title: What are the aspects of Esperanto?

text:
# Question
Title: What are the aspects of Esperanto?
By design (looking at the 16 rules of Esperanto) there is no verbal aspect in the Esperanto grammar. However, one can see an incohative aspect in the prefix *ek-* (e.g., *mi ekridas* "I burst out laughing").

More controversial is the question of a perfective/imperfective aspect (see this question and its differing answers) or a continuative aspect. Those aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English (despite tenses named \*present perfect or present continous).

What are the verbal aspects in Esperanto and how are they expressed?

# Answer
Whoever told you Esperanto lacks verbal aspect was lying to you. Yes, aspect isn't mentioned in the 16 Rules. However, this clearly doesn't mean Esperanto completely lacks aspect -- the 16 Rules are not intended to be a linguistically rigorous analysis of Esperanto, but merely a set of easy rules to teach laymen. Zamenhof definitely designed Esperanto containing some aspectual markers, especially given the amount of influence he took from Slavic languages; what is unclear is exactly *how much* aspectual information he intended to be encoded in certain markers.

Based on your description of Esperanto's complex tenses and your claim that "these aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English", you seem to be under the impression that to truly be present in a language, an aspect must be marked by a single morpheme rather than through syntactic constructions like the verb + participle constructions in English and Esperanto "complex tenses." However, that isn't how that works. The English present/past continuous constructions do mark progressive/continuous aspect. The English present/past perfect constructions do mark the perfect, though "perfect" is a bit more of a complex mix of tense and aspect than it is pure aspect. The fact that certain syntactic constructions are used here rather than a single affix does not make the aspectual marking here any less "pure".

There actually has historically been some debate over how Esperanto participles mark aspect when used in complex tenses. Zamenhof himself saw Esperanto participles as marking a mixture of tense and aspect, and this resulted in a divide among Esperantists regarding whether to translate, say "The house was built long ago" with *estis konstruata* (because the participle happens at the same time as the main verb) or with *estis konstruita* (as the building is accomplished and focused on describing its result). The latter group largely won out with an un-official notice from the Academy in 1965, which gave the following positions:

> 1. The Esperanto tense system consists of but three tenses: the present, the past, and the future.
> 2. All other time relationships (such as the pluperfect, future perfect, etc. of many other languages) are expressed by adverbs, conjunctions, or simply by context.
> 3. The six participles, used either with nouns or with the verb esti, show aspect, not tense. They show, in other words, in what phase of the action the subject finds himself with respect to the object: whether beginning and unfinished (-ant, -at), finished and fulfilled (-int, -it), or not yet begun but intended or awaited (-ont, -ot).
> 4. Accordingly the forms with -ata focus upon the duration or repetition of the act, and the forms with -ita focus upon the result of the act. The forms with -ita can also show priority in time in the event that there is separate evidence of that in the sentence, such as a word like jam = “already.”

(Quoted from Being Colloquial in Esperanto's Appendix on Participles, which goes into more detail about the conflict here.)

While this treatment of Esperanto participles are markers exclusively of aspect is technically not an official order from the Academy, it has generally been treated as such my most Esperantists, and this is largely how Esperantists use participles -- the *-anta/-ata* participles marking the continuous/progressive, the *-inta/-ita* participles marking the resultative, and the *-onta/-ota* participles marking the prospective. This is consistent with how they're used outside of the complex tenses as well. Based on this, one would have to willfully ignore a lot of Esperanto usage and convention to claim its participles *don't* mark aspect.

In addition to the obvious aspect marking on the participles, it should also be noted a few other affixes mark what could be considered aspect. You've mentioned *ek-* as a marker of inchoative aspect yourself (it could also be said to mark the momentane). *-iĝ-* could also be said to have some inchoative flavor to it (though it's a bit more obscured among its other functions, consider that *eksidi* and *sidiĝi* are near-synonymous), and *-ad-* similarly can mark something like continuative or iterative aspect.
> 8 votes

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Tags: esperanto, tense-aspect-mood
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# Question
Title: How to link extraterrestrial animal names from other language with terrestrial languages?
As title states; how to name extraterrestrial fauna/flora to human languages, would reffering to animals similar to cows as to cows and to plant that bears round red fruits as to apple be linguisticly acceptable? Or maybe new words would have to be put in place to describe those creatures?

# Answer
> 3 votes
I think, the more generic a term is, the better you can use a known term in your native language. The more specific a term is, the greater is the need for some circumlocution or some conlang term.

**Examples:** Specific kinds of flowers and trees in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" have constructed names like *mallorn*, *niphedril*, or *simbelmyne*. He consistently used *pipe-weed* (the word *tobacco* is used by the narrator, but not in dialogues). Already on the level of genera, Tolkien uses terms like *pine tree*, *oak*, ... and of course there is *grass*, there are *trees*, there are *horses* and so on.

Whether you want to call some space creatures "cows" depends on the picture the word "cow" evokes and the uses of cows (Do they give milk and flesh? Can you use oxen for ploughing or driving a cart?) in your fictional culture.

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Tags: translation
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# Question
Title: Is there any importance of "dots" while constructing alphabets for a language?
In English, there is a little dot over small letters of i and j. I am not sure what that dot signifies to - pronunciation or sound.

In Gujarati, Hindi and Sanskrit languages, there happens to be dot over letters which signifies to sound "*-n*" for example *Ganga* written in either of three with dot over "*Ga*" alphabet sounds "*Gan*".

Is there any importance altogether to have such notations? Why? How do you add the same while devising grammar rules for a constructed language?

# Answer
In English, the dot does not carry meaning. It's just part of the lower case letters *i* and *j.* There is no dotless base form. Note that the letters *i* and *j* aren't dotted in every font or variant of the Latin alphabet. Notably, there is no dot in Gaelic type.

Turkish, on the other hand, does distinguish between dotless *I/ı* (representing the phoneme /ɯ/) and dotted *İ/i* (/i/).

Historically, the tittle was added to improve legibility. In late medieval blackletter, the letters *i, m, n,* and *u* were basically all made up of vertical strokes, *minimum* basically was *ııııııııııııııı.* So a dot was added to *i:* *ıııiııiıııııııı.*

Dots can be used for a variety of purposes: Inuktitut syllabics (a constructed script for a natural language) use dots to indicate vowel length, while the Hebrew abjad uses them as vowel marks (niqqud), so does Tengwar. In Arabic, they are used to distinguish letters that have come to otherwise look identical (i‘jām).

Dots are an easy way to derive one symbol from another.

As jknappen has already said: it's up to you what you want to use dots for in your script or if you want to use them at all.

A thing you might want to consider is the medium your script is supposed to be written on. Dots can be easily produced with ink on paper but they are harder to carve in wood where you might want to use a short line instead. Of course, if it is meant to be mainly printed or displayed by screens, reproducibility is much less of a concern.
> 13 votes

# Answer
You are the one who constructs the writing system, so it is your choice whether you assign some "meaning" to dots.

There are constructed scripts with dots carrying some meaning:

* In Tengwar one, two or three dots above a consonant denote different vowels following that consonant (there some other markers for more vowels)
* In Kelen a dot below a vowel denotes the length of the vowel

I'm currently not aware of a constructed scripts where some dots are just part of certain letters (like in the Latin alphabet *i* and *j*) without adding information to a dotless base form.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Dots (and diacritics generally) have been used in writing systems for several reasons:

**To mark vowels**

In abjads and some abugidas, consonants are written as large characters, and vowels are written as diacritics around the main characters, frequently a dot or dots, but also dashes and other small marks.

One option for a con-writing system which I haven't seen before would be to swap this, and have the vowels be the main characters, and the consonants be indicated by diacritics.

**Sound modifications**

Diacritics are used in some writing systems to indicate some sort of sound modification, such as voicing, lenition/fortition (turning a stop into a fricative or vice versa), vowel length, or tone.

**To increase the character inventory**

If a language borrows a script from another language, it might not have enough characters for all of its phonemes. One common option is to use diacritics to make more characters. This is common when languages adapt the Latin script, such as in French or Vietnamese.

Or because of language change, the writing system may no longer be adequate if new phonemes arise. One option is to add a mark to an existing character. (This is probably actually the origin of all of French's diacritics.)

**To improve legibility**

Diacritics can be used to improve legibility, which is the origin of the dot of "i" and "j". Some languages also use diacritics to distinguish homophones.

**To mark syllables**

The diaereses is used to indicate that two adjacent vowels are to be pronounced separately, as in the name *Noël*.

This is not a complete list. The Wikipedia page for diacritics gives a thorough look at what writing systems for conlangs use them for.
> 6 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems
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title: Swadesh List for Verb Infinitives?

text:
# Question
Title: Swadesh List for Verb Infinitives?
I was looking through Wikipedia's Swadesh Lists recently and wondered if there was anything like a Swadesh list for verb infinitives, similar to how Spanish verbs work (to be, to want, to eat, to know, to jump, etc.) or verb meanings. Is there one? What verb infinitives does it contain (what number)?

# Answer
It's worth noting that there are PLENTY of word frequency lists around, but almost no one ever bothers to even try compiling cross-linguistic ones (for reasons that should be pretty obvious). Lists for English, furthermore, hardly ever even attempt to separate different word categories (again for reasons that ought to be obvious).

The Conlanger Lexipedia is based off a 1500 roots list (with some caveats) compiled from a 1.1 million word corpus of science-fantasy writing. You can count the verbs yourself... once you decide what counts as a verb (the list can't tell apart verb vs. adjective vs. noun uses, and the commoner an English content word, the likelier it is to drift between noun/verb/adjective).

