# Question
Title: How did people learn how to make conlangs?
All I can find are guides on how to make auxlangs and artlangs. I don't want to make either, I want a personal language. I don't care if my language could pass for a real one. I don't care about etymology. What matters for me is if its usable and learnable, that's it. The ease of learning question isn't really relevant.

There are no guides for that. Every guide basically says 'people find this hard to use, so don't use it' or 'make a conlang, then mangle it through sound change, then mangle that through another system of sound change'.

Clearly, if I'm going to do this, I need to just learn on my own how to do it. How did these fields develop? Could one person like me even develop a well-developed field within my lifetime? The two major types of conlangs THAT EVERY ON INSISTS YOU MAKE have histories going back over half a century in the case of artlangs, and over a century in the case of auxlangs.

Since I can only find auxlang and artlang guides, I need to make my own. So how did these fields evolve? How did Zamenhof manage to make a conlang that's clearly usable despite only one widely panned auxlang existing before it? Was the original Esperanto even that usable? Did people just change it into something usable as time went on? Or did he just model it off of natural languages close enough where it just happened to be usable?

As for what mattes to me, being usable is one as I stated. The biggest thing that matter to me is simple practicality. However, nobody ever EVERY says anything about the ramifications of a conlang have any feature. What happens if a language lacks aspect? Can you even tell a narrative in a fully aspect-less language? Yeah, there's standard German, but even there you can find hints of it. It does make the distinction between 'when' and while', and there ARE ways to indicate imperfective though they're all considered colloquial. Is there any language on earth that completely lacks aspect? I've asked this many times and have never gotten an answer. Can such a language then actually exist? Would it be usable if you made a conlang like that? Nobody can give me the answer, and so I have to come up with my own. And its not just this; I constantly come up with stuff that simply does not work. I've tried to look at natural languages, but then everyone starts pointing me to artlang guides ASSUMING THAT'S THE ONLY REASON I WOULD BE LOOKING UP A NATURAL LANGUAGE.

Also, I care about the final product. I don't want to 'evolve' a language; I want the end product to be EXACTLY according to my vision. I don't need to start at the 'start' like artlang guides tell you do; I need to start at the opposite end! Of course, it doesn't really matter if it couldn't have evolved naturally, but it still doesn't help when every single guide says 'evolve it naturally, do everything fucking backwards and end up with a hideous mess that you would never want to learn yourself'.

I need to develop my own field if I hope to get anywhere. How can I do this though? I've learned pretty much everything there is to know about making artlangs, and it hasn't helped me in the slightest. Funny thing is, I CAN make artlangs no problem. The evidence is clear, I've been reading the wrong guides for over 10 years (probably more like 15 at this point). I need a personal conlang guide, and its obvious that I'm going to have to make my own if I ever hope to get anywhere.

# Answer
I cannot speak for everyone else, but I can share my experience thus far. Hopefully this can be of some value to you.

When I started conlanging, I did the grammatical and phonological research to learn what I was dealing with. Then I attempted my own conlangs according to the structure suggested by guides like Biblardion's How to Make a Language series. But each one of my conlangs died shortly after starting. Frustrated with many months of lost time, I sought out tools to help me organise and structure my conlang. But to my dismay, few were available, and they were mildly helpful at best.

So. I set out to create my own tool, Der Spracherfinder, a generalised conlanging spreadsheet program with templates to aid a conlanger along his or her journey. Potentially interesting to you is the lack of any sort of evolution page. **Not everyone wants to create a half century or more of fictional history** to justify their phonological and morphological decisions, so I omitted such a page. **Besides, who's gonna read and critique that history anyway?** It's not like we're trying to pass some sort of conlang exam! What Der Spracherfinder does encourage, however, is sketching out grammar, syllable structure(s), and phonology so that you can get to the juicy part: the lexicon!

