# Question
Title: Analyzing word order when the person-conjugation leads verb phrases
Suppose person-conjugation leads the verb phrase and (if the subject is clear or is not the focus) the verb phrase may often come before any lexical subject, too. Although this puts the subject information before the verb in the verb phrase, such sentences would be analyzed as Verb-Subject, not as Subject-Verb?

E.g., here the object comes first for being surprising; we seem to know "Grandpa" already, so the subject need not be out front.

> Grandpa turned down *Hedy Lamarr*.

> Ya *Hedy Lamarr* le eŋamoc Grandpa.

> ACC *Hedy Lamarr* 3ps.PST reject Grandpa.

I gather the "only word-specified subjects count" from this line in WALS

> a language is considered SV if the single lexical argument in an intransitive verbal clause more commonly precedes the verb, but VS if such an argument more commonly follows the verb.

(I gave a transitive example rather than an intransitive.) This mostly comes up for third-person-like subjects, I reckon. SV or VS does not factor when you specify first-/second-person pronouns with a vocative phrase (You were right, Fred).

# Answer
This looks like topic-fronting, when the topic (whether that's a subject, object, or something else) moves to the very beginning of the sentence. If the verb then comes first in the verb phrase, you get V2 word order, as found in many Germanic languages: exactly one phrase has to come before the verb, but what that phrase *is* varies. According to generativists, this topic moves to the specifier of the CP.

So knowing nothing else about your language, this is how I'd analyze your example sentence.

(Add in the small-v layer if you like; I left it out for simplicity. The gloss also doesn't show whether the object comes before or after the verb, if it doesn't get moved; I arbitrarily chose to put it after.)

In other words, yep, this language underlyingly has VS word order. It's just that the subject tends to get moved to the specifier of C, since it's usually the topic. But if something else is the topic instead, then you can see the underlying position of the subject: *after* the verb.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: terminology, syntax
---


title: Is it possible to prevent vowel shift?

text:
# Question
Title: Is it possible to prevent vowel shift?
The English Great Vowel Shift made a huge discrepancy between English pronunciation and English orthography. In perspective of conlang creators, that's something that should be prevented.

It seems like, if a language has a considerably many number (more than 5 or 6) of vowels, a vowel shift is going to happen (gradually) anyway. I'll take Korean as an example. ㆍ and ㆎ were lost, ㅐ \[aj\], ㅔ \[əj\], ㅚ \[oj\], and ㅟ \[uj\] had become \[ɛ\], \[e\], \[ø\], and \[y\] respectively, the difference between ㅐ and ㅔ is disappearing, and ㅚ and ㅟ are becoming diphthongs.

Currently, the conlang I'm making has 10 vowels: A \[ɑ\], Ä \[æ\], E \[e\], È \[ɜ\], I \[i\], Ì \[ɯ\], O \[o\], Ö \[ø\], U \[u\], and Ü \[y\]. This vowel structure doesn't quite seem to be stable either. \[ɜ\] seems likely to clash with \[ɑ\] or \[ɯ\]. A way of preventing that clash is adding a suprasegmental to \[ɜ\] to become \[ɜ̃\], \[ɜ̰\], \[ɝ\], etc. But I don't want to let *that* happen either. So I'm seeking for an *external* way of preventing it. Is it really possible to prevent *every* vowel shift?

# Answer
As you are asking for an *external way* of preventing vowel shift, here is a suggestion: Design some texts (religious text, spells, whatever you want) that must be preserved in their pronunciation exactly. Your constructed culture has written down exact pronunciation rules for those preserved texts, and thus keeps the vowels of those texts fixed.

Of course, in any natural scenario this leads to a split between a vernacular (with all kinds of sound shifts) and the ceremonial language that is conserved over time, similar to the roles of Sanskrit compared to Modern Indo-Aryan languages, or the role of Latin compared to Modern Romance languages.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: phonetics, vowels
---


# Question
Title: What makes lojban such a "logical" language?
The title says it all. While I have not studied it, I have repeatedly heard that lojban is an especially "logical" language, one that could even be a way to speak a "natural" language to the computer that it can understand.

What feature of lojban (or features) makes this so? Is it just that humans haven't gotten to it yet?

# Answer
Lojban was designed with a few key features in mind, which are ultimately why it claims the title of "logical" language.

First it's good to know that a logical language actually means something pretty specific. It's usually built on predicate logic, and a desire to express any logically-expressible statement unambiguously. No two statements are allowed to mean the same thing, and no statement is allowed to mean two things.

In this sense, Lojban fulfills the literal criteria for what counts as a logical language. There's also the colloquial sense, though - the way people *think* about it, when someone says "logical language."

It is designed to be a regular language. This gives it a few key properties that make it easier for computers to process (though it's still an immensely complicated task to implement). Most of these properties are mathematical, and you can read them on the Wikipedia page. However, what it means in an intuitive way is that no word or word phrase's meaning changes based on words it's not adjacent to. That's a nice property when you're a computer and have a hard time maintaining a sense of context.

Lojban also has no irregular forms or rule exceptions whatsoever. All words are constructed based on specific properties that are clearly delineated, using roots that are unique and are intended to mesh with each other as-is.

This means that any construction which can be built in a logical form can be written *completely* and *uniquely* in Lojban. There are no ambiguities *between* forms. Note, though, that this is commonly confused with "the language has no ambiguity." It's possible to be ambiguous in Lojban, but only intentionally, and that ambiguity is unique to the way you wrote it.

It also allows for systematic, structured learning and use. New words fit into the existing grammar and structure without any other prompting, once you know what they mean and how they're used. No additional grammatical structures are needed to use any words, once you know them.
> 16 votes

# Answer
What is meant by "logical language", is that the language's grammar is engineered so that any statement you make is *syntactically* unambiguous. Grammatically correct statements only parse one way.

In natural languages, and many constructed languages, the meaning of a statement can be interpreted to be a number of things, depending on context.

An example to given in the "Complete Lojban Language" book (CLL), is the term "Pretty Little Girls’ School". In English, there's no way to tell what this means. Does it mean a school for "pretty little girls", a pretty school for "little girls", or a small school that is pretty and for girls?

Lojban's grammar is such that the relationship between words is unambiguous. The meaning to words themselves doesn't matter all too much to the language's designers, just the relation between those words. As such, ambiguity is still possible, but usually in the form of semantic vagueness.

That said, it's not like there's only one way to say anything. According to the CLL, there are **Forty** ways to translate the English phrase "Pretty Little Girls' School" into Lojban. Among them, is `melbi cmalu nixli ckule`, which would be a direct translation of the English phrase, word-for-word, and refer a "school for girls who are beautifully small". Whatever "beautifully small" means.
But if you go through the list of possible interpretations, you'll notice that there are in fact some statements that evaluate to the same meaning, either because that's how the semantics work out, or because the two statements can be logically equivalent. (`2 + 2 = 4` is equivalent to `2 × 2 = 4` and `2² = 4`)

Ultimately, these properties are what make Lojban a tempting tool to use for communicating with AI, who are notoriously bad at working out vague context we use in everyday speech. And it's also why Lojban is called a "Logical Language".
> 13 votes

# Answer
The syntax of a logical language is amenable to rewriting, which generates a deductive system, a special case of a formal system. There are two main features of a logical language:

* Some utterances are provably equivalent to each other
* Some utterances provably imply other utterances

For the case of Lojban, I maintain brismu, a living collection of rewrite rules and formal proofs.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: lojban, language-structure
---


# Question
Title: How are separable verbs / phrasal verbs avoided in languages?
Phrasal verbs are common in English. What do other languages (natural or conlang) do to *avoid* this feature? That is, how can they say the same things without having this feature?

# Answer
Well, a phrasal verb is a way of conveying some sort of verbal meaning. So instead of using a phrasal verb, you can just use a verb. Instead of "pick up", you can have a verb "take"; instead of "back down", you can have a verb "retreat". And so on.

Some languages, like Latin, have a set of affixes that you can attach to verbs to derive new ones, and this is how they make all the verbs they need to express various meanings. Other languages just have a lot of verbs in their lexicons.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: verbs
---


# Question
Title: To limit or not to limit vocabulary in a conlang, what are the possibilities?
I have a list of ~4k words in my conlang, which I've boiled down from English concepts to what I would call the "base list" of words. In theory, everything can be built upon these words. I mean, in theory, everything can be built upon 1's and 0's, so there is a tradeoff in readability/speakability and the size of the vocabulary. But I'm trying to balance human's memory capability and not have too many words. Like I've heard experts know 100k words in English max, but there are millions of English words. Etc..

Then I'm thinking, in English there are names of people and places which are completely made up words / sound sequences. I was driving down the freeway and seeing all kinds of names of streets which are not meaningful words or human names, but you could still pronounce them. This adds to the "vocabulary" a lot.

I'm wondering if you can avoid this explosion in vocabulary (human / place etc. names). For example, in English, "common plant names" are not used anywhere else (Toyon, Yarrow, etc.). Same with those street names.

How do other languages handle it (natural or conlangs)? Are there natural languages which don't have made up sound sequences which fit into the rules of the language? I am imagining Native American stereotypes like "Dark Horse" for a person's name (where the words have standalone meaning), instead of "Tom Sawyer" (which words don't have any standalone meaning). Do any natural languages avoid the problem of adding thousands / millions of words like this, which are otherwise meaningless?

I know the definition of word is fuzzy and varied / hard to define across languages. I know it Turkish and other agglutinative languages you have infinite word possibilities, so not really thinking like that. I am imagining more for an analytic style language like English or Chinese or Vietnamese, whether conlang or natlang, how you can avoid the problem of introducing meaningless identifier words which would increase the size of the vocabulary drastically.

# Answer
> 1 votes
*Every* language—at least every language that's expressive enough for useful communication—has some way of adding words to the lexicon to refer to arbitrary entities. It's simply not feasible to communicate otherwise. Even toki pona, with its deliberately restricted vocabulary, would let me adapt my username as something like *jan Lekone*.

This doesn't mean speakers necessarily know them as part of their mental lexicon. I certainly don't know every name ever used in English and I'd wager you don't either. But if someone comes up to you and introduces themself with a sequence of sounds you've never heard before, every language allows you to associate that sequence with that person.

