# Question
Title: Are there any free resources for learning conlang creation?
Where are some free resources available online for learning how to create conlangs? I'm very new to this, however I can speak one conlang (toki pona).

I checked a few other questions this was marked as a duplicate of but they are not what I need. I'm looking for resources for learning to make conlangs (not conlang creation tools, like here) that are accessible online for free (rather than paid books like I found in the answers here).

# Answer
> 0 votes
I have been working a conlang for a few years now, and I initially found some free lists of words here and there, bought a book or two, but never really found them that deep.

Recently I encountered Lojban. If I were to start this process over learning from scratch, I would study Lojban. They tell you in there the history of how it was made, the problems they tried to solve, etc.. It's a pretty good glimpse into how to create a conlang. Here is a Lojban timeline.

I created a repo with some word/sentence lists to be able to know some things to cover at the basics. Wikipedia has a bunch of basic word lists, and there are some other spreadsheets floating around on the web somewhere.

But other than that, just wrapping your mind around the pieces of creating a conlang, there are several good books on this which I'm sure you've seen recommended (like the Language Construction Kit you linked to). Creating a sound system, maybe a writing system, creating a lexicon, and then creating the grammar (the real hard part, which there's not much out there for learning materials).

Toki Pona would also be another good conlang to study, for a minimalist perspective. Here is a word and grammer cheat sheet.

# Answer
> 5 votes
This isn't properly a conlang resource, but it's a language learning resource which is pretty useful, at least if your conlang is set in the modern world and not a fantasy one: Gabriel Wyner's 625 Word List of cross-linguistically common non-function words you may want to create to jumpstart your vocabulary generation and have something to start messing about with when you start the syntax.

Besides that, Zompist's Language Construction Kit, though it is not as detailed as the paid, print version you mention, still works fine as guide to get someone started and is still free. There was a time when it was just about everything that was available on the Web.

As for more modern materials, there are Artifexian's and David Peterson's Youtube channels have a lot of tutorials on how to organise your conlanging work. In fact, Peterson once gave a talk at Google where he sketched out the beginnings of a conlang in an hour, which you may try to emulate for an attempt 1.

# Answer
> 3 votes
The conlang-guiding spreadsheets @Ylahris made, Der Spracherfinder, seeks to take a new person through stages and resources recommended by some of the other guides. It carries your work on one stage to the next stage.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I acknowledge that my response is late, but I'd like to provide a link to an updated version of my Der Spracherfinder that @Vir mentioned. Should you choose to use it, I hope it proves useful. I was in your situation before, and I was disappointed with the available tools. Thus, I created Der Spracherfinder in hopes of guiding new conlangers through the process, as well as providing a template for future projects. Why rebuild the factory each time to build a tire?

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Tags: conlang-creation, resource-request, tools
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title: Subordinate Clauses In OSV

text:
# Question
Title: Subordinate Clauses In OSV
So, I'm working on my very first conlang, which happens to be OSV (object-subject-verb word order). But I seem to have run into something of a roadblock. How could I handle clauses such as, for example, 'the bird sings when the sun rises'? I'm considering adding some kind of marker or even creating some sort of word hierarchy, but I don't want to wind up with anything excessively complicated. Again, we're dealing with OSV here. Any advice for a struggling amateur here?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Adjuncts (which is "when the sun rises" here) can usually be placed anywhere in a sentence. Using another example with an object, the following are possible:

* When the sun rises, a song the bird sings
* A song when the sun rises the bird sings
* A song the bird when the sun rises sings
* A song the bird sings when the sun rises

They all sound a bit weird because English is not OSV, but are probably valid in a poetic context... Toki pona always puts temporal adjuncts at the front of a sentence. If you allow free variation, it's probably a good idea to impose a relative order (place before temporal before manner or similar), which is common in natural languages. But otherwise you have free reign -- it's *your* language!

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Tags: conlang-creation, word-order
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# Question
Title: How to develop partial reduplication diachronically?
I want a daughter language of some proto-conlang to develop partial root reduplication for consonant initial roots as a productive and mostly regular morphological feature (the precise value it marks is unimportant here). The re-duplicated part would be the first consonant of the root, with an additional vowel which could be in vocalic harmony with the first vowel of the root. To give some examples:

* kɔt -\> kakɔt
* lim -\> lelim

mostly like the ancient Greek perfect tense. I suppose the historical development of such a feature involves a great deal of analogical leveling, however I wonder how far one can get simply by regular sound changes.

A possibility would be to have some initial clitic (marking the grammatical feature I am interested in) disappearing and triggering gemination of the initial consonant of the following word by vowel deletion and regressive assimilation, then separation of the geminate by vowel epenthesis, *e.g.* with a clitic *ne*:

* ne kɔt \> \*nkɔt \> \*kkɔt \> kakɔt

However, he last step seems quite un-naturalistic by virtue of a geminate integrity principle. Do you have any idea on how to design a reasonably naturalistic evolution leading to productive partial reduplication?

# Answer
The last step (inserting an epenthetic vowel) is exactly what Mycenaean Greek did *in writing*, in the Linear B script. The script, being syllabic by nature, did not have a convenient way of transcribing consonant clusters, and the geminates were written by repeating the CV syllable. Thus your kkɔt would be written T¹ (ko-ko-T²) in Linear B. Now you can posit a long and rich literary tradition, based on a prestigious dialect that developed the geminates while other dialects did not and the prestige shifted to other dialects later on; and/or the pronunciation diverged from the orthography and a "dictionary reading" became the norm, pronouncing the fictitious vowel (kind of what happened with Literary Czech (re)introducing the /i:/ vowel instead of /ei̯/ by virtue of using the letter "ý" in the orthography)

¹) The way of writing the word final -t is unimportant for this question - Mycenaean and Cypriot scripts diverged on this.

²) Incidentally, this happens to be one of the most vulgar words in Slovak. Just a coincidence, I guess :-)
> 3 votes

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Tags: morphology, diachronics
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# Question
Title: What sounds work best for an underwater language spoken by crab people?
Currently I am working on a species of crab people who live semi-aquatic life styles, and I would like their languages to do two things:

* Be easy to understand underwater
* Be based somewhat on their biology

For the biology point, I have only so far excluded fricatives, as they have no nasal cavities. Their mouths are mostly human, with tongues and lips. I am currently trying to find what sounds would travel best underwater, and if there are any other noises I should exclude entirely or make them struggle to pronounce due to unfamiliarity.
I am new to conlanging as a whole so I don't really have anything good that I have been using as research beyond the IPA page from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International\_Phonetic\_Alphabet).

# Answer
I am thinking Dolphins and sonar, loud sharp noises that travel far even underwater. Maybe clicking noises with their tongues, maybe popping noises made by pursing lips and blowing air.

If it is what I am suspecting and the reason they are called 'crab' people is because they have distinctive claws of some kind then definitely include snaping their claws at least for emphasis. If they have human hands as well as claws you can have an amusing side note where a foreigner snaps with their fingers in an attempt to communicate and the crab people(s) are shocked because they only use their claws to make the louder noises so they didn't know finger snapping was possible.

Also if like crabs they have more then 2 pairs of limbs and some of them have fingers, you could always go for sign language. The crab people could also have antennae which could lend a hand signaling wise. You could also have the crab people make like bees/ants and dance to communicate, especially if they have pointy pod things for feet then crabs tap dancing to tell a story would be pretty interesting.

Depending on how alien and or crab like you want the crab people to be having the ability from other underwater creatures like color changing and light flashing could be an option (the language could even be mostly silent between crabmen).

You also haven't mentioned if magic is a factor, you could always explain talking underwater clearly/unimpeded away with special spells or abilities like having the crabs all share a hive mind or a psychic connection to a crab mind internet.
> 3 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonology
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title: An all consonant language? (Part Two)

text:
# Question
Title: An all consonant language? (Part Two)
I'd like to create a language with only consonants, using the letters b, ch, d, f, g(hard), j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, sh, t, th (voiced and unvoiced), v, z, and (most importantly) h. I feel like the h would just become a mixture of unvoiced vowels as humans spoke the language. Is this likely to happen over time?

# Answer
Well, over time, you're almost certainly going to gain vowels. Vowels are very easy to pronounce (think about the first sounds babies make as they're learning to use their mouths), and very easy to hear. So the evolutionary forces that apply to any language in productive use will tend to introduce vowels. They're just so useful!

If you want this language to be naturally spoken for a long time without evolving vowels, you'll need some way to prevent that. One way would be to have the speakers lack vocal cords, or not be able to use them (so they're always whispering). This makes vowels a lot harder to hear, so they lose some of their evolutionary advantage. But this will probably remove all the nasals, too, since those are practically impossible to hear without voicing.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I personally don't think it is possible to have a language without vowels unless you are talking about a sign language or some code like language that doesn't use syllables (as in clicks or taps or dots and dashes like morse code). Though I think @Draconis has a point, maybe if they whispered a lot, or maybe if the speakers were snake people and hissed everything and replaced the vowels with 'S's.

However far more achievable would be to have little to no supporting and elongating vowels, and as little vowels as possible.

Nothing would be drawn out, all sounds immediately followed by another sound when two or more phonemes are put together. Very up and down sounding, like stuttering on purpose but language.

