# Question
Title: Are there speech communities for Tolkien's Elvish languages?
Has anyone tried to put one of Tolkien's Elvish languages Sindarin or Quenya into everyday conversational use? I can imagine fan groups doing this, but I can also imagine big problems with the available vocabulary (and potentially also with the available grammar).

Are there documented events where Elvish was spoken conversationally?

Any additional information (e.g., on how to deal with the vocabulary) are also welcome!

# Answer
> 12 votes
# It is not possible to speak Tolkien's Elvish Languages.

This may confuse some people, considering how much nonsense there is online for "how to speak Tolkien's Elvish" (there's even a wikihow article about it). But according to the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, an organization dedicated to the study of Tolkien's invented languages, even Quenya and Sindarin are simply not learnable:

> The vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Tolkien's invented languages, even of Quenya and Sindarin, **are far too incomplete to allow its casual, conversational, or quotidian use**. As Tolkien himself stated, "It should be obvious that if it is possible to compose fragments of verse in Quenya and Sindarin, those languages (and their relations one to another) must have reached a fairly high degree of organization — though of course, far from completeness, either in vocabulary, or in idiom" (Letters p. 380). Indeed, it was never Tolkien's intent to make Quenya, Sindarin, or any of his languages into spoken, written, auxiliary, or otherwise "useful" forms; rather, they were done for purely personal enjoyment. As Tolkien wrote, "It must be emphasized that this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my personal linguistic 'aesthetic' or taste and its fluctuations" (ibid.)

-- the aforementioned E.L.F.'s FAQ, emphasis mine

An article entitled "Elvish As She Is Spoke" goes into more depth about the history of Tolkien's Elvish and the problems with trying to learn to speak it.

## "But don't they speak Elvish in the films?"

The lines and lyrics from Tolkien's languages in the Peter Jackson films were written by David Salo, a linguist who wrote a grammar of Sindarin. He built the dialogue he needed on the limited available attested vocabulary, coining some new words himself but with the goal of making it intelligible to any viewers familiar with Tolkien's languages. To quote him:

> Why is there Elvish in the movie? Why did Peter Jackson care enough to strive for some accuracy in the way language is presented? (...) The Elvish in the movie is addressed to the minority of viewers who know something about the languages. And what are they going to want to do when they hear the Elvish sentences? They're going to want to figure out what they mean, and *why* they mean what they mean. Part of *my* intention, my particular vision and contribution to this movie, was to create sentences which would be intelligible to the people who study the languages (...) I'm enormously happy to see some people saying based on their knowledge of Elvish, great or small, that they recognized and understood some of what they heard on the screen. That's great - that's *exactly* the kind of effect that I was looking for.

Here is a collection of the translated dialogue from the LoTR films, with the attested and unattested vocabulary in each line listed. As you can see, a lot of it is attested in Tolkien's works, but there is quite a bit that needed to be invented for the film by Salo. There have been other projects based on Tolkien's Elvish languages in the past as well, but the real fanatics tend to view these as "pseudo-Elvish", since anything not invented by Tolkien can't really be said to be part of Tolkien's Elvish. That said, there's nothing wrong with seeking out resources for and learning these expansions on Tolkien's conlangs -- just know that calling any one an authentic recreation of Tolkien's Elvish is pretty flawed.

## Tl;dr

> Since Tolkien never fixed his languages firmly or described them completely enough to provide any such comprehensive and corrective model (that never being his goal), ... it is consequently a further inescapable fact that no one has or ever will be able to speak Quenya and Sindarin, any more than anyone will ever (again) be able to speak, say, Etruscan or any other fragmentarily-attested non-living language.

Look into the E.L.F.'s resources (though they do seem a tad outdated) if you're interested in further exploring what information we have about Tolkien's Elvish.

---
Tags: tolkien-elvish, speech-communities
---


# Question
Title: Mixed writing systems - which words should have their own symbols?
Assume that a conlang is written partially with an alphabet and partially with pictograms. The idea is to have something like the Japanese writing system.

Does it follows the structure of natlangs to have symbols for the words which are of particular cultural importance for the speakers of this language? Is there a common pattern or system for a categorisation of words which have their own symbols in most of the natlangs using such a mixed writing system, e.g. *man*, *woman* etc?

# Answer
> 6 votes
There is already a conlang that kind of does that. In toki pona you can write the words in a set of pictograms (actually, there are several pictogrammatic writing systems, I'm referring here to the 'hieroglyphs' from the official book). As there are only 120 words, it's easy to have pictograms for all of them.

The only problem is what happens with **other** words. Names, for example. The toki pona solution is to select a hieroglyph whose word starts with the respective sound. This leaves some choice, as you typically have several pictograms available and you can choose a word whose meaning is somewhat relevant to the name. For example, *Kanata* (Canada) could start with the pictogram for *kasi* ("plant, leaf"), to link to the maple leaf; *Nokisi* (Norway) would start with *nena* ("hill, mountain"), etc.

Here you are using pictograms to **spell** a word, but it is easily conceivable to have a separate script for names and foreign words.

If the vocabulary of your language is substantially larger than toki pona's 120 words, you might not want to use pictograms for everything. In this case you could use them either for 'core' words (whether you define them by meaning, age, etymology or frequency), or it could be words that have no inflections (and thus don't change, eg function words like *and* and *for* in English).

In the end it's your choice how you solve this, but there are certainly some possible justifications for different choices that you could explore.

# Answer
> 5 votes
One consideration is the source of the symbols themselves. DINGIR had the syllabic value /an/ in Sumerian, but it also stood in for the word "god" because An was a Sumerian god. (And, one step further, DINGIR still meant "god" in Akkadian even though the Akkadian word for god was now *ilu*.)

The Sinaitic inscriptions were written in an abjad, and yet (may have) used certain letters as the words that the letters were derived from: For instance, the glyph *ʾ* may have stood for ox (\* *ʾalp*), *h* may have stood for celebration (\* *hillul*), and *r* for head (\* *raʾsh*), because the pictures that originally formed those letters depicted an ox, celebration, and a head.

So if your script derives some of its symbols from pictures of something, the symbol could stand in for the word that the glyph depicts (or once depicted). This is a little circular when trying to determine which words should have their own symbols, but the point is that what determines which words have this status is often just an accident of history instead of a categorization of important words.

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Tags: writing-systems, cultural-influence
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# Question
Title: Are there works composed in Quenya or Sindarin by people other than Tolkien himself?
Are there any works composed (e.g., peoms, songs, short stories) in either Quenya or Sindarin by other authors than JRR Tolkien himself?

I am already aware of some dialogues in the *Lord of the Rings* films, these do not count here as an answer.

# Answer
> 4 votes
**NB: I am not competent to guarantee that any of these works are "correct" or "grammatical", with the exception of JRRT's submission.**

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Tags: tolkien-elvish
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# Question
Title: Could a language with no voiced fricatives exist?
I am working on a language and I am trying to bring it down to seventeen consonants. One of the ways I am trying to do that is by removing all voiced fricatives. Is this even reasonable?

# Answer
> 6 votes
According to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), a large database of various world languages' structural properties gathered from descriptive materials like grammars, around a third of the surveyed languages have a voicing contrast in plosives but not fricatives, and another third have no voicing contrast in either plosives or fricatives. Based on this, it seems that by raw numbers you're *more* likely to have only voiceless fricatives than you are to have both voiced and voiceless fricatives.

# Answer
> 6 votes
There are even languages with *no fricatives at all*. The UPSID sample contains 31 of them, making 6.8% of the sample.

FUll output of my UPSID query:

The 'fricative' sounds do not occur in these languages:

Language (sounds)

ALAWA (26) ANDAMANESE (24) ANGAATIHA (21) ARRERNTE (30) AUCA (21) BANDJALANG (16) BARDI (24) BORORO (20) BURARRA (21) DERA (17) DINKA (32) DIYARI (25) DYIRBAL (16) EKARI (15) GARAWA (22) GUGU-YALANDYI (16) KALKATUNGU (23) MALAKMALAK (19) MBABARAM (24) MURINHPATHA (25) NASIOI (13) NGARINJIN (24) NGIYAMBAA (18) NUNGGUBUYU (23) PANARE (25) WARAY (21) WESTERN DESERT (20) WIK-MUNKAN (18) YANYUWA (32) YIDINY (16) YOLNGU (23)

These 31 languages are 6.87% of all languages in UPSID.

Querying for languages without voiced fricatives gives "These 222 languages are 49.22% of all languages in UPSID". So the absence of voiced fricatives is a quite common feature of natural languages.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Sure. A lot of languages don't distinguish voicing in fricatives. This doesn't necessarily mean that fricatives in such languages will be unvoiced, but most of them will probably do that.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Voiced fricatives are actually rare, humans don't seem to like them for some reason.

Of course, you could also count languages that don't distinguish voicing at all, but many of these make some other distinction like aspiration.

There are some languages out there with phoneme inventories even smaller than what you're aiming for. Piraha and Rotokas come to mind. Creoles in general tend to have minimalistic phoneme inventories too.

---
Tags: phonology, naturalism
---


title: Are there nasalized nasal consonants?

text:
# Question
Title: Are there nasalized nasal consonants?
As in, \[ñ\] or \[ñ̃\]. It seems to me you can make a nasal sound more nasal, maybe by stressing your nose muscles or something in that sense. Does this exist?

EDIT: Apologies, I was thinking about *Nareal consonants*, which do apparently exist. (see answer by me below, the other answers are also good.)

# Answer
Nasal consonants are not nasal because you use any "nose muscles", but because the nasal passage is open and air is passing through it as well as the mouth. To my knowledge, the nasal passage does not have different degrees of being open or closed, so there wouldn't be any way to make a nasal consonant *more* nasal.

However, there are definitely some sounds that are *less* nasal than standard nasal stops. Prenasalized and poststopped consonants, where a nasal followed by a non-nasal stop is treated as a single consonant, exist and are phonemic in some languages. There are also denasal phones, in which the nasal passage is open and used as a resonant cavity but air does not flow out the nose (think of how someone sounds when they have a stuffy nose). While denasals are not phonemic in any natlang to my knowledge, they are sometimes allophonic or phonetically present in a language that is losing its nasals.
> 6 votes

---
Tags: phonetics
---


# Question
Title: List of conlangs whose goal is to minimize ambiguity
Which conlangs have a primary goals of avoiding ambiguity?