In so making Der Spracherfinder, I came upon my own goal-focused strategy for conlanging:

1. Grammar first; regardless of phonology, this is the brain of the language. Here we decide all the really fun morphological features that we want. We can sprinkle in culture too! We then can sketch grammar by morphing English sentences into the conlang's syntax and adding morphology placeholders where appropriate.
2. Syllable structure second; using our grammar, we can get a sense of how complex our syllables should be. A morphologically dense language may, for example, opt for smaller syllables. Also in this stage, determine the stress pattern. These two be crucial for wordcraft later.
3. Third comes phonology. By now, you may have thought of all your desired phonemes. Whatever the case, choose phonemes now and stay consistent. Avoid doing what I did, which was changing the phonology constantly to get a sense of progress.
4. It's lexicon time!! With the grammar, syllable structure, stress system, and phonology decided, all that remains is filling in those morphology placeholders and replacing the English words with conwords or conphrases!!
5. Refine and iterate as desired. Excellence won't come first try.

In your question, you seem rather anxious to get straight to the goal. Use this determination to your advantage. **Lay out your vision on paper then create a plan of execution.** Be very specific in what you want your conlang to have and do. Make sure your goal is attainable, and allow yourself wiggle room. **Above all, enjoy the process.** And be mindful that your ambitions will almost always be ahead of your skill (which is why we experience creative block). Ira Glass gives some great advice for creative work in this video. Give it a listen. **I would also advise asking yourself, "What is holding me back?"**

As for guides to making a personal conlang, I do not know of any. Sorry, man. However, you could pioneer your own solution and share it with the world someday! Good luck to you! May your vision come to fruition!
> 3 votes

# Answer
Learning other languages (natural and/or constructed ones) helps a lot. Johann Martin Schleyer, the inventor of Volapük, was a renowned polyglot, Zamenhof, inventor of Esperanto, spoke a bunch of European languages and Hebrew, and also Tolkien, famous for his artlangs, knew a lot of languages including Welsh and Finnish.

I cannot give a general recommendation of what languages to learn at least to some degree because this depends on your personal preferences. When you are fascinated by far eastern culture, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai are natural choices; when North Africa is on your mind try Arabic, Berber, Ancient Egyptian or Koptic.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit is what we used waaaaaaay back in the Web 1.0 days.

https://zompist.com/kit.html

It's technical and thorough and helpful, thinks I.
> 1 votes

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Tags: history
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# Question
Title: Are there things that commonly end sentences other than verbs?
I'm copy-pasting this from the linguistics board because someone recommended that and I'm not getting any replies there. I'm not expecting much given the luck I've been having on here, but w/e.

I've taken a liking to verb-final word order. It helps with parsing since the ending of every clause is marked by an inflected verb. However, I normally prefer head-first languages. This got me thinking; are there things that languages often use to end a sentence other than verbs? The conlang Laadan using evidentiality markers, but of course that's a conlang that's known for breaking some linguistic universals (such as completely lacking voiceless plosives among other things).

Point is, is it really necessary to have a verb-final order to get the parsing advantages that come with such an order? Even a verb-initial order doesn't work, because that would require you to place relative clauses before nouns (a feature seen in no VO language) and place a relativizer at the end of the clause, a feature I also can't find any evidence for.

Is a verb-final word order the only way languages can consistently mark the end of clauses using words?

edit: The reason I'm looking into this is so my orthography can get away without punctuation. It would be simpler yes to just use punctuation, but its my conlang and I would like to know if there's another way to do this.

# Answer
You could put what syntacticians call a T at the end of your clauses instead of a V. What this looks like varies by language but you could use it as a general-purpose end-of-clause marking.

Some languages have obligatory start-of-clause markers, like Hittite. That accomplishes something pretty similar to an end-of-clause marker.
> 0 votes

# Answer
If you are specifically looking for end-of-sentence marking, then some Slovak dialects overuse the particle "či" as an interrogative sentence ending (kind of reverse of the Polish sentence-initial "czy").

But if sentence-initial is enough, then the Eastern Slovak uses "ta" as a start-of-sentence particle, to such an extent that the speakers are stereotypically ridiculed for it. This is however far from universal.

Turning away from the spoken language to the written one (as a separate linguistic system), of course there is such thing - a punctuation mark, usually one of . ? ! This shows nicely in some dependency trees, where the punctuation is in fact the root of the tree.
> 0 votes

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Tags: word-order
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# Question
Title: Can the suffixes of an agglutinative language include morphemes which are also part of the base verb/noun word forms?
One thing that makes it hard to imagine how agglutinative languages could work is how they can handle when the suffix is also included in the base verb/noun word forms.

