title: How to showcase a conlang?

text:
# Question
Title: How to showcase a conlang?
How would one go about "Showcasing" a conlang, other than by works of fiction, like Tolkien? I want to have a way to share my language to the world in full, with outlined grammar and everything.

# Answer
> 11 votes
The traditional method of promoting a conlang was creating a booklet, often self-published and self-promoted by the conlang creator.

Nowadays, it is easier to set up a comprehensive website essentially containing the content of that booklet.

The content of the booklet or website typically consists of

* A teaching grammar of the conlang
* A vocabulary list
* Sample sentences like you find in Teach Yourself a language books
* Sample texts, often translations of well known texts into the conlang

Frequently used sample texts include The Lord's prayer, the Tower-of-Babel fable, "The North Wind and the Sun", and the Declaration of Human Rights.

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Tags: conlang-documentation
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# Question
Title: Are there any Conlangs using Chinese characters?
The Chinese character system is one that is universal to many Chinese dialects. Two people can pronounce the same character in two different ways, but when writing to each other it is intelligible.

Have people used this opportunity to create a sort of conlang dialect of the language, and in doing so making up entirely new sound for the characters, and perhaps even making up new grammar too. I could image it even being a serious bastardizing of the characters too take on new meanings that would bring it closer to, say, a European language. Like how one uses the Latin alphabet to create a conlang.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Toki pona is a minimalist language with a ~125 word vocabulary that can be written using a proposed system of either Chinese or Japanese characters, although it is officially written in the Latin alphabet.

On tokipona.net, click on "Word List" in the group of links at the top for the full list of words, or compress for ways to write it using different alphabets. 言良り良去私 (toki pona li pona tawa mi)='I like toki pona.', literally 'toki pona is good to me'.

# Answer
> 7 votes
This may be a stretch and probably not what you’re looking for, but:

Essentially, that’s what Japanese did. Japanese and Chinese have nothing in common, yet when the Chinese writing system made it to Japan over 1000 years ago it was the only one they had. Initially, it was used only to write Chinese, but then it was developed into a system suitable to write Japanese via many intermediate steps and multiple parallel paths. Now, centuries later, Japanese has:

* some characters that are identical to (traditional) Chinese ones with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 大 (large) or 中 (centre)
* some characters whose written forms have been simplified from traditional Chinese but with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 国 (state) 売 (to sell)
* two sets of characters that are radically simplified/modified from their traditional forms and used only for their phonetic value (katakana and hiragana)
* some characters whose written forms are as in traditional Chinese but whose meanings have departed. The best example I could find was 豚 which means *pig* in Japanese but *piglet* in Chinese.

(Of course, some characters’ meanings departed in Chinese while they are still used in their original sense in Japanese like 湯 (*hot water* in Japanese and old Chinese; *soup* in modern Chinese; they shouldn’t be listed in a separate bullet point because they generally fit the first)
* compound words composed of more than one character with a meaning akin to the Chinese one
* compound words composed of more than one character with a completely different meaning (手紙 which in Japanese means *letter* (the one you send) but in Chinese is toilet paper)
* entirely newly created written compounds, often spelt with hiragana and kanji to better reproduce Japanese grammar
* new characters created by combining individual parts, e.g. 働 (to work) made from the individual symbols 人 (man, person) and 動 (to move); the former regularly becomes a ‘pole with a steep hat’ in compounds such as 休

As Japanese and Chinese are linguistically so different (Chinese can have closed syllables, it has tones, the vowel registers differ and more), the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters obviously differs substantially from their original at the time of borrowing. In general, most characters can be pronounced in two or more ways depending on their surrounding. These pronunciations are grouped into *kun* (have nothing to do with the Chinese original pronunciation; this is a Japanese word with a similar or identical meaning) and *on* (more or less loosely modelled on the Chinese pronunciation when the character was borrowed which may have happened more than once). However, even *on* pronunciations can be considered a simplification at best; a bastardisation of th original pronunciation may be more accurate.

Differences notwithstanding, I know one Chinese who claims to be able to get the basic gist of written Japanese and with some crude knowledge of Japanese I was able to grasp the meanings of some things written in Chinese on Taiwan recently. So a certain degree of intelligibility seems to be conserved.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Outright Chinese characters? I am not aware of one (Though you might want to look up *A Book from the Sky*). Conlangs using Chinese-**style** characters? Certainly. Mark Rosenfelder, in *Advanced Language Construction*, draws examples from his own Uyseʔ and Wede:i. While the Grammar of Wede:i is available, only a little of its written system us described, and Uyseʔ is hardly online at all. This reflects more on the sheer amount of work to make an ideogram system presentable to the reader though.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I made a language using Chinese characters, I named the language

Yinhan language (印汉语)

Example sentences:

Hello, what are you doing? = 汝好，汝何做？

I'm fine = 吾好

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Tags: conlang-creation, history, writing-systems
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title: Do I need a Dative Case?

text:
# Question
Title: Do I need a Dative Case?
My conlang already has Benefactive and Lative cases, does it really need a Dative case? I'm racking my brain to find situations that couldn't be covered by those two and would require a separate Dative case.

# Answer
Yours is a very interesting and legitimate question, but in the light of what we know from the languages of the world, what you ask might not be what you mean to ask. Let me expand a bit below.

**To answer your question in brief**: *no*, your language does not need a Dative, but *yes*, your language needs a device (or "construction" in Construction Grammar terms) to express the third argument (also called the "indirect object") of verbs that take on three arguments (subject, object, indirect object).

Now, whether you have separate devices (constructions, or in your case "cases", no pun intended) for semantically different indirect objects or not, that is up to you. Since you already have a Benefactive case that could express an indirect object (whether that is semantically a recipient or a beneficiary or else), then you can use that to express an indirect object that is a simple recipient. So, note that **there can be a mismatch between syntactic arguments and semantic arguments** (for example indirect object vs. recipient, benefactor, etc). Moreover, depending on what linguistic framework you assume, things can be slightly different. Here I am adhering to some form of (Radical) Construction Grammar.

For example, since you have a Benefactive case and a Lative case you could use the former in sentences like "I gave the book *to the man*" and "I opened the door *for the woman*" and the Lative case for "I went *to the market*" and "I am throwing a stone *at you*". But again, that is really up to you, as also hinted at in other answers/comments.

The drafts of the first two chapters of Croft's *Morphosyntax: constructions of the world's languages* expand on this. See https://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/WACpubs.html.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Your lang, your rules. But generally speaking, no, you don't need a dative case.

Funny thing is, you don't even need a dative case even if you were to wrack your brain and come up with handfuls of potential situations! Languages are funny that way. Those sneaky native speakers will just come up with some clever way of handling things!
> 1 votes

# Answer
You might consider something like:

"I gave you it" \> "I gave it so that you recieved it"

"I told you it" \> "I said it so that you heard it"

"I passed you it" \> "I threw it so that you catch it"
> 1 votes

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Tags: nouns, case
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title: Creation of Alphabets

text:
# Question
Title: Creation of Alphabets
If the creation of languages is called language invention what is the creation of writing systems called?

I don't think it's called Lettering because when I search for that on the net, I see that this is the creation of fonts. I would like to know what the practice or hobby of creating new writing systems is called.

> Si a la creación de lenguajes se le llama conlanging como se le llama a la creación de alfabetos?
>
> No creo que sea Lettering porque cuando busco sobre eso en la red veo que es la creación de tipografías. Quisiera saber como se llama a la práctica o hobby de crear nuevos sistemas de escritura.

# Answer
> 7 votes
**Neography**
As with language invention, there are different names for fashioning writing systems.

While "conscirpt" and other "con-" forms are current, their problems are numerous. Neography is a well known term even beyond the art of language invention, well predating and certainly looking & sounding better than the alternatives.

---

> **Neografía**
> Al igual que con la invención del lenguaje, existen diferentes términos para diseñar sistemas de escritura.
>
> Aunque las formas "conscirpt" y otras del tipo "con-" son términos actuales, sus problemas son numerosos. La **neografía** es un término bien conocido incluso más allá del arte de la invención del lenguaje, y es mas anterior y ciertamente luciendo y sonando mejor que las alternativas.

# Answer
> 1 votes
"Writing systems" are also called "scripts", so analogous to "language invention", you could call it "script invention".

However, the creation of languages as a hobby is also called "conlanging", from "conlang", shortened from "constructed language". By analogy, "constructed scripts" are sometimes called "conscripts", and the process of inventing them "conscripting". Note that while "conscripts" is pronounced with the same stress pattern whether you are referring to constructed scripts or individuals forced into government military service, the verb form moves the emphasis from "conSCRIPT" to "CONscript", and the participle form "CONscripting", when referring to the creation of writing systems.

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Tags: writing-systems, terminology
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# Question
Title: Would a "Common Denominator" phonology be too simple (or even non-existent)?
Many languages have sounds that are very hard to pronounce to certain speakers.

For example, the French "R" sound is hard for English speakers. What if we have a language that accepts many variations of a word so that it's still accepted even if it sounds a little different?

Another example, Japanese phonology does not distinguish between L and R. This video shows how incredible it is.

I think this is a similar concept to how languages can change how many things you can notice, even colors can be hard to distinguish if you don't have a word for it.

But if you're coming from a language that does distinguish between the sounds, it will be easier for you to pronounce words of a language that doesn't distinguish it. I think that the Japanese L/R sound is easy because they don't care which one you pronounce, it sounds the same to them.

However, I know it might cause the language phonology to be too simple, which will cause very long words. I have not studied every single language in the world. But is really that bad if we are to create this "combined phonology?"

# Answer
> 6 votes
It is indeed possible to create a non-trivial ‘lowest common denominator’ phonology. I know because I made one myself a while ago. For consonants, I took the 10 most common segments from PHOIBLE disregarding voicing distinctions:

/m n/
/p t k/
/s h/
/l j w/

Vowels are much easier: /a i u/ is suitably lower-common-denominator, and is widely attested.

