 'see', 'saw' and 'seen', two of which concerns the past, and forms the different kinds of pasts by adding words around them. Some languages, like Spanish, have more verb forms for the different pasts. "I saw" would translate to "Yo vi", while "I was seeing" translates to "Yo veía"¹
Some languages use even more past times. There is a time that's in the past, but after X, and there is nothing stopping you from giving this time its own verb form. In English, you could express this bu the (comparatively clunky) "I was about to eat when you came".
In the end it's up to you, but I think you'll have a more interesting conlanging time if you at least give it some thought!
¹) I know the 'yo' isn't necessary, I just think it might be clearer for those not very familiar with Spanish.
The most important thing to recognize is that many of these terms are language-specific. The word "preterite" is mainly used in describing Germanic languages, for example; in Ancient Greek, which has a very similar tense, it's called the "aorist".
So for a concrete example, let's use Latin. It's got several different past tenses that we can poke at using various different terms.
In Latin, each "tense" (tempus) actually involves two components: the time and the aspect. The time indicates the reference point of the action: past, present, or future? The aspect indicates the action's relationship to that reference point. This means you can have several different verb tenses (or "TAMs" if you prefer) that all relate to past time, but have different aspects.
In Latin, there are three aspects, which actually correspond very nicely to English verb forms. The imperfective (from the Latin for "not finished"), also known as the progressive or continuous aspect, indicates that something is happening over a period of time or happens frequently: "I am eating". The perfect (from the Latin for "finished"), also sometimes called the perfective aspect, indicates that the event is over and done with and you're talking about the aftermath of it: "I have eaten". And the simple aspect, also known as the aoristic or (confusingly) the perfective, treats the event as a single point in time: "I eat". (Unlike in English, you can't combine these in Latin; there's no one-to-one equivalent to "I have been eating", for example, to talk about the aftereffects of a long-term action.)
These are the foundation of the tense system:
The imperfect tense is past imperfective, "I was eating". It indicates an event happening for some time in the past.
The aorist or preterite tense (from the Latin for "passed") is past simple, "I ate". It indicates an event happening at a single point in the past.
The perfect tense is present perfect, "I have eaten". Note that the reference point is actually the present! Remember, the perfect aspect focuses on the aftereffects, and the aftereffects of the past are happening now: I have eaten (in the past) so I'm no longer hungry (in the present).
The pluperfect tense (from the Latin for "beyond finished") is past perfect, "I had eaten". This is talking about the aftereffects (perfect aspect), but those aftereffects themselves happen in the past.
This is how Latin decides to break things down. (It also has all of these aspects for the present and future times as well, giving tenses like the future perfect, talking about future aftereffects: "the show starts at nine? I will have eaten by then".) But other languages can, and do, handle things differently! And, annoyingly, there's no consistent standard for how these terms are used.
Some people, for example, use the term "perfective" for what I've called perfect aspect. Other people use it for what I've called simple aspect. The word "aorist" comes from the Greek for "undefined", so some people apply it to whatever the most "default" tense or aspect is in their language. And since "preterite" literally just means "passed", it's a convenient label to slap onto whatever past tense is lacking its own name.
What matters most is that you understand the distinctions you're making in your language, and give them labels that you (and hopefully the audience too) can understand.
"The aspect indicates the action's relationship to that reference point." Note that in linguistics generally, "aspect" doesn't refer to anything relating to reference points, but about the internal temporal structure of an event. (Viewed from the outside as a whole, viewed from the inside as it takes place, focusing on the beginning or end, etc.)
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1768 | Do you make a word then give it meaning, or do you think of a meaning and assign a word to it?
I wonder which is more effective, creating a list of conwords then giving definitions or, creating a list of definitions then assigning conwords?
Readers of this question may also be interested in this one: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/q/1608/142
meaning and then words, because every language is built on the needs of the environment in which is based. List the main words used in that environment according to the geography and culture you are planning, then you can start to separate it into groups and assigns common radicals and all the other word-creation processes.
I have mostly made up conwords when I had a new meaning in mind. Most of the time now I am deriving new words from combinations of existing words. I do occasionally think of a conword that sounds so good that I replace past words or seek out a meaning so that it will become a fairly common usage.
That said, one way or another, I do wind up with conwords I like but don't need yet. I keep a list of them for future use. Importantly for my productivity, I have a counterpart list of English concepts for future use: so that I neither forget them nor randomly divert myself from the task I'm on when I think of them.
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1779 | What steps in the conlang process am I missing?
My currently known process for conlanging is 1) set goals, 2) define phonology, 3) Romanize, 4) phonotactics, 5) define word order, 6) define morphosyntactic alignment, 7) define morphology type, 8) create list of basic root words, 9) phonological evolution and new word derivation
Is there anything I am missing? Should I reorder any of these?
Remember that "word order" and "morphosyntactic alignment" and "morphology type" are broad categories used to make generalizations about natural language. Saying that English is SVO can be a useful shorthand, but that ignores everything that makes English syntax interesting!
These broad categories are a starting point, laying out the basic groundwork for you. But it won't give you anything unique or individual about your particular language. That part is up to you.
So I would replace those steps with figuring out the syntax and morphology in general. Don't limit yourself to Greenberg's universals—because often, linguistic "universals" aren't. And this goes double for conlangs.
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1791 | What phonotactical constraints are commonly used by conlangers?
I'm continuing development of Der Spracherfinder (to help you fellow conlangers), and I want to know which phonotactical constraints are most common and helpful to conlangers. For example: forbid sonorants clustering with obstruents in coda position.
I doubt there is a comprehensive survey that could tell you what's "common" (especially considering that the vast majority of conlangs are probably private matters). Is your question intending to be an informal survey?
For conlangs intended to resemble natural languages, I would suggest:
Looking at the constraints in natural languages with a similar phonology.
Speaking possible words out loud and trying to reduce the effort required to articulate.
For conlangs not intended to resemble natural languages, especially those used in fictional settings by non-human speakers, anything goes.
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1849 | Are mora and syllable weight the same thing?
I'm researching syllable structures to learn better ways to construct words. I've come across mora and weight, and upon first glance they seem to describe the same thing in different words.
Mora is described as a measure of timing. For example, ba = 1 mora, baa/bai = 2 mora, and baab = 3 mora. (Source)
Compare this with weight which seems to describe mora, but with words like "light", "heavy", and "CV, CVC, CVCC, etc." (Source)
Are these the same thing, or is there a vital difference I am not understanding?
Edit: I don't know why, but the phonology tag pops up when I click the phonotactics tag. I've tried fixing it to no avail.
Moras and syllable weight are the same type of thing: they're a way to explain why different syllables behave differently, in certain languages. But which one is more useful depends on the details of the language in question.
In English, syllables come at a mostly-consistent pace. But in Japanese, they don't. A syllable like taa or tan takes approximately twice as long as a syllable like ta, and a syllable like taan takes approximately three times as long. As a result, the "syllable" ends up not being a very natural unit for talking about prosody. Instead, we talk about a smaller unit, the "mora"; ta is one mora, taa and tan are two, taan is three. This ends up being a useful system for analyzing Japanese prosody.
In Latin, on the other hand, syllables like ta and tan/taa act differently—but there's no difference between the behavior of tan/taa and taan. In other words, the only distinction that matters is between syllables that have either a long vowel or a coda (or both), and syllables that have neither. Furthermore, the number of consonants in the onset and coda don't matter; all that matters is if a coda is present or not. In this case, it's more useful to say that syllables have a binary property: they're either "heavy" or "light". The actual number of morae doesn't really matter: once a syllable is heavy, thanks to having either a coda or a long vowel, adding the other makes no difference.
Sometimes both of these are useful. In (Old Babylonian) Akkadian, there are three types of syllable: light syllables have a short vowel and no coda, heavy syllables have a long vowel or a coda, and ultraheavy syllables have either a long vowel and a coda, or an ultralong vowel. The exact number of morae still doesn't necessarily matter: adding a coda to an ultralong vowel makes no difference. But it's convenient to define these categories of syllables in terms of morae: one mora is a light syllable, two morae is a heavy syllable, three or more morae is an ultraheavy syllable.
"In English, syllables come at a mostly-consistent pace" feels misleading, given how much shorter unstressed syllables are than stressed, and English's tendency towards stress-timing
@Tristan Stressed syllables are consistently longer than unstressed ones, but stressed and unstressed syllables also follow a generally consistent rhythm, meaning the overall time per syllable is very consistent. That's what I'm trying to convey.
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1740 | What is an example of a constructed language focusing on beauty and conceptual purity?
By conceptual purity, I mean it tries to avoid arbitrariness, and seeks the most default or neutral way to achieve an aim.
For example, some languages are written right to left, others left to right. The spatial arrangement may be convenient, but it seems to add more layers to the system than may be needed. If words could be represented in a form permitting nesting (circle, square), “sentences” could be arranged in a central way. With computers, instead of representing time as a spatial axis (the flow of communication from left to right), we could represent it as change, through time, exactly what it is (the forms on the screen morph in real time).
Also, “letters” can be made beautiful as well as less arbitrary - the letters of the Roman alphabet don’t have a stark resemblance to the sounds they stand for. The order of the Roman alphabet also seems arbitrary.
If something is unordered, it should be reflected that way. It would be interesting if there were a very elemental mathematical function which could generate distinct shapes, but randomly. Or, the letters should have diagrammatic coherence with mouth patterns. You could have a symbol for the part of the mouth, and the type of activity / force (labial, plosive). You could also develop this system with more precision, make the standardization of the International Phonetic Alphabet also appear arbitrary (I think). I actually don’t know, but I think there may be phonemes that are borderline between two IPA phonetic concepts. Since certain phonemes have continuously varying parameters that really define them, as well as with allowable margins of nearness for a sound to be understood as that phoneme, there should be a phonetic symbol that denotes this explicitly - the entire specification of a phoneme, the total information, in a logical diagram that is sort of like “the picture theory of language”, it actually maps to the phenomenological / ontological form of the sound phenomenon, and is not taken to stand for it by convention alone.
Or, we could use a series of dots, like die faces, or Braille, but maybe we could use principles to decide what maximal beauty could look like. How spaced should the dots be, and why? We should consult a cognitivistic theory of aesthetics. Maybe this more tempered form could at least write from top to bottom, since somehow it feels more human and natural to me than bottom to top. Maybe on a smartphone screen you could read downwards infinitely, or you could have the idea of “lines” by scrolling to the bottom whereupon the nice line ascends upwards in reverse order; you continue reading by scrolling up.
Or, of course, you could get rid of phonemes entirely.
The grammar should try to keep what we understand to be the pure functions of semantics intact rather than, again, conventionalized. I can think of more ideas later. The idea is the same: what form maps purely to the nature of logic/propositions/semantics, minimizing arbitrary representation conventions?
Which constructed language is like this?
