# Question
Title: How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there?
I've seen several variations of Tolkien's Elvish around, with different names, such as Sindarin and Q(u)enya.

**How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there, and how do they differ from one another?**

# Answer
> 11 votes
In this article, it is mentioned:

* Primitive Quendian (language of the Elves in Cuiviénen)
* Avarin
* Various Avarin languages (some later merged with Nandorin)
* Common Eldarin (the early language of all the Eldar)
* Quenya (the language of the Ñoldor and the Vanyar)
* Quendya (also Vanyarin Quenya) (daily tongue of the Vanyar: closest to archaic Quenya)
* Ñoldorin Quenya (also Exilic Quenya) (the "Elven Latin" of Middle-earth)
* Common Telerin (the early language of all the Lindar)
* Telerin (the language of the Teleri who reached the Undying Lands)
* Nandorin (languages of the Nandor — some were influenced by Avarin)
* Original language of Greenwood the Great
* Original language of Lórinand
* Sindarin (language of the Sindar)
* Doriathrin (dialect of Doriath)
* Falathrin (dialect of the Falas and Nargothrond)
* North Sindarin (dialects of Dorthonion and Hithlum)

So a good many dialects exist. However, we cannot exactly count how many there are, because it mentions "various" and we don't know whether there is a hierarchy of languages that have branched off somewhere else. However, we can confirm there are at least **17 dialects of the Elvish**.

# Answer
> 6 votes
It's a tough question, and one that may be impossible to answer. There are tons of references all over the internet, such as Wikipedia (whose sources look decent on this one), Wikia, and a half dozen others I looked at. Basically, though, it looks as though the consensus is that the Elvish tongue is divided into Eldarin (the tongue of the elves during the March) and Avarin (the tongue of the Avari, a group of elves who never started on the migration to Valinor). The Eldarin tongue was divided into Quenya (language of the Vanyar) and Common Telerin (the third elven tribe to take the Great Journey).

The Quenya was divided into Quendya (the daily tongue of the Vanyar) and Exilic Quenya (tongue of the Noldor, such as Galadriel), while the common Telerin was divided into Telerin (language of the Teleri of Valinor), Sindarin (language of the Teleri of Beleriand), and Nandorin (language of the Nandor).

Counting them, you would have at least a dozen, give or take a few for dialects off of the ones I've listed.

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Tags: tolkien-elvish
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# Question
Title: Is the Klingon alphabet inspired by Tibetan alphabet?
Is the Klingon alphabet inspired by Tibetan alphabet?

Because they look similar..

# Answer
> 8 votes
Considering this question is a rehash of another question on SX, I'm inclined to say it's chance resemblance — and not a very high one at that. It is very highly plausible that it was designed by a non-linguist at Paramount (if I understand correctly) at a time when there was no easy way of finding out about Tibetan even with the budding Internet of 1992 when the aforelinked article was published in the `HolQeD` journal of the KLI. The article specifically says:

> More recently we’ve been treated to a different alphabet, (often incorrectly attributed to Michael Okuda, scenic designer for Star Trek: The Next Generation™), one which corresponds to the phonemes of Klingon as described by Okrand in The Klingon Dicitionary. While the characters themselves are easily identifiable from background displays on Star Trek: The Next Generation™ (assuming one has access to video equipment and a reasonably large television screen), there has never been an “official” release describing the particular relationship between individual glyphs and specific sounds. As Okuda has indicated (HolQeD 1:1, 11) all Klingon background displays are composed for appearance, not communication. And yet, an unofficial letter to a Klingon fan group from an unnamed source at Paramount resulted in the following alphabet: \[...\]

# Answer
> 2 votes
According to this answer on Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange, no. The author draws from the official Klingon language website, saying:

> "...the producers called on professional linguist Dr. Marc Okrand to create authentic speech for the Klingons. His task was to make their language as alien as their ridged prosthetic foreheads, while still remaining pronounceable by human actors and consistent with the battle cries from the first movie.
>
> Dr. Okrand did not base Klingon on any particular language, but drew on his knowledge of how language works to construct a wholly new language."

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Tags: inspiration, writing-systems, klingon
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title: How to read One Ring inscription?

text:
# Question
Title: How to read One Ring inscription?
The following inscription appears on the One Ring in *The Fellowship of the Ring* book:

Which in Black Speech can be written down as:

> Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
>
> Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

However, the inscription is using different letters. I've checked Tengwar, but I can't find any of the words (e.g. *ash*, *nazg*, etc.).

How should the inscription be read exactly, in other words, how it's transformed from the above fiery letters into latin letters?

# Answer
> 5 votes
You are likely having a hard time reading these tengwar because of three big problems:

1. the style itself is such that the tengwar are slanted and written calligraphically
2. the mode used to write them is unusual and not common for Elvish languages
3. there are no spaces between words!

The page linked should provide assistance; the issue is that the tengwar and tehtar behave (like in several modes) as in an abugida: the vowels are diacritics to the "host" consonants, and a null consonant is used for vowel-initial words (even when the words aren't separated by spaces).

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Tags: tolkien-black-speech, tengwar
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# Question
Title: What is opposite of "burzum", "darkness", in Tolkien's Black Speech?
I'm aware that *burzum* means *darkness* in The Black Speech.

Do we know what the opposite is? How is *lightness* written?

# Answer
As @Darkgamma says, we don't know. The closest we have would probably be **ghâsh**, which means fire, and one could probably guess that the characteristic of being fire-like would be something like **ghâshum**, but there is no empirical evidence for that, except that the suffix -um seems to mean -ness, as in **burz-** (meaning dark) + **-um** (meaning -ness), put together to form **burzum**.

That said, **ghâshum** would literally mean "the characteristic of being like fire," not literally "lightness."
> 11 votes

# Answer
In short: no.

In a bit long: not really, and some people have gone to the effort of analysing the Black Speech. In essence, the list of words we know thus far is rather scant:

> agh "and"
> ash "one"
> -at infinitive suffix, or possibly a specialized "intentive" suffix indicating purpose: Ash nazg durbatulûk "one Ring to rule them all"
> bagronk (DBS) "cesspool", possibly bag+ronk "cess+pool"
> búbhosh (DBS) "great"
> búrz "dark", (isolated from Lugbúrz, q.v.), burzum "darkness"
> dug "filth", tentatively isolated from pushdug, q.v.
> durb- "rule", infinitive durbat, only attested with suffixes: durbatulûk "to rule them all". The verb durb- is remarkably similar to Quenya tur- of similar sense. ghâsh "fire" (stated to be derived from the Black Speech, may or may not represent Sauron's original form of the word)
> gimb- "find", infinitive gimbat, only attested with a pronominal suffix: gimbatul, "to find them"
> glob (DBS) "fool"
> gûl "any one of the major invisible servants of Sauron dominated entirely by his will" (A Tolkien Compass p. 172). Translated "wraith(s)" in the compound Nazgûl, "Ringwraith(s)".
> hai "folk", in Uruk-hai "Uruk-folk" and Olog-hai "Troll-folk"; cf. also Oghor-hai.
> ishi "in", a suffixed postposition: burzum-ishi, "in the darkness".
> krimp- "bind", infinitive krimpat, only attested with a pronominal suffix: krimpatul, "to bind them"
> lug "tower". Isolated from Lugbúrz, q.v.
> Lugbúrz the Dark Tower, Sindarin Barad-dûr (Lug-búrz "Tower-dark")
> nazg "ring": ash nazg "one ring", Nazgûl "Ring-wraith(s)"
> Nazgûl "Ring-wraith(s)", nazg + gûl (q.v.)
> Oghor-hai "Drúedain" (UT:379; this may or may not be pure Black Speech)
> olog a variety of Troll apparently developed by Sauron. Olog-hai "Olog-people".
> pushdug (DBS) "dungfilth", possibly push+dug "dung+filth"
> ronk (DBS) "pool", tentatively isolated from bagronk, q.v.
> skai (DBS) interjection of contempt
> sha (DBS) interjection of contempt
> sharkû (DBS?) "old man"
> snaga "slave" (May be DBS.) Used of lesser breeds of Orcs (WJ:390).
> thrak- "bring", infinitive thrakat, only attested with suffixes: thrakatulûk "to bring them all"
> u (DBS) "to"
> -ûk "all", suffixed to pronominal suffixes: -ulûk, "them all"
> -ul pronominal suffix "them".
> -um "-ness" in burzum "darkness". uruk a great variety of Orc. According to WJ:390, Sauron probably borrowed this word "from the Elvish tongues of earlier times".

The abbreviation *DBS* stands for *Debased Black Speech*, a colloquial idiom variety of the Black Speech as used by the orcs and goblins.
> 10 votes

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Tags: tolkien-black-speech, phrase-request
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# Question
Title: Grammar concepts required for every conlang
Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?

For example, is there a list of such concepts available?

# Answer
> 15 votes
Darkgamma's reply wasn't wrong, but I think it slightly misses the question.

One way of ensuring that your conlang is able to convey a certain meaning/feature is to grab a text and start translating it. If there is something in the original text you have trouble translating, try to find a way to work around it with the grammar you currently have OR invent a new construction to deal with it. In order to do the first one well you need a good awareness of your conlang's grammar. Another danger of this method is relexing the original, especially new vocabulary. Third option: Don't have your conlang be able to translate the challenging characteristic/expression of the text you're translating 'genuinely'. F.e. there's alienable vs. inalienable possession in the text you can simply translate it with the standard expression for possession in your conlang (assuming you do ***not*** have the distinction in your conlang).

You asked about lists. There are questionnaires used for typology which I think can be helpful for conlanging, but I don't know of anyone who has tried utilizing them. Here you can find a link to a collection of them.

