# Question
Title: From known languages, what are the expected features of a Generation Ship Language?
Pandorum is a generation ship movie. Generation ships are a fairly big sub-genre of sci-fi where people live for many generations in a ship while travelling to a distant star.

The movie Pandorum did not use a conlang at all, despite the ships residents devolving into a tribe of "primitive" natives. What sort of features would we expect to find after 1000 years of travel in space, using real world island languages as a guide?

# Answer
The idea that language would not change over 1000 years of travel in space is absolutely ludicrous. 1000 years ago was before *Middle English* existed. Massive amounts of language change can occur over such a long period of time. Even very conservative languages change significantly over such a long period of time. No language will remain unchanged after 1000 years. Based on natlangs, it's more likely than not that the language will not be mutually intelligible with its predecessor after 1000 years.

How exactly the language changes depends a lot on the details of the situation -- how multicultural is the ship? What is the lingua franca of the ship? How are other languages viewed relative to the lingua franca? If there is enough of a divide in where different languages are used (such as if everything for official purposes is in English but a great number of native, say, Spanish speakers speak Spanish with their families at home), you may end up with diglossia arising. If there are significant numbers of multilingual people on these ships, you can bet there will be a lot of borrowing from minority languages into the dominant language, at least in less formal contexts. As in real life, there may be stigma against using such borrowings.

Honestly, language change in this situation won't likely differ that much from language change anywhere else. A conlanger has a lot of freedom in how they want to deal with the diachronics in this situation. The only real difference is that you don't have any chance of outsiders suddenly arriving and bringing with them waves of loanwords. ...Well, at least, you *probably* don't.
> 24 votes

# Answer
It's worth noting that widespread literacy, availability of written materials and public education are capable of *greatly* slowing down rates of change in the standard language. Additionally, if the generation ship's inside are designed with an ecology (as some SF ships are, like Bernard Werber's *Le Papillon des étoiles* or Léo's *Centaurus*), you can't reasonably expect a shrinking of vocabulary about nature. Basically, in a 1000 years I'd expect changes, of course, but I'm not sure we have the comparison levels to characterize just how much chances are likely to actually occur because the rates of change of standard languages over such long periods of time (presuming no "dark age" occurs somewhere along the line) are currently simply not really known.

Case in point: literary French and English from 300 years ago are still pretty comprehensible today (Voltaire's first play was presented that year, Dafoe' *Robinson Crusoe* is from 1719...). Go to three hundred years before *that* and you're firmly in Middle French/English, which are definitely rather different beasts.
> 15 votes

# Answer
# Vocabulary Changes

### New words

The vocabulary can be expected to contain a few new terms or simpler ways of describing certain things that might be seen a lot or might be new, such as new star systems, stellar formations, etc. The words for some of these terms might already exist but shorter terms and compound nouns might come into play to make everyday speech in the Generation Ship a bit simpler.

### Lost words

In addition to new terms being added to the vocabulary, some terms may go out of use and become lost from the vocabulary; for example, certain things that might only be seen on a planet (like a tree for example, or a mountain). Terms for those might be lost because they would likely not be used very often if at all. Once the ship arrives and these concepts are explored again, new terms might develop, though they might be similar if the terms are created based on modifying and combining existing terms (tree might be "tall bush" and mountain might be "giant mound", for example).
> 14 votes

# Answer
More or less, the generation ship language will be a natural evolution of the languages brought in by the first generation (their common language probably being something similar to L2 English).

Some things will be spacy: They need a new system of orientation in 3D space with lack of gravity or artificial gravity at work, directions like up, down, east, north, west, and south are no longer meaningful. They will also develop some slang with respect to parts of their space ship and forget all the vocabulary about geographical features on earth.

EDIT: The space ship is probably operating with an air pressure that is significantly lower than on earth, corresponding to an altitude of 1000 or 2000 m. In this case, the space ship language may acquire ejective consonants (For a correlation between altitude and ejective consonants, see Caleb Everett's work "Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065275 )
> 11 votes

# Answer
My guesses would be that it evolves towards one of two extremes:

1. less morphology, fixed word order - this is what happened to English. Dropping cases and most inflections, but having a stricter word order to compensate for the loss of morphological markers.
2. more morphology, freer word order - not sure if that actually is realistic. It's harder to invent new inflections than to drop them, and unless there is a flourishing poetry scene (perhaps to battle boredom), there wouldn't be too much reason for making word order less strict.

Most languages seem to navigate a path between those extremes, but that would mean it'd just become a different language altogether.

Looking at some real-life examples is tricky, as Latin -\> French/Spanish/... for example had lots of interference from other languages and external events. In general I would think the language becomes simpler. It's a closed community, so changes can spread quickly and are not a hindrance to understanding. The environment is fairly static, so you don't need complicated phrases to refer to things.

One aspect would be communicating with the ship's computer (assuming a natural language interface) or texts. But you could think that a 'priest' class develops which does that communication and preserves the 'old' language. A bit like the Vatican with Latin.

Word meanings would probably change, as there are many words but only a limited number of things that need to be named; words would probably be re-used, or acquire new additional meanings.

Some things that won't change are the underlying distributional laws of language. There will still be a number of high-frequency short words that make up most of the active vocabulary. Zipf's law will still apply. The relationship between phoneme inventory and average word length will also remain: fewer phonemes will result in longer words. Short words will be more polysemous than long ones. But overall language will adapt to it's purpose, communication, in the given environment. If there are no trees, then the word *tree* might suddenly refer to an antenna. Or *grass* might be used to mean "an area of metal flooring that is slippery when wet".
> 11 votes

# Answer
I'll assume here that the generation ship in question's mission is a resounding success: the inhabitants were not attacked by huge insectile aliens that enslaved them all; the Computer did not rise up and shut out its erstwhile masters, leaving them to fend as best they could in a decaying piece of technology. No, society not only survived but thrived and the people who set foot on their new homeworld have at their command all the accumulated knowledge and technology they brought with them.

In this scenario, there will, I think, actually be very little change in the language spoken on board the generation ship. Whatever interlanguage the first generation brings aboard (likely English) will be the language of general communication among all the inhabitants of the ship. Education will be carried out in English, though programmes will be in place to teach "ancestral" languages brought on board as well. And of course, the homes of firstgen folks will resound with their own native languages.

As subsequent generations are educated (in English), familiarity with other languages will fade. Since this project, while still Earthbound, brought together the best and brightest and well educated to begin with, their level of comfort with English will be high regardless of their cradle tongues. Because running a generation ship requires a huge commitment in education (sciences, mathematics) & experience (astrogation, complex technological subsystems), communications skills will be highly prized. Just as with Modern Standard American, the nature of life & culture aboard ship will tend to keep a fairly strict standard language in place. We're basically looking at a situation where everyone is highly literate and most likely cross-trained in several disciplines ánd certainly likely trained in one or more "traditional" crafts, artforms or skillsets.

This is not to say that jargon won't arise or that English will all of a sudden stop borrowing words from other languages! Far from it. By the time we get to journey's end, I'd speculate that *lastgens* will be quite able to understand the recorded speech and song of *firstgens* and that their languages will be not much different at all.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Others have mentioned that vocabulary for things not seen in space might vanish, and @HyperNeutrino mentioned that new terms might arise if the ship reaches a planet.

New terms might come into existence as metaphorical references to things that the colonists were familiar with on the ship. Just like we refer to "folders" and "files" on a computer or speak about "surfing" the "net" (using older terms to metaphorically refer to newer things that needed terms), generation ship colonists newly landed on a planet might refer to a land vehicle as a "shuttlecraft" or "capsule", call their political leader a "captain", or refer to the death penalty as "being thrown out of an airlock" (even if the actual means of execution becomes something else). Today we sometimes refer to uploading files as "posting" them. Our colonists might rediscover physical message boards but refer to posting notes on them as "uploading".

There could be a wider cultural effect too that expands to include both linguistic and non-linguistic features. If colonists are used to a shipboard timekeeping system that is detached from astronomical phenomena, or that is based on astronomical phenomena only visible from elsewhere in the universe, they might continue using it after landing on a planet despite the presence of astronomical phenomena that could be used to construct a calendar. Consider how the Apollo astronauts on the Moon continued to use Earth-based timekeeping metrics even though they could have adopted some sort of "Moon time" based on the cycle of the Lunar day and/or the apparent rotation of Earth in the sky. This sort of phenomenon could cause holidays to "rotate" throughout the seasons of the new homeworld in a similar way that dates defined in Earth-based lunar calendars (e.g. Ramadan) can occur in any solar season. Perhaps the new colony world has a year that is half that of Earth, so Christmas now comes every *other* northern hemisphere winter, or the year is twice as long as Earth's, so the colonists celebrate Christmas at the beginning of winter and again at the beginning of summer.

See Robert Heinlein's *Orphans of the Sky* for some examples of how this might look.
> 6 votes

# Answer
A generation ship is a small society that is technologically advanced but stagnant. It's a society that depends on ancient wisdom to survive. Their material and intellectual resources are very limited compared to the civilization they came from, so the rate of scientific and technological advancement will be slow. Most of their efforts in those fields must go into maintaining a sufficient understanding of the ship and the science behind it to keep the systems operational.

For similar reasons, most of the entertainment the people consume will be from the civilization of their origin. Some new entertainment will be produced, but in limited quantity and with lower production values.

Because of limited resources, I would expect that everyone on board would be bilingual. There would be an everyday language that would drift and evolve, as others have already discussed. There would also be the ancient language of entertainment, higher education, and operations manuals that would remain static by necessity.

Bilingual people tend to mix the languages when talking with each other. This would make the evolution of the everyday language different from what we have seen on Earth. Because the original language would still be in active use, the everyday language would sometimes drift away from it and sometimes be influenced by it.
> 6 votes

# Answer
The particular circumstances on a generation ship will work in several directions. Some accelerate language change, some slow it down.

