# Question
Title: How can I explain the origin of the dual number in my Slavic-influenced East Nordic conlang?
The language I am creating is derived from East Norse and heavily influenced by Slavic. It has a quite complex grammatical structure - for example, it has not only taken over the two additional cases from Russian but also developed several own ones.

One unique aspect is the dual noun form, which is avaliable for describing things that usually occur in complementary pairs. There are dual-only nouns for things that *only* occur in the described pairs (such as a romantic couple) and dual forms of ordinary nouns in “natural” couple forms (a pair of shoes, the poles of a magnet, my eyes - not two houses or a couple of road signs). Some features are either identic to either singular and plural. A part of the pronouns - most notably all second-person pronouns - are however unique (somewhat similar to the dialect of Bavarian spoken in Munich).

I am wondering how I can “trace back” such a development. According to my knowledge, (correct me if I am blatantly wrong) neither East Norse nor Old East Slavic had the aforementioned features, and just “inventing it by accident somewhere around 1100” would sound like a too handwaved explanation.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Both Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic had the dual grammatical number. So you could just say that your conlang retained it the whole time. Alternatively you could say that it lost it and then subsequently borrowed it again from one of the Slavic languages which retained it.

If you were after a specific source, Old Church Slavonic could be ideal because it could have a wider influence than other Slavic languages through its religious prestige status. If the religious traditions of the Slavonic Orthodox churches were very highly valued by your conlang's speakers then that would help to explain why the dual number was retained by them even though the other languages of the region had lost it.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I think taking the dual retained in old Indo-European languages is a good idea. However, if your language is settled in Skandinavia, you could attribute it to contact with an Uralic language.

While the dual was lost in some (e.g. Finnish), dual pronouns are present in Sami languages that go pretty far south and have been in that region for a long time. After that, extending the usage of the dual to nouns would be a far easier natural development.

Additionally, that contact could explain the cases your language developed, as Uralic languages all have complex case systems (depends on exactly which cases you have though).

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, morphology, diachronics, nouns
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# Question
Title: Is there any concept of "isomorphic" constructed languages?
What I'm thinking is: if two conlangs have the same syntactical structure and can be translated by simply exchanging words while maintaining the same (or very similar) structure, is there are specific term for this scenario, and are there any examples for this? I'd imagine Lojban and Loglan would probably fit in this category as Lojban is, after all, a child project of Loglan. Are there any other examples of conlangs designed with identical (or very similar) syntactic features, and is there a name for this relationship?

# Answer
There is the term relexification meaning that the words of a given language are replaced by new words without changing the structure of the starting language. Relexification does not only occur in conlangs but also in natural languages.
> 20 votes

# Answer
For a lower-level kind of isomorphism: I have read a story in which an alien speaks a synthetic language, suited to its own vocal tract, into a machine that converts its speech phoneme-for-phoneme into a human language.

It could be a scene in Poul Anderson's *A Circus of Hells*, or not.
> 1 votes

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Tags: terminology, language-structure, syntax
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# Question
Title: Is there a specific term for a substitution cipher language?
A really simple but effective method to create an unintelligble language from a given language is applying a substitution cipher to the vocabulary. In order to be pronouncable, vowels should be substituted with vowels, and consonants with other consonant of comparable sonority.

It is of course a special case of a relexification, but is there a specific term for this?

# Answer
"code" or "coded language". Probably mostly used in conjunction with sign languages, where the signs replace the (spoken) words (e.g. Signing Exact English as opposed to "natural" signed languages), but also for "encoded" spoken languages (either by relexification or phoneme substitution).
> 3 votes

# Answer
I think we could use some terms from physics here. Let's say a relex is isochor (alternative: isomek from Ancient Greek mêkos "length") if it preserves length of words, and isotonic (alternative: isoson/isosonor/isosonic, a Latin-Greek mix) if it preserves sonority patterns. Your substitution cipher would then be an isochor-isotonic relexification.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I have never heard of a "substitution cypher language."

One might adduce Pig Latin or Double Dutch as examples of such a thing, but these are not conlangs. They are typically called "language games." A substitution cypher is not a language--it's a way of disguising one or more languages.

To qualify as a conlang, a constructed communication system has to have its own grammar and its own way of mapping meanings onto words.
> 1 votes

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Tags: terminology, relexification
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# Question
Title: What are sounds that I have to include in my phonology for it to be naturalistic?
Additionally, are there any such things as hierarchies, where if I want to include one sound, I should also include another?

# Answer
Most if not all phonemes in a language will share something with at least 2 other consonants. For example, if a language has a plosive, then it'll probably have several. Likewise, if it has a voiced plosive, it'll probably have other voiced consonants, possibly of other points of articulation.

Of course, this just the majority of the time. English, for instance has only one palatal consonant (the 'y' sound) and only one lateral (our 'l'). Though few languages have more than one lateral consonant (assuming they have any at all), and 'y' is the only common palatal consonant. All the others are rare.

There, however, a few universals. All languages have voiceless stops. They may only have one (and there are that do), but they will always have one. Also, all languages have monophthongs. So that means that there aren't any natural language out there that only have diphthongs for vowels. Note however, that diphthongs in a language can be made up of monophthongs that don't exist in the language. Take note that the English 'o' sound is actually a diphthong. English doesn't have the monophthong 'o' for some reason. This is why books that teach you foreign languages often tell you cut off the last part of the 'o' sound. What they're actually trying to get you to do is not do the off-glide that our 'o' normally has.

Beyond that though, there are no universals. No one phone is found in all languages. And exactly how many phonemes a language has varies widely. The most common is 5 vowels (the standard 5-vowel array you see everywhere) and 20 to 25 consonants. But there's languages with only half a dozen consonants, and others that have dozens. Then there's the case of Ubykh, which not only has dozens of consonants but only contains 2 vowels, which are of course prone to considerable allophony. In general, its hard to find languages that have fewer than 5 vowels, but they do exist. Several native languages up in Canada only have 4 vowels. The Semitic languages only have 3 vowels (well, modern Arabic also has 2 diphtongs, and its three monophthongs distinguish length, though classical Arabic only had 3 monophthongs, I don't know about Hebrew).
> 8 votes

# Answer
No, even among natlangs there are no true universal sounds. The closest would a low /a/ type vowel, which 98%+ of natlangs do have, but not all. Note that this is in terms of phonemes, not allophones. Other very common phones include the stops \[p/b\], \[t/d\], and \[k/g\], as well as one or more nasals.

When creating a conlang, a minimum of two to three vowel phonemes or three consonant phonemes (with more consonants if there are few vowels and vice versa) would be expected for a naturalistic phonology. The natlangs with the smallest phoneme inventories have on the order of around ten to twelve phonemes, however analyses of such languages are usually controversial. Such languages also often have tone or phonemic length, which does make it harder to compare languages and harder to come to consensus on what should count as 'smallest'.
> 4 votes

# Answer
In general, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, and /a/ are phonemes found in almost all natlangs (but certainly not all).
> 2 votes

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Tags: phonology, naturalism
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# Question
Title: Can features in the physical environment meaningfully affect the development of a local language's phonology?
Imagine that I'm creating phonemic inventories for multiple conlangs, each of which is spoken by a people settled within (or roaming about) a very different physical environment from the others. Assuming that these different civilizations developed their languages completely apart from one another and haven't simply drifted apart from one original root language, is there any consensus that certain phonemes work better or worse in different environments?

For instance, do certain phonemes perform better or worse:

* over choppy waters being sailed by a seafaring people?
* through a jungle or heavily wooded area populated by a tree-dwelling people?
* in a mountainous area frequently traversed by various groups settling near or even on the mountains?
* carrying over a vast inland plain or a placid lake?
* cutting through the ambient noise of a swamp or jungle (or even a city)?

These are just examples. I'm not specifically asking about any of those scenarios. I just want to make sure that any language I create would be as plausible as possible, down to the very last detail I can think of. Any reliable resources on the subject would be great, but as a complete novice, I haven't been entirely sure what to search for and have come up short on my attempts so far.

# Answer
> 13 votes
There has also been evidence that suggests that ejectives tend to occur more frequently in areas of higher elevation, perhaps due to their being easier to produce in these regions:

> We present evidence that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form. We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high. \[...\] we offer two plausible motivations for \[this correlation's\] existence. We suggest that **ejective sounds might be facilitated at higher elevations due to the associated decrease in ambient air pressure, which reduces the physiological effort required for the compression of air in the pharyngeal cavity**–a unique articulatory component of ejective sounds. In addition, we hypothesize that **ejective sounds may help to mitigate rates of water vapor loss through exhaled air**. \[...\] Our results reveal the direct influence of a geographic factor on the basic sound inventories of human languages.

(emphasis mine)

# Answer
> 13 votes
Here is another researcher (Prof. Ian Maddieson) suggesting exactly such correlations:

> In a presentation on Wednesday at the Acoustical Society of America fall meeting, Maddieson showed that consonant-thick languages like Georgian are more likely to develop in open, temperate environments. Meanwhile, consonant-light languages like Hawaiian are more likely to be found in lush, hot ecologies.

The complete article even includes a world map showing consonant heaviness per region. Generally speaking there certainly seems to be a relation but the research is not very far into how exactly the impact of surroundings are on the languages.

> Other researchers say this is just the beginning of a line of research into how nature rules our speech. "This is the first of its kind, and there are several others coming now. It's becoming increasingly clear that the way we speak is shaped by external forces," says Sean Roberts, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study.