# Answer
> 15 votes
> Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?

The primary issue here is trying to find out *what* is necessary for a language to function; not even 'Chomskyan tenets' like recursion (or broader concepts like classifiers and numbers) seem to be obligatory, and language in essence seems to boil down to a glorified predicate machine with parts tacked on by Broca's area — and so, the answer is, for now, **no**: we'd very much like to see a way of doing this, and it would be truly groundbreaking in linguistics, seeing as it's a major focus point for many researchers in many fields of philosophy, linguistics, psychology and neurology.

# Answer
> 7 votes
The way to make sure a language is detailed enough is by putting it to use. You have to write something in the language that the language was designed for in order to be able to tell if it works. For example, if you're writing an auxiliary language, you might want to see if you can express the Babel text or the Declaration of Human Rights (two popular texts for translation) to see if your language expresses them the way you intended. If you're writing a language for a fictional race, you could translate whatever kind of text that race produces.

No language actually *requires* a genitive case or a construct state (prepositions are an easy way to get out of either; but a constructed language can never be "wrong" even if it's very ambiguous, as long as the final product suits what you were trying to make). You probably would have decided sometime in the design process the most basic questions, like if the language uses cases. If for some reason you haven't, you will notice that this is missing when trying to write something in the language.

The reason this works is that it's impossible to write sentences without deciding on the essential features of the language. Writing sentences forces you to decide on word order, for example. Using sentences with diverse syntax and morphology can also help to determine if you left something out of the language.

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Tags: grammar
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# Question
Title: Does Dovahzul have the same grammar rules as English, or are they different?
I have recently been reading this page about the Dragon Language, and I was curious about whether if it and the English language share grammer rules. They seem to have similar bases (organized alphabets with words that derive from it), but I am unsure since Dovahzul seems to be primitive.

# Answer
There are a lot of rules that are exactly the same. For instance, Dovahzul has the exact same parts of speech:

* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Adverbs
* Articles
* Conjunctions
* Interjections
* Prepositions

However, there are some rules that are different: for instance, in the Dragon Language, some words can be used either as an adjective, noun, verb, or adverb, such as the word **Nahlot**, which means officially "Silenced," but whose meaning can be expanded to mean "silent," "silently," or "silence."

So yes, it shares some rules with English, but no, its rules are not the same. If you had any specific questions about specific rules, you'd have to ask those in separate questions.
> 5 votes

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Tags: grammar, dovahzul
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# Question
Title: How does Láadan aim to express the views of women more than natural Western languages?
Láadan was created, according to Wikipedia, to try an experiment in seeing if a constructed language designed specifically for women could better express the views of women better than natural Western languages:

> Láadan is a feminist constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women.

How does the language aim to express this difference? What differences make it better for women to express their views than in natural Western languages?

**What steps are the creators of Láadan taking to make sure that women can express themselves better in Láadan than in natural Western languages, that it will be different from those natural languages**?

# Answer
> 18 votes
I am not an expert on Láadan but I was also researching it in the context of feminist communication. This is what I found based on that research.

The idea behind creating Láadan as a "feminist" language was to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to see if natural languages were biased toward expressing male communication, but the language's creator, Suzette Haden Elgin, was unable to prove or disprove the hypotheses she set out to study because of low adoption of the language. As far as I can tell, even Elgin remains uncertain on the effect of these approaches to facilitating feminine communication.

The distinctive characteristics that strike me are

1. **It is a tonal language** \- This seems to have been very deliberate in the development of Láadan. Does this facilitate feminine thought with particularly more clarity than non-tonal languages? I am not sure, and I couldn't find any reputable research indicating whether or not that is the case, but I suspect that when the language was being developed by Elgin she did not make it a tonal language by accident. Since her hypotheses about the implications of Láadan on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis remain unconfirmed, we probably don't know for sure.
2. **The language has emotional context markers.** This is presumably meant to aid in the expression of subtle emotional context to avoid ambiguity that leaves a dialogue open to interpretation and reliant on context clues.

* *-d* anger marker
    * *-th* pain marker
    * *-li* love marker
    * *-lan* celebration marker
    * *-da* joke marker
    * *-di* education marker
    * *-ya* fear marker
3. **The language has many affection words**, for example, of love. Like the other aspects, whether this is truly a facet that favors female communication over male based on empirical evidence is unclear to me, but it certainly satisfies many widely accepted assumptions about differences in male and female thought. However, it should be noted that many of these assumptions are widely challenged today. Perhaps men desire more nuanced emotional communication as well but suppress this impulse for cultural reasons.

* **a** love for inanimates
    * **áayáa** mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome
    * **áazh** love for someone sexually desired in the past, but not anymore
    * **ab** love for one liked but not respected
    * **ad** love for one respected but not liked
    * **éme** love for one neither liked nor respected
    * **am** love for one related by blood
    * **ashon** love for one not related by blood, but kin of the heart
    * **aye** love that is unwelcome and a burden
    * **azh** love for one sexually desired now
    * **oham** love for that which is holy
    * **sham** love for the child of one’s body

These text examples were taken from this online PDF resource.

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# Question
Title: What legal aspects should one consider when creating a constructed language?
Constructed languages, like everything, is an intellectual property, and most countries worldwide do care about protecting the rights of the owners.

If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?

My common sense suggests me that something is obvious here:

* entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;
* lots of things are public domain, e.g. SVO/OVS clause order or the Latin alphabet;

…but I'm totally lost about the case if *some* aspect(s) of existing works can be incidentally copied or deliberately borrowed.

**Where should I start here?**

# Answer
> If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?

No. It is conceivable that conlangs might be patentable under US law, but none so far have been.

> entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;

Probably not. Again, it might infringe a patent, but there are very few patents on writing systems. Copying a specific *font* or typeface would constitute copyright infringement, but not copying the writing system in abstract.

> Where should I start here?

I'd start by reviewing Sai's talk at LCC 6 on the legal status of conlangs, and the accompanying slides and legal memo.

You might also review the Language Creation Society's involvement in the Axanar case regarding whether or not Paramount "owns" Klingon.
> 12 votes

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Tags: legal
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# Question
Title: Is there a practical lower limit to the number of morphemes required in a language?
Many conlangers have tried (and occasionally succeeded in) creating oligomorphemic¹ languages. What are the most minimalistic successful attempts? From this, can we extrapolate a lower bound?

¹also called oligosynthetic, a bit of a misnomer in my opinion

# Answer
Outside of Toki Pona, there haven't been any "majorly" successful attempts at making an oligomorphemic language — as far as I know. While derivational and inflectional morphology could be done away with (and its information load transferred to syntax I guess), the question is how many semantic morphemes is too few before a language becomes incomprehensibly vague.

I'm guessing the theoretical lowest lower limit is the set of 63 semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see also Goddard's *Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 2010*). Wierzbicka and Goddard propose that you could theoretically explain almost all necessary concepts by building up from this set of primes, and lacking ways to express some of them will leave you incapable of expressing at least a subset of all possible topics.
> 7 votes

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Tags: morphology, semantics
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# Question
Title: How developed is the Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time series?
Robert Jordan's fantasy novel series *The Wheel of Time* includes a lot of short quotes in the Old Tongue, a fictional ancient language from a previous Age. Translations are provided for these, either in the text itself or in the glossary at the back of each book, but we never see more than a few sentences at a time.

**How much was this language actually developed by Jordan?**

Did he create an entire fictional language, as Tolkien did for his Middle-Earth books? Or did he just create some plausible-sounding fictional words and put them together to form the quotes he needed? Would it be possible, either from the text of the books themselves or from his unpublished notes, to actually learn the language properly to any extent?

# Answer
> 10 votes
From here on Theoryland:

> Is there a complete language of the Old Tongue, and if so how long did it take you to develop it?
>
> ROBERT JORDAN There are basic 880 some words—maybe 900. I got a list of what is considered basic English—which are the 800 odd words of a basic English vocabulary. Removed the words that were of no use in the context of my world. Came up with words in the Old Tongue in each of those English words and then added those words that did have a specific context in my world.

Elsewhere on that page is an interview where he said this:

> What language is the Old Tongue based on? Gaelic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and some additions of my own—bridging material, if you will. Grammar and syntax are a blending of English, German and Chinese, with some influences from a set of African languages, read about long ago and all but the oddities of structure long since forgotten. There are inverted constructions, for example (as in Mordero dagain pas duente cuebiyar!—literally, "Death fear none holds my heart!") and places where the article is omitted, especially where the word is a title or has gained enough importance to now incorporate the article; the absence of article indicates that it is the important or special meaning of the word that is intended. Though even then, it is not a hard and fast rule; the same inconsistencies of English are incorporated here. I am attempting to create a language which has grown, not one which was made.

It seems to be a complete enough language in terms of grammar and authentic enough for Jordan to use, though lacking in vocabulary. From these quotes I get the feeling that he created the language well enough at one point that he didn't have to spend hours conlanging to be able to put a few sentences into his novels.

In the Wheel of Time Companion there was an English-Old Tongue dictionary, which is uploaded on Tor.com here. At the beginning on the website (not sure if this is also in the book as I don't have it on me) this is written:

> While it is reminiscent of Tolkien’s ground-up creation of Elvish languages for The Lord of the Rings, The Old Tongue differs in that Jordan took a top-down approach, creating a dictionary of terms from which some basic suffixes, roots, and usage rules emerged.

I didn't bother scrolling all the way down or counting the words, but it doesn't seem to have much grammar aside from the suffixes and stuff. Although we don't have access to this, Jordan seems to be implying that the grammar does exist. All I could find was this on the Tar Valon library.

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Tags: wheel-of-time-old-tongue, history
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# Question
Title: How much of Tolkien's "black language" exists?
What samples or knowledge do we have of the black speech created by Tolkien? Having read a decent amount of the legendarium (Silmarillion, LotR, Hobbit, Children of Hurin, and some of the Lost Tales) the only occurrence I am aware of is the inscription on the one ring.