# Answer
> 7 votes
There are both natlangs and conlangs with extremely simple phonologies.

For natural languages, Central Rotokas holds the record for the smallest attested inventory of consonant phonemes (6).

For a conlang, you may want to look at Toki Pona with an inventory of 14 phonemes: 9 consonants and 5 vowels. Toki Pona has some speech community and is more than just a *Plansprachenprojekt*.

These examples show that languages with extremely minimal phonologies are feasible. Yes, words and phrases become longer, but this is compensated by a higher speech rate.

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Tags: phonology, auxlangs
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# Question
Title: Were Tolkien's Elvish languages based on known natural languages?
I'm a great fan of Tolkien's books, especially *The Lord of the Rings* and *The Hobbit*. One thing I have always wondered about in his books though, is whether the Elvish tongues were actually fully new languages. Were they totally constructed as it were from scratch, or was Tolkien patterning them after some European / other languages that were actually in use (or ancient languages out of use)?

# Answer
Tolkien started really early in his life to develop languages. Started at 13 and developed languages till his death.

> Tolkien was a professional philologist and a specialist in the Old English language. He was also interested in many languages outside his field and developed a particular love for the Finnish language (he described the finding of a Finnish grammar book as "entering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before".

> Finnish morphology (particularly its rich system of inflection) in part gave rise to Quenya. Another of Tolkien's favorites was Welsh — and features of Welsh phonology found their way to Sindarin. Numerous words were borrowed from existing languages, but less and less obviously as Tolkien progressed. Words that are an exact match with existing Welsh words can be found in the early drafts of Tolkien’s manuscripts published as The History of Middle-earth,\[4\] but attempts to match a source to a particular Elvish word or name in works published during his lifetime are often very dubious.

Source: Languages (Tolkien Gateway)
> 16 votes

# Answer
Tolkien took inspirations from lots of existing languages. His inventions bear much resemblance to those languages in phonology and in syntax, but less obviously so in vocabulary.

Ken's answer already presents the two best known languages (Finnish and Welsh) that gave rise to Quenya and Sindarin, but they were not all.

> Actually it\[Quenya\] might be said to be composed on a Latin basis with two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me 'phonaesthetic' pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is however less consonantal than any of the three. (Letters)

A Latin student can easily recognize the shared stress rule between Quenya and Sindarin in the Appendices.

> In longer words it falls on the last syllable but one, where that contains a long vowel, a diphthong, or a vowel followed by two (or more) consonants. Where the last syllable but one contains (as often) a short vowel followed by only one (or no) consonant, the stress falls on the syllable before it, the third from the end.

Words in Quenya that begin with ps-, ks-, I think, show some Greek influence.

> ksaráre psare súle

Telerin's phonology is again "of an approximately Latin type"(PE19).

And there is Danian "in general a Germanic type", Ossiriandic - Old English, East Danian - Old Norse, Taliska \- Gothic, West Avarin - Irish, West Lemberin - Finnish, East Lemberin - Lithuanian (ibid.). Most of the dialects mentioned here only exist in the Comparative Tables though (or remain unpublished).
> 4 votes

# Answer
As mentioned on Wikipedia, it was modelled on Welsh and some other Norse languages:

> Sindarin was designed with a Welsh-like phonology. It has most of the same sounds and a similar sound structure, or phonotactics. The phonologies of Old English, Old Norse and Icelandic are also fairly close to Sindarin and, along with Welsh, certainly did have an influence on some of the language's grammatical features, especially the plurals (see below).
> 2 votes

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Tags: inspiration, tolkien-elvish
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# Question
Title: Considering that my elves are anatomically different from humans, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?
For years now, I've been building and rebuilding an alternate Earth dense with geography, geology and wildlife. Among them is this world's equivalent of humans, *Draculodon silvius*, the "elf". Among purebred elves--elves that haven't interbred with their dwarf cousins--the average male stands 84 inches in height and 110 pounds in weight, whereas the average female stands 67 inches in height and 99 pounds in weight. Other differences are as follows:

* Longer arms (65-77% the length of the body)
* Longer hips
* Shorter torsos
* Longer necks
* Pointed symmetrical outer ears averaging 3-5 inches in length
* Asymmetrical inner ears 70% wider than our own
* Longer feet
* Thicker soles
* Taller cheekbones
* Longer, sharper canines
* Larger molars
* Tooth number: 44

So with those anatomical differences listed above, what sorts of phonemes, vowels and consonants could they be capable of speaking?

# Answer
Your descriptions don't really indicate any different phonemes that could be articulated.

A longer neck might mean deeper voices if the larynx is located further down (as the resonance area beyond the larynx becomes larger); I would assume that the different dental configuration would also not change anything.

If you think of the various places of articulation in the mouth, they would still be in the same place.

However, while the range of sounds will be the same as possible in human languages, you canpick a different subset from the possibilities — any human language only uses a fraction of the possibilities. The composition of that subset would be what makes your language unique.
> 1 votes

# Answer
It's worth thinking a bit about how the IPA table is divided and the motions underlying these sounds (i.e. gestural phonology).

We have places of articulation, and manners of articulation.

If your elves' have vocal tracts with analogous structures (moving backwards: lips, teeth, alveolar ridges, hard palates, soft palates, uvulas, pharynxes, and glottises) then the same places of articulation will exist. If you have additional structures, you'll have additional places of articulation, and if you're missing some structures you'll have fewer.

Now methods of articulation. There are four main articulators involved in speech, each of which allows for the production of sounds in a different set of places of articulation. These are the lips, the tongue, the pharynx, & the glottis.

Each articulator can produce a variety of gestures:

* Complete closure: this gives stops, taps, and trills
* Close restriction: this gives fricatives
* Open restriction: this gives approximants and vowels

The tongue, and to a lesser extent the lips are very flexible and can contact multiple places of articulation. In humans, the lips can contact the other lip, or the teeth, whilst the tongue can contact anything from the lips to the uvula. If your elves have especially short lips, or lack the overbite common in humans today, they might find labiodontals difficult and lack them, and if they have short tongues, they are unlikely to have linguolabials, or even dentals.

Additionally, these articulators are able to form a variety of shapes and can use different parts of themselves to make the articulation. This gives the difference between retroflex and alveolar consonants (are you contacting with the top of the tongue, the tip, or even the bit just below the tip), between sibilants & non-sibilants (is the tongue flat or grooved), and between laterals and non-laterals (is the restriction made with the edges of the tongue or the centre). In natural languages, these shape contrasts are only observed with the tongue as articulator, but if your elves have especially bendy lips, they might be able to produce analogous contrasts with their lips.

The glottis and pharynx are fairly restricted due to their very nature, both only being able to act in their respective place of articulation, but you do have some freedom here in terms of what articulations they can actually produce. Human glottises can produce stops or fricatives, but the pharynx cannot produce stops. Perhaps your elves are able to fully close their pharynx (not only would this allow for pharyngeal stops, it would also allow for a new secondary articulation, intermediate between clicks, which use a velar closure, and ejectives, which use a glottal closure).

In humans, because our jaws are hinged at the back, fully open restriction is only really possible from the soft palate forwards. This is why the distinction between approximants and fricatives starts getting fuzzy around the uvula and back, the open restriction & close restriction are just too nearby for the clumsy back of the tongue, or the pharynx, or glottis to reliably distinguish them (likewise, vowels are articulated exclusively in the space between the alveolar ridge and soft palate). If your elves have mouths that swing open in such a way that the back is as open as the front, they might be able to reliably distinguish uvula fricatives from approximants.

In addition to these main articulators, there are a couple of other things to consider. These are the vocal chords and the nasal cavity.

Vocal chords give you the ability to distinguish voicing. Humans have tremendous control over our vocal chords allowing for languages that distinguish many different phonations (modal voicing, voiceless, creaky, breathy, etc), as well precise differences in voice onset time (voiced, tenuis, aspirated). If your elves have even finer control they may be able to distinguish even more levels, and if they have weaker control, they may distinguish fewer, or none at all.

The nasal cavity allows for nasal sounds. Gesturally, nasals aren't a separate method of articulation, but a secondary articulation on top of a voiced stop (the same secondary articulation that would go on a nasalised vowel, approximant, or fricative). In nasalised sounds, the very back of the soft palate (around the uvular) lowers, allowing air to enter it at the same time as it enters the mouth, this adds an additional resonating chamber giving an extra overtone visible in a waveform. Because the back of the soft palate has to lower to produce them, nasals are most easily produced forward in the mouth, are difficult on the soft palate, and impossible further back than the uvula. If your elves' nasal cavity connects further forwards than humans, they might find velar or even palatal nasals difficult, if it connects further back, they might find uvular nasals easy, and have an additional series of pharyngeal nasals even further back that they can produce but find difficult.

Any other changes to the vocal tract will affect the timbre of the sounds produced, but not what the sounds actually are at a gestural level (or how they would likely be perceived by a human with some exposure to the language). Many of the changes discussed above (especially adding or removing structures from the vocal tract) will also affect the timbre. As it is, it sounds like all the differences between your elf vocal tract and a human one are of this type.
> 1 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonology, biolinguistics
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# Question
Title: What is the influence of Russian on Tolkien's languages?
I have noticed some artifacts from Russian in published earlier manuscripts of Tolkiens works, e.g.,

* The figure named *Beorn* in *The Hobbit* was named *Medwed* in earlier manuscripts
* In Early Quenya, there is the word *velike* "great"

So what is the influence of Russian to Tolkien's languages?