---
Tags: vocabulary
---


title: How to create a Romance-based conlang?

text:
# Question
Title: How to create a Romance-based conlang?
How unoriginal! Yet another guy creating a Romance-based conlang (especially since it's already been covered several times here). Jokes aside, as the title suggests, I'm looking to create a Romance-based conlang. I'd like to point out that I'm not that new to creating conlangs: I've already created one, it's not realistic/natural at all (plus, I didn't make it evolve from proto-fictional-languages, I just created it lol). The reason I'm telling you this is that I have NO IDEA how to create a conlang based on existing languages.

Should I research the phonology, phonotactics, orthography, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, etc. of the five "main" Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) and mix it all up? Or should I research the phonology, phonotactics, orthography, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, etc. of Proto-Roman and/or Vulgar Latin and make them evolve in my own way so that I end up with my "own" Romance language?

If the answer is none of the above or only the latter, then can you tell me how to go about it?

Thank you in advance for answering!! :)

# Answer
> 2 votes
There are several approaches to this task.

One of them is in fact creating an altlang, based on an alternate history where a Romance language survived or develops in some region outside the Romania as we know it. This answer to another question explicitly names Brithenig set in Great Britain and Venedic set in Poland. The general way of developping such a language is to start from Vulgar Latin, apply some interesting sound shifts and some borrowing from a substrate language.

Another approach is creating a Pan-Romance *lingua franca*. Starting with Peano's Latino sine flexione, there was quite a bunch of such languages, notable members of that branch are Novial, Occidental/Interlingue and finally Interlingua (IALA). Interlingua enjoys quite a success as an international auxiliary language, ranking second after Esperanto. Typically, such languages streamline the grammar to make it more palatable and use some eclectic selection of words from the different living Romance languages (often neglecting Romanian, by putting a strong Romanian bias in your selection you can create something fresh and new).

Other approaches are possible.

---
Tags: conlang-creation, natural-languages
---


# Question
Title: In logical languages, what is the relationship between subset relations and the Axiom of Choice?
I will use Lojban for this example, but any logical language with similar relations could be examined; this should be portable to other Loglans, at least.

{cmima} relates sets to their elements; it can be glossed as "is an element of" and represents elementhood. Note that {cmima} is a binary relation.

In contrast, {steci} also relates sets and their elements, but it is a ternary relation. {steci} relates a set, one of its elements, and an extensional property of that element. Some definitions of {steci} imply that there is an entire subset of the given set which contains only the elements which have the given property.

Now, Lojban has the feature that some components of a relation may be omitted, deleted, ignored, or removed. If we remove the first place of {steci}, which relates extensional properties, then we are left with {cmima}. In this sense, if {steci} is defined as a primitive relation, along with removal of components, then {cmima} may be defined from {steci}.

With all of that background out of the way, **does {steci} imply the Axiom of Choice?** Suppose that we provide {steci} with a set and an element of that set. Then, the various extensional properties of that element are choice functions which select the element (and possibly other elements) from the set. This looks like the Axiom of Choice!

# Answer
> 1 votes
My guess: It doesn't.

Sketch argumentation: *{steci}* allows you to talk about choice functions, but it does not guarantee that the thing you are talking about is actually a well-defined choice function, think, e.g., of the smallest element of an open interval as subset of real numbers. In other words: You can formulate sentences in Lojban that aren't *true*. You can lie in Lojban (as well as in any other language), and you can utter things that aren't even lies but complete nonsense.

---
Tags: semantics, lojban, loglan
---


title: Languages without adpositions?

text:
# Question
Title: Languages without adpositions?
What does it look like with a language without adpositions of any kind? I saw there are about 30 languages without adpositions listed here, but couldn't find resources on the ones I checked. I even found one case which I answered here of Somali avoiding adpositions:

> dekedda agteeda: near the harbour -\> \[the harbour her vicinity\]

But I couldn't find anything else. Could you provide a few examples of what it would look like in a few languages?

# Answer
> 2 votes
The purpose of an adposition is to show how a noun relates to the rest of the sentence. In English, we indicate two particular types of relationship (subject and object) with nothing but word order, and use prepositions for all1 the rest.

So what are some other ways of doing this, other than adpositions?

Case marking can take over a lot of these. In English we need to use prepositions to indicate possessors, beneficiaries, and circumstances. In Latin, there are special case markers for all three of those (genitive, dative, ablative). Old Hittite has even more, and can express things like location (locative) and destination (allative) with case alone. Finnish has even *more* and can express identity (essive), lack (abessive), accompaniment (comitative), and more. The more cases you have, the fewer prepositions you need.

Sometimes the line between case marking and adpositions can be blurry. Sumerian and Japanese both attach their case markers to phrases rather than words. Some people consider these cases; others consider them postpositions.

Another option is relational nouns, where these sorts of relationships are expressed by more specific nouns. Swahili has one standard way to combine nouns, and to get specific meanings like "on" or "in" or "behind", you combine a noun with another noun meaning "top surface" (*juu*) or "interior" (*ndani*) or "space behind" (*nyuma*). It doesn't appear on that list, I imagine, because its "one standard way to combine nouns" acts a lot like an adposition, but you could replace that with a genitive case without losing anything.

1 Prepositions plus the postposition/clitic/case marker *'s*, which it's hard to put a label on because it behaves like nothing else in the language.

---
Tags: untagged
---


title: Layered languages

text:
# Question
Title: Layered languages
I was wondering if there exist layered languages, either natlang or conlang. What I mean is that the basis of the language is quite simple (simply mashing vocabulary together creates correct sentences), but then more complex structures can be used to add more meaning/nuance and such. One example of what I mean is the idea of inbetween words which can be left out seemingly without changing the meaning but they do change some subtle nuances. The idea would be that the language is very simple to get conversational in (safe for vocabulary of course for which there is no shortcut), but has a lot of depth to beyond that point which can be ignored at first. I am sorry if this isn't very clear, I am not very experienced in conlangs.

# Answer
> 1 votes
OK, here's some food for thoughts.

Arguably, natural languages are layered in this sense. There are some simple registers like Baby talk and Foreigner talk, there are registers like Elaborated and restricted code used by adult native speakers of different social classes.

More on the side of constructed languages, there is BASIC English, a simplified version of English with the purpose of easy learnability for foreigners, and there is Leichte Sprache, a special version of German to be understandable for people with cognitive challenges.

---
Tags: list-of-languages
---


title: Executive phoneme list for human?

text:
# Question
Title: Executive phoneme list for human?
I want to make my own language, but for begin this works, we need to know all phonemes existing, for decide which keep and which give up.

Do you know a site with list of phonem with playable sound (it's important to understand, we need to hear)

# Answer
> 5 votes
The problem is that phonemes are a theoretical abstraction. They only exist by contrast with something else, and what things contrast depends on the language.

For example, if you look at an IPA vowel chart, you can see the angled line on the left side that represents all the front vowels. There's an infinite number of possible vowels there, and every language divides that line up differently. Some languages draw a dividing line somewhere in the middle, and have two categories: high and low. Some languages draw *two* dividing lines and have three categories. Others draw three lines and have four categories, and so on.

So, how many phonemes are there along that line? Maybe infinitely many, or at least hundreds, since every language draws their dividing lines differently. Or maybe only five or so, since I don't know of any language that has more than that many front unrounded vowels. What *are* those phonemes? Well, every language defines them differently.

If you look at an IPA chart, that's a great start for this. The IPA originally tried to provide separate characters for any sounds that any (European) language drew a dividing line between, which is why it's got five symbols for front unrounded vowels. But that quickly became infeasible when they started expanding to non-European languages. For example, a lot of languages have aspirated stops, or ejective stops, and these didn't get their own symbols. Or, they originally thought no language distinguished dental from alveolar sounds, and assigned them the same symbols…but that turns out to not be true in various Australian languages.

So the best way to get this sort of understanding is to read up on the IPA chart, *and* learn about some of the distinctions that languages make that don't get their own IPA symbols. But be prepared: there are a *lot* of symbols there. Know that no language in the world, natural or constructed, distinguishes *all* of them.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Wikipedia's IPA pages are really comprehensive. You can hear each IPA sound in the chart, as well as read up on each individual manner/place of articulation.

For Consonants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA\_pulmonic\_consonant\_chart\_with\_audio

For Vowels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA\_vowel\_chart\_with\_audio

---
Tags: phonetics
---


title: Mathematical Quenya Symbol?

text:
# Question
Title: Mathematical Quenya Symbol?
I found many sites where Quenya numerical system was explain, but nothing about mathematical opperation like :

`+ - / *` (I don't speak about advanced notion like x² or square), but there is nothing written by tolkien about basic equation ?!?

# Answer
> 4 votes
I don't believe so, no. The idea of writing equations with symbols like that is actually a very recent invention, historically speaking; ways of representing numbers go back to the very beginnings of writing, but the equals sign wasn't invented until the 1500s! So it's not surprising that the elves didn't have such a thing (or at least that Tolkien never mentioned it in the existing sources).

---
Tags: tolkien-elvish, number
---


# Question
Title: Spectrum of personal names and how they may overlap with real words across languages?
In English, we have names like Matt, Mark, Luke, John, etc.. These are actual words too in English (ignoring spelling, just the sound):

* mat: floor mat
* mark: a mark on the wall
* luke: luke warm
* john: toilet

There are probably many others in other languages (Chinese, Spanish, conlangs of various sorts, etc..).

I would ask how do we tell these apart from regular words, but I feel like I've asked that already and it comes down to context and where the word fits into the sentence. But we don't have names like the F-word or SH-word, though Dick is a real name (surprisingly!). So even swear words can be names, not sure why we don't avoid that one. Rich is a name, Lance (my name, a dagger-like knife), they are "things" of various sorts.

I never associate my name Lance with the dagger, unless I am thinking of what it means in other contexts.

So what is the spectrum of how languages handle names (conlangs or natlangs). Are there any that keep them a disjoint class of words (i.e. completely separated), separated from "regular" words? Are there any where it's even more intense than English, and every name in some lang is a "real" word? What are some example languages and names, and where I can perhaps find more information on those? Is there ever severe problems with names mapping to real words (like Dick) in other languages?

Would it be a problem if even extra common words like "the" or "is" are names (assuming English, but in any language)?