Instead of having vowels stressing/not stressing/raising them up or down for the sake of tone, I theorize that rhythm would instead become far more crucial. Something like iambic pentameter must exist especially for more formal kinds of talk/occasions. And people singing or just arguing probably always sounds like rapping/a rap battle.
> 2 votes

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Tags: phonetics, unnatural-features, sound-change, speaking
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# Question
Title: Is There an Optimal Order for Addressing Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics?
I am about to create a constructed language. Is it acceptable if I follow the levels of language in the given order: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics? Or do I need to do this other way?

# Answer
> 2 votes
As already said, this order is logical but each aspect shouldn't be designed independently. For instance, if you want your language to have an agglutinative morphology, its phonology should be thought beforehand with this *purpose* in mind. To give an example if your phonology have consonant final words but doesn't tolerate some consonants to be adjacent, it means that you cannot have suffixes starting with a consonant as morphemes, or you need to add rules to handle them:

* by adding a vowel between the root and the suffix (turkish: *masa + m \> masam*, my table -- but *kalem-i-m*, my pen). Is it going to be the same for all suffixes ?
* by deleting or modifying one the conflicting consonant (inuktitut: *umiaq + liuq- \> umialiuq-* to build a boat). Should you delete the root or the suffix consonant ? Or merge them into something else, following what rules ?
* and many other solutions

so that your morphology can easily become extremely complicated for some choices of phonology. Of course you can have a virtually constraintless phonology and all sorts of morphemes (like georgian does) or a very rigid phonology and syllable structure and morphemes that fit into the pattern (like japanese).

The same is true for morphology/syntax interactions. If your language has a lot of information encoded morphologically, you would expect (at least for naturalistic conlangs) its word-order to be relatively free, or you might end up with your grammar doing a lot of things redundantly, which a lot of conlangers find aesthetically unpleasant. Instead you should have a quite rigid word order if your language is isolating \[\*\].

In the end, everything is a matter of taste, but if you want your result to be consistent, it is a good idea to have a general picture of the result before diving into the details, for example by defining beforehand some typological features of your conlang-to-be.

\[\*\] of course this is by no means systematic, chinese can switch easily from SVO to topic-comment sentence structure without any morphological device to indicate it.

# Answer
> 1 votes
The way you do this is up to you, essentially -- it's *your* language. However, it seems logical to follow this order, because you will compose larger units that you use in subsequent stages of your design.

For example, when looking at syntax, you will be dealing with words. It's a lot easier if you already know what those words look like, though you can of course use placeholders instead. But then you dont get the 'feel' of the language.

This doesn't have to be strict: if, during your work on syntax, you find that a word doesn't look so good, simply go back and change it.

As I said, this is more advice than fixed rules.

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Tags: morphology, syntax, phonetics, semantics
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title: Lower than / Covered by

text:
# Question
Title: Lower than / Covered by
I am wondering if there is a distinction in any natural language between a preposition or postposition with the meaning "lower than" and a different preposition or postposition with the meaning "covered by" such that it would be incorrect to say that my muscle is under my skin etc. You have to use the preposition or postposition with the meaning "covered by".

I also wonder if there are any natural languages with unique prepositions or postpositions or other unique distinctions. One thing I was thinking about for one of my conlangs would be to have some prepositions with fairly unique meanings such as "nearer to the center" or "along the top of something" or a distinction like being on the west, east, north, south side of something or proceeding in that direction. That would be if the speakers know the cardinal directions at all times, similar to the Aboriginal Australians.

Well, this is my question and I hope someone would know something unique about this. I am thinking about this presently and I have investigated the grammars of some languages, but I don't know where to look. I also want to know if someone else might have an idea for a preposition which would mean something more unique or distinct, or if some other distinction can be made such as that the hypothetical language would use two or more prepositions with separate meanings where we would use just one word.

# Answer
Scandinavian languages have the preposition you look for. I'll use Swedish as an example.

The word "nedanför" means "below", but strictly in the sense you ask for. It could not be used if you mean "muscles below your skin". Similarly, "ovanför" means "above". There are also Swedish words "under" and "över" with the same dual meanings as in Eglish.

As you ask for further examples of prepositions, I could mention that most of the basic Swedish prepostions come in pairs: one that concerns locality and one that concerns direction or movement. As an example, where English has the prepostion "here", Swedish has "här" and "hit". "We are here" translates to "vi är HÄR", while "we came here" translates to "vi kom HIT". Similarly, while English uses the same word "in" in both "we came IN" and "we are IN a house", a Swede would say "vi kom IN" but "vi är I ett hus". And so on.

Some prepositions come in groups larger than 2. The just mentioned "här" ("here") and "hit" ("to here") are accompanied by "häråt" ("in the direction towards here"), and to further complicate things "hitåt" means approximately the same thing. (If you like to mess with people and make them confused, try asking the next Swede you meet about the difference between "häråt" and "hitåt"!)
> 2 votes

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Tags: grammar
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title: Vowel Breaking Sound Change

text:
# Question
Title: Vowel Breaking Sound Change
I find breaking to be an interesting sound change which I haven't used much before, and I'm trying to figure out when it would most commonly occur. My understanding is that it would be prone to happen if the vowel is a front vowel and the consonant or consonant cluster is pronounced in the back of the mouth, like "kald" becoming "ċeald" in Old English. Similarly with "ċealf", "hīeran" and so on.

Now I think this sound change is a bit daunting to keep in mind when going over how certain words might change from a proto-language to a current language, so I had in mind creating a kind of cheat sheet showing which vowels might break into which diphthongs. I'm also looking to find good examples of vowels breaking in other languages.

I'm aware of a notable example, Proto-Germanic "ek" turning into Old Norse "jak", which turned into the modern word for the pronoun "I" in several Scandinavian languages. Something similar happened with "hertōn" turning into "hjarta".

Keeping this sound change in mind, I think of a potential word "ahel" in a proto-language and turn it into "ajal" or "aial" or "ajel" in the descendant language.

I found some good examples too in Romanian, such as Latin "pellis" turning into "piele", meaning "skin", and "porta" into "poartă", "flōr" into "floare", "petra" into "pietră".

In Rejang there are three specific vowels breaking, "ə" turning into "êa", "i" turning into "ea", and "u" turning into "oa", such as in "tənur" turning into "tənoar" turning into "tênoa", meaning "egg".

It seems to me that if the breaking vowel is "e" or "a" there seems to very often be an addition of an "i" or "j" sound, while "u" or "o" tends to have an "a" put after it, and the consonants that tend to trigger this kind of change are "r" and "l" mostly. Of course, this is just my guess having looked at some examples of vowel breaking, and I would like to find more examples.

# Answer
"Breaking" tends to involve a vowel becoming a diphthong, which requires more articulatory effort but makes it more perceptually distinct. This can either result in a diphthong "centered" on the original position—for example, e becomes aj—or it can involve inserting a different sound at one end or the other (like i becoming aj).

Off the top of my head, the latter is more common. We see that happening in Old English vowel breaking, for example (æ \> æə \> æɑ), and also in Modern English's Great Vowel Shift (u \> əu \> au). Old English vowel breaking was triggered by consonants at the back of the mouth, but the Great Vowel Shift was triggered by the vowel space getting too crowded, and the high vowels needing some way to become more distinct. Crowdedness also led to breaking in the Western Romance languages, as in Latin fokum \> Spanish fwego (via an intermediate \*fwogo), Latin festam \> Spanish fjesta.
> 2 votes

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Tags: phonology
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# Question
Title: Pros/cons for grasping/groking/using novel concepts, new made up words (sound sequences) or multi-word terms composed from simple words?
I am back to thinking about how one could best represent the plethora of concepts from the human perspective. Whether we should *invent new words* (which are basically arbitrary sound sequences, using the conlang phonology), or we should *combine multiple simple words into terms*?

The example that quickly comes to mind is human names, contrasting English names (John, Jim, Jane, etc.) with stereotyped Native American names (Black Horse, White Cloud, etc.). English names (from a layman perspective) are meaningless, while these Native American names are composed of meaningful words (though they lose their meaning when being used for identifiers like this).

What is easier to grok, or easier to use in conversation when you are talking to someone and they don't know the term set you are going to be using (like when you are teaching someone something new)? On one hand it seems easier to compose simple words into longer phrases (like the Native American example), or like we have "magnetic resonance imaging" instead of calling it "foobarbaz". In English we have a mixture, we invent new words like "tylenol" or "proton", which aren't part of everyday speech. But then we have like "dwarf star" or "computer science" instead of "xiamakan" and "isholang" sort of thing.

In English, animal names (bear, coyote, etc.), human names, place names (Africa, Asia, etc.), rock names (granite, lapis lazuli etc.), religions (judaism, islam, taoism, etc.), and many other things use words which aren't part of the basic lexicon. But other things like the examples I mentioned above are multi-word terms from simpler concepts. Often times the word in the native language means something simple though, like "jew" comes from "yehuda" which means "praised". So we have the "praised people" and the "submitting people" (islam).

What are the pros and cons of both approaches?

Like I mentioned, to me it seems easier to use simpler words composed into longer terms than to make up arbitrary words (even if the word technically has a useful etymology, for layman's sake it is a meaningless set of sounds). But then on the other hand, calling a "wolf" a "large tooth animal" and a cat a "pounce animal" might not be descriptive/identifying enough for practical communication. I'm not sure if you can go completely one of these approaches over another, or you need a mix.

Having arbitrary words/sound sequences like "proton" and "muon", not to mention the name of Chinese and Arabic named cities coming from English, means the size of the vocabulary grows to hundreds of thousands of words, if not millions. Which makes me desire using a small set of say 10k base words, and combining them into terms, of which you can get to millions of terms as well, but using simpler words as a foundation.