# Answer
> 15 votes
Am reading through LotR now, and have just finished H, Lost Tales, R, FG, etc. so the memories are still pretty fresh.

The Ring verse is the longest bit of Black Speech, followed by Grishnákh's bit of invective towards Ugluk. Other than that, there's only a couple individual words (like *snaga*, slave and *ghash*, fire) to be found.

Tolkien himself wrote as much in a letter (No. 144) to a reader of page-proofs (presumably of LotR): *...\[Black Speech\] only occurs in the Ring inscription, and a sentence uttered by the Orcs of Barad-Dur and in the word Nazgúl.*

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A related query on the Black Speech.

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Tags: tolkien-black-speech, resource-request
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# Question
Title: How much Dwarvish did Tolkien actually devise?
The Dwarvish language in Tolkien's legendarium is famous for being virtually unknown to non-Dwarves. Apart from a few phrases, like Gimli's battle-cry "Baruk Khazad! Khazad ai-menu!" *(from memory; please forgive the lack of diacritics)*, almost nothing of their language is known to other Middle-Earth dwellers.

But what about us in the real world? **Did Tolkien actually develop the language beyong those few phrases, in any of his wider notes on Middle-Earth and its languages?** Or did he focus more on the Elvish languages, and create the in-universe conceit of Dwarvish secretiveness just so that he didn't have to develop yet another language?

# Answer
> 8 votes
As per this (cited by "An Analysis of Dwarvish" in Arda Philology 1: Proceedings of the First International Conference, with a very nice glossary of the language, which can be found here):

> Regarding Khuzdul, Tolkien stated that "this tongue has been sketched in some detail of structure, if with a very small vocabulary" (PM:300). It evidently came into being in the thirties.

Here PM refers to the Peoples of Middle Earth. The complete corpus of the language is described on the same site as being

> a few names, like Khazad-dûm and Zirak-zigil, the inscription on Balin's tomb, and a battle cry: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! "Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!"

A petty-dwarf, Mîm, is also named, in The Children of Hurin, though that is the only reference there. The names also include Chamber of Mazarbul \[records\].

(A complete glossary is given on the website; it is too long to copy here.) It also mentions Appendix D, E, and F in the Lord of the Rings (F primarily containing history, of course) and the Appendix in the Silmarillion also apparently contains a reference to Khuzdul:

> At least one Khuzdul word made its way into Sindarin: kheled "glass", that appears in Grey-elven as heledh (see the Silmarillion Appendix, entry khelek-)

This appears to be all we know of Khuzdul. In spite of this, extensive analysis has been made, with a not insignificant amount of it guesswork. See "An Analysis of Dwarvish" for one example (provides a theory of language structure).

Of course, Tolkien did state that it was "sketched", but the question is where it was - there's a chance it may be unpublished:

> Yes, there is some unpublished material concerning Khuzdul. However, it’s only a small amount, and as I recall, it consists mostly of phonological discussion, though inevitably there is in conjunction with this some discussion of the grammatical significance of various root modifications. But don’t expect anything like Etymologies or the "Early Qenya Grammar" for Khuzdul.

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Tags: tolkien-dwarvish, history
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# Question
Title: What does xorlo do, and is it an official part of the Lojban language?
I've noticed that many speakers of Lojban use xorlo, which is a modification branching off the base language, but finding explicit information about it is difficult. What does it do?

I also know people are generally using it by consensus, but is xorlo an official part of the language? What happens to the original text, *The Complete Lojban Language*?

# Answer
> 12 votes
**xorlo is an official part of the Lojban Language.** The Complete Lojban Language does not contain information about xorlo, and is no longer guaranteed to be entirely accurate. The Committee for Developing Lojban (BPFK) voted 11-0 to include xorlo in the official record as a part of the Lojban language. The proposal is not finalized until the BPFK declares their work finished, but it is extremely unlikely to change, as it has become an integral part of how the language works conversationally.

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In essence, xorlo changes the meaning of two particle articles in lojban: lo, and le.

**lo** as an article used to indicate that you were talking about a set of objects which are truthfully what you claim they are. Nothing about them indicates that they would be anything else. For example, "lo jgena" meant "some things that are, to our best perceptions, knots."

Now, it doesn't say anything about perceptions, or the truthiness of what it is. It just means "any or some." It becomes the most generic article you can use in lojban, in place of anything else, because it is vague. "lo jgena" now means "any/some knot(s)," without qualification or ulterior statement about veracity.

**le** as an article used to mean "some things I have in mind, which I am describing." For example, "le jgena" meant that you had some knots in your head. The change to le is very minor in this context, and its pure meaning hasn't actually changed. The only difference is that it now exists *only* to be used when you have *specific* images of something in mind. Now, if I tell you "le jgena," you know I mean something more specific.

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Tags: lojban, regulation
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# Question
Title: How would you say "good morning" or "hello" politely in Klingon?
Klingons from *Star Trek* aren't very polite, and the language developed for them reflects that - they don't exactly have many *polite* ways to say things. The closest think I've found to a polite greeting is "Nuq'nuh", which translates to "What do you want?", which... isn't very polite, IMO.

Is there any way to *approximate* a polite greeting in Klingon?

# Answer
This answer is based largely on my copy of *The Klingon Dictionary* (written by Marc Okrand, who created Klingon), which is reliable and good if you need a quick translation from English to Klingon or vice-versa. I'm going to cover most of the same ground as rotaredom's answer, just in more detail.

The book notes that there aren't really any greetings in Klingon; they're simply unnecessary. Klingon as a language is somewhat utilitarian in its application, and exchanges typically start with a straightforward statement or query by one party. Saying the Klingon equivalent of "How are you doing?" when you just want to figure out the new ship's departure time is simply wasteful. One answer to your question, then, would be to simply avoid a greeting. The less you talk, the less time you take up. That said, if you want to truly greet someone, you have two options. . .

## Choice 1: Be utilitarian.

This utilitarianism is why all Klingon "greetings" are just introductory phrases. **"nuqneH"** is the one that seems to be commonly used, as rotaredom said. Its translation is "What do you want?" "Nuq" itself can be treated as an interrogative sentence on its own, simply meaning "What?"1. It can also be used as the start of a sentence, such as

> nuq legh yaS

which means

> What does the officer see?

Additionally, "neH" is used as a form of "to want" (though it also used as an adverbial, to mean "only"). Therefore, we have the compound "nuqneH", properly an exclamation that stands by itself as a sentence.

## Choice 2: Use an honorific.

The *Dictionary* notes that "neS" is the only honorific suffix in Klingon, used as part of larger words. For instance, **"qaleghneS"**, coming from "qa" ("you"), "legh" ("see") and "neS", translates to

> I am honored to see you.

This states a fact, and gets to the point. It *may* be used towards a superior, but this is not mandatory, and I don't think it's commonly used. If you wish to open the conversation with an inquiry, **"HIja'neS"** (which includes "HIja", normally used as an affirmative) can work. Its translation is

> Do me the honor of telling me \[about something\].

Again, use this when asking a superior something, but only if you really want to be respectful.

## Miscellaneous

Though I have yet to see any of the following used as a greeting, I imagine you could modify them to create some sort of opening remark.

* **"bel"** is the verb for "to be pleased", so when greeting someone, you could conceivably say "jIbel" ("I am pleased", with "jI" for first-person). Likewise, "Quch" is the verb for "to be happy". Using "jIbel" or "jiQuch" to indicate satisfaction upon meeting someone is a possibility.
* **"maj"** ("Good") or **"majQa'"** ("Well done") are exclamations used as praise. You could use these - preferably "majQa'" - when welcoming an inferior who has successfully completed a task, like blowing up an enemy spaceship.
* **"toH"** is another exclamation, meaning "Well!" or "So!" You would use this in, for instance, a sentence like
> Well! I didn't expect to see you back alive.

---

1 Appending "Daq", to make "nuqDaq", yields "Where?"
> 11 votes

# Answer
According to klignonwiki.net, there isn't an exact equivalent, but you do have a few options:

* **nuqneH**: It's the only word that could literally be called a greeting, but literally it means, "What do you want?" It's possible as a conversation starter, though. (Also indicated by kli.org.)
* **qavan**: Litterally, "Salute." It's actually the imperative, meaning that it could come across sounding like an order. It's a possibility, though, similar to the Greeks who greet one another with the imperative form of "Rejoice!"
* **qaleghneS**: Literally, "I am honoured to meet you." It was used by Riker in *The Emissary*.

All in all, probably the best supported one is **nuqneH**, which kli.org states is the Traditional Greeting.
> 8 votes

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Tags: klingon
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title: unique agglutinative root system?

text:
# Question
Title: unique agglutinative root system?
The language of The Old Ones is described as "an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages" (H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time", Chapter 4). What techniques could a conlanger use to devise a unique root system for an agglutinative language?

# Answer
> 5 votes
In my opinion, it reflects, if anything, more on Lovecraft's lack of linguistic understanding than anything about the language of the Old Ones, since the roots in human languages get pretty damn ridiculous, so it's really hard to imagine something "utterly unlike any found in human languages". You would have to design a phonology produced by speech organs completely unlike those of humans to approach this.

Where I to tackle this, I would go for a system not unlike Arabic, but where the root is constituted of a set of *vowels* instead (with maybe "consonant harmony"?).

Alternatively, Mark Rosenfelder's Kebreni has roots where vowels are swapped around a whole lot, and I doubt that metathesis as a base derivational system exists in any human language.

Generally, I'm not sure designing something literally outside the boundaries of what the human mind can handle is by definition possible, which is what Lovecraft truly was after in his poor description attempt.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I'm not entirely sure what Lovecraft meant by "root systems", but whenever you want to do something that human languages don't or rarely do, a good first step is looking at language universals. The traditional ones, however, as set out by Joseph Greenberg, were more about syntax and only a little about morphology, which roots would probably fall under depending on what you want to do with them. Still, we can use the same techniques. We can look at what some real languages do with roots and try to figure out what they don't do, and then do that.