# Answer
Remember that names are given by people. Nobody wants to name their child "The" or "Is" because it'll just create confusion and problems for them. But even if there is a homophone ("Iz" short for Isabelle is not unknown), context generally makes it work.

Toki pona draws a strict division between "official words" (the lexicon) and "unofficial words" (names), with differences in how they can be used, but this is not especially naturalistic. I'm not aware of any natural language that works this way.

In most languages, names are just a subset of nouns. Even in English, think about how many nicknames are just words. The same is true for nicknames in most of the languages mentioned below, even if they have different systems that are more common for personal names.

In Swahili, many names are just words. For example, the name Zuri is just the adjective for "good" or "kind". However, names generally take the "class zero" gender marker (used for names and kinship terms); if you were describing a good person, you'd call them ***m**zuri* instead (with the class-one gender marker).

In Ancient Greek, most personal names were created by sticking two roots together. At first, these combinations generally made sense, but that wasn't a requirement: the child of Demosthenes ("people-strength") and Xanthippe ("yellow-horse") might be named Demippos ("people-horse"), using half of each parent's name to create something nonsensical on its own.

In Latin, there was a very limited supply of "standard" personal names, most of which had clear etymologies (Decimus "tenth", Spurius "bastard") but some of which didn't (Gaius, Aulus). But people went beyond this "standard" set all the time, using other nouns and adjectives.

In Akkadian and Egyptian, names tended to be full sentences, ideally ones that mention a god somewhere in them. "Nebuchadnezzar" is *Nabû-kudurri-uṣṣur* "may Nabu protect my firstborn"; "Ankhesenamun" (Tutankhamun's wife) is *Ꜥnḫ-s-n-jmn* "she lives for Amun". These would be trimmed down to the first couple syllables for casual use, and we *also* find names that are just single descriptive nouns or adjectives.

English is a bit of an outlier, in that most of our names have been borrowed from other languages for reasons of prestige, concealing their meaning. But it's far more common in general for names to be meaningful words or phrases. In fact, outside of English and a few other languages, it's common to develop folk etymologies of foreign names: the Hebrew name *Moše* (\> English "Moses") likely comes from Egyptian *msj*, which was very common in theophoric names, but it's also got a folk etymology within Hebrew (where people are used to names making sense).
> 3 votes

---
Tags: names
---


# Question
Title: Conlangs based on lesser known antique languages
The canon of classical languages studied in Europe comprises Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (and maybe classical Aramaic). Inspired by this answer mentioning a conlang based on Hittite, my follow-up question is: Are there conlangs based on other languages of the antiquity, like Sumerian, Elamite, Akkadian, Hurrian, or Ancient Egyptian?

# Answer
> 9 votes
## Eressilian (Hittite)

I wrote the answer you linked, which talks about Eressilian, a conlang based on the Hittite language, supplemented with loanwords from Arabic, ancient Greek and Persian. I talked there about the Greek influence (which is slight, from the information we have); the Hittite roots are of course much stronger. An example passage given by the creator shows Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Hittite and Eressilian:

> ### Hittite
>
> Hūmant+es antuhsa+es arawa+iya+ya annual+iya kraht(Persian)+a hoquq(Persian/Arabic) anda asanzi hassant+ke. Anda mem+iyan+a wajidan(Persian) asanzi har+ke+ya ēsdu aniya+du adelphotés(Greek)+us katta hūmant+as anda.
>
> ### Eressilian
>
> Uvẽndesh ãndushesh irawedhadha ãnnuelidha krata ukuk ãnda eshẽnji eshshẽndke. Ãnda mẽvedheva wajidan eshẽnji erkedha ishchu enidhadhu elelpulush kata uvẽndesh ãnda.

I don't have a grasp on the pronunciation of either language, but after attempting to sound it out, the two are quite similar. For instance, the Hittite "antuhsa es" appears similar to the Eressilian "ãndushesh" - both meaning, I believe, "man" or "human".

## Goa'uld (Egyptian) (sort of)

This is the "language" spoken by the Goa'uld race in *Stargate*. It's ostensibly based in ancient Egyptian, drawing from the language and hieroglyphs - appropriate, given that the Goa'uld supposedly ruled Earth as gods, sometimes appearing as the gods of the ancient Egyptians. I keep seeing references to a writing variation called Nakht, which I can't find much information on.

Some (though not much) of the writing uses the Meroitic system. To my (untrained) eye, there don't appear to be a huge amount of similarities (see Meroitic and Goa'uld), but some crossovers show through pretty easily, such as "l"s and "n"s. Those are probably the main Meroitic contributions.

All that said . . . Goa'uld vocabulary is basically made up, and so it's not really a conlang. No attempts were made to keep much linguistic continuity, and so it's not a constructed language as such. There are probably *some* similarities to ancient Egyptian, but likely not many. I include it here only because its use of some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs is notable; it appears that an alphabet for the language was indeed constructed.

## Irǧeret (Egyptian and Akkadian, with Ugaritic, Arabic and Hebrew influences)

This one seems decently documented by its author. The vocabulary and phonology are derived from Egyptian, although there isn't much vocabulary listed. The organization of nouns - in number and gender - resembles Akkadian. It also contains the Akkadian declensions, with the addition of the dative. In short, the grammar and morphology appears Akkadian, while the vocabulary should be Egyptian. It's an interesting blend.

## A note on Proto-Indo-European

A couple of languages have been derived from Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed common ancestor of Indo-European languages. It's only known indirectly. Therefore, many (though not all) conlangs that are based on it also use words from more recent Indo-European languages. Proto-Indo-European is certainly antique; whether it's "lesser-known" is perhaps another question entirely. That said, it's not a terribly common template, and so I'm listing some Proto-Indo-European languages here for the sake of interest.

* **Sambahsa:** Sambahsa, an international auxiliary language, appears to be heavily influenced by Proto-Indo-European, primarily through vocabulary. It modifies words from languages ranging from India to Spain, attempting to go back to the languages' common roots.
* **Atlantean (Proto-Indo-European):** Like Sambahsa, Atlantean is Proto-Indo-European in origin, especially when it comes to vocabulary (grammatically, it is quite different). Notably, it was created by Marc Okrand, the man behind Klingon. According to the linked website, Okrand
> took Proto-Indo-European roots and then compared them with language families at various points in time from around the world. Where similarities between words existed, he altered the root or its semantic value to reflect that similarity. By the combination of the PIE roots and by the adoption of new roots from these world languages, he created a vocabulary.

Given that these languages borrow vocabulary from many descendants of Proto-Indo-European, you could argue that they're not directly based in it. However, the intentional linguistic diversity within the family - and the attempts to base words on common similarities that are attributable to Proto-Indo-European - do seem to make these conlangs its descendants.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Certainly there are a few!

Probably more lurking about the shadows...

# Answer
> 2 votes
There's not much info about it online at the moment, but I have been developing Emezila, a conlang based on a mixture of Sumerian and Arabic. It can't really be described as an evolution of Sumerian, but it draws a lot from Sumerian vocabulary and a little from Sumerian grammar.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I've got an ongoing project of creating languages for a world where the Carthaginians won the Second Punic War, where Punic occupies a roughly analogous position to that that Latin has in our world.

Much of it is still only a sketch, but the Late Vulgar Punic (i.e. the analogue of Proto-Romance), Qartydšatim is in a reasonably complete state.

As Carthage was less Imperialist than Rome, I also assume many now-extinct languages would have survived (at least much later than they did in our timeline) so my plans also include descendants of Gaulish and Osco-Umbrian up to the modern day, and Etruscan until Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages (I haven't fully decided).

I also have multiple conlangs derived directly from Proto-Indo-European if that counts as lesser known or antique, although all probably need revisiting as my understanding has improved since I last worked on them. Only one of them has information available online which is Elyŝiskää.

---
Tags: diachronics, list-of-languages
---


# Question
Title: What is a good way for a speaker of English to get started learning Toki Pona?
I am interested in learning Toki Pona. As a speaker of Toki Pona and English, what would be a good learning path for someone that speaks primarily English and has a moderate amount of knowledge about linguistics? Are there specific methods that are particularly useful for learning Toki Pona as an English speaker?

# Answer
> 3 votes
I used /dev/urandom's course, which is structured as a series of 13 lessons. Each lesson introduces 10 new words, some aspect of the grammar, and concludes with a series of English-to-tp and tp-to-English exercises using the words that have been introduced so far.

As it happens, 10 new words is also Anki's suggestion for how many new things to introduce per day. Each day I put the lesson's 10 words into flash cards (using the "basic with reversed card" type so it'll quiz me on both tp-to-English and English-to-tp translation) and then used Anki to learn and review them.

I'm told the 12 days of sona pi toki pona course uses the same structure, though it's not the one I used myself. The o kama sona e toki pona course was similar, but has been deprecated by the creator; an old version can be downloaded from that link, but be warned, it's remarkably difficult to use on modern browsers (and also the author no longer recommends using it).

# Answer
> 3 votes
*(Posting a separate answer so it can be voted up or down separately.)*

If you prefer a book rather than a lesson series, there are the classic *lipu pu* ("Toki Pona: the Language of Good") and *lipu ku* ("The Toki Pona Dictionary") by Sonja Lang. These are the original authoritative references on the language.

There's also an unofficial book by B. J. Knight, which has the advantage of being free.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Chatting with other toki pona users! It helps you learn much faster than many courses. Just learn the basics (this cheatsheet is a good resource), then find a community of toki pona speakers! Personally, I recommend kama sona ("to study"), as it's very welcoming to new learners.

---
Tags: toki-pona, conlang-learning, conlang-documentation
---


# Question
Title: What exactly is meant by gerund words in English, and how to translate them into this conlang?
I have a conlang with a very simple grammar. All words are "base words" and start and end with a consonant, and there are 5 vowel suffixes to convert those base words to the 5 forms of words (to simplify a bit):

1. -i: actions (verbs)
2. -e: manners (adverbs)
3. -a: objects (nouns)
4. -o: features (adjectives)
5. -u: prepositions and conjunctions

All actions and objects can take preceding modifiers which don't have a suffix, only the head action/object/feature has a suffix.

I'll just make up some words to keep it simple for this post, but following this pattern. There is a word `reC` meaning "progress/progression", and it is used as a modifier to actions/verbs, like `mek` ("make"). "I" is `suq` and "food" is `fud`. "Be" is `vut`. So "I am making food" is basically "I be \[progressive\] make food", and it might be like `suqa vuti reC meki fuda`.