This is a big choice to make for a conlang, should you limit the size of your vocabulary to a smallish set of words (closed set, like 10k words, not talking toki-pona level minimalism), or should you allow arbitrary new words to be formed (open set)? If it's not an easy answer, how would you go about conceptualizing the choices to be made here?

One thought I had is to use arbitrary new words for the most basic things that you can observe (dog, cat), name, or recognize as a valid pattern (for example, mathematical "groups", calling them groups is confusing, but calling them "groupon" or something might be better). Then you can add more arbitrary words as necessary, but keep it to a minimum if possible, and instead opt for combining words into multi-word terms.

That would work for animals. So some animals get their own word (horse, dog, cat, deer, etc.), but others get built off those (hippo = river horse, giraffe = long neck deer, which are two Chinese examples). Things which it would help to think of them as their own pattern not based on anything else, you give a fresh new word (proton, electron, etc., but those could be called "positive particle", "negative particle" too, instead). Other concepts you map to multi-word terms. But I just am confused on how I can better think about what approach to take in the grand scheme.

With math jargon in particular, I find it particularly hard to understand new concepts because they invent new words. "Abelian group" for example, when they could just say "commutative composition groupon" or something. But commutative is also a complex concept, so it's like you would have an expression "groupon where you can combine the two elements in any order", or "order independent element combining groupon" :). That's where it gets tough, what would lead to better understanding in the end?

It seems that having a short term ("abelian group") would be best in some cases for learning, as long as there is a way to easily look it up and see "groupon where you can combine the two elements in any order" or some more primitive definition quickly. Not sure if there are other ways of looking at / solving this conundrum. Clearly, when you become versed in the topics, having a short reference is most helpful (abelian, for example). But it's definitely hard to get over the hump when you hear new words, that's for sure too.

Could you get away with calling an abelian group a "cloud nine stack"? Meaningless basic words used to reference it, would that be easier than a made up sound sequence?

# Answer
> The example that quickly comes to mind is human names, contrasting English names (John, Jim, Jane, etc.) with stereotyped Native American names (Black Horse, White Cloud, etc.). English names (from a layman perspective) are meaningless, while these Native American names are composed of meaningful words (though they lose their meaning when being used for identifiers like this).

Well, they have a meaning—the meaning is "this person I'm talking about". For another example, look at ancient Greek names. Usually these consisted of two noun elements stuck together, which were often meaningful: Demosthenes "people-strength", Xanthippe "yellow-horse". But Xanthippe doesn't necessarily have a yellow horse; that's just her name. And the pieces of these names can be inherited; the child of Demosthenes and Xanthippe might be Demippos, "people-horse". This makes no sense literally, but perfect sense if the meaning is "descended from Demosthenes and Xanthippe".

> On one hand it seems easier to compose simple words into longer phrases (like the Native American example), or like we have "magnetic resonance imaging" instead of calling it "foobarbaz". In English we have a mixture, we invent new words like "tylenol" or "proton", which aren't part of everyday speech. But then we have like "dwarf star" or "computer science" instead of "xiamakan" and "isholang" sort of thing.

"Proton" isn't just a meaningless coinage, though; it's made up of meaningful elements in Greek. For technical terms, English doesn't really like making compounds, which is why next to "computer science" you have "linguistics". Other languages have a more transparent compound there, like Swahili *maarifa ya lugha* "science of language" or German *Sprachwissenschaft* "speech-knowledge-making".

> One thought I had is to use arbitrary new words for the most basic things that you can observe (dog, cat), name, or recognize as a valid pattern (for example, mathematical "groups", calling them groups is confusing, but calling them "groupon" or something might be better).

Mathematicians don't seem to have any difficulty with it.

> That would work for animals. So some animals get their own word (horse, dog, cat, deer, etc.), but others get built off those (hippo = river horse, giraffe = long neck deer, which are two Chinese examples). Things which it would help to think of them as their own pattern not based on anything else, you give a fresh new word (proton, electron, etc., but those could be called "positive particle", "negative particle" too, instead).

"Hippo" comes from "river horse" in Greek. "Giraffe" comes from "flute-leg" in Persian. We just didn't need to come up with our own names for these because speakers of other languages had done it already. For the particles, English just really likes Greek and Latin coinages for its technical terms; "proton" is literally "first-bit" and electron is "electricity-bit".

> With math jargon in particular, I find it particularly hard to understand new concepts because they invent new words. "Abelian group" for example, when they could just say "commutative composition groupon" or something. But commutative is also a complex concept, so it's like you would have an expression "groupon where you can combine the two elements in any order", or "order independent element combining groupon" :). That's where it gets tough, what would lead to better understanding in the end?

I can't think of any name that would get someone to grok groups (or commutativity, or…) without just learning the axioms, and then working with them until they've internalized the concept. At which point, you want a relatively short name so you can talk about it easily.

> But it's definitely hard to get over the hump when you hear new words, that's for sure too.

Is it really the word that's the difficulty? "Group" is a common English word that most people know; the group axioms (and everything that follows from them) are a lot harder to learn than the name.

> Could you get away with calling an abelian group a "cloud nine stack"? Meaningless basic words used to reference it, would that be easier than a made up sound sequence?

Sure; mathematicians love coming up with bizarre names for things. One method of analyzing Schubert polynomials has recently been dubbed "pipe dreams". But the name "Abelian group" makes it clear that you're talking about a specific type of group, and "cloud nine stack" doesn't.
> 1 votes

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Tags: vocabulary
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title: What are L, S, and F phonemes?

text:
# Question
Title: What are L, S, and F phonemes?
On the Procgenesis language generator, you find these five Phoneme types: C,V,L,S,& F. I believe that C and V are Consonants and Vowels respectively, but nothing I look at can explain the rest. The link is here: http://procgenesis.com/LanguageGen/langgen.html

# Answer
From a bit of experimentation, it seems:

L is liquids: consonants that can appear after a C in an onset.

S is starts: consonants that can appear before a C in an onset.

F is finals: consonants that can appear in a syllable coda.
> 1 votes

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Tags: untagged
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# Question
Title: Is there any conlang where syllables are inverse to word frequency?
Is there any conlang where the more common words are shorter, and the more syllables a word has, the rarer (in terms of occurrence) it is?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Words tend to get trimmed down over time, with more commonly used words being more prone to this. Thus, its natural for common words to be shorter than less rarely used ones. I've seen conlangs get criticized for not adhering to this rule (such as having the word for 'new' be three syllables in length, in a conlang with a VERY liberal phonotactics that should allow an abnormally wide variety of syllables). Of course, not everyone adheres to it, but some try to.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I have no data but I guess naturalistic conlangs like Interlingua and even the more schematic Esperanto have this property.

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Tags: phonology
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title: To make a conlang indeciphrable

text:
# Question
Title: To make a conlang indeciphrable
How to make a language/code indecipherable or very hard to decipher/learn? What are the key points? How does linguists decipher languages?

# Answer
Languages are governed by certain laws/principles, that reflect the relationships between elements. For example, element frequency: you generally have a few elements which are very common, and a long tail of rare events.

To make a language hard to learn, break those rules. Make each word/phoneme/letter equally frequent. Common words are short and have several meanings, long words are rare and generally have fewer meanings (as they are more specific). Turn that the other way round. Make long words frequent and unspecific.

Early codes where cracked with frequency tables, ie the letters "e" and "t" being the most common symbols, so substitution ciphers were easily solved. Mix up the spelling of your words to make them semi-random (maybe add some random letters in the middle that are ignored).

The language you will end up with this way will be pretty unusable, and very hard to learn.
> 3 votes

# Answer
All languages have patterns that can be decerned. Word frequency lately has been used to weed out some of the more common words like personal pronouns. Proper nouns also tend to get borrowed as-is into languages.

That said, the languages of our world that haven't been deciphered carry characteristics that would be hard to replicate in a conlang.

For one, the biggest problem is often just the lack of texts. Most of the undeciphered languages of our planet have few surviving texts to draw upon. A good example of this is Etruscan, which remained undeciphered until a very extensive text was discovered on the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy. Thus, anything with a lot of text will be easily deciphered.

Another thing is alieness; its not hard to decipher a language that has a close relative that is well-known. No romlang is going to fool anyone. This is probably one of the few things that could be replicated in a conlang.

Another is the writing system; some languages just have ultra elaborate orthographies, and extinct ones are no exception to this.

Yet another is the lack of bilingual texts; the ancient Egyptian language remained undeciphered until the famous discovery of the Rosetta stone. This could be a problem for a conlang; you have to record the grammar and vocab down SOMEWHERE, and its NEVER a good idea to record it in all the conlang! So any conlang you make, will require you to write materials in a known language that someone else could learn the language from!

So, basically, its a futile effort. You're probably better off using some form of cryptography (though a modern computer can easily beat any cipher you can perform by hand). Of course, you could do somethings to make it harder to learn (such as adding in a lot of irregularities, or some crazy complicated morphology), but there is no way to make it 'impossible'.
> 3 votes

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Tags: unnatural-features
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title: How to learn to make a conlang?

text:
# Question
Title: How to learn to make a conlang?
No, I'm not asking for resources. I've consulted every resource I can find, but even after more than a decade of research, I still have no conlang to show for it. I started with the Language Construction Kit 1 and 2, learned everything I could about linguistics, consulted every guide I could find, and I still don't know a damned thing. All I have to show for all this work is mountains of repetitive phonologies that occasionally have some grammar notes that never went anywhere due to them turning out to be impractical.