The top 200 words (page 36-37 of the book) have the following roots that are "primarily" verbs:

> go, will, know, see, come, like, would, could \[end of top 50 words, *could* is 49\] look, give, seem, must, call, think, make, ask, work, run, mean, may, wear, feel, want, stand, hear, open, should, end, keep, sit, need, turn, move, try, begin, place, close, talk, can, get, take, tell, find, speak, might, let, hold, fall, bring

**Be mindful of the biases introduced by an English list**: the English auxiliary system, in particular, wouldn't be reproduced in any other languages as the past forms (and very often the main forms!) would be regular verbal inflections instead of separate forms. Arguably, I shouldn't have included the auxiliary verbs at all, really:strictly speaking these verb have no infinitive form to begin with.
> 6 votes

# Answer
When designing some of my recent attempts at languages, I've used a list of Proto-Indo-European roots (taken from here). Looking at the verbs covered by those roots, you get a good list of verbs which would be important to a pre-literate culture. So while you get verbs like "to paint" (since slapping colour on things is rather old) or "to shop/trade" you don't get verbs like "to write" or "to read".

Obviously this is somewhat culturally biased: someone living in other parts of the world without domesticated animals is unlikely to need a verb for "to domesticate/tame", while the plains/steppe dwelling PIE culture didn't need a verb to describe a long crossing over water ("to sail"), whereas someone from a culture in the South Pacific would. Still, it's a good place to start because it gives you functional verbs that a human society is more than likely to have.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Note that a break down of concepts according to part-of-speech (like verb, noun, adjective, adverb, etc.) does not generalise well over the languages of the world. The amount of verbs—whatever you define them, anyway—can vary to a large degree in natural languages, and adjectives may be completely absent (their role being taken over either by verbs \[like the apple reds\] or by nouns \[the apple's redness\]). So asking for a list of verbs already introduces some bias (wanted or unwanted, depending on your design goals) into your conlang design.

It is therefore quite understandable that such lists don't exist.
> 1 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary, verbs
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# Question
Title: Which IPA phones can be made and understood underwater?
I have a human culture that gradually develops an underwater civilisation. They still require mouth and nose breathing and will be living in air bubbles, retaining traditional phones. They do spend *a lot of time* swimming around and I want them to be able to communicate through water as well. Modified and new underwater phones will develop over time etc.

**What I'm interested in and haven't been able to find an answer to is, of our *current* available phones, which ones can be made, heard and understood underwater?**

* let's work off the idea that there is no breathing equipment in the way of these vocalisations. Free diving.

Before I start constructing modified sounds and augmentations etc *I would like to know what I can keep of our current soundbank.* What do I have to throw out completely. I may ask a later question on constructing/modifying new sounds for underwater languages.

* I understand that humans hearing underwater is affected by bone conduction, skipping the first 2 ear bones. We will be able to hear much higher frequencies and from further away, although direction will be hard to discern. I'm still reading up on all of these features but just wanted to say I was aware of these various facts. For the purpose of this question, I'm just focused on using current known sounds underwater.

# Answer
> 10 votes
From reading the answers to the Worldbuilding SE you reference, I would draw the following conclusions:

1. anything unvoiced goes out of the window. So no /f/, /p/, /k/, /t/, /s/ etc. They are pretty useless, as they are predominantly in the higher frequency ranges (especially the fricatives) or very short and without much energy (which would be provided by the glottis). And higher frequency sounds travel less well in water.
2. consonants in general are either short (plosives) or prefer higher frequency bands (fricatives), so apart from /r/ and /l/ (and possibly /v/, /z/) would not carry well underwater.
3. vowels seem best suited. And looking at the frequency characteristics, those with lower formants seem slightly preferable, so /u/ and /o/, and the back /a/: vowels produced at the back of the vocal tract. The fronted vowels (/i/, /e/, frontal /a/) would have a higher frequency component again.

So in summary I would think a vowel-based phoneme inventory might be best. This inventory could be supplemented by some approximants (/l/, /r/, /j/, and /w/). Which is weird, as consonants usually carry most information in natural language!

Compare:

* Whch s wrd, s cnsnnts sll crr mst nfrmtn n ntrl lngg!
* i i ei, a ooa uuay ay o ioaio i aua auae!

# Answer
> 6 votes
A while ago, someone on reddit tried to test this experimentally (using a bathtub). Here’s what they found:

> **Vowels**
>
> > Overall, these were the hardest to distinguish (at least personally). **The most striking vowels were /æ, i, u/**. /a, o, ɑ, ɒ, ɔ/ all seemed to blend together, losing distinction. The same happened to close-mid and open-mid center vowels as they too blurred. The front close vowels also blurred, as did the back close and close-mid vowels.
> >
> > **Tone** definitely helped to distinguish sounds, and you can really play with vowel length. It's eerie to hear your voice carry underwater and not dissipate as quickly. You can also factor in **uvular trilled vowels**. With tone these sound very unique.
>
> **Consonants**
>
> > I found it most easy to distinguish **/p, t, k/** from their ejective counterparts, but **not** voiced /b, d, k/. Like the vowels, **most of the fricatives (labial, dental, and alveolar) blurred** together. You can distinguish this amorphous group against /ts'/. **Retroflex fricatives merged with /tʃ/ and /dʒ/**. As you farther back the consonants begin to get indistinguishable from vowels. The other consonants followed suit, at least to my ears. **Nasals were all identical**. **Clicks were not possible**, unless you want to inhale and choke on water.

reddit post

Now of course this isn’t exactly hard science, as it’s all based on the perception and articulatory skill of one person. Still, it provides intersting data.

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Tags: phonetics, geography, biolinguistics
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# Question
Title: 21st century International Auxiliary Languages
What are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) created and promoted in the 21st century?

I am aware that many people think that Esperanto and Interlingua are in some sense "the last word" on International Auxiliary Languages and that other projects have no realistic chance in succeeding against the established ones. This does not prevent authors to invent new conlangs purposed as IALs, and I like to hear of recent projects fulfilling this criterion.

I am only interested in projects that are worked out to a certain degree, including a grammar, a sketch of derivational morphology, a substantial word list, and some sample texts. Mere conlang stubs don't qualify as answers.

The target group should be really international, conlangs designed for specific subgroups (like interslavic or intergermanic languages) don't count.

# Answer
The only legitimate examples from the Wikipedia article International auxiliary language are Nerrière's Globish (2004) and Interslavic (2006). Both of these fail OP's criteria, since they are specific to one language branch. Other instances either predate 2000 (Kotava, Lingua Franca Nova), or were not intended as auxlangs (Lojban) or both (Toki Pona). To these, Wikipedia's list of constructed auxiliary languages adds Sambahasa (2007) and Lingwa de planeta (2010), both of which pass OP's criteria.

Ironically, the Interslavic wikipedia page says that "the language" dates from 1665—but what that actually means is the first Slavic-based auxlang, rather than Interslavic (initially Slovianski-N), which was created by Jan van Steenbergen in 2006.

(The Wikipedia page is also confusing in that it discusses the multiple variants of Slovianski and preceding and subsequent efforts together, rather than highlighting the lineage of the language now labelled Interslavic. But since work is ongoing to unify all those variants, that confusion is not surprising.)
> 3 votes

# Answer
Lojban is an example. It hasn't been created in the 21st century, but it still has a very active community, and its grammar is specified thoroughly. Of course, it has weaknesses for IALs like a distinction between labial and rhotic consonant and a five-vowel system, but it is much less eurocentric than Esperanto and Interlingua.
> 0 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, history, list-of-languages, auxlangs
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# Question
Title: What are the places where I can attach an indication of tense in relation to a conjugated verb action?
# Info

My conlang uses verb conjugations *only* in the present tense. To indicate other tenses (preterite/past imperfect/subjunctive/future/etc) I use the combined phrase "sona," meaning "in (the) time (of)" and then adding a various suffix to indicate the specific tense("sonasato"="in time past"). This means I only have the present tense of conjugations per verb, not changing the actions of the subject per tense. (In English, you have "I eat" (present) and "I ate" (past), as one example. In my conlang, you use "In the time of past, I eat." (Past, but using a present conjugation.) What I'm wondering about are the places where I should put this simple tense indicator in a sentence. The conlang's sentence structure is like this (using an example from English as translation): English:

The dog drank from a bowl of water.

The dog(determiner+noun)-\> drinks (conjugated verb, "it drinks") from (preposition) a bowl (determiner+noun) of (preposition) water (noun).

In my conlang, you would say

Sepyew ("(it) drinks", conjugated form of "to drink" in present tense) eu bítõe (the dog) de è roum (from a bowl, this would be contracted into "dè roum" or "dèroum.") de aqua (of water.)

This, however, was the present tense. The past tense (The dog *drank* from a bowl of water) involves the "sonasato"(in the past tense) in some form, but I don't know where the most logical place to place it would be. Ordinarily, that wouldn't present a problem.

Unfortunately, my conlang has no punctuation, that is to say, sentences are one long string of words. I've not considered how to handle this with dialogue, but otherwise it hasn't presented a problem until now. Pauses for breath within conversation are natural, but I'm **addressing this question from the written aspect of language**. Because the sentences are fluid, I don't know how to handle the abrupt changes between tenses other than using the "sona" variants excessively. And the rules of the language mean that the tense is always expressed, per statement (not sentence, because of the punctuation) by either ignoring the sona rule (indicating the present tense) or by using it (to indicate some other tense.)

# Question

Keeping that in mind, what would be the most logical place to place the tense indicator so that I can change it relatively easily between tenses in a language with no periods or commas (pauses), and where?

# Answer
Since it’s your conlang, you can put it wherever you think is best—but my inclination would be immediately adjacent to the verb it applies to. Your sentence structure seems to be VSO, so my initial inclination is to place it immediately *after* the verb.

For your sample sentence, *Sepyew sonsato eu bítõe de è roum de aqua.*

For the translation of a sentence like "The truck carried the food Joe ate", you would need two tense indicators, one for each verb: "it-carry past-tense the truck \[he-eat past-tense Joe the food\] sentence-as-object-indicator". If only one verb is in a non-present tense (The truck carries the food Joe ate), you apply the tense indicator to the verb that is in the non-present tense:"it-carry the truck \[he-eat past-tense Joe the food\] sentence-as-object-indicator".
> 3 votes

# Answer
The most prominent positions in a sentence are the beginning and end, and so those positions are frequently used to indicate the information structure of a sentence. A word carrying grammatical markers is not very prominent, but there is actually a common position for unprominent words: second position, or Wackernagel's position, named after the linguist who identified the pattern.