So say we are translating "I went to the store" to an agglutinative language. According to ChatGPT, we have:

* **Turkish**: "Mağazaya yürüdüm."
    + "Mağazaya" means "to the store." mağaza is "store".
    + "Yürüdüm" means "I walked." yürümek is "to walk", so it appears "yuru" is the base.
* **Finnish**: "Kävelin kauppaan."
    + "Kävelin" is the first person past tense form of "kävellä," which means "to walk."
    + "Kauppaan" means "to the store."

So say that instead of mağazaya, where ya indicates "to", that "to" was "za", then we would have "mağazaza". But then say we had a word "mağa", which means "tree", and then we say "to the tree", we say "mağaza". But that means store.... *How do you deal with this situation*?

It seems to me you would have to build an optimization function to take every affix in your lexicon, and every root or base noun or verb, and figure out how everything relates to everything else. An enormous undertaking, an optimization / fine-tuning function so to speak.

But how can you solve this without having to do that brute force sort of approach?

I start by creating suffixes:

* da, ma, pa, pi, mi, si, do, mo, vo, and 30+ more

And then I create root verbs.

* dara, dada, dapa, disi, etc..

Now I combine them.

* darada, dadada, dapapa, dadapa, disisi....

Now, given I don't limit my verbs to just 2 syllables, I might have also these roots:

* darada, dadada....

Well I can't have those as roots, because it will conflict with the dara+da and dada+da I already have!

I don't see a way to solve this problem, so you don't run into this ambiguity. Can you please shed some light on how to look at this problem, and potentially how to solve it when creating an agglutinative language? Thank you.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Well, some ambiguity is unavoidable. This is specifically *morphological ambiguity*, where there are two or more distinct ways of breaking a word down into pieces. The famous example in English is "unlockable", which could either be parsed as (unlock)-able, able to be unlocked, or un-(lockable), unable to be locked.

In English, and other languages in general, people just live with it. If some particular ambiguity gets bad enough to become a problem, one or more of those words will fall out of use and get replaced by others. But language is a system that can handle quite a lot of ambiguity without breaking down.

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Tags: morphology, agglutination, affixes
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# Question
Title: Is this lojban sentence grammatically correct?
Is "ta se klama" grammatically correct? Could I say "That is gone to" in lojban, without adding a zo'e to my sentence? Or would it have to be "That is gone to by something"?

# Answer
zo'e in Lojban is always implied when any place of a selbri isn't filled. You can use zo'e when you want to explicitly note that there is a "something", but it's not necessary.

So, ta se klama is grammatically correct, and would mean "That is gone to", as you said, or equivalently "Someone/something has gone there".
> 1 votes

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Tags: grammar, lojban
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# Question
Title: For writing a grammar, benefit of linguistic vs "readable" terminology
I am writing a grammar for my conlang. I imagine finishing it and hiring a grad student or somebody to read it for comments, but otherwise, realistically, it probably has no other audience than myself so this question admittedly doesn't matter. Still, I am interested to consider what advantages or disadvantages community members consider. Thank you for your time.

In many places, I use linguistic terms like 'nominative.' Sometimes I don't find such terms for my concept, or I find a closely related term but think it would mislead, in which case I might derive a "readable" alternative: the alwaysative and neverative verb aspects, say.

**Writing a grammar, would you err toward consistency either with linguistic or with "readable" terminology? Why?**

# Answer
This isn't actually a problem unique to conlanging. Linguists working with natural languages run into this all the time too! Fundamentally, the goal of your terminology—whatever you end up using—should be to give the audience a clear understanding of what you're talking about.

If your cases happen to work very similarly to certain cases in Latin, then using the traditional Latin names might serve this purpose. It means people who already speak Latin (or Greek or German or…) don't need to learn a new name for "this is the case for the subject of a verb". When that happens, using a term like "nominative" can be helpful. There are a whole lot of languages in the world that have a "nominative" case, so most linguists are familiar with it.