# Answer
> 9 votes
There have definitely been serious linguistic theories about environment affecting features like this - the ones I can remember off the top of my head are that certain sound changes in Proto-Germanic were because its speakers had thicker phlegm or something and that tonogenesis is more likely to occur in certain tropical climates. The latter was a relatively recent paper. These are taken relatively seriously by many linguists, but most I've met are highly skeptical. They haven't reached widespread acceptance, so I would certainly not say there's any consensus about it.

That said, if you'd like your conlang to contain certain phonemes because you personally think they'd work better in a certain environment, there's nothing stopping you.

# Answer
> 5 votes
If you're looking for parallels in animal communication, there's plenty of good evidence that environment shapes the kinds of sounds used. For instance, Henry & Lucas (2010) showed that birds in forest habitats (more absorption) were more sensitive to frequency changes (FM), as modulated narrowband sounds (essentially, vowels) are more reliably transmitted in that cluttered environment. Birds living in open habitats had more temporal resolution, and tended to use more amplitude modulation. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2009.01674.x

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Tags: phonology, resource-request
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title: How is ANADEW pronounced?

text:
# Question
Title: How is ANADEW pronounced?
How is the acronym ANADEW pronounced among conlang enthusiasts. I have seen it only in print so far and I want to know whether the letters are spelled out or whether it is pronounced as if it were an English word.

# Answer
As a native speaker of American English from the middle of the North American continent, I have always pronounced it as /ˈænədu/, like Xanadu (the movie), but with out the leading /z/. Visit https://tophonetics.com for a close approximation (capitalization ignored, British and American options generate the same audio).
> 5 votes

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Tags: terminology, conlang-community
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# Question
Title: A Hypothetical Mediterranean Language Inspired by Both Greek and Latin
Here is the scenario:

*In or before the Classical Period, a king from some Greek city-state--it doesn't matter which--first brought all the other Greek city-states together to become one unified nation. Either he or his heir then declared that the whole of the Mediterranean belong to the Greeks. First phase of the grand plan was to conquer the Mediterranean was to absorb the lands of their closest neighbors, the Roman Republic. The Republic, weak from the Conflict of the Orders, embraced their Greek conquerors with minimal resistance. In absorbing Greek and Roman lands together, Greek and Roman culture merged into one, and that includes language.*

The inspiration behind this scenario is that both Greek and Roman cultures have such inspirations on modern Western culture that it's hard to decipher where Greek ended and Roman began. But what if both cultures were merged into one new one? If you mix Greek with Latin, what should I look out for in regards to grammar?

*I ask this because many people are not convinced that Glosa, an auxlang already inspired by both Greek and Latin, won't be the natural answer to this question.*

# Answer
The situation you describe, in which Classical Greece invades the Roman Republic, has two probable outcomes. (This is assuming a single language "merged into one" excludes the possibility of both languages coexisting. However, a language can also exert influence on another without supplanting it.)

* If the Romans adopted (or were forced to adopt) their conquerors' language, which is what happened in other nations after Alexander the Great's conquests later in history, then the spoken language would become Greek. The influence of the Latin language in such a case would exist as a substrate, which could introduce Latin loan words and grammatical structures into Roman Greek.
* If the Romans didn't choose (or weren't forced) to adopt Greek as their language and continued to speak Latin, then Latin would remain the spoken language, but would have Greek influence on vocabulary and grammar, as a superstrate or adstrate. As it is, Latin already has Greek influence on its vocabulary, with learned words like *philosophia*; but in the case of a Greek conquest, it would probably gain more mundane words as well.

A comparable case in history with regard to English could be the Norman invasion of England. Anglo-Norman and English were spoken alongside each other. Eventually, English was the only language spoken of the two in England, but not without considerable influence from Anglo-Norman. Looking at this case might give an idea of how a language could change followed by the invasion of another one.
> 2 votes

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Tags: grammar, inspiration, naturalism, natural-languages
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# Question
Title: How do you model language changes with wave theory (areal developments)?
I'd like to hear from anyone who has built a dialect continuum, in which innovations spreading from different centres affect overlapping subsets of the range (see wave theory). How do you model it? How do you manage the results?

I suppose I'd start with a list of towns and a table determining how likely a town is to adopt an innovation from each of its neighbors. The table can change over time as towns lose or gain influence, or new roads are made.

Then what? Maintain a separate grammar for each town? Impractical.

With a list of sound shifts, you can easily generate a given town's version of a given lexeme as needed; but managing changes in syntax or morphology is, I'd think, not so easy.

# Answer
> 4 votes
I have never tried to do it, but I think the approach you call "impractical" is the way to go. You need to maintain a grammar and a vocabulary for each town and for each period (say, a snapshot every 50 or 100 years) to keep consistency.

The good news that can save a lot of time is, that you probably don't need complete reference grammars for each step in the evolution: Start with a good grammar of the oldest stage of your language continuum and than write the grammars of the evolving dialects/languages in terms of differences to the old grammar.

Only when accumulated differences become too large to be handled well, write a full grammar again.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Yes, having a separate grammar for each town would be the way to go.

When modelling the spread of linguistic difference, do bear in mind geography, rather than just distance. Some regions can be very close in mountainous terrain but still have very different languages/dialects, whereas regions in flat plains (without major rivers) tend to be far more similar.

If you have a map with geographical features, use something like A\* to calculate the distance between towns.

As regarding changes in grammar: if your grammar is expressed in the form of rewrite rules, you could allow them to change as well. A fairly radical change would be from

```
NP -> adj n

```

to

```
NP -> n adj

```

ie the adjective moves behind the noun it modifies. The resulting grammar would of course still be valid. However, you want to make such changes very rare and slow. Alternatively, annotate each rule with a probability, and then have both rules in parallel. Change would then be an increase/decrease in probability.

For language change in general you might be interested in Piotrowski's Law. (Unfortunately the only explanation I have found for it is in German). This models mathematically how change spreads throughout language.

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Tags: conlang-creation, diachronics, dialects
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# Question
Title: How would one describe different tones on paper?
In my new language, I use tones, such as those in Mandarin and Cantonese, to diversify my words. When I try to make a dictionary, I do not know how to describe these tones. I have tried using parts different English words to describe what a tone sounds like, but that is not very efficient. Is there a simpler way to describe these tones?

# Answer
> 3 votes
I think vowel + shift in tone is key. If you'd just have different tones (as in notes) for vowels, that would conflict with expressions of pain, surprise, etc. In Asian Philology, when we talk about "tones", we actually mean a change in pitch for a vowel. Chinese has 4: Same, Up, Down and Down+Up. Thai for example has more.

Here's a grid of the most used tonal notation systems for Chinese:

The most common in use today is Pinyin

# Answer
> 2 votes
You can use standard musical notation to describe the tones of your conlang. Level tones are just represented by different notes, and tonal glides can be represented by groups of notes joined with a slur. The notes can also hint the duration of a syllable.

An alternative to that are Tone Letters introduced by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao providing a nice visual cue to tone levels and contour tones.

These means are for the explanation of the tones to the aspiring learner of your conlang, their representation in a writing system is another thing worth a separate question.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Vietnamese is a tonal language that is written with a Latin character set, using accents and other "punctuation" to indicate the tones. Take a look at it because at the Wikipedia entry on the Vietnamese alphabet for some ideas about how it is implemented.

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Tags: phonetics
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# Question
Title: Is there some more detailed information about Dritok available?
Dritok is a conlang by Dan Boozer without any voiced sounds. It is said to be based on chipmunk sounds.

While this language even has a wikipedia article, I was not able to discover some more detailed information about the language like full phoneme inventory or some information about the transcription system used or some glossed examples of it.

Are there some resources on Dritok available?

# Answer
This website contains a video and links to some resources. The most important is this PDF, which explains gestures ("Dritok Gestural Syntax"), phonology and grammar.
> 4 votes

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Tags: unnatural-features, resource-request
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title: How do you call a "stillborn language"?

text:
# Question
Title: How do you call a "stillborn language"?
And by "stillborn", I mean a dead language that never really lived to begin with: a modernized version of an archaic language frozen in time, or an all-out archaic language (with archaic grammar and vocabulary), but with modernized pronunciations (and all the vowel shifts and consonant shifts applied). Like Classical Latin, which was probably never spoken in daily life (in contrast with Vulgar Latin).

Or just simply a language that is based off an actual natural language, but highly stylized and artificial, having had diglossia with its parent-language since the start, never having been an actual spoken language at any point in history.

# Answer
> 4 votes
You're describing a couple different and not totally related things with different terminology used for each:

* Classical Latin is an example of a literary language, a language used not really in speech but used to communicate through writing.
* Modern Standard Arabic, one of those artificial languages based off of a natural one but not really being a spoken language. It's very frequently affected by diglossia, and not really used in natural settings. It's usually referred to as simply a standardized lanuage, and also qualifies as a literary language.
* Hebrew as spoken in daily life in Israel would qualify as the first type you described, a modernized version of an old language that was resurrected after death. It would be referred to as a revived language.

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Tags: history, terminology
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# Question
Title: Has any conlang ever replaced the use of a pidgin?
I've read that being a simple, yet more expressive, substitute for a pidgin language is one of the possible applications of Toki Pona.