Clearly I'm doing something wrong; what else do I have to do other than research? No amount of research seems to help me. Obviously, I need to do something different, but what can I do? I've tried to make experimental conlangs, but that seems to just mean I accept that all my conlangs are going to hit a brick wall and then be abandoned rather than expecting it to actually go somewhere for once.

edit: What have I tried? I keep trying to use features I don't fully understand. For the longest time, I tried to make a language with fluid s alignment. I later found I didn't understand what that meant. I tried to make a VSO conlang, but also kept running into syntax problems I could not solve until I found out what VSO really was. Long story, time and time again, I can never make use of a feature I don't understand. What does it mean to understand? I can say what ergative alignment is, but I don't know the endless ramifications of having such a system. I only understand systems I've used myself extensively. What that means is I only know the features of English and German. Nothing else. I can define cases that German does not have, but I only know really know how to use the ones German has. I tried to solve this recently by mixing English and German, but I can't find anyway to make such languages function. Essentially, after all my studying, all I really know how to do is make a perfect relex of either English or German. It has to work 100% like one or the other. That is not conlanging; that's making a bad cipher.

I need to know how to actually conlang. How do I fully understand how to use any grammatical feature? The only way for me is to know and use a language that has it, nothing else works. I did contemplate trying to learn odd languages like Hungarian to fix this, but I've never been able to learn a language I had no use for. I've also been told that learning a whole language just to learn to conlang is highly excessive. What other way is there? How do I learn to use features I haven't had years of personal experience with? That is my problem; I don't fully understand anything. I can make a perfect replica of either English's or German's tense systems, but I can't make one that even slightly deviates from one or the other. I can use nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative cases, but forget anything else. I can use SVO order, and German's odd order, but I can't even make an SOV language let alone VSO and anything with an OS order is literally unfathomable to me.

Everything I've studied has not been sufficient; if I want to understand even one thing, such as a lative case just for an example, I would need a thick book that does nothing but explain it. I need to know every way it can be utilized, what it forces upon a language, because only then do I truly understand it. How can I learn to do this?

# Answer
I usually hang out on Writing SE and see questions from people struggling to write a novel. The problem often seems to be that people are too critical of everything they write, so they can’t move beyond a phrase or a chapter, and the advice that’s usually given is to get the first draft down – even if it’s crap – and then rewrite it. Your issue sounds similar: you’re getting caught up in the details and trying to have it all come together at once, and not accepting that it won’t be perfect from the outset.

I have very little linguistics knowledge yet have managed to make a basic conlang for my novel that I can write simple sentences with. It’s far from finished, but I can see where it’s heading. The following might sound rather naive, since you've done so much research and work already, but perhaps it will help someone who is just starting out. This is what I’ve done so far:

1. I made up a few words for things important to the culture I’m creating. I used google translate for inspiration, looking at phrases in various languages, and realised I wanted lots of vowels and didn’t want certain consonants. The first words were pretty random but I gradually gained a sense of which letter combinations looked and sounded right. I’ll come back to this at a later stage and try to extrapolate some rules (at which point I will probably need to rewrite some words) but for the moment, it’s enough to move on with.
2. I decided on a phrase I wanted to translate and I chose OVS word order. I don’t know why, it just felt right. The good thing about it is it’s not like any of the other languages I know, so it has forced me to think creatively about grammar and not just translate word for word.
3. The phrase also contained an adjective, a plural, and subject and object pronouns so I had to think about how to deal with all of those. The rules I created were arbitrary, but since I don’t know any better, I didn’t get bogged down with fully understanding anything and I have absolutely no idea of the ramifications of any of my decisions.
4. I started translating more phrases, making words and rules up as I went. I'll be at this stage for some time, I expect. When things don’t work, I retcon rules and rewrite the phrases I’ve already done.

Perhaps I will get stuck at a later stage, but being willing to go back and change and rewrite as new requirements come to light seems important. For me, creating the language is like writing the novel: get a draft down on paper, it doesn’t have to be right, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t all make sense. Then review and rewrite, over and over, amending the bits that don’t work, filling in the gaps and refining the stuff that does work.

In a comment, you asked how can you know if you will even like your language before you have the grammar finished? My answer is to make decisions that you like. I love my language, even though it’s in its infancy, because every decision I make is something that intrigues me or sounds good to me, and makes me want to explore it further. It’s your language, you can do whatever you want with it, so make fun decisions.
> 2 votes

# Answer
While the *Language Construction Kit* offers one particular way of building a conlang, it's very much not the only one—and it seems that one in particular isn't working for you. You say you've ended up with a big pile of half-baked phonologies and nothing else, which suggests that starting with the phonology doesn't fit your style.

I would say instead, decide on *what interests you about this particular language*. For me, this usually happens when I read about some interesting linguistic feature in my research. Did you know Kiowa has an "inverse number system"? Every noun in Kiowa has a "natural" number (hands usually come in pairs, so two is the normal number of hands; blades of grass tend to come in large quantities, so "a lot" is the normal number). You then put a marking on a noun if it's *not this natural quantity*—you would use the marking for "one hand", or "three hands", or any number that's not two. You'd also use the marking for "one blade of grass", because that's not the normal amount of grass.

Or, in Swahili, noun case and noun gender are part of the same system. A noun cannot have both a case and a gender. Or, in Lingála, there's a special verb marking for things that are irreversible and cannot be undone. Things like this. I'll see something cool and think "oh, what can I do with that?"

If you *don't* spend your days reading about languages (shocking, I know), inspiration might come from somewhere else. When David J Peterson created the High Valyrian language for *Game of Thrones*, he had basically nothing to go from. But the books included the phrase *valar morghulis / valar dohaeris*, meaning "all men must die / all men must serve". Apparently this *-is* ending on verbs means "all \___ must \___". Why would you have a verb marking for this? What other things could it be used for? How would that fit into the system as a whole?

My advice for how to create a language is, pick the aspect that you have some sort of inspiration for, and start from there. If phonology is uninspiring to you, ignore it for now. Take the phonology from some random language on Wikipedia and move on. If morphology is uninspiring, just take the noun cases from German…or say "there's no morphology in this language at all". But find *something* that specifically interests you, and use that as your starting point.

Also remember the rule of linguistics: *universals aren't*. Your language doesn't have to work like the textbook on ergativity says. No two languages with ergative alignment work the same. It's fine for yours to be an exception too.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Project management skills are useful for conlanging. I have rather bad ADHD, and that is something tat has prevented me from making much progress even though I've been composing a conlang in my head for the better part of a decade and have very little written materials to show for it.

It may be a good idea to start a thread on a conlanging forum to share tidbits over time: external encouragement and debates/questions are very useful productivity tools!
> 1 votes

# Answer
It looks to me that you're trying to do too much at once.

Maybe start off with 'modifying' an existing language. Leave the phonology as is, and work on new words only. Play around with morphology, and then perhaps syntax. Languages evolve over time, so maybe that would make the task less daunting for you: don't start from scratch.

Existing languages are well-tested for their utility. So you change one aspect, and it will probably work less well. Now see what else needs adjusting to make it work again. For example, you start with English and introduce free word order. Now the subject/object distinction is tricky. So you introduce morphological markers (which could be free morphemes) to indicate what the subject is. Then make the next change, and see how your own language evolves from the one you started with.

Or maybe start off with a smaller, less complex language. Look at toki pona, which is a bit of an extreme here. What do you need your language for? Is it a *lingua franca* to be used in trade situations? Then ignore vocabulary etc for areas that are irrelevant. Keep your language small and simple, and play around with it. Then, once you have a language you are happy with, create another one which is more complex and general.

And most of all: don't let perceived lack of progress frustrate you. This is supposed to be fun!
> 1 votes

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Tags: resource-request
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# Question
Title: Question on if I am doing Split-Ergativity right
I am making a split ergative language, and I am struggling a lot on it.

So, I am doing a Dyirbal-type pronominal split, where 1st and 2nd person are nominative-accusative and everything else is ergative-absolutive. So here is an example (just making this up, this is just an example as I don't want to share my language yet), assume this is VOS

> Musu hama tani

so, Tani would be a 1st person pronoun, so it would be marked:

> Musu hamanai tani

Where -nai is a accusative marker, and Tani is nominative and lacks a marker. But if you switch Tani to Kata, the third person pronoun:

> Musu hamago katasha

Where -go marks the Absolutive case, and -sha marks the Ergative Case.

But when you go into intransitives

> Yasi tanisha

And this is where I am just getting confused. Can someone help explain how exactly split ergativity works, preferably using some rushed sample conlang to indicate to me where I am going wrong and how I can fix it, or just modify what I have shown you in a way to fix it up and make it actually work. Because I am struggling to make both systems work together, as I understand them pretty well individually, but, again, putting them together is just making it rough for me.

This is just stressing me out.

# Answer
With a special absolutive case marker (*-go* in your example) you go beyond plain split ergativity where nominative and absolutive are typically identical. So the question boils down if the subject of an intransitive sentence should be nominative or absolutive. My gut feeling says nominative, but as a conlang designer you are free to take the other choice as well. You can even go further to tripartite alignment by creating a special *intransitive case* for the subject of intransitive sentences.
> 1 votes

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Tags: grammar, morphology, syntax
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# Question
Title: How to prevent your conlang from explosively growing
I have made many conlangs in my life but they all wind up facing the same issues, and I am not sure how to prevent it.