Heptapod is essentially written circularly, so that could presumably be nested (though it doesn’t seem to be in the actual movie). For non-arbitrary grapheme shapes, you could look at Tengwar, which indicate things like place and manner of articulation; but then you don’t even need to go to conlangs for that, just look at Hangul for Korean.
@JanusBahsJacquet - Hangul is a constructed script, though.
@YellowSky All scripts are constructed. Hangul was just constructed later than many others.
If you get rid of phonemes, then you don't ever hafta find anybody else to speak it, which makes is less a language than a set of personal habits.
Probably there is no conlang or conscript that implements all the mentioned levels of "purity" or beauty touched in the question.
For scripts I'd like to mention Alexander Melville Bell's visible speech that does not only have a logical order of the symbols but also symbols encoding the way the sounds are articulated.
Hangul, already mentioned in a comment by Janus Bahs Jacquet also deserves a honorable mention here.
I'm quite fond of Rikchik. Hangul taken to the nines.
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1742 | How large must my consonant inventory be in order for nonconcatenative morphology to work?
In my quest to create a language for some fictional characters of mine, I came across nonconcatenative morphology like triconsonantal roots. If I wanted to employ this in my conlang, how many consonants must I have? I see Arabic and Hebrew, for example, have at least 25 consonants. Could I use fewer?
It's a matter of combinatorics; if all your roots have three consonants, then you can have n^3 different roots; with ten consonants that would be 1000. (This assumes that all combinations are valid/usable). With 25 consonants you'd be at 15,625. If you add more variation, ie add biconsonantal roots as well, you can increase the number a bit.
So I would start off by thinking about the inventory you need, and then work backwards from there. But don't forget that 'root' is not the same as 'word': it would be more like 'concept': once you add vowels in between the consonants, your total number of words will be a lot more than the number of roots.
Case in point: the KTB root that is always used in introductory texts can be used to form the words for "book" and "write", along with a plethora of other assorted words
Whence came that KTB convention? I've always wondered. From Youtube to my Intro To Linguistics textbook, it's omnipresent.
@Qaziquza not sure -- I do remember learning it when I started an Arabic course at Uni 30 years ago...
It is possible to reduce the consonant inventory by allowing consonant clusters in the place of single consonants, like GR.B.N. Of course this has repercussions on the set of available forms, a null vowel between two places can now create ambiguities.
@OliverMason, I assume the KTB example is used because it's a simple one showing how a root can be spun out into so many different, but related, things: so you go from a root generally meaning "to write", to "book", "to correspond", "to copy", "to dictate", "writer", "office", "record", "clerk", "desk", "library", "bookshop", "subscription", "reporter", and so on.
@KeithMorrison There's also the fact that most people writing down these examples are, you know, writing, so the word itself is on the mind
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1744 | What words would naturally evolve tri-consonantal roots?
I determined to create a conlang with tri-consonantal roots (I call them tri-cons for short). My question then arose, "what words would naturally have a tri-con?" Verbs and the nouns derived from them would have tri-cons as exemplified in natural nonconcatenative languages. At the same time, those very languages have words which seem unrelated to tri-cons. In essence, I do not want to create tri-cons where none would evolve for naturalism and efficiency purposes.
Perhaps a more clear question is, "how prevalent are tri-cons in nonconcatenative languages?"
Besides nouns and verbs, there are more content words that probably evolve triconsonantal root, namely adjectives and adverbs.
I won't expect function words like articles, determiners, pronouns, pre-/post-positions, particles, and conjunctions to be triconsonantal: Those words tend to be very short in any language and three consonants are already a heavy payload.
Somewhere on the fence are numerals and interjections: They can be "rooted", but they needn't.
Triconsonantal "I, me" isn't out of the question though, as the real-world East and Southeast Asian Sprachbund is the home of co-opting nouns into service as personal pronouns for the sake of politeness. Look at w-t-š or b-k-w from Japanese or k-ñ-m from Khmer. Not to mention both Arabic and Japanese ʔ-n-t "you".
@DamianYerrick and in the context of triconsonantal languages, the Tigrinya 2nd & 3rd person pronouns also come from the PS n-p-š "breath/soul" root (albeit with the f < p assimilated to the s < š)
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2072 | How did people learn how to make conlangs?
All I can find are guides on how to make auxlangs and artlangs. I don't want to make either, I want a personal language. I don't care if my language could pass for a real one. I don't care about etymology. What matters for me is if its usable and learnable, that's it. The ease of learning question isn't really relevant.
There are no guides for that. Every guide basically says 'people find this hard to use, so don't use it' or 'make a conlang, then mangle it through sound change, then mangle that through another system of sound change'.
Clearly, if I'm going to do this, I need to just learn on my own how to do it. How did these fields develop? Could one person like me even develop a well-developed field within my lifetime? The two major types of conlangs THAT EVERY ON INSISTS YOU MAKE have histories going back over half a century in the case of artlangs, and over a century in the case of auxlangs.
Since I can only find auxlang and artlang guides, I need to make my own. So how did these fields evolve? How did Zamenhof manage to make a conlang that's clearly usable despite only one widely panned auxlang existing before it? Was the original Esperanto even that usable? Did people just change it into something usable as time went on? Or did he just model it off of natural languages close enough where it just happened to be usable?
As for what mattes to me, being usable is one as I stated. The biggest thing that matter to me is simple practicality. However, nobody ever EVERY says anything about the ramifications of a conlang have any feature. What happens if a language lacks aspect? Can you even tell a narrative in a fully aspect-less language? Yeah, there's standard German, but even there you can find hints of it. It does make the distinction between 'when' and while', and there ARE ways to indicate imperfective though they're all considered colloquial. Is there any language on earth that completely lacks aspect? I've asked this many times and have never gotten an answer. Can such a language then actually exist? Would it be usable if you made a conlang like that? Nobody can give me the answer, and so I have to come up with my own. And its not just this; I constantly come up with stuff that simply does not work. I've tried to look at natural languages, but then everyone starts pointing me to artlang guides ASSUMING THAT'S THE ONLY REASON I WOULD BE LOOKING UP A NATURAL LANGUAGE.
Also, I care about the final product. I don't want to 'evolve' a language; I want the end product to be EXACTLY according to my vision. I don't need to start at the 'start' like artlang guides tell you do; I need to start at the opposite end! Of course, it doesn't really matter if it couldn't have evolved naturally, but it still doesn't help when every single guide says 'evolve it naturally, do everything fucking backwards and end up with a hideous mess that you would never want to learn yourself'.
I need to develop my own field if I hope to get anywhere. How can I do this though? I've learned pretty much everything there is to know about making artlangs, and it hasn't helped me in the slightest. Funny thing is, I CAN make artlangs no problem. The evidence is clear, I've been reading the wrong guides for over 10 years (probably more like 15 at this point). I need a personal conlang guide, and its obvious that I'm going to have to make my own if I ever hope to get anywhere.
What's the difference between an artlang and a personal conlang? (genuine question, I'm new to the whole conlang scene)
An artlang is something made to be 'aesthetic'. Tolkien for instance claimed his goal with his Elvish languages was 'to create the most beautiful language possible'. These days, the term 'artlang' is most often used to refer to conlangs meant for fantasy conworlds, that are supposed to look like a language that could exist. A personal language is one the developer intends to use themselves, they don't really care if anyone else speaks it or even knows about it. Its essentially the polar opposite of an artlang, which DON'T HAVE TO BE USABLE BY HUMANS. In fact, some people like that.
Usability is at odds with being private to a single person. What are you trying to express, and why have natlangs been an obstacle to that expression?
Then what would make a language 'private'. If private isn't usable, then why bother with making a private language then? Why would anyone bother with a non-artlang that isn't usable?
So are you looking to create something along the lines of Toki Pona? By all accounts it seems to be simple, easy to learn and usable. If that's what you're after, perhaps someone here can give more specific advice on how to work towards a similar type of language.
"What matters for me is if its usable and learnable," by whom?
Its a personal language, so its me, obviously.
I agree that nobody else can tell you what is usable and learnable only to you. The advantage you have is that you can leave many more things open to context and allow relatively inconsistent rules, since no one else needs to get it.
If all you find is “how to make an auxlang” and “how to make an artlang”, then look at where their advice overlaps. You are not obliged to make your language easy for the world to learn (Esperanto), nor to defy any universals (Klingon), so ignore any advice in either of those directions. If it's personal, would you be content with an encoding of a language that you already know? In my youth I amused myself by disguising Italian words, swapping front and back phonemes.
Why do people keep making comments rather than answers? Stack exchange doens't like discussions for some random reason. That said, I first got into conlanging to make an auxlang, so I have seen a few guides. However, I haven't seen one in probably over 10 years, and the two I do know of aren't online anymore and haven't been for years. All I can find now are guides for naturalistic artlangs.
I cannot speak for everyone else, but I can share my experience thus far. Hopefully this can be of some value to you.
When I started conlanging, I did the grammatical and phonological research to learn what I was dealing with. Then I attempted my own conlangs according to the structure suggested by guides like Biblardion's How to Make a Language series. But each one of my conlangs died shortly after starting. Frustrated with many months of lost time, I sought out tools to help me organise and structure my conlang. But to my dismay, few were available, and they were mildly helpful at best.
So. I set out to create my own tool, Der Spracherfinder, a generalised conlanging spreadsheet program with templates to aid a conlanger along his or her journey. Potentially interesting to you is the lack of any sort of evolution page. Not everyone wants to create a half century or more of fictional history to justify their phonological and morphological decisions, so I omitted such a page. Besides, who's gonna read and critique that history anyway? It's not like we're trying to pass some sort of conlang exam! What Der Spracherfinder does encourage, however, is sketching out grammar, syllable structure(s), and phonology so that you can get to the juicy part: the lexicon!
In so making Der Spracherfinder, I came upon my own goal-focused strategy for conlanging:
Grammar first; regardless of phonology, this is the brain of the language. Here we decide all the really fun morphological features that we want. We can sprinkle in culture too! We then can sketch grammar by morphing English sentences into the conlang's syntax and adding morphology placeholders where appropriate.
Syllable structure second; using our grammar, we can get a sense of how complex our syllables should be. A morphologically dense language may, for example, opt for smaller syllables. Also in this stage, determine the stress pattern. These two be crucial for wordcraft later.
Third comes phonology. By now, you may have thought of all your desired phonemes. Whatever the case, choose phonemes now and stay consistent. Avoid doing what I did, which was changing the phonology constantly to get a sense of progress.
It's lexicon time!! With the grammar, syllable structure, stress system, and phonology decided, all that remains is filling in those morphology placeholders and replacing the English words with conwords or conphrases!!
Refine and iterate as desired. Excellence won't come first try.
In your question, you seem rather anxious to get straight to the goal. Use this determination to your advantage. Lay out your vision on paper then create a plan of execution. Be very specific in what you want your conlang to have and do. Make sure your goal is attainable, and allow yourself wiggle room. Above all, enjoy the process. And be mindful that your ambitions will almost always be ahead of your skill (which is why we experience creative block). Ira Glass gives some great advice for creative work in this video. Give it a listen. I would also advise asking yourself, "What is holding me back?"