In situations where people from multiple languages come together they need to be able to communicate with each other. Pidgins are introduced or developed in these situations, but there is a limited scope to what can be said in pidgins. Over time, pidgins creolise into full natural languages. I would like to know if a language like Toki Pona (or a similarly minimal conlang) has ever successfully replaced the use of a pidgin to allow more to be said, rather than letting the pidgin creolise naturally.

# Answer
Basic English is minimal in that it limits the number of words in the language (though not as extremely as Toki Pona). It was intended to be an international auxiliary language (although it never really caught on).

The language was used in 1945 in order to quickly teach Chinese sailors to understand naval orders. This was reported at the time in a Time magazine article (paywall beyond first two paragraphs; the reference to the article comes from Wikipedia).
> 6 votes

# Answer
Yep. How reconstructed/engineered modern Hebrew replaced Yiddish and Judesmo. Both can be considered as pidgins, from German and from Spanish, with lithurgic Hebrew vocab. And modern Hebrew is *definitely* a conlang.
> 0 votes

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Tags: history, toki-pona, pidgin
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# Question
Title: Are there human beatbox inspired conlangs?
Human beatbox is an art form producing percussion sounds with the mouth only. It uses techniques and sounds that are rare or entirely absent in natural languages.

Are the constructed languages that take inspiration by human beatbox sounds?

# Answer
> 3 votes
I tried to find conlangs based on such sounds but could not find any. However, the closest human phonemes to such sounds are clicks and many conlangs use them. I don't know any well-known conlangs that use clicks, but HyPry and Gdili were two that I could find.

You could try making one yourself, but given that Beatbox sounds are fairly limited and sometimes hard to distinguish, I doubt you would be able to make an effective language from it without adding in typical consonants and vowels.

# Answer
> 1 votes
ANADEW: Nuxalk (also known as Bella Coola), a natural language of the Salishan family spoken at the west coast of Canada, has some beat-box elements: long strings of consonants without intervening vowels. Nuxalk features ejective consonants, too.

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Tags: list-of-languages, unnatural-features
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# Question
Title: Is Glosa more than just a relex of English?
Looking for information on the International Auxiliary languages Interglossa and Glosa again, I stumbled over these sample texts in Glosa. I am astonished, how slavishly Glosa copies the English syntax: While some elements of a noun phrase or a verb phrase may be slightly reordered, translation unit after translation unit are completely parallel in the English and Glosa texts, even for rather complicated English sentences. And the English preference for past participles also carries over to Glosa in a one-to-one fashion.

Has Glosa any syntax of its own (independent from English)? Are there any Glosa idioms setting it apart from a relex of English?

# Answer
> 3 votes
While Glosa definitely does seem to take a lot of influence from English, it's grammar isn't quite so indistinguishable from English's as to be an *obvious* relex.

It avoids classic relex mistakes like including do-support, and while its tense-aspect system doesn't do anything too wild for English speakers, it uses a variety of particles rather than English's auxiliary-based periphrastic tenses. It's also noteworthy that it lacks plurals, a decidedly un-English-like feature. Both these features were likely inspired by Mandarin Chinese.

Glosa also has an article that is unspecified for definiteness, using *u(n)* for both "the" and "a(n)", which is a departure from its major influences -- English, which has distinct definite and indefinite articles; Mandarin Chinese, which doesn't have any such articles; and Esperanto, which possesses one explicitly definite article. However, this article's syntactic behavior does not seem notably different from the English or Esperanto articles, so it's not thinking too far outside the box there.

You could definitely argue that Glosa's departures from English are pretty small, and that it's thus still quite relex-y in spirit. It's certainly closer to normal English grammatically than Interglossa, which is reportedly based on Simple English. So it really depends exactly how far you think a conlang must depart from English grammatically to "count" as not being a relex.

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Tags: classification, auxlangs, relexification, glosa, english
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# Question
Title: Is Basic English a well-defined constructed language?
Wikipedia says that Basic English is an English-based controlled language, an international auxiliary language, and an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English.

The problem is: there is a fixed number of 850 basic words for beginners, but there is no definite list. Some lists have 1500 words, others have 2000 words, but one can always draw more words from the English language. For instance: how would you talk about a cucumber, an oak tree or a rhinoceros without some silly circumlocution or using the real English word?

So, **is Basic English a well-defined constructed language that can exists on its own?**

# Answer
> 3 votes
The website describing Ogden's Basic English is **here**. Wiktionary has the 850 word list **here**.

I would argue that Basic English is a (rather) well defined invented language. Wikipedia lists it as a *controlled natural language*, which simply means that it is a natural language whose natural form and evolution have been suspended and its new form and evolution have been created by someone. In this case, Charles Ogden.

Classical Latin I have seen argued is a similar beast: a natural language that has some constructed or artificial tendencies, just not a single author.

The controlled language is, I would argue, the "fourth axial point of the Gnoli Triangle" --- the point where the art, science/engineering & practicality of invented languages become cotangent with the world of natural languages.

Basic English and its relatives might thus be seen as "conlang-natlang creoles". Where the creolisation process happens between two types of language rather than between two specific languages.

---

As for existing on its own, I think that is a rather different matter. If we were to replace the grammar with some kind of *fundamental* rule list and replace the English lexicon with unique, perhaps even levelled-Germanic words, we'd basically end up reinventing Esperanto. Or Folksprak. As such, yes, it could "exist on its own".

But Basic English is quite different among auxlangs, in that its essential function is that of a "bridge language". It is designed to bring people who have no English at all across the gap and to a place where they can immerse themselves in the broader Anglophone world. Basic English is thus, in this key regard, self limiting in scope and usefulness. It's great so long as the learner has extremely limited access to English speakers or English media.

As soon as that learner discovers the Internet or Anglophone aural culture (radio, television, movies) or English literature (broadly defined as anything written), they are going to discover the limitations imposed by Basic English. They'll have to leave it behind. In that sense, Basic English can't really have its own existence.

To build on your example: a Basic English speaker would simply have to step off the bridge and begin learning the "extended" lexicon of ordinary English!

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Tags: classification
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# Question
Title: How do languages manage to make sense with a free word order?
Many of the world's natural languages, and some conlangs, have a free word order, so that the words can be put in any order with it still making sense.

If they can't use word order to indicate the structure, what strategies do they use instead? Have any conlangs used strategies not found in natlangs?

# Answer
There are three main strategies for indicating grammatical relations in languages with free word orders. It is common for languages to have more than one of these, and to my knowledge all free word order natural languages have either case or verbal agreement.

# Case

Case refers to grammatical markers attached to nouns which indicate the noun's role in the sentence. Some languages have a very large number of cases, but in general you can expect such a language to have at least two cases: nominative and accusative, or ergative and absolutive. Here is an example from Walmajarri:

```
parri-ngu  pa   manga-Ø   nyanya
boy-subj   AUX  girl-obj  saw
'The boy saw the girl.'

parri-Ø  pa   nyanya  manga-ngu
boy-obj  AUX  saw     girl-subj
'The girl saw the boy.'

```

In Walmajarri `ngu` is the ergative case marker. Walmajarri has a null absolutive case marker, shown here as `Ø`.

# Agreement

The second strategy is agreement, where markers are attached to the verb to give information about the subject and object. Depending on the language, these markers might indicate the person, number, or gender of each noun. Here's an example, again from Walmajarri:

```
nayili  nya-ka-kyaka-ji-pila
north   see-IRR-REDUP-1sgO-3dlS
'You two watch out for me in the north.'

```

Here the verb has two suffixes (actually clitics), `-ji` and `-pila`, which mean a 1st person singular object, and a 3rd person dual subject. While it is most common for these verbal agreement markers to be attached to the verbs, in some languages they are attached to other elements in the sentence. In Walmajarri the most common sentence form actually has these markers attaching to a modal auxiliary:

```
ngayirta  ma-rnalu     majurra  kang-ka-rla
NEG       AUX-1plincS  matches  carry-IRR-PAST
'We didn't take matches.'

```

Here `ma` is the unmarked modal auxiliary, to which `-rnalu` is attached, the marker for a 1st person plural inclusive subject. Matches is a third person singular object and so has a null marker.

# Incorporation

The third strategy is incorporation, where a language productively forms compound words where the verb includes the object. English doesn't do this very productively - our compounds are more like individual set combinations. So in the verb *babysit* the object *baby* is incorporated, but the meaning of the compound is not obviously derived from its component parts. In incorporating languages this process happens productively with the components often keeping their normal sense. Here is an example from Nuu-chah-nulth:

```
maḥt'a-ʔa-mit-ʔiš    čakup
house-buy-past-3ind  man
'A man bought a house.'

ʔu-ʔaa-mit-ʔiš    maḥt'ii  čakup
Ø-buy-past-3.ind  house    man
'A man bought a house.'

```

Nuu-chah-nulth is called an obligatory incorporating language because if the object is not incorporated a dummy morpheme `ʔu` must be used.

Now while incorporation is used in many languages, we have to be careful about making generalisations as each language incorporates nouns according to its own rules. Some incorporate adjectives, and some don't. Or for example, in Nahuatl an independent noun indicates a specific event, whereas an incorporated noun indicates a more general or habitual meaning:

```
ni-c-qua  in   nacatl
I-it-eat  the  flesh
'I eat the flesh.' [particular act]

ni-naca-qua
I-flesh-eat
'I eat flesh' or 'I am a flesh-eater.'