I am hugely biased coming from English, so at this point my language closely reflects English's use of things like prepositions and various word forms, but I'm alright with that. But my problem is with "gerunds", which nothing seems to describe what gerunds "mean", only that they are verbs converted into a noun form using `-ing`. Like "computing is fun". This is different from my "making" in the last example, but how is it different, what does a gerund word actually mean? How can you break it down or distill it into a set of abstract atoms?

* It is not "progression" the gerund is talking about...
* Is it the "state" of performing the action or something?
* What is it exactly?

Then, I can say "Making food is fun", and it be a gerund, but I can't use `reC` because that is for progression. What is the essence of gerund basically?

My best guess so far would be to say (assuming fun is `fan`):

* `reC mek fuda vuti fano`

That is, it gives a hint at progression, but it treats "making" as a modifier on "food", and the whole thing is a noun phrase.

Does that make sense? Or what would you do, how would you treat the gerunds in a simple system like this?

# Answer
You can think of a gerund as a nominalisation of a verb, including any objects. So *to cook a meal* would turn into a gerund, *cooking food*. (Obviously you can also leave out the object, and *cooking* could be gerund on its own).

Functionally it is similar to an ininitive clause:

> To cook food is fun.

> Cooking food is fun.

Technically it describes a process, but as a nominal element, ie it can be used in a sentence where you would use a noun otherwise.

This is different from the progressive form as in your *making food* example. There you still have a subject (*I*) and the verb form is *am making*. With a gerund you don't have a subject (which is why a gerund is a non-finite form, like the infinitive), because the gerund **is** the subject. *Cooking is fun* is different from *Me cooking is fun*.

You could indeed express that with `reC meki fuda`; that is pretty much analoguous to English.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Blatantly plagiarising my own answer to a similar question on esperanto.se:

The English gerund (or *the -ing form*) is a strange beast because it conflates three historically different forms in one. The difference is still preserved in other Germanic languages like Dutch or German

1. The nominalised infinitive (German *das Tanzen*, Esperanto *danci*)
2. The present active participle (German *tanzend*, Esperanto *dancanta*)
3. A deriviative noun (German *-ung*, not available for *tanzen*, but for other verbs, e.g., *drehen* "turni": *die Drehung* "turnado")

In Latin grammar, only the first thing is called *gerundium*.

And Modern English is again special in using the gerund to form the progressive aspect of verbs. The gerund is becoming more frequent over time in English, we probably haven't seen yet its climax.

For a conlang you probably want to separate the different functions of the heavily overloaded gerund.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: vocabulary, grammar
---


# Question
Title: How should a consonant (IPA) chart look for lip-less, teeth-less, non-humans?
I've made this account just now to ask a question about our world-building project. Axobit - the most dominant species on my planet - are axolotl-like bipedal organisms. They have blowholes on their necks that contain their vocal-cords and a muscle to articulate. Specifically, I'm unsure on how to pick consonants for these creatures. They can't produce nasal sounds (at least I don't think they could), and they can't make dental sounds due to the lack of teeth in their speaking-blowhole things.

What sounds could/couldn't my creatures produce? I plan on them making sounds humans can't produce as well - like chirping and croaking. Is this possible? And how do I include this in a language?

I have more additional questions, but will opt to include those in another post :3

All help is greatly appreciated ^.^

# Answer
Frame challenge: Don't rely on IPA symbols or IPA categorizations for being whose articulatory mechanisms don't match that of humans; the IPA was designed for human articulation.

Having said that, you *can* get away with using the IPA symbols and classifications that would result from humans trying to imitate the phonemes of the Axobit language. For example, if the closest a human can come to a particular Axobit sound is a voiced glottal fricative, represent that sound using the IPA symbol ɦ. It's not going to work for everything, especially if they make sounds that are not part of human linguistic phonology.
> 6 votes

---
Tags: phonetics
---


# Question
Title: How many tense subcategories are there across languages, or conceptually?
I have this:

That is 3 tenses, but a total of 4 5 4 = 13 "subcategories".

This boils down to more abstract concepts such as *continuity* and *completeness*. This is a nice table:

Could there be 16, 24, 32 different configurations, beyond my 13? If so, what are they at a glance? What is the general framework for thinking about all of them, taking cross-language thinking into account?

# Answer
There are a lot of different things you can mark on a verb, including tense (setting a sort of temporal reference point), aspect (the relationship of the action to that reference point), mood (the relationship of the action to objective reality), and evidentiality (the source of your knowledge of the action). Some languages have these as separate, independent categories that you can mix and match; others have a certain fixed set of combinations you can choose from.

In Ancient Greek, there are three tenses (past, present, future) and three aspects (aoristic, imperfective, perfective). The aoristic aspect treats the action as a single point; the imperfective aspect indicates that it happened for a long time or was repeated or habitual; the perfective aspect means the aspect is over and done by the time of the reference point and the aftereffects are what matter. Present perfective, for example, corresponds to English "he has eaten" (so he's no longer hungry now): you're talking about the present, and what's relevant are the aftereffects of something that's over and done.

Almost all of these combinations of tense and aspect get their own special marking, though a couple are combined: present aoristic and present imperfective, for example, look the same. (Latin has the same set of three tenses and three aspects but combines them differently; in Latin the past aoristic and present perfective look the same, in Ancient Greek they don't.) But Ancient Greek also indicates mood—is this a real event, something possible, something hoped for, something commanded to happen, etc?—and in some of these moods, tense is *not* marked, only aspect. Commands, for example, only have aspect, not tense.

In Lingála, there's tense, aspect, and mood (no evidentiality), but only certain combinations are possible:

* Present, future, recent past, distant past, ultimate past (something that's happened and can never be undone)
* Imperative (commands), habitual (something that happens over and over), imperative habitual (something that *should* happen over and over)
* Subjunctive (something that's possible), gnomic (something that is eternally and universally true)

There's no such thing as a habitual subjunctive, for example; it's just not one of the combinations that exist.

In Hittite, there are only two aspects and no tense. You indicate whether the action has been completed or not, and that's it.

In English, you can combine aspects ("she has been working out" is talking about the aftereffects of something happening for a long time), but can't combine moods or tenses (\*"she might can did that"). Syntactically, there's only one slot for the tense and mood, which is traditionally called the "T" or "I" position, but multiple slots for the aspect.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Actually, there can be a lot more tenses than the usual three, and also languages with no tense at all or only two tenses (past and non-past or, more rarely, future and non-future) exist. The Wikipedia article on Grammatical tense has some examples of additional tenses like Remote Past, Remote future, Hodiernal Past, Hodiernal Future (Past/Future, but today).

The subclassification inside the tenses are known as Grammatical Aspect, again, the languages of the world provide more possible aspects beyond English's simple, continuous, and perfect aspects. Examples of other types of aspects are completive and incompletive (denoting the completion or non-completionof an action), inceptive (beginning of an action), prospective (preparation of an action), and habitual Grammatical aspect is different from Lexical Aspect or Aktionsart that is determined by the semantics of the verb.

Finally, linguists often consider Tense, Aspect, Mood as an intertwined system of grammatical categories to be viewed together. These categories may be incremented by Evidentiallity and Polarity.

Postscript: You also may want to look at Reichenbach's theory of tense, introducing new tenses like the Posterior Past and Posterior Future.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: grammar, tense-aspect-mood
---


# Question
Title: How do you figure out sentence structures in a conlang (or even when natlangs emerge)?
For example, the different types of language:

1. Pidgin
2. Creole
3. Standard natural language
4. Conlang

It seems we could create a stepping-stone map going from pidgin -\> "stereotypical natlang" somehow. Somehow there is a process of creating the language, which is very murky / blurry to my mind currently. The easy part is phonetics/phonology, and lexicon. The super hard part is the sentence structures, in my experience so far.

*Side question, are any "natlangs" (what you'd think of as a natural language traditionally) actually conlangs? Like Sanskrit? Was it made up by an individual or small group? What about Korean or Tibetan, I know those writing systems were supposedly created by one person (same with Armenian if I remember correctly). Or is that just writing systems, not the language constructed?*

I have been working on a conlang for at least a year, having mostly developed a lexicon and basic rules for simple noun and verb phrases (seen in that link's website). I have played a lot with sentence structures, absorbing as much as I can from the Chinese Grammar Wiki "sentence patterns" / templates, and my knowledge of English. I don't know Chinese well, it will take me a few years to learn it enough to move it into working/long-term memory.

I am still stuck on mostly mirroring English words and sentence patterns, because that is most familiar. I have made this language maximally isolating/analytic, sort of like Vietnamese/Chinese, where everything is its own word (no conjugations or inflections or anything). Even past/future tenses are words, as is pluralizing, etc..

My question is, how do conlangers iterate on their sentence structure? *To me, it seems like you must first start speaking a prototype version of your language, then expanding/refining its sentence structures as you feel what works and what doesn't.* This would inherently require memorizing your lexicon of at least a few hundred words, and starting to try and "think" in terms of your language.

Can you paint a picture of how I might go about creating sentence structures and formalizing the grammar, without knowing things in advance, so I can make a bit more progress?

How do natural languages handle this? Or, since no one knows, how might they have evolved to their current state of complexity, in what sort of phases or steps? A conlang might seem to be a microcosm of how a natural language develops, sped up in time and developed by an individual or small group instead of a relatively large community.

**How do you figure out sentence structures?**

1. Create some arbitrary sentence structures, perhaps based on some other language (like English). Say 10 types of sentences, or 10 features of sentences.
2. Try and speak and understand what you're saying (as a solo conlanger) using those structures.
3. When it doesn't make sense, *refine*? That is where it become super fuzzy to me... How do you refine your sentence structures?

I get caught up in the process of testing out sentences using my rules, and not wanting to memorize my language rules without them being finalized. So somehow I need to try and speak, but evolve the rules as I go. Whereas in a natlang in today's world, the rules are pretty much set in stone in advance.

How do you create rules which are flexible and evolving, and *not set in stone* at first, and still make process in producing an understandable language?

P.S. if you have any books or papers which are relevant here, please add a comment, I would love to take a deeper look.