# Answer
> 12 votes
To begin with, Tolkien writes in letter 142 that

> I love music but have no aptitude for it \[...\] Slavonic languages are for me almost in the same category. I have had a go at many tongues in my time, but I am in no ordinary sense a 'linguist'; and the time I once spent on trying to learn Serbian and Russian have left me with no practical results, only a strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic

which implies that large portions of his languages are probably not structured on Russian. I then further point to this essay. In summary, the

> conclusion that Tolkien “consciously or unconsciously achieved a literary effect in terms of Slavic culture through the prism of the Germanic”, goes too far on too little evidence \[...\] Better would be to say that Tolkien did indeed incorporate a few Slavic elements into the multifaceted and multi-sourced structure and background of Middle-earth, but that he did so quite sparingly and, in almost every case, only at its furthest margins.

While the detailed analysis can be found in that article, it seems fairly clear that while a few words may have crept in here and there, these words were also Germanic cognates or were cut out of Tolkien's language, with only one or two exceptions.

# Answer
> 4 votes
In the Comparative Tables, Tolkien wrote "East Lemberin is of Lithuanian type". Not really Russian, but that's as close as we can get for direct evidence.

The Tables do show changes, to my knowledge, historically common/similar to both Lithuanian and Russian, and unique to other Elvish dialects. For example, kj \> š, gj \> j, kw \> k, gw \> g.

Also the "strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic" in karatechop's answer IMO, does suggest there could be some Russian influence.

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Tags: history, tolkien-elvish, russian
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# Question
Title: Can a toki pona vocative phrase go before an adverbial phrase?
If I wanted to translate an imperative phrase: "Dad, eat quickly!" I can say

> *tenpo lili la mama o moku*

However it seems a bit odd to me to put my vocative *mama* in the middle. It seems more natural to me that the vocative clause go towards the beginning of the phrase.

I might try

> **mama o tenpo lili la moku*

But I am not sure that this is right. It is my impression that *o* marks the verb, *moku*, in place of *li* rather than marking the noun, *mama*. And if the sentence were "Dad eats quickly", I'm quite sure

> **mama li tenpo lili la moku*

would not be grammatical.

Is there a common easily understood way to put the vocative noun at the front of the sentence? How do toki pona speakers usually structure imperative sentences with an adverbial phrase?

# Answer
You're right that a 'la' phrase can't be inserted in the middle of a sentence: it always precedes a sentence, providing additional context (or a conditional). This is the only way I've seen used in the community. And by way of concurrence, from pu page 23, "\[la\] allows you to link two sentences, or link a fragment to a sentence."

There are a couple answers to your example that are idiomatic in common toki pona.

> mama o moku **kepeken tenpo lili**.
>
> Dad, please eat **using little time** \[quickly\].

*kepeken* can be used to describe usage of more abstract ideas and isn't just for physical objects.

> o pali e sitelen sina **kepeken nasin pona**.
>
> Complete this drawing **using simple methods** \[simply\].

The second answer is a bit more literal about "adverbial phrase," and comes in the form of a modification on *moku*. This usage is less idiomatic in spoken and written toki pona, but I do see this form from time to time.

> mama o moku **pi tenpo lili**.
>
> Dad, please eat **quickly**.

Just like content words can be used to modify a head noun, content words can also be used in the same way to modify a verb. Where 'moku' is 'eat', 'moku lili' can be 'eat only a bit of'.

In general, one of these two methods will suffice. It's sometimes also possible to incorporate into a 'la' phrase preceding the rest of the sentence, but it's not always straightforward for a reader to comprehend, because it can easily be misunderstood as a conditional instead of an addition to context.
> 6 votes

# Answer
(I'm not an active tp speaker, so this is not based on my experience of usage, but just from the official book)

You could split it into two sentences (as suggested in lesson 17 of *TLoG*):

> *mama o pali e ni: tenpo lili la sina moku*

"Dad, do this: eat quickly"

This has the advantage of having the addressee at the front, and it keeps the overall structure simple, which after all is a guiding principle of toki pona.
> 3 votes

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Tags: toki-pona
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# Question
Title: Is there a set of sound change rules that undoes Grimm's law?
Zompist has a Sound Change Applier that comes with some example rules:

```
[sm]//_#
i/j/_V
L/V/_
e//Vr_#
v//V_V
u/o/_#
gn/nh/_
S/Z/V_V
c/i/F_t
c/u/B_t
p//V_t
ii/i/_
e//C_rV

```

Is there a set of similar rules that would "undo" Grimm's Law sound changes?

# Answer
Define categories for aspirated and unaspirated voiced stops, voiceless stops, and fricatives:

```
A=ḅḍġǵ
U=bdgɠ
V=ptkƙ
F=φþxẍ

```

(I’m forced to use strange characters for each of these phones due to the one-character-per-phone restriction of SCA².)

Then Grimm’s law can be reversed as follows:

```
U/A/_
V/U/_
F/V/_

```

(As far as I can tell, PIE had none of /ɸ θ x xʷ/. If it had, Grimm’s law would of course be impossible to undo as it would have caused mergers. Luckily, this does not appear to have been the case.)
> 7 votes

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Tags: phonology, diachronics, sound-change
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# Question
Title: Strategies for marking boundaries between potentially discontinuous top-level clauses
*What are some strategies for making boundaries between top-level clauses obvious?*

I think the most straightforward strategy is some kind of collection of sentence-final particles, but I'm curious about others.

I'm particularly interested in features that would enable *discontinuous* clauses.

I was reading a paper recently about prolific agreement in some Nakh-Daghestanian languages. The noun class that the absolutive argument belongs to can be repeated many times throughout the sentence:

```
Aˤli-l      qːatːa          b-ullaj      b-ur
Ali(I)-ERG  house(III).ABS  III-do.PROG  III-AUX

```

Here's an excerpt from Foley's paper *Agreement in the Languages of the Caucasus* showing a curious fact about this agreement. There are many kinds of words that can exhibit agreement with the absolutive argument, but agreement isn't uniform within a word class.

> So far we’ve seen that NEC languages allow verbs of all stripes to agree — lexical and auxiliary, finite and nonfinite. But agreement is not limited to verbs. A remarkable property of NEC agreement is its ‘promiscuity’: a wide range of lexical categories can participate in gender agreement, all controlled by an absolutive clausemate. ... Yet while agreement in NEC may be promiscuous, it is also spotty. For any given lexical category that can potentially agree, typically only a minority of lexical items in that category actually do. For example, just 32% of Archi verb stems participate in agreement (Chumakina & Bond 2016:111) ...

A feature like this could be useful for making clause boundaries obvious if the repeated feature *changes frequently from clause to clause*. I think the absolutive argument is probably pretty variable, but I am not certain.

For instance, suppose we have two sentences. Following the notation of the paper, I'm using `ROOT(n)` to mean that `ROOT` has the `n`th noun class. `(I)` and `(II)` don't have any independent expression.

```
1) 1sg-ERG cat(I)-ABS see-PRES-I
   I see the cat.
2) 1sg-ERG mouse(II)-ABS NEG-see-PRES-II
   I see the mouse

```

Combining the sentences in the following way is possible, since it's clear which verb goes with which argument

```
3) 1sg-ERG cat(I)-ABS mouse(II)-ABS see-PRES-I NEG-see-PRES-II
   I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

```

What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses?

# Answer
> What are some ideas for features that could be used to support disentangling discontinuous top-level clauses?

Interesting question! For a start, some languages have ‘verbal classifiers’ (Aikhenvald 2000). These are a set of incorporated nouns or dedicated affixes which agree with a verbal argument, most commonly the S/O argument. Such a system will certainly be mostly or entirely orthogonal to the gender system, so is useful for further disambiguation. Even 5 or so verbal classifiers — a very small number — is enough to give a reasonable number of class/classifier combinations: (I denote the noun classes in uppercase and verbal classifiers in lowercase)

```
1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I NEG-i-see-PRS-II
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse

```

By the way, I see no reason why the verb should agree only with the absolutive argument in noun class (cf Bantu), so let’s add some polypersonal agreement for further disambiguation:

```
1sg-ERG cat(I,i)-ABS mouse(II,i)-ABS i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

```

Let’s go further. In some languages, alignment is lexically determined by the verb used. Though this usually occurs with agreement affixes, one can imagine a system where there are several possibilities for case-marking of intransitive and transitive verbs, with the verb retaining its transitivity. This adds extra information when two verbs are juxtaposed with their arguments interleaved. In this case, it seems reasonable for a verb like ‘see’ to take absolutive–dative marking (or absolutive–accusative, or nominative–accusative, if you like):

```
1sg-ABS cat(I,i)-DAT mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-1sg NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

```

Let’s go further. It is common for converbal constructions to specify whether the verb is same-subject or different-subject with respect to the main verb, or following clause in the case of clause chaining. Of course, the converbal affix only attaches to the verb itself. However, the Australian language Kayardild has a rather odd construction in which an oblique case is suffixed to nearly every single word of a different-subject complement clause (Evans 1995). This gives me enough precedent to postulate a system wherein a same-subject or different-subject affix is added to every word of the relevant clause:

```
1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

```

(Incidentally, converbs already allow a certain amount of discontinuity in the main clause: e.g. *the man, being a traitor, was tried by the king*.)

Let’s go further. Negative concord allows the negative to be marked several different times within the clause (e.g. dialectal *I ain’t got no money*). It is straightforward to state that e.g. the negative prefix must be applied to both the absolutive argument and the verb:

```
1sg-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-DAT-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-DAT i-see-PRS-I-SS NEG-i-see-PRS-II-1sg
I see the cat, but don't see the mouse.