```

A free word order conlang could require incorporation of all objects and not use either case or agreement, a typological combination that does not exist in natlangs to my knowledge.
> 9 votes

# Answer
It should be noted that in addition to relying heavily on one strategy, it's also possible to mix strategies is various different ways, relying on different strategies to back each other up. For example in Fore(Kainantu-Goroka(TNG), PNG), there is a hierarchy like this, where if each strategy fails, the one lower in the list can be relied on. I'm putting "case" in quotation marks, because the "ergative" case marker in Fore is not really a case-marker as much as it is an often optional and occasionally prohibited derivational marker:

1. Verbal agreement
2. Animacy
3. "Case"-marking
4. Word order

Point 2, "animacy" means that referents higher on the animacy hierarchy are interpreted as being more likely to be agents, as such the NPs in a sentence like *aebá nanita: yaga: amiye* `he pig food 3sg:gave_to:3sg` "he gave the pig food" can be freely reordered without a change in truth value, despite the fact that the verbal agreement is wholly inadequate to disambiguate the roles of the participants. Only in the few instances where the other strategies fail is word order a primary disambiguative device.

There are some languages where a primary disambiguation strategy is marking on the verb whether such a hierarchy a broken or not, called direct/inverse marking (this can disambiguate situations with two 3rd persons of equal animacy as well by considering e.g. topicality or obviation).
> 16 votes

# Answer
The way these languages do this is with inflections. Nouns, for example, can be declined to show cases, which tell the speaker things about what they are doing. Verbs can be used to show who the subject is, and the tense and mood and stuff. For example, in English we would say:

> The boy loves the girl

However, in Latin (I don't know any other languages with cases well enough for this answer) we would say:

> Puer puellam amat.

There's a lot of info here: the first word (**puer**), meaning "boy" is in the nominative case, meaning it is the subject of the sentence. **Puellam,** girl, is in the accusative, meaning it is the direct object. In addition, the verb, **amat,** has the 3rd person singular present indicative ending **-t.** In this case this isn't enough to tell us who the subject is, as both the nouns are 3rd person singular, but coupled with the nominative, we can easily figure out who is loving whom. Therefore, the same thing can be expressed as:

> Puellam amat puer

or

> Amat puer puellam

or any other combination you'd like, and the listeners or readers would understand because of the cases of the nouns. Latin has six or seven cases (depending), but some languages have more. Finnish has 15, Hungarian has 18; Wikipedia has a whole bunch of cases that appear, all to free up the word order.

Because of these, many prepositions can be omitted entirely, verbs can use inflections to show the subject and stuff.

Adjectives that modify nouns must agree in case with the nouns--so a reader can easily infer their meaning from what case they are in. Because of these, word order having any grammatical function is unnecessary and redundant.

As another example, my own conlang Simean has four cases. Here is a sentence with all of them:

> Nuler loyile shuir edeï sefmou.

Translated, this is: "The soldier (Nominative) is giving the king (Dative) of the land (Genitive) a book (Accusative)." The verb, **loyile,** is the stem **loy-** plus the imperfect affix **-i-** plus the third person singular **-le.** If instead, we wanted to say "I am giving the king of the land a book," we could take out sefmou, soldier, and we wouldn't have to add in the word for I because of the verb inflection. Instead, the subject could be expressed through the verb. Instead of the **-le** we would use **-ë,** and the listeners would know what we were talking about--who gave whom what and all that.

Technically, any one of these words could be moved somewhere else--the only thing in Simean that dictates word order is convention.
> 11 votes

# Answer
Apart from the morphological / grammatical angle, we can also understand meaning by context.

**A mournful song sang the choir.**

Except in the *Land of Strange Tales*, we know that choirs sing songs. Songs don't sing choirs. The inversion is startling when interjected into speech of ordinary pattern, but it's quite understandable. Even though we don't have morphological clues to tell us, we intuitively know that this sentence is not to be "read straight through".

**Man bites dog.**

Again, context informs our understanding. Here, the (seeming!) inversion is nòt used for poetic effect, but is instead the epitome of the ironically prosaic. In this case, the context is journalism and headline writing style and is a commentary on what is newsworthy.
> 8 votes

# Answer
The key principle to understanding what is being uttered or has been written is to know how to put the words into a structural context. This is often explained in simple terms using the W questions: ***w****ho* is doing something, ***w****hat* are they doing, *ho**w*** are they doing it, *to **w**hom* are they doing it, ***w****hen* and ***w****here* are they doing it, etc. In grammatical terms, these can be labelled as subject, verb, adverbs, objects, adverbials and more.

In some languages, quite a few categories are distinguishable *a priori* just by their ending. For example in Esperanto, singular nouns are marked with terminal *-o*, adjectives end in *-a* and conjugated verbs usually in *-\[vowel\]s*. Likewise, a general knowledge of the conjugation tables of Finnish often allows a quick and dirty rough estimate whether a word happens to a noun or adjective or a verb form. English is generally terrible at this distinction with a number of words being written and pronounced the same regardless of the category (see: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo).

However, what is mentioned in the paragraph above only accounts for the word type; if a sentence has two nouns we may not immediately be able to distinguish between the subject noun and the object noun without additional information. Thus, languages generally use one of two methods to clarify what exactly is meant:

1. The information is encoded in word order. This is often the rule for languages with rather low levels of inflection such as English or Chinese. In English, the following two sentences are different because of the different subject and object functions even though all the words are the same:

> The man bites the dog.
>
> The dog bites the man.
2. The information is encoded in inflection, prepositions, participles, suffixes and the like. While very likely all languages make use of this scheme partially, some do to a much larger extent than English; for example German or Finnish. In German and Finnish, the following two sentences with the same words but different order mean *the same:*

> Der Mann beißt den Hund.
> Mies puree koiraa.
>
> Den Hund beißt der Mann.
> Koiraa puree mies.

(I’m not sure if the second Finnish example is strictly allowed in that way; however, my Finnish course includes a similar precedence of an OVS sentence).

By marking the nouns according to case — and thus, according to their grammatic function — we have one clear subject (the agent, the man; nominative case in both examples) and one clear object (the patient, the dog; accusative or partitive case). Once the relation between the two is established like this, one is typically free to move the components around.

Other than using declension by case, modifiers can be placed around a word. In Japanese, that would be the particles が, は, を, に, へ and others. The word or phrase that precedes the particle が is understood to be the subject of a sentence, whatever precedes を is an object. In theory, this would allow the parts suffixed in that way to be moved around as seen fit. (Whether Japanese actually does that I do not know as my knowledge of it is still too basic.) Other options of the same general flavour include prepositions: ***in*** *the house* shows that the house is used to denote location and is not an agent or a patient of the sentence. Even in the otherwise relatively strict word order of English, adverbials such as that can be moved around to a certain degree.

---

**tl;dr:**

Languages that allow a more or less free word order will not rely on word order to assign syntactical roles. Instead, markers or modifiers of certain types will likely be used; cases and declension being a rather common choice.
> 8 votes

# Answer
The real answer is that **languages don't actually have free word order**. Rather, languages with 'free' word order use the rearrangements to signify additional meaning. Here, look at English:

> Hey, what did you eat?

This is a plain question, indicated by shifting the 'what' from its underlying position to the front.

> Wait, you ate what?!

From the perspective of a logician, this sentence should mean the same thing, right? But it doesn't. When you don't shift a wh-word, it doesn't remain a question, it's a statement of surprise and maybe a request for clarification. It's also stylistically informal, and wouldn't be used in a sentence. In other words, it's what linguists call a 'pragmatic shift'.

*Every* language with 'free' word order does something like this. Traditional grammar and logic tends to downplay or be unaware of word order and pragmatics, and so people who speak such languages tend to believe that words can be arranged in any which way you want. But underlyingly, every arrangement of word order carries a stylistic or pragmatic significance, and using the 'wrong' arrangement will make it sound off to a fluent speaker, even if they couldn't explain why.

Esperanto is an interesting example -- officially speaking, Esperanto has totally free word order. But in practice, Esperanto word orderings follow unspoken stylistic and pragmatic rules (typically lifted from Germanic and Slavic). So this would presumably occur with any fluently spoken language, conlang or not.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Many languages, like Japanese and Korean, have particles added to words to show which part of speech they are. While word order is still necessary for these languages to make sense, a conlang might have grammar where each word's part of speech is not defined by their place in the sentence, but what particles are attached to the words. A similar effect could be achieved by using different pitches or different word forms to define a word's part of speech.
> 4 votes

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Tags: grammar, typology
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# Question
Title: Constructed languages or dialects for Time travellers
Time travel is a standard trope in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Since time travel disrupts the normal perception of time time travellers may develop some linguistic means to deal with this situation.

My question is: What are examples of either constructed languages for time travellers or constructed varieties of natural languages used by time travellers and how do they deal with aspects related to time travel?

# Answer
Ted Chang wrote "Story of Your Life" which was the basis for the movie Arrival. I thought both the book and the visual representation in the film were excellent examples of languages based on a travelers use of time. In this story understanding the language is to understand your life as a simultaneous event, and thus have access to all moments at once.

You may also want to consider Jargon specific to your vision of time travel. Do paradox occur, and if so what is the resultant outcome? Do parallel realities exist, are there different types? Can futures be erased or overwritten, if so, what do you call a future that no longer exists, or a person lost in one? Do you have some sort of McGuffin for the travelling part? Is the language the means of travel? Do bodies travel or only minds?