# Answer
> 2 votes
**You have a legitimate question as to how to build sentences, right?**

Your question, albeit a bit verbose, is a legit question which I interpret as you wanting to know how to build sentences that don't copy English. If I have misinterpreted your question, I hope my response is nonetheless useful to you.

So! Let me give a few tips which really helped me. I'll be citing the accredited World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) throughout my response.

Firstly, I like to build sentence structure from its components rather than choosing SOV, SVO, VSO... that way I can get a better feel and intuition of my conlang and get a sense of how naturalistic it is. Fortunately, we don't need to know conlang vocabulary to do this.

**Order of Object and Verb**

A lot can be inferred about a language based on its order of object and verb which is why I favor deciding this first when I make conlangs (more on this later). WALS Feature 83A lists some useful statistics which are

* 712 of 1518 (46.9%) surveyed languages favor OV,
* 705 of 1518 (46.4%) surveyed languages favor VO, and
* 105 of 1518 (6.65%) surveyed languages favor no particular order.

As seen here, the world's languages are pretty evenly spit between OV and VO, so just choose one that you like. Consider the implications of each and why your fictional speakers would orient their syntax in such a manner. Additionally consider the effect of animacy. The sentence "man ate berries" is unambiguous in any order because berries aren't known for eating. But the sentence "bird ate snake" is ambiguous without case marking or other methods since birds can eat snakes and snakes can eat birds.

**Subject Location**

By far the most common order for subject and verb is, well, subject then verb. 1192 of 1496 (79.7%) surveyed languages have SV order (see: WALS Feature 82A). When compared against the order of object and verb, we see that

* 457 of 692 (66.0%) of surveyed VO languages favor SV,
* 180 of 692 (26.0%) of surveyed VO languages favor VS,
* 676 of 695 (97.3%) of surveyed OV languages favor SV, and
* 7 of 695 (1.01%) of surveyed OV languages favor VS.

Some languages have fluidity in their syntax, and these are accounted for in the unlisted percentages.

**Adposition Location / Order of Adposition and Noun Phrase**

Again, citing WALS to compare feature 83A against feature 95A,

* 456 of 498 (91.5%) of surveyed VO languages favor prepositions
* 472 or 486 (97.1%) of surveyed OV languages favor postpositions

Like before, you as the conlanger get to choose which you like. Sound it out in your head (or aloud if you so desire) to decide whether you want sentences like

* "Shepherds **in Spain** watch sheep", or
* "Shepherds **Spain in** watch sheep", or
* "**In Spain** shepherds watch sheep", or
* "**Spain in** shepherds watch sheep", or
* something of your own design.

Try not to analyse these with an English perspective. Try to put yourself into the paradigm of your conlang's speakers. Perhaps think poetically? Find what works for you.

**Adjective Location / Order of Adjective and Noun**

One way you can differentiate your conlang from English is the position of adjectives and nouns. English places adjectives before nouns, but 64.3% of languages favor the opposite! (see: WALS Feature 87A) Comparing against order of Object and Verb, we see that

* 456 of 612 (74.5%) of surveyed VO languages favor Noun-Adjective,
* 114 of 612 (18.6%) of surveyed VO languages favor Adjective-Noun,
* 332 of 597 (55.6%) of surveyed OV languages favor Noun-Adjective, and
* 216 of 597 (36.2%) of surveyed OV languages favor Adjective-Noun.

Knowing the order of adjective and noun is useful for knowing how words will *tend to* compound and form genitives. Since adjectives precede nouns in English, words compound in that order (e.g. saucepan).

**Possessor and Possessee / Order of Genitive and Noun**

Conlang YouTuber Biblardion in his How to Make a Language series suggests that the order of Adjective and Noun is strongly related to the order of Genitive and Noun. The possessor is, in a way, an adjective to the possessee. Fact checking this claim with WALS, we see that

* 342 of 732 (46.7%) of surveyed Noun-Adjective languages favor Genitive-Noun,
* another 342 of 732 (46.7%) of surveyed Noun-Adjective languages favor Noun-Genitive,
* 232 of 318 (73.0%) of surveyed Adjective-Noun languages favor Genitive-Noun, and
* 65 of 318 (20.4%) of surveyed Adjective-Noun languages favor Noun-Genitive.

Furthermore, most VO languages tend to favor Noun-Adjective + Noun-Genitive, and OV languages tend to favor either Noun-Adjective + Genitive-Noun or Adjective-Noun + Genitive-Noun (see: WALS Features 83A, 86A, and 87A combined).

**Demonstrative & Article Location**

If your language has demonstratives and articles, you can have some fun mixing up their locations. Of the 1225 surveyed languages that have demonstratives,

* 542 have Demonstrative-Noun,
* 562 have Noun-Demonstrative,
* 9 have a demonstrative prefix, and
* 28 have a demonstrative suffix.

When I compared this against order of Adjective and Noun, the demonstrative strongly correlated with the adjective's location. The idea here is to decide whether you like

* "**These** dogs", or
* "Dogs **these**", or
* something else.

**Relative Clauses**

Most languages (70.3%) favor Noun-Relative clause. But there are a variety of ways that relative clauses can be formed. VO languages overwhelmingly favor Noun-Relative clause, and OV languages can go either way. Some example sentences are

* Farmers **who grow wheat**...,
* **Wheat who grow** farmers..., and
* Farmers **(who) wheat grow (who)**... *the who can go in either position*.

**Embedded Clauses & Complementizers**

Finally, decide the position of embedded clauses and their complementizers. VO languages favor Comp. + Emb. Clause whereas OV languages are evenly split. The common routes are exemplified by the following sentences. Note that I have chosen SV for these examples.

* I know ***that* shepherds watch sheep**.
* I **shepherds sheep watch *that*** know.
* I ***that* shepherds sheep watch** know.

I think you could have a lot of fun playing with these orders. Try them out and see what you like. Experiment with the aforementioned components of sentences until you are happy.

**Putting it all together...**

Once you've decided all the above, try taking a text in English then reordering it to obey your conlang's syntax. Omit words that do not exactly fit your conlang or replace them with approximates. While you do this, think of ways to "un-English-ify" the words and syntax. You could even explore how to vary syntax while maintaining grammatical correctness. Go wild and have fun!

**In Ganzen und Großen...**

I recognize this is a really, *really* long response, but I hope it is of value to you. I found myself in a similar situation asking how sentences should be formed. By looking into crosslinguistic data, various guiding trends appeared. Using this data has helped me more confidently decide my conlangs' syntaxes. Remember, since we're dealing with conlangs, you can make it into whatever you want! Just make sure to remain consistent and give logical reasons for why things are the way they are. As for *evolving your conlang's syntax*, I would recommend starting cave-man simple then slowly increasing complexity. Or heck, just come up with the modern conlang and figure out the protolanguage later! You could look into common etymological routes for tenses, aspects, moods, and other features of interest.

---
Tags: grammar, sentence-structure, word-order
---


title: Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona?

text:
# Question
Title: Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona?
In Toki Pona, the small word *o* has several meanings.

In the official book *Toki Pona: The Language of Good*, it says

> The particle *o* has three uses: (1) after a noun phrase to show who is being called or addressed, (2) before a verb to express a command or request, (3) after the subject (and replacing *li*) to express a wish or desire.

The question is whether a sentence like ”my friend, come here” (using *jan pona mi* 'my friend', *kama* 'come', *ni* 'here') should be *jan pona mi o, o kama ni* or *jan pona mi o kama ni*. Or perhaps those phrases are both acceptable? In that case, are they used interchangeably, or are there different use cases or styles?

It seems there are Toki Pona speakers with different opinions on this. Who are they, and what are their arguments?

# Answer
The book by jan Pije and jan Lope says:

> We've learned how to address people and how to make commands; now let's put these two concepts together. Suppose you want to address someone and tell them to do something. Notice how one of the *o*'s got dropped, as did the comma.
>
> *jan San o, ...* \- John, ...
>
> *... o tawa tomo sina!* \- ... go to your house!
>
> *jan San o tawa tomo sina!* \- John, go to your house!
> 9 votes

# Answer
Although one of the "o"s is usually dropped, you don't have to, especially if it adds a certain emphasis to something or has some poetic value in a song etc, or maybe if you're calling someone first, making sure they're listening, then continuing. It's just not often done. So for general purposes, yes, drop an "o".
> 8 votes

# Answer
The advantage of just leaving two o's is that you have one fewer rule to make people learn.

Merging o's might sound better especially if o o is something that sounds wrong in your mother tongue. Sandhi, the rules for pronouncing and changing pronunciations of words at barriers is undefined in toki pona- no one with any clout ever definitively said anything one way or the other. Instead, we will get people doing what they do in their native language.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Merging the `o`s is most common method I've seen, but they are mostly interchangeable. Using one `o` indicates one sentence (`My friend, come over here.`), while two `o`s are used to split the sentence (`My friend! Come over here.`). In general, if it is clearly one sentence, you can just merge the `o`s, but if there is a break between the two portions, separate them into two sentences and duplicate the `o`
> 0 votes

---
Tags: grammar, toki-pona
---


# Question
Title: Does the grammatical and polysynthetic structure of my language preclude poetry?
My conlang, called Pandemonic for now, is a language with OSV word order, that uses synthetic prefixes and postfixes to both nouns and verbs. Only adjectives and adverbs, which always follow the word to which they apply, are not heavily synthetic, though they may both have prefixes. Conjunctions appear at the end of the group of conjoined elements.

Given that it appears that these structures will often limit the trailing sounds of the words in Pandemonic sentences, should rhyming or other poetry be possible and meaningful?

# Answer
The verbal suffixes making most sentence ends sound the similar doesn't necessarily mean you can't do rhyming poetry - in fact, you can go out of your way to make them rhyme *exactly* the same. The Georgian national epic, the ვეფხისტყაოსანი *Vepxist'q'aosani* (conventionally translated as "The Knight in the Panther's Skin"), is written entirely (?) in "monorhymed quatrains" - 4 lines a row, each 16 syllables long, that each end in the exact same rhyme. For example, the last quatrain of the introduction (rhyme bolded):

> თუ მოყვარე მოყვრისათვის ტირს, ტირილსა ემართ**ლების**;
> სიარული, მარტოობა ჰშვენის, გაჭრად დაეთვ**ლების**;
> იგონებდეს, მისგან კიდე ნურაოდეს მოეც**ლების**,
> და არ დააჩნდეს მიჯნურობა, სჯობს, თუ კაცსა იახ**ლების**.