As for guides to making a personal conlang, I do not know of any. Sorry, man. However, you could pioneer your own solution and share it with the world someday! Good luck to you! May your vision come to fruition!
Yeah, you need to decide the grammar first before you even begin making words. If you conlang has case, this will limit what forms nouns can take, so you can't make nouns until you decide the endings if any. Similar thing with verbs; what should they end in? How will tense/aspect be marked on them? If you have case, you can possibly do without certain adpositions. The list goes on and on, so you can't make words until you have a grammar. Of course, its hard to make a grammar when you can't make sample sentences. Maybe just make all your first nouns rhyme just in case you decide to add case?
@user8600 What exactly about making your personal language is holding you back? If it is deciding noun and verb affixes, I'd just create some and stick with it. Likewise with grammar. Just pick your favourite features and get rolling! Remember to conquer little by little as to not burn yourself out.
You could try creating example sentences using the method I suggested in my answer. Take a sentence in English (or German, if you so fancy), add affix placeholders, rearrange syntax to fit your conlang syntax. Boom! Prototype #1 complete!
Remember, we creatives never get it right first try.
Learning other languages (natural and/or constructed ones) helps a lot. Johann Martin Schleyer, the inventor of Volapük, was a renowned polyglot, Zamenhof, inventor of Esperanto, spoke a bunch of European languages and Hebrew, and also Tolkien, famous for his artlangs, knew a lot of languages including Welsh and Finnish.
I cannot give a general recommendation of what languages to learn at least to some degree because this depends on your personal preferences. When you are fascinated by far eastern culture, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai are natural choices; when North Africa is on your mind try Arabic, Berber, Ancient Egyptian or Koptic.
I've thought about learning other languages, but that would obviously involve a lot of work (it took me 4 years just to become an upper intermediate in German, and when I first learned German I was still young enough for it to be a 'native language' to me!) Besides, I've never managed to learn a language I had no practical use for. I only learned German because I was listening to German metal at the time. I also tried to learn French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. I even bought a Korean book a few years ago, but quickly lost interest in it.
Besides, others have told me in the past that learning a whole language just to make a conlang is highly excessive. Most conlangers don't know more than one language and they do fine. Of course, to me you don't fully understand a language unless you can speak it. I never agree with the assessments anyone makes about the grammatical features of German. They're all just so obviously incorrect to me. It doesn't help that such people never seem to know German themselves, but insist you don't have to know German to know German.
Point is, I don't understand any grammatical features that aren't contained either in English or German. Pretty much all I can do is make a relex of one or the other. I can't even seem to mix them for some reason, even though being closely related they tend to overlap more often than not.
Maybe a purely passive knowledge of some language of your choice (enough to do translations with the help of a dictionary from the original but neglecting any conversational skills) is already good enough. Modern language teaching concentrates on the latter, unfortunately, so maybe Latin?
I used to do that when I was younger. I even used this to write a story in Russian once, seriously. Sadly, I don't have that file anymore (it was lost probably 20 years ago), so I have no way now to check to see how accurate it was. Back then I didn't think it required that much knowledge to speak a language. Change the word order, swap out every word one for one, add some things that English doesn't have like cases, and you're good to go. I know now that is far from correct, probably why I don't do such things anymore.
Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit is what we used waaaaaaay back in the Web 1.0 days.
https://zompist.com/kit.html
It's technical and thorough and helpful, thinks I.
And a very enjoyable book, I find.
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2076 | Tips for making a conlang that uses an abjad?
I've been looking at Classical Hebrew a lot for inspiration on some features it has. Turns out, it wasn't what I expected (such as that its not actually a VSO language, it just looks like that due to it being pro-drop and the bible really liking to link sentences together with conjunctions). However, in the process I learned some things about its abjad.
Of course, abjads normally get stereotyped as impractical and antiquated. However, in Semitic languages, they're not to impractical as they may look. Due to numerable reasons, figuring out the vowels your own isn't actually that hard. Yeah, its not 100% reliable, but lets be real its no worse than English' infamously inconsistent orthography (how many sounds can the 'gh' alone digraph represent?) Basically, an abjad is more akin to a compression algorthm. You just write what's needed, because the rest can be deduced from that. This actually interests me; its like a syllabrary in reducing the number of characters needed to write a word, but it doesn't require nearly as many letters, and syllable structure is also far more free since you don't need a symbol for every possible syllable (languages that do use them tend to have a very small number of syllables, thus increasing word length simply because fewer short words are possible).
Also, I thought it may be an interesting creative challenge. Make a conlang that works perfectly fine for an abjad. However, this is proving harder than I expected.
For instance, you can't make as much use out of stem changes. Think of the English words 'speak' and 'spoke'. If you wrote them with just consonants, then both would be 'spk'. Clearly the language can't have something like this. In Hebrew, just about every possible 'vowel template' also involves the addition of consonant somewhere, meaning the extra consonant essentially shows what vowels are used. Thus any changes in vowels must be accompanied by some consonant. I guess part of speech would work fine though, however you'd obviously need to make it easy to determine part of speech. English does this fine, and it even makes liberal use of zero derivation. On the topic of English, y cn ndrstnd nglsh vn wtht th vwls, a rather old trick. Then there's Yiddish, which is a dialect of German written in the Hebrew script, and it makes use of stem changes arguably more so than English does! If they can get away with it, surely a language specifically made for an abjad could do so.
Another problem is it sorta reduces the number of possible words. Let's say you had a normal 5-vowel inventory. In the case of a CVCV word, this means any one pair of consonants could have up to 25 variants. This would result in a lot of ambiguity of course if the vowels weren't written. Thus, at most only a few of these could be used. This obviously would put quite a limit on the number of possible words. I could fix that by just making an abnormally large consonant inventory. Speaking both English and German, I can easily handle quite a few, but that would have a minor drawback in that it could make an English transliteration hard (how do you write three different 'r' sounds?)
Before people say it, my language could fit an abjad quite well actually. Its phonotactics for example would make it pretty easy to guess where vowels have to go. In fact, for all of the possible combinations of 3 consonant words, there's only 1 or 2 possible arrangements of vowels. This doesn't give you the exact vowels of course, but that too could easily be guessed. Part of speech is one (all verbs in Hebrew only use one template for their infinite forms, regardless of which of the language's 7 conjugations it belongs to). Gender/noun classes could be used to help diversify vowel templates for nouns. You'd have to remember which gender each noun was, yes, but its not like a lot of natlangs don't require that.
I'm still finding it limiting though not being able to use simple stem changes. I mean, Kebreni, a conlang that also uses this tri-consonantal roots thing obviously couldn't be written with an abjad. It relies solely on changing vowels to indicate the benefactive and anti-benefactive! Its a strategy I really like, since it prevents you having to lengthen words. Here though, I could not do such. I have thought about doing the 'matres lectionis', such as for vowel affixes, but I would like to make this actually a pure abjad if I could. Adding an extra symbol is fine I guess; no worse than adding a consonant symbol for any other affix. It could do cause some ambiguities; is that final 'w' a syllable that begins with 'w' or is it an 'u' suffix?
Clearly I need more techniques for morphology that would be compatible with such a system. Does anyone have any recommendations?
If the abjad has a rule where all words or syllables must start with a vowel, you might want to use a zero consonant in your conlang. However, if your conlang doesn't have that rule, it may not be crucial for your conlang.
EDIT: I used to have one on my conlang but it swiftly went in jeopardy.
I was already thinking that, yes. I was also thinking of using the symbol to indicate where vowels go in case its ambiguous. It could also be used to mark diphthongs, though both the latter uses could cause confusion. I was also thinking of using it just to indicate the number of syllables. Most words would have a number of syllables equal to the number of consonants minus 1. This however could also cause a fake out, because there would be exceptions (such as if all three consonants were a plosives). Not so sure about that. Point is, I was already thinking a lot about using such a letter.
You have already explored some of the difficulties of matching a language with an abjad. It is of course not overly difficult to design a semitic-like conlang by studying Semitic languages and how they build up a huge number of forms from triconsonatal roots. Note that Semitic languages use more devices from just adding vowels inside the root, such as consonant gemmination and suffixes containing additional consonants. Note also that no vowel at all is an option, too, and that a vowel can be added at the beginning or the end of a word form. Radically deviating from that is not that easy: Two-consonantal roots are probably not enough to build the vocabulary of a full language but maybe still worth a try, for a minimalistic core vocabulary you may want to look at Toki Pona. Four-consonantal root are possible and an interesting field of investigation.
Than, your example of English speak, spoke shows another possibility: Indivisible consonant clusters (ICCs). You will have to fiddle with your abjad to mark those consonant cluster an to distinguish speak from seapk and I can envision a lot of creative possiblities here (adding separate characters for the ICCs, using ligatures, using some special cluster joiner or cluster divider characters like (sp)k vs. s(kp)).
I've been having a hard time finding info on Hebrew that isn't meant to teach the language. Most of what I know about this system comes from the conlang Kebreni, which doesn't work quite the same way. It avoids the infamous problem this system creates where you end up with atrocious consonant clusters everywhere. Kebreni mainly relies on messing with the vowels to mark things; only two possible markings actually involve the addition of phonemes. I could lay out how it all works here, but it would take me several comments to do so. It would probably be better just to look it up yourself.
As for root size, I realize I'm going to mainly need 3 consonant roots. Even that though doesn't result in quite enough possible words, thus why I would need an abnormally large consonant inventory. Besides, that would sorta fit this. If there's only 3 vowels but over 30 consonants, why not focus on them? Also, I do know Hebrew uses at least one two-consonant affix. Its feminine marker. Arabic on the other hand apparently just lengthens the final vowel to mark the feminine. if I wanted all my affixes to be a single consonant, I also know that would put a severe limit on their number.
For instance, you can't make as much use out of stem changes. Think of the English words 'speak' and 'spoke'. If you wrote them with just consonants, then both would be 'spk'. Clearly the language can't have something like this.
To offer a counterexample, many conjugations in Ancient Egyptian worked like this, and thus were simply not differentiated in writing: sḏm can be infinitive sāḏam, subjunctive saḏma, participle sāḏim, the stative or imperative that I can't find vocalizations for…
These just had to be distinguished by context. The writing system used determinatives to distinguish between different lemmas with the same consonant, but made no attempt to distinguish different forms. And it worked well enough for thousands of years.
(For another counterexample, English-speakers can figure out if "read" is /rid/ or /rɛd/ by context.)
Regarding 'read', its normal convention to write the past tense using the perfect form. Thus instead of saying' 'I read' when you mean past tense, you say 'I have read'. Also, this isn't an ambiguity with a third person. I.e. 'He reads' vs 'He read'.