* **Accelerating**: Language is used to create identity. The first, most important and biggest tribe are the ship's crew and passengers (if such a distinction is made). They will start to set themselves apart through names for themselves versus the planet dwellers.
Within the ship, different sub-tribes like engineers, gardeners, educators etc. will create respectively continue to develop their own slang in order to set themselves apart from other groups. The urge to set themselves apart is greater because the ship packs many people in a comparatively small space, creating a need to draw virtual borders.
* **Accelerating**: Groups with lots of spare time (which I suppose our space travelers will have) generally devote some of it to developing sophisticated tastes, fads and fashions, thus creating in-groups; their language evolution is interacting with these identity functions. Individuals who are unable or unwilling to speak "their slang" (and wear their hair cut, and posture ...) are marked as "not belonging to them". To a degree this happens in every generation of teenagers. But we can see that also on a larger scale in the development of the aristocratic French, or the fast-paced development of the politically correct speech in the United States.
* **Slowing down**: There will be constant communication between all individuals of the ship through some kind of publications and messaging as well as personal conversation, given the necessary physical proximity and the need to cooperate during the mission (no group will be able to isolate themselves). This will ensure that there will continue to be a single *lingua franca*, fads and fashions not withstanding. Some people may learn and teach other languages for scientific, identity, hobby and nostalgic reasons, but they all will be competent in the main language. An important driver of the evolution of this language will be the slang of the youngsters, as always.
* **Slowing down**: The generation ship will probably communicate via radio with the planet they came from; but most communication will be internal, partly because after a while communication with the home planet will not be real-time any more. The generation ship will form an isolated, small community. Such communities, like the Amish in America or the German settlers in Romania, are known to preserve customs and language longer than the bigger communities thy split off of. We can assume that the ship receives entertainment from the home planet, like music, movies and written prose. Thus they will keep in touch with the language on the home planet; whether that ongoing contact is sufficient to keep the language on board from running its own course I don't know.
> 4 votes

# Answer
It depends. There are two extreme possibilities. I would expect the real situation to be somewhere in between.

One extreme happens when the population of the generation ship just speaks a random language, or several. And when it either does not bring a large library or somehow manages to lose or forget it (e.g. due to religious extremism).

In this case there will be natural language change. Here are some things that fuel language change:

* The desire of a younger generation to assert their identity linguistically gives rise to youth language. As they grow older, part of their youth language becomes standard.
* Unstressed syllables are pronounced less and less carefully, giving rise to phonetic changes. E.g., several distinctive vowels may merge into a single neutral vowel when unstressed. Vowels or consonants may even get lost.
* The desire to express ourselves drastically in certain situation gives rise to new rules of grammar. E.g., this is how the future tense and the progressive aspect in English arose. (Neither existed in Proto-Germanic.)
* As a word or expression is used increasingly in a specific sense, sometimes it is no longer appropriate to use it in its original sense. This drift of meaning then creates a gap that will likely be filled by a new word or expression or by initiating a similar process for another, existing one.

All of these factors exist on a generation ship. As ohwilleke pointed out, two other factors - changing environment and contact with other languages (which also evolve) do not exist on a generation ship. (At least in the long run. Of course the first few generations will adapt their vocabulary and probably even grammar to the unique situation. E.g., some Australian languages use compass directions or geographical directions w.r.t. a specific valley instead of left and right. Something equivalent would make even more sense on a generation ship.) Therefore we can expect this language change to be really slow. Ohwilleke's example of Iceland gives us an idea of what to expect. If the ship's population starts with English, then after 1000 years they have a good chance to understand today's English to some extent. (To a greater extent if they continue reading books in today's English.)

Since, realistically, a generation ship to Alpha Centauri would be travelling for many thousands of years, without further stabilising factors we can expect that they would arrive speaking a language that is at most vaguely similar to the one they started with. I would not expect this language to have unusual features compared to languages currently spoken on Earth. There might, however, be some grammatical structures related to the special situation on the ship. And there might also be a large number of irregularities, as is often the case for languages of small speaker communities.

A generation ship will probably bring a large library. However, if the population had unrestricted access to it, this might lead to a society that basically lives in the past and will be unable to settle a new planet. But in any case I would expect that some people on board continue to learn Earth languages so they can understand part of that library. Depending on the precise circumstances, this could be a stabilising factor or even fuel language change due to different Earth languages being fashionable at different times.

A civilisation that wants to control the language spoken by the settlers of a distant planet will have to turn linguistics from a descriptive science into a field of engineering. They may be able to create a language that is a lot more stable than any naturally occurring language. This doesn't mean there is no change at all, but it means that significant change is normally cyclic.

Language change is already largely cyclic in terms of high-level features of languages. E.g., if a language does not have a past tense, then a composite tense like present perfect will likely come up to fill this gap. The auxiliaries will then merge with the verbs that carry the meaning, becoming suffixes or prefixes. They will slowly lose stress, become unrecognisable as auxiliaries, become indistinguishable from each other and finally will disappear, so that the language again doesn't have a past tense.

For an isolated speaker community, it might be possible to come up with a language A such that after one such cycle a language B results that is mutually intelligible with A to a strong degree. Now the speakers of B will likely read a lot of the literary output of the speakers of A, leading to further stabilisation.

Extending this idea, we one might come up with a family of languages that *could* in principle have cyclically evolved out of each other. Say half a dozen such languages. By providing an extensive and stimulating library in all of these languages, it could be possible to make language evolution essentially cyclic throughout the flight, so that at the end everyone will be speaking a variation of one of the library languages (possibly an intermediate stage). But it also seems likely that this would lead to a multilingual situation (with several library languages spoken simultaneously), so that one would also have to consider contact effects between these languages. And, perhaps more importantly, to conscious efforts to create linguistic innovations that are not represented in the library.

Note: I arrived at these last thoughts from a different angle. In the extreme case, success of an international language such as Esperanto would mean that everybody in the world speaks Esperanto and only Esperanto. But this is not a stable situation, at least not with an essentially random language such as Esperanto. So I thought about whether there can be a language that would remain the only language spoken on Earth once it managed to get to that point.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I recently read an interesting essay – wish I could remember where – saying that the more insular a language community is, i.e. the less likely someone is to converse in that language with a stranger, the less it uses syntactic complexities such as relative clauses, because you don't need to clarify your context if your interlocutor already shares most of your context.

If that's true, the effect is likely to show if the ship's population stays within a small multiple of the Dunbar limit. Such simplification might in turn allow word order to become more free, I think.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I found a (rather new) publication on this theme, namely

McKenzie, A., & Punske, J. (2020). Language Development During Interstellar Travel. Acta Futura, (12), 123–132. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.3747353

The publication is rather high-level invoking analogies to the Polynesian explorers, the Malagasy language, and the Balkan Sprachbund.

I became aware of this by the following blog post:

https://diaryofdoctorlogic.wordpress.com/2020/07/09/resolution-read-week-28-space-travel-and-language-change/
> 1 votes

# Answer
I'm sort of bemused that every answer I've seen has seemed to overlook the rather large elephant in the room.

Data is among the cheapest, most storage efficient things you can carry. Plugged into my computer at this moment is a 512 GB thumb drive. It is, in its (thick) protective case, 50mm long, 20mm wide, and 10mm thick.

This is a generation ship, made by a technologically advanced culture. Let's assume, for simplicity and practicality's sake, that everyone is fluent in one common language. Just for the hell of it, let's say English. And so, to keep people entertained, not only written material is provided but recordings. Lots and lots of recordings. Music. Movies. Documentaries. Learning material. TV shows.

Assume they provide the material in 720p resolution, so not quite full HD but better than standard. You'll get about 3.5 hours per gigabyte. Rounding off at 500GB of data, my perfectly ordinary thumb drive has a capacity of roughly 1,750 hours of audiovisual recordings. That's *over 10 weeks* of video. That's every Marvel Cinematic Movie released so far repeated 35 times. That's 2,500 "one hour" (ie, 42 minutes) North American television episodes. On a single drive.

There is a box beside my desk that is abut 100x150x300mm in size. I could stick about 450 of my thumb drives in there. That's 225,000GB, or about 787,500 hours of video. That's *ninety years* of video. All in something the size of a small box easily picked up by one hand.

So, one thing we could safely assume, if no one is trying to censor the material for some reason, and putting aside the stability of storage media, since if we're talking a long duration ship and everything is still working is probably a mostly solved problem, the people on board may well have access to a ridiculous amount of recording of people talking, and they're going to grow up with it.

There's not going to be any argument over how people talked a 1000 years before. No equivalent discussions over whether someone pronounced *vici* as "veechee", "weechee", "veekee" or "weekee" because ***they will know***. They'll know about different accents and how people pronounced vowels and consonants and how the written was different from the spoken because they can literally see and hear it first hand. It is what they will learn from because they grew up with it, just as their parents learned it, and their parents, and their parents.

Everyone proposing the language will radically change in this scenario, *how?*

You can't use a historical example of how much a given language has changed over a few centuries to make your argument because you are ignoring the fact that audiovisual recordings fundamentally alter how people communicate and never existed during the time spans your examples are going to cover. You can't cite historical precedent regarding language change because there isn't any. The situation we've been in over the last century and a bit in terms of communication is entirely unprecedented in the history of the freaking planet, let alone our species.
> 1 votes

# Answer
# Short Answer

The language used on a generation ship would change very little over the course of the journey despite its 1,000 year duration.

# Long Answer

Contrary to widespread conventional wisdom, language drift is very modest over long periods of time in the absence of specific environmental or language contact experiences the cause a language to change over time.

One of the best historical comparisons is the Icelandic language. It is almost unique in experiencing very little language contact or mass migration for a very long period of time. (In contrast, for example, Old English arose from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a linguistically Celtic and Latin speaking island, and Middle English arose as the main modification in the wake of England's conquest by a French speaking Normal elite and England was extremely involved in contacting other civilizations globally as part of its diplomatic, trade and cultural interactions with Europe and as a result of its global empire.)