You might consider leveraging something like Hobo signs, notes left by other travelers, with help or warnings, that type of thing. Alternatively, Signals of fealty and place, such as a question and response or sing the local anthem to identify other travelers as friend or foe. Flushing out what you want them to communicate, as well as the mood or archetypes of the speakers, might help drive the sound and appearance of the language.
> 3 votes

# Answer
You might want to explore the use of Gallifreyan in Doctor Who as he is a member of time-travelling people called the Gallifreyans. He always has a confused sense of time on his show.

It appears that this language uses a series of circles that represent different aspects of time.
> 2 votes

# Answer
That's a tough one. All languages (previously) in existence are in essence linear, because they are phonetic representations of human experience. Even when describing the past or the future, language does so in a linear form. Also, any human language is itself subject to time, with one phoneme uttered after another. In addition, the grammars of some languages are very restrictive to allow expression of effect preceding cause, etc. For example, Indo-Germanic languages cannot have verbs without a subject and the subject must precede the verb. So looking at natural languages it is clear that some are better suited to express time paradoxes etc. than others.

Probably the best candidate languages to extend or base a *conlang* on would be those languages that do not change sentence structure for singular vs plural, present vs past or future, affirmative vs negative, certain vs conditional, etc. Japanese for example would be a good candidate. To change all of the aforementioned sentence parameters you would just use suffixes, e.g. *-ta* for past tense, *-tachi* for plural, *-yo* for conditional, etc. It could therefore easily be extended with suffixes to express time paradoxes, timelines, etc.

Another language that meets the conditions of unchanging sentence structure related to time & conditions would be Chinese (Literary Chinese to be exact, Modern Chinese would be a bit more problematic due to its compound phrases). This is a monosyllabic language where word meaning is based on tone. Chinese currently has 4 tones. You could add modulations to these tones to express time travel related conditions and effects. But unless you've been brought up in this language it would be extremely hard to learn (just learning to distinguish the current 4 tones in all circumstances is already a daunting task for a non-native speaker unless you're also musically inclined).

If you want to construct a *conlang* that is not based on any existing language, a good candidate would be a language that is based on harmonics (i.e. multiple frequencies uttered at the same time). Different harmonics could represent different time-related states. However, human vocal chords are not really up to the task of uttering complex harmonics.

There's probably many other ways to answer your question but here's my 2 cents :)
> 1 votes

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Tags: list-of-languages, tense-aspect-mood
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title: Are there any "unspeakable" languages?

text:
# Question
Title: Are there any "unspeakable" languages?
Sorry, my title is slightly misleading; what I'm after is more like a written language that doesn't have its roots in spoken language, and has no definitive translation into speech, but is none-the-less concise and clearly understandable. Tall order, I know - perhaps something similar would be cave-paintings: they seem to have a strong meaning that one could imagine was clear to people at the time, and which may convey a narrative of some sort; but the actual recital might have many variations. Or a more modern example: when you see a red circle around a drawing of a cigarette, with a red line across, you know it means that you are not allowed to smoke (so the meaning is clear and concise) - but the equivalent wording depends on the viewer, and could include phrases like "Don't smoke", "No smoking", or many others,

It seems achievable, at least, that one could construct such a language, which might even be universally understandable; but has it already been done in the form of a full language?

# Answer
The answer is a definite *Yes, there are*.

The example that comes immediately to my mind is Bliss symbolics (also known as **Semantography**) by Charles Bliss from 1942–1949. As an additional bonus, it is still used and developped further, and may even be included into Unicode at some date.

EDIT: The term to look for is *pasigraphy*. There were lots of pasigraphies (Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen, gives the number 60) mainly in the 19th century, but the most successful ones were created in the 20th century. There were both philosophical pasigraphies (often using digits or abstract symbols) and naturalistic ones (starting from pictograms).
> 15 votes

# Answer
Most of what are generally considered languages, whether natural or constructed, are in fact two languages, one written and one spoken. We usually learn the two together, and thus learn the mapping between them. These can vary in how obvious they are. At one extreme are languages that use a very standard mapping. It is virtually impossible to be able to read the Roman alphabet - in English or French, say, and to be able to speak Portuguese, but not to be able to read Portuguese, as a friend of mine found out. She had these skills but had never learnt to read Portuguese. Her mum was shocked to find her reading a book in Portuguese and asked where she learnt to do that. She had not learnt - she could just do it.

The next step is English or Gaelic (and not many other languages) where the mapping is so poor that it is possible to be fluent in the spoken language, and not to be able to read the language, even though you can read another language in the same alphabet. 100 years ago there was a famous disaster involving a ship called the Iolaire. Virtually everyone on board, and the bereaved relatives, had Gaelic as a first language, but they could not read Gaelic and so had no idea the ship's name was Gaelic - they pronounced it as an English person would and had no idea what the name meant.

Next come languages like Chinese, which is in fact several spoken languages, with one written language. The symbol 米 means rice. How you pronounce it varies according to whether you speak Mandarin or Cantonese, or even Japanese which sometimes uses Chinese symbols (Kanji). Thus you can learn written Mandarin (you now know one word) with no clue as to how to pronounce it.

We use some logograms in English. Some, such as ☏, are pictographic in origin, and so have no inherent pronunciation - we just translate them to English as we read them. Others, such as &, are alphabetic in origin. This one is a fancy way to write *et*, which is Latin or French for "and". We ignore this and just pronounce it "and". Of course other people, such as the Germans, will pronounce these symbols differently.

You could always learn a natural or constructed language from a book that had no pronunciation guide, if it was written in Cyrillic, using Chinese characters, or using its own made-up logograms. But of course, you could find out how to pronounce it.

Next, a language could be constructed without a vocal form. I am not aware that this has occurred. The problem here is that there is no way stop someone inventing a vocal form for each symbol. This is a bit like learning Old English or Ancient Greek. We do not know exactly how they were pronounced, and so we use what is basically a modern guess.

The only examples I can think of where there is no vocal form is the sign languages used by deaf communities. They are genuine languages, unlike signed English, and usually have no accepted spoken or written form.
> 9 votes

# Answer
Yes, there are. There is a language called Silbo that is whistled and not spoken. There are around 70 whistled languages in the world. They're mostly for conveying words long distances.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Take a look at **Computer Languages**

Programming Languages and any computer language made to be understandable by humans is based on an already existent language (mostly english). Just to make things easy. But computers do not understand human languages, at least not directly. Machines still "communicate" and interpret information, but they do it in a language we don't understand.

Another thing you should consider, is **Braille**, since it's a writing system, but not a Spoken Language, as you say.
> 0 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems
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# Question
Title: What are some strategies for setting verbs apart from other words without knowing it's a verb
In languages with conjugated verbs there is usually a similar structure across verbs that makes them easy to recognize even if you do not know the word. For example in German, all verbs after the pronoun 'Sie' end with 'en' which makes them easy to recognize. This is compounded by the fact that verbs are in second position, making the verb in a sentence very easy to pick out.

In my language verbs are not conjugated, nor do they have tense. The way the language is structured, there can be multiple verbs per sentence, and it would make the language easier to parse if verbs could be picked out easily. I also worry that similar sounding nouns will become easy to confuse with verbs as I grow my dictionary, which would be nice to avoid completely.

I considered making all verbs have a particular ending, but this quickly gets repetitive and breaks up sentence flow since the sound will be made several times in one sentence.

What strategies can I adopt to make the verbs recognizable as verbs even if the reader/listener does not already know the specific verb being used?

# Answer
> 4 votes
In Lojban, cmevla (proper nouns, like .alis.) are the only words ending in a consonant. Depending on how big your vowel inventory is, you could make all verbs end in a vowel and everything else end in a consonant. That way, they are easy to pick out and still provide much variety.

To generalize that, you could just take the last sound of a verb from any distinct group of sounds, like nasals, fricatives or labiliased consonants ("labialiseds"?). One could also use that to make word correspondences, e.g. nominalization changing the verb's final sound to the corresponding nasal.

You also mentioned position in the sentence. Having the verb in a specific position (first, last, second, etc.) is a good way to distinguish them, but depending on your language, dependent clauses could get difficult.
Of course, coupling position in sentence with a specific ending sound provides a nice way to recognize sentence borders. There, one could again use the ending sound kind to modify the verb to signify a dependent clause.

# Answer
> 4 votes
There are several options; the most obvious ones I can think of are:

* Position: In Hawai'an (and Klingon), the verb is at the initial position of the clause. If there are multiple clauses in a complex sentence, you will need to mark the clause boundaries in some way, eg through punctuation or use of specific conjunctions. So you can put anything in that place, and it will be interpreted as a verb: *'Ono* means "delicious" as an adjective, in *'Ono ka hua moa* it is used as a verb to mean "the egg is delicious". That also might solve problems when you later grow your lexicon.
* Markers: In toki pona, the verb is always in second position in a clause, and is separated from the subject (which is in first position) through the particle *li*. So the sentence *waso li lape* can be parsed as *waso* \- subject, *lape* \- verb, even if you have no clue what the words actually mean ("bird" and "to sleep" respectively) Note: the personal pronouns *mi* ans *sina* are an exception to this rule, as they are not followed by *li*. *Lape* can also be a noun ("the sleep"). Transitive verbs are separated by *e* from the object, which again helps identifying the sentence structure.
* Morphology: if you want to avoid repetitive sounds, you can nominate different verb endings (or prefixes) to either introduce variation for variation's sake, or to indicate other features (number, tense, aspect, modality, ...) While Esperanto uses a limited set of verb endings indicating (mostly) tense, it does not sound repetitive. If your verbs are not marked for grammatical features, morphology obviously is not an option.