@user8600 Some people might use a convention like that, but it's not necessary to be understood: sentences like "I read that already" are plenty common.
Still, I do know that this system doesn't fit the Semitic languages 100%. Arabic still has to indicate where long vowels go, and Hebrew does write some long vowels. Both also have optional markers for all vowels. My project is sorta a challenge; make a conlang where a pure abjad does work 100% reliably. That's obviously hard to do, especially since I clearly have no examples. I'm probably just going to have to keep morphology to a minimum (to minimize morphology that only involves vowels, minus the addition of V syllables of course).
@user8600 Egyptian is an example of a "pure" abjad, insofar as it never indicates vowels in native words.
It did retain the use of logographs to disambiguate words though. I believe they're normally called 'determiners', since they didn't actually represent a pronounceable element. A common example of this is the words cot and cat (in Egyptian, apparently these also had identical consonants). To distinguish these, they literally carved a picture of a cat next to the word 'cat'. It was more akin to the radical system seen in Chinese. You need a new word, take one with a similar pronunciation and add a diacritic to it indicating the new word's semantic class.
@user8600 Only to distinguish lemmas, though, not forms of a word. All forms of sḏm "hear" have an ear determinative, with no attempt made to indicate which conjugation of "hear" it is.
Maybe so, yes, but that still means its not a pure abjad. That's what I'm arguing in case I was misunderstood. Pure abjads are rare, and it would seem the only one still in use is the Samaritan script. Hard to find info on that though.
Okay, I admit, maybe I'm not making a true abjad. I'm just making a language that is tailored-fit to work for a form of compression where the vowels can be inferred without them being explicately written. Its still an interesting project, even if its not a true abjad.
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2080 | A conlang with a 'compressed' writing system?
I'm making this since now I think an 'abjad' isn't what I actually had in mind. I was thinking of a system where the vowels don't have to be written, because they're always obvious. Essentially, my idea was more in line with a compression algorthm than a true abjad. Here's a link to the previous question if you want to read over my original idea:
Tips for making a conlang that uses an abjad?
My plan was to make a language that perfectly fit a writing system that only wrote consonants. The vowels could always be determined some other way. Here are the techniques I came up with:
The phonotactics often make it obvious what the syllable structure is. Basically, approximants and non-nasal plosives can only occur in onsets. Non-nasal plosives can only be followed by a vowel or approximant. Working out all possible 2 and 3 consonant roots (conflating all non-nasal plosives, approximants, and everything else into one for each of them), I've found that for all possible combinations, there's only at most 2 possible syllable structures, which themselves are distinguished by the number of vowels used. For instance, a sequence like ky could be one of kaya or kya. The vowel template required by its part of speech would itself make it obvious how many vowels there are.
The vowels to be used could be inferred by part of speech, but also declension/conjugation. The latte isn't really necessary, but I would guess that having only one possible template per part of speech would quickly get repetitive. Besides, having multiple declensions is useful for derivation, and all I would have to do is make sure the articles use different consonants for each gender.
Of course, this puts a limit on what features the language can use; obviously stem changes are not an option. As I mentioned before, you can't have conjugations like English speak->spoke. This of course puts a severe limit on the morphology strategies that could be used. This thing may need to be a highly agglutinating language where every possible affix includes at least one consonant if not more.
Of course, in real compression, different compression strategies often work better for certain data than others. A good example of this is the original pokemon games, which used one of two compression strategies for its sprites, because which worked better differed based on the sprite in question. Also, compression often isn't always perfect; you often simply can't perfectly replicate the original data based on its compressed form. Youtube's compression is infamous for this since it lowers the quality of audio. If you want perfect reconstruction of the original data, often times it just needs to have very specific qualities.
The closest I've heard of this in the real world are languages that only have CV syllables but write with an alphabet. Some chose to not write the most common vowel, since the limited syllable structure makes it obvious when a vowel is omitted. You only need to indicate what the vowel is. This is essentially similar to the concept of a null morpheme in a paradigm. On that note, perhaps null morphemes would also be good for this language? Assume a noun is neuter unless specified otherwise. Assume perfective aspect if no other marker is present. Assume singular if the plural marker isn't present. Assume a third person singular pronoun if none other is present. You get the idea.
This obviously isn't a lot though, so I would need more. Also, there's the problem with not being able to ever use stem changes, which obviously puts quite a limit on the morphology. Obviously, it would have to make use solely of agglutination, and maybe zero derivation (other than things like 'to ktb' and 'the ktb' having different vowels for the sake of minimizing repetition). I've also had someone recommend having words be really broad in meaning to help get the most out of all possible 2 and 3 consonant words. What other things can I do though, and what else may I have to worry about?
edit: Before anyone says it, yes I know this would make it hard to incorporate loan words. I don't see that as an issue for this language though. Besides, I could always just literally translate proper nouns literally based on their etymology if I really need to.
Are you aware of Devanagari? The writing system you imagine looks pretty close to the system employed Devanagari: There is in inherent default vowel (short a in case of Devanagari) to every consonant, and only other vowels are explicitly written. Some devices for absence of vowels are implemented (virama, ligatures, special treatment for post-vocalic nasals and r's).
The other direction to look at are some shorthand systems and what tricks they invented to speed up writing.
Well, I do know about Cree Syllabics, where they mark vowels by rotating the starting consonant. I did try to make a system like that once, but I found it limiting. All possible rotations of any one symbol had to represent the same consonant, so this made it sorta hard to come up with characters. Also, all possible characters could not be symetrical in any direction due to how vowels are marked (so no l or -). Also, the rotation thing limits you to just 4 vowels (which works fine for the language it was made for), or 3 if you want codas.
Looking up shorthand, it seems rather similar to what I had in mind. Some forms of shorthand only write consonants (Arabic itself ironically started out as a form of shorthand). It also likes to make use of abbreviations, which is something I know Tagalog does for its articles/prepositions. Shorthand though seems to mostly rely on using using characters that can be written as quickly as possible. I'm not really interested in doing that (I'm more concerned with saving space on paper rather then increasing writing speed), but the abbreviation thing is something I could consider.
Also, I forgot to mention that yes, I know what devanagari systems are. Though I was trying to avoid using super elaborate characters like you see in syllabraries.
There is a language (of the Caucasus?) that has been controversially analyzed as having only one vowel phoneme, with many allophones. If I remember right. Maybe two.
Assume: compression requires patterns.
If vowel change rules are absolutely consistent and productive, then you could perhaps match a vowel "naturally" with its parent consonant, then the spoken language would alter the vowel for grammatical purposes which are not recorded because reasons.
So the recorded language might be "lossy compression" so to speak.
e.g. "M" is an "E"-class letter, and "K" and "R" are "A"-class letters, and let's pretend that final vowels are elided, so when you see
MRK "to throw"
You naturally read it "MERAK".
But if someone was speaking about events in the past, he might have said "MERIK", "threw". That information is lost in transcribing MRK, so the reader hopes he has some context to retrieve the verb tense.
Something a little less lossy would require some sort of vowel letters or notation, and it assumes that the LAST vowel to be used is to be REUSED until you explicitly write a new one. So:
MERK => MEREK(E)
COMPRESSD => COMOPORESSED(E)
Unless you have some exceptions that always allow certain consonant clusters to not be blown apart (like doubled consonants above).
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2083 | How does this phoneme inventory look?
How does this phoneme inventory look and any roles for them? Like, how should these be used, what they look like, and how hard it may be for people to comprehend:
a - [a]
ā - [aː]
å - [ø]
ä - [ɛ/ɑ]
â - [ɒ]
æ - [æ]
b - [b]
c - [k/ɡ/t͡s]
č - [ʧ/t͡ɕ]
ç - [ɕ/s]
d - [d]
ð - [ð]
e - [e/ɛ]
ē - [eː/i]
ë - [ɘ]
ə - [ə]
f - [f/ɸ]
g - [ɡ]
ğ - [ɣ/ʁ]
h - [h]
ĥ - [χ/x]
i - [i]
ı - [ɨ]
ī - [iː]
ï - [ɨ/i]
j - [ʤ/j/i]
ĵ - [ʒ]
k - [k]
l - [l/ɫ]
ł - [ɫ]
m - [m]
n - [n]
ñ - [ɲ]
ŋ - [ŋ]
o - [o]
ō - [oː]
ô - [ɔ]
œ - [œ]
p - [p/ɸ]
q - [q/kw/kʷ]
ĸ - [q]
r - [r/ɾ]
s - [s]
š - [ʃ]
t - [t]
u - [u/ʊ]
ū - [uː]
ü - [ʏ/u]
v - [v]
w - [w/u/ʊ]
ŵ - [ʋ]
x - [ks/x/χ]
y - [y/i/j]
z - [z]
ž - [ʒ]
þ - [θ]
& - —
The alphabet itself:
a ā å ä â æ b c č ç d ð e ē ë ə f g ğ h ĥ i ı ī ï j ĵ k l ł m n ñ ŋ o ō ô œ p q ĸ r s š t u ū ü v w ŵ x y z ž þ &
All letter categories:
Vowels:
a ā å ä â æ e ē ë ə i ı ī ï o ō ô œ u ū ü
Consonants:
b c č ç d ð f g ğ h ĥ ĵ k l ł m n ñ ŋ p q ĸ r s š t v ŵ x z ž þ
Semivowels:
j w y
Other:
&
EDIT: Draconis recommended me to include a spreadsheet, so here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1V8HTUVOvpst9fFIOds_u27ue9JbeXOGjU2ns2JA6viY/htmlview
Pie chart of every letter category, with each category shown as the first letter in it.
Do the slashes mean indecision about how to pronounce a letter? Or perhaps the pronunciation of ‹x› depends on a word's origin?
Depends on the purpose of your conlang. If it's intended to be an "easily pronounceable" international auxiliary languages, then at least half of those phonemes need to go. But as the language of a fictional country, it's at least plausible.
Please stop doing minor edits every day that do no substantially improve this question. When you want to attract more attention to your question, you have several possibilities, like sharing a link to the question on social media or other site, or announcing a bounty when you have enough reputation.
@SirCornflakes The minor edits are due to the fluctuation of the alphabet, and as for the edits themselves, they thankfully have gone away.
@SirCornflakes Nevermind, I added a tag I shouldn't have so I removed the tag.
@SirCornflakes And I added a pie chart for detail. Truly sorry.
@SirCornflakes And I decided to make a larger edit by adding uppercase.
@SirCornflakes [unnatural-features] tag was readded. Will be the last time I edit this.
There is nothing unnatural about that phoneme inventory (maybe except the collision of [ɘ] and [ə]), c.f. the example of Danish quoted in the answer.
And again, the edits are annoying for the users here watching the "active questions". At the end of the day, this is a question-and-answer site for third party users to step by and look at. It is not a place to deposit documentation of a conlang (consider setting up a personal website for that purpose).
@SirCornflakes You're lucky, the edits are over.