Iceland was an uninhabited island (hence not subject to any substrate influences unlike many other colonists) settled in the historic era by colonists who spoke a single shared language fairly close to "Old Norse" (the proto-language of the Germanic languages), who had a total population similar to that of a generation ship.

Somewhat more subtly, Iceland's colonists were looking for economic opportunities, rather than constituting a cultural minority fleeing persecution in their homeland the way, for example, that the Puritan colonists of New England were, so they were not motivated at the outset to intentionally set out to put linguistic and cultural distance between themselves and the speakers of their original mother tongue the way that early Americans deliberately attempted to distinguish themselves linguistically from England to assert a distinct cultural identity. The Iceland situation of a group of people not committed ideologically to putting cultural distance between themselves and their ancestor population would likely also be true of the people on a generation ship.

The descendants of the original colonists of Iceland remained in constant communication with each other ever after, just as generation ship residents would, although this did break up from a single community into about a dozen or so chiefdoms that were substantially autonomous from each other and had distinct identities although they did retain a very thin form of island-wide weak government. So, tribal divisions, per se, do not distinguish a generation ship from Iceland.

And, Iceland received almost no significant waves of migration prior to the recent past, so it has never had a large community of outside language learners to influence its linguistic development (just as would be the case in a generation ship).

While Iceland wasn't as isolated from other people as generation ship would be, for a period of time roughly equal to the length of a generation ship journey prior to the introduction of telecommunications, Iceland was very isolated from the rest of the world, and the vast majority of what little contact it did have with the rest of the world from visiting ships was with people who spoke the closest linguistic relative of their language in the world. So, it did not have any languages from which to borrow words, and it was not subject to any areal effects from neighboring languages in a significant way (apart from Danish rule whose effect is noted below).

Icelandic is by far the most linguistically static of the Germanic languages, with the only significant change being a change in pronunciation that arose during a several century period of Danish rule, a country that speaks a closely related by different language derived from Old Norse. A generation ship would not experience this outside influence and would not need to develop a new written language as Iceland did.

As Wikipedia explains (at the link above):

> The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise the historical works and the eddaic poems.
>
> The language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. The Dano-Norwegian, then later Danish rule of Iceland from 1536 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic (in contrary to the Norwegian language), which remained in daily use among the general population. Though more archaic than the other living Germanic languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th to the 16th century, especially in vowels (in particular, á, æ, au, and y/ý).
>
> The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard established in the 19th century, primarily by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask. It is based strongly on an orthography laid out in the early 12th century by a mysterious document referred to as The First Grammatical Treatise by an anonymous author, who has later been referred to as the First Grammarian. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-creation of the old treatise, with some changes to fit concurrent Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of k rather than c. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used much in later centuries. Rask's standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of je and the removal of z from the Icelandic alphabet in 1973.
>
> **Apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts were written on vellum. Modern speakers can understand the original sagas and Eddas which were written about eight hundred years ago.** The sagas are usually read with updated modern spelling and footnotes but otherwise intact (as with modern English readers of Shakespeare). With some effort, many Icelanders can also understand the original manuscripts.

Also, usually new vocabulary is developed in response to new topics of conversation. Since the environment would change less and there would be fewer new things on a generation ship than in Iceland over the same time period (in part, due to a generation ship's lack of trade with the outside world that Iceland had) one would expect there to be less innovation in vocabulary on a generation ship than there was in Iceland. Still, as noted by @Hyperneutrino one might expect words that residents of a generation ship have no reason to use to be lost early on from popular speech (although presumably written sources would still preserve the old words for those so inclined, as a generation ship's residents would not be illiterate and written languages stabilize spelling and prevent old words from dying completely), and there would be a few new words developed over time.

Another clue with which I have first hand experience, which corroborates the example of Iceland, is the development of motherland languages in immigrant communities. For example, the dialect of Korean spoken in Korean immigrant communities in the U.S. that formed shortly after the Korean War is much more similar to the dialect spoken at the time of migration than the dialect of Korean currently spoken in South Korea, notwithstanding the fact that there have been many visits to South Korea and there has been access to modern Korean television and music in that time period in the U.S. Small, relatively isolated communities are simply much less linguistically innovative than large communities that are strongly connected to neighboring communities that speak different languages.

In summary then, it is likely that the language of a generation ship would be extremely static over a period of approximately 1,000 years, because generally speaking it would be in conditions very similar to those of Iceland which historically has had an extremely static language over a similar time period under similar conditions. And, several of the factors that are know to have led to the modest changes between Old Icelandic and Modern Iceland over that time period would be absent on a generation ship.
> -2 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, diachronics, naturalism
---


# Question
Title: Could you have a language with only three words?
**Don't immediately dismiss this!** Just give me a moment to explain and you might realize it's an idea that might have merit, especially considering the question title is a little misleading. Also, I'm no conlang or linguistics expert, so if there's a couple small things I got wrong but don't necessarily make this impossible, especially if fixing it might make it possible, correct me in the comments and I'll integrate it into my question to make the question something that can actually be answered.

Could you construct a language--or, at least, a grammar system--with only three words? OK, so first of all, "word" is not the proper term for what I'm trying to say, but I don't know of a term that fits. So. When I say three words, I mean three combinations of consonants and vowels that morphemes can be derived from. From now on, though, I'm going to refer to them as "words", just because it's the only term that vaguely fits. Again, don't dismiss me immediately. Let me explain my idea, and then please critique it.

The three base words would each have particular consonants and one particular vowel, in the structure 1v2v3 (where v represents the vowel, and the numbers represent the three consonants). For a silly example, let's say the three words are:

**Sazar**: Fire (s, z, r; a)

**Kitiv**: Lie (k, t, v: i)

**Lomon**: Truth (l, m, n; o)

(If I were to actually construct this language, I would *definitely* use different base words, but let's stick with these for the sake of example.)

There are thirteen distinct combinations of these letters to be derived from these words (1, 2, 3, v, 1v, 2v, v2, v3, 1v2, 2v3, v2v, 1v2v, v2v3), and that's without rearranging the letters at all. If you allow for rearranging letters, there are thirty-one distinct combinations (if I did my math right). Including the original "word", it's thirty-two.

All these combinations templates can result in 96 different roots/suffixes/prefixes/morphemes/etc. If you somehow made each combination represent some kind of modifier that can be made to a root word, could you construct, if not a language, then at least a grammar system, this way?

For example, if we made v3 represent plurality (-iv=singular, -on=plural, -ar=dual) and v2 represent person (-it=first person, -om=third person, and -az=second person) then that could be the conjugation for the language, giving you:

**I**: -itiv

**You**: -aziv

**He/She/It**: -omiv

**We**: -iton (or -itar for special, dual cases)

**You pl.**: -azon (or -azar for special, dual cases)

**They**: -omon (or -omar for special, dual cases)

Then, -omiv could be extended using v1, which would represent gender (-as=neuter, -ik=female, -ol=male). Using this, the conjugation for he would be the way-too-long-for-conjugation "-omivol".

You could make a modifier for roots that determine whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective, and you could also have the three tenses (it's fascinating how much language fits into groups of three) and make cases using combinations of the vowels and consonants, and you would have to stretch some things for prepositions, but maybe instead of having prepositions be words, you could make this an entirely written language and use visuals to convey prepositions (essentially making sentence order influence the physical positions of the objects the words refer to, instead of the grammatical meaning of the words).

I would probably need to create a couple (or many) other roots that the modifiers would be added to (or at least start with more flexible words than fire, lie, and truth), but could I at least base the grammar system off of only the three original words and modifiers derived from those three words?

I don't see any obvious issues with this language, besides long words, but I would appreciate it if more experienced conlangers could critique this. Also, if there are no issues with a conlang with only the grammar based on the three base "words", what about an entire language, where you could only build basic words by combining roots based on the three base words? This would limit the number of morphemes you could use for grammar, which might be an issue if there are a certain grammatical components every language needs and there aren't enough morphemes for all the components.

# Answer
After seeing a lot of different things thrown out there, I've decided to take a shot at this one. I think what you are suggesting is totally possible and plausible. The confusion of answers arises from that fact that a "word" can be defined in a couple different ways.

One reputable definition which allows for your proposed linguistic system is found in the Collins Dictionary:

> A word is a single unit of language that can be represented in writing or speech. In English, a word has a space on either side of it when it is written.

By that definition, you have designed three possible "units" which can be assigned the title "words" legitimately, and your language system works.

On the other hand, you have other possible definitions, such as that found in Meriam Webster:

> A speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use

If you opt for that definition (which some people do by default), it's a bit harder to stretch "word" to define what you're talking about. One of your proposed "words" communicates no inherent meaning, and *is* necessarily divisible into smaller units. Of course, it's a bit ambiguous, and one could argue that this definition of "word" obfuscates the nature of compound nouns etc.

---

In short, I would answer, **"It depends."** If you define a word simply as a unit of speech separated by spaces, you're all set. Other linguists might argue however that you ought to define the different "words" as different *classes* of words, with the organization of the letters defining words. And since you're inventing the language, I guess you can set the rules. ☺
> 4 votes

# Answer
If you really mean "morphemes" or "phonemes", then yes, of course you could design your language this way. One straightforward example is the Morse code, composed of three symbols - dot, dash, pause. If you e.g. represent the dot and dash vocally as two different sounds (different duration, different pitch or whatever, or even the traditional *dit* and *dah*), you can plausibly claim your language has only two phonemes (Though I would call it only a code of the main language it is used to encode, since it lacks its own grammar and vocabulary. But then, there are Q-codes, so nothing is absolute.).