Roots in most languages are pretty static. They have to be, because they carry the majority of semantic content for a word, so they have to remain recognizable. Some languages, though, have morphology that alters what we would think of as the root in Western languages. In many Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, roots are combinations of consonants, usually three but sometimes two, and inflect by changing the vowels. In Arabic the consonants *k-t-b* are a root that has to do with books and writing. The singular word "book" is *kitāb*, the plural "books" is *kutub*, "booklet" is *kutayyib* with a suffix, "writer" is *kātib*, and the verb "to write" is *kataba*.

Some languages also have infixes, which are affixes that are added inside the root instead of being added to the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix). Tagalog, for example:

> For example, the verb takbo (meaning to run) + the infix um can be made into the word tumakbo, which equates to the simple past tense past tense ran.

(From http://talktagalog.com/tagalog-verbs-grammar-prefixes-infixes-suffixes/)

In the Arabic example, some of the morphology was inflectional, meaning it added some extra meaning to the original root--making a plural, for instance. Some was derivational, meaning we added something to the root that created a new root word--making "books" from "book" is inflectional, but making "book", "writer", and "to write" from the root *k-t-b* is derivational. So one possible meaning for "root system" is a system of derivational morphology, and a "unique agglutinative root system" would be a unique agglutinative system of derivational morphology. Speakers tend to regularize morphology over time, but derivational morphology is a little more resistant to it than inflectional: in English, nobody uses "whom" anymore, but we still preserve irregularities like "*in*-vincible" vs. "*un*-beatable" vs. "*a*-sexual". So with derivational morphology, you have a bit more freedom to concoct a weird, wild system without having to simulate a bunch of lazy peasant speakers who can't be bothered to keep using your fancy inflections.

Anyway, hopefully this gives you some ideas for how to create your own system.

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Tags: rlyehian
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# Question
Title: Is Tolkien's Dwarvish really based on Hebrew?
Many sources say that Tolkien's Dwarvish resembles the Hebrew language. The Lord of the Rings Wikia states that:

> It appears to be structured, like real-world Semitic languages, around the triconsonantal roots: kh-z-d, b-n-d, z-g-l.

Also, from folk.uib.no:

> The basic structure of Khuzdul resembles that of Semitic languages, like Arabic and Hebrew. The stems from which words are derived are not by themselves pronounceable words, but consist of consonants only. Nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. are derived not only by prefixes and suffixes (if such devices are used at all), but also by inserting certain vowels between these consonants, sometimes also by doubling one of the consonants. Often the words are actually inflected by internal vowel-changes instead of adding affixes: Rukhs means "Orc", but plural "Orcs" is Rakhâs. The root consonants - the so-called radicals - remain the same, like \*R-Kh-S in this case. In Khuzdul as well as in Semitic languages, there are usually three radicals in the root; several such roots are mentioned in TI:174 and RS:466: B-R-Z "red", B-N-D "head", K-B-L "silver", N-R-G "black". An example of a biconsonantal root is Z-N "dark, dim" (RS:466).

and:

> **Baruk Khazâd!** is said to mean "Axes of the Dwarves!" Baruk is usually taken to be an example of something similar to the Hebrew "construct state": the state a word is said to be in when it is placed in front of a noun to express a genitival relationship: X Y meaning "X of Y" or "Y's X". (Compare Hebrew סוס (sûs) "horse", המלך (hammelekh) "the king", סוס המלך (sûs hammelekh) "the king's horse, the horse of the king".) Of course, we cannot be certain that baruk is the normal plural "axes" and not a specialized form meaning "axes of". It may be significant that all the other attested plurals contain a long vowel: Khazâd "Dwarves", Rakhâs "Orcs", tarâg "beards", shathûr "clouds", ûl "streams", dûm "excavations, halls", bizâr "valleys". Could the normal plural "axes" be \*barûk? Shathûr "clouds" may represent a plural pattern in -a-û-. In Hebrew, the vowels of words in the construct state are often shortened.

Was it actually based on Hebrew / Semitic languages, or is that simply an impression?

# Answer
### Yes.

According to this interview with Tolkien, he really did design it to be Semitic. He says,

> The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.

In other words, he did design their tongue to be very like the Semitic language, possibly since their history resembled that of the Jews.
> 15 votes

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Tags: inspiration, tolkien-dwarvish, history
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# Question
Title: Which constructed languages have been used to write scientific articles?
One of the most interesting aspects of Interlingua is that during its early days there were a number of scientific articles published in it. This is in contrast with most other constructed languages, which are primarily used to publish things that are of interest only to their own communities.

Have other constructed languages been used for that purpose?

# Answer
The Occidental magazine *Cosmoglotta* occasionally published scientific articles.

In the 32nd publication of Cosmoglotta, a "supplement" was added to the magazine, stating that it was "necessary to use the language not only in linguistics articles". The first "scientific article" appears in the 33rd publication of Cosmoglotta, which published an article about Wegener's theory of continental drift. The publications that follow also contain articles about biology and physics as well as philosophy, economics and politics.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Esperanto is not only used to write scientific articles but there is also a scientific journal published in Esperato, namely Science Revuo.
> 4 votes

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Tags: list-of-languages
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# Question
Title: Are words for "machine" and the like in Tolkien present in Elvish/Westron?
Tolkien was very much known to be a bit of a Luddite - no fan of technology; Treebeard says in reference to Saruman

> He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.

Which just about sums up his attitude towards technology. I'm curious if as a consequence words for "machine" and the like only show up in, say the Black Speech/Orcish, or if they are known to be rarely used, or derived from Khuzdul.

# Answer
Quenya has **tanwë** which means "device, craft, construction." A search for "machine" on this site which may or may not be reputable gives a couple of other words in Quenya, Sindarin, and Noldorin.

Tolkien did once use the word **gun** in the Hobbit. This question on sff explains that, and the top answer to it includes this quote:

> The Common Speech, as the language of the Hobbits and their narratives, has inevitably been turned into modern English. In the process the difference between the varieties observable in the use of the Westron has been lessened. Some attempt has been made to represent these varieties by variations in the kind of English used ... (LOTR: The Return of the King, Appendix F, "II. On Translation")

I'd recommend reading the entire answer.

Anyway, it seems that, logically, there should be no words for "future" technologies in Middle earth; any translation of them by Tolkien can be explained as Tolkien trying to make it easier for us to understand.

The other point I want to bring up is that many of the words found in modern Quenya dictionaries are not original creations by Tolkien, but derivations from his notes. I doubt he created these words intentionally to violate the technology level of the world.

In the Black Speech, we have only a very limited number of words, as seen here; in Dwarvish, as you pointed out in your own answer here, Tolkien has a very limited vocabulary, and only one word has been borrowed from Khuzdul into the Elvish languages.

I think the quote you have about Sauron being a robot is not literal--the orcs' tehnology was no more advanced than the men and the elves'. I'm sure that "mind of metal and wheels" is meant to be some Entish idiom that references being hasty.
> 1 votes

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Tags: tolkien-black-speech, tolkien-elvish, tolkien-dwarvish, translation
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# Question
Title: How much Dothraki was created prior to "Game of Thrones"?
Reading *A Song of Ice and Fire* and watching *Game of Thrones* are two different experiences. One difference that pops out to me is the language that the Dothraki speak, known by the same name.

Naturally the show seems to include much more of the language than the books do, as you need to have actors speak aloud for the audience to interact, where as in writing you can have the audience see the thoughts of the character.

This has me wondering how much of the language George R. R. Martin had developed prior to the production of *Game of Thrones* and/or how much was created for/by the show?

# Answer
**The majority of Dothraki was indeed created for the show.**

George has stated the he is not quite a linguist in that sense (comparing himself against Tolkien).

> I don't have a whole imaginary language in my desk here, the way Tolkien did.
>
> Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail. I, alas, am only a hardworking SF and fantasy novel, and I don't have his gift for languages. That is to say, I have not actually created a Valyrian language. The best I could do was try to sketch in each of the chief tongues of my imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spelling.
>
>  So Spake Martin, YET MORE QUESTIONS, July 22, 2001

He mostly just makes words as needed.

> "DO YOU HAVE THE LANGUAGES ALL PLANNED OUT?"
>
> No he'll make up a word here and there but he does NOT have the whole language written.
>
>  So Spake Martin, BOSKONE (BOSTON, MA), February 14,2003

Even going as far to say that now he will have refer to the creator of the language for the show in his future writing.

> Of course, he then added that with HBO having created Dothraki through the work of David J. Peterson, he feels like now if he wants to have Dothraki (and Valyrian as well) he'll have to refer to Peterson's work to get it "right", or ask Peterson himself how to say something in Dothraki.
>
>  So Spake Martin, STOCKHOLM AND ARCHIPELACON REPORT, June 28, 2015

The show selected David J. Peterson, an expert language creator from the Language Creation Society to create Dothraki for *Game of Thrones*

> Peterson drew inspiration from George R.R. Martin’s description of the language, as well as from such languages as Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili. However, the Dothraki language is no mere hodgepodge, babble or pidgin. It has its own unique sound, an extensive vocabulary of more than 1,800 words and a complex grammatical structure.

Which as of September 21, 2011 has over 3,000 words

> Also, for the curious, Dothraki is now up to 3,163 words: More words than Mr. Padre Tony Gwynn has hits, but still a ways to go to catch Pete Rose (and my guess is Dothraki will have double his number before he gets even a sniff of the Hall of Fame).
> 13 votes

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Tags: song-of-ice-and-fire
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title: "Turing-completeness" in conlangs

text:
# Question
Title: "Turing-completeness" in conlangs
Programming languages & programs are often said to be Turing complete when it's possible to simulate any Turing machine with it.