I know Lojban had that as a goal (and is in fact syntactically unambiguous), but are there others?

# Answer
> 6 votes
Here are the top five best-known (see footnote 1).

All these have Wikipedia articles under their name, except Ceqli (available on Dutch Wikipedia) to which you can go via the link given.

---

Footnotes: 1) These languages (except Lojban and possibly Ithkuil) don't actively disambiguate *phonemic* ambiguity. That's the difference between 'an app' and 'a nap'. It resulted in English *a nickname*, from *an ekename*. 2) An example of formal logic, using prerequisite axioms `[PERSON(a) 'A is a person', HAVE_ALIENABLE(a, b) 'A has B alienably', HEAD(a) 'A is a head']`, is `∀ x: PERSON(x) → (∃ y: HAVE_ALIENABLE(x, HEAD(y)))` ('Everyone has a head', 'For every X, if X is a person, there exists some Y which X has alienably and which is a head').

---
Tags: ambiguity, list-of-languages, design-goals
---


title: An Elvish word for squirrel

text:
# Question
Title: An Elvish word for squirrel
Is there an Elvish word for squirrel?

According to my latest information from Helmut W. Pesch, Das große Elbisch-Buch, Bastei-Lübbe 2009, there is no such word.

My best try is the Quenya word *nornoyaulë* (literally "oak cat", from *norno* "oak" and *yaulë* "cat", formed after a German dialectal word).

# Answer
## peccuvo

*peccuvo* (Quenya): Squirrel, lit. "nut-hider" \[*pec* 'nut' + *kuvo* 'hider'\] (source: Parma Eldalamberon #22 2015).
> 10 votes

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Tags: tolkien-elvish, phrase-request
---


# Question
Title: What are reasons to construct an auxlang, artlang, altlang, etc?
What are reasons to construct a language? Why do people construct languages? For example, auxlangs are created for global (or regional) 'compatibility'. Why do people construct artlangs, altlangs, englangs, auxlangs and philangs?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I cannot speak for any other language creator, but I have done so as part of "worldbuilding" - for an alien world to have alien languages adds verisimilitude, and even if the language isn't actually heavily used, knowing how the language works and having a partial vocabulary lets me insert words from that language where there is no exact translation in English, or where the English would be a long circumlocution. As an example, one language I worked up has a word that means, literally, "a change in lighting that reveals new detail", but whose use has been extended to the metaphorical equivalent - and in one discussion in the associated story, after one character explained something to another, the second thanked the first - "That was a very useful *kurìshdàm*; thank you."

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Tags: history, typology
---


# Question
Title: Is a naturalistic language without countable nouns possible?
Is a naturalistic language without count nouns possible, thus having only mass nouns? This would mean having many words for things with water: a sea, an ocean, a bottle of water, a puddle, etc.
What about compounding to get these words?

# Answer
As a matter of fact, Mandarin Chinese can be considered to be such a language - it treats every noun as a mass noun. Every noun requires a "measure word" for counting, like "bottle" in "four bottles of water" or "sheet" in "ten sheets of paper". Chinese has a considerable list of these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Chinese\_classifiers) but there's no particular reason that a language with only mass nouns would need to have so many classifiers.
> 8 votes

# Answer
Yes. A language can treat all nouns as mass nouns and require classifiers when counting objects.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, morphology, naturalism, nouns
---


# Question
Title: Klingon: does anyone actually use pIqaD, or is the Latin transliteration sufficient?
Having just started the Duolingo Klingon course, I'm wondering if anybody is using the Klingon writing system (pIqaD) at all, or whether the Latin transliteration is always used?

As the characters look pretty hard to learn for someone with a Western background, I tend towards the transliteration only; I guess one issue is a cursive (ie handwriting) script, as the original characters seem hard to write by hand.

# Answer
The official Klingon orthography according to the Klingon Language Institute is the Latin transcription. It is what Marc Okrand, the language's creator, developed and uses.

The Klingon script used in from Star Trek: the Next Generation on, known as the Okuda script (Michael Okuda was the set designer for Next Generation), is used, but it's worth noting that while the sounds of Klingon have been mapped onto these letters, the movies and shows just put random jumbles of letters on signs and things (this may not be true of Star Trek: Discovery, however -- I've heard they may actually have translated the signage). It's also not the only Klingon script to have been used -- according to an article in HolQeD, the Klingon Language Institute's journal, the 1980 *U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual* (now out of print) featured a completely different Klingon script, though this one was a mere way of encoding English text rather than being mapped onto Klingon phonemes (Okrand did not publish *The Klingon Dictionary* until 1985, after all).

Given this sort of background, you can by no means take for granted that the Okuda script is the "real" Klingon `pIqaD`, even though it will be occasionally used to write Klingon. The Okrand transliteration is the only truly official orthography.

In any case, resources and activities written in Klingon are more often written using the official Okrand transliteration than with the Okuda script -- the Klingon subtitles on Star Trek: Discovery, for one example, are in the transliteration (can't make Unicode add new characters for such things, after all!) In general, you'll be fine with just the transliteration -- in fact, you may have an easier time, as the transliteration is easy to type. That said, no one will judge you if you use the Okuda script because you want the writing to feel less Terran or something.
> 15 votes

# Answer
pIqaD shows up here and there, but in my experience (which is 20 years old, but I haven't seen much to contradict it), its use is emblematic. People will put a word up here and there, and it will appear in T-shirts; but people do not read connected texts in it.

As is, pIqaD is indeed unwritable with a pen. I experimented in my time with ways of making it more writeable: see my handiwork at Klingonska Akademien, linked from the discussion of some pictures of pIqaD.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Mark Shoulson revived the proposal to encode Klingon in Unicode, in a 2016 document called “pIqaD (Klingon) and its Usage.” In it, he gives several examples, including a comic book, *Star Trek: \[Manifest Destiny\] #1*, translated into Klingon and printed almost entirely in *pIqaD*.

The most recent example I’ve seen of someone using *pIqaD* in a context that has nothing to do with *Star Trek* is that some fans of the pro soccer player Meghan Klingenberg, of the Portland Thorns, bring this banner to all her home games in Portland, Oregon (photo by Molly Blue):

The Klingon Wiki has a list of fonts that support Klingon, including several that encode it in the region of the Private Use Area standardized by the Linux Kernel, and later, the ConScript Unicode Registry and adopted by the Klingon Language Instutute. There are, additionally, several TeX packages not listed there that support Klingon.

The font downloads and some other support files are on this page, although you might not necessarily want to install the registry entries, It’s usable; I got this image in LuaLaTeX with the KAG pIqaD font, complete with kerning:

Here is the same template with the font Klingon pIqaD vaHbo’ by Mike Neft:

Source code, in case the template is useful:

```
\documentclass[preview,varwidth]{standalone}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\makeatletter
%% Use the ISO 639 language code tlh as an abbreviation.
\newcommand\@tlhfontname{pIqaD}

%% Because many Klingon fonts do not contain a Latin alphabet, take the ratio
%% of the height of the H in the main text font to either the Latin H of the
%% the pIqaD font if it contains one, or the Klingon H if it does not, and
%% scale the pIqaD by that ratio.  This means pIqaD will match the height of
%% English.
\newlength{\@capheight}
\settoheight{\@capheight}{\normalfont H}

\newlength{\@tlhheight}
\settoheight{\@tlhheight}{{\fontspec{\@tlhfontname}
                           \iffontchar\font`H
                              H
                           \else
                              \symbol{"F8D6}
                           \fi}}

\newcommand{\@capratio}{\strip@pt\dimexpr 1.0pt *
                        \numexpr\@capheight\relax /
                        \numexpr\@tlhheight\relax\relax }

%% For symmetry with Polyglossia's \sanskritfont, \sanskrittext,
%% \devanagarifont, etc.
\newfontfamily{\klingonfont}{\@tlhfontname}[Scale=\@capratio]

\newcommand\klingontext[1]{{\klingonfont #1\relax}}

%% It's more consistent with LaTeX conventions to define strictly text-mode
%% symbols with names like \texttlhA than \klingonA, and this is a Very
%% Serious Project™.
\newcommand\texttlhA{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhB{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhCH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhD{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhE{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhI{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhJ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhL{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8D9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhM{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DA}}}
\newcommand\texttlhN{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DB}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNG{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DC}}}
\newcommand\texttlhO{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhP{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQ{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8DF}}}
\newcommand\texttlhQH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhR{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhS{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhT{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTLH{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhU{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhV{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhW{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhY{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhGlott{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8E9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhZero{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F0}}}
\newcommand\texttlhOne{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F1}}}
\newcommand\texttlhTwo{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F2}}}
\newcommand\texttlhThree{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F3}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFour{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F4}}}
\newcommand\texttlhFive{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F5}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSix{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F6}}}
\newcommand\texttlhSeven{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F7}}}
\newcommand\texttlhEight{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F8}}}
\newcommand\texttlhNine{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8F9}}}
\newcommand\texttlhComma{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FD}}}
\newcommand\texttlhStop{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FE}}}
\newcommand\texttlhMumm{\klingontext{\symbol{"F8FF}}}

\makeatother

\newcommand\tlhIngenbergh{\texttlhTLH\texttlhL\texttlhI\texttlhNG%
\texttlhE\texttlhN\texttlhB\texttlhE\texttlhR\texttlhGH}
% Could also directly insert the Unicode PUA characters.
\newlength{\nameWidth}
\settowidth{\nameWidth}{\tlhIngenbergh}

\begin{document}

\resizebox{\nameWidth}{!}{\texttlhMumm} \\
\tlhIngenbergh

\end{document}

```
> 3 votes

---
Tags: writing-systems, klingon
---


# Question
Title: Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages
Are there known cases of borrowing of words from a constructed language into a natural language?