In many languages, both with free word order and those with tighter syntaxes, the second position of a sentence is where grammatically important but non-emphasised words are found. Second position usually refers to it coming after a complete constituent (so it could be a word or a phrase), but in some languages it may mean it comes literally after the first word, even if that would split up a phrase.
> 3 votes

# Answer
The past tense marker you constructed, *sonasato*, is a rather long element. Applying the rule "short before long" this would indicate that you put it even after the objects, like

*Sepyew eu bítõe dèroum de aqua sonasato*

In this example it becomes the last element in the sentence.
> 1 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, tense-aspect-mood, syntax
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# Question
Title: Examples of the combination of 2 independent symbolic scripts
I am looking for examples real or con, of two foreign symbolic scripts being made into a hybrid language/script.

In my case I wish to see about making a hybrid 15th century Aztec-Chinese Hybrid language. (I know its not realistic)

I was thinking that the influence of a Chinese Empire in exile in the Americas would influence Aztec to take on the simplification of their character to be more based on simple strokes like chinese.

I.e. Chinese began as pictographs that evolved into today's simple stroke based script, Would Aztecs combine Chinese symbols with their own, adapt theirs to be more chinese?

I doubt the influence of Aztecs would inspire Chinese to have more complicated and colorized pictographs

# Answer
The obvious comparison to make here is to Japanese, as it's a real-life hybrid script and is currently the only non-Chinese language to use them. However, it's important to consider that Japanese did not have an existing writing system when Chinese characters were brought over, and for quite a while the Japanese elites wrote strictly in Classical/Literary Chinese, even after the evolution of hiragana (which were more often used by women).

Given that you have actual Chinese people in this exiled empire you describe, they will almost certainly be writing in Literary Chinese but speaking some form of vernacular (the specifics of which will depend upon where in China they've come from), so it's possible that Chinese characters will be repurposed to write Nahuatl, particularly if the Chinese become the dominant group in the area. Or it's possible that the opposite will happen, particularly if the Aztecs are the dominant group, and the Chinese will begin to write their language (be it Literary Chinese or their spoken vernacular) using the Aztec script.

The idea of the Chinese script influencing the Aztec script but the opposite not being likely seems to be based on some misplaced ideas about simpler characters being inherently better and more likely to catch on -- which script becomes dominant is more likely to be influenced by the sociopolitics of this situation rather than any inherent qualities of the script. Also be sure to keep in mind that different scripts are better for different writing materials -- will the Chinese be able to continue to produce the kinds of paper, ink, and brushes they're used to in the Americas? These are the sorts of things you need to research, ponder, and decide for yourself.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Let's look at some real world situations of contact of writing systems

It happens that a few characters from another writing system are borrowed into an existing writing system. Examples include

* Latin borrowing the letter Y and Z from Greek
* Koptic: Basically a Greek alphabet with 6 character borrowed from Demotic Egyptian
* Icelandic: Borrowing þ from Germanic runes

Sometimes, a writing system is just restyled after a foreign writing system, an example is the reformation of the Cyrillic script by Peter the Great.

Sometimes, several writing systems coexist and form a complex mixed writing system. This is the case in South Korea and Japan, where Chinese characters are mixed with either Hangul or Hiragana and Katakana.

You can pick from this list what you like most.
> 0 votes

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Tags: writing-systems, list-of-languages
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title: Designing a mildly weird phonology

text:
# Question
Title: Designing a mildly weird phonology
I want to design a mildly weird phonology with the following features

* Not particularly difficult to pronounce for speakers of average European languages
* Feeling somewhat unnatural or weird

The weirdness should be noticeable (like the OSV word order in Klingon is). It may include statistical effects (some phones are used more frequent than others thereby producing the effect of weirdness).

What techniques can I use to achieve this effect?

# Answer
> 6 votes
Probably the best technique is making the language weird by absence. Instead of giving the language weird phonemes, make it lack the most common phonemes. A language with 5 vowels but no /a/, /i/ or /u/. A language with several consonants, but no /p/, /t/, or /k/. Or totally without bilabials. Or with no stops.

# Answer
> 5 votes
You should start with consonants, I don't think you can make a vowel inventory as weird as a consonant inventory (maybe complex tones? creaky voice?). After that, it depends on your opinion of "particularly difficult" and "unnatural and weird".
\- Click consonants can be easy enough if you don't overdo it (more like Bantu languages/Damin and less like Khoisan languages, so only the simple ones).
\- Retroflex consonants are also not very European and sufficiently easy to pronounce, but maybe not noticeably weird.
\- Ejectives and implosives are similar, but much more noticeable.
\- Linguolabials sound and look weird (especially the trill) and are very easy to produce. Same goes for bilabial trill.
\- Prenasalization, unclosed plosives and similar modifications are non-European (I don't know much about their ease of pronunciation).
\- You could go with something like Kaybop and have manual percussives (Kaybop has clap \[bimanual percussive\] and facepalm \[faciomanual percussive\]), which is very unnatural (maybe a bidigital percussive?). These are weird no matter what you say. Also from Kaybop: Phonemic hats.

Klingon frequently uses velar and uvular voiceless sounds, which gives it its typical Klingonyness. You can also remove areas of the IPA (note that it is unadviced to just remove certain sounds), where you can choose randomly from removing all voiced, voiceless, labials, alveolars, velars, plosives, fricatives and so on, or make phonemes from any area noticeably more frequent.

Then there are phonotactics. Many European languages have consonant clusters, so a syllable structure like CV or CVC has an exotic feeling (just look at Austronesian languages like Hawai'i). Ithkuil on the other side is weird because it has so many consonants (and vowels) and very complex clusters.

This concludes my advices, but there are probably many more things fitting your description.

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Tags: phonology, unnatural-features
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# Question
Title: What reasons would there be for not having a human conlang with only vowels?
All natlangs have both consonants and vowels, but it's not immediately obvious why a human language couldn't be made from only vowels.

Has anyone theorised about why natlangs always have consonants?

Have there been any attempts to create conlangs with only vowels, and were they considerably harder to learn than languages with both vowels and consonants?

# Answer
A vowel-only language is surely constructable (and I think, learnable, too), but I am afraid that it will be instable against evolutionary pressure.

Vowel sequences like /aua/ or /aia/ tend to develop into glides /awa/ and /aja/ giving raise to the first consonants in the language, and at the hiat between two vowel a third consonant, the glottal stop, may materialise.

Efficiency of the coding is also a concern, maybe tones can take over the role of consonants in creating more different syllables from the vowels.
> 11 votes

# Answer
There are generally a lot fewer vowels than consonants in the phoneme inventory of human languages. That means, with fewer sounds you need to make the words a lot longer if you want to have a decent-sized vocabulary.

Also, vowel pronunciation is more varied. There aren't many different ways to pronounce /t/ or /k/, but any regional dialect will change vowels. Partly because there are no fixed places of articulation: vowels are distinguished by the opening of the jaw and the position of the tongue. Both of these are almost infinitely variable compared to closing your lips and releasing them (as you'd do for a /p/ or a /b/).

And finally, why would you disregard most potential sounds that the human vocal apparatus can produce? It's just not an efficient use of your anatomy. A bit like hopping on one leg instead of walking.

So the two main arguments against a vowel-only language are size of phoneme inventory and variability of vowel pronunciation.
> 10 votes

# Answer
Well, there is always Solresol, which has several isomorphic representations, and some of those could be considered vowel-only (depending on the instrument used).

For natlangs, there are whistled languages, with a very reduced consonant inventory. They could fit your criteria especially if you consider tones to be a feature of vowels, and look at the phonetic level - consonants are realized mostly by glides and occlusion (phonemically, consonants are copied from the spoken language & reduced).
> 10 votes

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Tags: phonology, unnatural-features, phonetics, vowels
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# Question
Title: Which features make a language easier to learn?
Which features make a language easier to learn for children learning a constructed language as L1? Are children learning a language with these features able to learn the language faster than a natural, irregular language without some of these features?

# Answer
Difficult question. I think regularity would speed up learning, as children during language learning overgeneralise (see experiments with English past tense endings). Thus instead of learning the correct exceptions at a later stage the corresponding feature would have been learned earlier.

There is a programme for teaching Esperanto as a first foreign language, as it can be used to increase second language awareness and is supposed to make learning a natural foreign language easier. You don't have to worry about exceptions, for one thing, so you can teach the concept without having to hedge your explanations by listing all the cases where it's different.

My personal view on 'difficulty' of different languages is that all languages are about equally difficult. Some languages are easier/simpler regarding some features (English inflectional morphology), but make up for that in others (vast number of near-synonyms with different distributional characteristics in English). Toki Pona is a very simple language (120 words, virtually no syntactic complexity), so you can learn it almost in a day, but it is very hard to express complicated narratives, and an equivalent text in a more complex language would be far more concise.

Learning Esperanto is reasonably easy, but then you look at how people actually use it in everyday interactions, and you find that it is more difficult than you imagined: there are a lot of the smaller particles that make it tricky to understand for a beginner. But the 'early' sentences composed when the language was still fairly new are a lot simpler. However, they were not suitable for encoding all the pragmatic and other information people need for an everyday language.

So, there are undoubtedly features that make it easier for children to learn a language as L1, but the question is "what for?" It's a bit like learning Lisp programming: understanding the syntax takes literally ten minutes, but that does not mean you can write useful programs in it after that. Languages are more than the sum of syntax and vocabulary, and if there was a language that was easier to learn and use than other languages, and had equal expressive power, then we would all be speaking it already.
> 10 votes

# Answer
Children learning an L1 have most of the same challenges as people in general learning an L2. Children learning a conlang, will have all of the problems of children learning a non-community language from a parent-- mostly problems of exposure. Kids need to hear the language for something like 20+ hours a week, less than that and they start to learn a pidgin form that is simplified. See the literature on language death for more about that process.