```

All these together then give enough leeway to do stuff like:

> mouse(II,i)-ABS-SS NEG-mouse(II,i)-ABS-DS i-chase-PST-II-I-SS NEG-i-catch-PST-II-I-DS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS, 1sg-ABS-SS rat(II,ii)-DAT-SS cat(I,i)-ABS-DS ii-see-PST-II-SS i-tell-PST-I-1sg-DS, ii-catch-PST-II-I-SS i-get.bored-PST-I rat(II,ii)-ABS-SS cat(I,i)-ERG-SS.
>
> *The cat chased a mouse, but didn’t catch it; I saw a rat, and told the cat. The cat caught the rat but got bored.*

(Warning: I’m a bit unsure as to whether some of the nouns should take SS or DS marking, but it should be fine as is.)
> 2 votes

---
Tags: morphology, syntax
---


# Question
Title: Does Esperanto have any words that mean more than one thing?
Looking at the "about Esperanto" page, I see this line:

> While he realized that a common language would not end the cultural barrier, it would enable ordinary people, not politicians, to have cross national conversations. To this end, he created Esperanto, a language that would be easy for most people to learn, due to it's logical, regular design.

Speaking from experience, one of the difficult parts of learning a new language is keeping different meanings straight for words that have different meaning. It's a little hard to bear at times how many words mean many things.

Does Esperanto, with it's "logical, regular design", have any homographs?

# Answer
One also has to bear in mind polysemy: a word that might correspond to one concept in English might translate to two different words in Spanish or German. A classic example is “corner”, which can be translated to Spanish as either *rincón* or *esquina*, depending on whether one is talking about an “inside” or “outside” corner. I went to check how Esperanto deals with that particular word and found that eo *angulo* refers not only to both kinds of corners, but additionally also means “angle”.

So yes, Esperanto clearly has polysemies.
> 21 votes

# Answer
One such word is vato, which means both "watt" and "cotton wool.

Wikipedia says that

> the physical unit "Watt" was first borrowed as ŭato, to distinguish it from vato ('cotton-wool'), and this is the only form found in dictionaries in 1930. However, initial ⟨ŭ⟩ violates Esperanto phonotactics, and by 1970 there was an alternative spelling, vatto. This was also unsatisfactory, however, because of the geminate ⟨t⟩, and by 2000 the effort had been given up, with ⟨vato⟩ now the advised spelling for both "Watt" and "cotton-wool".
> 19 votes

# Answer
In addition to the examples cited above, it's worth noting that due to Esperanto's extensive use of derivation and encouragement to use affixes as productively as possible, there is the potential for semantic ambiguity to arise. This occurs when a string that is an affix also occurs within a root word. For example, the suffix *-em* means "a tendency/propensity for...", deriving words like *kompatema* "charitable" and *kompatemo* "charity/mercifulness" from *kompato* "compasson, pity". However, what of a word like *modemo*? The root *mod-* means "fashion", so upon encountering this word you might assume it means "tendency to be fashionable" or something like that, but it's also a root of its own meaning "modem".

Now, realistically, this would be distinguishable from context, but then again that's the case for "watt" vs. "cotton wool" too. These sorts of weird ambiguities based on affixes are pretty rare anyway, and I don't think there's anything wrong with Esperanto having a few, but they aren't nonexistent.

Also, it's worth noting that when it came to "logical, regular design", Zamenhof was mostly concerned with avoiding irregularities in inflection and derivation. I'd argue he didn't *quite* succeed, but he definitely cared more about that than he did polysemy.
> 10 votes

# Answer
The selection of words in Esperanto tried to prevent:

* **homonyms**, same sounding words: `trajn/o` = *train*, railroad, `trejn/ist/o` = *trainer*; but also `poliso` = (insurance) *policy*, `politiko` = *policy*, measure
* **word parts** that could be mistaken as infixes; partly with artificial changes (`kun` \- instead of `kon*` = *with / in company,* as many latin derived words start with `kon` (`kongreso`, `kontraŭ`)
* **synonyms**, picking different words, if a word holds different meanings
* **false friends** in other languages (`tago` = *day* \- instead of `deo*`, `dio` = *god*, `bona` = *good*)

This makes Esperanto a more disambiguating language in some respects. It is not one hundred percent perfect, `ŭato` (= *Watt*) was (unsuccessfully) proposed to disambiguate from `vato` (= *cotton wool*). Or `plumo` = (1) *pen* (`skribilo`), (2) *feather*.

**Homography** should not happen in Esperanto: different pronunciations for the same spelling. However related are:

1. The rare letter/sound `ĥ` that often was reformed to `k`: `ĥemio` = `kemio` = *chemistry*; both forms valid.
2. The suffix `-uj`: `franco` = *Frenchman*, `Francujo` / `Francio` = *France*. This suffix was alienated as `-ij*` would be a phonetically too ambiguous combination for usage in Esperanto. However later in history an `-i` reform introduced a more "international" form, with its own problems.
> 2 votes

# Answer
The term *homonym* is usually used for words that are spelt the same and pronounced the same, and i think this is what is intended here. Homographs are spelt the same but pronounced differently and homophones are pronounced the same but spelt differently. Both of these *shouldn't* occur in Esperanto as there is an agreed pronunciation for each. However, to answer the question about homographs, which is clearly a part of the answer:

Various homonyms have been suggested already.

It is a feature of Esperanto, due to the origin of its lexis, that a *lot* of people know *some* of the words from their first language and there is always a temptation to pronounce these in the way more similar to that language. That means that wherever there are homonyms they may end up as homographs. To take *vato* as an example, people may pronounce this as in their first language, even if they are meant to pronounce it the same as the word meaning "cotton wool\*.
> 1 votes

# Answer
The words *plaĝo* & *strando* both mean beach. Another example is *kruro* & *gambo* for leg. See this question. Plaĝo is from French *plage*. My guess is strando comes from the Norwegian word *stranden* meaning 'bay'. EDIT: According to wiktionary *strand* is from the Old English word for shore/seashore. Norwegian is a Germanic language, so *stranden* may have come from *strand*.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: esperanto
---


# Question
Title: Could a language with only fricatives at the end of words reasonably exist?
There are several non-constructed languages, including English, in which almost all words end in consonants, but what about a language in which almost all words end in a certain type of consonant? In my case, I'm trying a synthetic language which relies on different types of fricatives at the end of words to show grammatical meaning. The language has several non-fricative consonants, but would it be realistic for those consonants not to form endings while the fricatives do?

# Answer
Yes, of course, that's entirely possible!

See also word-final voicing in Basque, which is an example of a sound change that affects word-final consonants especially much. Conceivable, such could also lead to spirantization (plosive\>fricative) word-finally. (And there are certainly more other ways such a trait could come to be)
> 5 votes

---
Tags: phonology, naturalism
---


title: Setting a signature Phonetics

text:
# Question
Title: Setting a signature Phonetics
A year ago, I became fascinated by *conlanging*. So I set out to create one for my soon-to-be-completed world, but no matter what I came up with, the words sounded like English. It feels like I am just copying an existing language. After a bit of reading and watching videos on Atriflexian, I developed a little idea about phonotactics but never got around to my original problem.

Italian, Spanish, French, German, English... each of these dominant languages have common roots, but one will not confuse one language with another. Is there some concept that I might be missing?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Look at the vowel system of each language, and you will see striking differences between them:

* Italian: Seven pure vowels
* Spanish: Five pure vowels
* French: Seven vowels plus rounded front vowels plus nasal vowels
* German: A lot of different vowels (actually nine basic vowels plus rounded front vowels plus shwa)
* English: A lot of very strange vowels: Back unrounded vowels and shwa even in stressed and long syllables, lots of diphthongs, relative rareness of pure, non-diphthongised vowels

So, doing something with the vowel system will make your conlang acoustically different from the major European languages. Not only the set of chosen vowels but also their relative frequencies play a role, making /i/ or /u/ the most frequent vowel in your conlang will make its sound very exotic.

---
Tags: conlang-creation, phonology
---


title: Reverse diachronic languages

text:
# Question
Title: Reverse diachronic languages
There is quite an amount of so-called diachronic constructed languages, taking one language (historical like vulgar Latin, or modern like present-day English) and applying some sound shifts and grammatical shifts to this language.

Going the other way round, constructing a language that is older in time than the given language and is meant to be a plausible antecessor of that language is much rarer. I am aware of Arcaicam Esperantom as an example of such a language, but I'd like to learn of more of them.

So what are examples of reverse diachronic constructed languages?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Possibly the most well-known example is Mark Rosenfelder’s Proto-Eastern, which was developed to be a plausible ancestor of Verdurian. Probably there are others as well.

---
Tags: list-of-languages, diachronics
---


# Question
Title: How to go about making a simple to speak (for English speakers) conlang?
I am new to conlanging, and would like to create a language which English speakers can easily learn. How would you suggest I go about optimizing it for English speakers? Which features should I choose to allow English speakers to learn it easily?

# Answer
> 6 votes
# Be extremely analytic.

Definitely don't inflect nouns. Keep verb and pronoun inflections to a bare minimum, and rely on modal verbs and adpositions as much as you can in place of complicated syntax rules. English inflection is so degenerate that including more than three forms per verb will be hard for English speakers -- you have slightly more leeway with pronouns, which in English decline into five forms under three principal parts, but don't overdo it.

# Keep the phonology to a subset of English's.

English has a *lot* of vowels, usually at least 10. While you probably shouldn't try to use all of them, keep to ones that are common in multiple dialects of English: /ə/, /ɪ/, and /ɑː/ for instance.

Avoid \<r\> entirely. You don't want to deal with differences between the English \<r\> and your conlang's and if it *is* the same as one possible English \<r\> then some other English dialects are going to run into problems with it.

Avoid intervocalic /VtV/. In American English, a regular sound change flaps /VtV/ to /VɾV/, but this is not so in all dialects, and thus may cause issues.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Start with "normal" English and restrict it by adding rules specifically crafted for certain communication situations - one widely used and successful example is the Aeronautical phraseology, which, despite the name is actually a controlled language.