# Answer
> 3 votes
What you want to avoid the most is to have too many rhyming words. A rhyme occurs when the last vowel and any consonants following it are the same.

You could end all verbs using the same consonant or consonant cluster. This would also give you an easy way to form verbs from nouns and nouns or adjectives from verbs: just add a suffix.

Instead of just ending all verbs with one ending, you could also have a small set of possible endings - which could carry some meaning too. Or you could simply forbid all consonant clusters in your language *except* when a word is formed by adding to a previous verb.

Example:

Say our language uses `-ct` for intransitive verbs and `-st` for verbs that imply causality - the subject causes something to the object.

The noun *vis* means **life**, the verb *visect* means **to live** and the adjective *visecti* means **alive**. By extension, *avisecti* means **dead** and *avisectist* means **to cause death**.

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Tags: vocabulary, verbs
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# Question
Title: What verbs should be irregular in a naturalistic conlang?
I've read that the most commonly used verbs in a language are almost always irregular, and for the most part the irregular forms of verbs can be traced to an archaic form being preserved in the language, or to the influence of other languages. When creating a naturalistic conlang, what verbs should be irregular? I'm already aware that 'to be' is almost always irregular, but are there any general patterns for which verbs are most often irregular in a natlang? (For example, are verbs involving movement more commonly irregular than not?)

# Answer
The more used a verb is, the more likely it is to resist evolution. So the most popular verbs are likely to be the most odd. This is common with auxiliaries.

Sometimes, irregular verbs form when two verbs becomes a single one. For example, a verb might have a polite and an informal variants which have different roots, but the informal one eventually falls out of use except for in the first person singular. Or the formal variant might become the past tense of the informal one.

I doubt this is very naturalistic, but if you're looking for inspiration to guide your choice of irregular verbs, you could also think of the activities which were more common during the evolution of the language. A conlang spoken by a prosperous society might have more irregular verbs related to possession, social interactions and art - while a conlang spoken by nomads living in a land with cataclysmic climate would have more irregular verbs about natural phenomenons and actions that everyone has to perform in order to guarantee their survival.

---

Note that verbs can have varying degrees of regularity. English has a pretty clean system, with a few boldly irregular verbs, a decent list of somewhat irregular verbs and a lot of very regular verbs.

Meanwhile, French verbs tend to be split across different groups based on their ending. There's -er, -ir, -oir and -re. Verbs within one group tend to have similar conjugations. Still, there is so much irregularity in French verbs that students often refer to verb conjugation volumes that have the full conjugation of about 100 model verbs. At the end of those volumes is a list of all French verbs with the page number of the most similar model verb.

EDIT: scrolling through the list of model verbs in a *Bescherelles* conjugation volume, those are the verbs which seem less regular to me (native French speaker):

* to be - être (also an auxiliary)
* to have - avoir (also an auxiliary)
* to go - aller (sometimes used as an auxiliary)
* to die - mourrir
* to know - savoir
* must - falloir (it's a whole verb in French)
* can - pouvoir (it's a whole verb in French)
* to have a duty \[to do something\] - devoir (mostly used as an auxiliary)
* to be of value - valoir
* to want - vouloir
* to rain - pleuvoir
* to drink - boire
* to do / to make - faire (not an auxiliary in French)
> 5 votes

# Answer
The first class of verbs that is often highly irregular are the auxiliary verbs. This does not only comprise *to be* and *to have* but also the modal auxiliaries (like *must*, *can*, *shall*, and *will*). They are used very frequently and tend to erode phonetically, and they are also prone to suppletion (showing a mixture of different stems from originally different words).

A quick check (for my native language German) seems to confirm your intuition that verbs of motion are more often irregular than average. They are also used quite frequently. In Romance languages, the basic verb for *to go* (e.g., French *aller* or Italian *andare*) is very irregular and mixing several different stems ((vulgar) Latin *ambulare/allare, vadere, ire*).

Some verbs are irregular because they rhyme with an irregular verb, e.g., German *schreiben, schrieb, geschrieben* "to write", borrowed from Latin *scribere*, became irregular because of rhyming verbs like *bleiben* "to stay".
> 8 votes

# Answer
Well, the statement is demonstrably untrue. Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) doesn't have irregular verbs, because verbs aren't conjugated. Quechua doesn't have any. And languages like Inuktitut has no irregularity in verbs because of the way that the language assembles words based on a root+affixes.
> 2 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, morphology, naturalism, verbs
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title: Finding inspiration for letter forms?

text:
# Question
Title: Finding inspiration for letter forms?
I believe I've mentioned before on here how I struggle to come up with forms for letters.

I've tried to solve this by looking at other systems. Despite the diversity in our world, I've found it surprisingly hard to find a multitude of systems to draw from.

The problem is: writing systems have different factors that can influence their design. Syllabraries tend to have more complex characters than alphabets, because they don't have to write as many of them to spell out a word. And besides, they need a wider diversity of symbols anyway. Logographic systems are no different. Also the medium makes a huge difference. The aesthetic of one script may not be too practical to replicate using a medium it wasn't intended for.

I've found this all divides up writing systems into multiple different categories based on design. This means that if you stick with a certain medium and type of writing system, you won't have much to go off of. Like, if you look at alphabets, all that really seems to be out there is Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Korean. And if you look at cursive scripts, you only really have two options: English cursive, and Arabic, which is technically an abjad. And of course if you want a logographic system, the only living logographic system (aka, the only one to see use in a world where literacy was normal writing was part of every day life) is Chinese. Beyond that, all you have to look at are long extinct logographic systems that were all made to be carved into stone. Or cuneiform, which used some rather odd tools and medium to write. How many systems do you know of that were written in clay, and were always stamped rather than drawn?

I can't come up with forms that really look overly different from the few alphabets currently in use. Worse yet, most of them are closely related to each other! It seems like every symbol possible has already been used in a writing system somewhere.

The only thing that has really helped me is I've noticed that most lower-case Latin letters are built from a limited number of shapes: a circle, loop, short line, long line, long line with a loop, and a dot. Sadly, I can't really come up with any practical letter forms that don't use these shapes. They're pretty simple and basic.

# Answer
> 6 votes
After all, there is a limited number of shapes that one can draw with reasonable effort. You can measure the effort for writing a character in a writing system by the number of strokes needed. For alphabets, there should be no more than 5 strokes, for a syllabary maybe 7 or 8.

But there are more shapes available than you may think: For a relatively recent (in terms of writing systems) invention, you can look at the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics having a distinct look from other writing systems.

The different Indic writing systems are also a good source of inspiration: While sharing a common set of characters and common principles, the letter shapes are always different in the various Indic and Indic inspired (like Thai or Khmer) scripts.

And it is still possible to invent a new and distinct writing system from scratch: Tolkien's Tengwar shows clear external influences (from Indic scripts and from Francis Lodwick's Universal Alphabet) but is clearly distinguished from both sources of inspiration.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The question basically provides the answer.

Consider the primary writing (and reading) conditions the conscript was hypothetically developed and employed in. This obviously includes the affordances and constraints of medium and tool, but contents (accounting data, prose, correspondence, legal announcements, religious scripture etc.), environment (e.g. humidity, lighting, movement) and, of course, physiology of the writers and readers also play important roles. This will not be constant over times and places, too, so you get natural iterations and bifurcations that may later remerge (like how the printed bicameral roman script is a combination of uppercase letters made mostly for stone carving and lowercase letters evolved from pen/quill writing).

This way you get the directions of writing pages, blocks, lines, words and characters. You get preferences for straight or curved, squared or circular, open or closed, flat or serifed, hanging or standing, leaning or upright, connected or separated, stacked or juxtaposed … strokes and shapes.

The frequency of use often determines the simplicity and distinctiveness of a glyph: the busiest ones tend to consist of the fewest basic shapes, often just a single one (like *o*). Naturally developing alphabetical letters (and digraphs) also have a tendency to *somehow* resemble the phonetic features of their corresponding sounds. This is true for roman lowercase letters for instance, though slightly different for other languages: while three bands (with ascender and descender) are available, vowels are restricted to the central band, sonorants are usually short as well, while fricatives and stops are longer (cf. sonority scale and length hierarchy of the syllable). Most orthographies avoid pairing big or complex characters, but often use a simple and a complex one (e.g. *ck*); or they employ complex ligation with utterly different compound glyphs. Word or syllable starts and ends may be marked stronger (or weaker), e.g. descending *y* and wider *w* as allographic variants of *i* and *u* at the end in English, which may also lead to canonically contextual, positional forms like roman long s or greek σ and a lot of letters in cursive arabic. That means the possible positions of a letter shape its glyph and the possible glyphs of a letter influence its adoption for certain positions.

In other words, the goal should not be to invent something distinctively new but to design something plausible.