**A rich vocabulary is hard**. Teachers of languages say that the shear amount of vocabulary you need to learn is a major barrier to learning a language. This is why auxlangs try to pick words that are highly similar to what someone already knows. toki pona takes the idea of vocabulary reduction to about as far as it can go, but in my experience with it, it still feels like you need to memorize about 3000 set phrases whose meaning can't easily be guessed from the parts.

**Morphology is hard**. Analytic languages are going to be less difficult. In communities where a polysynthetic language is dying, the kids start using it as if it were analytic, i.e. with sentences with more words instead of one spectacularly complex verb.

**Lexicalized grammar is hard**. This is when you make up words instead of applying a grammatical rule. For example, in German, you have to just memorize most plurals as a second word. It is easy to accidentally create lexicalizations if you mother tongue has them. For example, in some language antonyms are phrasal or morphological modifications of a base word, in English and other languages, antonyms often are a separate word. My son right now is at the point where he over-regularized past tense English verbs, an indication that lexical past tense forms, (see, saw, eat, ate, etc) are hard, even for kids.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Human beings first develop with a sense of Self and not being able to distinguish between "Self" and "The World". Things are seen as "Images" and "Objects", only later are abstract ideas understood. Human languages started off as SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) but later changed to different word orders.

With that being said, these features would make it easier to learn languages.

* Common Phonemes (/m/, /k/, /i/, /a/, /j/, /p/, /u/, /w/)
* No Consonant Clusters ( mk, mp, kp, pk)
* Noun based (let verbs and adjectives derived from nouns)
* Let any complex words have it's root from the simple (For Example: "Hospital" could be "Health-House" or "Healing Place").

Just like human beings start of learning simple things, then complex, let all "big" words be form from compounds of smaller ones.

* Remember language Universals. Frontal vowels (/i/) are usually used in words that represent smallness, sharpness, brightness, closeness, and hapiness. The sound /i/ uses the same muscles as when a human being smiles.

Back vowels (/u/) are usually used in words that represent bigness, depth, roundness, smoothness, darkness, dirtiness, far-distance, and gloominess.

Toki Pona has some of the features of what an easy language would look like. Good luck to inventing an easy/minimalist language. Cheers!
> 0 votes

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Tags: unnatural-features, auxlangs, conlang-learning, language-acquisition
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# Question
Title: Conlang where the initial consonants of words have meaning?
A lot of languages, both natural and constructed, mark things like part of speech, gender/noun class, tense, and what not with suffixes. But what about prefixes?

I think that would make more sense for a head-first language. But the issue with just adding vowels to the beginning of all words makes things look repetitive, and also adds an additional syllable.

An alternative would be to have the initial consonant instead be a prefix. Though this would mean that every root in the language would have to start with a vowel (unless the language was very liberal with initial consonant clusters).

I don't know of any language that does this. Its common for languages to have the rhyme of a word mean something, but I've never heard of the onset of the word meaning anything.

And yes, I'm aware of the 'consonant mutations' of the Celtic languages, but those are triggered by agreement. They can't indicate anything on their own, as far as I know.

I'm not saying that all conlangs have to be like natlangs, but in my experience, there's some things that languages do where there's a very good practical reason why they do them. If you come up with something that no natlang does, there may be a good reason for that. Humans for example seem to favor placing the subject of the sentence at the beginning. If you say try to place the verb first, you end up with a lot of weird problems. Of course, there are verb-initial languages, but they're rare and tend to feature very exotic grammars (Tagalog comes to mind).

# Answer
> 9 votes
Many languages mark things like those you mention at the beginning of a word. Noun class in Swahili and the other Bantu languages comes to mind. It doesn't require all roots to begin with a vowel; the prefixes also include vowels (as in *Ki*swahili).

Russian has prepositions (not prefixes) such as в, which are pronounced as part of the onset of the following word (and it does sometimes cause initial consonant clusters), in addition to case. There's no reason why a conlang couldn't have the same as a prefix for gender, case or tense.

You might also want to look at the WALS chapters Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology, Position of Case Affixes, and Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes for lists of languages that have these features as prefixes.

# Answer
> 5 votes
The closest in design is John Wilkin's Philosophical language. The words are formed according to a scheme not unlike Dewey Decimal Classification: Every letter of a word adds some more specific information to it. In this scheme, the first letter already carries a lot of information (giving the basic factorisation into classes) and the additional letters add specifics.

# Answer
> 4 votes
In the conlang "Ro", each letter represents a specific thing. The first letter is a clue to the meaning of the rest of the word.

For example,

gebrac means an inch, and the first syllable "ge" means measurement.

radac means boy, and the first syllable "ra" means person.

The initial consonant can therefore change the meaning since each letter has a meaning.

rebec means think, ribec means remember, but zibec means repeat.

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Tags: grammar
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# Question
Title: International Auxiliary Language created by a Japanese person
I remember some facts about an international auxiliary language (IAL) created by a Japanese person, but unfortunately I both forgot the name of the inventor and the name of the IAL. Can someone help me out?

Features that I can remember:

* Created by a Japanese around the turn of 19th to the 20th century
* Based on European languages (mostly latinate vocabulary)
* Having a schematic and simplified inflection
* When the author became aware of Esperanto he dumped his own IAL project and became one of the first Japanese Esperantists

I want to know the name of the author and (if available) the name of the language. Additional information is always welcome!

# Answer
I have found the language again, it is named Zilengo and it was designed by OKA Asajiro in 1890. Apparently not much information about the language is preserved.
> 8 votes

# Answer
Assuming that the OP misremembered a few facts, the language may be Babm, invented by the Japanese philosopher Rikichi \[Fuishiki\] Okamoto (1885–1963) and first published in 1962. It uses the Latin script as a syllabary (which is not the same thing as using a latinate vocabulary) and has "some degree of analytic inflection".
> 10 votes

# Answer
The only auxlang I've heard of being made by a Japanese person is Noxilo, but that's a modern invention. To my knowledge, the original creator is still alive. Noxilo is just a word-for-word cipher of Japanese btw. Even the phoneme inventory and orthography is clearly Japanese.
> 1 votes

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Tags: history, esperanto, auxlangs
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title: Slang in Esperanto

text:
# Question
Title: Slang in Esperanto
Esperanto has a literature (both original and translated) including criminal stories. Criminals are often portrayed as speaking some slang, so my question is:

How does criminal slang looks like in Esperanto?

# Answer
**La sociolekta triopo**

Manuel Halvelik created three sociolects for Esperanto, Arcaicam Esperantom (1969), an archaic pre-form of Esperanto, Popido (1973), a constructed dialect of Esperanto, and Gavaro (2006), an argot of Esperanto. *Arcaicam Esperantom* and *Popido* are used in the Esperanto literature, but I don't know a work using *Gavaro* (what is not surprising, looking at the publication date of Gavaro).

An interesting feature of Gavaro are the numerals, they are taken from Volapük and are obscure to Esperanto speakers: *1 bwal, 2 twel, 3 kwil, 4 fwol, 5 lwel, 6 mwel, 7 vwel, 8 zwul, 9 ĵwel, 10 dweg, 100 twum, 1000 mlat*.
> 1 votes

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Tags: esperanto, registers
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# Question
Title: I'm constructing a language with some rather hard-to-produce symbols. Computer or paper?
My constructed language has 26 English letters and 30 special characters (plus four different accent marks.) The characters are slightly abstract. The closest I've gotten to producing them is with LaTeX/MathJax (Which offers a wide enough range to produce most of them.) As I go along building vocab/conjugation lists, I've hit a roadblock where I *want* to write a word down, but it has a symbol in it that I can't reproduce well on whatever sticky note app (or Word!) that I'm using.

Is there any good platform for me to be able to build these lists on, or do I have to do it on paper?

# Answer
> 6 votes
I would recommend using a transliteration into ASCII or something similar which can be more universally used if the correct font is not available. For example, Esperanto uses some uncommon diacritics (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ), which are not always available. As a result people write them by using the letter 'x' which is not used in Esperanto: *cx*, *gx*, *ux*, etc.

Using digraphs or trigraphs you should be able to represent your extra characters; another option would be to append digits, as in *a1*, *a2* for different variants of the letter *a*.

If your system is unambiguous (like the Esperanto convention), then you can easily convert between it and a proper representation including all the characters.

Note: in German, the umlaut characters are often represented by appending an 'e': *ü* becomes *ue*. This is not unambiguous, as there are valid combinations of *u* followed by *e* which are not *ü*; an automatic back-transliteration is not possible. This is something you need to look out for.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Well, LaTeX is a great platform for writing anything, and you already seem to use it to some success. So I suggest using LaTeX and creating pdf out of it for distribution.

What helps in the long run is creating a font with all the special characters for your conlang. TeX and LaTeX come with a reasonably usable font creation program called METAFONT, but the so created fonts are only usable in the TeX universe—which may be sufficient for you. I have successfully created fonts with METAFONT, and our partner TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange has a lot of people that are willing to help with METAFONT.

# Answer
> 7 votes
My inclination would be to simply create a font for my language's writing system, and then use that font in whatever application I'm using to build my dictionary or text corpus. You can then use e.g., Word's autocorrect or an additional program like AutoHotKey to change easy-to-remember/easy-to-type sequences to the specific character from your font - for example, if your writing system has a glyph for the sound represented in English by the digraph ***ch***, you can set up autocorrect or AHK to change `ch` to whatever your glyph is.

There are many font editors out there; the ones that I would recommend at this point (for Windows; I don't do a lot of language development on other systems) would be FontForge or any of FontLab's font-creation tools (TypeTool, Fontographer, FontLab Studio, or FontLab VI).

# Answer
> 5 votes
You may want to look into getting Fontlab or Fontographer. You can design your fonts in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator and import them into the font software. From there, create ligatures that can do this.

The good thing about ligatures is that in a search, you can search for the individual letters. For instance, if you use "æ" for "ae" then you search for "ae" and not the ligature.