# Answer
> 2 votes
The easiest sort of conlang for English speakers would be one where the grammar of English is maintained unchanged, and you just add or replace a bunch of vocabulary. If you add a lot of new vocabulary for new concepts you could consider it some kind of new dialect. If you replace existing vocabulary so that the existing concepts are referred to with new words, then that's a relexification.

One example is The Gostak:

> Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
>
> Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.
>
> But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Well, obviously plain English is the simplest language to an English speaker. You can simplify it it even further by restricting the vocabulary and get at designs like Basic English. Or you can aim at people with low competences in language or reading, for German there is Leichte Sprache in this domain, I am not aware of a special English in that domain (but very close to that is Simple English Wikipedia, the term Special English itself was used for the controlled language used by Voice of America.

---
Tags: conlang-creation, natural-languages
---


title: How is Ido helpful in everyday's life?

text:
# Question
Title: How is Ido helpful in everyday's life?
Constructed languages such as Ido are easy but is there anyway it is helpful. Do they have any purpose in real life other than being an experiment?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Ido still has a small speech community, so by learning Ido you join that community and you can communicate with fellow *samideanoj*. Note that the community is small, probably eurocentric, and aging. You are engaging in a very special and rare hobby, I'd say.

Second, Ido is to a high degree mutually intelligible with Esperanto, so learning Ido will give you access to Esperanto, too. However, if you want to become an Esperantist, you should of course learn the original Esperanto instead.

# Answer
> 3 votes
*Note: the formulation of the question has changed after I submitted my response: originally it was about conlangs with Ido as a specific example. Hence my answer is not so much about Ido in particular, but conlangs in general.*

Esperanto is widely spoken all over the world, and is thus practically useful for communication; less widely used languages either have their own enthusiasts' communities (eg toki pona). Other, more obscure languages won't have that.

But they can still be useful in a variety of ways:

* expanding your horizon: learning a new language gets you to think in a different way (see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) from your native one. This is one reason toki pona was designed the way it was: the limited vocabulary forces you to shed aspects of meaning that are not essential for what you want to say. Klingon has a very lop-sided vocabulary, which again makes it easy to express some aspects, but hard to reason about others. This applies both to natural languages (through attached cultures) and constructed languages.
* easier language learning: this is especially valid for Esperanto. A conlang is often more regular, so learners can learn about concepts of linguistics without worrying too much about exceptions to myriad rules. There is an actual programme (whose name escapes me) where Esperanto is taught as the first foreign language to school kids. This makes it easier for them to learn subsequent languages and they progress faster (even taking into account the additional time of learning Esperanto)
* in-group communication: if you and your friends share an obscure conlang, you can use it to communicate in secret in public. Or you might find it easier to talk about a shared hobby (eg going to the extreme of jargon use by turning it into a language). Or you could write a secret diary in it.
* more concise expression: in computing you have the concept of DSLs (domain specific languages). You can design a conlang which is suited specifically for a particular purpose (expressing emotions, describing inter-personal relationships, mathematics, etc). Natural languages are general purpose languages, but with a conlang you can hone in on areas that you are interested in, and ignore others. This again relates to linguistic relativity in a way.
* game/recreational use: you can use a conlang as an 'exotic' language for NPC in games to make them more realistic. The player can then pick up the language (or learn it, if it is a more well-known conlang) and communicate with the NPCs. Or you could write songs in a conlang (who understands song lyrics anyway!) Or write poetry.
* ...

I personally found Esperanto easy to learn, and when learning other European languages you notice a cross-over in vocabulary. As I learned other languages before, it didn't really give me a better understanding of languages per se (I'd actually studied linguistics by that time already), but I can imagine that it makes it easier to acquire natural languages. I'm not familiar with Ido, so I cannot say anything specifically to that.

---
Tags: ido
---


# Question
Title: Has anybody come up with a "Japanized" version of toki pona?
I saw a post on twitter about creating a "Japanized" version of toki pona. Has anyone done that? toki pona certainly seems to be influenced at least a little bit by Japanese anyway (word structure/particles). The poster suggested starting by substituting the vocabulary with the equivalent Japanese words, which would be a little difficult, because tp words can vary quite a bit in meaning so it's difficult to fit them into one word/kanji. Kanji are usually chosen with simplicity in mind first, over having the exact equivalent meaning. 'lon' for example can mean at/in/on, but also means true/real/alive. 在 is the standard kanji used. 'tawa' can be go/move (could be 行?), but also means for (as in 'for me/you'). Officially 去 is used. The word 'toki' could be 話 (hana, speak) or 語 (go, language) depending on the context, but generally 言(gen?) is used.(言良-good statement/quote 話良-good speech, & 語良-good language, would all normally just be written as 言良). Has anybody created a list of toki pona words with the equivalent Japanese words? I use the seperate kanji as well as unofficial words like te...to for surrounding quotes

# Answer
There's a list of Chinese symbols that can be used for toki pona words on the official toki pona website. I know I saw something on Reddit about a week or two ago that said that there was somebody trying to create a mapping system for kanji for toki pona, but he hasn't uploaded a finalised version from what I've seen.
> 1 votes

# Answer
This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but are you familiar with sitelen telo?

https://i.stack.imgur.com/m1TtV.jpg
> 1 votes

---
Tags: toki-pona
---


# Question
Title: How to modernize a dead language vocabulary
This is an enthusiastic question: Currently I'm studying Akkadian for fun, but as it is a dead language, the vocabulary may have some missing words/concepts. For example, I didn\`t found a word for "steel", or some mathematical terms (I'm a mathematician). How could I borrow some modern word to akkadian? Form which language should I look for? (hebrew? arabic?) How could the word be "transformed" to look akkadian?

# Answer
There are several possible approaches here, and which you choose will depend somewhat on what your goals are for this project.

The simplest option would be to borrow the term as a loanword from a globally hegemonic language of today (likely English), making only the phonetic adaptations necessary to fit Akkadian phonology (e.g. you don't have any dental fricatives /θ ð/, so would need to replace these with some other consonant, e.g. the alveolar stops /t d/).

With this approach, you might have a word for steel as šaṭīlu- (š being the only coronal fricative, the a being inserted to break up the illegal onset cluster, and the unaspirated t being borrowed as emphatic).

You can instead choose to borrow the word from a language that was hegemonic at some point in the past, likely when the new technology was introduced. If you're doing this though, you need to be aware of the stage in the language's development you're borrowing into.

With this approach, you could do what Arabic and Hebrew did and borrow Middle Persian pwlʾpt' (pōlāwad), possibly as something like pūlâdu-, and then apply whatever sound changes would be expected to occur since the borrowing (if any).

You could also coin a word based on native roots, looking at the etymologies for the missing words in related or nearby languages (this technique was used a lot in the revival of Hebrew).

With this approach, your word for steel might be kûnu- (possibly phonemically kônu-, if there was an o phoneme) from the verb kânu "to be firm", following the same etymology as that of English "steel".

The other of your major choices is to look at the word in related languages, and construct what the Akkadian cognate would be, had the word existed at the Proto-Semitic stage (something that certainly would not have been the case here, seeing as Proto-Semitic predates the discovery of steel or most of mathematics by quite some time).

Unfortunately I can't use "steel" as an example here very well, because most of the nearby Semitic languages borrowed their word from Persian. Instead lets look at "equation". Here the Arabic word is مُعَادَلَة muʿādala, a verbal noun of a Form III verb. Form III verbs in Arabic (which promote the indirect object of a Form I verb to their direct object) do not have a direct cognate class in Akkadian, but the Gt-stem has the closest semantics in this case. The equivalent construction then might be something like tedāltu-.

As I say, which approach you should take depends on your goals.

* Borrowing from a modern hegemonic language is probably the easiest if you just want to make it usable today, and aren't interested in some alternate history for the language where it survived.
* Borrowing from a formerly hegemonic language on the other hand, is good if you are interested in that alternate history, and intend to apply various sound changes from the historical Akkadian to your present day form.
* Coining the word from native roots also works well if you're not interested in alternate history, but is likely to make it harder for other people to learn. This method has historically been popular only when there is already a community who uses the language (in at least some contexts), rather than those where someone is trying to build the community from the ground up.
* Constructing plausible cognates tends to make the most sense for accidental gaps in the lexicon where a word did presumably exist, in other instances it would be pretty unusual.
> 8 votes

# Answer
Languages adopt new words (in the sense you're talking about) four ways:

1. Immigration: simply borrow a word from another language, with some phonological changes if necessary to adapt it to the new language. English, as possibly the greatest vocabulary thief in history, does this all the time. Examples are too numerous to mention.
2. Adaptation/Evolution: you take an existing word from a related concept and either use it directly with a new meaning, or modify it a bit to differentiate it from the original word and meaning, or simply have the concept itself change over time. As an example, the word "toilet" made the transition "cloth cover for folded clothes" \> "cloth cover for a dressing table" \> "things related to dressing" \> "washing (ie, thing you do prior to dressing" \> "room where you wash" \> "room for personal hygiene" \> "the ceramic thing you sit on to defecate".
3. Metaphor: use a word or phrase that has some kind of metaphorical association with what you want to name. As an example, "steel" comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning something like "to stand fast" (ie, be resilient). A computer mouse comes from the shape and cord resembling a real mouse and its tail, as a more modern example.
4. Deliberate coinage: more likely a modern phenomenon, but it could happen. See, for example, "kleenex"
> 3 votes

---
Tags: vocabulary
---


# Question
Title: Is mathematics considered a constructed language?
Mathematics consists of various names, relationships, etc. that have been consciously constructed and developed over time. On the other hand its a "formal" language whose scope is extremely specialized compared to a regular language. How else does mathematics compare/contrast with constructed languages?

# Answer
> 4 votes
I think Programming and Mathematics fail to meet the standard because, despite being more precise, they are ultimately nowhere near as expressive as a language like English.