However, most cases *don't* work quite like certain cases in Latin. When this happens, you have to decide if it's worth using a name that's close enough, even if it's a bit misleading, or if it's worth creating a new name that your audience needs to learn. Which way this tradeoff swings tends to depend on how close your thing is to the traditional meaning, and how common the established terminology is. (A lot more people know "dative" than "adessive".)

Personally, I would err on the side of using more accurate names for things, even if you need to create new terms for it. When two languages both have a "dative" case because it's used for the recipient of giving, even though in one language it's fundamentally a case about *beneficiaries* and in the other language it's fundamentally a case about *circumstances*, the standardized name is actively hindering readers' understanding. Calling them the benefactive and circumstantial cases could avoid that.
> 2 votes

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Tags: grammar, terminology
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# Question
Title: Breaking out of the 'derive everything' trap?
Conlang guides often recommend you derive words wherever you can, only generating new roots when no form of compounding can work.

Problem is, as the 'natural meta language' demonstrates, most words can be 'derived' from just a few dozen words. When I try to think of derivations, I keep falling into an endless train of deriving whole chains of words. Even if that doesn't happen though, I still find I keep deriving words too much, creating a conlang that's more repetitive than even Esperanto.

English maybe gives me the wrong instincts, since it relies more on borrowing loanwords from other languages that coining its own. However, even in German, which relies far more on internal derivation, somehow its not nearly as bad as conlangs tend to be.

Another problem is I find that deriving words through morphology results in ultra long words (the same problem that Volapük suffers from).

What I think I need is some more esoteric derivational morphology that keeps things from getting too repetitive. Being able to shorten compounds would also help to avoid the overly long word problem. Or maybe I should just rely more on a random word generator and not care so much about the forms of my words. I know that tends to generate bad results, like common words being too long, no coherent sound symbolism of any sort, or sometimes too many words due to the user preferring to use the program over coining their own words. Still, I think it may be the best way to avoid making yet another oligosynthic language essentially.

Is there any better way to deal with this problem?

# Answer
Well, concatenation isn't the way words get derived is it? That leaves semantic shift out of the equation, for instance - instead of just "X could turn into Y if only given more morphemes", it could also be true that "X could turn into Y if only given enough time", or that "X could turn into Y if only given enough metaphorical extension".

If you can't get out of the headspace of simply deriving everything, try forcing yourself to not use derivational morphology or compounding, and ask yourself how you can reuse an existing root *as-is* instead of always needing to pile more affixes on top.

I mean, the real, sustainable long-term answer is to get comfortable with not deriving everything. This advice to only coin new roots when no form of compounding will work - I've heard it too, and it's bullshit. There's a grain of truth\* to it, but it's so poorly articulated that it causes far more harm to beginning conlangers than it averts. I have seen one derive a word for "farmer" as "one-who-causes-to-become-large". You know how actual, real languages, like English, derive it? As "farm-er". "farm" is just a root in and of itself. *Could* it theoretically be broken down further? Sure. But "it *could* be broken down further" does not imply "it *must* be broken down further", which you can tell because English demonstrably *doesn't* break it down further.

\*The grain of truth is that these roots are often, in turn, derivatives of earlier forms, even earlier compounds, that simply got reduced so much by sound change or diverged so much in semantic drift, that they got reanalyzed as a new thing in and of themselves. "lord" \< *hlafweard* "loaf-ward; keeper of the bread", evolving into a new root that in turn gets used in compounds like "lordship" or "edgelord", is one of my favorite examples. So it is, sort of, broadly true that it's derivation all the way down. Natural languages though spread this derivation out in *time* and *semantic space*. It's certainly not necessary for everything to be transparently derived *synchronically*.