If you want to use three *syllables*, it would be even easier - after all, Solresol manages with just seven, and Marr's theory claims all (European?) the languages originate from just four syllables (but that is very much a pseudoscience, most famously debunked by no one else than J. Stalin)
> 3 votes

# Answer
From an information theory point of view, you can express anything if you have at least two signs: computers do this through the use of binary, where the signal is either "on" or "off", or "1" or "0". If you have a "message" with just one bit of information, you can express two meanings, which are "on" or "off". If you want to express more complex ideas, you need a longer message. For example, if you want to express the decimal numbers from 0 to 15 in binary, you need at least four bits to represent them.

We as people have created a system where we know beforehand what the bits mean when we send and receive them. So if we send a message consisting of four binary digits, e.g. "0010", then we know that that means the number "2", because that's the convention we've agreed upon.

So you could certainly expand this principle by using three signs instead of two, and use conventions and codes to create meanings. The snag is that the complexity of the message would increase massively. For example, if I want to write the word "message" in English, I only need a total of seven symbols, and each symbol can be one of 26 signs (the English alphabet.) If I want to write the word "message" in binary, however, it will look like this:

> 0110110101100101011100110111001101110011011000010110011101100101

Which is a considerably longer message, because I only have two signs to work with, not 26.

The other disadvantage is: you need a convention or a "code" which both the sender of the message (the speaker) and the receiver (the listener) to be understood before a message can be transmitted. If you saw the above binary sequence out of context, you would have no way of knowing it meant "message", because I haven't told you that it represents a sequence of ASCII characters. It could just be meaningless computer code, or a very large number, or part of a recipe for a salmon bake.

So you could theoretically create a language with three "signs" and combine them to make meanings. For example, if your words were "ka", "pi" and "ol", then you could have the following sequences:

```
kapi = woman
kapiol = man
olka = cat
olpipika = dog

```

And so on. But you would have two problems with such a language:

1. The complexity of each resulting "word" would vastly increase as you make the message longer, and
2. There's no obvious relation between your signs and your word, so you would have to make your messages understood by pre-existing codes, agreed between the speaker and listener.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I haven't (and won't) check your math, but you have defined a grand total of 96... I'll call them blocks. I'll take the position that a block represents a sufficiently new type of language element that it doesn't have an existing name already. Maybe they're a special case of morpheme or of something else, I don't really care. They're blocks, and there are 96 of them.

You allow for 96^2 and 96^3 combos, which is nearly 900,000 blocks or polyblocks. That's plenty of room to define a language. That's bigger than many lexicons, and you can certainly spare a large subset for grammatical functions. Chinese for example is said to have 50,000 characters --- yes those are graphemes and there's apples and oranges here, but you take the point.

Imagine a person who only speaks and writes Chinese and has no awareness that other languages even exist. One day they are told, you can write everything in a language using 26 letters and some punctuation and so forth, you can get away with old-school ASCII with a maximum of 256 graphemes! He'd think you're talking doo-doo kaka.

You could probably do it with a great deal less.
> 2 votes

# Answer
If this is a language, then it should be possible to express more than just three words. You would need to be able to say, for instance, "the dog bites the cat." Imagine that we derive dog from *sazar*, bite from *kitiv*, and cat from *lomon* by reversing the consonants. Using only the grammatical information from your post and making some assumptions about syntax, we could form this sentence as *razas vitikomivik nomol*.

Is this possible? If so, then this is a working language. However, once we define *razas* to mean "dog," then we already have more than three words. *Razas* isn't an inflected or declined form of *sazar*; it's a new word formed by derivation. Even meanings related to the original word are a form of derivation (so making *razas* mean "fire-creature" and using it for all animals still won't help). Once you create new words by derivation, the language has more than three words. In the language you described, every word is originally derived from three roots or base-words.

As you describe it, the language is entirely possible. There's an infinite number of morphemes in the three roots, if you allow for very long words and a lot of repetition. You have 96 syllables, so to use your possible syllables most efficiently, the 96 most common morphemes/words could have a syllable structure like *az* or *iv*, your 962 next most common morphemes like *azaz* or *aziv*, and your 963 next most common like *azazaz* or *azivaz*, etc. But your vocabulary has to be limited to make sure that your longer morphemes (e.g. *aziv*) not be confused with combinations of shorter ones (e.g. *az* \+ *iv*) allowed for by your agglutinative morphology when they're not intended to be the same morpheme.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Your terminology is a little strange, but it sounds like your suggesting something like the tri-consonantal roots of Arabic. For example, د ر س represent the idea of acquiring or giving knowledge. يدرس = to Study; يدرّس = to Teach. The only difference between these and the root is the adding of ي (an infinitive marker) to the start of the word and a ّ to 'to Teach' (which acts as doubling the ر). Vowels and subvowels go between the letters to change the meaning of the words.

Is that similar to what you're talking about or am I off the mark?
> 1 votes

---
Tags: writing-systems, unnatural-features, miniature-artificial-languages
---


# Question
Title: How do you determine a New Letter's sound?
I'm trying to create a new language, but I need some advice. How do you determine what a new letter sounds like? Is there a pattern, or do I just make it up?

# Answer
If you're designing a fully new language, it's usually better to pick phonemes (sounds) before even thinking about orthography. Writing should really come after even grammar.

If you're just designing a new writing system, then yeah, you just make it up.
> 5 votes

# Answer
There are many ways of approaching the art of language invention. Some folks devise phonologies (sound systems) first; some people prefer to fashion logographies (writing systems) first. Still others like to write out a snippet of a song or poem first and try to sort out what just happened...

Whichever way you prefer to go, the basic answer to your question, depending on your philosophy of language invention, will be either the *conlanger's* answer: you make it up -- or else the *glossopoet's* answer: you discover the relation from within the language itself.

For example, if you came up with this letter:

# **§**

you could either look through your chart and say: ah! that'll do nicely as the letter for \[v\]. Then it's just a matter of filling in the blank.

Or alternatively, you could delve into the history and culture of the people who speak the language and consider the prehistory of their writing systems (if any) and consider any sound symbology that might exist, and someone from that speech community might enter your dreams one night and teach you what sound that letter makes.

There may perhaps be a pattern: that too is something the conlanger will create or the glossopoet will discover along the way! Or there may not be a pattern at all.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: writing-systems, phonology
---


# Question
Title: What tools are there to make this alien language?
Probably already been asked before but here goes.

Stevefan has traveled through some sort of trans-dimensional breach made of handwavium to another dimension where the inhabitants don't speak English. What tools are there on the internet that could help me form this language?

I want to make the spoken language for these aliens based off of Spanish and something similar to Spanish, close enough together that if you know Spanish you can kinda-sorta piece together the general meaning of the sentence. I could try to do something like the Minions from *Despicable Me* did where they alternate language every few words, but that doesn't feel very alien to me, just confusing.

As for the written language I'm not too concerned about, it just needs to be a glyph based written language. If you know of a little-known language like this I could just use Google Translate for that so I'm not too worried there.

# Answer
Let's take modern Spanish Spanish and apply some nice natural sound changes to it, together with some plausible alterations to the spelling rules, and see what we get.

To begin with, let's take a Spanish text on which to apply the changes, so that in the end we have an example of Alien Spanish, with the goal of ascertaining that it is at the same time Spanish-like and alien enough. The chosen text consists of the first ten articles of the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as given by the Spanish Wikipedia:

* *Los hombres nacen y permanecen libres e iguales en derechos. Las distinciones sociales solo pueden fundarse en la utilidad común. La finalidad de toda asociación política es la conservación de los derechos naturales e imprescriptibles del hombre. Esos derechos son la libertad, la propiedad, la seguridad y la resistencia a la opresión. La fuente de toda soberanía reside esencialmente en la nación; ningún individuo, ni ninguna corporación pueden ser revestidos de autoridad alguna que no emane directamente de ella. La libertad consiste en poder hacer todo aquello que no cause perjuicio a los demás. El ejercicio de los derechos naturales de cada hombre, no tiene otros límites que los que garantizan a los demás miembros de la sociedad el disfrute de los mismos derechos. Estos límites solo pueden ser determinados por la ley. La ley solo puede prohibir las acciones que son perjudiciales a la sociedad. Lo que no está prohibido por la ley no puede ser impedido. Nadie puede verse obligado a aquello que la ley no ordena. La ley es expresión de la voluntad de la comunidad. Todos los ciudadanos tienen derecho a colaborar en su formación, sea personalmente, sea por medio de sus representantes. Debe ser igual para todos, sea para proteger o para castigar. Siendo todos los ciudadanos iguales ante ella, todos son igualmente elegibles para todos los honores, colocaciones y empleos, conforme a sus distintas capacidades, sin ninguna otra distinción que la creada por sus virtudes y conocimientos. Ningún hombre puede ser acusado, arrestado y mantenido en confinamiento, excepto en los casos determinados por la ley, y de acuerdo con las formas por esta prescritas. Todo aquel que promueva, solicite, ejecute o haga que sean ejecutadas órdenes arbitrarias, debe ser castigado, y todo ciudadano requerido o aprendido por virtud de la ley debe obedecer inmediatamente, y se hace culpable si ofrece resistencia. La ley no debe imponer otras penas que aquellas que son estrictas y evidentemente necesarias; y nadie puede ser castigado sino en virtud de una ley promulgada con anterioridad a la ofensa y legalmente aplicada. Todo hombre es considerado inocente hasta que ha sido declarado convicto. Si se estima que su arresto es indispensable, cualquier rigor mayor del indispensable para asegurar su persona ha de ser severamente reprimido por la ley. Ningún hombre debe ser molestado por razón de sus opiniones, ni aún por sus ideas religiosas, siempre que al manifestarlas no se causen trastornos del orden público establecido por la ley.*

1. (Spelling change) Replace *ce*, *ci* with *the*, *thi* (as they are pronounced): *nacen* $\rightarrow$ *nathen*, *sociales* $\rightarrow$ *sothiales* etc.
2. (Spelling change) The acute accent indicates the position of the dynamic stress when it falls in a place other than where it's expected:

* If the acute is on the last syllable before an *n* or an *s*, delete the acute and double the consonant: *ningún* $\rightarrow$ *ningunn*, *demás* $\rightarrow$ *demass*, *razón* $\rightarrow$ *razonn*. (It's not deleterious, since Spanish cannot have double consonants in that position.)
3. (Spelling change) Replace *ñ* with *ny* and *ll* with *ly*. (It could have been the chosen spelling, but wasn't.)
4. (Spelling change) Replace *qu* with *k* (or *c*, since by now we no longer have any possibilit of confusion); *que* $\rightarrow$ *ce*, *aquellas* $\rightarrow$ *acelyas* etc.
5. (Spelling change) Replace all *i*s and *u*s with *y* and *w* when they represent semivowels (also called glides, the less sonorous parts of diphthongs): *igual* $\rightarrow$ *igwal*, *cualquier* $\rightarrow$ *cwalcyer*.
6. (Spelling change) Delete initial and intervocalic *h*. (It is silent anyway.)
7. (Spelling change) Replace *ge*, *gi* with *hhe*, *hhi*, and then *j* with *h*: *ejecutadas* $\rightarrow$ *ehecutadas*, *ejercicio* $\rightarrow$ *eherthithyo* etc.