Per request I will expand on my answer. Take, for example, the English sentence "Jane missed the bus this morning and couldn't get to the office in time her interview, needless to say, she was not selected for the position." There is no way to express that in any programming language that I know of.

```
var Jane = {Name:"Jane", Employment:"Unemployed", Bus:data.Buses[4]};
data.Buses[4].Depart("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
Jane.ArriveAt(data.Buses[4], "2019-10-05 07:45:00");

```

I won't go on trying the futile exercise of typing out a description of events in Javascript. Note that without knowing English the code makes no sense. Anything in code that isn't a keyword like "if" or "foreach" or "function" isn't part of the language and so you can only describe procedures for moving bits around, one way to illustrate this is to convert my Javascript to do the same thing, but with different variable names - the program will be exactly the same as far as the language specification goes and the resulting executable.

```
var x = {a:"", b:"Unemployed", c:y.z[4]};
y.z[4].dp("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
x.w(y.z[4], "2019-10-05 07:30:00");

```

If those two paragraphs mean the exact same thing as far as the language is concerned, you've completely failed to communicate anything useful. Computer scientists working on artificial intelligence are working to make systems where "bus" is a keyword, there is an idea of "bus" in the language. Until that technology is fully realized, we will be stuck with programming languages that are limited to describing things a computer can understand, a much lesser standard than what a human can. This is what I mean by less expressive.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Jesse Adam's answer already does a good job of establishing that programming languages do not have the same expressive power as human language. The notation used in mathematics certainly also does not have the same descriptive power, but it may be useful to look at representations of human language using formal logic, as that's probably the closest tie between linguistics and mathematics that you've got.

Formal semantics, as a discipline, does a lot of work defining a languages grammar using typed lambda calculus (something many computer scientists and mathematicians may have encountered before). This generally follows in the tradition of logician Richard Montague, creating what is called a Montague grammar. In a grammar such as this, a sentence like "Every woman sees a man" is represented as:

> ∀x(woman′(x) → (∃y(man′(y) ∧ sees′(x,y)))

And, in order to derive this compositionally (i.e., from the meaning of each word in the sentence combined together), the meanings of each word is as follows:

* "woman" = λx.woman′(x)
* "man" = λx.man′(x)
* "sees" = λy.λx.sees′(x,y)
* "a" = λP.λQ.∃x((P(x)∧Q(x)))
* "every" = λP.λQ.∀x((P(x)∧Q(x)))

Hopefully you can already see a problem here -- where do we actually get the meanings of woman′ and man′ and sees′ from? In this type of grammar, any noun like "woman" or "man" is a function mapping entities to boolean values -- in other words, "woman" is a list of every entity that exists in the world and either a 1 or a 0 depending whether that entity is a woman. A transitive verb like "sees" is a function that maps entities to entities to boolean values based on whether the first entity sees the second entity.

This, as you can imagine, isn't a super satisfying way to define a word -- defining "woman" as the set of all women is kinda circular, at best -- but semanticists generally acknowledge that the meaning of individual lexical items just cannot be formalized like this and leave that for lexical semanticists to figure out (and they, to my knowledge, generally do not try to formalize the meanings of individual words like this.

So, this has all been sort of a tangent from your original question, but in short: mathematics and the notation we use for it are not language in and of themselves, but there are formal/mathematical ways of representing human language. These formalisms can capture a lot about the relationships between words in a language, but they struggle to capture the actual meaning of a particular word, and thus in that way still ultimately fall short of the underlying expressive power of human language unless augmented with some way of truly capturing a content word's meaning.

Most conlangs aim to emulate the expressive capabilities of human language and, as such, we generally would not consider formal languages like programming languages or lambda calculus conlangs.

# Answer
> 3 votes
If we consider that the purpose of a constructed language is simply and purely created for Human interractions (like esperanto), mathematics cannot be considered as a conlang because it lacks one important thing that human language has: **Context**.

When I say:

```
He said it last time

```

We need to both have the same context to understand the meaning. **Mathematics and Computer programming languages doesn't reach at all this level of tacit agreement**.

However, now I also believe that mathematics help Human to understand and express things in a more abstract way. To make a rough comparison, **we could then consider a constructed language as General Purpose programming Language \+ Context and mathematics as Domain Specific programming Language**

# Answer
> 2 votes
I asked this question. After reading the responses and similar posts, I’ve come to the following understanding.

At this point in history I think mathematics is very clearly constructed so my question reduces to whether mathematics is a language. This question has already been asked (,) but I don’t find the answers completely satisfying.

The question "Is math a language?" obviously begs the questions: What is math? What is language? I would define natural language loosely as the normal languages that we know: English, Spanish, etc. But mathematics is more about the study of formal systems involving formal languages.

The divide between natural and formal language is especially evident in the impossibility of translation between them. For example, consider the formal system of chess with a formal language of pieces, moves, etc. It’s impossible to translate a natural language expression like “I love you” into chess moves without extreme contrivance. In the other direction a sequence of chess moves has no inherent meaning outside of chess. There’s plenty of natural language around chess in discussion, explanation, description, etc. But the internal language of chess is formal and strictly limited to chess. Set theory, a popular mathematical framework, is quite similar. You can't naturally say "I love you" with sets.

It’s worth noting that formal languages can be translated between each other in some sense similar to natural language. For example, chess or Magic the Gathering can be "translated" into a turing machine (ie. played on a computer). More surprising a turing machine can also be translated into MTG.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I would argue that mathematics itself is not a language in the way that English, Mandarin, Swahili, Quechua or even Esperanto are because, depending on how you define it, it is either too limited (mathematical notation) or it is too ill-defined (mathematics as practiced by mathematicians).

Mathematical English comes close to being a constructed language, but I would argue that it isn't one because usual mathematical practice does not sharply delineate it from ordinary English. Mathematical English is more like a *constructed register of English* than a constructed language.

I'm using *Mathematical English* in a very narrow sense; it is the variant of English that is used to provide semantics for *logical formalisms*, such as first-order logic. Consider this handout for example.

In Mathematical English, the meanings of certain closed-class English words are given new definitions and some of the semantics and pragmatics of English is deliberately changed.

In particular, in Mathematical English words like `and`, `or`, `not`, and `if` are used differently than in ordinary English. In particular, they are used in an entirely truth-functional way.

In the quote below, `if`, `and`, and  (read as "entails") are part of Mathematical English.

```
A, α ⊨ (θ ∧ ψ) if A, α ⊨ θ and A, α ⊨ ψ

```

This explains the meaning of the symbol for conjunction  by using the meaning of `and` in Mathematical English, which is similar to, but not exactly the same as, the meaning of `and` in English.

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Tags: typology, classification
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# Question
Title: How to prevent pronoun dropping in my language?
I have an idea for a language I am toying with where sentences have a fairly rigid structure, unfortunately I get the feeling that if I were to start with a precursor protolang (as part of me developing the language) with this structure, the leading pronoun would be worn away and eventually dropped by the time I figure out what the modern version of the language would look like.

I would end up with a Pro-drop language.

> A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are pragmatically or grammatically inferable.

The sort of 'rigid structure', besides being SOV, I have been thinking of would be something like:

> \<subject-pronoun\>\<pronoun-context-suffix\> \<first-object\> \<optional-second-object\> \<verb\>...

The unique difficulty is, that I intentionally want all sentences to be of this form.

Whereas in english you might say "The dog barks, and that makes me happy", in this language it would be "I 'happy-mood-indicator' dog barks'. Or where you might say "Alex gave them a book" in this language you would say "I 'uncertainty-indicator' Alex them gave book" if you didn't know it definitely happened, or "I 'profession-indicator' Alex them gave book", if it's your job to make sure Alex give them the book, "I 'part-of-group-indicator' Alex them gave book" if you being part of a group is important to the context (in this way, we only have the singular subject pronoun) and so on for different contexts.

But as you might guess, if **all** sentences start with the subject pronoun, I can't see a reason why the word would naturally stay as part of the sentence structure.

How can I prevent it being dropped?

# Answer
I'm interpreting the question as *how do I make obligatory subject pronouns at the beginning of a sentence diachronically stable under some perhaps-reasonable assumptions*.

First, the idea you're describing with an obligatory clause-initial subject pronoun and some kind of clitic in Wackernagel's position (directly after the first constituent) might already be fairly stable.

There is natural language precedent for obligatory subject pronouns, for example, see Fijian. There's nothing directly equivalent to the context particles, but Fijian does have some TAM marking particles that appear before or after the verb, which appears directly after the subject pronoun.

Speculating a bit, I think you're onto something that *subject pronouns are frequently pragmatically inferrable*. Indeed, some languages regularly drop the subject pronoun even in cases where the verb lacks person marking.

In order to combat this, you might do something like fuse the subject pronoun and negative marker, yielding something similar to the negative subject prefixes in Swahili and other Bantu languages.
> 4 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, naturalism, pronouns
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# Question
Title: What CompSci concepts have been used in conlanging?
I am looking for things in the vein of the use of run-length encoding in representing arbitrarily large integers in a Haskell-based conlang.

An example might be tree data structure based punctuation in a writing system (Lispy), a language in which sentence ends are signaled not by structure but by an explicit stop word (like a C-style language's semi-colon), or a language in which there are labels (explicitly or implicitly) assigned to each sentence, which can be used to refer to that sentence (assembly or BASIC-like).

Could someone share some examples of how CS ideas are used in conlanging?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Some examples of conlangs which use CS concepts include

* Fith, as pointed out to me by @bradrn in the comments of this question. It is a stack-based conlang, similar conceptually to forth, or min. It is spoken by "a race of centaur-like marsupials" known as Fithians.
* Shallow Fith, which is intended as a human speak-able subset of Fith, devised to allow Fithians and humans to communicate.
* The conlang from this question, Leksah. It is a functional conlang, inspired by Haskell, which was created for a world-building project. Leksah has functions, which act similarly to verbs, a function application word, and literals, which act somewhat like nouns.