I'm now designing a constructed language for my game and I want everything to be possible to say in it. How can I know if the language is "Turing complete", that is possible to say/describe everything using it? What would be the requirements for it? What words does the language need to have to be able to speak in it?

For now, everything I thought about:

* It's possible to describe the past, the present and the future (ex. "I bought a car", "I'm buying a car", "I will buy a car")
* It's possible to describe something (words?) (ex. "The cat is red")
* It's possible to describe nearby area/terrain (ex. "There is a tree")
* It's possible to describe plans (ex. "I want to buy a car")
* Any more ideas?

# Answer
> 40 votes
The best parallel for Turing completeness in human languages is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The NSM proposes that there is a limited set of basic semantic concepts which all human languages have, and which are not reducible to other concepts. They call these "semantic primes", because you combine them to get all other meanings, and because they can't be broken down. The list of primes, currently numbering 65, is a work in progress as new primes are proposed and evaluated, but after over 45 years of work on the theory the list has proven to be very reliable and new primes are only rarely proposed.

The NSM is a good guide therefore for judging whether a conlang is "complete" - whether it would be as capable for expressing human thought as any natural language. If a conlang has vocabulary items (they can be words, affixes, or phrases) for each of the semantic primes then I would judge it to be complete.

# Answer
> 18 votes
A language doesn't require grammatical structures specifically for expressing something to express it.

In Chinese, there aren't separate future and past tenses. At the same time, it's possible to describe the past, the present and the future. Auxiliary verbs like 要 *yào* "to want, to be going to" and many others can be used to describe what one would use the future tense for in English.

Grammatical constructs like "but" aren't necessary to convey meaning. We can use words like "caveat", "unfortunately" or "I'm afraid that" instead.

Languages reflect their culture. You should make your game's language reflect the culture that speaks it. If they value respect, add lots of ways of expressing deference, like Japanese.

If you went back in time to 1700s England and attempted to describe the different forms of RNA Polymerase, they would not have a robust understanding of what you meant.

**A language is a shared context between the speaker and the listener.** The common context allows them to communicate some subset of thoughts the human mind is capable of to each other. No language can communicate every thought- some languages have much less room for ambiguity than English, for example.

A good example is trying to communicate colors to a colorblind alien race. You can teach them about the human optical system all you want, but they will still not understand the sensation of color.

# Answer
> 6 votes
Let's first take note that no actual Turing-complete machine has ever been built, nor can one ever be built. Modern computers are good enough approximations for most purposes, but they are in reality just very large finite state machines. A true Turing machine requires *infinite* storage space.

The infinite storage space of the Turing machine model is mirrored in the (computationally equivalent) lambda calculus by the capacity to define an infinite number of arbitrarily-named variables. This suggests a natural connection to human languages: the potentially-infinite set of variables in lambda calculus corresponds to the set of *words* in a human language, while human grammars correspond to the reduction rules of lambda calculus. Transferring that back to the Turing machine model, the infinite storage tape of a Turing machine corresponds to the potential vocabulary of a human language, while the state transition rules correspond to a grammar.

So, the first thing you need to make a human language "Turing complete"--capable of referring to or describing *anything* that can be referred to or described--is an infinite vocabulary! That's clearly impossible, but like real computers approximate Turing machines, we can approximate a "Turing complete conlang" simply by ensuring there is some way to create new lexical items--either strictly by as-needed de-novo coinage, or oligosynthesis, or whatever other word-formation techniques you like--and then abstract away from the vocabulary and looking at the *rules* for how that vocabulary is used.

Continuing the analogy, the fact that there are two such radically different formulations for computation that are nevertheless provably identical in expressive power (the lambda calculus and Turing machine--and, in fact, even more different formalisms than that, like the SKI combinator calculus, NAND machines and the One Instruction Set Computer, etc.) suggests that there may not be any *single* simplest set of grammar constructs that make an abstract language "complete".

Empirically, however, if you put stock in David Gil's work on so-called IMA (Isolating-Monocategorial-Associative) language, the only necessary *and sufficient* requirement for effective human communication (or as he puts it, enough grammar "to sail a boat") is the existence of a generic "association operator"--a way to say "the things represented by these two sub-phrases are related somehow"--and literally everything else can be handled by pragmatics.

So, you need the ability to introduce whatever words you find that you need in a given situation, and you need at least one operator that can specify arbitrary relations between things (e.g., the generic English preposition "of")--which could have a surface expression as simple as juxtaposition. Everything else is sugar, that just makes figuring out the pragmatic details easier.

# Answer
> 3 votes
A language communicates ideas. If the set of ideas communicable by your language is large enough that it is adequate for any situation in your game, then it's good enough. No language is able to communicate all possible human thoughts; some conlangs (e.g. Ithkuil) try to expand the set of ideas that it can convey, but it is still not totally encapsulating.

Another thing to think about is conflation. For example, Toki Pona may be effective at communicating a wide range of ideas, but it often conflates or simplifies concepts (the lack of words for specific numbers being an obvious example of this).

# Answer
> -3 votes
Think:

> What features does a language you understand fluently have. Does your language contain that?

For example:

In English, we get plurals: apple , apples.

* Does your language contain a way to use plurals?

In English, we have exceptions to cover things that feel incomplete, or "out of place": ~~James's~~ but James' We have leaves not ~~leafs~~

* Does your language contain exceptions to make your language feel "complete" and "tidy"?

it's up to you to think of other examples, but I think that these were some good guidelines to follow.

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Tags: grammar, vocabulary
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# Question
Title: Which constructed language has the largest body of literature?
Which is the constructed language which has the largest body of literature, including both works that have been originally created in that language as well as works written in natural languages which have been translated afterwards?

# Answer
According to magazine author Arika Okrent in "Discouraging Words" from *Failure Magazine* (July 21, 2009), it's Esperanto. She writes,

> **What is the most widely used invented language?**
>
> Definitely Esperanto, which is ironic because when you say “Esperanto,” most people say, “Didn’t that die out in the 1920s?” Or, “Esperanto? That failed utopian project?” But in terms of invented languages, it’s the most outlandishly successful invented language ever. It has thousands of speakers—even native speakers—and that’s a major accomplishment as compared to the 900 or so other languages that have no speakers.

That's not hard to believe either. According to Esperanto.net,

> Professor Sidney S. Culbert of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, has done the most comprehensive survey on language use ever attempted. He has conducted interviews in dozens of countries around the world and tested for "professional proficiency", i.e. much more than just "hello, please, goodbye".
>
> Based on this survey, Prof. Culbert concluded that Esperanto has about two million speakers worldwide.

Obviously, this doesn't *quite* answer your question, since it was specifically about published literature. However, according to this answer on the Esperanto stack, there are probably around 200 novels that were originally published in Esperanto, along with 400 volumes of short stories - *and that's in the fiction category only.* There's a list of Esperanto libraries on wikapedia, some of which have thousands of works in them.

---

### Very likely Esperanto.
> 15 votes

# Answer
If you don't consider Sanskrit and Hebrew to be conlangs, your best bet would be Esperanto literature, with over fifty books over at Project Gutenberg alone.
> 7 votes

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Tags: statistics
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# Question
Title: Is the Voynich manuscript written in a natural or constructed language?
The Voynich manuscript is dated to the early 15th century.

> It is a medieval handwritten book of almost 250 pages, and even today the text cannot be understood. It has become quite famous, and it is recognised as one of the main unsolved problems in the history of cryptography.

Can we tell whether it is written in a natural or constructed language?

# Answer
> 6 votes
## There's no evidence to say that it is a constructed language.

The idea was investigated in detail by John Tiltman, a British army officer who specialized in cryptography. The possibility of the Voynich manuscript being a constructed language was brought to his attention by William Friedman, an expert on the manuscript. Friedman confided to Tiltman, after decades of work on it, that he thought the writing could be a form of "synthetic universal language", and so the cryptographer expanded his investigation in that direction, writing a paper on the theory.

The basic premise behind a "synthetic universal language" is to use characters to represent certain logical ideas; by chaining together letters, you can create "words" that describe more complicated principles. By adding the appropriate prefixes and suffixes, characters can be quite powerful. Tiltman noticed that some of the patterns in the words fit this type of design. However, the evidence for this sort of construction was not strong enough, and Tiltman's analysis of the frequency of the occurrence of certain letters did not support Friedman's hypothesis.

Tiltman also traced the historical origin of a "universal language", to determine if such an idea had been bounced around early enough. However, this proved difficult, and Tiltman found no concrete examples prior to the mid-17th century. This is two centuries after the Voynich manuscript was written - sometime in the 15th century - and so *if* the manuscript was indeed written in a universal language, it would predate these universal languages by two centuries.

Tiltman noted

> It was clear that the productions of these two men \[Wilkins and Dalgarno, two early proponents of universal languages\] were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution. When I was attempting to trace back the idea of universal language, I came upon a printed book entitled The Universal Character by Cave Beck, London 1657 (also printed in French in the same year). Cave Beck was one of the original members of the British Royal Society and his system was certainly a cumbersome mixture.

Beck's writing claims that the idea of a universal language goes back to the 16th century, but this still places it many years after the manuscript's origin. The idea of synthetic universal languages, though perhaps relatively widespread in the 17th century, simply was unknown in the 15th. This was a strike against Friedman's theory. If the Voynich manuscript was a synthetic universal language, it would have borne no relation - in time of conception of structure - to later examples.

The universal language route is of course not the only possibility; constructed languages can take many forms. However, it was possible the most promising option, and research into it went nowhere. Friedman's claim remains unsupported, and, to my knowledge, no further academic analyses have been done. We certainly can't rule out the theory that the Voynich manuscript is written in a constructed language, but we have no reason to believe that it is.