Words constructed arbitrarily *in* a natural language don't count here. For example, the Estonian word *relv* "weapon, firearm" coined in the 20th century (probably influenced by English revolver) wouldn't count.

# Answer
> 11 votes
Danish has borrowed the word *Volapük* (spelt *volapyk* in Danish) from the conlang of the same name, however unlike in the source where it means "world language", in Danish is has come to have the meaning "nonsense, unintellegible garbage", as in *Det er det rene volapyk!* "It's all Greek to me (lit. it is the pure volapük)".

# Answer
> 14 votes
The verb "to grok", having been coined by Robert Heinlein for his Novel *Stranger in a Strange Land* has gained significant popularity and is used with the same meaning as in the original language.

I am however not sure whether this meets the criteria of coming from a constructed language: To my knowledge the martians' language is clearly stated to be a full fledged language *inside universe of the book*, but "to grok" is one of the few (if not only) word to be given explicitly and there does not seem to be a full-fledged grammar or lexicon anywhere.

See also \[1\]; \[2\]

# Answer
> 8 votes
The most common one I can think of is *yahoo*, which was the name for brutish humans in the language of the Houyhnhnms from Jonathan Swift’s *Gulliver’s Travels*. The words *Lilliputian* and *Brobdignagian* have also entered the language from the same source, as have *big-endian* and *little-endian*, supposedly calques from the fictional Lilliputian language. *Utopia* is the endonym for the island nation of Thomas More’s novel, although it’s derived from Greek roots. Several of the portmanteau words Lewis Caroll had his characters from Wonderland or his other fictional settings say have become real words, for example, *chortled*. These might be considered words from an invented dialect. *Munchkin*, from L. Frank Baum’s *The Wizard of Oz*, has become both a dictionary word for a small person and a slang word for an immature powergamer. (Arguably, *Oz* has become a nickname for Australia.) *Robot* is another common word that might qualify: it was a trademark in the play *Rossum’s Universal Robots*, derived from Czech roots. None of these, however, were ever fleshed out into complete conlangs.

Another well-known example is *Idaho*, a made-up name that was passed off as a word from some Native language that supposedly meant, “gem of the mountains” even though the Natives did not mine or cut gems. As far as we know, a man named William Craig just invented it as a hoax. This was originally proposed as a name for what is now Colorado, but voted down in Congress after a blistering speech by Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, who said, “I do not believe it is an Indian word, \[...\] No Indian tribe in the nation has that word \[...\] It is a corruption certainly, a counterfeit, and ought not to be adopted.” No one has any idea where the word *Oregon* comes from, either, but certainly not any language native to the Pacific Northwest, so it’s only fair that Lane relented in 1863 when the name was re-used for the entirely different territory that still bears it today. There are many other stories of made-up foreign-sounding names becoming official, including Plano, Texas, which does not really mean flatland in Spanish.

To my surprise, I can’t think of a good example from Tolkien: *Hobbit*, for example, has become a name for the extinct species *Homo Floresensis*, but within the conceit of the novel, Tolkien used it as the translation from his conlang into English. Hobbit is an obscure Old English word that had been used occasionally before. Tolkien reveals in the appendix to *Return of the King* that it was an English calque for the actual endonym *Kuduk* in his conlang, meaning Hole-Dweller. Similarly, most of the other words in Tolkien that sound exotic were revived from Old English as “translations” from his conlangs, along with the obsolete plural forms *elves* and *dwarves* that he personally brought back. He might have a strong claim that the word *orc* today brings to mind his *orch*, translated from his conlangs into English as *orc*, but which is nothing like the sea-monster named *Orc* in the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, so the word should just be considered a homophone. The most familiar words from his conlangs themselves, not translated into English, would be the inscription on the One Ring. That is, unless you consider the English translations in the body of the text a conlang!

In *Star Trek*, the writers originally borrowed names from Western mythology, like Vulcan and Romulan, and later on, when they developed more serious conlangs for those species, came up with the justification that they didn’t really call themselves that in their own languages at all. However, loghaD gives the example of *Qapla'*, from Klingon, occasionally used by SF geeks to mean “Success!” in English, although it would not be familiar to most native speakers. I’ve heard geeks drop words and phrases from many sources about as often, like *grok* from Robert Heinlein’s Martian and *Bah-weep-graaaaagnah wheep nini bong* from *Transformers: The Movie*.

*Kryptonite*, now used as a generic word for an Achilles’ heel, was retconned into the alien endonym *Krypton*, a combination of the names of the Adam and Eve-figures of the alien species, Kryp and Tonn, plus the scientific suffix *-ite*. That it’s a homonym of a different chemical element in English is, in-universe, a coincidence. This is of course from DC Comics’ *Superman*.

Murry Gell-Mann has said he took the word *quark* from a nonsense poem in James Joyce’s *Finnegan’s Wake*, where it could have meant many different things at once.

There are several other made-up words in science fiction that have become at least somewhat widely-known. *Ansible*, by Ursula K. LeGuin, has been borrowed by many other works of science fiction. *Zeerust*, from Douglas Adams’ *The Meaning of Laff* (which gave geographic names joke definitions) is actually used by some writers, particularly at TV Tropes, in the sense he gave it: the particular kind of datedness of something that tried to be futuristic way back when. *Morlocks*, from H.G. Wells’ *The Time Machine*, appears in some dictionaries as a generic term for feral people. At least one college gave freshmen an orientation course called “Finding your Patronus,” after the spell from *Harry Potter*.

It’s anybody’s guess where Biblical and other mythological names that have become dictionary words, such as *Eden*, *cherubic*, *Semitic* or *siren*, came from, but one possibility is that some were made up from whole cloth at some point.

Unless you are an especially fundamentalist member of the Latter-Day Saints movement (not the same thing as a member of the FLDS!), you consider Joseph Smith’s Reformed Egyptian a conlang that gave us such words as *Deseret*. If any example I mentioned is from a scripture you believe to be literally true, I respect your religious freedom.

One edge case: a *barbarian* originally meant someone who didn’t speak Greek, and who sounded to the Greeks like he was saying “bar-bar-bar.” There’s a joke like this in what might be considered a work of ancient SF, Aristophanes’ *The Birds*, where a foreign god speaks only in nonsense syllables that the picaresque heroes pretend to translate, and although none of them became words, the calque *Cloudcuckooland* did.

All of those are words in English, but you asked about loanwords from any conlang to any natural language. Someone else brought up the conlang Esperanto, which now has native speakers (although I’m not aware of any loanwords from Esperanto in natural languages other than the name of the language itself). Some other answers on this site have suggested that Classical Sanskrit or Modern Hebrew might be considered conlangs of a sort, which in the process of turning a natural language into a literary language more like what its compilers wanted it to be, created a new one. One might then bring several others up, such as Old Church Slavonic, Indonesian, Katharevousa, Guarani or Bokmål, although I certainly do not have the expertise to debate how to classify any of them.

# Answer
> 5 votes
At the risk of sounding *too obvious*, the word *Esperanto* has been borrowed into many natural languages, with the meaning of "universal neutral way of communication". See e.g. phrases like "mathematics is the Esperanto of natural sciences" etc.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The word *Qapla'* ("success") is listed as an English word on Wiktionary, which in essence means that it is regarded as an English loanword from Klingon. It has sparked some debate, but it has survived Wiktionary's verification process twice (once in 2007 and again in 2008), even after a specific policy limiting words from fictional universes was instituted.

I wonder if the Klingon insult *petaQ* may also attain a similar status at some point. Although hardly commonplace, I've seen people use it in social media, without reference to Klingons or Star Trek, and as a part of otherwise English sentences (rather than just as an isolated phrase, as is usually the case with *Qapla'*). They usually spell it differently, however, with variations including *p'tak*, *p'takh*, *patak*, *p'tok* and others.

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Tags: natural-languages, borrowings
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# Question
Title: How do Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole?
In the book and TV series The Expanse inhabitants of the asteroid belt (Belters) speak a language called Belter Creole, a conlang designed by Nick Farmer which is intended to be the result of creolisation between most of the Earth's languages, including English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Romance languages, Hindi, Slavic, and Bantu. Although the dominant language of the series is English, Belters frequent mix in Belter Creole words, an example of code-switching.

I would like to know in which social situations Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole, or in order words, in which registers. (A register is "a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting" (Wikipedia).) Do Belters code-switch productively in all registers, or only in non-formal registers?

# Answer
Nick has talked about how there is no “slang” per se in Belter. Languages like French are spoken both on the street and in high society, so there are multiple registers. It’s an introductory language for many people.

Slang is often used to exclude; if you’re not “one of us” but you still Speak the language, you still are on the outside because you can’t quite follow what’s being said.

A language like Quechua in South America (according to Nick) doesn’t develop slang because speaking it is already a marker for being low-status socially (vs Spanish speakers). Speaking Quechua already excludes those on the other end of the linguistic divide.

Belter is similar. Nobody but Belters speak it (maybe some inner intelligence officers do, the way UK troops would learn Irish during the troubles. Speaking Belter is a mark of low social status.

Nick has said that he would imagine belters “fluidly speaking belt Lish. One can code shift on the fly between the two languages quite easily. If there amongst a bunch a rock hopper’s, they’ll probably all speak pure LB. When they’re on the docks, when there are more inners around, probably shift more towards English.

Belters have to speak English to deal with the UN/MCRN tax Collectors. When they get boarded by Mickie Marines, you BETTER speak English. When they deal with the any government office, it’ll be in English.

In Haiti, the majority of the population are monolingual Kreyol speakers. But the language of Education and government forms is French. That leads to some fucked-up outcomes. I imagine Belter would be treated like Creole languages usually are; something broken & degenerate, not a real language.

The correspondence courses Naomi took were almost certainly in English. Nobody is translating engineering textbooks into a “degenerate” language like a Creole, and nobody is teaching this classs in LB. Hinikirii Brown’s tablet on Anderson Station was in English, although he father spoke to her mostly in LB.