@SirCornflakes "Nothing unusual" — what do you mean by unusual? Sure, the phonemes of "ë" and "ə" may be unusual, but why are you excluding "&"?! It's exactly what it looks like!
& is not a phoneme, it is just a grapheme (presumably for the word "and"), and it spells out the three phonemes (or two, when a diphthong is considered one phoneme instead of two) /k/ /a/ /i/ (or /k/ /ai/).
@SirCornflakes Yes, but in my conlang, the ampersand & functions as both a logogram for a word AND a letter. Although it's RARELY used in words. And since there's no uppercase nor lowercase, it's the only unicameral letter. It therefore combines a logogram and a letter into a single mess of a grapheme.
@SirCornflakes Actually, the ampersand & in my conlang now has the same purpose as it does in English, French, and every other language that uses it: replacing "and".
Everyone, including @SirCornflakes, this is the TRUE last time I edit... as for the pie chart, the extra "b" is a mistake. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Edit reverted because the new figure was broken (at least on my screen). P.S. It is somewhat hidden, but this piece of help says: (Reasons to reject a suggested edit): No improvement whatsoever
changes to content or formatting that are unnecessary or make the post more confusing
changes to grammar, spelling, or style that are unnecessary
Thirteen vowel qualities (if I counted correctly) is a lot and makes the language hard to learn, but it is not outside the range some Germanic languages offer, I think specifically of the case of Danish here. Having two central vowels, ë - [ɘ] and ə - [ə], is probably a challenge, their coocurrence in one language is really rare. Giving them a bit more distance, e.g., by replacing [ə] with [ɜ], can help here.
The consonant system is not overly ambitious, it may provide some difficulties depending on the native language of the learners, the th's or the h-like sounds may be some obstacles.
But what about that one in between Thorn and the glottal stop, as well as the one AFTER the glottal stop (a.k.a. the last one.)
@thesmartwaterbear Those aren't phonemes, they're letters.
@Draconis The alphabet was changed for the true LAST time. Anyways, I meant that letter that's this... thing: &
@thesmartwaterbear Still not a phoneme I'm afraid.
@Draconis But it represents the [kai] sound as shown on the list.
@thesmartwaterbear [kai] is not a phoneme.
@Draconis Do you have anything to say about the letter shown as a literal & sign? In fact, does anyone have to say anything about that?
@thesmartwaterbear It's a letter, not a phoneme, and this is a question about a phoneme inventory. I'm not sure what else there is to say.
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
The most important point is, this isn't a phoneme inventory! It's an orthography. When you list multiple pronunciations for a letter, especially in brackets [] rather than slashes //, it's not clear if you want those to be separate phonemes, or different realizations of the same phoneme.
I'd recommend writing down a list of the phonemes specifically (with the orthography in parentheses if you really want to include it) and putting them in a table, like you'd find on Wikipedia. Any spreadsheet program (Excel, Calc, Google Sheets, etc) can make something like that.
The table will let you see whether there are any weird asymmetries, or whether any part of the consonant or vowel space is getting too crowded.
I already did that here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V8HTUVOvpst9fFIOds_u27ue9JbeXOGjU2ns2JA6viY/edit?usp=drivesdk
As for multiple pronunciations, yes, they DO show separate phonemes in themselves.
@thesmartwaterbear In that case, I'd recommend putting that into the question!
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2088 | I am constructing my own language and I need one more consonant
Other than BCChDDz FGHJK LLyMNNy PRSShT VYZZh.
C is Ts, Ch is as in China, Dz is Italian soft J/G, J is Dy/Dj/DZh.
W is too similar to V and U.
Dh is too similar to D and Th to T,
and I find it funny how the Catalans pronounce Barcelona.
It sounds like they are lisping and can't pronounce their C/S.
Please no popping/explosive, tonal, guttural
or too similar soft or hard version of existing one,
and Loh and Loch sound exactly the same, to me,
so no Esperanto's guttural H.
First of all, let me write down the consonants in a more rational way:
P B F V M
T D S Z N C L R
Sh Zh Ch Dz/J
Y Ny Ly
K G H
from the sketchy description in the question I don't get the difference between J and Dz.
The system has some obvious gaps in the last row: You could easily fill in a voiced counterpart to H as Gh (the sound of Spanish G in many situations (in the middle of words before a, o, or u, and not after an n, like in amigo) or Ng, the nasal counterpart of G, as a consonant of its own right.
Other easy additions may be further affricates, like Pf as segment filling the place above C, or a true Dz (D+Z) as voiced counterpart of C.
Or Add Ç (the German Ich-Laut, or the initial sound in some pronunciations of the English word huge) as voiceless counterpart to Y.
Any of these choices are quite natural and would not add anything exotic to the sound system of your conlang.
In the end of the day, you construct your language according to your taste. So take my suggestions as what hey are: just suggestions. You are free to not follow any of them, and it will not offend me.
Spanish g before e & i is /x/, a voiceless velar fricative. Spanish g is a voiced fricative before any other vowel and not word-initially or after n.
@SirCornflakes the correction was still wrong, just in a different way. I've corrected it properly now
What is the difference between the initial consonants of jump and gentle?? International Phonetic Alphabet would help.
@SirCornflakes gives a more structured answer, but here are some more consonants to consider.
You only have one R. There are many sounds in different languages that are written as R. Which one do you mean? Why not use both rolling R, as in Spanish, along with French R or American R? Mixing of different R-sounds occur, for instance, in some Swedish dialects(Can't find any english language description, but maybe you could run it through a translator?)
Otherwise, you can never go wrong with a voiced retroflex flap!
Finally, if you want something more exotic you could check out the sj-sound! It's mainly used in Swedish (No, I'm not biased towards that language at all...) and Wikipedia says:
These sounds are transcribed ⟨ɧ⟩ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Association (IPA) describes them as "simultaneous [ʃ] and [x]", but this realization is not attested, and phoneticians doubt that such a realization actually occurs in any language.
Because it's so rare, only found in Swedish, a German dialect and maybe some Himalayan language, there is some debate on how it's actually best described, but don't let that stop you.
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2113 | Are there things that commonly end sentences other than verbs?
I'm copy-pasting this from the linguistics board because someone recommended that and I'm not getting any replies there. I'm not expecting much given the luck I've been having on here, but w/e.
I've taken a liking to verb-final word order. It helps with parsing since the ending of every clause is marked by an inflected verb. However, I normally prefer head-first languages. This got me thinking; are there things that languages often use to end a sentence other than verbs? The conlang Laadan using evidentiality markers, but of course that's a conlang that's known for breaking some linguistic universals (such as completely lacking voiceless plosives among other things).
Point is, is it really necessary to have a verb-final order to get the parsing advantages that come with such an order? Even a verb-initial order doesn't work, because that would require you to place relative clauses before nouns (a feature seen in no VO language) and place a relativizer at the end of the clause, a feature I also can't find any evidence for.
Is a verb-final word order the only way languages can consistently mark the end of clauses using words?
edit: The reason I'm looking into this is so my orthography can get away without punctuation. It would be simpler yes to just use punctuation, but its my conlang and I would like to know if there's another way to do this.
You could put what syntacticians call a T at the end of your clauses instead of a V. What this looks like varies by language but you could use it as a general-purpose end-of-clause marking.
Some languages have obligatory start-of-clause markers, like Hittite. That accomplishes something pretty similar to an end-of-clause marker.
Can you elaborate on what this 't' is? A single letter isn't exactly specific enough for me to look this up myself.
@user8600 In syntax it stands for Tense, but it encompasses things like the English modal verbs (can, will, etc) as well.
Honestly, I've never heard of a language putting its tense markers anywhere other than next to the verb (most often they manifest as suffixes either on the main verb or an auxiliary, or sometimes even on subject pronouns). The only language I know of that uses unbound morphemes to mark tense is Haitian Creole, which is places before verbs. Again, I know of no natlang that does something like Haitian but places its tense markers, or any other mandatory form of marking, anywhere other than next to the verb. I was wanting to know if I absolutely needed an SOV order for this to work.
If you are specifically looking for end-of-sentence marking, then some Slovak dialects overuse the particle "či" as an interrogative sentence ending (kind of reverse of the Polish sentence-initial "czy").
But if sentence-initial is enough, then the Eastern Slovak uses "ta" as a start-of-sentence particle, to such an extent that the speakers are stereotypically ridiculed for it. This is however far from universal.
Turning away from the spoken language to the written one (as a separate linguistic system), of course there is such thing - a punctuation mark, usually one of . ? !
This shows nicely in some dependency trees, where the punctuation is in fact the root of the tree.
Honestly, I was trying this just to see if I could get away without using punctuation. I copy-pasted this from the linguistics board, which I've since deleted. Guess I need to update this to make this clear. I simply asked if there was a way to mark sentence ends with something other than v-final order or prosody, and I got assailed for the question being too complicated. Seriously. A simple yes-no question that I was worried may be TOO simple was too complex for the people over there to comprehend. Last time I ever post there.
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2126 | Breaking out of the 'derive everything' trap?
Conlang guides often recommend you derive words wherever you can, only generating new roots when no form of compounding can work.
Problem is, as the 'natural meta language' demonstrates, most words can be 'derived' from just a few dozen words. When I try to think of derivations, I keep falling into an endless train of deriving whole chains of words. Even if that doesn't happen though, I still find I keep deriving words too much, creating a conlang that's more repetitive than even Esperanto.
English maybe gives me the wrong instincts, since it relies more on borrowing loanwords from other languages that coining its own. However, even in German, which relies far more on internal derivation, somehow its not nearly as bad as conlangs tend to be.
Another problem is I find that deriving words through morphology results in ultra long words (the same problem that Volapük suffers from).
What I think I need is some more esoteric derivational morphology that keeps things from getting too repetitive. Being able to shorten compounds would also help to avoid the overly long word problem. Or maybe I should just rely more on a random word generator and not care so much about the forms of my words. I know that tends to generate bad results, like common words being too long, no coherent sound symbolism of any sort, or sometimes too many words due to the user preferring to use the program over coining their own words. Still, I think it may be the best way to avoid making yet another oligosynthic language essentially.
Is there any better way to deal with this problem?
Well, concatenation isn't the way words get derived is it? That leaves semantic shift out of the equation, for instance - instead of just "X could turn into Y if only given more morphemes", it could also be true that "X could turn into Y if only given enough time", or that "X could turn into Y if only given enough metaphorical extension".
If you can't get out of the headspace of simply deriving everything, try forcing yourself to not use derivational morphology or compounding, and ask yourself how you can reuse an existing root as-is instead of always needing to pile more affixes on top.
I mean, the real, sustainable long-term answer is to get comfortable with not deriving everything. This advice to only coin new roots when no form of compounding will work - I've heard it too, and it's bullshit. There's a grain of truth* to it, but it's so poorly articulated that it causes far more harm to beginning conlangers than it averts. I have seen one derive a word for "farmer" as "one-who-causes-to-become-large". You know how actual, real languages, like English, derive it? As "farm-er". "farm" is just a root in and of itself. Could it theoretically be broken down further? Sure. But "it could be broken down further" does not imply "it must be broken down further", which you can tell because English demonstrably doesn't break it down further.