Sure, there's a learning curve, but it may be better in the long run. Not only will you have your ligatures, but you'll have a font for any texts you create. You can also export to a woff font for web use.

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems, tools
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# Question
Title: What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language?
This question is different than the previous one titled “Which features make a language easier to learn?” in that I'm not interested in making it easy for L1 learners. For them learning the language spoken by their society is an inevitability.

Specifically, I'm interested in making a language that is objectively as easy to learn as possible for people learning it as a second language. And these features should help people regardless of what language they speak natively.

It seems intuitive that there would exist features that would help to create that.

For example, take French or German and remove the genders. This seems like it should make the languages easier to learn without losing any communicative power. Another example would be phonology. If English were to remove the 'th' sound it would be easier for speakers of other languages to learn.

I also realize that it may be the case that there just isn’t enough research on this topic to know definitively what features are best for this.

# Answer
It depends very much who your target audience is.

It is easier to learn languages that are similar to your own; as a German speaker, learning English is not that hard, apart from the grammatical features (aspect, for example) that don't really have a German equivalent. It's mainly a matter of learning the huge vocabulary with all its not-quite-but-almost synonyms.

Same with Esperanto. Grammar is easy, and most of the vocab is not too hard either. Here it's the particles which are the tricky bit.

I'm currently learning Dutch and Swedish, which are both similar to German, in some respects. No big deal. But both Arabic and Korean are a lot harder, and I gave up on Russian. These languages are very different from German, and thus harder for me to learn (the different alphabet is not the issue).

Klingon is hard for me to learn, because it has a different sentence structure (OVS, as opposed to SVO). If my native language had OVS as well, for example Apalaí or Hixkaryana, I think I would find Klingon much easier. Especially since Apalaí is also agglutinative, like Klingon.

There is a list of languages ordered by difficulty (from the Foreign Service Institute). The 'easy' languages are all Indo-European, and the hard ones are Asian/Semitic. You can imagine that the same list produced by a Chinese or Japanese institution would look very different.

Languages have no 'absolute' difficulty, but only relative. So to answer your question, you can make a language easier to learn for people if you make it more similar to **their** L1. Which, I guess, is the reason why there is no universal 'easy' language that we all speak...
> 5 votes

# Answer
**Measuring Easiness**

I agree with Oliver that we measure language difficulty based on how hard it is to learn from a given native language. However, I still believe that we can come up with language features that make a language easy to learn in general. To measure this, you would want to take the number of hours it takes to achieve a certain level of proficiency in a target language from 50 source languages (the languages with the most speakers). After this come up with an average by weighting the numbers based on number of speakers. A language with an average of 456 hours would be easier to learn for the average person than a language with an average of 678 hours. This is of course not a method of deriving 'absolute' difficulty but it's good enough for what I want. Now, actually running this experiment would take a lot of time but for now it's good as a thought experiment to figure out what the goal is.

**Phonology**

Trying to get the sounds right in a new language can be very time consuming. To counteract this an easy language should use phonemes that are common amongst the world's most spoken languages. As Richard noted in the comments the language Toki Pona has a very simple phonology that would be perfect for this. Toki Pona has nine consonants p, t, k, s, m, n, l, j, w and five vowels a, e, i, o, u. Not only are these very common phonemes but there is also the added benefit that there are no voiced/voiceless pairs. The reason this is useful is because it helps people whose language contains only one of the voiced or voiceless forms of a consonant. As an example, Arabic has no 'p' sound and therefore when they see the world 'pala' in a theoretical easy language they might pronounce it as 'bala'. Since there is no 'b' sound people will recognize that they are saying 'pala'.

**Vocabulary**

Having a vocabulary that everyone would recognize would be useful but it's unfortunately not possible. The best attempts at creating such a vocabulary would only be useful for around 15 percent of the world's population. Add to this the fact that phonology is more important, and using the simplified phonology, you would not even be able to mimic a lot of the vocabulary from a natural language. However, there are still some things that would help make a language's vocabulary easier to learn: avoiding homonyms, making common words short, constructing words to be easy to pronounce (ex. avoiding complex consonant clusters).

**Writing System**

It has been proven that phonetic writing systems are easier to learn than logographic systems. Between phonetic writing systems (alphabet, abugida, abjad) it's less clear what the easier to learn system is. However, it doesn't really matter due to the overwhelming adoption of the Latin script world wide (70% of the world's population use it). Even in places where the native language does not use the Latin script people will still have significant exposure to it. Because of this an easy to learn language should use the Latin script. The words should also be completely phonetic in their spelling. This allows learners to read, pronounce, and spell any word without having to memorize a bunch of spelling rules and exceptions.

**Regularity**

This one is self explanatory. A language that has regular grammar and no exceptions to its grammar rules is easier to learn. This should apply to all forms of grammar (inflections, word order, usages). As an example, if English were to always use -ed to make verbs past tense it would be easier to learn (swimmed, eated, falled).

**Lack of Unnecessary Features**

Just as biological evolution has left human bodies with a large amount of inefficiencies, language evolution has left natural languages with a large amount of inefficiencies. It would take a long time to go through these as there are many, so I'll just use the gender example from the question. As jknappen said in the comments grammatical genders do have a small amount of communicative power in that they can, on occasion, avoid ambiguity of two things. However, this only happens when there are two things potentially being referred to, when it's not clear based on context which thing is being referred to, and when the two things are different genders. Example from Wikipedia: "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain" vs "ein Blumenbeet im Garten, das ich pflege". This is very rare and not useful enough to merit spending a significant amount of time learning genders.
> 5 votes

# Answer
I agree with everything Oliver Mason said.

EDIT: After some more thought...for easiness that is only easy when in the presence of a first language, the question has the answer, which is: languages most similar to your first language. Otherwise, an easy language is an easy language.

I'd add that there is something to be said for:

**Small languages**, which have most content word classes are closed. In English, only function word classes, like prepositions are closed. When people are working from a small known set of words (or morphemes), sometime the lexemes they create are transparent and their meaning can be guessed. This reduces the burden of memorizing 7000-12000 words (or lexemes-- depending on the linguist, word count accounting can vary).

Smallness also applies to grammar- the fewer rules, the easier to learn, albeit at a cost of expressiveness.

Examples would be toki pona and Esperanto before the community began bulk importing of loan words from French, et al.

**Creole-like**. Creole languages tend to have certain predictable features that in part are explainable because they were spoken by communities that can't be bothered to learn the complex parts of the six languages in the community. Languages like this are more likely to be SVO, analytic, simplified and smaller, etc.
> 3 votes

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Tags: auxlangs, conlang-learning, language-acquisition
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# Question
Title: What language uses the most amount of phonemes?
I'm constructing an auxlang/artlang *(temporarily named Syn)*.

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*The Syn is (being) designed to interface with any known human language, with a wildly uniform set of simplistic, unambiguous symbols.*

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I have almost finished the phonetic alphabet component and have been trying to transliterate several languages into this while translating some that I know now on the side. However, since I'm not a native speaker of any of the transliterations and google translate is becoming not much of a help, I can't pinpoint the exact phonetic equivalent of some words. Now I'm running out of practice scripts from different spoken languages to accurately transliterate. Hence, I think I'm gonna need another language similar to what I'm making.

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Are there any languages, written or spoken, natural or constructed, that occupy majority of the entire phonetic alphabet, with as little diacritics, as few ambiguous strokes, and as strict 1-to-1 symbol-phoneme as possible?

# Answer
You're gonna have a hard time with "majority of the entire IPA". Non-pulmonic consonants are rare, and some consonants are hard to contrast (e.g. /β/ vs. /v/), while vowels are often highly allophonic. Natural languages tend to have fewer IPA places and distinction via aspiration, labialization, etc.

My best answer to your question would be Ithkuil (constructed, almost unspeakable language). It has 58 phonemes, with unusually many vowels (13). This allows it to have mostly single phonemes for morphemes. Ithkuil's Roman transliteration is a bit strange, as some phonemes use diacritics and others have digraphs, but it also has its own script (morpho-phonemic with alphabetic characters).
> 5 votes

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Tags: phonology, morphology, phonetics
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# Question
Title: What are the reasons behind ROILA's phonology?
ROILA (RObot Interaction LAnguage), a constructed language for communication between robots and between robots and humans, comes with a 5 vowel system. the vowels are written `a e i o u` but their sound are not according to cardinal vowels (which one would expect from natural languages) but:

```
a   æ   AE  fast
e   ɛ   EH  red
i   ɪ   IH  big
o   ɔ   AO  frost
u   ʌ   AH  but

```

(Columns are: spelling, IPA, ARPABET, example word)

What are the reasons behind that choice?

# Answer
The process of creating the phonology is described at length in Omar Mubin's PhD thesis "ROILA: RObot Interaction LAnguage" (available from the publications page). It seems to have happened in three stages.

1. He determined which phonemes are most common in a number of natural and artificial languages (pp. 17-19). The most common vowels were /i, u, o, a, e/ (in IPA).
2. The final set of phonemes he chose included the vowels a, e, i, o and u. He doesn't indicate that the vowels were given in IPA, and indeed he later gives them the IPA values /ae *(sic)*, ɛ, ɪ, ɑ, ʌ/ (pp. 22-23).
3. AA /ɑ/ was later altered to AO /ɔ/ in order to avoid confusion with AE /æ/ (p. 35-36).

The only explanation I can give for the incongruity between stage 1 and stage 2 is that he (mistakenly?) put the five vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ into his orthography, but changed their phonetic values to the English orthographic "short" vowels, which are /æ, ɛ, ɪ, ɑ, ʌ/ in American English.

The fact that he had to avoid confusion between /æ/ and /ɑ/ (in step 3), but doesn't consider any confusion between /æ/ and /ɛ/ or between /ɔ/ and /ʌ/ seems very English-centric, but which would be very strange from the perspective of Dutch, which doesn't distinguish either pair of phonemes (considering the fact he was doing his research in Holland).