At this point we have regular Spanish with a somewhat novel, but yet still consistent, spelling. Let's go and apply some natural sound changes:

8. Replace endings in *-ad*, *-ades* with , *-ass*. (Italian did it, for the singular; in the plural, Italian keeps  unchanged.)
9. Delete final *-o*; in order to preserve the position of the dynamic stress, you must of course double the preceding consonant, as required by rule 2. (Romanian did it; we have *lup* for Spanish *lobo*, *tot* for Spanish *todo* etc.)

* If the word ends in *-wo*, replace with *-u*.
    * If the word ends in *-yo* (at this stage of the modifications), replace the *-o* with *-u*.
    * If the final *-o* is the only vowel in the word, replace with *-u*.
10. Replace final *-i* with *iy*, final *-e* with *i*, and final *-a* with *e*. (Old French did the last one.)
11. Now do the plurals: replace final *-os* with *-uy*. (Romanian went even further, but let's keep it Spanish-y.) Replace final *-es* with *iy*. Replace final *-as* with *ey*.
12. (Slight, if any sound change.) Consistently replace *vl* and *vr* with *br* and *bl*, and elsewhere consistently replace *b* with *v*.
13. Finally, replace clusters of two occlusives (also known as stops) with the second one doubled, as Italian did.

At this point we have:

* *Luy ombriy nathen yiy permanethen libriy i igwaliy en derechuy. Ley distinthyoniy sothyaliy soll pweden fundarsi en le utilidà comunn. Le finalidà di tode asothyathyonn polítice iy le conservathyonn di luy derechuy naturaliy i imprescrittibliy del ombri. Esuy derechuy son le livertà, le propyedà, le seguridà yiy le resistenthye e le opresionn. Le fwenti di tode soveraníe residi esenthyalmenti en le nathionn; ningunn individu, niy ningune corporathyonn pweden ser revestiduy di awtoridà algune ci nu emani direttamenti di elye. Le livertà consisti en poder ather tod acelyu ci nu cawsi perhwithyu e luy demass. El eherthithyu di luy derechuy naturaliy di cade ombri, nu tyeni otruy límitiy ci luy ci garantizan e luy demass myembruy di le sothyedà el disfruti di luy mismuy derechuy. Estuy límitiy soll pweden ser determinaduy por le ley. Le ley soll pwedi proivir ley acthyoniy ci son perhudithyaliy e le sothyedà. Lu ci nu está proividd por le ley nu pwedi ser impedidd. Nadyi pwedi versi obligadd e acelyu ci le ley nu ordene. Le ley iy expresyonn di le voluntà di le comunidà. Toduy luy thyudadanuy tyenen derechu e colavorar en su formathionn, see personalmenti, see por medyu di sus representantiy. Devi ser igwal pare toduy, see pare proteger u pare castigar. Syend toduy luy thyudadanuy igwaliy anti elye, toduy son igwalmenti elegibliy pare toduy luy onoriy, colocathyoniy yiy empleuy, conformi e sus distintey capathidass, sin ningune otre distinthyonn ci le creade por sus virtuss yiy conothimyentuy. Ningunn ombri pwedi ser acusadd, arrestadd yiy mantenidd en confinamyent, exthett en luy casuy determinaduy por le ley, yiy di acwerd con ley formey por este prescritey. Todd acel ci promweve, solithiti, ehecuti u age ci sean ehecutadey órdeniy arvitraryey, devi ser castigadd, yiy todd thyudadann receridd u aprendidd por virtù di le ley devi ovedether inmedyatamenti, yiy si athi culpabli siy ofrethi resistenthye. Le ley nu devi imponer otrey peney ci acelyey ci son estrittey yiy evidentementi nethesaryey; yiy nadyi pwedi ser castigadd sinn en virtù di une ley promulgade con anteryoridà e le ofense yiy legalmenti aplicade. Todd ombri iy consideradd inothenti aste ci e sidd declaradd convitt. Siy si estime ci su arrest iy indispensabli, cwalcyer rigor mayor del indispensabli pare asegurar su persone e di ser severamenti reprimidd por le ley. Ningunn ombri devi ser molestadd por razonn di sus opinyoniy, niy awunn por sus ideey religyosey, syempri ci al manifestarley nu si cawsen trastornuy del orden públic establethidd por le ley.*

Now, this is still sufficiently Spanish-y for a Romance speaker to be able to go through it, albeit slowly. It may or may not be sufficiently alien...

If still not sufficiently alien, continue sound changes:

* Replace intervocalic *r* with *rh* and intervocalic *s* with *r* (Latin did the latter).
* Replace *s* between vowels, or at the beginning of a word before a wovel, with *w* (Greek did it).

If still not alien enough, you may want to go through some chain shifts (as in Germanic for example).
> 6 votes

# Answer
If you need to have your language loosely based on another language, you're very limited in how you build it. You need it to sound familiar but different to native speakers of that language. There isn't a lot of ways to accomplish this, you need to keep your changes small. My advice would be to prepare "find and replace patterns" for the vowels and a few common words, leave most of the consonants as is, and just run them over the text and use that as a starting point.

Eg. I've chosen a really simple replacement map: A-\>E. E-\>I, I-\>O, O-\>U, U-\>A. I'm ignoring diacritics because I'm a heathen but you could take steps to ensure hard vowels remain hard and soft ones remain soft - especially at the end of words where they could add an extra syllable. Anyway:

> We come in peace, take me to your leader

In Spanish is

> Venimos en paz llévame con tu líder

Becomes:

> Vinomis in pez llivemi cun ta lodir

That should sound sort of familiar to Spanish listeners, but also kind of alien, and you wont be able to understand it in entirety first time.
> 3 votes

# Answer
You have a few options:

* They actually speak Portuguese, which although being similar to Spanish, is sufficiently different and incompatible to make them mutually unintelligible.
* The alien dimension was actually a rural area in Paraguay, possibly even an indigenous area, and its inhabitants speak Spanish as a second language and not fluently, with an accent, vocabulary and grammar strongly influenced by Guaraní (an indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay).
> 1 votes

---
Tags: tools
---


# Question
Title: How can syntactic ambiguity with pronouns be avoided?
Due to the way pronouns work in place of any particular noun (subject or object) in the sentence, this often leads to ambiguous grammatical constructions.

Take this phrase in English for example:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing

Do `him` and `his` refer to Adam (where James will help edit Adam's essay or give him suggestions) or James (where Adam is sending James an exemplar to help James see examples of good writing)?

How would ambiguities like this be avoided in constructed languages? I know a simple solution is to just eliminate pronouns from the language but is there an alternative solution to allow pronouns to be used unambiguously?

# Answer
Here are three options you might want to consider:

**Noun classes** assign each noun a class (well known examples include the gender systems of Indo-European languages, and also the more elaborate systems of Bantu languages). Having pronouns agree with the noun class of the nouns talked about greatly helps reduce ambiguity, though it would likely not help in your specific example with two male human participants.

**Obviation** is the system of having two distinct third person pronouns, one (the *proximal*) referring to the most salient (important, topical) referent and one (the *obviative*) to less salient ones. In your example, likely Adam would be the proximal, and James the obviative. There are nice examples on the relevant Wikipedia article.

A third option, which is to my knowledge only attested in signed languages is **Indexing**. This is basically the human language equivalent of variables in programming languages: a new variable, usually a location in the sign space, is assigned to every important referent, and referred to by pointing at the location or otherwise involving the location during signing of relevant words. I believe Lojban does something similar to this as well.
> 35 votes

# Answer
In addition to the options mentioned by Adarain and Jan, various **reflexives** and reflexive-like operations can often be of use in dealing with such situations. English already has some reflexives, providing some amount of disambiguation, Danish goes a little further has a compulsory reflexive/non-reflexive distinction in 3rd person possessives, and while the specific example you mentioned doesn't work well in translation, a similarly problematic sentence "Adam sent James his essay" can be easily somewhat disambiguated with this system:

> Adami sendte Jamesj **sin**i stil
>
> Adami sendte Jamesj **hans**j(/k) stil

It is possible for reflexive systems to be significantly more broad than this, rather than just referring to antecedents in the same clause, even if it's omitted via some other rule, e.g. in *"Jonh saw Adam and shot **himself** in the foot"*, where there is no overt reference to John in the second clause, because it's been omitted due to subject coreference (such deletion rules, when constraints are put on them is actually another way of reducing ambiguity, I have relatively recently written a rather long forum post on this which goes into much more detail about them), it's possible to have "**long-distance reflexives**" which take antecedents outside of the clause.