# Answer
> 9 votes
We don’t know. It is written in an unknown script, by an unknown author. We don’t even know whether it is even in any language at all, or just random scribbles. Any attempts to connect it to a known language (such as Latin) have failed thus far.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Hope springs eternal. ***This article*** points to one recent lead in computational linguistics. *original article here*

I've read that some work has been done on the script, indicating that there are patterns, even if we don't know what they are referring to.

I have a copy of V.M. (a book èvery glossopoet should have!). I'm frankly of the opinion that, considering the size of the book and the cost of the materials in it and the cost in time to produce the work, it can't just be 240some pages of random nonsense. It's too expensive and would be an incredible, inconceivable waste of resources if it were just a meaningless & private toy of some overly rich maker.

Each page of vellum requires a relatively labour intensive process to make. Inks have to be made. Each page has to be hand written and hand drawn. Some pages are really large fold-outs. Almost every page is decorated in some way. That's a lot of work for it be nothing at all but a pretty conversation piece!

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Tags: voynich-manuscript
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# Question
Title: What is the oldest known constructed language?
Historically speaking, what is the oldest known constructed language that we are able to determine with historical evidence?

# Answer
The oldest language whose creator set out to actually invent a language (as opposed to Pāṇini, who wanted to create a classical standard out of an already extant language) was probably Lingua Ignota. The formerly brilliant Langmaker website had an article on it (now accessible through the Wayback Machine). It was made in the twelfth century, predating another early conlang, Balaibalan, which was made somewhen between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
> 18 votes

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Tags: history
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title: Saying "hello" in khuzdul

text:
# Question
Title: Saying "hello" in khuzdul
Khuzdul, Tolkien's mysterious dwarvish language, is limited in vocabulary (we don't know most of the words) and I can't find hello anywhere. Some notes:

* According to this, "good" is "gamut" and "day" is "manan", so "gamut manan" might sort of convey what I'm looking for. (On the other hand, I have no idea if the grammar here is correct.)
* This lists neither "gamut" nor "manan" as valid words in Khuzdul, so a reliable dictionary also seems to be somewhat in demand.
* This gives "huglgla" as hello. Again, this is listed in neither of the above links.

So, how would you say hello in Khuzdul? Are either of the above three sources reliable? The middle link seems to be closest to Tolkien's actual works, and seems to be cited decently frequently, but perhaps work has been done since that was published.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Well, from what we can glean out of the given texts, I'd be looking for something more like "at your service" rather than "good day".

I know the movies aren't canon, but Jackson depicts the Dwarves as not really comprehending Bilbo when tries to "good morning" them. And Gandalf's retort is classic. That greeting might be a cultural artifact of the Shire.

I wouldn't place too much faith in the lists you link to. They're fan art, which is fine as far as it goes. Especially the third one: that's just horrible garbled English. I mean really: *Baruk Khazâd!* next to *Haw aru tauu?* \- - - I should think it would be difficult to make a worse reconstruction of Khuzdul.

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Tags: tolkien-dwarvish, translation
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# Question
Title: Is the language of The Gostak more than just relexified English?
> Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
>
> Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.
>
> But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

So begins *The Gostak*, an Interactive Fiction game based on the classic phrase "the gostak distims the doshes".

The game is filled with words with no meaning in English, but which are used consistently, such that the player can at least learn their functions and relationships, if not what they actually mean. The grammar of the text seems to just be normal English, but are there places in the game where it starts to transform its grammar as well?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Well,

it is pretty clear that this is just relexified English, just look at the function words: *at, the, of, where, but, is, with, ...*. Also the syntax is 1:1 English syntax, and even the inflections (plural in -s, perfect participle in -ed, third person singular present tense in -s) are the original English one. All in all, it sounds like a strange kind of English slang.

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Tags: relexification
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# Question
Title: What significant traits are found in conlangs and not in natlangs?
Recently I encountered the acronym ANADEW, which I found to mean *A natlang's already dunnit, except worse*. Pondering a comment from Logan R. Kearsley where he speculated that "... it's mildly positive in naturalistic circles, since if a natlang already does it, you know you're justified in using it." I began to wonder what *did not* eventually fit in the ANADEW concept.

I gather that *Lojban* might be unique in its strong attention to being logical, as explained in two excellent answers to What makes lojban such a “logical” language?. If it is not unique, at least it still is something that I don't thing any natlang has as a strong point.

In the short time that this site's been open, it has struck me that conlangs might be *improvements* in one way or another over natlangs, yet despite their diversity, they haven't matched the diversity, and utility, of natlangs.

So, what I'm wondering is, other than *Lojban* and its "logic" is there some other significant traits that some human conlang has which is not found in a natlang somewhere?

I wouldn't consider using never-before-heard sounds as significant, though that's been mentioned in another question. I *would have* considered having a super minimal verb set significant, as in Kēlen, except that, well ANADEW, or in this case maybe *better*.

Full disclosure, I am *not* a conlanger, likely never will be. Nonetheless, I find many fields interesting, and created languages is one of them. With that in mind, please excuse some of my oversights or misconstrued concepts.

# Answer
> 8 votes
There are a broad range of answers possible here and it would be impossible to list everything. In general, it is rather easy to come up with a feature that does not seem to occur in natural languages: simply take a feature every language appears to possess (for example: phonemes, verbs, hierarchical syntax that can be described with syntax trees, a very large amount of words) and reject it. Then see what you can do with the language. This leads to so-called *Engelangs*, short for “Engineered Languages”.

Alternatively, one can from the ground up decide to build structure from a different “philosophy”, e.g. build on predicate logic, or stacks (the CS concept), or… well, whatever you can think of that can organize information, really.

To make an example, there is Ithkuil. Ithkuil does not strive to be a naturalistic language. Instead, its goal is to allow for unambiguity. Among the things it does to provide that are a range of grammatical inflections not found in any natural language - too many to list, but one example I can make is its case system. In most natural languages, case is something of a helper to syntax. Case marks words for their syntactic roles and thus helps create the structure necessary to understand a sentence. In Ithkuil however, case marks *semantics*. The sentence “I hit you” in ithkuil would require different cases for “I” and “you” depending on whether e.g. I was a volitional actor, or whether the hitting was an unavoidable circumstance, or an accident, or mediated by someone else… While traces of such systems are found in natural language, none get even close to the extreme of Ithkuil.

Finally, an interesting anecdote is the *Conlang Trigger System*, a novel way of structuring languages employed in *naturalistic* conlangs (i.e. ones striving to be mistakable for natural languages). The trigger system developed from misunderstandings of the way certain Austronesian languages (such as Tagalog) work. It’s a perfectly plausible system… just not actually attested in natural languages. I believe there’s a nice writeup on the whole topic, but cannot find it right now.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Whilst I also think that this question is too broad as you could argue that almost all conlangs that weren't created to be "naturalistic" have *some* feature never before seen in a natural language. **Wikipedia talks about many a priori languages which, by definiton, contain features not based on existing languages.** With that being said, here are some of my favourite (perhaps less well known) philosophical languages that are vastly different from all natural languages.

---

**Pasigraphies**

A pasigraphy is a constructed writing system which aims to be intelligible to all people. Unlike other writing systems, pasigraphies generally only exist in written form and cannot be spoken. Some notable pasigraphies include

* **Characteristica Universalis** by Gottfried William Leibniz
Leibniz ws one of the earliest proponents of a universal pasigraphy or "alphabet of human thought" assigned "charactaristics" to objects so that they would be able to be manipulated by means similar to algebra.
* **Real Character** by John Wilkins
The most successful of Wilkins' many philosophical languages and one of the first to gain popular attraction, Real Character is an ideographic system that uses the combination of different symbols to form new concepts.
* **Blissymbolics** by Charles K. Bliss
The most successful pasigraphy to date, Blissymbolics is fundamentally similar to Real Character and are now mainly used to teach people with speech and physical disabilities.

*(Examples of Blissymbols stolen from All Things Linguistics)*

* **Transcendental Algebra** by Jacob Linzbach
Inspired by Leibniz's Characteristica, Transcendental Algebra was created to accompany Edgar de Wahl's international auxiliary Occidental and allows for the "algebraic manipulation" of facts to calculate truth.

---

I feel like this list wouldn't be complete without a shoutout to **Solresol** (not having words seems pretty un-natlang-y to me)

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Tags: typology
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# Question
Title: I want to create a family of languages. Should I do one first or should I concentrate on all of them?
I want to create a whole family of related languages like a natural language family, like Semitic, Italic and Germanic languages. In what ways can this be done? What are the requirements, drawbacks and benefits of each?

# Answer
> 5 votes
The usual way to approach making a family of related languages is to first make a proto-language (or adopt an existing or reconstructed natural language for this purpose), then simulating natural evolution of both phonology, morphology and semantics in multiple different directions. While the creation of the protolang cannot really be parallellised (though one can deliberately introduce features that one would like to play around with in the following process, or that one can easily see multiple outcomes for), the process of evolving the descendants of the protolanguage can definitely be parallellised, and whether or not to do so is simply a matter of taste (though some things necessarily require some amount of parallel work, such as making a dialect continuum).

There are alternative methods to the derivation-from-protolang method, however they tend to either be much more cumbersome (e.g. trying to reconstruct a protolanguage from two or more seperate conlangs) and/or produce results that do not show the same regularity of correspondence that is indicative of genetic relation in natural languages (e.g. trying to just make two seperate but similar conlangs).

# Answer
> 1 votes
For a naturalistic language family one has to apply naturalistic sound shifts and other naturalistic language changes. Those rules and changes are usually directed, therefore it is the best to design the oldest stage of the language (aka the proto-anguage) first and to apply sound shifts and language changes afterwards.