> *Tu moq'vare moq'vrisatvis t'irs, t'irilsa emart**lebis***;
> *Siaruli, mart'ooba hshvenis, gach'rad daetv**lebis***;
> *Igonebdes, misgan k'ide nuraodes moets**lebis***,
> *Da ar daachndes mijnuroba, sjobs, tu k'atssa iakh**lebis***.

> If the lover cries and weeps for his love, tears are the lover's due.
> Solitude suits him, the roaming of plains and forests suits him, too.
> When he's by himself, his thought should be of how to worship anew.
> But when a lover is in the world, he should hide his love from view.

(Source \- though, that translation takes some liberties to make the English mirror the rhyme structure of the original Georgian. A more literal translation can be found here.)

But if monorhyming bothers you, then the obvious alternative is just to not make your language's poetry based on rhyming to begin with. Plenty of languages' definition of poetry is effectively rhyme-blind. Mark Rosenfelder, in his *Language Construction Kit*, gives the following examples for alternatives:

* Latin did poetry based on *meter* \- the particular example he uses is *dactylic hexameter*, made up 6 "feet" per line, where a "foot" is a either a long/long pair (a *spondee*) or long/short/short pair (a *dactyl*):

> *Cūm pu-er | āu-dā|cī co-e|pīt gaū|dē-re vo|lā-tū*
> *Dēs-se-ru|īt-que du|cēm, cāe|lī-que cu|pī-di-ne | trāc-tus,*
> *Āl-ti-us | ē-git i|tēr. Ra-pi|dī vī|cī-ni-a | sō-lis*
> *Mōl-lit o|dō-rā|tās pēn|nā-rūm | vīn-cu-la | cē-rās.*

> When the boy began to rejoice in bold flight
> He deserted the leader and, drawn by desire for the sky
> Made his way higher. Proximity to the fierce sun
> softened the fragrant wax, the binding of the feathers.

English can do something similar but it's much easier, because of our lexical stress, do *iambic* meter - series of unstressed-stressed pairs; Shakespeare famously used lots of iambic *pentameter*, which often rhymed, but didn't always:

> The **e**|vil **that** | men **do** | lives **af**|ter **them**;
> The **good** | is **oft** | in**ter**|rèd **with** | their **bones**;
> So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
> Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
> If **it** | were **so**, | it **was** | a **grie**|vous **fault**,
> And **grie**|vous**ly** | hath **Cae**|sar **an**|swer’d **it**.

* Old English used lots of *alliteration*, as in this sample from Beowulf:

> *Wæs se **g**rimma **g**æst **G**rendel hāten,*
> ***m**ǣre **m**earc‐stapa, sē þe **m**ōras hēold,*
> ***f**en ond **f**æsten;****f**īfel‐cynnes eard*
> ***w**on‐sǣli **w**er **w**eardode **hw**īle,*
> *siþðan him Scyppend forscrifen hæfde.*

> Grendel this monster grim was called,
> march-riever mighty, in moorland living,
> in fen and fastness; fief of the giants
> the hapless wight a while had kept
> since the Creator his exile doomed.

* Hebrew poetry is often based on *parallelism*, especially *synonymous parallelism* \- finding multiple ways to say the same thing:

> עד־אנה יהוה שועתי ולא תשמע אזעק אליך חמס ולא תושיע׃
> O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear; or cry to you "Violence!", and you will not save?
> (Habakkuk 1:2)

> ויגל כמים משפט וצדקה כנחל איתן׃
> But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
> (Amos 5:24)

Or *antithetic parallelism*, where two opposite ideas are juxtaposed with parallel sentence structure:

> נסו ואין־רדף רשע וצדיקים ככפיר יבטח׃
> The wicked flee when no man pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion;
> (Proverbs 28:1)

* You could always rely simply on *diction*, that is, word choice for poetic effect. For example, Old Norse poetry was full of "kennings" replacing simple, concrete, boring words with more figurative, evocative, almost always longer (maybe *much* longer), circumlocutions. e.g.:

> *Ǫld vann skjǫldu ossa rauða, þás kómu þingat hvítir; þat vas auðsætt hljóms hring miðlǫndum. Þar hykk ungan gram gerðu gǫngu upp í skip, þars sverð slæðusk, en vér fylgðum; svǫrr blóðs fekk gunnsylgs.*
> Men made our shields red, that came there white; that was obvious to the {sharers of the {sword-clamour \[battle\]} \[warriors\] }. There I think the young king made his advance up on to the ship, where swords were blunted, and we followed; the {bird of blood \[raven\] } gained a {battle-draught \[=blood\] }.

(Source)

> *Fengum feldarstinga, þanns lendingar álhimins sendu oss útan, ok galt við fjǫrðhjǫrðu. Mest selda ek mínar hlaupsildr gaupna Egils við mævǫrum sævar; hallæri veldr hvôru.*
> We received a cloak-pin, which the {landsmen of {the channel-sky \[ice\] } \[Icelanders\] } sent us abroad, and I spent it on {fjord-herds \[fish\] }. Most of all I sold my {leaping herrings of Egill’s palms \[arrows\] } for the {slender arrows of the sea \[herring\] } ; the famine causes both things.

(Source)

So there's lots of ways to still do poetry even without rhyming. If you really don't want to rhyme.
> 14 votes

---
Tags: grammar, syntax, language-structure, word-order
---


# Question
Title: How does the Lojban "logic" of limiting gismu to very specific argument structures not run into problems?
Looking at the definitions for the many gismu, we find things like bakri:

> chalk; x1 is a quantity of/contains/is made of chalk from source x2 in form x3

Why limit it to just x1-x3, why not x1-x30? Just joking, but how did they land on these seemingly arbitrary models of relations/actions?

I can construct a sentence about chalk which has many more than 3 parts:

> \[x1: foo\] bakri \[x2: made from limestone\] \[x3: from the beach\] \[x4: that evolved out of the geological processes from the ocean\] \[x5: in the form of a slab\] \[x6: located at the top of a cliff\].

Just making stuff up, but couldn't it be said that these gismu/verbs could take way more arguments than they are showing/allowing? Why did they limit them the way they did? What was their thought process or motivation? How did they know the language would "work" with such limitations/decisions on what x arguments to include in a gismu?

Basically, I don't understand why/how they landed on the number and structure of the arguments to each of the gismu, and looking for some insight on how it doesn't break down.

By "break down", I mean like my example, I can show for every gismu more or less arguments than alloted. I can come up with a million other example hypothetical gismu with other argument structures. So why did they land on these as the final ones with their final structure?

# Answer
First, it's worth pointing out that some selbri, notably {du}, do permit more than five arguments. Five is the maximum for gismu due to the FA series ({fa}, etc.) which only has five members; if gismu routinely accepted more arguments, then they would not be easily addressable.

Lojban is meant to combine six different source languages, each with their own cultural history, into a single synthetic vocabulary. As a result, we have a ready source of parameters from each source language. When a source language contributes a verb for a gismu, it also may contribute a subject, an object, and more; these are candidates for gismu arguments.

That all said, there are two kinds of "break down" or "problem" that we might want to consider, and Lojban has tools for addressing both of them.

First, as you've mentioned, it seems like there are dozens of arguments that we might want to add to a selbri in order to augment the described relationship. We can do that with modal place structures, as described in CLL, chapter 9. The classic example from CLL is {viska sepi'o lo kanla} "seeing with my eye;" the modal compound {sepi'o} "using a tool" is a conjugation of {pilno} "x1 uses tool x2 for purpose x3." The exact semantics of modal phrases are not specified, other than that they involve the particle {jai}; see CLL for nasty details.

The second kind is irregularity within the vocabulary. My favorite example involves animals. There are dozens of words like {danlu} "x1 is an animal of species x2," all with a regular two-place structure, and all are subrelations (in the mathematical sense of "binary relation") of {danlu}. So, for example, {mlatu} "x1 is a cat of species x2" is a subrelation of {danlu}, and {cinfo} "x1 is a lion of species x2" is a subrelation of {mlatu}. However, some gismu have extra places, like {tirxu} "x1 is a tiger of species x2 with coat markings x3," and this causes a lot of sophistry around the nature of big cats. If we were to remove the third place, with {tirxu fi zi'o}, then we obtain a subrelation of {danlu}.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: lojban
---


# Question
Title: Where synthetic languages "inflect," what is the verb for what analytic languages do?
When I indicate noun properties morphologically, I am "inflecting." When I indicate them with separate words:

fish

this fish

these fish

from these fish

I am not "inflecting." Is there a similar verb for what more analytical languages do?

Further, to describe this activity accurately, does it matter whether the separate word is itself inflected? e.g., "I inflect *this*-\>*these* to \[insert requested verb\] both proximal and plural"?

# Answer
> 4 votes
The use of function words to do what *might otherwise be achieved via inflection* is called periphrasis. The adjectival form is *periphrastic* (as in *periphrastic future tense*). I don't think there's a verb.

# Answer
> 1 votes
### Verbum Nullum

For the examples given, I would argue that none of those are inflexion per se, except "from". As you note, English does have morphological inflection, but not all grammatical relationships are shown with inflexion.

I would say that "these" simply **modifies** "fish"; but also that I do not think "modify" is being set up as a "non-inflexional synonym". It modifies the totality of all individual fish by specifying a particular non-singular subset of fish that happen to be in close proximity to the speaker. We can contrast with "those fish" which specifies a particular non-singular subset of fish that happen to be somewhat distant from the speaker. Similarly, we can modify "fish" in other ways by size, by colour, by type, by sex, by gender, etc. So, inflexion is a kind of modification, but not all modifications are inflective.

I would also argue that English does have extramorphological inflexion. For example, we have a rich verbal system, that inflects (morphologically) for basically one person, sometimes for number and sometimes for mood. We also have a somewhat complex system of modal and auxiliary mediated inflexion.

For example:

* I mought could see to that.
* If she had only would've done this...
* She done gone spoilt the milk.

Your dialect may vary, but I would argue that these modals do in fact count as inflexion for English as much as any Latin synthetic inflexion. Long story short: **English has (at least) two kinds of inflexion**.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Edit 2023-08-26: I think this answer is wrong and is superseded by this one.