Miller is a perfect example of code shifting. Watch his hands throughout the seasons; for a “welwala”, he is the most hand-gesturing Belter on Ceres. When interviewing Gia (who has just had a client murdered in her room), he interviews her in LB to set her at ease. But when talking to the Governor’s agent about the water thieves, he speaks perfect English.

Prax is an educated Belter. You don’t do botany classes in LB. and when he wakes up on the refugee ship, he first asks for Mei in English. When he realizes the crewman he’s speaking to is a Belter, Prax switches to LB. Prax spends so much time speaking English, shifting back into LB is something that takes a moment.

So yeah, my feeling is the code shift mainly comes from “am I speaking to a Belter, or an Inner?” The inner/Belter dichotomy is cooked into LB down to the level of pronouns the way social hierarchy is cooked into Japanese.

“Beltalowda” is the plural pronoun for “Belters” with the connotation of both “all Belters” as well as “us Belters” ( becaus again, almost nobody outside Belters speaks LB). “Inyalowda” is both “all inners” \[No distinction between Earther or Martian\], and “You inners”.
> 4 votes

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Tags: registers, belter-creole
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# Question
Title: What do double consonants specify in Esperanto?
The Esperanto word for 'Finland' is *Finnlando*. What does the doubled consonant specify? The Esperanto alphabet is phonemic. Why are there two consonants? Is it gemination (which doesn't appear often elsewhere in Esperanto)?

# Answer
There are two questions (with answers) on the Esperanto stackexchange dealing with this problem (and yes, it is perceived as a problem even among Esperanto speakers):

The conclusion is: The double letter should be pronounced differently from the single letter, and it should be a true double consonant (not just a long consonant). *Finnlando* becomes hard to pronounce by these rules, and Esperantists are in fact shifting to the word *Suomio*.
> 8 votes

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Tags: writing-systems, phonology, esperanto
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# Question
Title: How to model the change of script over time
I want two languages to share a root but I want them to look unrecognizable written down (with the original language having a written form, so not independently created writing systems). Are there any well known patterns of how languages can change their script over time? What is some general advise on how to make this change realistic?

# Answer
> 7 votes
1. The surface that things are written on. Runes were carved in trees and, as such, do not have curves. The Greek alphabet was written on tablets, and curved lines were possible. The Arabic alphabet was written quickly on papyrus. Also, some civilisations might prefer cursive script over others. Arabic letters differ whether they're isolated, at the beginning of a word, at the end or in the middle. So does your handwriting with the Roman script. But Arabic kept their cursive when the digital age came, and the Roman script got rid of it and created the same character.
Os (runes), psi (Greek alphabet, but modernised on a computer, see footnote 1), šīn (Arabic script, isolated)

# ᚩ, Ψ, ش
2. Let's call the ancestor A. The two daughter languages will be called B1 and B2. A could be a pictographic script, from which B1 devised a syllabary but B2 kept pictographs. Or A was an abjad (alphabet without vowels) and B1 became an alphabet whereas B2 stayed an abjad.
3. Although language is passed on from mother language to daughter language with diachronics, script *doesn't need to*. In fact, you don't often see one script in the same language for three language-generations except in some cases like Latin (but Vulgar Latin wasn't really written much). Borrow a script from a neighbouring language. This is what I recommend doing.

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Footnotes: 1) Ancient Greek part of the Rosetta stone. Greek characters in Unicode are in many fonts modernised, this is an example of typical Ancient Greek script.

# Answer
> 4 votes
There are several factors in a writing system that can be subject to change:

* *The style of writing*: In fact, style is ever-changing in human culture, and we see new styles every generation. Old styles may be revived, or the new styles become divergent enough to be considered a new writing system. Note that handwriting from a century ago (e.g., in Germany) is already very hard to read for the current generation and special training is needed to do it.
* *The set of symbols used for writing*: Some symbols may fall out of use, others are newly introduced (either by borrowing (Greek Y and Z into Latin Y and Z), or by modification of existing symbols (Latin V splitting up into U, V, W), or by new invention "out of nothing" (Emoji).
* *The use of diacritical marks*: The writing system may be borrowed from another language and is not a perfect fit for the new language. Some devices are needed to accommodate the sounds of the new language to the writing system, like digraphs (e.g, English *sh* or *ch*), diacritical marks, additional letters, or a combination of any of the former.

Whether the introduced changes create a new writing system or just a variant of an existing writing system is merely a question of definition. I remember a heated debate on the Unicode mailing list whether Hebrew and Phoenician are one or two writing systems.

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Tags: conlang-creation, diachronics, writing-systems
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# Question
Title: How Standard Average European is Esperanto?
Esperanto is by design based on European languages, so every similarity to European languages is in fact intended.

But I want to know how Standard Average European (SAE criteria listed by @Sparksbet) Esperanto is. One of the hallmarks of SAE, the *have-perfect*, is absent from Esperanto, and some criteria are formulated in a way that I feel not able to evaluate them. Has someone undertaken this already, or can do it on-the-fly?

See also this combination of features in Esperanto that is not matched by SAE languages but by central Semitic languages and Welsh.

# Answer
> 11 votes
# Tl;dr: Esperanto possesses about 8/12 SAE features

Let's go through these features one by one. This is going to be pretty long, sorry for that. For reference, I'm using the famous Haspelmath paper as reference for which features define the SAE sprachbund, as I did in my earlier post.

## 1. Definite and indefinite articles - ✗

Esperanto defies SAE norms out the gate here, as it **only has a definite article**.

> *libro* \- "a book"
> *la libro* \- "the book"

This is actually quite bizarre, as those SAE languages that do not fit this criterion (such as Slavic languages, which heavily influenced Esperanto) have no articles at all. However, some neighboring non-SAE languages do have only a definite article, so this isn't too bizarre cross-linguistically.

## 2. Relative clauses with relative pronouns - ✓

Haspelmath characterizes this way of forming relative clauses, unique to SAE languages, by the following criteria:

* The relative clause is post-nominal
* There is an inflecting relative pronoun
* This pronoun introduces the relative clause
* The relative pronoun functions as a resumptive, signalling the head's role in the relative clause.

Esperanto relative clauses **fit all of these criteria**.

> *Tiu blua balono, **kion** mi estis tenanta, knalis*
> "That blue balloon, which I was holding, popped."

Here, the relative clause *kion mi estis tenanta* follows the nominal head *balono*. It is introduced by an inflecting relative pronoun *kion*, which is inflected for the accusative case to mark the balloon's role in the clause (that it is the object of *estas tenanta*. Pretty much prototypical SAE here.

## 3. 'Have'-perfect - ✗

Many European languages used a form of "to have" plus a passive participle to mark what we can loosely call the perfect. The languages that possess this construction have grammaticalized it to different degrees, but according to Haspelmath, "what is important here is that they all must have had basically the same meaning when they were first created."

Esperanto **does not have a 'have'-perfect**. Instead, Esperanto emulates Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in using "to be" + an active participle -- a form Haspelmath explicitly contrasts with the 'have'-perfect in his article.

> *Mi estas vidinta la viron.*
>
> ```
> mi est-as vid-i-nta          la  vir-on
> I  be-PRS see-PERF-ACT.PTCP  the man-ACC
>
> ```
>
> "I have seen the man."

Unsurprising given Zamenhof's language background, but not SAE.

## 4. Nominative experiencers - ✓

With "verbs of sensation, emotion, cognition, and perception," there are two main strategies for expressing the experiencer -- either the experiencer is treated like an agent and marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "I like it"), or it is treated like a patient or goal and the stimulus is marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "It pleases me", "It is pleasing to me"). English pretty much exclusively uses nominative experiencers, but this isn't strictly binary across languages -- many languages, including quite a few SAE languages, will have some verbs that do the former and some that do the latter. However, most SAE languages have a very strong tendency to prefer nominative experiencers.

Esperanto **primarily uses nominative experiencers**.

> * *Mi vidis fantomon.* \- "I saw a ghost."
> * *Mi timas la mallumon.* \- "I fear the darkness."
> * *Mi flaras florojn.* \- "I smell flowers."

Esperanto does possess at least one verb that bucks the trend, *plaĉi*.

> *Ĉokolado plaĉas al mi*
> "I like chocolate" (lit., "Chocolate is pleasing to me.")

However, even this construction is gradually becoming less used over time as speakers favor the nominative experiencer verb *ŝati* instead.

> *Mi ŝatas ĉokoladon.*
> "I like chocolate."

Therefore, I think it's safe to say that Esperanto is pretty SAE in this regard.

## 5. Participial passive - ✓

To quote Haspelmath: "Standard Average European languages typically have a canonical passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb ("be", "become", or the like). In this passive the original direct object becomes the subject and the original subject may be omitted, but it may also be expressed as an adverbial agent phrase."

**Esperanto passives behave pretty much exactly in this way.** Unsurprising, since none of the language families from which it draws its inspiration differ from the SAE trend here either.

> *La knabo estas batita (de sia fratino).*
>
> ```
> la  knab-o  est-as bat-i-ta           de si-a      frat-in-o
> the boy-NOM be-PRS hit-PERF-PASS.PTCP of REFL-POSS brother-FEM-NOM
>
> ```
>
> "The boy is hit (by his sister)."

Granted, these passive participle constructions in Esperanto can often be avoided using anticausitive morphology or free word order in contexts where this type of passive construction would be unavoidable in, say, English. But this construction exists and is certainly frequently used enough to be considered a nicely SAE feature of Esperanto.

## 6. Anticausative prominence - ?

Esperanto possesses both a causative affix *-ig* and an anticausative affix *-iĝ*, both of which are used very frequently.

> ```
> fand-i           fand-iĝ-i          brul-i             brul-ig-i
> melt-INF         melt-ANTIC-INF     burn-INF           burn-CAUS-INF
> "to melt (tr.)"  "to melt (intr.)"  "to burn (intr.)"  "to burn (tr.)"
>
> ```

To say for certain that Esperanto has a preference for one over the other, some proper analysis of the language's vocabulary and usage would have to be done. In my limited experience, I'd say that they're about equally common in Esperanto, but it's really not possible to say without a lot more research into Esperanto verbs and their usage.