# Answer
> 3 votes
In order to construct a realistic and suitable writing system, these are some things you should consider before you think about how you want it to look:

* Could your needs be served by a writing system in existence realistically? For example, if you're creating a Slavic language, you could easily use the Cyrillic or Latin scripts (cf. Russian, Czech); there's no need to design a new script.
* What do geographically or lexically similar languages use as their primary scripts? Finnish uses the Latin script as a result of Swedish influence, even though Swedish is not related to Finnish linguistically.
* How does the language intersect with the culture of the people speaking it? Although Serbian and Croatian are technically the same language, they typically use different writing systems because Serbians tend to be Orthodox (Cyrillic-associated) and Croatians tend to be Catholic (Latin-associated). Conversely, Cantonese uses the same script as Mandarin despite not being the same language due to geographical and political similarities.
* When did your language and its script split off from its ancestors, and how were they written? Despite Greek not being a Semitic language, it had a close proximity to the Phoenicians and thus borrowed their alphabet. But if your language came more recently, perhaps you should base it upon a more recent alphabet such as Greek itself, or even the Latin script (as with Lisu).
* How strict is your language phonologically, and what semantic effect does changing vowels or consonants have? Arabic uses an abjad in part because the consonants provide the actual base meaning, while vowels change various minutiae, while Japanese (in part) can use a syllabary because it's very restrictive with syllable structure. On the other hand, Georgian uses a full alphabet because it has so many consonant clusters, which can't really be expressed concisely in a syllabary or abugida.

*Then* you can consider how you want it to look. You can give something a more cursive or angular appearance while still basing it off of something relevant. This also gives it more of a unique flavor even if you're using an existing system. This is something you could do for a Phoenician-based system that doesn't look like Phoenician (crude, but you get the point):

You should additionally think about the direction in which your script is supposed to be written - letter forms can change based on that. They tend to lean right in an LTR script and vice versa, and be either thin and tall or confined to a square for a vertical script (like traditional Mongolian/Uyghur and Chinese hànzì respectively). Also, vertical scripts don't often have completely open bottoms or tops of characters like LTR scripts might.

In a fantasy world, where you're relying less on historicity and looking more for inspiration, you kind of just need to look at different scripts applying the sort of aesthetic you want, then alter them and perhaps combine them together into a whole system. If you enjoy neat and somewhat simplistic scripts with varying letter heights, you could combine inspiration from Latin and Armenian. For loopy, natural-looking scripts, take a look at Georgian and Greek. There are tons of different writing systems across the world, and I guarantee you'll find inspiration somewhere if you look.

# Answer
> 2 votes
My reply is going to look a lot sillier in comparison, but I suggest taking inspiration from the shapes of a large collection of items. I've seen conlangs use alphabets inspired by mushrooms and flowers, but you could try constellations, animals, fruits, street signs, soda brand logos, anything to get you inspired. Here's my silly attempt using emojis for example.

Once you've drawn say 50 symbols, you can start filtering out the ones that look too different or those which just wouldn't be natural to write using a pen, brush, quill or whatever your fictional society uses. Try writing words using these symbols and you'll see which ones are too tricky to write and need simplifying, and which ones are too close to tell apart.

# Answer
> 2 votes
**1. Erosion**

I like the emoji suggestion above, but I have a similar suggestion, and that's to start with simple line pictures of the things represented. In other words, follow the same kind of evolution that produced today's "Roman" alphabet. It's been known to happen that way, independently, more than twice (proto-Canaanite, Linear A, and Mayan).

Take simple little line drawings and then erode them until you have just a few manageable strokes per letter (or syllable, or whatever).

**2. Cloud, Stars, Light, and Shadow**

Another source of inspiration is to watch the clouds for useful patterns, or connect the dots of particular stars, or look at interesting light patterns filtering through curtains at night (for example), or watch the interplay of light and shadow under trees (for another example). Sometimes you'll get a GREAT and unexpected source of inspiration.

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems, inspiration
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# Question
Title: How to develop a detailed, realistic a posteriori conlang?
# Background

To begin, I’ve been conlanging ‘properly’ for around two to two and a half years now and have been into it for far, far longer. However, I have yet to create a conlang that is truly in-depth, detailed, and realistic. I soon want to begin that process. I am confident in my knowledge of linguistics and have at least a basic knowledge of most areas and a more in-depth knowledge of others (none the less, I am still an amateur of linguistics, of course).

# The current situation

At the moment, I am in the *very* early stages of planning – I’ve yet to decide on the final concept which I am going to develop. My ideas currently on the shortlist are:

* A Celtic language spoken on a (fictional) island nation off the north-western coast of Ireland with North-Germanic influence due to interactions and mixing with the Norse people throughout history.
* A Turkic language spoken in a (fictional) nation in the Southern Caucasus with influence from Georgen, especially on the phonology and vocabulary side.
* A Uralic language spoken in Eastern Finland and the Karelia/Murmansk regions with Slavic influence.

Of these ideas, I am currently most drawn towards the first bullet-point, however, choosing the scenario of the conlang is not the crux of the issue. That is the issue of creating an in-depth *and* realistic, believable a posteriori conlang. I want to create a language that has detailed and believable phonology and grammar.

# My questions to you

1. What is your advice on creating a good a posteriori conlang in general?
2. How do I effectively develop a conlang with as much detail and depth as possible?

Thank you very much for any help or guidance.

# Answer
So, you are going to create an altlang (a naturalistic language living in an alternate history of the the world). First, define your starting point (easiest for the first scenario: Old Irish or proto-Goidelic is a suitable starting point for this one). Look at the real world descendants from that starting points (Middle Irish and Modern Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelish) and what changes happened to them. You can create variation by retaining some archaic features, applying changes from different descendants, or applying changes in different temporal order to create a new artificial Goidelic language. You may also throw in some original changes not occurring in the known Goidelic languages. Keep a timeline of those changes—the changes will apply to loan words as well!

Than decide on the influence of the other language: Are there only borrowings of words, shall it influence syntax (e.g., the order of noun and genitive or noun and adjective, shall the basic word order change?), are there new phonemes added to the phonology?

Decide, when the influence happens, does it happen only once, are there several waves of influence. Note that the other language changes over time, too. Your conlang may preserve archaic words from the donor language that have fallen out of use or have undergone sound shifts there.

Put everything together and enjoy the result!
> 7 votes

# Answer
Have you looked at Brithenig or Wenedyk? These were generated by applying to Latin the sound shifts that affected Welsh and Polish (respectively) over the same period. You could start with early Irish and apply Scandinavian sound changes.

Of course there would also be lexical and syntactic borrowings; those are less systematic by nature, and so can be governed more by your taste. Do you know the concept of *Sprachbund*?

On another hand, aren't there natlangs with at least some of the features you want? Scandinavians ruled parts of Ireland; Russia rules over some Uralic peoples; there are Turkic languages adjacent to Georgia — I would expect some influence.
> 5 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, diachronics, naturalism, inspiration, natural-languages
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# Question
Title: Conlangs based on Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?
Have there been any attempts to create a language based on Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?

Of course PIE has had an effect on other languages, and through them ended up in many a posteriori conlangs as well. What I mean is whether there have been any attempts to create a usable language based on what we know of PIE and filling in the blanks with conlangery.

# Answer
Academia Prisca published Modern Indo-European as a revival of a late stage of the Indo-European language (Northwest Indo-European, billed as the ancestor of Italo-Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic). Resources published for learning include a grammar, syntax, conjugator, vocabulary, lessons and texts. Since it is meant as a modern revival, it introduces neologisms (such as *read* and *write*), but as far as I can tell, the entire lexicon is derived from cognate languages.
> 10 votes

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Tags: history, natural-languages
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# Question
Title: Would these features be naturalistic in this scenario?
# Background

I am planning a naturalistic Goidelic language which shall have quite an influence from Old Norse – probably at least 1/4 or 1/3 of the vocabulary to be of North Germanic origin, as well as a mostly undecided, but lesser influence on the phonology and grammar. Despite the North Germanic influence, I would still like to retain a ‘broad-slender’ vowel system, lenition, eclipsis, and (possibly) prothesis.

Also, although I intend for the Old Norse influence to be less focused on grammar, I came up with the idea of, instead of deriving from the Old Irish definite article *in* and having it work similarly to the other Goidelic languages, I could derive from the Old Norse clitic article *-inn* and instead use this style of clitic article.

# Questions

1. Would the retention of broad-slender vowels and consonant mutations be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?
2. Would the replacement of the Goidelic definite article with an Old Norse-style clitic definite article be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?
    * As an extension to this question – would it be realistic to retain the different Old Norse articles for the different genders (*-inn* for masculine nom., *-in* for feminine nom., and *-it* for neuter nom.) as well as the different cases (for example, *-innar* for feminine genitive singular) or to just keep one or two articles (such as to just derive from *-inn* for all the definite articles in my language), regardless of the gender or case?

Thank you in advance.

# Answer
Yes, the whole thing looks naturalistic.

ad 1) When you assimilate the Old Norse words to a Goidelic phonetic system, lenitions and broad/slender distinctions come in very naturally. It will be more difficult when you insist on some Old Norse sounds sticking out of the Goidelic system; they can form exceptions to the lenition rules or evolve specific lenitions of their own.

ad 2) Retaining the Old Norse suffixed article is definitely an option, and simplifying it to only one form (independent of gender, case, and number) looks most natuaral to me, but keeping the inflected forms is also covered by your artistic license as a conlang author. Or you may inflect the definite forms according to Goidelic inflectional rules.
> 2 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, phonology, naturalism
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# Question
Title: Are there constructed languages with a tense system inspired by Theory of Relativity?
For readers who aren't familiar with the Theory of Relativity, here is a sketch of how the Special Theory of Relativity structures space and time:

* There is a point "here and now" where the observer is located
* There is an "absolute past" meaning the region of space and time wherefrom light signals can reach the point "here and now". This region is also termed *backward light-cone*
* There is an "absolute future" meaning the region of space and time whereto the observer can send light signals. This region is also called *foreward light-cone*
* There is a "disconnected" region that can neither be reached by light signals nor send light signals to the observer.