Unsurprisingly, "American English speakers significantly outperformed other speakers in our setup" (p. 34). They also mention problems with Dutch accents and different regional English accents (p. 86 of this document).
> 7 votes

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Tags: phonology, machine-communication, vowels, roila
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title: How to conjugate "fhtagn" in R'lyehian?

text:
# Question
Title: How to conjugate "fhtagn" in R'lyehian?
The accepted translation of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu fhtagn" seems to be "Cthulhu dreams".

How would one conjugate "fhtagn" to get the word derivations "dream", "dreamer", "dreaming".

This answer had a helpful link for translations, but not much in the way of deriving conjugates.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Lovecraft probably didn't think about grammar, and we certainly don't have enough material to reconstruct one. Could also be like Sindarin, where Tolkien wrote much, but never released any specification of the language. Quote from the threat you linked: "To my knowledge, we only have the transcription in the Latin alphabet" (comment from Sparksbet).

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Tags: grammar, rlyehian
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# Question
Title: Adding entire musical concepts to expand vocabulary
I want my language, Syn, to be as precise, efficient, unambiguous, and aesthetic as humanely possible. To do that, I think even the texture, dynamics, rhythm, and the likes should be accounted for.

As far as I know, only Mandarin incorporates changes in intonation corresponding with a different meaning of the same spoken word, but even that can be hard to notice for non-speakers.

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Are there any other languages that incorporte musical concepts?

If there are, how did people manage to use those concepts?

If there are none yet, will such a language possess an added difficulty when speaking it?

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I imagine that the native speakers of Syn would be naturally adept in tone recognition, and every conversation would seem like an a capella get-together.

# Answer
> 4 votes
There is a precedent for the use of a musical tone scale in constructed languages: Solresol, a philosophical language constructed in the 19th century. Some natural languages also have a whistled mode, most notably El Silbo and Pirahã.

I am not aware of a language—neither natural nor constructed—that incorporates the concept of rhythm or other musical concepts.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The *Yllurian Spell Singing Language* incorporates as part of its magical effect the use of ordinary lexicon & grammar with musical pitch & rhythm.

As a ritual language, for any given spell to be effective, not only must the text be written and sung, but the tones & rhythms must be notated as well. The text may be sung or the notes may be played upon a flute constructed to conform to the particular mode of the music.

You can read a little about the Spell Singing Language *here*.

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Tags: phonology, vocabulary, music
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# Question
Title: What are some real world data on the numbers of speakers of constructed languages?
What are some real world data (e.g., from census data, membership data, visitors of conlang related events, other estimates) on active speakers of constructed languages?

# Answer
> 2 votes
* There is some basic data at Ethnologue for Esperanto.
* The Font of All Knowledge lists some statistics for other invented languages (Hungarian & Russian census data).

Not much, but a (small) start.

# Answer
> 1 votes
For any particular language maybe 1-2 to dozens. The best way to find out would be to collect as many writing samples as possible that have been posted to the internet. Pick some arbitrary cut off for what counts as "speaking" the language for length. When I did this for toki pona, there were maybe a few hundred people who could write at least a few paragraphs.

Na'vi and Klingon probably have at least a handful to few dozen each. I don't know of any corpus gathering projects for those languages.

The number of people who have purchases learning materials, such as the Klingon dictionary, is thousands of times higher than the number of people who invested the time to learn the language. I look forward so seeing more stats out of Duolingo for the Game of Thrones Languages and Klingon.

As for the acid test of fluency- natives who learned the language from their parents, maybe one or two. (Excluding Esperanto natives- there are a lot of those)

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Tags: speech-communities
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# Question
Title: In what ways are grammatical genders useful?
In a previous question about making a language easy to learn as a second language I suggested that grammatical genders have very little usefulness. A couple of people, however, suggested that grammatical genders have more usefulness than I think. Because of this I am interested in hearing about any potential uses for grammatical genders.

Usefulness can be identified by looking at what happens when the grammatical gender is removed. If the speaker needs to communicate the lost information through other means then the grammatical gender is deemed useful.

# Answer
The generic term for genders is "word classes". In some languages male/female isn't the main way to divide up the world.

Word classes are useful for co-ordination. If a language lacks gender, (or animacy, what have you), then you need some other way to know what adjective goes with what noun, which antecedent a pronoun refers to and so on. A language with lousy coordination might be English, with things like "He saw him hit him with it."

They make languages hard for language learners because the semantic relationship between the word classes overtime becomes increasingly arbitrary and creates a lexical burden for language learners, i.e. you just have to memorize the word class for each word. Also, gender marker is obligatory, so you have a high entry cost-- you can't say anything until you work out the genders of the relevant words.
> 4 votes

# Answer
Grammatical gender, along with noun classes, are often used in word derivation. Of course, the more categories you have, the more productive this can be.

They also allow a larger number of 3rd person pronouns, allowing for multiple 3rd persons (or objects) to be referred to simply with pronouns without as much confusion arising as to which pronoun refers to who. Though this is more useful in systems where everything has gender. In English for example, this is only useful in about 20% of cases, because only people can be referred to as he and she (everything else just gets 'it', except for maybe pets). In French however, where every noun is referred to as either he or she, this helps out about 80% of the time.

And as people have mentioned, gender agreement can help tie nouns and adjectives together, allowing you to put them in any order. Though any form or noun-adjective agreement can accomplish this. Case agreement, for instance, is much more effective at this.
> 4 votes

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Tags: grammar, gender
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# Question
Title: Is there any easy way to find out how multiple unrelated languages express the same concept?
As any linguist (and anyone who knows unrelated languages, probably), not all languages express things the same way. Worse yet, its not possible to express everything logically, so all languages are forced to rely on something arbitrary to express certain concepts.

I try to find out how other languages do things, but I rarely meet with any success. Most dictionaries I find online assume you already know the language, which of course makes sample sentences useless.

It seems like the only way to find out how a language does anything is to know it. This means that as a conlanger, its nigh impossible to make a conlang that doesn't in some way resemble the languages you know. This can obviously be quite a problem if you're monolingual, as most Americans are. I'm not monolingual, but even I have a problem avoiding Euro-centrism since the only other language I know well is German. Yeah, German does some things differently, but its not that different from English since the two are closely related. They tend to overlap more often than not.

Is there any convenient way to get information on specific things in languages without just having to learn half a dozen unrelated languages?

# Answer
> 3 votes
Unfortunately not.

There are a few concepts (like colour terms or kinship terms) that are regularly studied in linguistic typology and where one can find a lot of publications including high-level overviews including a lot of unrelated languages.

For the most concepts, there is nothing comparable available. Maybe one can find studies (e.g., from translatology) comparing a certain concept in a pair of languages or a small group of languages, but those languages tend to be the well-known big ones (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese).

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Tags: resource-request
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title: What is an overview of sound changes?

text:
# Question
Title: What is an overview of sound changes?
One of my works-in-progress is a language called Proto-Oreadin. As the name suggests, it is a proto-language, which eventually I am hoping to expand into a family of languages. Currently I have a completed phonology, most of the grammar, and I'm beginning the lexicon. My plan to create these daughter languages is by using the zompist.com sound change applier app to evolve the words of my language into multiple daughter languages, and then apply semantic shifts, borrowings, and other pieces of worldbuilding context—but that's a separate issue.

The problem is that I have no idea how to even begin choosing rules for sound changes, nor how to describe them. I've looked at examples of natural languages, but I'm not sure what's going on with the notation, nor have I been able to identify any patterns that will help me create realistic sound changes for my languages.

1. How are sound changes notated?
2. What are the general categories of sound changes?

# Answer
> 15 votes
To answer part a), the basic syntax of the notation goes like this:

> \[*before*\] \> \[*after*\] / \[*context*\]

The part after the slash gives the situations in which the sound changes occur. For example, the hypothetical spirantization of \[b\] to \[v\] intervocalically could be notated as follows:

> b \> v / V\__V

This rule indicates that b becomes v when surrounded by a vowel (V) on each side. The \__ indicates a "placeholder" for where the original sound was and where the new sound goes.

Some other common notations are # for word boundaries and \[+feature\] or \[-feature\] to indicate the presence or lack of a certain feature respectively. For example, final-obstruent devoicing in e.g. Russian could be

> \[+stop\]\[+voiced\] \> \[-voiced\] / \__#

where the \__# means that the stop in question (\__) is at the end of a word (#).

As for b), the best way to get an idea for what kinds of things generally happen in languages is honestly probably just by reading about lots of different languages and seeing what tends to happen. Some of the most common general processes are:

* **Lenition**, probably one of the most common sound changes, in which a "softer" sound becomes a "louder" sound. (There are some general rules that determine what this actually means, although it can vary between languages). A few examples are intervocalic flapping in many English dialects (/bɛtər/ → \[bɛɾɚ\]) and the pronunciation of /b, d, g/ as fricatives or approximants, roughly \[β, ð, ɣ\], in most contexts in Spanish.
* **Assimilation** is another frequent sound change. This occurs when features of a given phoneme are influenced by the phonemes around it. For example, in English and Spanish, /n/ becomes \[m\] before bilabials and \[ŋ\] before velars (e.g. \<rainbow\> \[ɹ̠ʷej**m**bow\], \<concordar\> \[ko**ŋ**koɾðaɾ\]).
* Similar ideas are **umlaut** and **vowel harmony**, in which vowels change depending on other vowels in the word. Remnants of Germanic umlaut can be seen in English, e.g. foot/feet, and vowel harmony is prominent in e.g. Turkish, where all of the vowels in a word have to harmonize (for the most part) so that affixes have several different forms (for example, the genitive suffix is \[in\] after front unrounded vowels, \[ɯn\] after back unrounded vowels, \[yn\] after front rounded vowels, and \[un\] after back rounded vowels).

While there are general patterns, it's also important to note that some sound changes seem completely illogical and random, and just... sort of happen. The most infamous examples are the ruki rule, where \[s\] became \[ʃ\] but only after \[r, w, k, j\] (?), and strangest of all, Proto-Indo-European \*dw to Armenian erk (???). So you really have a lot of room for creativity here, while still being able to be naturalistic.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I guess this forum really isn't set up for the kind of intense assistance & interaction you really need. Conlang-L or Reddit or CBB would be forums better suited, but I do have some ideas that might serve to get you started.