I don't know if this analogy will help you, but - when studying a foreign language, you're typically taught to translate the *meaning* of a sentence, not the *words* of a sentence. Well, what if that meaning is encapsulated in a single word? If there's a single word that maps to that idea, then fixating on how, instead, you could break that idea into component parts is - mistranslating? It's perfectly fine to have single words for concepts that English does not have a single word for; just because English circumlocutes, doesn't mean you have to. One of my languages has a single devoted word for "to have one's heart beat" (*lak’salos*). This derives straightforwardly - with some verbalizing morphology but no compounding - from a proto-root **læqʃ-* meaning "heart" (nothing about "beating", actually), that yields a verb for "to encourage; to hearten; to rally troops wavering or in retreat back to line of battle; to dispel fear or angst" (*lax̌šʷanla*) in another descendant of the same proto. Notice how I'm giving multiple possible English meanings - that's because the word (*lax̌šʷanla*) fundamentally maps to a *concept*, an image I have in my head. It's a concept that could be decomposed into component parts multiple different ways, but the thing I'm trying to translate isn't the *component parts of the concept*, but *the concept itself*. Another one my languages has not just a single word, but a single *monosyllablic* word (*ki*) for "the divine right to rule".

> Or maybe I should just rely more on a random word generator and not care so much about the forms of my words. I know that tends to generate bad results, like common words being too long, no coherent sound symbolism of any sort, or sometimes too many words due to the user preferring to use the program over coining their own words.

These problems all strike me as... very self-imposed? *I* use a word generator when coining new words (originally Awkwords, now a word generator of my own creation), and nothing compels me to use the first word it spits out. Quite from it - I'll have it generate *hundreds* of words at a time and ones I like, I'll copy and paste in a "word bank" - an Excel file of words that have pre-vetted for sounding good. Then when I need to coin a new word, I'll peruse the word bank for inspiration, for which one has the right, ineffable *vibe* for the meaning I'm looking for. I can get *quite* picky about which words I'll accept from the generator - for every 100 words generated at a time, usually 1-2, *maybe* 3, end up in the word bank. (It's trivial to generate another 100, after all - I just click "Generate" again. The words are not exactly in short supply.) Even then some of the words in the bank just sit there never getting used, because it never ends up feeling like they have the matching "vibe", and I'll just go and generate thousands more words instead.

So the suggestion to me that random word generators confined you to words that are too long or not having the right symbolism, sounds nonsensical to me, when I am exercising discretion at every step. Ultimately *I'm* the one choosing the words - arguably I'm way *too* choosy, but at any rate, nothing about the use of a word generator is somehow forcing my hand into using words I don't want to use.
> 2 votes

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Tags: morphology
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# Question
Title: Should non-sibilant fricatives be treated like plosives or fricatives?
I don't like ending my words with plosives, because my native language tends to not audibly pronounce them. I prefer to stick to fricatives and nasals for codas. However, I'm unsure where non-sibilant fricatives should go. Do they undergo de-voicing in codas like plosives do? I've seen auxlang guides recommend to keep coda consonants limited to fricatives, nasals, and 'liquids', but such guides normally don't recommend you use rare phones like non-sibilant fricatives. Maybe I should just play it safe and treat them like plosives, keeping them limited to onsets?

# Answer
Why do people post comments for rather than answers? This has been answered and I don't see much that can be added to it.

The answer is I've been accidentally pronouncing my non-sibilant fricatives as affricates, thus my confusion over whether they're more akin to plosives or fricatives. Either I need to just treat them like affricates, or learn the proper fricatives. That's my answer.
> 0 votes

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Tags: phonology
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# Question
Title: How do I naturalistically merge two languages without a clear Substrate and Superstrate?
For my latest worldbuilding project, I'm trying to create a naturalistic language for a fictional empire I've been creating. This empire was born at the end of the Bronze Age when various kingdoms and city-states voluntarily united to defend against the growing power of a thalassocracy.

Though the story of the people who speak this language is more or less ironed out, I can't figure out how to proceed when devising a language for this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and *not very centralised* empire.

Though the languages spoken within the empire would all be related sister-languages derived from the same Proto-Lang, I don't know how to determine whether one of these languages becomes more "prestigious" while the others remain as just dialects.

Do I just pick the language with the most speakers? Do I just pick the language that the Emperor speaks, even if the rest of the (very powerful) nobility might speak another language entirely? Do I unite the languages in a single `koinè`? If so, how?