While present, past, and future are commonly found in natlangs and conlangs of all flavours, the disconnected region is a new feature brought in by the Special Theory of Relativity. Are there conlangs with a tempus system including such a region?

EDIT: In real life, the disconnected region is not determined by the speed of light but by the availability of direct communication channels. Thus a sentence like *My husband is in his working office now* is about the disconnected region (assume no smart phone stalking to verify the sentence).

# Answer
I think you are looking for the constructed language called Lojban

According to an earlier reference to its grammar,

> Technical note for readers conversant with relativity theory: The Lojban time tenses reflect time as seen by the speaker, who is assumed to be a \`\`point-like observer'' in the relativistic sense: they do not say anything about physical relationships of relativistic interval, still less about implicit causality. The nature of tense is not only subjective but also observer-based.

Here is a specific reference to its use of a "relativistic tense"

> There's been a proposal to have words expressing relativistic tenses that are different \> from usual past, current and future used in most historical natural languages.
>
> How this 4th tense would work? Consider we are 3 light years away from a star that explodes. And in 3 years we see the explosion. So what? How do we use this 4th tense?
>
> It would be a tag with a modifier ue'ei.
>
> ue'ei = \[MOhI\] 4th relativistic tense modifier

There's also an interesting set of charts describing in detail the use of relativity theory in Lojban on the current lojban language site.

Lastly, in the Lojban Reference Grammar site, there is this little intriguing tidbit on Lojban tense usage.

> In Lojban, the concept of tense extends to every selbri, not merely the verb-like ones. In addition, tense structures provide information about location in space as well as in time. All tense information is optional in Lojban
> 3 votes

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Tags: list-of-languages, inspiration, unnatural-features, tense-aspect-mood
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# Question
Title: Are Interslavic and Neoslavonic the same conlang?
I read that Interslavic and Neoslavonic merged into a single language.

> All three projects collaborated closely with each other from that time, and in 2011 Medžuslovjanski („Interslavic”) was chosen as a common name. Fruits of this cooperation were, among other things, a common dictionary, a common news portal and a common wiki.

I wonder why there are two websites:

Is there any difference in the grammar? If so, which one is the most popular?

# Answer
Depends on how you look at it; the Interslavic page does say (as you have noticed) that:

> All three projects collaborated closely with each other from that time, and in 2011 Medžuslovjanski („Interslavic”) was chosen as a common name. Fruits of this cooperation were, among other things, a common dictionary, a common news portal and a common wiki.

-- *History of Interslavic*

Thus, historically speaking, they are two different projects (plus a third one) that have coalesced into one, and are now one project with some internal variation. The websites are continuations of their individual parent projects, as each team retained its independence from the new fused project.
> 7 votes

# Answer
A few years ago (about 2) these two projects united into the single one called Interslavic (2-nd version). So, since then it's a common project with unified grammar.

Before it they were slightly different.
> 6 votes

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Tags: slavic, zonal-languages
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# Question
Title: Language with nominal TAM and no verbs: Ergative or tripartite?
I'm working on a language with **nominal tense–aspect–mood** (TAM), i.e. inflecting nouns instead of verbs. So, a sentence like "the woman sees the man", could be roughly translated to something like "the woman**s** see the man".

This type of sentence shows an ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment: the subject of a transitive sentence is marked (ergative case), while the direct object is unmarked (absolutive case).

I also like the idea of **removing verbs as a class (since tense, aspect and mood can be expressed by the subject**) and "reclassify" those words as nouns. So "the woman**s** see the man" could actually mean something like "the woman *makes sight of* the man", in the sense of "making eye contact". In other words, having **ungrammaticalized verbs**.

Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the woman**s** sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

So my question is: **does the language need a marking for the direct object** (accusative case), having then a tripartite alignment? Or can I simply get away with **only TAM marking** (absolutive case) and **no markings for verbs or direct objects**?

I have the feeling that I'm forgetting something. I think that the idea of "not having verbs" makes sense to me, since many languages like English, French or Spanish actually lack of inflections and employ only word order, but I might be wrong.

What do you think? Thanks!

# Answer
> 2 votes
In your example:

> Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

...sight is a verb.

In order to have a verbless phrase, you'd want something like "the man within the woman's sight", making it clear you're using the noun "sight" and not the verb "sight".

However, and I've seen this pointed out, if you end up needing particular constructions in order to indicate actions, all you're doing is making an overly complicated verb.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Maybe you're using nouns as instrumentals... so can you have noun cases, i.e. an instrumental case to distinguish whether a noun is the Object versus the Instrument?

And, I'm not sure that that necessarily makes the Instrumental Noun just a complicated verb.

`Woman-SUBJ+TAM Man-OBJ Eye-INST`

`"Woman's (focus?) [is] on the Man via (her) Eye".`

With a fixed word order, no case markings are needed.

Or TAM could potentially mark the subject. Instrumentals could be chained after the object, making them feel just a bit like adjectives or adverbs or something.

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, morphology, tense-aspect-mood, syntax
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# Question
Title: Good cultures to base a robotic language off of
I've created a race of nomadic robots, but am having trouble finding a culture to base their language off of. They're peripatetic nomads, meaning they travel around offering goods and services to any friendly people they come across, but most nomadic peoples of this style either use the languages of their country, or the language is too fluid and natural to be suited for machines.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Humans in such kind of situation devolop a Pidgin specifically for trade. It is arguably easy not only for humans but also for robots: no complicated ingredients in syntax nor morphology, and also usually a simple phonology.

# Answer
> 2 votes
How about Polynesian languages? The people travelled far distances, their culture was very spread out, and they don't really have a country that 'owns' the language.

A further positive aspect is that you can pick up basic Hawai'ian on Duolingo; this quickly gives you a feel for the language. It's VSO, so sounds unusual enough to Western cultures who are more used to SVO. It would also be very plausible for machines who might process knowledge in predicate calculus (as in `eats(cow, grass)`).

The vocabulary has a strong English influence, due to the colonialisation by the Americans, who made teaching the language illegal, but you will probably adapt that anyway to choose your own words.

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Tags: cultural-influence, machine-communication
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# Question
Title: Does The Syntax Construction Kit cover any new material that isn't in the other conlanging books I've read?
I've got most of Mark Rosenfelder's books on conlanging except *The Syntax Construction Kit* (which I'm not sure I need).

The conlang I'm currently working on is a 'holy musical magic language' called Fae Spraesh which is developing differently than my other projects - it's Tolkienesque, while my other (mostly undeveloped) conlangs are mostly fictional blends of particular real-world languages and thus not Tolkienesque at all. I have no plans to study university linguistics, and I'm not looking to develop a Fae Spraesh writing system at this time.

Does *The Syntax Construction Kit* cover any new material that might be useful to my conlanging, or do Mark Rosenfelder's other books (*Language Construction Kit*, *Advanced Language Construction Kit* and *The Conlanger's Lexipedia*) and David J. Peterson‘s *The Art of Language Invention* suffice?

# Answer
I will attempt to answer this question, despite not having read the book, so please take my advice with caution.

Looking at the website of the book, zompist.com/syntax.html, you can see an outline of the contents. Rosenfelder describes the book as "a tour of modern syntax".

Being a linguist myself, it looks like the book I'd loved to have had while at university. It covers (English) syntactic theory in a way that looks interesting and not simply dry and theoretical -- he supplements the book by a set of interactive tools to develop your own grammars based on the theoretical ideas of Chomsky and others. He does follow a particular strand of syntactic theory, which is mainly common in the US, not so much in the UK, but he also covers some alternatives to the Chomskyan approach. Rosenfelder's own view of Chomsky is nuanced and somewhat sceptical: he has an essay on this on his website (which I wholeheartedly agree with). Note, however, that this is about English, and these formalisms have been developed by linguists working mostly with English, so if your conlang is very different, they might not easily apply to it.

Apart from Chomskyan Generative Grammar, he also talks about Markov text generators, which would be useful to generate (random) texts in a given language. This might be a useful tool to practically explore your conlang: generate some text, and try to translate it. Several other tools are also aimed at generating sentences, rather than just analysing them. The meaning is often a bit random (as it is not really controlled), but at least the grammar will be correct.

So this is basically a syntax textbook, which will introduce you to syntactic theories while playing around with the formalisms and actively doing syntax (which to me is the best way of learning about them!) If you are interested in grammar, and the formal properties of different types of grammars, this looks like an ideal book. In fact, I have put it on my wishlist with a well-known on-line book retailer.

However, if all you want to do is build a smallish conlang, which might not even have a very complicated grammar, then this book looks like overkill to me. On the site he mentions that there is "a chapter on how you can apply all this to your conlangs". So conlangs are not really the focus of the book, but more a possible application of the described syntactic apparatus to invented languages. I would assume -- from the description on the webpage -- that this is a fairly advanced book, which is great for linguistics students and for serious conlangers who want to make use of sophisticated formalisms when describing their languages. In that sense it will not cover too much of the same ground as his more 'applied'/'practical' books about language creation. If the previous books have kindled an interest in linguistics, though, and you want to know more about approaches to syntactic description, then this might be the book for you.
> 2 votes

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Tags: resource-request, tools
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