## 7. Dative external possessors - ✓

As @jknappen has pointed out, Esperanto **does allow for dative external possessors**

> *Mi lavas **al mi** la manoj.*
> "I wash my hands." (literally, "I wash to me the hands")

I can't personally speak for how common they are, but the only requirement for this criterion is that they exist.

## 8. Negative pronouns and lack of verbal negation - ✓

This is another easy one, as this SAE feature is **explicitly spelled out in the basic 16 rules of Esperanto:**

> 12. When another NEGATIVE word is present, the word NE \[English no, not\] is omitted.
>
> ```
>   Mi ne  venis     Neniu  venis
>   I  not come      No.one comes
>
> ```

## 9. Particles in comparative constructions - ✓

There are quite a few ways of marking comparatives, but particle comparatives like the English "than" are pretty overwhelmingly SAE. Esperanto **uses a particle comparative**, as its *ol* is pretty much identical in function to English "that".

## 10. Relative-based equative constructions - ✓

Esperanto's equative construction *tiel ... kiel* is actually more **transparently based on relative clauses** than the English construction, as it uses synchronic relative correlatives -- and even the English "as ... as" construction is considered relative-based by Haspelmath. Another transparently SAE feature.

## 11. Subject person affixes as strict agreement markers - ✗

It's far more common, cross-linguistically, for languages with person-marking to be pro-drop. However, several SAE languages (including French, German, and English) inflect the verb to agree with the person/number of the subject *without* allowing the subject to be dropped.

While Esperanto is not pro-drop, to my knowledge, **Esperanto does not inflect verbs to agree with the person or number of the subject**, and so it avoids this SAE feature.

## 12. Intensifier-reflexive differentiation - ✓

European languages verb frequently distinguish between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns, but using one form for both appears to be more common worldwide. English actually averts this, as it uses its reflexive in this intensifier function (e.g., "He did it himself").

**Esperanto's intensifier particle, *mem*, is distinct from its reflexive pronoun *si*.**

> *Li batis sin.*
> "He hit himself."
>
> *Li mem batis ĝin.*
> "He hit it himself."

Thus, Esperanto is SAE in this regard.

# Answer
> 9 votes
# Esperanto shares a number of similarities with Standard Average European and is definitely Eurocentric.

One Eurocentricism is definitely non-existent in Esperanto, and two are questionable.

## ✱ Definite and Indefinite Articles

Esperanto uses a definite article la for definite nouns and uses no article for indefinite nouns. This is like some West Germanic languages (but only in the plural), Icelandic, Faroese and (Ancient) Greek. This doesn't fit the SAE exactly, which states that there is an indefinite article alongside the definite article. Nevertheless, it is also missing in quite\] a few European languages.

## ✓ Post-Nominal Relative Clauses with Resumptive Pronouns

Esperanto has post-nominal relative clauses and allows resumptive pronouns (verification needed). The latter part may be because of a Eurocentricism on Zamenhof's part he didn't notice. This fits the SAE standard.

## ✕ 'To have' Perfect

Esperanto uses *esti* 'to be' where European languages use 'to have'. Active-passive is indicated with the participle, cf. *mi estas vidi**n**ta* 'I have seen' and *mi estas vidita* 'I have been seen'. This doesn't fit the SAE but isn't completely different.

## ✓ Nominative Experiencer

Esperanto is nom.-acc. and uses nom. for A and E, whereas for P acc. is used.This fits the SAE standard. Esperanto prefers 'standard' verbs like 'I like it' over a bit more complicated constructions like 'it satisfies me'. This fits the SAE standard.

## ✱ Active-Passive

Like I said above, passive is formed with 'to be'. But so is the active. The difference isn't the verb 'to be'-'to have', but the participle (specifically, whether the participle has *-ta* or *-nta*). This literally *does* fit the SAE but doesn't act like the SAE languages.

## ✓ Anticausative Preference

Preferences are up to the speakers. I'm not a speaker but I'd say there is a preference for anticausatives over causatives, especially since many Esperanto speakers are European and copy their preferences to Esperanto.

## ✓ Dative External Possession

Esperanto uses dative external possession, especially in translations where another language, with dative external possession, is translated to Esperanto. This fits the SAE.

## ✓ Comparative particle

Esperanto uses the particle *ol* 'than' for comparatives. *Ol* comes from German *als* 'than', also a comparative particle. This fits SAE perfectly.

## ✓ Relative Clause Based Equative Construction

Esperanto uses *tiel ... kiel* for 'as ... as' relative-clause based equative constructions. Literally, that is 'so (in that manner) ... how/as (relatively used: in what manner, in which manner)'. This fits SAE.

## ✓ Reflexive and Intensifier Pronoun

Esperanto doesn't have a form like the English 'himself' and uses *mem* 'self'. This is the root of 'himself'. *Lin mem* 'himself' is literally 'him self'. The reflexive is different, Esperanto uses *si*. This fits SAE standards.

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Tags: esperanto, eurocentrism
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# Question
Title: Is any of the Wakandan writing in Black Panther used for something other than English?
For the film *Black Panther* production designer Hannah Beachler created a Wakandan writing system partially based on real African writing systems. Well that's what this and other news articles say, but if you look at how it's used, for example in the film's intertitles, it's clearly only a transliteration alphabet of English:

You can see here how the letters are 1-1 mappings of the very non-phonemic English spellings.

Now in the film, when the characters aren't speaking English, they are actually speaking Xhosa. (I'm not sure if in-universe that they are meant to be speaking Xhosa, or if Xhosa is just used to represent what would be a distinct Wakandan language in-universe, possibly related to Xhosa.)

Is any of the Wakandan writing in the film used to write Xhosa? Or any other African language, or even an actual conlang?

# Answer
It's important to note that there were **two** Wakandan scripts used in the set design of *Black Panther* -- one is the transliteration alphabet seen here, while the other is a se of symbols based on Nsibidi that is more logographic in nature. They were used on different parts of the set, with the more logographic script occurring in a lot of the more traditional contexts and the alphabet occurring more widely throughout the set.

The Omniglot page for the script includes text written in both English and Xhosa using the script, but the Xhosa text seems transliterated from the romanized orthography for Xhosa. That said, since the author described the alphabetic script as a "more evolved" version of the logography, it's possible that it was deliberately designed to be similar to the Latin transliteration of Xhosa? Granted, that doesn't seem particularly in-character for the Wakanda depicted in the film, but who knows. Perhaps we'll learn more about the script in the inevitable sequel.

I think we *can* say that the alphabetic script is not *only* used to transliterate English as it is in the title cards. Consider this image from the article, which features portions of some Wakandan signs:

The glyphs on the rightward sign are difficult to make out and may be part of the logographic script, but those on the leftward sign read "DJO" in the Wakandan script -- as neither DJO nor OJD are allowable clusters in English, it seems unlikely that this is a portion of an English word transliterated into the alphabet.

However, it definitely is used to transliterate English even outside of the title cards. Let's look at the text on the throne in this poster:

The text on the lefthand side of his throne clearly reads "WISDOM" and the righthand text reads "LOYALTY" -- obviously an English transliteration. This is particularly egregious given that this is the king's throne, which arguably shouldn't feature the modern Wakandan script at all, much less Wakandan being used for English. However, it is admittedly a poster, so it's not really properly in the movie -- I cannot find a screenshot of the base of the throne from the actual film, so I can't say whether the text is the same there.

The alphabetic script is frequently used in the set design of the lab, but the only screenshots I can find of it are either too blurry to make out or just feature simply the glyphs overlapping each other for aesthetic in a screensaver-esque fashion.
> 11 votes

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Tags: writing-systems, classification
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# Question
Title: Is there evidence that any natural languages were actually constructed?
Is there any evidence that a ‘natural’ language that exists today was created by somebody a thousand (or two) years ago. And that it evolved till today?

# Answer
Possibility? Of course, there is always a possibility, but rather remote one, if you mean a full featured well-known modern language.

The best candidates are "taboo languages", where the lexical items are replaced because of taboo/religious pressure. Perhaps the best known is Dyirbal, where a special version of the language is to be used in front of "tabooed" persons.

Though it probably does not go millennia into the past, and it's questionable if it should be considered a language, since it is just a vocabulary encoding.
> 16 votes

# Answer
Yes, the Damin language (Wikipedia article), a ceremonial language and only natural click language outside Africa, was probably constructed.
> 12 votes

# Answer
You could argue that modern Hebrew is at least partly constructed.

Hebrew fell into disuse and only survived as a 'sacred' language in a religious context. Then, with the rise of the Zionist movement towards the end of the 19th Century, Hebrew was modernised and used as a *lingua franca* in the Palestine region. In the process, aspects of Hebrew variants were combined, and the vocabulary was extended to allow the use of Hebrew in modern day life.

See the Wikipedia article on the Revival of Hebrew.
> 9 votes

# Answer
Cryptolects (aka Cants or Secret languages) come to my mind as candidates. While they are typically not fully constructed, they often contain a constructed core vocabulary making the language unintelligible to outsiders. When they exist long enough, they are learned as first language by the group members.

Examples of such cryptolects include Verlan (French based) and Läppe Tellep (German dialect based).

EDIT: It took me some time of searching for this one because I forgot the name: Eskayan spoken on Bohul island in The Phillipines.

EDIT2: Another example where it is probably no longer decidable whether it is an isolate language or a secret language is the Nihali language in central India.
> 7 votes

# Answer
People learn languages from other people who speak them. If someone ever got others to adopt his language as their "natural language," they would have had to learn it from him. Without a community of speakers, it would have been impossible for this to happen. At some point we have to account for the fact that someone would have had to design the language and actually teach it to others.

I believe that this has never happened in *recorded history*. We do indeed find that an early Greek philosopher named Pherecydes invented an "artificial" word for "table":

> He maintained that the divine name for "table" is θυωρός, or that which takes care of offerings. (Diogenes Laertius 1.119)

There is no evidence for anyone ever having invented an *entire language*, which would certainly be much more notable.