I wind up with countless different forms of each word as modifiers stack up onto each other (Like in my current one I have things like animacy agreement on verbs which also have a tense system on top of that, which combinatorically explodes in size very quickly). And this is not the end of it, as these all independently evolve and begin to change so much from one another that they aren't recognizable as the same word.

But, looking at actual languages, we see this does not occur, you don't have something like the Animate Imperfective aspect of a verb becoming its own independent word over the years. So, what exactly am I doing wrong? Should I not be phonetically evolving these compounds? Or should I only phonetically evolve, like, the animate marked verb, but not the animate imperfective?

Example to show what I mean: (assume VOS)

*Jani-ta-sak*, *Jani* is verb, *-ta* is animate agreement marker, and *-sak* is the imperfective aspect. But over time, *Janitasak* would diverge quickly from like, *Janitamisi*, to the point of unrecognizability. So, is this wrong? Should I just evolve *Janita* and keep *-sak* as a suffix, instead of evolving *Janitasak* as a whole?

This is just a struggle I have always had with conlanging and I want to try to avoid it this time as I am really fond of this language and don't want to have to throw it away.

# Answer
> 3 votes
The most important thing to remember is: if you're going for naturalism, speakers need to be able to learn patterns and extrapolate them between words. If a sound change gets in the way of this process, analogy will intervene to fix it.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the inflections you have will stay the same. Maybe animacy and aspect markers will merge, and you'll end up with six distinct markers instead of two-crossed-with-three. Maybe some especially common words won't get evened out, leaving you with certain irregular verbs ("be" is often like this). But fundamentally, people can't learn a new inflection for every single word, so analogy will smooth out the worst of the irregularities.

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Tags: grammar, evolution
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# Question
Title: Can a language exist without transitive verbs?
I'm developing my first conlang (no name yet) for a story and came up with an interesting idea: all verbs are intransitive, and objects are added with prepositions. So, a sentence like "I eat fish" would be translated literally as "I eat with a fish."
Sentences with more than one object would be stuck together in whatever way makes sense, yielding sentences like "I gave from money to the man," and "I roasted with an apple and a fire."
How naturalistic would this be? The language is spoken by a remote people so I don't care how rare it is, just that it's possible at all.

# Answer
I'm reminded of how every so often a conlanger will have the bright idea that "hey, what if there was a language with no verbs?" And yet, the grammatical relationships that are mediated by verbs still need to be expressed, so they inevitably end up "inventing" a new part of speech... that does exactly what verbs do... but they're too emotionally invested how creative and quirky having a "verbless" language makes them sound, to call a spade a spade and admit that they have verbs.

In your case, there isn't really a reason to do this whole song and dance about how these oblique arguments (instrumental as in "with a fish", genitive "from money", etc.) obviate the need for direct objects. If they're consistently being used where languages would normally put a direct object, for arguments that for all intents and purposes *act* like direct objects, then let's call a spade a spade - you have direct objects. And therefore transitive verbs.

Synchronically, your direct object case effectively just has a bunch of allomorphy. Diachronically, patientive cases often evolve from these kinds of oblique cases, so I would think I was just looking at an intermediate stage where the patientive case was in the middle of evolving. In either case "I have no transitive verbs" ends up being an unhelpful way of describing an otherwise unremarkable phenomenon.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Although I am not aware of any natural language that goes without the notion of transitivity, I think it is worth a try. For a broader point of view, you may want to study morphosyntactic alignment to see what natural languages do with transitive verbs, there is definetely more than the boring nominative-accusative system of Standard Average European languages.

I also want to bring the logical languages to your attention with Lojban as their most popular representative. Here each "verb" has a well-defined predicate structure but no place in this predicate structure can be identified as the direct object.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Let's consider a nonce version of English in which objects are prepositional phrases. This alone will not make the verbs intransitive.

For the verbs to qualify as intransitive, those prepositional phrases have to be adjuncts. In other words, you have to be able to omit them from sentences without making the sentences ungrammatical.

Let's assume that "throw" in your conlang can be modified by an adverbial prepositional phrase meaning "of a baseball."

We know that "Jeff threw of a baseball." means "Jeff threw a baseball." But what does "Jeff threw," mean? It has to have a reading, or the verb "throw" can't be intransitive because it must take an object. Making the object a prepositional phrase is no different in this connection than giving the object an equivalent case-affix.

One way around this is to make all your verbs ambitransitive, as "eat," "write," "read," "sing," and "speak" are in real English. Objects can be omitted from sentences with ambitransitive verbs if the objects don't denote anything important and the action denoted by the verb is the focus. So, for example, "Jane is eating," doesn't need an object if it answers the question "What is Jane doing?" rather than the question "What is Jane eating?"

If all of your verbs are ambitransitive, you could have a sentence like "Jane is throwing" that answers the question "What is Jane doing?"

The problem with this scheme is that some verbs aren't sufficiently descriptive to tell the listener what she wants to know about the states or events that the speaker is talking about. For example, we could say "Alvin is kicking," but, in most contexts, we couldn't do so without prompting a response such as "What do you mean 'he's kicking? Kicking WHAT?" So too with other verbs in sentences like "Don closed," "Mary opened," and "Morey picked up."

I'm out of time and don't see an obvious alternative to my own failed scheme, but I hope to read more about how you plan to address the issues raised by your scheme.
> 1 votes

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Tags: grammar, naturalism, verbs
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# Question
Title: What would be the most accurate character to use to transliterate the 'e' sound in 'bet' to the Arabic alphabet?
I'm trying to transliterate toki pona words containing an 'eh' sound like 'esun', 'en', 'kule', 'ken' & 'seme'. I found an online Kurdish transliteration tool that displays 'esun' as ئه‌سون & 'kule' as کوله. Is that accurate? I've also seen ێ used.

the tool gives the initial vowels as: ئا for a, ئه/ئە for e, ی/ئی for i, ئۆ/ۆ for o, & ئو for u. is there a difference sound-wise between ه and ة (as in سه‌مه/سةمة-'seme')?

I like the idea of using only harakat for vowels when possible & leaving them out if not neccesary for comprehension like کَلاَ/کلا instead of کالا for 'kala',(except for finals to make 'sin'/'sina' & 'pan'/'pana' clear) because it fits the minimalist nature of toki pona, but e (as in b**e**t) & o (as in **o**pen) are a problem since they don't really exist in Arabic. I would probably use 'ۆ/ئۆ' for o, but is ه/ة or ێ better for 'e'? Could I use ِسِمه for 'seme' or is سةمة/سه‌مه better?

is 'میِ کن سِتِلِن إِ تۆکیِ یۆکیِ پۆناَ کِپِکِن سِتِلِن أَلَپیِ' a reasonable transliteration for 'mi ken sitelen e toki toki pona kepeken sitelen Alapi' or should 'kepeken' be کەپەکەن?

# Answer
> 2 votes
I don't know any language written using the Arabic script, but as far as I can tell the most common approach across languages for representing /e/ is using some variant of ي.
Somali uses ئ, Pashto and Uyghur use ې, and Kurdish, as you mentioned, uses ێ. The Jawi script used to write Malay even uses ي for both /i/, /e/ and /ɛ/. Urdu uses two different symbols, ے (which is based on ي) and ہ (which isn't).

I can't really speak in terms of how recognizable any of this would be to Arabic-speakers of course, but since multiple languages that needed an /e/-like letter reached for ي, it seems reasonable to suggest that approach.

But things are never simple - ە is also quite common. For example, you mentioned Kurdish which uses it to represent /ɛ/ (which is not /e/, but pretty similar), and Persian also uses it for /e/. And as I said earlier, Urdu does use ہ (based on ه), though I believe ے is more common (except word-intially, where it can't appear).

It seems to me like some twist on ي is the most common across languages, but which one to pick is not obvious (though I expect they'd all be about equally clear to someone who isn't already familiar with one of them). ە is more uniform, but might be a bit less common, and in languages that use both (like Uyghur and Kurdish) it seems that the ي variant usually represents /e/, while ە is something like /ɛ/.

So, I'd probably suggest ێ, but either option seems reasonable.

Source: Arabic script § Additional letters used in other languages (Wikipedia) (and various language and script articles mostly linked to from there)

# Answer
> 0 votes
I found a system that somebody else created using إِ for 'e' & إِي for 'i'. 'en' can be written as إٍ or إِن so 'ken' could be كٍ or كِن. Diacritics are optional so it could also be ك or كن. The word 'sitelen' (draw/picture) is commonly written as سِيتِلٍ/سيتل, but can also be سِيتِلِن/سيتلن.

esun إِسُون/إسون or إِسٌو/إيو

en إِن/إن or إٍ/إ

kule كُولِ/كول

ken كِن/كن or كٍ/ك

seme سِمِ/سم

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Tags: toki-pona
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# Question
Title: Is there a good reason not to reverse the letters  and  in Shavian?
In the Shavian alphabet, the letter makes an f sound and makes a "v" sound. It seems reasonable that these two letters should be reversed, since looks like an f. To stay consistent with the pattern of voiced/unvoiced letters in Shavian, the would then have to be raised and would have to be lowered, but this would just make look *even more* like an f.