*The grain of truth is that these roots are often, in turn, derivatives of earlier forms, even earlier compounds, that simply got reduced so much by sound change or diverged so much in semantic drift, that they got reanalyzed as a new thing in and of themselves. "lord" < hlafweard "loaf-ward; keeper of the bread", evolving into a new root that in turn gets used in compounds like "lordship" or "edgelord", is one of my favorite examples. So it is, sort of, broadly true that it's derivation all the way down. Natural languages though spread this derivation out in time and semantic space. It's certainly not necessary for everything to be transparently derived synchronically.
I don't know if this analogy will help you, but - when studying a foreign language, you're typically taught to translate the meaning of a sentence, not the words of a sentence. Well, what if that meaning is encapsulated in a single word? If there's a single word that maps to that idea, then fixating on how, instead, you could break that idea into component parts is - mistranslating? It's perfectly fine to have single words for concepts that English does not have a single word for; just because English circumlocutes, doesn't mean you have to. One of my languages has a single devoted word for "to have one's heart beat" (lak’salos). This derives straightforwardly - with some verbalizing morphology but no compounding - from a proto-root *læqʃ- meaning "heart" (nothing about "beating", actually), that yields a verb for "to encourage; to hearten; to rally troops wavering or in retreat back to line of battle; to dispel fear or angst" (lax̌šʷanla) in another descendant of the same proto. Notice how I'm giving multiple possible English meanings - that's because the word (lax̌šʷanla) fundamentally maps to a concept, an image I have in my head. It's a concept that could be decomposed into component parts multiple different ways, but the thing I'm trying to translate isn't the component parts of the concept, but the concept itself. Another one my languages has not just a single word, but a single monosyllablic word (ki) for "the divine right to rule".
Or maybe I should just rely more on a random word generator and not care so much about the forms of my words. I know that tends to generate bad results, like common words being too long, no coherent sound symbolism of any sort, or sometimes too many words due to the user preferring to use the program over coining their own words.
These problems all strike me as... very self-imposed? I use a word generator when coining new words (originally Awkwords, now a word generator of my own creation), and nothing compels me to use the first word it spits out. Quite from it - I'll have it generate hundreds of words at a time and ones I like, I'll copy and paste in a "word bank" - an Excel file of words that have pre-vetted for sounding good. Then when I need to coin a new word, I'll peruse the word bank for inspiration, for which one has the right, ineffable vibe for the meaning I'm looking for. I can get quite picky about which words I'll accept from the generator - for every 100 words generated at a time, usually 1-2, maybe 3, end up in the word bank. (It's trivial to generate another 100, after all - I just click "Generate" again. The words are not exactly in short supply.) Even then some of the words in the bank just sit there never getting used, because it never ends up feeling like they have the matching "vibe", and I'll just go and generate thousands more words instead.
So the suggestion to me that random word generators confined you to words that are too long or not having the right symbolism, sounds nonsensical to me, when I am exercising discretion at every step. Ultimately I'm the one choosing the words - arguably I'm way too choosy, but at any rate, nothing about the use of a word generator is somehow forcing my hand into using words I don't want to use.
Actually, I do the same thing with a word generator of my own design. Probably doesn't help though that I have a bad habit of making short-lived sketchlangs, forcing me to re-make the program all over again. They're only 200 lines in length at worse, so its not really a big deal, but it does mean that I can't re-use lists from other conlangs. And yes, I even set up my programs to let me chose syllable number. Never bothered to do it for phoneme count though, perhaps I should.
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2128 | Should non-sibilant fricatives be treated like plosives or fricatives?
I don't like ending my words with plosives, because my native language tends to not audibly pronounce them. I prefer to stick to fricatives and nasals for codas. However, I'm unsure where non-sibilant fricatives should go. Do they undergo de-voicing in codas like plosives do? I've seen auxlang guides recommend to keep coda consonants limited to fricatives, nasals, and 'liquids', but such guides normally don't recommend you use rare phones like non-sibilant fricatives. Maybe I should just play it safe and treat them like plosives, keeping them limited to onsets?
Do you mean treated like plosives or sibilant fricatives in the title? Non-sibilant fricatives are, by definition, fricatives.
Though the fact that you call them "rare phones" might mean you mean something other than sounds like [f].
The only phones I've ever seen called non-sibilant fricatives are θ and ð. I used to see them as plosives before I looked them up for the first time. i was weirded out that they were classified as fricatives. To me, a fricative is a consonant where you can hold it indefinitely, unlike stops which can't be held (outside of nasals anyway). Essentially, if you can germinate it and its not a nasal, its a fricative.
The term for a consonant you can hold indefinitely is a "continuant", and all fricatives do fall into that category—including the two you mentioned. I can easily hold them for at least ten seconds each. But there are some dialects of English that have turned them into stops; I suspect you might speak one of those? (Or perhaps your native language isn't English?)
In natlangs that devoice final consonants, as far as I know, the rule applies to all fricatives as well as stops. But that is a separate question from whether or not you ‘ought’ to allow this or that consonant in coda. – Can't you hold [θ]? I can.
No, I cannot. Like I said, I was taken off-guard when I first found out all those years ago that it was a fricative.
@user8600 can you let us know your native dialect of English (or your native language if it is not English)? As others have said, there is no phonetic reason [θ] or [ð] cannot be held indefinitely (or at least until you run out of breath), but it's entirely possible you don't pronounce the phonemes represented /θ/ & /ð/ as [θ] & [ð]. It's important to note that the representation of these phonemes is based on their pronunciation in the standard GA and RP varieties and there are plenty of other varieties that do pronounce them as stops (notably Caribbean, Irish, & Indian English)
I'm a native English speaker, but I've had speech problems my whole life. When I was taking speech therapy courses in elementary school, the teacher taught us to pronounce 'th' by 'biting our tongue then yanking it back'. Both the voiceless and voiced variants somehow got interpretted as allophones in my brain. The reason I've been thinking about them is because I'm trying to teach myself finally to hear the distinction. The same teacher btw taught us to do a retroflex L rather than an alveolar L and it wasn't until I started studying linguistics that I discovered this.
these stopped pronunciations of /θ/ & /ð/ may or may not be distinct from /t/ & /d/. Caribbean English speakers generally merge them together. Indian English speakers generally have /θ/ & /ð/ as dental stops and /t/ & /d/ as retroflex stops. Irish speakers vary, with some having /θ/ & /ð/ as dental stops and /t/ & /d/ as alveolar stops (possibly palatalised) but many (most?) pronouncing both sets as dental stops
it sounds like you may have learnt affricates [t̪͡θ ] & [d̪͡ð]. As an affricate includes a stop part this explains why you can't produce them indefinitely. Affricates often pattern with stops, but can also pattern fricatives so you can go either way
I had no idea those even existed. So I'm not even pronouncing θ and ð? And here I am trying to put them into a conlang. Fml. Guess I need to remove them then, and forget about learning the distinction (at least for the time being). Fml and fuck that quark speech therapist that taught me to mis-pronounce my own native language. Who knows what else I'm doing wrong? I was in that class all 6 years of elementary school!
for any place of articulation with both stops and fricatives you can have an affricate (occasionally clusters of stop and fricative at different places of articulation are analysed as non-homorganic affricates, but this is unusual). As for the speech therapist, it is a very difficult business teaching people to produce specific phones and many of the distinctions made are extremely fine making them difficult to communicate, especially to children
with that in mind, and noting that it is generally more important for speech to be understandable (something that depends to a large extent on speech being consistent) than for it to have the same phonetics as the standard, it may make more sense for a speech therapist teaching someone to distinguish e.g. /θ/ from /t/ to focus on teaching a consistent distinction between [t̪͡θ ] & [t] rather than focussing on the precise pronunciation of /θ/ as [θ] which may take longer to teach to the same degree of consistency
Either way, I guess my answer is these phones I thought they were should be treated like other fricatives. Mine though need to be treated like affricates. Guess that's my answer. Fml still. Am I cursed to only make conlangs that sound like Toki Pona or a romlang just because of my own speech problems?
Why do people post comments for rather than answers? This has been answered and I don't see much that can be added to it.
The answer is I've been accidentally pronouncing my non-sibilant fricatives as affricates, thus my confusion over whether they're more akin to plosives or fricatives. Either I need to just treat them like affricates, or learn the proper fricatives. That's my answer.
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1921 | What is the relationship between order of object and verb and the position of adverbs?
I've been researching ways to make conlangs more naturalistic. So far, sources such as WALS and a linguist YouTuber Colin Gorrie have stated the relationship between object-verb order and adjective-noun order. But what about adverbs? Do adverbs tend to mimic the position of the adjective?
Thanks!
First, the site behind the link you provided argues against any correlation of object-verb order and adj-noun order.
The order of adjective and noun is often claimed to correlate with the order of object and verb. [...]
[T]he data provide no basis for thinking that OV languages have any stronger preference for AdjN order than VO languages do.
However, verb-adverb and verb-object order are correlated. Dryer (1992) "The Greenbergian word order correlations" (English, restricted access) states
ADVERB. Although manner adverbs and other adverbs often pattern similarly, I consider only manner adverbs here, because many other kinds of adverbs are interpretable as sentence adverbs and exhibit
greater flexibility of word order in many languages. Table 10 shows that
manner adverbs overwhelmingly precede the verb in OV languages and generally follow
the verb in VO languages.
From the table one can see that 89% of the OV languages also position the manner adverb before the verb, and
76% of the VO languages position the manner adverb after the verb.
So if you want to make your language more natural, the natural place for adverbs will be the same as the object if seen from the verb.
But I would strongly discourage you from restraining the position of the adverb too much. Even in English, which has an overall fairly strict word order, adverbs can move around in the sentence and all languages I know at least provide a way to move adverbs more front or more behind than usual.
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1959 | Are there languages with more rigid word order than English?
English is sometimes said to not rely on free word order, and instead have a "strict" word order. But I can find all kinds of cases where word order is still free in English:
I walked quickly over to the tree.
I walked over to the tree quickly.
I quickly walked over to the tree.
In English, noun phrases appear to always have the adjectives/modifiers preceding the main noun (but maybe there are cases that break this mold, not sure), so they are more strict:
The big red car.
You can also have separated / phrasal verbs in many ways in a sentence.
Are there any languages which have a super strict word order, like 1 way of saying each thing, instead of many? If not, why not? If so, what are some examples?
I am wondering if it would be possible to construct a conlang with sentences something like modifiers-verb-modifiers-noun-modifiers-verb-modifiers-noun-etc. sort of thing, so modifiers always precede the noun or verb, and there are no prepositions. But wondering if that would be too "rigid", so looking for inspiration of how other languages handle this sort of situation.