In Mandarin, the reflexive *ziji* can refer to both local and non-local antecedents in some cases:

> Zhangsan renwei Lisi kan-bu-qi ziji
> `Zhangsan think Lisi look-not-up REFL`
> *"Zhangsani thinks Lisij looks down on self**i/j**"*

Certain things block this though, for example shifts in perspective:

> Zhangsan renwei wo zhidao Wangwu xihuan ziji
> `Zhangsan think I know Wangwu like REFL`
> *"Zhangsani thinks Ij know Wangwuk likes self**\*i/\*j/k**"*

In Igbo, in complements of communication, entities that are coreferential with the source of information are marked by what is known as "**logophoric pronouns**":

> ọ́ sị̀rị̀ nà ọ́ byàrà
> `he said that he came`
> *"hei said that hej came"*
>
> ọ́ sị̀rị̀ nà yá byàrà
> `he said that LOG came`
> *"hei said that hei came"*

Gokana also has such a system, though the marking is on the verb, though the constraints on what can be coreferential are quite free:

> aè kɔ aè dɔ
> `he said he fell`
> *"hei said that hej fell"*
>
> aè kɔ aè dɔ-ɛ
> `he said he fell-LOG`
> *"hei said that hei fell"*
>
> aè kɔ oò div-èè e
> `he said you hit-LOG him`
> *"hei said that you hit himi*
>
> aè kɔ oò ziv-èè a gĩ́ã́
> `he said you stole-LOG his yams`
> *"hei said that you stole hisi yams"*

The wikipedia article on logophoricity goes into more depth.

It is also possible to have two different reflexives, requiring respectively local and non-local antecedents. Danish has a rather limited case of this in bare complements to perception verbs, where the two reflexives *sig* and *sig selv* which are usually either only different in level of emphasis or in complementary distribution, respectively require non-local and local antecedents:

> Holger hørte Peter tale om sig.
> *"Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himi."*
>
> Holger hørte Peter tale om sig selv.
> *"Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himselfj."*
>
> Holger hørte Peter tale om ham.
> *"Holgeri heard Peterj talking about himk."*

**"4th Person systems"** such as seen Eskimo languages are rather similar, though more general as they are used in all subordinate clauses are also another type of reflexive-like construction (the "fourth" person is often labeled 3R) and they are also used intraclausally in possessive marking. In all of these cases they mark that a participant or possessor is coreferential with the subject of the main clause (which is defined in terms of S/A despite the case marking being ergative). An example from Siberian Yupik:

> esghaghyagu quyaaq
> `see:CNSQ:3s>3s happy:IND.3s`
> *"when hei saw himj, hek was happy"*
>
> esghaghyamigu quyaaq
> `see:CNSQ:3Rs>3s happy:IND.3s`
> *"when hei saw himj, hei was happy"*
>
> esghaghyatni quyaaq
> `see:CNSQ:3s>3Rs happy:IND.3s`
> *"when hei saw himj, hej was happy"*

In addition to all these various reflexive constructions, **switch reference**, the overt marking of whether the "subject" is either the same or different, either between two coordinate clauses, or a subordinate and main clause can also resolve some ambiguity. Take for example this pair of sentences from Hua:

> ebgi-Ø-na korihie
> `hit-SAME-3sg.ANTICSU ran.away.3sg`
> *"hei hit himj and hei ran away"*
>
> ebgi-ga-na korihie
> `hit-3sg.DIFF-3sg.ANTICSU ran.away.3sg`
> *"hei hit himj and hej ran away"*

Switch reference can only deal with one set of coreference though what exactly is tracked varies. In some languages, it is specifically the actor that is tracked, while others may track the topic or some other pragmatically prominent NP, or may even differ in what is tracked in the controlling clause as opposed to the clause recieving the marking. Additionally the marking may occasionally also be sensitive to changes in things like time, place, discourse coherency and/or reality status, and as a result, switch reference may fulfill may other roles than simply dealing with ambiguity. This paper, particularly chapters 5 and 6, goes into quite a bit of detail about the highly varied and interesting usage of switch-ref in Papua New Guinean languages.
> 29 votes

# Answer
In addition to Adarain’s answer, the ambiguity can also be resolved in an out-of-the-box way. For example, English can use *the former* or *the latter* in place of an inflected form of *he* to distinguish between the two cases. Languages like German go a step further and would just use *this* instead of *the latter* in most cases. These words do not replace pronouns, they just complement them. This gives the nice feature of preserving a possible ambiguity where it is intended for poetic or dramatic purposes while removing it entirely where clarity is desired.

Another out-of-the-box way is to restrict the way in which such constructions can be constructed. Trying to think of how German handles the situation I realised that the sentence translated directly is unambiguous in German:

> Adam hat James seinen Aufsatz geschickt, um ihm beim Schreiben zu helfen.

The only way this can be interpreted is Adam helping James just by the way the grammar works. Adam is the sentence’s subject and the infinitive construction can only be tied to the subject. If you wanted James helping Adam, you need to work around by using a subordinate clause:

> Adam hat James seinen Aufsatz geschickt, damit er ihm beim schreiben hilft.
> 11 votes

# Answer
For a conlang, it seems like one other way to avoid ambiguity that I do not see noted in previous answers is to have **the language enforce grammatical rules** such that a pronoun must *always* refer to a specific type of referent. That is, consider these four possible types of grammar rules (they may be other rules a language may follow):

1. **A pronoun always refers to the last referent**, any mention of a prior referent must be renamed. So in your example, the grammar would remove the ambiguity as such a rule would refer to James in your original example:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing

And if Adam was the intent, then it would need to be one of these:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help Adam with his writing

or

> To James, Adam sent the essay to help him with his writing

2. **A pronoun always refers to the far referent when two referents are in view**, and is left off when the near referent is intended. So of James getting help, no pronoun is used, and the sentence would roughly translate simply as:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help with writing

But of Adam, the pronoun would be used:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing

3. **A pronoun always refers back to a subject**, never an object (which must be restated if intended). So of James:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help James with James's writing

Though I suspect something like #2 for James might be stated as well; or the language would form such a statement to place the main player in the subject position in a passive construction:

> James was sent an essay by Adam to help him with his writing

For Adam, it would be as you originally stated:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing

4. **A pronoun always refers back to an object**, never the subject (which is restated if intended). So of James it is as you already had:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help him with his writing

But for Adam, it might be this:

> Adam sent the essay to James to help Adam with his writing

Notice in that previous example by restating "Adam" as the object of "to help," it then put Adam in the most recent object position and allows for the "his" to then refer to Adam (who was also the subject).

So for some of these grammatical ways of reducing ambiguity, the sentence structure in the language becomes more important (which may or may not be desirable in the language one is constructing).
> 5 votes

# Answer
Here are some solutions, roughly in descending order of naturalness.

1. distance-specific determiners or inflections
2. topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic
3. switch-reference on nonfinite verbs
4. pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.

---

### 1 distance-specific determiners or inflections

You can solve this problem in a reasonably natural way using demonstratives or distance-specific determiners. This is similar to proximate and obviative pronouns, but not identical.

For instance, suppose all non-vocative uses of names require some kind of definite determiner. And suppose there are proximal and distal determiners ("this" and "that"). I'm also assuming that these determiners can form NPs without an accompanying noun, like in English.

then you could say something to the effect of

```
this Adam sent essay to that James to help that with that's writing.

```

There's a lot of variation in existing natural languages when it comes to contrasts in demonstratives. Some languages surface distinctions such as visibility (e.g. Malagasy) or audibility (e.g. Khaling, a Sino-Tibetan language from Nepal) or altitude/elevation.

---

### 2 topic-prominence and a dedicated pronoun for referring back to the topic

The reflexive pronoun solution described above normally tracks co-reference with the syntactic subject of the matrix clause.

If that solution is not flexible enough, you can track co-reference with the topic instead and explicitly mark the topic in some way.

For example, suppose James is the topic and TOP is the pronoun that refers to the topic. Let the postposition/clitic は mark the topic of a clause.

```
to James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.

```

Or you could do something like the following if you want は to obscure the role of the topicalized noun.

```
James は Adam sent essay to help TOP with TOP's writing.

```

As far as I know, no topic prominent natural languages actually do this.

---

### 3 switch reference on non-finite verbs

Switch reference marks whether the subject of a clause is the same as the previous clause or not. Suppose each verb is marked SS for same subject or DS for different subject. I'll assume utterance-initial words are marked with `DS`.

This requires some care in defining what exactly "previous clause" means.

```
Adam sent.DS essay to James to help.SS him with his writing.DS .

```

so in this sentence, `sent.DS` marks that `sent` is in an utterance-initial clause. `help` receives a same subject marker because `help` and `sent` have the same subject, sort of, and writing has a `DS` marker because James is writing, not Adam.

Getting the details right on how exactly you want pervasive switch-reference to work might be a bit tricky.

---

### 4 pro-forms incorporating some feature such as the first sound of a word.

Suppose you have some forms consisting `some constant` \+ `ona`, which can refer back to a noun beginning with that particular consonant sound (or `ona` itself if the word begins with a vowel). Then you can do something like:

```
Adam sent essay to James to help JONA with JONA's writing.

```

the choice of `JONA` over `ONA` means that James is the one whose writing we're attempting to improve.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I was thinking about the ease of Blissymbols in this context ... although Charles K. Bliss never mentions the case, one could imagine that the person symbol can be followed by an index 4 (or even 5) ... allowing in all cases just one reading ... but with some problems for doing so out loud ...