Edit:

I am in the process of creating an as-yet unpublished conlang with a system of pattern matching with pronouns. For example, `The red horse is friends with the black dog. The red <third-person pronoun> is much bigger than the black <third-person pronoun>`, would mean that

1. The red horse and black dog are friends.
2. The red horse is much bigger than the black dog.

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Tags: conlang-creation
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# Question
Title: 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???

# Answer
> 4 votes
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.

# Answer
> 3 votes
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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Tags: classification
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title: Finding Sentence Structure in VSO

text:
# Question
Title: Finding Sentence Structure in VSO
I'm making a Conlang, and this conlang uses a Verb-Subject-Object Sentence Structure. I'm trying to convert part of the poem "The New Colossus" into the Conlang, but I'm stuck trying to figure out which parts of the poem are which. Specifically, I'm stuck trying to find (and convert to VSO) **this** part;

> *"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."*

If someone could assist me with finding and converting the structure here, it would be great.

# Answer
> 4 votes
This sentence is in the imperative mood, so there is no subject (it´s implied to be the addressee). The verb is *give*, *me* is the indirect object (the target of *give*), and the rest of the sentence is the direct object.

The direct object is a complex noun phrase, with *masses* being the head, a set of determiner/adjective groups (*your tired* etc) as pre-modifiers, and a post-modifying clause *yearning to breathe free*. This could be interpreted as a relative clause with *who are* being omitted for poetic reasons.

\[Note: I have labeled the possessive pronoun *your* as a determiner here, as it has the same function, and cannot be used at the same time as another determiner.\]

**UPDATE:** It has occurred to me after Anton´s comment that there is also a slightly different interpretation of the direct object possible. Instead of it being a single noun phrase with the head *masses*, it could also be a list of three different groups of people:

* give me your tired (people)
* give me your poor (people)
* give me your huddled masses

This is ambiguous, so it really depends on how you read it. The adjectives *tired* and *poor* could in that interpretation also act as nouns.

So the direct object could either be a single noun (*masses*), or an enumeration of three. But this does not affect the overall sentence analysis otherwise.

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Tags: grammar, morphology, translation, language-structure
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# Question
Title: How do you write a language without the word "to" preceding verbs?
I am working on a fantasy language and am perplexed by the true meaning of the word "to" in English, at least when it appears before a verb, as in these sentences.

> I want to go somewhere.
> I want to go to eat
> I want to go play
> I want to go skating

I'm not sure if you can "stack" more than two verbs together ("to go to eat", or "to go play"). If you can, it would be cool to see examples. But then the main question is, how do you write these sorts of sentences in a language without "to" (essentially stacking verbs). Do you just leave out "to" altogether, and just put the verbs one after another, or are there some particles involved, etc.? What if you can stack 3+ verbs in a sequence, how does that work in languages without "to"?

Actually thinking more on it, it appears I am stacking 3 verbs (want + go + eat), and you could make it 4 with "would" (I would want to go eat). But can it get any larger? (Tangent question, main question is how to do it for arbitrarily long verb chains in a custom or natural language).

# Answer
> 3 votes
Most (?) of natlangs do it differently, not by using this "infinitive prepositions". To have some real life examples:

* if there is an (morphologically marked) infinitive, it is often used in this case: Slovak "Chcem ísť niekam" (want-1P go-INF somewhere) and "stacking" works as expected: "Chcem ísť jesť" (want-1P go-INF eat-INF). English is in fact also in this class (but the infinitive is marked with a "preposition").
* if there is no infinitive, you can kind of assume the second verb to be a subordinate clause and use whatever you do for subordinate clauses: Bulgarian "искам да ям" (want-1P that-CONJ eat-1P).

As for the "would", that word is kind of overloaded in English, but in this case "I would go to eat" it is a conditional and that one is usually expressed differently (note there is no "to" following), either by a dedicated verbal inflection (if your language has them), e.g. Italian "andrei a mangiare" (go-1P-COND to eat-INF), where the "a" is a preposition required by the verb "andare", or a separate conditional particle. Slavic languages often do both, e.g. again Slovak "Išiel by jesť" (go-3P-COND would-COND eat-INF) where the "go" is conjugated as if in the past tense (common form for the conditionals) and the "by" is an uninflected conditional particle (I switched to the 3rd person, because 1st person requires an auxiliary verb and that would unnecessarily complicate the sentence).

# Answer
> 3 votes
The *to* in English marks an infinitive, which is often used as a verb complement:

> I plan to eat a burger.

Another way of expressing the same relationship (that your intention is to eat someting) would be

> I plan eating a burger.

(That sounds a bit odd to me, though, as *plan* would probably be used more often with a *to*-infinitive rather than an *ing*-clause). This almost sounds to me like me planning while I am eating.

If your intention is not just to eat, but to go somewhere to eat, you say

> I plan to go (out) to eat a burger.

You can add some modality, and say

> I would plan to go to eat a burger (if I had the time to do the planning).

Basically you're adding more features to your verb group.

The question now is, what do you want to express, and then you need to think about how to do that. You seem to be coming from the other direction, trying to replicate the *form*/*structure* and not the *function* of English verb constructions.

I would think of what you want to say:

* semantic content: this is done by choosing a particular verb (eat, go, plan)
* pragmatics: be judgemental/evaluative (talk/chat/gossip/converse/...)
* modality: how likely is it? Do I have to do it? Am I abble to do it? In English you use modal verbs for that (can, would, should, must)
* tense: when does it happen? Past, future, present? This is done by modals (will) or morphology (planned, ate, went)
* link with subject/object: for redundancy, do you want to have shared features between the subject or object and the verb? I eat, but she eats. You could be inventive and have the verb agree with the object (\*I eat a burger, \*I eats two burgers)
* ...

You don't need to express any of this (apart from the semantic aspect) through the verb. You could have separate words that signal any of these, or use word order: if the verb is before the noun, then it means you disapprove of what happened, if it is after, you're fine with it (that would be an odd example, but hey, it's *your* language and you can do what you want to).

Or you could have affixes that you attach to the words (which is like regular past tense markers in English).

Some verbs (and nouns) take complements, eg anything related to planning/thinking. Or other verbs that relate to actions: *I'm waiting to start*, or *I'm waiting for Godot to arrive*. So for longer verb groups you're probably looking at having such verbs at the beginning.

So the length of verb groups really depends on what you want to put into it.

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Tags: vocabulary, verbs
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# Question
Title: How to handle denoting the noun in a sentence when there are noun-modifiers present?
I am working on a conlang and considering ways to denote a noun in a sentence. It's easy to handle single-word nouns (translating from English), because, well, they are one word. An example of a single word noun is "tree". In my case, I just prefix them with `a`. But it gets more complex when you consider more complex multi-word nouns. Some examples include:

> The big old tree.
> The big old oak tree.
> The tree leaf forest.
> The dirt path.
> The dirt path area.
> The town grocery store.

*All my examples are where there is a main noun at the end, and everything else comes after the `The` (it prefixes the noun). But I'm sure there are examples you could come up with where everything else comes after (or surrounds) the key noun, I can't think of any off the top of my head for English.*

The first one consists of what are traditionally called **adjectives** I think. As `big` and `old` are just simple adjectives. Adjectives are known as "noun modifiers". In my foobar (fake, for demonstration purposes) conlang, adjectives are prefixed with `u`, so it makes it easy: `ubig uold atree`. Cool, that should work...

But then it gets more complicated. "Oak tree" is a type of thing. You could say "oak" is an adjective, but is it really? I don't know for sure.

Then it gets even more complicated. The phrase `tree leaf forest` should probably be written `tree-leaf forest`, but when speaking you don't denote hyphens, so there's that. But all 3 of these words themselves (standalone) are nouns ("tree", "leaf", and "forest"). So do I mark them as noun-after-noun, or a bunch of adjectives followed by a single trailing noun. That is the key question I am asking, is it the pattern (in English or any other language), that the noun is either *by definition* or *by some principle* **a single word** (like the trailing `forest` in `tree leaf forest`) and the rest are adjectives? Or how should we think of this?

The phrase `dirt path area` has the same exact problem. What is to be a noun, what is to be a noun-modifier? Because "old" and "dirt" are very different, "old" on its own is an adjective/noun-modifier, while "dirt" on its own is a noun ("old path forest" vs. "dirt path forest"), shouldn't they be distinguished in some way in theory? By that I mean, grammatically classified differently?

In the last case, "grocery store" is the noun, so there is a case where actually, it's not the trailing single one-word noun that should be marked as a noun, it is the 2 word phrase "grocery store" that should be marked as a whole noun. But preceding "grocery store" is "town", which is also (standalone) a noun, but in this case acting as an adjective. But really, "grocery" is the "type" of store, so store is the noun, and grocery is the adjective.

I'm sure there are cases where the noun is 3 words, but I can't think of any ("coffee shop" is 2, "full moon", or perhaps 3 would be "assistant state secretary"). Oh but then you have "assistant state secretary Jane Doe". In the first case you have "secretary" as the trailing noun ("assistant", and "state", being adjectives I guess?), but in the second one "secretary" is now an adjective? And "Jane Doe" is the noun?

Basically the question is, what counts as a noun when there are other seemingly-"modifiers" present around the noun, and what counts as a modifier?

# Answer
What you call "multi-word nouns" are usually called "noun phrases". It is a peculiarity of English (but not uncommon; isolating languages tend to do this, see Chinese) that you can stack nouns into a noun phrase, with a head and the rest of the nouns as modifiers.

Inflectional languages tend to mark the part of speech of words, and there is no ambiguity between adjectives as modifiers (often in grammatical category agreement with the noun), and a noun (in the appropriate case, usually genitive or an equivalent). In the former case, you can often turn a modifying noun into an adjective by an appropriate morphological derivation.