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1961 | How to create a Romance-based conlang?
How unoriginal! Yet another guy creating a Romance-based conlang (especially since it's already been covered several times here). Jokes aside, as the title suggests, I'm looking to create a Romance-based conlang. I'd like to point out that I'm not that new to creating conlangs: I've already created one, it's not realistic/natural at all (plus, I didn't make it evolve from proto-fictional-languages, I just created it lol). The reason I'm telling you this is that I have NO IDEA how to create a conlang based on existing languages.
Should I research the phonology, phonotactics, orthography, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, etc. of the five "main" Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) and mix it all up? Or should I research the phonology, phonotactics, orthography, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, etc. of Proto-Roman and/or Vulgar Latin and make them evolve in my own way so that I end up with my "own" Romance language?
If the answer is none of the above or only the latter, then can you tell me how to go about it?
Thank you in advance for answering!! :)
See also this question and its answers for more Romance conlangs
There are several approaches to this task.
One of them is in fact creating an altlang, based on an alternate history where a Romance language survived or develops in some region outside the Romania as we know it. This answer to another question explicitly names Brithenig set in Great Britain and Venedic set in Poland. The general way of developping such a language is to start from Vulgar Latin, apply some interesting sound shifts and some borrowing from a substrate language.
Another approach is creating a Pan-Romance lingua franca. Starting with Peano's Latino sine flexione, there was quite a bunch of such languages, notable members of that branch are Novial, Occidental/Interlingue and finally Interlingua (IALA). Interlingua enjoys quite a success as an international auxiliary language, ranking second after Esperanto. Typically, such languages streamline the grammar to make it more palatable and use some eclectic selection of words from the different living Romance languages (often neglecting Romanian, by putting a strong Romanian bias in your selection you can create something fresh and new).
Other approaches are possible.
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1984 | How should a consonant (IPA) chart look for lip-less, teeth-less, non-humans?
I've made this account just now to ask a question about our world-building project. Axobit - the most dominant species on my planet - are axolotl-like bipedal organisms. They have blowholes on their necks that contain their vocal-cords and a muscle to articulate.
Specifically, I'm unsure on how to pick consonants for these creatures. They can't produce nasal sounds (at least I don't think they could), and they can't make dental sounds due to the lack of teeth in their speaking-blowhole things.
What sounds could/couldn't my creatures produce? I plan on them making sounds humans can't produce as well - like chirping and croaking. Is this possible? And how do I include this in a language?
I have more additional questions, but will opt to include those in another post :3
All help is greatly appreciated ^.^
Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer.
A loadspeaker or a pair of headphones have no vocal chords, no lips, no teeth, no nose and no throat and yet they can make all the souns a human can make and many more which humans cannot make. The question is fundamentally unanswearable. (And I suspect that there may be a misunderstanding of what vocal chords do. They make possible the distinction between p and b, t and d, k and g, s and z, f and v. Humans have a mode of speech called whispering where they keep their vocal chords relaxed and inactive, with the loss of distinction between those pairs of sounds.)
Long story short, it all depends on how their phonation mechanisms work. For example, how much fine control they have on their vocal chords. Consider the parrots who have no lips and no teeth, but they have excellent control on their phonatory apparatus and they can make all human speech sounds and lots more.
Welcome to worldbuilding! Please edit your question to have only one question and not several: "What sounds could/couldn't my creatures produce? I plan on them making sounds humans can't produce as well - like chirping and croaking. Is this possible? And how do I include this in a language?"
This is more for the conlanging stack than the worldbuilding one
Frame challenge: Don't rely on IPA symbols or IPA categorizations for being whose articulatory mechanisms don't match that of humans; the IPA was designed for human articulation.
Having said that, you can get away with using the IPA symbols and classifications that would result from humans trying to imitate the phonemes of the Axobit language. For example, if the closest a human can come to a particular Axobit sound is a voiced glottal fricative, represent that sound using the IPA symbol ɦ. It's not going to work for everything, especially if they make sounds that are not part of human linguistic phonology.
I agree, there should be no difference in an IPA chart that is intended to allow humans to emulate the Axobit language. The differences in organs which you are concerned about do not need to be a factor at all, you simply give the Axobit race a syrinx such as the lyrebird, and a vast range of vocalizations can be accomplished far beyond what human vocal organs can produce. The function of the IPA chart is to facilitate vocalization with human physiology. Rather than change that purpose, re-define concepts like a "retroflex" right-hook ɽ in terms of articulations of the syrinx.
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2015 | Can IPA consonant diacritics apply to all consonants, or do some diacritics apply to certain consonants?
I am coding a successor to my "Der Spracherfinder 1.5" which can handle diacritics (among many other improvements). I want the option to apply diacritics but only to consonants that would accept said diacritics. Yet I have little knowledge on which diacritics are allowed with which consonants. I would appreciate an explanation or referral. Thanks!
P.S. I was not sure what tag to apply to this question, so sorry for any confusion there.
Many combinations of consonant and diacritic are nonsensical, but I'm not aware of any exhaustive list of these combinations.
For example, it makes no sense to velarize a velar consonant; kˠ is just the same as k (it already has a velar closure). An apical velar consonant isn't possible (you can't get the tip of the tongue back to the velum), so k̺ is a physical impossibility. Some combinations just aren't clear what they describe: a lowered stop k̞ presumably means a less-than-complete closure, but then it's not a stop any more.
However, I think it's fair to put this responsibility on your users, rather than the program itself.
"you can't get the tip of the tongue back to the velum" speak for yourself. I can just about stretch the tip of my tongue to touch my soft palate (the velum). Of course, this isn't something I could do rapidly or precisely enough to use it in fluid speech (it also requires me to lower my velum, so any apical velars I produce are necessarily nasal)
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2020 | Can you help me write some phonological rules for my conlang?
To be more precise, I'm referring to the writing process that goes, for example, from "/m/ becomes [ɱ] before /f/ or /v/ or before a word boundary followed by /f/ or /v/ " to "/m/ > [ɱ] / _(#)[f, v]".
I know and understand the basics of it, as you can see above, but there are sentences that are "simple" and yet so difficult to turn into this pattern (at least for me lol). So, if you really don't mind, can you help me turn the following sentences into the pattern [...] > [...] / ...[...]... or just check the ones I did if it's right or not?
"/n/ match the place of articulation of the consonant it precedes except for /w/ where /n/ remains [n]." I wrote: /n/ > [αplace] / _[+consonant -w αplace]. Is it correct?
"Plosives, fricatives and affricates must share the same voicing in a consonant cluster. The voicing of the last plosive, fricative or affricate in a consonant cluster dictates the voicing of the others." (The reason why I specified "plosives, fricatives and affricate" is because nasals and approximants are not affected by that nor do they affect it. For example, /sm/ is [sm] and not [zm] even if /m/ is voiced.) So how to turn it into the pattern above?
"/b/, /d/ and /g/ become [m], [n] and [ŋ], respectively, before nasal consonants."
"/n/, /t/, /th/ (can't write superscripts but it's an aspirated /t/), /d/ and /l/ become their retroflex counterparts when adjacent to /ʂ/ or /ʐ/, even across a word boundary.
"Gemination is forbidden within a word, but is permitted across a word boundary. So any consonant preceding an identical consonant disappears/is not pronounced unless in two different words." I wrote: [+consonant1] > ø / _[+consonant1]. Is it correct?
"/l/ becomes [l̪] before dental or dentalized consonants." I wrote: /l/ > [l̪] / _[consonant +dental, +dentalized]. Is it correct?
If you made it this far and/or you're gonna answer to at least one of them, thank you so, so much!!
Edit: Forgot to mention it but this is for my conlang. I don't wanna have whole paragraphs on my document to describe allophony so that's why I'm asking here about the pattern [...] > [...] / ...[...]...
I'm more familiar with how sound change rules are written in sound change engines like SCA2 or Phomo (or the one I wrote myself for personal use, ASE), but I'll take a crack at it. This is complicated by the fact that I don't know the full phonemic inventory you're using though.
"/n/ match the place of articulation of the consonant it precedes except for /w/ where /n/ remains [n]." I wrote: /n/ > [αplace] / _[+consonant -w αplace]. Is it correct?
That looks correct to me, other than +consonant being probably unnecessary. Vowels don't have a place of articulation, unless you want to argue about semivowels.
"Plosives, fricatives and affricates must share the same voicing in a
consonant cluster. The voicing of the last plosive, fricative or
affricate in a consonant cluster dictates the voicing of the others."
[+obstruent] > [αvoice] / _[+obstruent αvoice]. (This assumes you don't have clusters 3+ phonemes long with a sonorant separating two obstruents, like /t͡ʃlb/ or something.)
"/b/, /d/ and /g/ become [m], [n] and [ŋ], respectively, before nasal consonants."
If those are the only voiced stops so we can write a general rule, then [stop +voice -nasal] > [+nasal]/_[+nasal]. If you also have, say, /ɢ/, then you would need to exclude that from the target.
"/n/, /t/, /th/ (can't write superscripts but it's an aspirated /t/), /d/ and /l/ become their retroflex counterparts when adjacent to /ʂ/ or /ʐ/, even across a word boundary.
I don't think you can write this one in terms of features, because I can't think of a feature that /t tʰ d l n/ all have in common that isn't also shared by /s z/ (or /r/ - I don't know if your language has any alveolar rhotics). So I would probably write this as {t tʰ d l n} > [+retroflex] / _{ʂ ʐ}, {ʂ ʐ}_. I also don't know if /ʂ ʐ/ are the only retroflex consonants (before applying this rule), because if so, you can generalize it to {t tʰ d l n} > [+retroflex] / _[+retroflex], [+retroflex]_. That won't work if you also have, say, /ʈ͡ʂ/.
"Gemination is forbidden within a word, but is permitted across a word boundary. So any consonant preceding an identical consonant disappears/is not pronounced unless in two different words." I wrote: [+consonant1] > ø / _[+consonant1]. Is it correct?
I think so, yes. Or more compactly, C₁ > ∅ / _C₁.
"/l/ becomes [l̪] before dental or dentalized consonants." I wrote: /l/ > [l̪] / _[consonant +dental, +dentalized].
Again unless you for some reason have dentalized vowels, I don't really see the point in specifying "consonant" in the environment. I'm also not really convinced there's a need to distinguish "dental" vs. "dentalized", since "dentalized" is [+dental] just applied to a consonant that doesn't usually have that feature. I would just do /l/ > [l̪] / _[+dental].
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2060 | How to learn to make a conlang?
No, I'm not asking for resources. I've consulted every resource I can find, but even after more than a decade of research, I still have no conlang to show for it. I started with the Language Construction Kit 1 and 2, learned everything I could about linguistics, consulted every guide I could find, and I still don't know a damned thing. All I have to show for all this work is mountains of repetitive phonologies that occasionally have some grammar notes that never went anywhere due to them turning out to be impractical.