There is a nice Facebook post from Blissymbols about pronouns at https://www.facebook.com/298159500318475/photos/a.298161243651634/1360473830753698/?type=3

... I made an archive for acccessibility : https://archive.is/PI4PY
> 0 votes

---
Tags: grammar, ambiguity, conlang-creation
---


# Question
Title: Which character is best to use for a schwa? Ь or Ъ?
Cyrillic for English - (Сарилик фоьр Иңглиш) is an adapted Cyrillic orthography to write English using ь as schwa, so 'sofa' would be written 'соьфь'. Does ь make sense as a schwa or is ъ better? The way I understand it ъ basically forces a pause. Is there really any use for ь or is there something I'm not understanding about how they are used? Is there a character that would make sense to use at the beginning of a word?

# Answer
> 4 votes
If you're going to use one of \<ъ\> or \<ь\> to represent /ə/, it's probably better to use \<ъ\>. This letter is currently used to write /ɤ/ in modern Bulgarian, whereas \<ь\>, as far as I'm aware, is only used to write actual vowels in dead Slavic languages. Moreover, because \<ь\> historically represented a short front vowel, it is used in modern languages like Russian to indicate palatalisation, something that does not accompany /ə/, whereas, e.g. in both modern (and more widely in pre-reform) Russian, \<ъ\> marks not a vowel but the absence of palatalisation.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I'd use neither ь nor ъ because they aren't vowels in Russian or related languages. I could think of Ы that is a vowel and may be the closest by pronunciation, or of Э that looks a bit like a schwa. In extended Cyrillic we even find a true schwa  but this one may be out when we have only a Russian Cyrillic keyboard available.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I'd use `Ъ`. Because:

> \<ъ\> is used to write /ɤ/ in modern Bulgarian (some of which are non-etymological). \<ь\> and \<ъ\> were also used to write "ultra-short" vowels in some older Slavic languages, e.g. Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian. – Miztli Oct 30 at 10:07

But Ь is not used for a vowel in all Cyrillic languages.

---
Tags: writing-systems, phonology
---


# Question
Title: What are resources for conlangers designing a knot writing?
I have not encountered many con-scripts encoding information in knots, rather than by marking flat media. I imagine that many conlangers would enjoy the inspiration of Andean khipus, which, going back to about 3,000 BCE, are ancient comparable with Proto-cuneiform.

# Answer
> 6 votes
I made one such conscript. I found another for writing English.

Some useful resources include:

Ashley's Book of Knots

Animated Knots

Various macrame websites and the concept 'sinnet' (you could decorate "nodes" within)

I think khipus and knot-writing most fascinating and I have greatly enjoyed the exercise. If people comment with specific curiosities, I will try to help. This question doesn't, per se, require an "answer" but I hope posting it may be useful and fruitful for the community.

Thanks, jk - Reinstate Monica, Andrew Ray, and curiousdannii for your input about correct posting!

# Answer
> 5 votes
One knot-like writing system (not mine) is Sylvia Sotomayor's Kelen Ceremonial Interlace Alphabet (can be found at http://www.terjemar.net/kelen/lajathin.php). It is ceremonial because it would likely be immensely impractical in every-day usage. The alphabet uses an interlace pattern where each letter is defined by a binary left-right pattern. From the author: "If these make your eyes water, don't feel alone. The idea was to create an alphabet for identifying things and places that could only be read by the initiated."

The following PDF distributed as a handout by the author at the LCC2 conference for even more information. http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/Sylvia\_Sotomayor.pdf

---
Tags: writing-systems
---


# Question
Title: Will I be able to read texts written in all Romance languages simply by learning Interlingua?
Interlingua's official site claims that speakers of all Romance languages will immediately understand the language **on paper** when first exposed to it. Is this true? Can I really understand Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and French simply by learning a conlang?

If it is true, then why isn't it more popular?

# Answer
On their site it says:

> Millions understand Interlingua "at first sight". Speakers of Romance languages especially understand Interlingua immediately and almost effortlessly. Ideal for traveling!

So it's the other way round: if you speak a Romance language, Interlingua will make sense to you because it contains many elements (eg vocabulary) from these languages. This does not, however, mean that you can necessarily understand any Romance language after learning Interlingua, though I assume there will be some benefit going both ways.
> 6 votes

# Answer
**Yes. And also No.**
Interlingua is certainly a "simplified" Romance language and much of the lexicon is shared with other Romance languages. But not all Romance languages are made alike. Romanian is pretty divergent. Sardinian is pretty conservative. I believe Interlingua has more in common with the "central" Romance languages, standard Italian and Spanish (Castillian).

I'm sure a speaker of Italian or Castillian would have as little difficulty with Interlingua as they would have had, a couple centuries ago with Lingua Franca. I think if you were to learn Interlingua to a high degree, you would find relatively straightforward Spanish and Italian texts to be comprehensible.

Let's find out for ourselves!

---

**Interlingua**
Nostre Patre, qui es in le celos,
que tu nomine sia sanctificate;
que tu regno veni;
que tu voluntate sia facite
super le terra como etiam in le celo.
Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,
e pardona a nos nostre debitas
como nos pardona a nostre debitores,
e non duce nos in tentation,
sed libera nos del mal.

**Portuguese**
Pai nosso, que estás no céu,
Santificado seja o Vosso nome.
Venha a nós o Vosso reino.
Seja feita a Vossa vontade,
Assim na terra como no céu.
O pão nosso de cada dia nos dai hoje.
Perdoai as nossas ofensas
Assim como nós perdoamos a quem nos têm ofendido.
Não nos deixeis cair em tentação,
Mas livrai-nos do mal

**Mozarabic**
Padre nuoso dal ciel
sanctificadu sia al teu nomne
venga a nos al teu reynu
ed faya-se al tua voluntade
ansi en al tierra quomo en al ciel.
Al pane nuostru de cada dia da-nos-lu huoi
e perdonad-nos al nuostras offensas
quomo nos autrossi perdonamos al qui nos offended
ed non nos layšes cadere in al tentatzione
ed liberad-nos dal male

**Castillian**
Padre nuestro que estás en el Cielo,
santificado sea tu nombre,
venga a nosotros tu Reino,
hágase tu voluntad en la Tierra como en el Cielo,
danos hoy nuestro pan de cada día,
y perdona nuestras ofensas,
como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden,
no nos dejes caer en la tentación,
y líbranos del mal.

**Catalan**
Pare nostre, que esteu en el cel,
sigui santificat el vostre nom;
vingui a nosaltres el vostre regne;
faci´s la vostra voluntat,
així en la terra com en el cel.
El nostre pa de cada dia doneu-nos avui;
i perdoneu les nostres culpes,
així com nosaltres perdonem els nostres deutors;
i no permeteu que caiguem en la temptació,
ans deslliureu-nos del mal.

**Languedocien**
Le nostre Paire që ess eïs cels
sanctificat sia lo teus noms
avenga lo teus regns
et sia faita la tua voluntas
sico ël cel è ë la tera
è dona à nos ôi lo nostrë pa që ës sobrë causa
è perdonna à nos lès nostrès dëoutès
aissi co nos perdonan à nostrès dëouteïrès
è no nos amenés en tentatio
mes delioura nos dël mal.

**French**
Notre Père qui es aux cieux,
que ton Nom soit sanctifié,
que ton règne vienne,
que ta volonté soit faite
sur la terre comme au ciel.
Donne-nous aujourd'hui notre pain de ce jour.
Pardonne-nous nos offenses,
comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés.
Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation,
mais délivre-nous du mal.

**Anglo-Norman**
Li nostre Pere, qui es ciels,
saintefiez soit li tuens uons;
avigne li tuens regnes.
Soit faite ta volonte, si comme ele est faite el ciel,
si foit ele faite en terre.
Nostre pain de chascun jor nos donne hui.
Et pardone-nos nos meffais,
si comme nos pardonons a cos qui maeffait nos ont.

**Provencal**
Paire nostre, que iest els eels;
ton nom sia sanctifficat.
A nos veng-a lo teu reg-nat.
En la terra faelia sia quo el eel voluntat tia.
Lo pa nostre cotidia liuei nos dona dieus de ta ma.
Remet so que nos te deuem,
quo nos als autres remetem.
De temptacio nos deffen,
ens delivra de mal.

**Italian**
Padre nostro che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo Nome,
venga il tuo Regno,
sia fatta la tua Volontà
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione,
ma liberaci dal Male.

**Sicilian**
Patri nostru, ca siti nnô celu,
Fussi santificatu lu nomu vostru.
Vinissi imprescia lu regnu vostru,
Fussi faciuta la vostra Divina Vuluntati,
Comu nnô celu, d'accussì nnâ terra.
Ni dati sta jurnata lu nostru panuzzu cutiddianu,
E ni pirdunati li nostri piccati,
D'accussì niàvutri li pirdunamu ê nostri dibbitura.
E mancu ni lassati a cascari nnâ tintazzioni,
Ma ni scanzati dû mali.

**Sardinian**
Babbu nostru k’istas in sos kelos,
santificadu siat su nòmene tou,
benzat a nois su regnu tou
e fatta siat sa voluntade tua
comente in su kelu gai in sa terra.
Su pane nostru de dogni die dàdenolu oe,
perdona a nois sos peccados nostros
comente nois perdonamus sos inimigos nostros,
e non nos lesses ruer in tentatzione,
ma lìberanos dae su male.

**Romanian**
Tatăl nostru care eşti în ceruri,
sfinţească-se numele Tău,
vie împărăţia Ta, facă-se voia ta,
precum în cer aşa şi pe pământ.
Pâinea noastră cea de toate zilele,
dă-ne-o nouă astăzi
şi ne iartă nouă greşelile noastre
precum şi noi iertăm greşiţilor noştri
şi nu ne duce pe noi în ispită
ci ne izbăveşte de cel rău.