Indeed, there is a good argument (in my view) for reversing these letters, which I outline below. Since Shavian is very carefully constructed, this doesn't seem like something the designers would have overlooked. Therefore, I think it is fair to ask, **Is there a good reason that these letters were not originally reversed when the Shavian alphabet was designed?**

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Arguments for reversing the sounds of and (and raising while lowering ):

* Visual similarity of (raised) with f. (Such similarity seems to have been a low-priority goal of Shavian, e.g., = c, = g, = s, = z, = i, = o.)
* The proposed change would keep the pattern for voiced/unvoiced pairs intact.
* The proposed change would make the / pair more consistent with the / pair, since then and would be true mirror images of each other, both being aligned in the same way (and a similar claim holds for and ).

# Answer
> 5 votes
Your own link to the copy of the Wikipedia article on the Shavian alphabet explains:

> Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet. It should be:
>
> 1. at least 40 letters;
> 2. as phonetic as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to phonemes);
> 3. distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply misspellings.

and

> The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall, deep and short. Short letters are vowels, liquids (r, l) and nasals; tall letters (except Yea and Hung ) are voiceless consonants. A tall letter rotated 180° or flipped, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing the corresponding voiced consonant (except Haha ). The alphabet is therefore to some extent featural.

/f/ is a voiceless consonant, and therefore a tall letter; the corresponding voiced consonant is /v/ and is therefore a deep letter that is the /f/ rotated 180°. To make the Shavian /f/ look more like the Latin 'f' would weaken criterion #3 above, and in fact it is likely that your comment about visual similarity being a low-priority goal may be wrong, to the extent that (and this is just a guess on my part) visual similarity may have been a low-priority **anti**-goal.

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Tags: writing-systems, english, shavian-alphabet
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title: How does this phoneme inventory look?

text:
# Question
Title: How does this phoneme inventory look?
How does this phoneme inventory look and any roles for them? Like, how should these be used, what they look like, and how hard it may be for people to comprehend:

a - \[a\]

ā - \[aː\]

å - \[ø\]

ä - \[ɛ/ɑ\]

â - \[ɒ\]

æ - \[æ\]

b - \[b\]

c - \[k/ɡ/t͡s\]

č - \[ʧ/t͡ɕ\]

ç - \[ɕ/s\]

d - \[d\]

ð - \[ð\]

e - \[e/ɛ\]

ē - \[eː/i\]

ë - \[ɘ\]

ə - \[ə\]

f - \[f/ɸ\]

g - \[ɡ\]

ğ - \[ɣ/ʁ\]

h - \[h\]

ĥ - \[χ/x\]

i - \[i\]

ı - \[ɨ\]

ī - \[iː\]

ï - \[ɨ/i\]

j - \[ʤ/j/i\]

ĵ - \[ʒ\]

k - \[k\]

l - \[l/ɫ\]

ł - \[ɫ\]

m - \[m\]

n - \[n\]

ñ - \[ɲ\]

ŋ - \[ŋ\]

o - \[o\]

ō - \[oː\]

ô - \[ɔ\]

œ - \[œ\]

p - \[p/ɸ\]

q - \[q/kw/kʷ\]

ĸ - \[q\]

r - \[r/ɾ\]

s - \[s\]

š - \[ʃ\]

t - \[t\]

u - \[u/ʊ\]

ū - \[uː\]

ü - \[ʏ/u\]

v - \[v\]

w - \[w/u/ʊ\]

ŵ - \[ʋ\]

x - \[ks/x/χ\]

y - \[y/i/j\]

z - \[z\]

ž - \[ʒ\]

þ - \[θ\]

& - —

The alphabet itself: a ā å ä â æ b c č ç d ð e ē ë ə f g ğ h ĥ i ı ī ï j ĵ k l ł m n ñ ŋ o ō ô œ p q ĸ r s š t u ū ü v w ŵ x y z ž þ &

All letter categories:

Vowels: a ā å ä â æ e ē ë ə i ı ī ï o ō ô œ u ū ü

Consonants: b c č ç d ð f g ğ h ĥ ĵ k l ł m n ñ ŋ p q ĸ r s š t v ŵ x z ž þ

Semivowels: j w y

Other: &

EDIT: Draconis recommended me to include a spreadsheet, so here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1V8HTUVOvpst9fFIOds\_u27ue9JbeXOGjU2ns2JA6viY/htmlview

Pie chart of every letter category, with each category shown as the first letter in it.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Thirteen vowel qualities (if I counted correctly) is a lot and makes the language hard to learn, but it is not outside the range some Germanic languages offer, I think specifically of the case of Danish here. Having two central vowels, ë - \[ɘ\] and ə - \[ə\], is probably a challenge, their coocurrence in one language is really rare. Giving them a bit more distance, e.g., by replacing \[ə\] with \[ɜ\], can help here.

The consonant system is not overly ambitious, it may provide some difficulties depending on the native language of the learners, the th's or the h-like sounds may be some obstacles.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The most important point is, this isn't a phoneme inventory! It's an orthography. When you list multiple pronunciations for a letter, especially in brackets `[]` rather than slashes `//`, it's not clear if you want those to be separate phonemes, or different realizations of the same phoneme.

I'd recommend writing down a list of the *phonemes* specifically (with the orthography in parentheses if you really want to include it) and putting them in a table, like you'd find on Wikipedia. Any spreadsheet program (Excel, Calc, Google Sheets, etc) can make something like that.

The table will let you see whether there are any weird asymmetries, or whether any part of the consonant or vowel space is getting too crowded.

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonetics
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# Question
Title: Tips for making a conlang that uses an abjad?
I've been looking at Classical Hebrew a lot for inspiration on some features it has. Turns out, it wasn't what I expected (such as that its not actually a VSO language, it just looks like that due to it being pro-drop and the bible really liking to link sentences together with conjunctions). However, in the process I learned some things about its abjad.

Of course, abjads normally get stereotyped as impractical and antiquated. However, in Semitic languages, they're not to impractical as they may look. Due to numerable reasons, figuring out the vowels your own isn't actually that hard. Yeah, its not 100% reliable, but lets be real its no worse than English' infamously inconsistent orthography (how many sounds can the 'gh' alone digraph represent?) Basically, an abjad is more akin to a compression algorthm. You just write what's needed, because the rest can be deduced from that. This actually interests me; its like a syllabrary in reducing the number of characters needed to write a word, but it doesn't require nearly as many letters, and syllable structure is also far more free since you don't need a symbol for every possible syllable (languages that do use them tend to have a very small number of syllables, thus increasing word length simply because fewer short words are possible).

Also, I thought it may be an interesting creative challenge. Make a conlang that works perfectly fine for an abjad. However, this is proving harder than I expected.

For instance, you can't make as much use out of stem changes. Think of the English words 'speak' and 'spoke'. If you wrote them with just consonants, then both would be 'spk'. Clearly the language can't have something like this. In Hebrew, just about every possible 'vowel template' also involves the addition of consonant somewhere, meaning the extra consonant essentially shows what vowels are used. Thus any changes in vowels must be accompanied by some consonant. I guess part of speech would work fine though, however you'd obviously need to make it easy to determine part of speech. English does this fine, and it even makes liberal use of zero derivation. On the topic of English, y cn ndrstnd nglsh vn wtht th vwls, a rather old trick. Then there's Yiddish, which is a dialect of German written in the Hebrew script, and it makes use of stem changes arguably more so than English does! If they can get away with it, surely a language specifically made for an abjad could do so.

Another problem is it sorta reduces the number of possible words. Let's say you had a normal 5-vowel inventory. In the case of a CVCV word, this means any one pair of consonants could have up to 25 variants. This would result in a lot of ambiguity of course if the vowels weren't written. Thus, at most only a few of these could be used. This obviously would put quite a limit on the number of possible words. I could fix that by just making an abnormally large consonant inventory. Speaking both English and German, I can easily handle quite a few, but that would have a minor drawback in that it could make an English transliteration hard (how do you write three different 'r' sounds?)

Before people say it, my language could fit an abjad quite well actually. Its phonotactics for example would make it pretty easy to guess where vowels have to go. In fact, for all of the possible combinations of 3 consonant words, there's only 1 or 2 possible arrangements of vowels. This doesn't give you the exact vowels of course, but that too could easily be guessed. Part of speech is one (all verbs in Hebrew only use one template for their infinite forms, regardless of which of the language's 7 conjugations it belongs to). Gender/noun classes could be used to help diversify vowel templates for nouns. You'd have to remember which gender each noun was, yes, but its not like a lot of natlangs don't require that.

I'm still finding it limiting though not being able to use simple stem changes. I mean, Kebreni, a conlang that also uses this tri-consonantal roots thing obviously couldn't be written with an abjad. It relies solely on changing vowels to indicate the benefactive and anti-benefactive! Its a strategy I really like, since it prevents you having to lengthen words. Here though, I could not do such. I have thought about doing the 'matres lectionis', such as for vowel affixes, but I would like to make this actually a pure abjad if I could. Adding an extra symbol is fine I guess; no worse than adding a consonant symbol for any other affix. It could do cause some ambiguities; is that final 'w' a syllable that begins with 'w' or is it an 'u' suffix?

Clearly I need more techniques for morphology that would be compatible with such a system. Does anyone have any recommendations?

# Answer
> 2 votes
If the abjad has a rule where all words or syllables must start with a vowel, you might want to use a zero consonant in your conlang. However, if your conlang doesn't have that rule, it may not be crucial for your conlang.

EDIT: I used to have one on my conlang but it swiftly went in jeopardy.