Designing a whole language familiy requires a lot of historical linguistic background, but it is not impossible, as the family of Elvish languages by Tolkien shows.

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Tags: diachronics, conlang-creation, language-families
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# Question
Title: What are some reasons that constructed languages would want to have ambiguity?
As far as I know, most constructed languages have no syntactically or semantically ambiguous grammatical constructions. However, would there be any reasons that a constructed language might include certain potentially ambiguous constructions, and if not, why do many (or maybe most) natural languages have so much ambiguity, and why would that not be resolved in natural languages?

# Answer
> 21 votes
1. If naturalness (being like a natural language) is a design goal, then a conlang can embrace ambiguity with no shame.
2. Efficiency. Most ambiguous sentences are understood well enough in the context they are uttered in, clarified either by prior knowledge, non-linguistic communication (body language, pointing, etc), or through follow up questions from the listener. When most ambiguity is not actually a problem, it doesn't need to be explicitly countered. To require a language to be completely and always unambiguous would require much more specific and cumbersome sentences, violating the cooperative principle.
3. Wordplay. Puns, double entendres, and garden path sentences are unlikely to be possible or productive without substantial ambiguity.

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Tags: ambiguity, design-goals
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title: Is Loglan still alive?

text:
# Question
Title: Is Loglan still alive?
Loglan is a predecessor of the Lojban language. Is it still supported and actively used/developed, or is it a dead language?

# Answer
> 9 votes
## Yes.

Loglan is continuously being developed and modified, as the website shows. There are new reports about changes to the language (and proposals to do so). The CEO of the Loglan Institute, Randall Holmes, has written periodic reports on the language; the one from 2015 shows that several speakers have proposed changes, including the addition of new words (see Appendix 9). For the most part, excluding specific major developments like the Great Morphological Revolution of 1989, the structure has stayed the same, but grammar and vocabulary continue to grow and evolve.

In terms of the total number of speakers, we have little to no data. My impression is that since the split, Lojban has become more popular than Loglan. The Lojban community is largely Internet-based, and perhaps 20-200 people use it in some non-negligible capacity. Loglan's userbase is probably smaller than that, although I don't know how small. It's clearly non-zero, but not by much - perhaps 10 or 20 people.

Now, the question of whether Loglan is dead or alive rests in part on how you define a "dead language". I don't think anybody has ever learned Loglan or Lojban as a native language; you could therefore argue that it was never alive in the first place. So I suppose the best answer to your questions is that yes, Loglan is still being used and changed, but it's not "alive" in the sense of most languages.

The Loglan Institute considers Loglan to be alive because of the constant grammar/vocabulary changes; they define a dead language as one that isn't evolving. Based on that definition, Loglan is indeed alive.

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Tags: loglan, history
---


# Question
Title: Can you construct garden path sentences in Lojban?
A garden path sentence is a sentence whose beginning suggests one parsing which is invalidated as the whole sentence is read and then re-parsed. Some examples in English (from fun-with-words.com):

> Fat people eat accumulates.
>
> When Fred eats food gets thrown.
>
> The girl told the story cried.

It is claimed that Lojban is a syntactically unambiguous language. Does that mean that garden path sentences cannot be constructed in Lojban?

# Answer
Lojban's official formal grammar is written in YACC, which is a LALR(1) parser generator. Since this means that the parser only ever "looks ahead" a maximum distance of one token while parsing, garden path sentences are impossible in the traditional sense.

This just means that the parse tree can't be drastically transformed during the sentence—it doesn't mean that the *meaning* of sentences can't be changed signficantly later on within them. The first example that comes to mind is the song *NA KU* from Djemynai's ZA'O, which contains the chorus "*pu ku zvati fa do .ije ca ku zvati fa do... na ku*." This glosses roughly as follows:

```
pu-ku zvati   fa-do
PST   present 2sg.NOM
You were here.

.i-je ca-ku zvati   fa-do   na-ku
and   PRES  present 2sg.NOM NEG
Now you are not here.

```

Note that the use of *ku* allows the negation particle to be moved to the very end of the sentence. This does not affect the parse, so it's not a traditional garden path sentence, but it still allows the creation of a surprising effect, which is similar in some senses.
> 18 votes

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Tags: lojban, ambiguity
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# Question
Title: What is a constructed variety of a natural language called?
What would a conlang created to be an alternate version of an already existing natural language be classified as?

For example, a version of English that could have been spoken in an alternate steampunk-era Victorian England, or a conlang of the Finnish language in the year 2349. To be clear, I'm assuming that the conlang would be an actual, dedicated one, and not just a few "alternate" words thrown in for flavor; the examples I picked were just the first ones that came to mind.

(Bonus: is there a classification for a conlang created to be a conlang of a conlang in this same way?)

# Answer
> 10 votes
That would be an **a posteriori** conlang, in contrast with an **a priori** one. Wikipedia. The process of changing a language through time is called **diachronic conlanging**.

An example of a very well-done a posteriori conlang would be Carisitt which has been developed as if it was a natural language deriving from PIE (that is, it is also an example of diachronic conlanging). Examples of an a priori conlang are abundant, for instance all of Tolkien’s works.

# Answer
> 5 votes
For naturalistic languages placed in an Alternative History setting the term Altlang (short from Alternative Language) is used.

An example of such an Altlang is Alternese (an alternative history English) by Justin B. Rye.

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Tags: terminology, natural-languages, classification
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# Question
Title: Which types of conlangs are the most popular to construct?
For example, can it be shown that there are more auxiliary than artistic conlangs? Note that I'm not talking about use, but about which type is more popular to create. The answer can address any level of specificity; i.e. it could address types, subtypes, very broad generalizations, etc. (I'm afraid I don't know very specific categorizations to be more clear; feel free to edit or suggest better words in the comments.) I would prefer answers focused on conlangs from more "modern" times; say, starting with the introduction of Tolkien's languages forward.

If no answer is possible because the data doesn't exist or isn't organized in a way that allows for such an inventory to be taken, that is also acceptable.

# Answer
> 5 votes
This is a hard to answer question, as there isn’t any statistically useful database. CALS has a bunch of data, but only a small subset of conlangers have ever entered their data there. There, there seems to be a clear preference for the creation of **Artlangs**, i.e. creating languages simply for the sake of creating art, not to fulfill any purpose. **A priori** langs seem to be favoured over **a posteriori**, likely because the latter is quite a bit more work-intensive (every new vocabulary item needs to be researched if one wants to do a good job at it…).

A larger sample size can be found on reddit. However, there are no statistics there, and the sample is skewed in favour of beginner conlangers (only few experienced conlangers ever frequent it. source: personal experience as a moderator). To get an idea of the data, we can use Google search results. With the added restriction `site:reddit.com/r/conlangs` here are some results (first number total of following search results):

**Auxlangs**: 893

* Auxlang: 469
* Auxiliary Language: 212
* IAL: 212

**Artlangs**: 430 (this number is problematic because this category appears to be taken as the default by many, yielding no search results)

* Artlang: 191
* Artistic Language: 239

**A priori**: 1'170
**A posteriori**: 328

**Naturalistic**: 363

**“Romance” languages**: 1'403

* romlang: 363
* romance: 1'040

**“Germanic” languages:** 1'210

* germanic: 1'210

**Indo-European**: 730

**Creole**: 364

---

As you can see, on reddit, taking inspiration from existing European language families is very common. From personal experience, among more experienced conlangers there are very few people trying to create auxiliary languages, most people striving to either create naturalistic languages or to push the boundaries of linguistics in some way or another. But I cannot provide any data for this.

# Answer
> 6 votes
My experiences are largely the same as those of Adarain, though I have access to a data-set that perhaps better shows the predominance of artlangs, as I moderate a moderately sized discord server in which users can request roles that show what kind of languages they make and at the same time get a fancy-coloured name. Many users have more than one roles and the roles are not mutually exclusive either. The first number is the amount of people who have the role, the second number is the amount of people who have it as their primary colour:

* A posteriori: 24, 8
* A priori: 73, 19
* Artistic: 66, 43
* Auxiliary: 11, 8
* Engineered: 16, 16
* Joke: 8, 4
* Secret (for secret communication): 12, 4

These numbers clearly show the dominance of a priori artistic languages. Additionally, all but one of the people with auxiliary as their main colour are relative beginners, though this a rather small sample and it may come down to server culture as much as anything.

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Tags: history, classification, statistics
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title: On what license Lojban can be used?

text:
# Question
Title: On what license Lojban can be used?
Given the fact that inventor of the Loglan language started to claim his copyright on the language's components, and Lojban is basically a successor to Loglan, on what license Lojban is published? Can it be freely used without any limitations?

# Answer
> 7 votes
Logical Language Group, Inc. retains the copyright, but grants permission to copy, redistribute, and create derivative works from the official book, under conditions such as attribution and a requirement to include a permission notice identical to the one below.

> Copyright © 1997 by The Logical Language Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
>
> Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this book, either in electronic or in printed form, provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
>
> Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this book, provided that the modifications are clearly marked as such, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
>
> Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this book into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation that has been approved by the Logical Language Group, rather than in English.
>
> The contents of Chapter 21 are in the public domain.

From the Boring Legalities section of the Lojban Reference Grammar

The Formal Grammar (chapter 21) is in the public domain, as the above license says.

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Tags: lojban, legal
---


title: Why learn constructed languages?

text:
# Question
Title: Why learn constructed languages?
I understand why *create* conlangs - they are sometimes needed for world of a book or game.

But... why learn them?

If most people in the world know normal languages and speak them, we can communicate with them using existing languages. There is no problem with talking with someone without knowing his language, because nowadays a lot of people in the world speak English, which is kind of an international language.