**Classical Latin**
Pater noster, qui es in caelis;
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
adveniat regnum tuum;
fiat voluntas tua,
sicut in caelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie;
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris;
et ne nos inducas in tentationem;
sed libera nos a malo.
> 2 votes

# Answer
No. Of course you won’t. You don’t just learn a language by staring at it. Like everything, learning a language takes time. I would recommend learning one of those languages.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: conlang-learning, interlingua
---


# Question
Title: Is there a language that meets these criteria?
I feel less and less comfortable with the incoherence of natural languages, so I'm looking for a constructed language that suits me.

1. semantically close words must share a common affix (not like biology and mathematics in English which are sciences but do not have the same suffix),
2. vocabulary must be finite and relatively small (a few hundred or thousand words would be fine) with no synonyms,
3. grammar must be fully regular.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I think it should be *toki pona*. Reasons:

> semantically close words must share a common affix (not like biology and mathematics in English which are sciences but do not have the same suffix)

In toki pona, every science has a compound noun word beginning from *sona*. Biology is *sona jan* and Mathematics is *sona nanpa*. (Physics is *sona lon* and Linguistics is *sona toki*.)

This is due to the fact that toki pona has a limited vocabulary; so, to form words like "physics", it simply says the phrase "science of existence" or *sona lon*.

> vocabulary must be finite and relatively small (a few hundred or thousand words would be fine) with no synonyms

The vocabulary is just 123 words. Almost all of these are polysemantic, there's nothing like synonyms.

> grammar must be fully regular

Grammar is not fully regular, but that's only because of the fact that toki pona has a few words. However, there are *not* that many exceptions, as in any language like English or Spanish. I have studied 12 lessons of the official book and till then, the only irregularity is the fact that *li* doesn't follow *mi* and *sina*.

**In all, the language satisfying (1) and (2) and partly (3) to its fullest is toki pona.**

Another close competitor is *Esperanto*. It totally satisfies (2) and (3) and partly (1). (Some semantically similar words don't seem to have common affixes in them.)

So, in all, if you are looking for such a language, go definitely for **toki pona** or **Esperanto**.

PS. Even I felt the same (unable to successfully learn natural languages due to the several irregularities) and thus myself decided to go for toki pona first (because I already know a lot about it) and then Esperanto.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The best one that I've seen is probably Esperanto. It has a relatively small vocabulary that makes up a great bulk of the words and there are different affixes that change the meanings of words. For example, *bo-* is used in front of any family member to make it '-in-law' (*boonklo, bopatro, bofrato, &c* are *uncle-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law*) The language is perfectly regular with no exceptions once you learn the quirks of the grammar. I see above in the comments that somebody said that they didn't like Esperanto but it doesn't look like it's the OP, so I'll leave the suggestion here anyway.

If you want minimalism is the goal, then I definitely suggest toki pona which has only has 120-125 words. There's a varation of that called toki ma which has closer to 300, but there's a lot of overlap with vocabulary.

---
Tags: list-of-languages, miniature-artificial-languages
---


# Question
Title: Is is okay that most consonant assimilations result in a phone whose dedicated letter doesn't exist?
Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. A lot of consonant assimilations happen in this language. This language is supposed to be spoken by angels.

My native language is Korean, btw. Korean also has many consonant assimilations.

# Orthography and phonetics

My conlang uses Latin alphabets except W. No diacritics. All of them is pronounced as their IPA counterpart, except four:

* C = \[qʼ\] (Voiceless uvular ejective)
* N = \[ɴ\] (Voiced uvular nasal stop)
* Q = \[ʔ\] (Glottal stop)
* X = \[ǃ\] (Voiceless alveolar click)

Sounds exotic, huh? That makes 19 consonants and 6 vowels.

Plosives are tenuis by default.

# Consonant assimilation

In my conlang, syllables have structure of `(C)V(C)`. So two syllables can make two adjacent consonants. Every combination of two consonants can occur. That's where consonant assimilation happens, and also where this question arises. Let's call `CC` "former consonant" and "latter consonant", respectively:

* Plosives as the former consonant get no release. Examples: "BK" to \[b̚.k\], "KB" to \[k̚.b\].
* "H" as the former consonant usually assimilates to \[x\].
* "V" as the former consonant usually assimilates to \[ʋ\].
* "H" as the latter consonant...:

+ ...turns voiced plosives to implosives. Example: "BH" to \[ɓ\].
    + ...makes fricatives pharyngealized. Example: "FH" to \[fˁ\].
    + ...makes nasal stops voiceless. Example: "MH" to \[m̥\].
    + ...makes voiceless plosives aspirated. Example: "KH" to \[kʰ\].
* "J" as the latter consonant usually makes the former consonant palatal or palatalized. Examples: "MJ" to \[mʲ\], "SJ" to \[ɕ\].
* A plosive followed by "L" has lateral release.
* "V" as the latter consonant usually makes the former consonant labialized. Example: "XV" to \[ǃʷ\].
* "CH", "DJ", "DZ", "PF", "TJ", "TS" assimilate to affricates.

To show all combinations:

I set these consonant assimilations to make pronunciation easier, but my concern is that these introduce too many new phones that lacks their own letters. Are they tolerable?

# Answer
I would argue that the orthography of your conlang is not just OK but really excellent given your description of the phonology.

Why is this the case? It keeps the number of letters needed to write the language in a very comfortable range. The additional sounds are given by digraphs, a method that is often preferable over adding more letters to the basic alphabet or adding diacritics to the base letters.

I also imagine that the orthography keeps morphemes recognisable assuming that at least some morphemes are just CVC syllables and combining them results in assimilation.
> 4 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, phonetics
---


# Question
Title: good naturalistic system for Germanic language?
I hope this isn't too redundant of a question...

I was hoping somebody could briefly summarize what general features languages descended from proto-Germanic tend to have? I understand all the relevant terms, but I cannot work my way through grammar breakdowns because I have unmedicated ADHD, so it all blends together :(

I'm really stuck and I would REALLY appreciate if some kind person could lay out some key features of either Germanic languages in general or protogermanic specifically.. like a brief bullet point list?

# Answer
> 8 votes
A long time ago, I was involved in a project named *Folkspraak* to create a Germanic conlang. It was entertaining, but it did not went very far at that attempt.

Some grammatical hallmarks of Germanic languages are:

* A very simple tense system, present and past only, all other tenses are periphrastic and later acquisitions
* A past participle as third principal part of the verb
* Weak verbs ("regular" verbs) and strong verbs (looking irregular, but in fact they are regular, too, falling into several classes of strong verbs)
* Related pairs of strong and weak verbs like *fall*/*fell* where the weak verb is a causative of the strong one one (*to make fall*). More examples for this relation from German *trinken* (strong verb, "to drink")/*tränken* (weak verb, "to water (animals)"); *springen* (strong verb, "to jump, to leap")/*sprengen* (weak verb, "to explode; to water (lawn); to gallop"). A notorious one is *erschrecken* (strong verb; "to get frightened, to startle)/*erschrecken* (weak verb; "to startle so., to frighten")—notorious because the infinitive and some other form coincide and there is some confusion and a tendency to use *sich erschrecken* (weak verb) instead of the original strong verb in Modern colloquial German.
* Modal verbs that are special (preterite-present)

For nouns there is less common ground for the Germanic languages, while German retained four cases and three genders for nouns, those features are partially or completely lost in some other Germanic languages. You can do whatever you want (strive for simplicity or keep a more complicated system at your wish). Same for adjectives.

---
Tags: grammar, naturalism, zonal-languages
---


# Question
Title: Four vowels, with no /i/ sound. Is it possible?
My vowel phonemic inventory would be just /a/, /e/, /o/ and /u/ with no /i/ sound. Is this possible or not?

# Answer
> 9 votes
This would be very unstable in a human language. For an example of what happens when this vowel is missing, let's look at English's Great Vowel Shift. One of the first things to change was /i:/ becoming /aj/, leaving it without /i/. Within less than a hundred years, /e:/ had migrated to take its place.

In your specific case, I would expect /e/ -\> /i/, /a/ -\> /e/, and /o/ -\> /ɒ/ in fairly short order.

This is because vowels like to spread out on the vowel chart and become more distinct to improve understanding. Because of the limitations of your mouth making it difficult to have highly fronted low vowels, the general rule is that you will have more high vowels than mid or low vowels. Your vowel system violates this universal (with more mid vowels than high vowels).

# Answer
> 7 votes
For a constructed language, this is definitely possible. It is not a natural choice but not completely unseen in natural languages, according to PHOIBLE 92% of the sampled languages contain the vowel /i/.

# Answer
> 2 votes
A vowel system of /a e o u/ would certainly be unusual and unstable, and appears to be unattested, but lack of /i/ is certainly attested. Marshallese, for instance, has the thoroughly strange vowel inventory of /a ɜ ɘ ɨ/ (though \[i\] is present phonetically, as an allophone of /ɨ/). Kalam has a vowel system of /a e o/ (though \[i\] is again present phonetically, as an allophone of /j/). And, depending on which website you trust, Hixkaryana has either /a e ɨ o u/ or /æ e ɯ ɔ u/.

# Answer
> 1 votes
you could, with conlangs you really can do anything. it doesn't need to make sense.

however you should probably ask yourself what your goal is with that. if you're going for naturalism, /i/ is one of the most universal sounds crosslinguistically, a language without /i/ is practically unheard of... even languages that don't have an /i/ in the inventory will usually have it as an allophone of something. of course, nothing is stopping you from making a naturalistic lang with no /i/ still... it would be a weird trait, but overall, hardly any real life language is 100% naturalistic, and they tend to have strange quirks. even if this one is one of a kind, if you are going for naturalism in other areas, it could probably be passable.

if you want to make an auxlang, then again, lack of /i/ would be strange given it is easy to pronounce, and seen in practically all languages.

if you want an artlang and you simply dont like the sound of /i/ then there's not much otherwise stopping you. the same if your language is for a non-human phonology.

---
Tags: phonology, phonetics, vowels
---