Since it seems like you've got a handle on the basics and are really asking for a directional nudge, I'd suggest the following:

* Make a short list (maybe a dozen) of Proto-Language words and sort them by various characteristics: words that begin with a voiceless stop; words that contain a voiced stop followed by a syllabic liquid; words with an accented long vowel root.
* Pronounce one of the words over and over and try "permutations in the phonetic neighbourhood" like CWAD**RUT** CWAD**RUT** CHWAD**RUT** CHWADHRUT **CHWAAH**RUTH **HWAAR**RUS HWAARUH **HA**WARƏH **HAW**WAR
* Make a note of how certain sounds are "eroded" or, I guess more properly, how they *evolve*. \[kw\] relaxes into \[hw\]; \[dr\] \> \[ðr\] \> \[r\]; as the final syllable weakens, the accent shifts towards the word head; as the accent shifts towards the word head, medial long vowels become shortened.
* Sit back in astoundment how you've just discovered several sound change rules!

If you don't like that progression, try another one.

Kind of a simplistic exercise, but it's a good method to start. Eventually, other rules you discover are going to intersect and sometimes abrogate another law. Sometimes two parallel dialects run along slightly different tracks.

Sometimes dialects are "behind the times" when compared to others, and this will launch you into the wonder world of diachronics. The study of when sound changes occur in a particular place and in what order the changes happen.

And of course, you're considering a whole family tree, so you're going to need to do this exercise multiple times. You might find that two or three daughter lineages kind of align in certain ways. For example, \*cwadrut yields hawar in language A and qewarro in language B and kawrs in language C but shwuntz in language D and shhwandaras in language E.

As you examine other words, you notice that ancestral \[k-\] remains \[k\] or becomes \[h\] (both palatal sounds) in several languages, all of which are at the eastern end of this proto language's continuum; while most of the languages where ancestral \[k-\] has become \[ʃ\] are all in the west. A nice geographic split (that may or may not actually mean much), much like that which exists within Indo-European languages.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Stolen from this answer by sumelic on linguistics: There is searchable version of the *Index Diachronica* that allows to search for some sounds and explore postulated and observed changes of that sound. The notation used is the same as in @Doorknob's answer above.

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Tags: phonology, diachronics, language-families
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# Question
Title: Grammatical cases occurring only in conlangs
What are examples of grammatical cases that are not attested in natural languages, but occur in some conlang?

To qualify here, the conlang should have at least some bit of flesh (e.g., a few consistent texts, either original or translated). Pure sketches of potential cases aren't interesting to me.

The Respective or Dedative case in Quenya, also called Short Locative, is too speculative to be counted here; its attestation is very weak in the available material from J. R. R. Tolkien.

# Answer
I think the best conlang to look for such cases is Ithkuil. http://ithkuil.net/04\_case.html contains a list of all cases. My \[short\] research suggests that some of them (e.g. navigative for "noun relative to whose vector, arc, or trajectory of motion an event takes place" or allapsive for "amount of time that expected to pass between the contextual present and the time of a future event") aren't attested in any other well-known language. I may be wrong, but it seems plausible regarding Ithkuil's goal of expressing extensive detail.
> 10 votes

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Tags: unnatural-features, case
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# Question
Title: Why are compound words in Volapuk hard to parse while compound words in Esperanto are not?
Of all the criticisms you see of Volapuk, one the most pervasive is that it can be difficult to parse some of the longer compound words. Which is pretty obvious. With all words being CVCVCVCV... and prefixes being (C)V and suffixes V(C), it stands to reason it could be hard to figure out where the root word is amongst the long list of affixes.

But why doesn't Esperanto have this problem? Is it just because the roots are easy to recognize (if you're already familiar with a western European language)? Or is it that Esperanto has somehow managed to avoid the need to form words with long chains of affixes. If so, why was making long-winded compound words necessary in Volapuk but its hard to find a reason to in Esperanto?

Note that I don't know Volapuk, and I only know the utmost basics of Esperanto. I've never actually used the language at any point in time. But I've seen more examples of affix-heavy words from Volapuk than I have from Esperanto (the only Esperanto example I even know of is 'malsanulejo').

# Answer
Esperanto phonotactics was never as restrictive as Volapük's. Its prefixes (including prepositional prefixes) are mostly not CV but CCV or VC, and its stems often enough begin or end with consonant clusters. So morphological boundaries are often easy to tell.

Moreover Esperanto initially avoided stem endings for multisyllabic stems that might be ambiguous with suffixes. Hence *banquet* becomes *bankedo*, not *banketo*, for fear of ambiguity with *bank-eto* "little bank".

Esperanto initially did pursue agglutinativity aggressively, and I'm not sure that it was less enthusiastic about doing so than Volapük. But *malsanulejo* is indeed exceptional for Esperanto.
> 2 votes

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Tags: esperanto, volapuk
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# Question
Title: Can a conlang be used for machine-machine communication?
On Wikipedia page we can read that constructed language is devised for human or human-like communication. Given the fact, that there are already some constructed language examples for human-computer communication such as Lojban, can constructed language be created by humans for machine-machine communication? Or it won't be a constructed language anymore?

One example could include a Droidspeak code (the fictional language spoken by droids).

# Answer
> 5 votes
## Yes, but why?

Constructed languages would be better for machine communication than natural languages because languages evolve based on how people use them but machines have some difficulties learning how to interpret those changes. With a fully constructed language, the machine can understand exactly what things mean because all of the rules and details are well document and not allowed to change through natural processes.

However, machines already communicate by sending data in specified formats; why would using a constructed language be beneficial in any way?

# Answer
> 5 votes
Rick Morneau has a conlang designed to be suitable as both a machine translation interlingua and as a medium of communication. And two Facebook AIs apparently spontaneously constructed their own mutual language. FWIW.

# Answer
> 4 votes
While it would technically be "possible" to design a human-modelled language for a computer, it's impractical; machines already communicate using sets of binary symbols, so to speak. Applications on a computer, for example, use an application binary interface (ABI) to relay information and call functions (etc etc) from one another. As there are many different ABIs that may or may not be mutually compatible, you can say that there already are several machine languages in active use, and many more extinct ones (by merit of their machines no longer being in use).

# Answer
> 1 votes
There is a constructed language, ROILA (RObot Interaction LAnguage) designed for human–robot interaction. I see no conceptual problem in using this language for robot–robot interaction as well and I can imagine the use of such a language instead of electronic impulses as a requirement for some challenges in robotics like football playing teams of robots.

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Tags: machine-communication
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title: Should Auxlangs have metaphors?

text:
# Question
Title: Should Auxlangs have metaphors?
Auxlangs are meant to be easily learnt/understood by the entire populace of the world, no matter their native language. So, they are constructed to be unambiguous and it's reference should have a one-to-one mapping to worldly objects/concepts.

**Doesn't having metaphors undermine the whole point of Auxlangs?** I mean a metaphoric phrase can have different meaning in different contexts, which leads to ambiguity.

# Answer
*Theoretically* you can eliminate metaphor, yes, but you are working *against human nature itself*.

Certain metaphors are exceedingly common and embedded in the very grammar of many languages (although their exact expression may vary), so in that regard, avoiding metaphor is extremely difficult because it's somewhat an inherent part of the human psyche. Either you will subconsciously integrate some of it, or your users will inevitably create some. Grammaticalization typically originates directly in widespread metaphor.

Your etymologies and extended meanings (because even in an auxlang, creating a root for *every* meaning is downright *exhausting*: there's a reason most auxlangs borrow at least part of their vocabulary!) are usually going to be metaphorical in some ways, whether from real languages or from otehr roots. Indeed, "metaphor" is an example: etymologically, the meaning is "carry over, transfer".

## Examples

Up is good, down is bad, quality is possession (hence the use of "have" for qualities and actions), individuals are samples ("a human has two eyes" is metaphor: you don't mean a *specific* human!).

**Time** is a major source of metaphor in this regard. Time usually moves from back to front. *Movement* is the key word: verbs of movements are extremely common expressors of time relations!

**The body is space**: using body parts to generate locatives is also a very common feature cross-linguistically, found in languages as distinct as Hebrew, Nahuatl and Swahili. The fact that virtually all languages in the world use body-relative directional (in front of, behind)... except for the aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr, well known for using only absolute directions.

**Fabrication is causation**: the use of verbs meaning "make, create, fabricate" as causative auxiliary is a common metaphoric transfer of the idea of creating an object to "creating" an action in something else.
> 11 votes

# Answer
Metaphors are based on shared cultural understanding. Here is one often quoted example of a metaphor from Shakespeare's *As You Like It*:

> All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances ...

Understanding this metaphor relies on the concept of 'theatre' being shared among the speakers. If you assume the word for 'stage' exists in your language, then that might indicate that this would be the case. So it depends on the reach of your language. In most cultures that regard themselves as 'civilised' you would probably find that something like theatre and plays exists, so this particular metaphor should be fine.

However, some metaphors can be so specific that even native speakers cannot understand them: *He kicked the issue into touch*. Unless you know about rugby, you are likely to not have a clue what the speaker is on about.

As you cannot really regulate the content of your language, but only vocabulary and syntax, you cannot stop speakers from using metaphors. It is the responsibility of the speaker to make sure they are understood by their target audience, so avoiding metaphors or culture-specific expressions/assumptions is generally a good idea, but it has to come from the speaker, not the designer. And the speaker will probably realise that very quickly when they fail to make themselves understood.