This leaves thousands of years of prehistory (before the invention of writing) when this could have happened, but it seems much more difficult to design a language without writing, or, for that matter, to do it without the linguistic knowledge that exists today.

Coining of new words has always happened, but that is language change, which develops from an existing language, and not the invention of an entire language from scratch.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Depending if you include scripts in the definition of "natural language", Hangul is a famous example of an alphabet that was created in the 15th century and has evolved since then.

In addition, the notoriously difficult Tangut script was created "in a very short time" around 1036 and was widely used in books and inscriptions by the Western Xia for about 500 years.
> 4 votes

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Tags: classification, natural-languages
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# Question
Title: How would the grammar of a conlang develop as a creole from other languages?
Assume that the backstory of a conlang is that it developed from a set of other languages. In other words, speakers of these (different) languages were living in the same area and were communicating with each other and from this a new language emerged, a creole.

In such a situation which aspects of the original languages would be inherited by the new languages? Obviously the vocabulary would be somewhat mixed but what happens with the grammar? Would the easiest concepts prevail? Would it be necessary that one of the original languages would be dominant in some sense or could they have an equal influence?

# Answer
> 8 votes
I would think that it relates to the power structures behind the language communities, and to their relative size.

This can be kind of observed with English after the Norman invasion. The basic English grammar still remained Anglo-Saxon (as the majority of the population spoke it), and the main influence of Norman French (the powerful but small elite) was in the vocabulary. There are a few instances (eg putting some specific adjectives after the noun, as in *president elect* or *times past*) where French structures were adopted.

I would think that vocabulary is more a conscious choice, and Norman power made people adopt French words, but the grammatical structures being more sub-conscious meant that they were harder to change.

Another issue is how closely related the origin languages are. Obviously, while Norman French and Old English are different families, they both share the Indo-European ancestry, so are not that radically different. Compare that to, eg the Philippines, where there is a great language variety, and Asian/Polynesian languages clashed with Spanish/English in the colonial period. Here is one creole, Chavacano, which apparently has mostly Spanish vocabulary (so that it is classed as a Romance language), but *their grammatical structures are generally similar to other Philippine languages* (Wikipedia).

So it seems that power drives the vocabulary, but quantity of speakers determines the grammar.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Yes, the vocabulary of a creole would be mixed, though it's likely that one of the parent languages provides most of the words. I concur with the previous answer to also look at English, since it does a few interesting things going on.

Another interesting language in that regard is the historical lingua franca, Sabir (a pidgin, and as such the precursor to a creole).

Creoles tend to have fairly simple grammar, losing some of the complexity of their parent languages. I'm not sure if necessarily the easiest concepts prevail, but in general, the more rare and complex it is, the more likely it will be lost.

I suggest learning about different natlang creoles to get a basic understanding of the processes, similarities and differences based on the languages involved; you can find a list on Wikipedia that should get you started.

On the more technical side, here is a PDF by McWhorter, and this article on Pidgins and Creoles by Baptista should also provide some more insight.

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, diachronics, creoles
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# Question
Title: What are the common features of "Elvish" conlangs?
I want to create a fantasy world with Elves speaking their own language. In order to avoid unwanted associations with works of other authors, the Elves should speak a newly invented language. What features make a conlang sound "Elvish" in a fantasy setting, delineating it from languages of other races (like humans, dwarves, or orcs)?

My picture of Elves is heavily influenced by the works of Tolkien. The Elves are tall and strong humanoids with very long live-span living in the forests of my fantasy world. They are fond of arts and crafts and of poetry, but also engage in fights and wars when necessary.

Elves like these are a common race in genre fiction by many authors, and they also occur in genre based games (e.g., Dungeons and Dragons). They often have typical Elvish names, and some authors also invented some bits of Elvish languages for them. So I assume there are some common features for Elvish languages. What are they?

EDIT: In the meantime, this Wikipedia article has acquired a quite comprehensive list of Elvish languages.

# Answer
One way to look at "elvish" features is to compare how different elvish languages look, and to take inspiration from that.

A look at the phonologies of a few elvish languages:

**Quenya**
(phonology from here)

```
         Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d            k g
Fricative  f v     s     (ç)      x     h
Trill                r
Semivowel (ʍ) w             j
Liquid               l

      Front Central Back
Close  i(ː)         u(ː)
C-Mid  eː           o:
O-Mid  ɛ            ɔ
Open         a(ː)

```

**Sindarin**
(phonology from here)

```
         Labial  Dental Alveolar Lateral Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasal        m       n                              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d                            k g
Fricative  f v     θ ð   s       ɬ                      χ      h
Trill               r
Approximant                          l       j    ʍ w

        Front Central Back
Close   i y             u
Near-C  ɪ               ʊ
O-Mid   ɛ               ɔ
Open          a

```

Some common denominators in Tolkien's Elvish: They all have distinction between voiced and unvoiced stops and (labial) fricatives, both have the somewhat /ʍ/ as a phoneme or allophone as well as /ŋ/, /x~χ/ and /h/. With vowels, they each have four vowel heights but nothing much in common beyond that. Allowed syllables seem to be (CC)V(CC) in Quenya (many more details at Wikipedia) and (C)V(C) in Sindarin, though I don't see that explicitly.

**Pathfinder Elf Names**
(names from here)

> Male Names: Caladrel, Heldalel, Lanliss, Meirdrarel, Seldlon, Talathel, Variel, Zordlon.
>
> Female Names: Amrunelara, Dardlara, Faunra, Jathal, Merisiel, Oparal, Soumral, Tessara, Yalandlara.

My interpretation of the names hints at some of these features: Only two nasals, voicing distinction, five vowels.

Allowed syllables: Apparently (C)V(CC) or (C)V(LC) where L is a liquid (l or r) or nasal

**Dungeons & Dragons Elf Names**
(names from 3.5 edition Player's Handbook p. 16)

> Male Names: Aramil, Aust, Enialis, Heian, Himo, Ivellios, Laucian, Quarion, Soveliss, Thamior, Tharivol
>
> Female Names: Anastrianna, Antinua, Drusilia, Felosial, Ielenia, Lia, Mialee, Qilathe, Silaqui, Vadanja, Valanthe, Xanaphia
>
> Family Names: Amastacia, Amakiir, Galanodel, Holimion, Liadon, Meliamne, Naïlo, Siannodel, Ilphukiir, Xiloscient

Here we seem to have gemination at the end of words, vowel length, maybe uvular stop; th and ph are *probably* fricatives and not aspirated, judging by the presence of v and absence of f. Syllables seem to be (C)V(CC).

Using the very questionable methodology of taking the least common denominators of all of them would give us something like:

```
          Labial   Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n
Stop       p b     t d                      k g
Fricative  f v     θ       s z                    h
Trill                        r
Approximant                  l       j       w

        Front Central Back
Close   i               u
Mid     e               o
Open          a

```

If you want an elvish language to be easily recognizable as elvish, you might be able to copy some of these features. I'm not sure, though, that there *is* any feature that might be universally understood as elf-like.
> 8 votes

# Answer
In addition to the phonological and phonotactical aspects given by @b a, I want to add some more phonotactical and statistical features for an Elvish language

* Preference of front vowels /e, i/ over back vowels /o, u/
* Restriction of word-final sound, words tend to end in a vowel or in one of the consonants /t, d, θ, ð, n, s, r, l/
* The two-vowel sequences /ae/ and /ie/ occur frequently. Laura Wattenberg calls the combination *ae* "the defining fantasy vowel". It is very frequent in fantasy names, even more frequent than in Welsh.
> 2 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, typology
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# Question
Title: Does Volapük contain any elements (order, participle, etc) not present in its European source languages?
Volapük was designed back in the 1800s to be a 'world language', but at first glance, it appears to the layman (me) to just be a mixing of Romance languages, English, and maybe High German. Are there any new ideas or concepts that were presented in this conlang, or were all of its rules simply derived from these parent languages?

# Answer
> 5 votes
The Volapük panoply of mood suffixes contains distinctions that were familiar to its audience through classicising education, but I think it fair to say they weren't in the immediate source languages: the optative, jussive, and potential moods as suffixes don't correspond to what German or English or French does morphologically; nor does giving a suffix to the apodosis of conditionals (if... *then*). In fact, while the optative is Ancient Greek and the jussive is Sanskrit, the potential in Europe is limited to Finnish, and the apodosis suffix seems to be completely made of whole cloth.

I'll add that, as with Esperanto, a lot of the compounding was schematic and not inspired by natural languages; the notorious example of *lu-* "derogatory prefix" is probably the most obvious (*bien* 'bee' \> *lubien* 'wasp'; *vat* 'water' \> *luvat* 'urine').

---
Tags: history, typology, inspiration, volapuk
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title: Teaching children constructed languages

text:
# Question
Title: Teaching children constructed languages
Are there any modern accounts (either of personal experiences of individuals on this forum, or in general) of an individual creating their own language and teaching it to their child(ren)/family?

# Answer
One guy taught his daughter Volapuk.

There is a contemporary case of someone teaching their kids their personal conlang, she used to be active on one of Facebook's conlang groups.

The revived languages, Cornish, Hebrew, Sanskrit, have similar dynamics to conlangs. Having government support in the form of schools and day care works wonders for the project being successful.

Getting a child to speak your languages takes time (20+ hours a week) of exposure, and it really helps to have a community of peers who also speak that language, or a child's decision to keep using their parents language will be personal and idiosyncratic. I get this impression from people I've met who tried speaking Arabic or Icelandic to their kids in the US where they got plenty of exposure to their parents, but no particular supporting community of peers.
> 9 votes

# Answer
There's a pretty badly written account (English translation) of someone's children learning Arka, though I have no idea if it's true.

There's also the better-known case of d'Armond Speers teaching his kid Klingon.

**Edit:** the author of the first article later confirmed that it was a hoax.
> 5 votes

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Tags: history, conlang-learning
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title: Dialects of Klingon

text:
# Question
Title: Dialects of Klingon
There seem to be dialects of Klingon, as stated here, Maltz speaks the Rumaiy dialect while Saavik speaks the Kumburan dialect.