# Answer
> 1 votes
You have already explored some of the difficulties of matching a language with an abjad. It is of course not overly difficult to design a semitic-like conlang by studying Semitic languages and how they build up a huge number of forms from triconsonatal roots. Note that Semitic languages use more devices from just adding vowels inside the root, such as consonant gemmination and suffixes containing additional consonants. Note also that no vowel at all is an option, too, and that a vowel can be added at the beginning or the end of a word form. Radically deviating from that is not that easy: Two-consonantal roots are probably not enough to build the vocabulary of a full language but maybe still worth a try, for a minimalistic core vocabulary you may want to look at Toki Pona. Four-consonantal root are possible and an interesting field of investigation.

Than, your example of English *speak, spoke* shows another possibility: Indivisible consonant clusters (ICCs). You will have to fiddle with your abjad to mark those consonant cluster an to distinguish *speak* from *seapk* and I can envision a lot of creative possiblities here (adding separate characters for the ICCs, using ligatures, using some special cluster joiner or cluster divider characters like *(sp)k* vs. *s(kp)*).

# Answer
> 1 votes
> For instance, you can't make as much use out of stem changes. Think of the English words 'speak' and 'spoke'. If you wrote them with just consonants, then both would be 'spk'. Clearly the language can't have something like this.

To offer a counterexample, many conjugations in Ancient Egyptian worked like this, and thus were simply not differentiated in writing: *sḏm* can be infinitive *sāḏam*, subjunctive *saḏma*, participle *sāḏim*, the stative or imperative that I can't find vocalizations for…

These just had to be distinguished by context. The writing system used determinatives to distinguish between different *lemmas* with the same consonant, but made no attempt to distinguish different *forms*. And it worked well enough for thousands of years.

(For another counterexample, English-speakers can figure out if "read" is `/rid/` or `/rɛd/` by context.)

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Tags: grammar, morphology, syntax, abjad
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# Question
Title: I am constructing my own language and I need one more consonant
Other than BCChDDz FGHJK LLyMNNy PRSShT VYZZh. C is Ts, Ch is as in China, Dz is Italian soft J/G, J is Dy/Dj/DZh. W is too similar to V and U. Dh is too similar to D and Th to T, and I find it funny how the Catalans pronounce Barcelona. It sounds like they are lisping and can't pronounce their C/S. Please no popping/explosive, tonal, guttural or too similar soft or hard version of existing one, and Loh and Loch sound exactly the same, to me, so no Esperanto's guttural H.

# Answer
First of all, let me write down the consonants in a more rational way:

```
P  B  F  V  M
T  D  S  Z  N  C      L  R
      Sh Zh    Ch  Dz/J
         Y  Ny        Ly
K  G  H

```

from the sketchy description in the question I don't get the difference between J and Dz.

The system has some obvious gaps in the last row: You could easily fill in a voiced counterpart to H as Gh (the sound of Spanish G in many situations (in the middle of words before a, o, or u, and not after an n, like in *amigo*) or Ng, the nasal counterpart of G, as a consonant of its own right.

Other easy additions may be further affricates, like Pf as segment filling the place above C, or a true Dz (D+Z) as voiced counterpart of C.

Or Add Ç (the German *Ich-Laut*, or the initial sound in some pronunciations of the English word *huge*) as voiceless counterpart to Y.

Any of these choices are quite natural and would not add anything exotic to the sound system of your conlang.
> 3 votes

# Answer
@SirCornflakes gives a more structured answer, but here are some more consonants to consider.

You only have one R. There are many sounds in different languages that are written as R. Which one do you mean? Why not use both rolling R, as in Spanish, along with French R or American R? Mixing of different R-sounds occur, for instance, in some Swedish dialects(Can't find any english language description, but maybe you could run it through a translator?)

Otherwise, you can never go wrong with a voiced retroflex flap!

Finally, if you want something more exotic you could check out the sj-sound! It's mainly used in Swedish (No, I'm not biased towards that language at all...) and Wikipedia says:

> These sounds are transcribed ⟨ɧ⟩ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Association (IPA) describes them as "simultaneous \[ʃ\] and \[x\]", but this realization is not attested, and phoneticians doubt that such a realization actually occurs in any language.

Because it's so rare, only found in Swedish, a German dialect and maybe some Himalayan language, there is some debate on how it's actually best described, but don't let that stop you.
> 2 votes

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Tags: phonology, phonetics
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title: Syllabic plosives

text:
# Question
Title: Syllabic plosives
Fricatives and Sonorants can be in a nucleus of a syllable. Can plosives also act as a syllable? If so, do any of your conlangs have this feature?

# Answer
ANADEW: Nuxalk aka Bella Coola is a natural language famous for its long chains of plosives. However, calling the plosives *syllables* in this case raises another question: Is syllable a term that is suitable for the description of Nuxalk, or should one say that there are no well-defined syllables in Nuxalk (see this question on the linguistics stackexchange for more on this).

For use in conlangs, see also Are there human beatbox inspired conlangs? on this site, five years ago there was kind of a "no" answer to the second question.
> 1 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, naturalism, phonetics
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# Question
Title: Are there any languages with a vertical consonant distinction?
Are there any languages which distinguish consonants exclusively by manner of articulation instead of place of articulation and such, akin to a vertical vowel system?

# Answer
> 2 votes
I don't know of any, and I wouldn't expect to find any.

From an information-theory point of view, consonants tend to convey much more information than vowels. I can't think of any natural language that has more vowel phonemes than consonants, even if you include tone as a property of the vowel (rather than of the syllable); there are just a lot more possible ways to obstruct an airflow than to let it go through, so there's a much larger space for the phonemes to occupy without crowding each other and becoming difficult to distinguish.

Vertical vowel systems take some of the information load from the consonants and duplicate it on the vowels. If vowels before labialized consonants become rounded, now you have a bit more redundancy there, and you don't have to worry as much about distinguishing labialization on consonants. This is most useful when each consonant is conveying a lot of information, like in Ubykh, with its 84 phonemic consonants and 3 phonemic vowels.

A "vertical consonant system", presumably, would take some of the information load from the vowels and duplicate it on the consonants. But in natural human languages, this isn't very useful—the consonants are already carrying a lot more information than the vowels are. Over time, I would expect this to simplify into *only* marking the information on the consonants—and now it's just a normal consonant system, not a vertical one any more.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I am not aware of any natural language with that feature, and I quick-checked that Damin hasn't it either.

But you can certainly construct such a language, there are enough different manners of articulation to make up a sufficient consonant phoneme inventory.

# Answer
> 0 votes
No, but it is possible. You can go from /m n p t k s w j/ to /n t ts s j/ like that: /w/ \> /m/ \> /n/, /p/ \> /f/ \> /h/ \> nothing, /k/ \> /kx/ \> /cç/ \> /tʃ/ \> /ts/

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonology, history
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title: Translate into quenya

text:
# Question
Title: Translate into quenya
I want to translate those sentences in quenya :

One ring to show our love,

One ring to seal our love,

One ring to spread our light,

And forever to make us bright

This gives with latin letters the following :

Er cor ana tán our mel,

er cor ana seal our mel

er cor ana pále- our kal

ar ullúme ana care us calima

So this gives in Tengwar the text in the image I've joined.

What do you think? Do you have any correction to bring?

I wish you a good day.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I don't know where you got those "Quenya" lines but they look suspiciously like from a certain broken machine translator which is absolutely not helpful.

I'd use *corma* for "ring" - *cor* would be Sindarin. (cf. *Cormacolindor* "Ring-bearers")

*Er corma* "One ring" sounds about right.

Now "to show" is to explain the purpose or attribute of "One ring". AFAIK, the only known sample from the corpus that comes close is

> *Vanda sina termaruva Elenna-nóreo alcar enyalien*
>
> Oath this stand-FUT Star-wards-land-GEN glory **recall-GERUND-DATIVE**.
>
> "This oath shall stand **in memory of** the glory of the Land of the Star" Or literally "This oath shall stand **for the recalling of/to recall** ..."

This would lead to: *Er corma tanien* \<our love\>.

\***mel* from your translation would be the bare stem of the verb "to love". No, you can't use a verb here, let alone its stem. The noun is *melme*.

So depending on who WE are, our love can be translated:

> *melmelva* "our love (mine, yours, and others')"
>
> *melmelma* "our love (ours, not yours)"

Or let's say it should be:

> *melmenqua* "our love (between you and me, the two of us)"

The first line would then be:

> *Er corma tanien melmenqua.*

the third:

> *Er corma palien calanqua.*

And The fourth:

> *ar ullume carien inque calima*
>
> and forever make-GERUND-DATIVE us/thee-and-me bright

Or:

> *ar ullume calimatien inque*
>
> and forever bright-CAUSATIVE-GERUND-DATIVE us/thee-and-me

The second line is tricky because I can't find a word for "seal". Maybe you can find a replacement with a real dictionary.

---

Alternatively, instead of using the dative form of a gerund, you can use a relative clause, which is far better attested in Quenya.

> *Er corma i tana melmenqua* One ring that shows our love.
>
> ??
>
> *Er corma i palya calanqua* One ring that spreads our light
>
> *Ar ullume calmata inque* ~

---

I found a fan-coined verb *lihta\- "to seal" (from líco "wax"), it looks OK, IMO.

The second line can therefore be either:

> *Er corma lihtien melmenqua*

or

> *Er corma i lihta melmenqua*

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Tags: tolkien-elvish
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# Question
Title: What are the characteristics of "Non-Linear Language"?
What characteristics would describe a "Non-Linear Language"? For instance would it use Logographs (Chinese, Egyptian, etc.)? Or could it use IPA sound symbols? What would make the language Non-Linear in a speech context (not written)?