Clearly I'm doing something wrong; what else do I have to do other than research? No amount of research seems to help me. Obviously, I need to do something different, but what can I do? I've tried to make experimental conlangs, but that seems to just mean I accept that all my conlangs are going to hit a brick wall and then be abandoned rather than expecting it to actually go somewhere for once.
edit: What have I tried? I keep trying to use features I don't fully understand. For the longest time, I tried to make a language with fluid s alignment. I later found I didn't understand what that meant. I tried to make a VSO conlang, but also kept running into syntax problems I could not solve until I found out what VSO really was. Long story, time and time again, I can never make use of a feature I don't understand. What does it mean to understand? I can say what ergative alignment is, but I don't know the endless ramifications of having such a system. I only understand systems I've used myself extensively. What that means is I only know the features of English and German. Nothing else. I can define cases that German does not have, but I only know really know how to use the ones German has. I tried to solve this recently by mixing English and German, but I can't find anyway to make such languages function. Essentially, after all my studying, all I really know how to do is make a perfect relex of either English or German. It has to work 100% like one or the other. That is not conlanging; that's making a bad cipher.
I need to know how to actually conlang. How do I fully understand how to use any grammatical feature? The only way for me is to know and use a language that has it, nothing else works. I did contemplate trying to learn odd languages like Hungarian to fix this, but I've never been able to learn a language I had no use for. I've also been told that learning a whole language just to learn to conlang is highly excessive. What other way is there? How do I learn to use features I haven't had years of personal experience with? That is my problem; I don't fully understand anything. I can make a perfect replica of either English's or German's tense systems, but I can't make one that even slightly deviates from one or the other. I can use nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative cases, but forget anything else. I can use SVO order, and German's odd order, but I can't even make an SOV language let alone VSO and anything with an OS order is literally unfathomable to me.
Everything I've studied has not been sufficient; if I want to understand even one thing, such as a lative case just for an example, I would need a thick book that does nothing but explain it. I need to know every way it can be utilized, what it forces upon a language, because only then do I truly understand it. How can I learn to do this?
Sorry to hear that you're not happy with how you've been going, but it doesn't sound like there's a concrete problem. It's not clear at all that you're doing anything wrong!
How do you know you're doing anything wrong? It doesn't sound to me like you're doing anything wrong, you're just in the process of making a conlang. That's a process that takes most people a very long time!
What does "success" mean for you? Or what does "go somewhere" mean for you? Conlanging is an artistic activity, which means everyone has different expectations and gets to define success for themselves. Coming up with a new phonology and grammatical system sounds successful to me. Is vocab the issue? Syntax? Does "success" for you mean that other people are using your conlang?
Alright, that's a good goal. (It would be good to [edit] this question to state that goal.) So why can't you use it? Have you not generated enough vocab for your personal uses (like writing a diary for example)? Or is it another issue?
Okay, I admit mentioning the personal conlang would be an actual addition. I don't see why that wouldn't get my question re-opened, considering every thing else i've posted on here.
No, you didn't actually say that you don't have enough grammar to write a full sentence! I'd recommend you [edit] this question to explain what grammar you have come up with, and then to explain why you think they're too impractical to use.
As curiousdannii said, what you want to achieve, and where you've gotten stuck, is very important information to add to the question! With that information, I can think of some useful answers.
Alright then, I edited the question. Am I going to get a notification if its not accepted, or am I just going to get left hanging forever?
maybe this answerto a different question can help you: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/a/1610/142
Also look at this question and its many answers: https://conlang.stackexchange.com/q/459/142
Firstly, I extend my sympathies to your struggle. I too still lack an conlang to show for my years of efforts. I mean, my language Tsaúmi is still only a thing of my imagination! So. If I may, I suggest creating a simple, flexible starter template for any new project. This may ease some frustration when starting anew. For example, I created a template in a spreadsheet that uses checkboxes for phonemes and drop-down lists for grammatical features. That way I can sketch out my language in just a few minutes. Also, remember that all words were new once. I hope my comment helps a little.
May I ask, what keeps you going after all this time, despite accumulating so many "failures"? Many would have given up already. But you, you however, have kept going. You evidently have the tenacity to put up with 10 years of research and iterations. I believe you surely will create that special conlang in due time. Have patience with yourself.
I usually hang out on Writing SE and see questions from people struggling to write a novel. The problem often seems to be that people are too critical of everything they write, so they can’t move beyond a phrase or a chapter, and the advice that’s usually given is to get the first draft down – even if it’s crap – and then rewrite it. Your issue sounds similar: you’re getting caught up in the details and trying to have it all come together at once, and not accepting that it won’t be perfect from the outset.
I have very little linguistics knowledge yet have managed to make a basic conlang for my novel that I can write simple sentences with. It’s far from finished, but I can see where it’s heading. The following might sound rather naive, since you've done so much research and work already, but perhaps it will help someone who is just starting out. This is what I’ve done so far:
I made up a few words for things important to the culture I’m creating. I used google translate for inspiration, looking at phrases in various languages, and realised I wanted lots of vowels and didn’t want certain consonants. The first words were pretty random but I gradually gained a sense of which letter combinations looked and sounded right. I’ll come back to this at a later stage and try to extrapolate some rules (at which point I will probably need to rewrite some words) but for the moment, it’s enough to move on with.
I decided on a phrase I wanted to translate and I chose OVS word order. I don’t know why, it just felt right. The good thing about it is it’s not like any of the other languages I know, so it has forced me to think creatively about grammar and not just translate word for word.
The phrase also contained an adjective, a plural, and subject and object pronouns so I had to think about how to deal with all of those. The rules I created were arbitrary, but since I don’t know any better, I didn’t get bogged down with fully understanding anything and I have absolutely no idea of the ramifications of any of my decisions.
I started translating more phrases, making words and rules up as I went. I'll be at this stage for some time, I expect. When things don’t work, I retcon rules and rewrite the phrases I’ve already done.
Perhaps I will get stuck at a later stage, but being willing to go back and change and rewrite as new requirements come to light seems important. For me, creating the language is like writing the novel: get a draft down on paper, it doesn’t have to be right, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t all make sense. Then review and rewrite, over and over, amending the bits that don’t work, filling in the gaps and refining the stuff that does work.
In a comment, you asked how can you know if you will even like your language before you have the grammar finished? My answer is to make decisions that you like. I love my language, even though it’s in its infancy, because every decision I make is something that intrigues me or sounds good to me, and makes me want to explore it further. It’s your language, you can do whatever you want with it, so make fun decisions.
While the Language Construction Kit offers one particular way of building a conlang, it's very much not the only one—and it seems that one in particular isn't working for you. You say you've ended up with a big pile of half-baked phonologies and nothing else, which suggests that starting with the phonology doesn't fit your style.
I would say instead, decide on what interests you about this particular language. For me, this usually happens when I read about some interesting linguistic feature in my research. Did you know Kiowa has an "inverse number system"? Every noun in Kiowa has a "natural" number (hands usually come in pairs, so two is the normal number of hands; blades of grass tend to come in large quantities, so "a lot" is the normal number). You then put a marking on a noun if it's not this natural quantity—you would use the marking for "one hand", or "three hands", or any number that's not two. You'd also use the marking for "one blade of grass", because that's not the normal amount of grass.
Or, in Swahili, noun case and noun gender are part of the same system. A noun cannot have both a case and a gender. Or, in Lingála, there's a special verb marking for things that are irreversible and cannot be undone. Things like this. I'll see something cool and think "oh, what can I do with that?"
If you don't spend your days reading about languages (shocking, I know), inspiration might come from somewhere else. When David J Peterson created the High Valyrian language for Game of Thrones, he had basically nothing to go from. But the books included the phrase valar morghulis / valar dohaeris, meaning "all men must die / all men must serve". Apparently this -is ending on verbs means "all ___ must ___". Why would you have a verb marking for this? What other things could it be used for? How would that fit into the system as a whole?
My advice for how to create a language is, pick the aspect that you have some sort of inspiration for, and start from there. If phonology is uninspiring to you, ignore it for now. Take the phonology from some random language on Wikipedia and move on. If morphology is uninspiring, just take the noun cases from German…or say "there's no morphology in this language at all". But find something that specifically interests you, and use that as your starting point.
Also remember the rule of linguistics: universals aren't. Your language doesn't have to work like the textbook on ergativity says. No two languages with ergative alignment work the same. It's fine for yours to be an exception too.
Project management skills are useful for conlanging. I have rather bad ADHD, and that is something tat has prevented me from making much progress even though I've been composing a conlang in my head for the better part of a decade and have very little written materials to show for it.
It may be a good idea to start a thread on a conlanging forum to share tidbits over time: external encouragement and debates/questions are very useful productivity tools!
I did take a project managament class once when I was getting my programming degree, though I don't really remember it. Besides, how would you plan out a conlnging project? I was thinking of just 'replicating' some old language learning material I have.
I think conlanging, like any creative behavior not process-bound, there is no "wight way". It's just is something that everyone figures what works for them (though as I said, some sort of project management skills help with self-organisation!). Some people start by jotting the very basics for each section, and developing later, some people start with phonology, other with grammar... You could just go about translating/writing a text and figuring out what you need/want as you go.
The reason I tend to focus so much on phonology, is because its my specialty. I first started learning to conlang to make my own auxlang, and the first thing I decided to tackle was the 'ease of pronunciation' thing. Also, either way you need a phonology to make words; its really hard to develop a language when you can't make sample sentences. What, are you going to just be making gloss translations until you get around to making actual words?
Regarding project management, another problem I have is I want to be able to actually use the thing as soon as possible. It seems however that you have to have a fully developed conlang before you can do that. Yeah, you can make simple 'X sees Y' sentences, but you're going to need something far more substational before you can start making more extensive texts. How could I possibly even know I will like using the language I'm making before I essentially have the grammar 'finished'?
It looks to me that you're trying to do too much at once.
Maybe start off with 'modifying' an existing language. Leave the phonology as is, and work on new words only. Play around with morphology, and then perhaps syntax. Languages evolve over time, so maybe that would make the task less daunting for you: don't start from scratch.
Existing languages are well-tested for their utility. So you change one aspect, and it will probably work less well. Now see what else needs adjusting to make it work again. For example, you start with English and introduce free word order. Now the subject/object distinction is tricky. So you introduce morphological markers (which could be free morphemes) to indicate what the subject is. Then make the next change, and see how your own language evolves from the one you started with.
Or maybe start off with a smaller, less complex language. Look at toki pona, which is a bit of an extreme here. What do you need your language for? Is it a lingua franca to be used in trade situations? Then ignore vocabulary etc for areas that are irrelevant. Keep your language small and simple, and play around with it. Then, once you have a language you are happy with, create another one which is more complex and general.
And most of all: don't let perceived lack of progress frustrate you. This is supposed to be fun!
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