Is there something known about the differences between the Klingon dialects? What are remarkable features of the respective dialects?

# Answer
Apart from the word for "forehead" being diagnostically different in the various dialects of Klingon (as pointed out by @JeffZeitlin), the only other canonical information I know of is that in some dialects, \<D\> and \<b\> /ɖ, b/ are pronounced as /ɳ, m/ (\<N\> and \<M\>—though I don't remember if those transliterations are canonical, or invented by me for the Klingon *Hamlet*).

EDIT: More about dialects from http://klingonska.org/piqad/, citing *Klingon for the Galactic Traveller*. (I was right that I made up \<M\>, and \<N\> is not canonical.)

> The Tak’ev Dialect
>
> Dialect spoken in the Tak’ev (taq’ev) region. It is one of the larger minority dialects and has a much greater number of speakers that the Krotmag dialect. It sounds like blend of Krotmag an Standard Klingon, and is the one dialect (that we know of) which most closely resembles Standard Klingon. It is only briefly described in canon.
>
> * Nasal vowels
> * Pronounces b as mb
> * Pronounces D as ND
>
> The Krotmag Dialect
>
> Dialect spoken in the Krotmag (Qotmagh) region. This dialect has fewer speakers than the Tak’ev dialect, but is well known and easily recognized by other Klingons. Some of the dialects peculiarities have even influenced Standard Klingon.
>
> * Nasal vowels
> * Pronounces b as m (as in English mime)
> * Pronounces D as N
> * Often uses extra words in noun phrases, originally to differentiate between words with b and m (e.g. ’uS qam leg foot, nach qam head face), but now prevalent even when no disambiguation is needed (e.g. NeS ghop arm hand, nach ghIch head nose, qorNu’ tuq family house and even yan ’etlh or ’etlh yan sword sword)
> * Often adds short extra sentences to disambiguate between verbs with b and m (e.g. mImoH. yIjotchoH. You’re impatient. Calm down!, mImoH. ’oy’ mInNu’wIj. You’re ugly. My eyes ache.)
>
> The Morskan Dialect
>
> Dialect spoken on the conquered Klingon world Morska. We’re treated to brief bout of the Morskan dialect of Klingon in ST6 when Enterprise encounters a Klingon listening post. (The Klingon spelling of the word “Morska” is unknown – the only canon occurrence is in spoken form, in the Morskan dialect, by that guard in ST6).
>
> The Morskan dialect is characterized by the following speech patterns.
>
> * Pronounces tlh as ghl at the beginning of syllables, and as ts (as in English cats) at the end
> * Pronounces H as h (as in English hat) at beginning of syllables, and not pronounced at all at end
> * Pronounces Q as Standard Klingon H
> * Usually drops -’e’ from the final noun in “to be” phrases (except when the subject of such phrases are emphasised)
> 8 votes

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Tags: klingon, dialects
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# Question
Title: Is there a stroke order for any of the Klingon alphabets?
Is there an order in which you write the strokes making up a letter belonging to the Klingon alphabet (apart from the Latin alphabet)?

Are letters from Klingon alphabets intended to be written manually, as opposed to solely being printed?

I looked at Klingon alphabets and pIqaD but neither had information about this.

# Answer
There have been stroke ordering proposals by fans devising handwriting of pIqaD. One is http://klingonska.org/writing/examples/pic/zrajm-piqad.jpg , from Zrajm of Klingonska Akademien: http://klingonska.org/piqad/. Another had been proposed by the late Glen Proechel's group:

> Interstellar Language School (lead by Glen F. Proechel) has published “An Alien Writing System Primer” explaining how to write pIqaD in longhand. (It is non-canon, of course – and to my knowledge not endorsed by the KLI.)

It was 20 years ago, I've seen it, and I don't remember it. (I do remember not liking it. ;^)
> 5 votes

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Tags: writing-systems, klingon
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# Question
Title: Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn?
Auxiliary constructed languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages.
**Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn than natural languages?**

# Answer
Some auxiliary languages are easier to learn than natural languages. There have been many experiments that show that Esperanto is both easier to learn than other languages, and also makes learning future languages easier.

Two quotes from some of the experiments on Esperanto:

> "It is possible for the average student to understand written and spoken Esperanto in 20 hours better than he can understand French, German, Italian, or Spanish after 100 hours."
>
> "A child can learn as much Esperanto in about 6 months as he would French in 3–4 years... if all children studied Esperanto during the first 6–12 months of a 4–5 year French course, they would gain much and lose nothing."

However, it's not necessarily true that auxiliary languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages. Esperanto is a very regular language, and that makes it easy to learn. Other languages, such as Interlingua, are not as easy to learn, but are meant to be more recognizable to someone already familiar with the vocabulary of Romance languages. It is still more regular than the natural languages it's based on, so it likely is easier to learn, but it sacrifices some regularity in order to have a more familiar vocabulary.
> 7 votes

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Tags: auxlangs, conlang-learning, language-acquisition
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# Question
Title: Language with contextual-free vocabulary
Every language (I know of) needs a context or a mark of reference for understanding a lot of the expressed message.

I'm refering about concepts like *I*, *you*, *this*, *there*, *tomorrow*...

I'd bet there is no organic language that doesn't use such contextual words. Still, though, I wondered:

* Is there any constructed language that has no word context-dependant?
* If there is: How does it manage to express common messages?
* If there isn't: Would it be possible to have such language?

# Answer
Firstly, I have thought about this too before. Actually, only one word is needed for all of *I*, *you*, *this*, *there*, *tomorrow*, etc. You can analyse these as I, (the person I am referring to), (the thing I am referring to at/by/on ME), (the place I am referring to not at/by/on ME), (the day which is one day later than the day I am in). This goes for most words like those.

* Not that I know of. But let's create one for demonstration purposes: *Loj-**ban mi***. It is Lojban, but there's a ban on the word *mi* (and *vi*, and *ti*, and other words incorporating *mi* as said above).
* It would be able to express concepts like 'Bananas grow on trees', as this doesn't depend on the concept I. However, saying stuff like ***My** name is Santa Claus.*, ***It**'s going well.* and *What are **we** doing **tomorrow**?* would be impossible.
We could replace it with other concepts, for example, 'the speaker/writer'. But this is ambiguous, take this sentence: *I don't know who said that, but the speaker is in big trouble when I find out!*. (And, pulling it off correctly, it nevertheless depends on context). Names can be used, so the answer is actually **yes**. 'Tomorrow' would have to be expressed as a date, 'this' would have to be 'The plate on the table in the house of Joe Example, etc.
* Yes, as we proved above with Loj-**ban mi**, it is possible. *Would it be learnable?* Probably. But not usable in practice.
> 4 votes

# Answer
All human communication is context-dependent. A context-independent language would be ununderstandable (by humans, at least).

My anser to this question, Can all sentences be represented logically? deals with this problem; the basic reasoning comes from Hubert Dreyfus, *What computers cannot do*, via Setargew Kenaw Fantaw.
> 3 votes

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Tags: terminology, ambiguity
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# Question
Title: How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic?
As something of a follow-on to my question about “naturalizing” conlangs, I’m looking for any information - actual tools would be nice, too, if available - for “borrowing” from one conlang into another in a realistic manner. There would be a number of subsidiary questions for this, some of which I include here:

* Assuming that I’m borrowing from *sourcelang* to *destlang*, should I *destlang*ize the word, or leave it in its “native” form (ignoring issues of orthography relative to different writing systems)? By *destlang*ize, I mean things like…

+ Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of *destlang*?
    + Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to *destlang*’s orthographical conventions?
    + Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to *destlang*’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?
* What sort of methods exist for choosing *which* words to borrow?
* What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?

(At the suggestion of a commenter, I wish to make it clear that I am interested in this issue primarily with respect to “naturalistic” conlangs and natlangs.)

# Answer
# Should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form?

In natural languages, borrowed words are almost always "*destlang*-ized" to some degree, but it won't necessarily always to the *same* degree. Even within the same language, often some borrowed words will be more integrated into the language than others. The more recently a word was borrowed, the more speakers of the language will treat it as a "foreign" word and be willing to make exceptions for it, but as its use becomes more and more common, speakers will inevitably begin to treat it as a native word if it doesn't fall out of use.

## Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?

Sometimes, sometimes not. There are examples of both in natlangs.

The English verb "to google" has been borrowed into many languages, and it seems to typically conform to the conjugation patterns of those languages. Even in Japanese, a language with a famously closed class of verbs, borrowed "to google" as a verb ググる(it may have become a verb after being borrowed as a noun, but either way, it's quite remarkable).

Yet it's also possible for exceptions to be made. This happens with some English noun borrowings (most English speakers won't try to pluralize *edamame* or *Pokémon* with English plural morphology), but not with others (many English speakers will pluralize *zucchini* as *zucchinis*, and you'll pretty much never heard *zucchino*).

In my experience, verbs are more likely to take on the native conjugation patterns than nouns are native declension patterns, but I don't have any data to back that up cross-linguistically. A borrowed word *is* definitely more likely to be conjugated or declined like a native one the longer it has been in the language (the pedantry about pluralizing Latin borrowings in English is an exception to this, but that's more because of the social prestige associated with having studied Latin).

## Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?

This really is a case-by-case thing. If the language uses a completely different writing system, almost definitely, but sometimes the orthographical conventions won't be the same as native words. Japanese uses katakana for borrowings, for instance, and English borrowings from Japanese and Chinese tend to follow whatever romanization scheme was most popular when they were borrowed, even if the pronunciation is pretty opaque. For instance, the Chinese word 道 was borrowed as "Tao" in English based on older Chinese romanizations, even though the Chinese word now romanized as *dào* and the English derived word "Taoism" is more often pronounced /ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm/ in English (though a spelling pronunciation /ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm/ has arisen due to this).

## Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?

***Almost always yes.*** While sometimes educated speakers or upper-class speakers will try to pronounce a borrowed word with its "original pronunciation" rather than its borrowed one ("gyro" is a good example of this), even those pronunciations are almost always somewhat changed to fit the destlang's phonology better, and often they aren't even closer to the pronunciation in the sourcelang. How exactly the word is altered to fit the destlang's phonology depends on the particulars of the borrowing situation, however.