A conlang/auxlang is only a tool -- you cannot control how people use it.
> 6 votes

# Answer
If an auxlang did not have metaphors, it would soon acquire them if the auxlang in question were used as the world's second language. I doubt that there exists any community of sapient life forms that could not make comparisons between things, beings, and forces that happen to be dissimilar.
> 1 votes

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Tags: auxlangs, ambiguity, semantics
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# Question
Title: Organizing a lexicon in a logographic writing system
A little background before my question: I am an amateur in mid-development of a logographic *writing system*, not necessarily a whole language with phonetics. As I develop, I don't so much care about grammar, at least not yet. The language is heavily context-based, it requires you to have foreknowledge of the concepts it conveys, and ideas portrayed in the writing system are to be implied by the reader. It's memory-intensive, so you can't quite analyze it like, say, English, and determine its meaning through some roots or affixes. In a nutshell, virtually no grammar. No specific way to order your ideas, just implied context.

Ideas are distinguished by category: nouns, verbs, adjectives. (That should be used as a dominant identifier for the question yet to be asked)

Okay, that'll probably do it for background. My question is this: **Is there an advantageous method to sort and organize characters of a logographic system, specifically for *dictionary look-up*?** *(Given the properties I mentioned above.)*

My current method is just sorting by the *kinds* of ideas. Ex.: In the verb category, I may sort verbs whether they describe *positional* things, e.g., *to be underneath*, or *motional* things, e.g., *to run*, etc. For nouns, a similar system may be employed (haven't reached this point yet), as well as for adjectives.

However, I imagine that such an approach would/could create confusion. (Is an ice cream cake a cake or an ice cream? Why?)

Certainly, there must be other options I'm not seeing. This question, for example, seems to brush the idea just a smidgen, but it is centered largely on computer programs for organization. **For this**, I should specify that I am working entirely *on-paper*. Computerization is not an option quite yet. I am strictly searching for methods for organizing a kind of lexicon, entries similar to those arrayed in an English dictionary.

# Answer
Having a dictionary ordered by theme or idea is a good thing and it can carry you a long way in the design of your writing system.

For a more systematic approach, you need a way to order your logograms. Chinese sorting may be an inspiration for you. They identify a "radical" in each character, and than order by radical + number and order of additional strokes. The approach has the advantage that simpler characters (with fewer strokes, and probably more frequent usage) come before more complex ones.
> 6 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems, vocabulary
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# Question
Title: What's the purpose of vowels and consonants?
Other than making words easier to pronounce, is there any purpose to having the letters divided like this? Should they or a similar concept be added to a constructed language?

# Answer
> 6 votes
This is somewhat similar to "what's the purpose of odd and even numbers".

Looking at the sounds produced in human languages we can distinguish two different ways of articulation, one where sound waves are produced by the glottis, modulated in the vocal tract through opening of the jaw (open/closed) and position of the tongue (front/back), but otherwise pass through unrestricted.

The other type of sound does not depend on the glottis (whose action is optional), and an airflow is generated coming from the lungs, passing through the vocal tract; but this time, there are constrictions at various places of articulation, which modulate the frequency spectrum of the resulting sounds to produce significant differences. Depending on whether the glottis is active, these sounds can be classified as voiced or unvoiced.

The former are called vowels: they are always voiced, and are defined through the positions of jaw and tongue. The latter are consonants, and are defined through the place of the constriction (glottal, dental, labial, ...), the nature of the constriction (fricatives, stops) and whether they are voiced or unvoiced.

As it happens, you kind of need both kinds of sounds in a language to make it pronounceable. Just like you need odd and even numbers to do maths.

You can see this in syllables: a syllable has to have a vowel as its central element, and is surrounded by consonants. You can have different syllable structures: CV, VC, CVC, etc., and depending on language some structures are more common than others. But this is more of an emergent feature than some deliberate decision.

# Answer
> 3 votes
The purpose of vowels and consonants it to make up syllables. We just call the most prominent part of the syllable "vowel" and the the other sounds grouped around that core "consonants". Some sounds can be on both sides: There are languages where the liquids (l, m, n, r) can act as vowels, and some short vowels (i, u) can act as consonants usually named "glides" and given separate IPA symbols /j, w/.

For spoken languages produced the usual way, having vowels and consonants is a natural thing. But there are even natural languages without vowels and consonants: The sign languages around the world don't have an equivalent to this distinction.

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Tags: phonology, phonetics, vowels
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title: What is the meaning of ANADEW?

text:
# Question
Title: What is the meaning of ANADEW?
The acronym ANADEW is quite popular among conlang enthusiats, but what does it mean?

For an answer, I'd like to see not only an expansion of the acronym, but also some good usage examples.

# Answer
ANADEW means "a natlang already did it even worse" or "a natlang already did it, except worse". In essence you thought of a strange feature for your conlang, but there is actually a natlang that has that (or a very similar) feature and did it worse than it is in your conlang.
If, for example, Pythagoras had made a click conlang (which somehow survived one or two millenia) with simple and easy clicks, then the "discovery" of the Khoisan languages with very complex click systems (worse for Europeans) would have made an ANADEW case.
I don't think that's the best possible example, you can find a few more at https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/6yxo6k/anadew\_game/ .
> 12 votes

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Tags: terminology
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# Question
Title: How many active Klingon speakers are there?
I am well-aware of the fact that some people use Klingon in conversions at special conventions and events.

Is there an estimate about the number of Klingon speakers and how many of them are there?

# Answer
According to Wikipedia, about 20 or 30 fluent speakers

Another more interesting article, a bit more scholarly, mentions a wide variety of numbers per study.
> 3 votes

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Tags: klingon, speech-communities, statistics
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# Question
Title: How could a syllabary be adapted for a language with a complex syllable structure?
By definition, a syllabary has separate glyphs for each possible syllable (and usually unrelated or at least not systematically related ones for similar syllables, unlike alphasyllabaries). This obviously clashes in practicality with having complex syllable structure, leading to a large amount of possible syllables and therefore a large amount of symbols. How can this conflict be dealt with?

# Answer
Linear B is an interesting example for this:

> This system was apparently designed for a non-Greek language, as it did not fit the sounds of Greek very well. In fact, it is likely that Linear A was used to write the pre-Greek language of Crete, and the incoming Greeks adopted this writing system for their own use, but without changing how the system fundamentally works. In doing so, they developed "spelling conventions" to represent sound patterns found in Greek but not in the syllabary.
>
> First, there are many Greek sounds that are missing in Linear B signs, such as \[g\], \[kh\], \[gw\], \[b\], \[ph\], \[th\], and \[l\]. To solve this problem, signs for similar sounds are used instead: p-signs are used for \[p\], \[b\], and \[ph\]; k-signs are used for \[k\], \[g\], and \[kh\]; t-signs are used for \[t\] and \[th\]; q-signs are used for \[kw\] and \[gw\]; and r-signs are used for \[r\] and \[l\]. However, while this convention was likely easily understood by ancient Mycenaean scribes, it took modern scholars a lot of theoretical analysis and work, plus comparison with later Greek dialects and reconstructed Mycenaean words to rediscover how this system works

And more relevantly:

> Another inadequacy stems from the fact that Linear B signs usually represent Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllables, but the syllabic structure of Greek allows initial consonant clusters, ending consonants, and dipthongs. In the case of a syllable with a initial consonant cluster, individual consonants in the cluster are written by a CV sign whose vowel matches the vowel of the syllable. Therefore, for example, the word tri is written as ti-ri, and khrusos as ku-ru-so. In the case of ending consonant, the situation becomes more complicated. Ending consonants such as \[l\], \[m\], \[n\], \[r\], and \[s\] are not usually written, whereas other consonants such as \[k\] and \[p\] are written in a way similar to initial consonants.

So one way to represent consonant clusters in a syllabary is to pick a "dummy vowel" that gets read over when the word is pronounced, as in Linear B, or Japanese katakana when writing foreign words.

The question doesn't mention just how complex the syllable structure is; if it's not *too* complex, you can also do what Japanese hiragana does with the ん character and have a single character that represents a syllable-ending consonant. Or something like what Brahmi does for vowels and nasals, adding strokes and dots to represent them. Maybe if *kra*, *tra*, and *pra* are common syllables in your language, you could have a stroke that represents an *r* between the consonant and vowel, and add it to the characters for *ka*, *ta*, and *pa*.
> 12 votes

# Answer
The best solution to this is to not make your writing system syllabic if your language does not support the syllabic structure by having a low number of syllables.

I guess that one of the most commonly cited examples of a syllabic writing system is the Japanese katakana/hiragana system. Japanese phonology fits these systems *very* well because syllables are basically (C(y))V with the principal exception of syllabic *n* and the secondary one of ‘double consonants’ (まって — matte). Therefore, Japanese needs only around 50 distinct symbols for its syllabary. It made perfect sense to simplify complex Chinese characters to a reduced form carrying just a phonetic information.

On the other hand, languages such as German or English would be terrible choices for inventing a syllabary. Their syllable structures have very little constraints at all; basically anything is possible. Coming up with a syllabary would require many hundreds if not thousands of characters — to the point where it would be simpler and more consistent to create an ideographic writing system instead.

Take for example *to write*. In a syllabary, the symbol for *write* in *I write* would be the same as in *right (there)* or *you are right.* But then if you take *I wrote*, the *wrote* would be something completely different (yet with the same symbol as *rote memorisation,* I think?). *I have written* would use two symbols, neither of which has anything to do with the previous ones.

In an alphabetic or alphasyllabic system, there would at least be some visual resemblence between all those forms allowing for recognition. That’s also why English benefits from its extremely irregular (based on phonetics) spelling: meanings can be recognised based on writing and words with similar meanings are written similarly. Their common root is retained in a common spelling which is not possible in a pure syllabary.

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A language’s writing system will either have been developed by the language itself or have been copied and adapted from geographically close languages. Of course, it would be possible for a Germanic-type language with a highly variable syllable structure to adapt a syllabic writing system initially — but it is very highly likely that it will soon be improved in numerous ways until an actually working alternative has been found.

Instead of thinking how you can bring the two ends together, I would propose you think of which writing system actually makes sense for your language.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Both the Brahmic scripts and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics have a grapheme for "suppress this sign's inherent vowel".

This could get tedious with big clusters; also, if you're starting with a pure syllabary, you have to decide which vowel to suppress!
> 6 votes

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Tags: phonology, writing-systems
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