I couldn't find a real reason why. We don't talk with characters inside books or movies. We do eventually talk with in-game characters, but they rather speak a normal language, not a conlang. If they don't do so, then we can still understand what they want to say, because games often add some kind of translation, if creators of the game want the player to understand the message.

Is learning constructed languages ever necessary? What are the possible reasons of learning a conlang?

**EDIT:** I don't think this is opinion based. I'm not asking "why do you learn conlangs?" I'm asking for the most common reasons why people learn conlangs, not for opinion.

# Answer
> 4 votes
An unordered set of potential reasons:

1. Showing off. I know something cool that you don’t. For some, that is the reason to learn Latin but for others that may be the reason to attempt to learn e.g. a language from the Lord of the Rings. It can easily have a vast impression on fans of the franchise.
2. Cosplay. This is especially true for languages appearing in games/movies/etc. For many cosplayers, the prime goal when cosplaying a character is to mimic them as perfectly as possible. Of course, if you’re mimicking e.g. Eragon after he has learnt the ancient language, you want to at least be able to produce meaningful sentences (unless you’re explicitly aiming for mishaps like the one in the underground city — but arguably that requires even *more* knowledge). If you’re cosplaying Arya, that is even more true.
3. Creating a franchise that uses a conlang. If you want to make extensive use of your conlang while writing a series of books like A Song of Ice and Fire, getting it right at later stages is much easier if you have some basic understanding early.
4. Just because they can. For some people, picking up a language is extremely easy so they may just want to do it for intellectual stimulation.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Jan's answer covers most of the reasons to learn conlangs. I just want to add more on why people create them, which should illuminate why people learn them.

You say you understand that people create conlangs for the "world of a book or game." This is the case, but there are many other types of conlangs. Conlangs can be created as a linguistic experiment, an attempt for people to speak more logically, as a language intended to become universally accepted (arguably the most famous conlang, Esperanto, is for this purpose). They can be created to add spice or realism to a world, like Dothraki, Klingon, Quenya; they can be just for fun, or a secret language to speak with your friends. You can even make a language for only women, so they can communicate on an equal footing with men.

But then why do people learn conlangs? Well, it depends what type it is. Maybe you just want to because you can--or maybe you genuinely believe that it is the only logical way to communicate. Or maybe you're a huge fan of Star Trek and you want to speak klingon. Or maybe you just want to be able to communicate with your siblings without your parents understanding.

The great thing about conlangs is that you don't need to care about them unless you're interested. They don't affect your lives unless you want them to.

# Answer
> 2 votes
The above answers didn't rely resonate with me. I will try to explain why i started to learn a constructed language called lojban.

**1. Better Meaning extraction for human-computer interaction**

I want to build AI's and talk to them like real humans. The problem i'm facing is how to convert my English **from speech** to - **text form** \- **then into meaning** \- so that the computer can take different programmatic actions depending on that meaning..

And i want to do this with complex thoughts - not "Cortana close the light" type of commands. That is easy to do it in English already.

English and most other languages is not well suited for easy parsing of meaning. The amount of ambiguity in any non trivial phrase is enormous. Exponential complexity is a big problem. We humans solve it by putting things into context - and also trough lot's and lot's of experience.

And even so - we sometimes misunderstand each other.. Keep in mind that we are very smart. Computers are kind of dumb at this point.

Building this context and this experience in an AI is almost an inapproachable task. Building the context is even a bigger problem then parsing the relations between words. It's called an AI hard problem. Only big companies like Google and Microsoft have the resources to approach a problem of this size. Cortana is mostly pre-scripted answers at this point (feb 2018). Is not the real deal.

Now if you have a constructed language like lojban - you have at least 2 big benefits:

1. the speech to text conversion happens very easily - because lojban has no phonetic ambiguity. Words are typed the way they are pronounced. Is a 1 to 1 mapping. I don't need to understand what you meant in order to know for certain what you said.
2. the grammar is very congruent / precise - and is said to have zero exceptions - this makes parsing and meaning extraction easier by orders of magnitude. Ambiguity is still an issue - but a manageable one.

In English - we extract meaning and solve ambiguity by relying mostly on statistics. We garter billions of phrases - and based on that we **infer** what is **the most probable meaning of a phrase**. We do this with models based on neural networks - that are black boxes for the most part. Point is - grammar rules are not that useful in English. When you debug your program - you can't clearly see why a certain chunk of text was summarized to a certain phrase. You can use your human intuition - and you can agree or disagree with the summary - but if you disagree - you can't easily inspect the decision that the computer took at each step.

Introduction to the parsing problem is a good place to start. The production systems are more advanced then this.

In lojban, by contrast things are simpler: there are only verbs(selbri) and nouns(sumti) - actually is more like - **functions** and **arguments to those functions**.

One can heavily rely on rules - and that is enough to get the meaning out with a very high accuracy. And in principle is scalable .. phrases, paragraphs, pages .. hole speeches, hole books, the entire Wikipedia - a web of meaning..

So this is why i'm interested in it. A web of meaning - as opposed to a web of data. Right now computers can see **the data** \- but they can't see **the meaning**.

**2. Answer to questions the way an Expert would do it**

Another even more interesting use-case for a constructed language is it's ability to provide a sufficient and universal representation of knowledge that is easy to query by computers. We are interested in getting useful answers from big amounts of unstructured data.

Google is trying to do this for ages. You still get bad results even for easy to answer questions. The way an expert answers a question - is different from google.

We need more of that expert answer. This is almost always true for complex questions.

**You want the answer alone** not 10's of articles that might or might not contain the answer - articles that you need to read yourself.

And this situation is primarily because 99.9% of human knowledge is represented as text - mostly in English - which is very hard to parse, and query in a meaningful way.

So one way to solve this - is to have all this knowledge in a system that is easy to query by design. And this is what constructed languages can potentially offer. And i don't mean sql databases - is way better - is in the computation itself. The way we humans do it internally - the computers will be able to do it as well. We are still a far cry form that - but i think this direction is promising..

**3. On a personal level. Language might affect the way you think.**

This is best express by watching an awesome movie like Arrival. or by reading articles like this.

If lojban were to be our default language instead of English - i think our entire civilization we would have been centuries more advanced that we are now - not just technologically - but in general.

I'm just learning this stuff myself. But hopefully this allows you to see that there are much more practical applications - with very serious consequences then just: "you look more smart in front of your friends" - that is not something would convince me to get trough the struggle of learning a new language.

Yet there are people that don't struggle that much - for them the other reasons might make more sense.

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Tags: speech-communities
---


# Question
Title: What is the key to realistic inventories
Shy of simply recreating or stitching together natural languages' phonological inventories, what is the solution for making a naturalistic conlangs' inventory naturalistic?

# Answer
You should think of phonology in terms of **distinction**. You have to distinguish certain consonants and vowels from others, and you have to figure out the best way to do that.

A realistic inventory has spread out places of articulation, often symmetrical. It's much easier to make a distinction between spread-out consonants that between consonants that are articulated similarly. That's why this is a really common inventory:

```
             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close
Mid-Close
Mid          e             o
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open           a

```

And *this* is unheard of:

```
             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close   ɪ             ʊ
Mid-Close          ɘ
Mid
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open

```

You should always make sure a language makes distinctions that are spread apart, e.g. /p t k/, rather than distinguishing three types of t-sounds /t̼ t ʈ/ without also having a distinction from /p k/ (unless for some reason you're making a language to be spoken by aliens without lips, for instance). There's also no reason to have only three consonants /p d kʰ/; you should either have only one set (such as /p t k/), or have a set for each of them (i.e. /p pʰ b, t tʰ d, k kʰ g/).

Every rule has its exceptions, but this is true of most natural languages, and you should use this as a starting point.

(Some more details can be found in my answer on Linguistics, from which I copied some of the examples)
> 8 votes

# Answer
In addition, inventories should be remotely gridlike. That is, if a series of phonemes of one manner of articulation occurs (let's say /p t k q/), then a similar series is likely to occur at another (e. g. /ɸ s x χ/ is more likely to occur than /θ ʒ h/).

This is an example of what not to make. The article shoehorns the inventory into a grid, but you should notice that there are a lot of gaps. This is a somewhat more realistic inventory.
> 4 votes

# Answer
There are some websites providing phoneme inventories of natural languages, among them:

1. A very simple interface to the UPSID database
2. PHOIBLE Online

The WALS survey also has several chapters on phoneme inventories, including data about the size of the inventories and about the distribution of rare segments and the absence of frequent segments.
> 2 votes

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Tags: phonology, conlang-creation, naturalism
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# Question
Title: How can boustrophedon writing systems be published?
Boustrophedon writing systems are ones in which the direction of writing swaps after each line.

At least one conlang is intended to be written as a boustrophedon (in that case vertically.)

Now if you manually typeset a document your could reverse the lines, but that doesn't allow for plain text boustrophedon writing, nor does it allow for reflowable text (such as on a webpage.)

Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon? There are multiple text direction control codes in Unicode, can any of them be used for boustrophedon text? Or has anyone proposed a control code to be included in Unicode, or designated one in a Private Use Area?

Or are there any other practical ways of publishing boustrophedon text (because a custom PUA code wouldn't be supported by most software) such as some kind of CSS filter for a webpage?

# Answer
> 16 votes
> Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon?

From the unicode.org FAQ about bi-directional text\[1\]

> The Unicode Standard does not provide formatting codes to signal boustrophedon text. Specialized word processors for ancient scripts might offer support for this. In the absence of that, fixed texts can be written in boustrophedon by using hard line breaks and directionality overrides.

I don't know of any online method of inputting reflowable boustrophedon text, however there seems to be a LaTeX package\[2\] availible that offers automation of the process at least in LaTeX documents, both for "regular" boustrophedon and the Rongorongo style where glyphs are rotated rather than mirrored, which would allow for relative ease of publishing pdf documents at leat.

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Tags: writing-systems, unicode
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