# What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow? What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?

I've combined these questions because I feel there's a lot of overlap in the answers. Often, words are borrowed to fill a semantic gap in the destlang, which is why words for new technologies are so often borrowed (think of how many languages borrowed the word "television"!)

Borrowings are also often used to refer to the "versions" of certain things from the part of the world that speaks that language -- consider how *anime*, a generic word for all animation in Japanese, was borrowed into English as a word for a style of Japanese animation, or how English borrowed "chai" from the Hindi/Urdu word for tea, चाय (cāy) / چای (ćāy) to refer to tea with certain spices based on Indian recipes.

Also, sometimes words are borrowed because they carry some social value seen attractive by the speakers of destlang. Maybe destlang speakers think sourcelang sounds refined and sophisticated, and so upper-class destlang speakers borrow words from sourcelang to sound fancy. Of course, this sort of situation depends on a lot of social and sociopolitical factors wherever the languages are spoken.
> 10 votes

# Answer
There are a few words in Esperanto that are arguably borrowed from Ido; examples include *olda* "maljuna, malnova" and *kurta* "mallonga". With respect to the subquestions: These words didn't need any changes, they already blend perfectly into Esperanto. The borrowings from Ido still are in a niche position in Esperanto and live mainly in the poetic register.

Of course Ido (as a fork of Esperanto) shares a lot of vocabulary with Esperanto, but this is due to inheritance and not borrowing.

I also remember vaguely that some of Tolkien's Elvish words were borrowings between Sindarin and Quenya, but unfortunately I don't have an example at hand. This would be a "constructed borrowing" between conlangs, adding to their naturalness and their diachronic depth.
> 4 votes

# Answer
One thing you may want to consider is how the sourcelang word reached the destlang. If the word was spread through literature to the destlang speakers, then it may be spelled the same as it is in the sourcelang but pronounced according to the pronunciation of the destlang. If the word is spread through oral communication then it may sound like the sourcelang but be spelled differently. One example would be *ray* (or *rai*), a Spanish word descended from the English *ride* as in *I got a ride home*.

Another thing you may want to consider is the possibility of usages that sourcelang speakers may consider "incorrect". An example of this would be the French word *le parking*, which means *car park* in English. In the case of "incorrect" usage the important thing to consider is which social societal group naturalized the word and in what context. If the word was naturalized by academics, then it may continue to be pronounced and used the same way it is in the sourcelang (as in the cases of many Latin words used in English). If it was naturalized by non-linguists in normal social contexts, then it may be naturalized with spelling errors, mispronunciations, and odd usages (consider *le shopping* in every day French).
> 3 votes

# Answer
An addition to Sparksbet's excellent answer I'd add one tool to your armamentarium:

**DENATURALISATION of BORROWINGS**

Sometimes foreign words borrowed a long time ago from L1 become naturalised in L2 only to become *denaturalised* again in later times. In other words, the legitimately L2 word becomes more like the antecedent L1 word.

Case in point, *PEKING*. English borrowed this city name centuries ago and happily naturalised it (as we tend to do sooner or later with every word we borrow!). But recently, you've probably noticed an odd spelling *"BEIJING"*. For some strange reason, this word has de-evolved from its naturalised form to something approaching a modern Mandarin pronunciation-spelling of the name, rather than the English pronunciation of the name.

This doesn't always happen. Thus far, we continue to pronounce *Baile Átha Cliath* as DUBLIN; *Moskva* as MOSCOW; and *Krung Thep Maha Nakhon* as BANGKOK.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Its common for languages to borrow the words for trade goods introduced to them by other cultures. These are called 'Wanderwoerter', or 'wandering words' in German. All the words for 'tea' in our world, for instance, can be traced back to just two distinct roots. One gave rise to the word for tea in China and Mongolia, the other is the common ancestor for the words for 'tea' everywhere else. Words for region-specific materials also tend to get borrowed. Though they can also just be named after foreign locations that the people who speak the destlang got the material from (we have quite a number of these in English).

Words for technologies also tend to migrate. Hungarian has multiple words related to horse riding that originated in Turkish.

Also note how English likes to borrow foreign words for foreign objects. We have words like sombrero from Spanish and kimono from Japanese. Note however that borrowed words may not hold the same meaning as they do in their parent languages. In Spanish the word 'sombrero' is the word for any hat with a brim. And kimono is the name for a specific garment, but in English we normally use it to refer to any kind of traditional Japanese dress. This is pretty common cross-linguistically.

Also note that some languages borrow foreign words more than others. Some prefer to just derive new words from native words. Finnish used to be like this. German still is to a large extent (though that doesn't mean loan words don't exist in German, there are a few from French and English, such as bon-bon, pommes frites, and jeans).
> 1 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary, naturalism, borrowings
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# Question
Title: Designing a vocabulary for geographical features
I want to draw a map of a fictional world resembling Europe in climate and basic geographic features (so there are rivers and lakes, alpine mountains, mittelgebirge, marsh lands and bogs, some plains and forests).

I am thinking of dithematic words (similar to typical endocentric compound words where the second part denotes the general feature and the first part gives a distinguishing detail), so I need words for river, lake, mountain, marsh, bog etc. and some determining words.

However, I want the words to look naturalistic and not overly schematic. What techniques can I use to make the geographical features look naturalistic?

EDIT: Assume that I have already designed a phonology for my conlang stub, and that I have already some phonotactics and candidate root words. What I am interested in is some natural looking variation of the names to generate.

# Answer
There are many factors that make actual real-world placename not look schematic (unless, maybe, you're looking at Japanese placenames...)

**Have many different etymological sources from names**

In practice, names have a lot of forms, and the younger the names, the more varied the forms: religious names (i.e. saints) and feasts, people names ("X's place", "X's farm", "X's dwelling" are all very common sources of names, but just look at how many us towns are named after female given names!), other placenames (e.g. Athens, Georgia), etc.

**Layer the source languages**

European names show variety at least in part because the names comes from many layers of languages: France has names in modern French from Germanic, Celtic, Romance (French, Old French, Spanish, Latin roots), and pre-IE languages. In England you have Scottish, Celtic, Old English, Normand and Old Norse/Danish names.

**People really don't pay that much attention to the form of a word**

A simple example is how *common* "new town" is as a name: Newton, Newcastle, Villeneuve, Neuville, Villanueva, Villanova, Neustadt, Neuburg, Novgorod, Novohrad, Nevşehir, Yenişehir... All of these are fairly common city names in their respective languages. "Blue Lake" may not feel original, but to te people who come later, it's just a name like any other. The same as we don't really *notice* "Rowan" or "Rose" are common nouns once they are people's name.
> 5 votes

# Answer
The first thing is: Design not only one word for each geographical feature, use several of them. To give some examples from a natural language (German in this case): A mountain may have a name in *-berg* (which is frequent in the mittelgebirge) but also *-spitze*, *-horn*, *-kopf*, or *-kuppe*. Some beacon mountains have names of their own without an element meaning "mountain" (e.g., *Brocken*, *Großer Belchen*, *Kahler Asten*, or *Eiger*). Similarly, cities are not just *-stadt* "city", but there are also cities in Germany with names in *-burg*, *-berg*, *-heim*, *-reut*, *-furt*, or *-hafen*.

The second thing is: Hydronyms are special. The names of larger rivers often reflect an older substrate and are not taken from the current language of the place and don't have any transparent meaning. Examples are *Potomac*, *Arkansas*, *Mississippi*, *Missouri* in the USA or *Thames*, *Rhine*, *Rhône*, and more in Europe.

With this in mind, the names on the map should show some interesting variation.
> 6 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary, naturalism, geography, names
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# Question
Title: Is there existing terminology for distinguishing multiple imperative moods?
I have found a conlang, Klyran, which has a rather interesting feature: multiple imperative moods. Quoting from the documentation:

> For imperative mood there are number of suffixes that correspond to different sort of request from begging to ordering with threat of killing in case of refusal. These suffixes can be omitted.

(For the case of an suffixless imperative form, a "default" form of the imperative mood is presumed, similar to a real-world imperative in meaning.)

While this part of the language has not been fully fleshed out (nobody yet has bothered to define the various imperative mood affixes) -- is this feature (multiple imperative moods) something that has existing terminology surrounding it?

# Answer
> 7 votes
I don't think there is any really reliable cross-linguistic labelling system that would include all of these. There are terms for most of them, but they're often used for only a few languages, and perhaps not very consistently. For someone who is created a conlang, they have flexibility then to adapt these terms for their language, however the important thing is to clearly describe in detail the full semantics of the language, rather than just assigning labels.

The broad category for all of these is **deontic modality**, which covers the modality of how the speaker thinks things ought to be. Within deontic modality there are many subtypes. The SIL Glossary has a very useful section giving a hierarchical description of deontic modality.

English actually has a very large number of modal verbs, with subtly different senses, so with examples from English we can illustrate a lot of the subtypes, even though they're usually not given clear labels. The English modals are however very complex, most of them being used in different contexts to mean very different things.

* The **imperative** is actually one of the least marked ways of issuing a directive/command. In English it is a structurally different way of forming a sentence, but in other languages it may have a more regular structure with a particular verb form that fits into a wider affix paradigm.
* *Should* is usually weaker than the imperative, giving a recommendation. Possible labels include **hortative** and **propositive**.
* *Have to*, *need to* and *must* can all be stronger than the imperative, but they also often imply that the person giving the instruction needs to plead to some extent with those they are instructing; an autocratic dictator would never tell their servants that they need to do something, they would simply tell them to do it (with an imperative sentence.) Labels include **precative** for requests, and **directive** and **obligative** for commands that emphasise obligation.
* When *will* or *shall* are emphasised and stressed in English they are used to indicate a serious instruction, which sometimes sound almost sinister with an implied threat for those who disregard them: "You *will* do this... (or else!)" The label **commissive** is used for threats, but not exclusively, as it's also used for promises.

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Tags: terminology, tense-aspect-mood
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