# Answer
In fact, there are a lot of possibilities, and many of them are attested in the history of natural languages.

1. Majority language wins. This happened in China at least twice, it was conquered and ruled by foreign people (Mongolians, Manchu), but the ruling class became sinicized. It also happened in medieval France and Spain - they were conquered and ruled be Germanic tribes (Franks and Burgundians for France, Vandals and Goths for Spain), but the majority language of the residents won out.
2. Most prestigious language wins. This happened in antiquity in the Roman empire, and we see it in many post-colonial states in Africa. There are some prerequisites for that, such as a working educational system helping that.
3. Pidgins and Creoles emerge, and a Creole wins. This can be watched in Papua New Guinea, where Creole languages like Police Motu and Tok Pisin are becoming the *de facto* standard of communication.
4. Something else happens. The case of English is not as clear as my points 1 through 3 suggest: While the majority language finally won, it was heavily impacted and changed by the languages of the conquerors (Normans and Danes).
5. Stable multi-linguality. Quite rare in the wild, but Switzerland with a coexistence of Swiss German, French, and Italian is an example. The fourth language of Switzerland, Romansh, is under pressure, despite attempts of language preservation.
6. Mixed language. This is very rare in the wild, but there are a few mixed languages out there, like Michif \- in this language the verb phrases come from Cree and the noun phrases come from French, forming a stable mixed language.
> 8 votes

# Answer
because, i try to learn chinese, which is for me, cantonese dialect i have difference between, learning words and learning language, i can say that details can be, really important

like, in vietnamese you have, xin loi, or you have specific, anh / chi, for saying mr or, mrs, and therefore you have, whole expression 'excuse me mister', xin loi anh

which, in cantonese sounds, very much alike tsing man, or qing wan, in chinese simplified, but its formal

because, i read about Angkor in cambodia and you see, that names of cities in cambodia was, completely random, so you have Chena, or other and it means not more than typical , situation which was calling some hill, 'hill number 232', and this is quite alot names in cambodia, so you cant put any importance to names when, learning asian language, and best suggestion is to make list of words from dictionary, to later try to abreviate to them, because to learn to say something is completely something else

for example, story from classical CW Ceran book, when scientist had list of 1051 words, from some old african ancient empire, and even emperor of france promised to him to, publish this words and allow people in morocco and tunisia learn, when actually this words from stone of rosetta, was maybe his own invention

so, you see that examples teach about, what is proficiency and unless , you want to be example of free interpretation, you should work in points, not in line because words have separate meaning, but phrases which mean something are, mostly very small things, like comments, or thoughts that only in small amount can describe something

books can, be example of really big , problems that somebody described in hope to, find some answers, but very often the truth is otherwise than assumed by author, and reading about cleopatra egypt, and some person name achilles can, bring to thought some conclusion that, this is just unreal and, you cant belive that this country existed , without war which doesnt really appear , and this is one of points, that you must consider opposite story , and the story can be really silly

for, example who will guarantee, that hannibal didnt, burn egipt 3 times, and exactly where did he, take elephants from ? or, exactly if there was empire in Angkor, from east to india and even bigger, you have 2 theories already, first that if there was food distribution, if synaj, named Myanmar, was cut off from food transport, then myanmar would die as, country and this question about, empire and economy

or, that where today is, pakistan previously was Bengal, and otherwise then where exactly was india back then ? or, how this happened that this countries changed in places ? because, this is political issue about, past that something was located somewhere else, and only today you think that all was the same

but, unless this is historical question , you see that language doesnt explain what happened, and people expect to learn everything in one, because they think this is obvious , but usually everything in life seems to be, some joke and unless you dont want to become, object of laughter as legendary hero who , found the truth but didnt noticed that, this truth is a bit useless , you should plan your learning, and this is only time, that can help to find way, because its like jungle of problems and, even ancients didnt thought somebody can answer all questions

you have, example of Jingwu the school that transformed kung fu, at first you think that this is some, frog school of asking this book, because word seems very much alike, qingwa , and because title say transformation you begin to ask what, transformations author suggests, to change stupid questions to something more logical, which is very rare idea, and this is reflection

so, mostly you find reflections and, there is no special revelations, but where appears such difference, like notation, between vietnamese and chinese language, you start worry, who is right here

so, it is better to stick to your, principle that something is more important , and have some direction because it works much better and gives some results which doesnt seem strange, or even uncomprehensible

best wishes, and good luck
> -1 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, naturalism, diachronics
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