# Answer
I'd like to argue that there is no such thing as a non-linear language. Every language needs to convey some some information from the speaker to the listener (or signer to the viewer, or using another channel at all), and that information can by represented as a stream of bits that is linear in time. I have heard of scifi writers talking about "non-linear languages" used by some non-human beings but no one of them provides samples or a tentative description of those non-linear languages.

P.S. My notion of "linear" is not identical to the term "linear language" in Theoretical Computer Science, those "linear languages" are a proper subset of the context-free languages (and from linguistics we know that natural languages are sometimes not context-free). In my answer I just mean "being able to be represented by a linear string of symbols".
> 1 votes

# Answer
I agree with the answer by Sir Cornflakes; to phrase it in a different way: there is plenty of information that is non-linear. Thought, concepts, relationships, images, etc. But language is a code to transmit this information between people. I have an image that I want to describe to you, but I need to linearise my description, because in languages you have a temporal/sequential element in the transmission. Even German and hieroglyphs do that. There is a fixed sequential ordering when you read hieroglyphs (or Hangul for that matter, which is also two-dimensional).

If you want to look at an image, you cannot look at it all at once, so you need to select a sequence in which you visit the various areas of it. That is then linear again. And depending on the order, the image might have a different meaning to you, just like word order in many languages.

So, language being a means of communication, there has to be a linearity to it.
> 1 votes

# Answer
A purely *spoken* language could not be non-linear, as sounds must be expressed one after another. The only real exception to this that I can think of would be a language that must be spoken by multiple speakers simultaneously.

Written languages have significantly more options though, as they aren't restricted by time. The author will have to write in a certain order, but nothing has to guarantee that the reader reads in that same order. I would recommend reading this essay on nonlinear languages and looking at UNLWS, the Unker Non-Linear Writing System, which I think is an example of a nonlinear language done well.
> 1 votes

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Tags: typology
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# Question
Title: What made Tolkien's diachronics purposefully not naturalistic?
Somewhere else I heard that Tolkien's languages had some purposeful non naturalistic diachronics with stuff like elvish languages having the elves make some purposeful changes to them partially due to their longer lifespans.

I want to try and mimic that kind of thing with my conlang spoken by a small collection of gods but I don't really know what I could/should do differently to get that effect.

Edit: I saw another question about Tolkien's diachronics here but I didn't see any mentions about which of those wouldn't have normally occurred.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Tolkien discussed "why did Elvish language change" in *Dangweth Pengoloð* ("the Answer of Pengolodh" to said question).

Both Men and Elves willfully change their speech during their lifetime:

> when the union of the thought and the sound is fallen into old custom, and the two are no longer perceived apart, then already the word is dying and joyless, the sound awaiting some new thought, and the thought eager for some new-patterned raiment of sound.
>
> But to the changefulness of Eä, to weariness of the unchanged, to the renewing of the union: to these three, which are one. the Eldar also are subject in their degree.

The Elves make innovations and popularize them consciously.

> though many be the patterns and devices so made that prove in the end only pleasing to a few, or to one alone, many others are welcomed and pass swiftly from mouth to mouth, with laughter or delight or with solemn thought ... **For to the Eldar the making of speech is the oldest of the arts and the most beloved**

And the changes they introduce are not "at haphazard".

> none among the Eldar would change the sounds of some one word alone, but would rather change some one sound throughout the structure of his speech

Therefore

> ... **albeit more wittingly, albeit more slowly, the tongues of the Quendi change in a manner like to the changes of mortal tongues** ...

Tolkien also came up with a quite unconvincing excuse as to why the Eldar don't remember their languages of old, but that's another topic.

> For we have much lore concerning the languages of old, whether stored in the mind or in writings; but we hear not ourselves speak again in the past save with the language that clothes our thought in the present.

---

The *Shibboleth of Fëanor* details the history of a conscious change or merger (θ \> s).

> It was attacked by the loremasters, who pointed out that the damage this merging would do in confusing stems and their derivatives.

But then Fëanor made it political and almost everybody hated him so *s* prevailed in the end.

As you can see (θ \> s) is nothing abnormal, the difference may be that the Elves were (more) witting of the change.

---

There's an interesting note following the *Dangweth* I just found while researching into this.

> The Eldar had an instinctive grasp of the structure and sound-system of their speech as a whole, and this was increased by instruction; for in a sense all Eldarin languages were ‘invented’ languages, art-forms, not only inherited but also material engaging the active interest of their users and challenging awarely their own taste and inventiveness. This aspect was evidently still prominent in Valinor; though in Middle earth it had waned, and the **development of Sindarin had become**, long before the arrival of the Noldorin exiles, **mainly the product of unheeded change like the tongues of Men**.

# Answer
> 4 votes
That the Elves (specially the Noldor) made purposeful changes to their language is mainly an in-world statement in Tolkien's work. I don't see much unnaturalness in the sound shifts of the different Elvish languages, they all feel rather natural and not even rare or unusual. A strange aspect may be the *rate* of language change given the enormous lifespan of the Elves. The Elvish languages change at a pace that would be rather normal for *human* languages transmitted over many generations.

One may also wonder about the noun inflection in Quenya with its ten cases. There is no described way how it came into being and it is also not declared to be just the starting point of Elvish language evolution.

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Tags: conlang-creation, diachronics, unnatural-features, tolkien-elvish
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# Question
Title: A conlang with a 'compressed' writing system?
I'm making this since now I think an 'abjad' isn't what I actually had in mind. I was thinking of a system where the vowels don't have to be written, because they're always obvious. Essentially, my idea was more in line with a compression algorthm than a true abjad. Here's a link to the previous question if you want to read over my original idea:

Tips for making a conlang that uses an abjad?

My plan was to make a language that perfectly fit a writing system that only wrote consonants. The vowels could always be determined some other way. Here are the techniques I came up with:

1. The phonotactics often make it obvious what the syllable structure is. Basically, approximants and non-nasal plosives can only occur in onsets. Non-nasal plosives can only be followed by a vowel or approximant. Working out all possible 2 and 3 consonant roots (conflating all non-nasal plosives, approximants, and everything else into one for each of them), I've found that for all possible combinations, there's only at most 2 possible syllable structures, which themselves are distinguished by the number of vowels used. For instance, a sequence like ky could be one of kaya or kya. The vowel template required by its part of speech would itself make it obvious how many vowels there are.
2. The vowels to be used could be inferred by part of speech, but also declension/conjugation. The latte isn't really necessary, but I would guess that having only one possible template per part of speech would quickly get repetitive. Besides, having multiple declensions is useful for derivation, and all I would have to do is make sure the articles use different consonants for each gender.

Of course, this puts a limit on what features the language can use; obviously stem changes are not an option. As I mentioned before, you can't have conjugations like English speak-\>spoke. This of course puts a severe limit on the morphology strategies that could be used. This thing may need to be a highly agglutinating language where every possible affix includes at least one consonant if not more.

Of course, in real compression, different compression strategies often work better for certain data than others. A good example of this is the original pokemon games, which used one of two compression strategies for its sprites, because which worked better differed based on the sprite in question. Also, compression often isn't always perfect; you often simply can't perfectly replicate the original data based on its compressed form. Youtube's compression is infamous for this since it lowers the quality of audio. If you want perfect reconstruction of the original data, often times it just needs to have very specific qualities.

The closest I've heard of this in the real world are languages that only have CV syllables but write with an alphabet. Some chose to not write the most common vowel, since the limited syllable structure makes it obvious when a vowel is omitted. You only need to indicate what the vowel is. This is essentially similar to the concept of a null morpheme in a paradigm. On that note, perhaps null morphemes would also be good for this language? Assume a noun is neuter unless specified otherwise. Assume perfective aspect if no other marker is present. Assume singular if the plural marker isn't present. Assume a third person singular pronoun if none other is present. You get the idea.

This obviously isn't a lot though, so I would need more. Also, there's the problem with not being able to ever use stem changes, which obviously puts quite a limit on the morphology. Obviously, it would have to make use solely of agglutination, and maybe zero derivation (other than things like 'to ktb' and 'the ktb' having different vowels for the sake of minimizing repetition). I've also had someone recommend having words be really broad in meaning to help get the most out of all possible 2 and 3 consonant words. What other things can I do though, and what else may I have to worry about?

edit: Before anyone says it, yes I know this would make it hard to incorporate loan words. I don't see that as an issue for this language though. Besides, I could always just literally translate proper nouns literally based on their etymology if I really need to.

# Answer
Assume: compression requires patterns.

If vowel change rules are absolutely consistent and productive, then you could perhaps match a vowel "naturally" with its parent consonant, then the spoken language would alter the vowel for grammatical purposes which are not recorded because reasons.

So the recorded language might be "lossy compression" so to speak.

e.g. "M" is an "E"-class letter, and "K" and "R" are "A"-class letters, and let's pretend that final vowels are elided, so when you see

MRK "to throw"

You naturally read it "MERAK".

But if someone was speaking about events in the past, he might have said "MERIK", "threw". That information is lost in transcribing MRK, so the reader hopes he has some context to retrieve the verb tense.

---

Something a little less lossy would require some sort of vowel letters or notation, and it assumes that the LAST vowel to be used is to be REUSED until you explicitly write a new one. So:

MERK =\> MEREK(E)

COMPRESSD =\> COMOPORESSED(E)

Unless you have some exceptions that always allow certain consonant clusters to not be blown apart (like doubled consonants above).
> 0 votes

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Tags: morphology, writing-systems
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