As far as I know, there isn't a dedicated word for adding more words to express grammatical meaning.

I propose **exflect(ion)** by analogy with **inflect(ion)** to fill this gap.

---
Tags: terminology, isolating-languages
---


# Question
Title: Polysemies in Proto-Languages: Ways of Formation & Construction?
I'm curious about (and also stuck at) the natural formation and ways of construction of polysemies in naturalistic conlangs / natural languages.

More specifically: I'm constructing the vocabularies of a proto-language. When it comes to words with only subtle differences, I failed to come up with a proper method.

To my knowledge words are formed by putting word roots together. The word roots should have all the basic meaning covered. But I frequently see words with same or similar *basic* meanings, like learn / study, middle / center, get (one of the senses) / become, etc. in English. As for now I can only think of two reasons, but I'm not sure:

1. These words comes from different sources. But for proto-languages this is simply impossible.
2. Multiple possible combinations of roots has similar meanings, and eventually the two become polysemies. But I suppose this only works for not-so-basic concepts.

My problems are:

***a)*** How polysemies is formed in natural contexts?
***b)*** How can a proto-language have polysemies? Or it shouldn't have any? (In this case how to express the "subtle" differences between words?)

---

**EDIT** Thank you, Draconis and Sir Cornflakes! I would clarify that by *proto-language* which might be the wrong term to use I actually (somewhat) mean the *first* language ever evolved in a group of people. So it's at the root of any language tree, thus can have no or little external sources of words.

What I care more is how can I construct polysemies (or just words with similar meanings) in a naturalistic conlang: by using a new word root, or some other construction?

# Answer
So, let's start with some thoughts on the first language of humanoids.

*Genetics*

I think that there are some genetic mutations necessary to create speaking humanoids from non-speaking, more chimp-like creatures. I won't speculate much about the nature of that mutations (whether there are some "language genes" or if just an enlargement of the human brain is sufficient), but I assume, there are such mutations.

*The first humanoid who was able to speak didn't*

Just because there was no other humanoid to speak with. Even nowadays, children deprived of linguistic input don't develop a fluent language later in their lives.

*When there are several humanoids who are able to speak they develop a language*

When there several children (at least two in a sufficiently short time interval) that have the capability to speak, they will develop their own private language. These children will have the first language among humanoids. Since there is more than one speaking child, they already have different (highly overlapping, but not identical) idoelects, I assume one source of polysemy (different lects) is present from the beginning.

*Language probably emerged at roughly the same time in different groups of humanoids*

The language enabling genes spread between different groups of humanoids before the onset of language. They reach the critical concentration at different groups at about the same time. In each group, a different language evolves. Multilinguality is an issue from the very beginning of mankind.

*Conclusion*

I think there was already some polysemy in the earliest languages of mankind, and this is unavoidable because natural language only exists when more than one single individual speaks it. And when something new has to be named, different speakers come up with different words for that something, and only continued language usage streamlines it to one or two stable words.
> 1 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary
---


# Question
Title: For analytic / isolating languages, how complex are the grammar rules for ordering the words in a sentence?
For a language like Chinese, or other conlangs which are mostly analytic/isolating, how complex does the grammar get in terms of ordering words in a sentence. After looking at Mandarin Chinese (not knowing much of it), I see there are at least probably 100 rules for where to put words in a sentence, such as this:

> In Chinese, the time at which something happened, is happening, or will happen appears at the beginning of the sentence or immediately following the subject.

What do you need in terms of grammar rules (roughly speaking) for ordering words in a sentence if you are analytic/isolating? Can you have free word order, or must you really restrict things in some fashion? Why are there so many word order "conventions" in Mandarin Chinese, is that common in analytic/isolating languages?

# Answer
Isolating and Analytic languages tend to have a more rigid word order because they lack the encoded information of inflectional/derivational morphemes. As such, these types of natural languages rely on the word order or additional content words to convey meaning. Natural languages that allow for "free word order," or more accurately less strict word orders encode grammatical info (Case/Tense/Gender/Number/etc.) into each word, often relying more on these morphemes and agreement to convey the intended meaning. Even if word order is ignored, the same meaning would be conveyed by the included morphemes. These morphemes are what allow for a language to easily change its preferred word order.

To keep the structure and word order of an analytic/isolating conlang, one can focus more on the way that constituents come together to form noun phrases, verb phrases, and clauses. That said, natural languages can also be flexible and allow multiple, acceptable constructions, but "certain conventions" would be the most common pattern used native speakers. In English, one could say "the red, big dog caught the ball" and be understood although convention would dictate "the big, red dog caught the ball" as more acceptable. However, "the ball the big, red dog caught" would change the meaning entirely or be considered ungrammatical.

Having personally studied Mandarin Chinese and White Hmong (both strong analytic languages) I found that word order was very strict when dealing with the positions of nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, and prepositions, but they had different approaches in how clauses could come together.

Slioussar, N. (2011). Processing of a Free Word Order Language: The Role of Syntax and Context. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 40(4), 291–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-011-9171-5

Gell-Mann, M., & Ruhlen, M. (2011). The origin and evolution of word order. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(42), 17290–17295. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113716108
> 2 votes

---
Tags: grammar, sentence-structure, isolating-languages
---


# Question
Title: How could the future "Kesh" language from the book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K. Le Guin develop from modern languages?
In the book *Always Coming Home*, by Ursula K. Le Guin, the author created the future Kesh language and Aiha alphabet. Does anyone with an anthropological or etymological background and experience with this book have any idea how modern languages would evolve into this? Could it just be English + 5000 years, or does it seem like there's other languages that got mixed in?

From the back of the book it is stated that their written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable which is quite a shift from modern English, but it seems like they may be many thousands of years in the future which would allow for such drastic changes. Some words such as "kailikú" for "quail" have the similar hard /k/ and "sleep" is translated to "lahe" which seems to be pronounced similarly to "lay". These seem to be fairly rare and most words have no obvious connection or similar pronunciations.

# Answer
> 4 votes
5000 years is a really long time for linguistic evolution, and after such a long time little resemblance between the original and the final outcome is left. So almost anything is a plausible outcome.

The feature "written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable" has a nice scientific name ***alloglottography*** and it was quite common in the Ancient Near East. I wonder how it can survive in a society Ursula LeGuinn describes for the Kesh people because it is definitely harder to maintain than the knowledge of a simple alphabetic writing of the spoken vernacular.

The alphabet looks like a new invention but it shows some superficial similarities to Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and may have evolved from them. Or it was just reinvented at some point of time after a period of illiteracy.

# Answer
> 1 votes
It's also worth noting that we currently have **no** attested examples of a language evolving over 5,000 years. We have attestations of languages from 5,000 years ago (that's right about when writing was first invented), but none of those languages have living descendants. We also have reconstructions of how the ancestors of English (and many other languages) might have looked 5,000 years ago, but these are far from certain. Five millennia is an *incredibly* long time.

So as Sir Cornflakes says, basically anything is plausible after such a long span of time. Certainly, such a distant descendant of English wouldn't be expected to have much in common with it. We might see similarities in some of the basic vocabulary (our word for "water" has changed remarkably little from Proto-Indo-European), or in the patterns of the grammar (a lot of our question words start the same way, just like they did in PIE, even if that starting sound has changed quite a bit), but really there's **no** feature of language that I would be surprised to see change over such a timespan.

---
Tags: morphology, diachronics, inspiration
---


# Question
Title: Can IPA consonant diacritics apply to all consonants, or do some diacritics apply to certain consonants?
I am coding a successor to my "Der Spracherfinder 1.5" which can handle diacritics (among many other improvements). I want the option to apply diacritics but only to consonants that would accept said diacritics. Yet I have little knowledge on which diacritics are allowed with which consonants. I would appreciate an explanation or referral. Thanks!

P.S. I was not sure what tag to apply to this question, so sorry for any confusion there.

# Answer
Many combinations of consonant and diacritic are nonsensical, but I'm not aware of any exhaustive list of these combinations.

For example, it makes no sense to velarize a velar consonant; kˠ is just the same as k (it already has a velar closure). An apical velar consonant isn't possible (you can't get the tip of the tongue back to the velum), so k̺ is a physical impossibility. Some combinations just aren't clear what they describe: a lowered stop k̞ presumably means a less-than-complete closure, but then it's not a stop any more.

However, I think it's fair to put this responsibility on your users, rather than the program itself.
> 4 votes

---
Tags: tools
---


# Question
Title: Can core argument markers swap roles? If so, how?
I have been trying for some time to figure out how to smoosh a bunch of my originally-unrelated languages into a larger family. They have a fair amount of noun and verb morphology that was suspiciously similar despite my not originally intending it. Here are some affixes I've reconstructed with their reflexes across 3 languages I'm trying to stitch together under this family: Proto-West-Celean (PWC), Mtsqrveli, and Apshur:

| Proto-form | PWC reflex | Mtsqrveli reflex | Apshur reflex | Proto-meaning |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **-VS* | **-oS* (agent) | *-is* (direct object), *-os* (nominalizer)? | *-os* (nominalizer)? | ??? |
| **-Vm* | **-om* (direct object) | *m-* (verb transitive/telicizer)? | /m/ in *am* (demonstrative)? | definite??? |
| **-l* | **-l-om* (dative) | *-(Vl)i* (genitive) | *-lda* (benefactive) | dative |
| * | **-eH* (feminine agent) | *-ɣe* (benefactive) | *-a* (oblique object), *-lda* (benefactive), *-\[w,h,d,z\]a* (allative) | allative |
| **-r* | **-(e,o)r* (transitive agent) | *-ar-* (plural, earlier partitive) | *-Vr* (ergative, genitive), *-\[wile,hile,di,zi\]r* (ablative) | ablative |
| **-k* | **-(ey)k-* (genitive) | ? | *-kʰ* (adjective ending) | genitive |
| **-j* | **-ye-* (verb stative aspect) | *-(Vl)i* (genitive), *-ia* (definite agent), *-is* (definite direct object), *iq'-* (copula root) | *-di* (pegative), *-lda* (benefactive), *-ldi* (instrumental), *-da* (superlative), *-daj* (superessive), *-dir* (superelative), *-d-* (verb subjunctive mood) | stative |
| * | **-ob-oS* (comitative) | *ba* (and), *-\[e,o\]b* (verbalizer) | *-wa* (allative), *-waj* (adessive), *-wiler* (ablative), *-Vw-* (verb progressive marker) | adessive ("next to") |

You can see many of the reflexes are similar enough to reconstruct a proto-meaning. What's throwing me off is the cases where the PWC agent markers **-oS* and **-eH* correspond to *object* markers in the other languages. How to explain this discrepancy?