> I'm sure there are cases where the noun is 3 words, but I can't think of any

*Grave sex scandal* \- one interpretation considers *grave* to be an adjective, the other one a noun (and conveys a rather macabre meaning).

To turn it into a concrete example, in Esperanto *grava seksa skandalo* would be ADJ-ADJ-NOUN, but you could also use (somewhat stiff) *grava skandalo de sekso* ADJ-NOUN-NOUN\_GEN (lit. *grave scandal of sex*); the macabre meaning would be covered in *seksa skandalo de tombo* (sex scandal of (a) grave), or using the usual morphological process to turn nouns into adjectives, *tomba seksa skandalo*. Although Esperanto speakers would likely exploit the agglutinative properties of the language and use *seksskandalo* if it were not for the difficult -kssk- consonant cluster.
> 3 votes

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Tags: nouns
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# Question
Title: How to create words which will be unambiguously parsable in a conlang?
Right now I am working on this, a list of words to translate into the conlang. At first I started by manually deriving the words from Hebrew/Arabic/Sanskrit/Greek/Latin/English/Spanish, but then found it to be too tedious and time-consuming, so I started just randomly assigning many of the words to a set of precomputed words which fit a specific pattern. The patterns are (c = consonant, v = vowel):

* cv (2 letters, like "do")
* cvc (3 letters, like "bol")
* ccvc (4 letters, like "gran")
* cvcc (4 letters, like "bord")
* ccvcc (5 letters, like "start")
* cvcvc (5 letters, like "tekal")

Everything except the 2-letter words is a "base" word form, which starts and ends with a consonant. Then there are these rules:

* suffix `-a`: make it into a noun
* suffix `-i`: make it into a verb
* suffix `-o`: make it into a "feature" (modifier/adjective)
* suffix `-aha`: make noun into plural
* suffix `-iha`: make verb into continuous (like "-ing")
* suffix `-iho`: make verb into past tense (like "-ed")
* suffix `-ihi`: make verb into future tense (like "will x")
* suffix `-oho`: make feature into an adverb (like "-ly")

Then you can start combining words to make more complex words. There are things like `-tion` (capturing the result of action, written as `xom` by itself), or `-er` (the person performing the action, written as `pum` by itself). So you have for example:

* `meki`: create
* `mekixoma`: creation
* `mekipuma`: creator

This seems all fine and well, with little ambiguity so far. But then I start running into trouble with the following I think.

* prefix `na-`: meaning `not`.
* `nav`: number 9 (happens to start with `na-`, but not prefixed with `na-`).
* `fod`: "fold"
* `rod`: "path" or "road"

So you can have the word phrase "ninefold path" as `<navo> (feature/adjective) <fodo> (feature/adjective) <roda> (noun)`, or `navofodoroda`.

All is fine and well so far. We separate the words with their POS tag basically.

But now say we add a word like `vofod` (cvcvc), which isn't derived from "fold" (`fod`), but means `voice`. And say we want to say "without voice path", that would be the same then! `navofodoroda`. So now there is ambiguity!

Darn, how do I avoid this? I already have a pretty strict word-formation structure/system, but it seems to break down even then. I don't get how to avoid such ambiguity.

Perhaps I could put constraints on what letters can be used to create words, but that seems like a nightmare, how do I know what to prevent and where? In that case, no word other than `na` could start with or contain `na-`. But that seems quite restrictive, I don't know. Do other natural languages do such a thing (or conlangs)?

If I do that, how many different ways am I going to have to put constraints on word structure, and given what? What are the key words that will restrict other word formations? I have no idea if this is the right track to go down... Any other suggestions?

It is like `fourier analysis`, it has the word `four` in it, but it doesn't mean "four" the number. Somehow you are able to tell what it should mean. Or "dominican republic", you have the name "dom" (dominic), but don't think of this as containing it. And the word 'republic' which contains "re" and "public", but it has nothing to do with re + public directly. What are some other examples like this? I can't think of many? Or "nineveh" (assyrian empire), does not mean "nine" + "veh". But we don't have a same word "nine+veh" that means something else, so we never encounter this problem I'm solving. Hoping for some guidance on how to solve this.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Many languages use prosody to indicate separation between words. In English, for example, almost all words have a single primary stress in them. So when you hear another primary stress, you know there's been a word boundary; this is how you can tell the difference between "greenhouse" and "green house". In Latin, similarly, every word has a single ictus, which appears at a well-defined position following certain rules. Given a stream of syllables in Latin, the ictus will tell you unambiguously where to divide them into words.

Many languages also have explicit marking when nouns are combined into larger noun phrases. This might be a case marking, like in Ancient Greek and Sumerian, or it might be an extra word (often called a "particle"), like in Japanese and Swahili, or it might be a phonological change, like in Akkadian and Egyptian.

Finally, natural languages always have a lot of redundancy in them (which is a feature, not a bug). Most arbitrary strings of phonemes are not meaningful, and in general, changing the grouping of phonemes in a sentence will not produce a meaningful result. (For example, "meaningful" has meaning, "me ningf ull" does not.)

# Answer
> 3 votes
It may worth to have a closer look at Lojban. It has a lot of devices implemented to ensure that any legal stream of sounds can be uniquely parsed into words and that compound words can be uniquely split into components. This is done by ascribing special phonotactics to each part of speech, and by adding devices like spoken quotation marks.

Lojban does not prevent semantic ambiguity, however: it allows the speakers to be deliberately vague or ambiguous in what they say.

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Tags: vocabulary, ambiguity
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# Question
Title: How to handle the "key" *focusing* words in a Conlang, like the, me, we, here, this, etc.?
So I have a burgeoning conlang that I've been playing around with, still stuck on the word portion (it has been several months). But every now and then I can take a little breather and work on some sentence structures. Today is one of those days.

It turns out, I have boiled words down to one or two syllable words (which gives about 150k possibilities before compound words take shape). But there are 42 words which just seem *special* for some reason, and I have made them into the only 2 letter words in the conlang:

```
bo,you
da,here
de,of
di,there
do,i
du,by
fa,this
faya,these
fi,that
fiya,those
fe,than
fu,sure
ga,ouch
go,it
gu,but
he,hey
ka,a
ke,okay
la,the
me,what
mu,just
na,no
pe,why
pa,then
pi,if
se,when
ta,at
te,who
tu,to
ve,how
vi,and
vu,or
we,where
wo,we
ya,yes
ye,cheer
zo,they
xo,should
ko,could
po,would
so,so

```

I can probably remove should/could/would from the list, and the expressions "hey" and "yeah", and yes and no. But that leaves us with basic logic (and/or), and the pronouns, and this/that, here/there, the question words (who what when, etc.), and "at", "of", and "the" and "a". That's mostly it.

I am thinking of making `ma` mean "I", and then `maya` mean "we" (-ya being a pluralizing suffix). But I haven't seen this multi-syllabic form of pronouns in other languages, so I feel like I'm going out on a shaky limb. Any inspiration in this regards?

But pretty much every other concept other than these I treat as 1 of 4 things: noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. But these last ones, they seem different. Especially the pronouns.

How else can these be handled and dealt with outside of the English paradigm? Not only in terms of where they exist in a sentence (or as part of a word variation), but if they are multisyllabic and/or built out of smaller parts, and/or are conjugated to have plurals or other forms. Are they always treated so specially in languages, or in some languages are they no different than nouns or verbs? That's the main crux of my question. How else can these be dealt with outside of English, treating them as more primary-focused "objects" than tangential "pronouns" or "determiners", etc.

Also sort of tangential, I am wondering why we have so many variations of "I" (me, my, mine, myself, I, at least!). Where can I find more information on why these exist, and how other languages treat them? Do other languages have more, or fewer, forms than these 5? Why or why not?

Side note, it is extremely hard to search the web for "how do other languages handle I", since it's only one letter, google is like Psht! *remove it from the search param and find nothing* haha.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Wikipedia is a good place to start, and several languages such as Japanese and Chinese have dedicated pages for their pronoun system. Japanese, as it so happens, has the structure you seek where suffixes make pronouns plural: 'Watashi' means 'I', while 'watashi-tachi' means 'we', etc. For many other languages, like Swahili and Arabic, there are good sections on pronouns in the Wikipedia pages for their grammars.

It's worth noting also, that many languages don't use pronouns as much, or use them in a different way than English does. You could for instance use verb forms to convey who is doing the verb (like Spanish does to some extent), modify the nouns to signal that they are being possessed, and so on.

# Answer
> 3 votes
> Are they always treated so specially in languages, or in some languages are they no different than nouns or verbs? That's the main crux of my question. How else can these be dealt with outside of English, treating them as more primary-focused "objects" than tangential "pronouns" or "determiners", etc.

See Vietnamese, it almost does not have personal pronouns, using kinship nouns instead (one can imagine such a language can lose whatever pronouns remain and then we'll have a completely pronoun-less language).

Also check signed languages, their concept of pronouns is interesting (and not just personal pronouns).

> Also sort of tangential, I am wondering why we have so many variations of "I" (me, my, mine, myself, I, at least!). Where can I find more information on why these exist, and how other languages treat them? Do other languages have more, or fewer, forms than these 5? Why or why not?

Of course, fully inflected languages usually inflect the pronoun, and often the possessive as well - e.g. in Slovak, you 6 cases for the pronoun, 6 cases times 3 genders times 2 numbers (=36 forms) for the possessive (in 1st and 2nd person, the gender is marked for the possessee, but in the 3rd person, for the possessor and the possessive does not inflect, to make things more interesting).

In Hungarian, the inflection of personal pronouns is turned head over heels - it is the agglutinative suffix that is inflected *by the pronoun*. E.g. the dative suffix is -nek (simpifying a bit), but the dative of én (I) is *nekem*.

Then there are languages with a 4th person (obviative) to mark "less important (than 3rd person)" entities in a sentence.

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Tags: pronouns
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