One idea I had was that maybe the parent **-VS* and * morphemes simply had a meaning that could re-grammaticalize as *either* an agent *or* a patient - WLG 2019 implies the dative case (or, one step back, the genitive, ablative, or allative) could do this. But all of those already exist, and they all already map to different morphemes.

I also thought about how split-ergativity can arise in a nominative-accusative language, like in Hindi; verbs become rendered in the passive voice, ditching the semantic agent ("she(NOM) saw the man(ACC)" \> "the man(NOM) was seen"), then the agent is reintroduced via an oblique case ( \> "the man(NOM) was seen by her(INST)"), which gets reinterpreted as an active form (" \> she(INST-ERG) saw the man(NOM)").

Apshur is purely erg/abs; PWC and Mtsqrveli are currently nom/acc, though I've been toying with making them split ergative instead (partially to explain how they could be sibling branches with a purely erg/abs language...). That + PWC seemingly inventing a new accusative case **-om* without an equivalent in the other languages, suggests something like that ergativization process above might have happened, except... in reverse. But *how* does that process happen in reverse?

# Answer
Straight up swapping the meaning of two case markers (let's call them like that for simplicity's sake) seems a pretty strange occurrence. There are however, theoretical ways this could happen:

* You have some sort of "trojan horse" phenomenon with several words that have "inverted" arguments (cf. "I like X" vs. inverted Spanish "me gustas X" or German "Es gefällt mir"), and the inverted force somehow becomes generalized, causing what is essentially a reanalysis of these two cases.
* Two of the main paradigm from two different cases became so similar as to generate confusion, and one of them is replaced with something else, which just happen to cause what *looks* like an inversion of the meanings of these affixes.

Though I know of no example offhand for affixes, I would be surprised if this second situation has not happened in some language somewhere! English borrowed *they* from Old Norse because the thirst person pronouns were getting almost all identical, *she* was also innovated for the same reason, but its sources are less clear (cross-linguistically, innovation or borrowing of pronouns is not a frequent phenomenon).
> 1 votes

---
Tags: grammar, morphology, diachronics, syntax, language-families
---


# Question
Title: Can you help me write some phonological rules for my conlang?
To be more precise, I'm referring to the writing process that goes, for example, from "/m/ becomes \[ɱ\] before /f/ or /v/ or before a word boundary followed by /f/ or /v/ " to "/m/ \> \[ɱ\] / \_(#)\[f, v\]".

I know and understand the basics of it, as you can see above, but there are sentences that are "simple" and yet so difficult to turn into this pattern (at least for me lol). So, if you *really* don't mind, can you help me turn the following sentences into the pattern \[...\] \> \[...\] / ...\[...\]... or just check the ones I did if it's right or not?

1. "/n/ match the place of articulation of the consonant it precedes except for /w/ where /n/ remains \[n\]." I wrote: /n/ \> \[αplace\] / \_\[+consonant -w αplace\]. Is it correct?
2. "*Plosives, fricatives and affricates* must share the same voicing in a consonant cluster. The voicing of the *last plosive, fricative or affricate* in a consonant cluster dictates the voicing of the others." (The reason why I specified "plosives, fricatives and affricate" is because nasals and approximants are not affected by that nor do they affect it. For example, /sm/ is \[sm\] and not \[zm\] even if /m/ is voiced.) So how to turn it into the pattern above?
3. "/b/, /d/ and /g/ become \[m\], \[n\] and \[ŋ\], respectively, before nasal consonants."
4. "/n/, /t/, /th/ (can't write superscripts but it's an aspirated /t/), /d/ and /l/ become their retroflex counterparts when adjacent to /ʂ/ or /ʐ/, even across a word boundary.
5. "Gemination is forbidden within a word, but is permitted across a word boundary. So any consonant preceding an identical consonant disappears/is not pronounced unless in two different words." I wrote: \[+consonant1\] \> ø / \_\[+consonant1\]. Is it correct?
6. "/l/ becomes \[l̪\] before dental or dentalized consonants." I wrote: /l/ \> \[l̪\] / \_\[consonant +dental, +dentalized\]. Is it correct?

If you made it this far and/or you're gonna answer to at least one of them, thank you so, so much!!

**Edit:** Forgot to mention it but this is for my conlang. I don't wanna have whole paragraphs on my document to describe allophony so that's why I'm asking here about the pattern \[...\] \> \[...\] / ...\[...\]...

# Answer
> 2 votes
I'm more familiar with how sound change rules are written in sound change engines like SCA2 or Phomo (or the one I wrote myself for personal use, ASE), but I'll take a crack at it. This is complicated by the fact that I don't know the full phonemic inventory you're using though.

> "/n/ match the place of articulation of the consonant it precedes except for /w/ where /n/ remains \[n\]." I wrote: /n/ \> \[αplace\] / \_\[+consonant -w αplace\]. Is it correct?

That looks correct to me, other than +consonant being probably unnecessary. Vowels don't have a place of articulation, unless you want to argue about semivowels.

> "Plosives, fricatives and affricates must share the same voicing in a consonant cluster. The voicing of the last plosive, fricative or affricate in a consonant cluster dictates the voicing of the others."

\[+obstruent\] \> \[αvoice\] / \_\[+obstruent αvoice\]. (This assumes you don't have clusters 3+ phonemes long with a sonorant separating two obstruents, like /t͡ʃlb/ or something.)

> "/b/, /d/ and /g/ become \[m\], \[n\] and \[ŋ\], respectively, before nasal consonants."

If those are the only voiced stops so we can write a general rule, then \[stop +voice -nasal\] \> \[+nasal\]/\_\[+nasal\]. If you also have, say, /ɢ/, then you would need to exclude that from the target.

> "/n/, /t/, /th/ (can't write superscripts but it's an aspirated /t/), /d/ and /l/ become their retroflex counterparts when adjacent to /ʂ/ or /ʐ/, even across a word boundary.

I don't think you can write this one in terms of features, because I can't think of a feature that /t tʰ d l n/ all have in common that isn't *also* shared by /s z/ (or /r/ - I don't know if your language has any alveolar rhotics). So I would probably write this as {t tʰ d l n} \> \[+retroflex\] / \_{ʂ ʐ}, {ʂ ʐ}\_. I also don't know if /ʂ ʐ/ are the *only* retroflex consonants (before applying this rule), because if so, you can generalize it to {t tʰ d l n} \> \[+retroflex\] / \_\[+retroflex\], \[+retroflex\]\_. That won't work if you also have, say, /ʈ͡ʂ/.

> "Gemination is forbidden within a word, but is permitted across a word boundary. So any consonant preceding an identical consonant disappears/is not pronounced unless in two different words." I wrote: \[+consonant1\] \> ø / \_\[+consonant1\]. Is it correct?

I think so, yes. Or more compactly, C₁ \> ∅ / \_C₁.

> "/l/ becomes \[l̪\] before dental or dentalized consonants." I wrote: /l/ \> \[l̪\] / \_\[consonant +dental, +dentalized\].

Again unless you for some reason have dentalized vowels, I don't really see the point in specifying "consonant" in the environment. I'm also not really convinced there's a need to distinguish "dental" vs. "dentalized", since "dentalized" *is* \[+dental\] just applied to a consonant that doesn't usually have that feature. I would just do /l/ \> \[l̪\] / \_\[+dental\].

---
Tags: phonology
---


title: An all-consonant language? (Part One)

text:
# Question
Title: An all-consonant language? (Part One)
I'd like to make a language that only has consonants. Since I kind of feel like the letter "h" is a consonant, I'd prefer to omit it. The language would include b, ch, d, f, g(hard), j, k, l, m, n, ng, p, r, s, t, th(voiced and unvoiced), v, and z. I think maybe humans wouldn't be able to speak it without also pronouncing h and/or vowels. My question is, what (if any) problems in pronunciation would arise if humans tried to speak a language like this?

# Answer
The IPA draws a sharp distinction between "vowels" and "consonants", but really, there's nothing you can measure in a spectrogram to decide if something is a vowel or not. `[w]` and `[u]` are basically identical, in terms of objective acoustics. The real difference is phonological.

In other words, the true difference between a vowel and a consonant is how it's used in a language. "Vowels" act as the core of a syllable, while "consonants" attach to either side. In my variety of English, `/m/`, `/n/`, `/l/`, and `/r/` can be used as syllable cores (the second syllables of "rhythm", "button", "bottle", and "dollar"), which in some sense makes them "vowels". (The most common term for this is "syllabic consonants".) For me, "mirror" actually has `/r/` acting as both a consonant and a vowel in the same syllable!

So if you want to make a language that doesn't use any of the letters the IPA deems to be vowels, that's totally doable. If you don't want to have any syllable cores, that gets harder. You need to decide how you're sticking your phonemes together in order to avoid having anything that could be considered a syllable or its core.

To finish with a conlang example, I once made a very limited conlang for a tabletop game, in which a character was named *Gzhzaqrh*: `/gʒ̩.ˈzɑ.qʁ̩/`. In this name, the *zh* and *rh* act as syllable cores, even though they're normally considered consonants. The result tends to sound strange and unusual to humans, which is probably what you're going for. (In the game, it was spoken by orcs.) But the players didn't have much difficulty pronouncing the name, once they got used to it (though as English-speakers they usually substituted velars for uvulars).
> 2 votes

# Answer
There is **no** problem in an all-consonant language as natural languages like Nuxalk aka Bella Coola demonstrate. The example language actually has vowels, but it is famous for its long vowelfree consonant sequences and even full sentences without vowels.

Your choice of consonants including a lot of voiceless fricatives may be problematic because the different fricatives can easily be mistaken for each other in a noisy environment, when transmitted over a traditional phone line, or when the listener is hearing impaired. But again, Nuxalk also goes with a range of voiceless fricatives, so this is probably also not a problem.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: phonetics, unnatural-features, speaking
---