# Question
Title: How do you remove the confusion in a conlang when creating and distinguishing nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles?
I am trying to implement a conlang and am confused how we as humans are able to distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, particles, etc. in a sentence. I get that **word order** is a factor, as well as the nebulous idea of **context**. But word order seems so flexible, I don't see what I need to do when creating a conlang in terms of how to structure nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles, to make sure you can understand the sentence. What are the key techniques or procedures to follow in designing this? So you can clearly tell what is a noun, verb, adjective, or particle. How do we even do this in regular natural languages? I don't understand. And I don't know how to search for this in Google to learn more about how we resolve the sentences meaning without having clear and unique patterns that clearly separate nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles from each other.

Some of examples on why it's confusing.

> I see the **big black oak tree**.

The `tree` is the noun, and `big black oak` are modifiers on the noun sort of thing. So you could say they are adjectives or "features" of the tree.

> I see **the big**.

But here `big` is the noun, like `The Big`, as in something big, in which you are invoking a lot of context in your listeners mind. Or

> I see **the black**.

Here black is the noun, like all you see is darkness.

In these sentences, there is no change in the structure of the words, but they take on different roles in the sentences. That is, `big` can be an adjective or noun (or even a verb!) without adding a specific prefix or suffix to that base.

I can't come up with a science on why we are able to properly interpret these sentences. In my conlang, I am thinking that, in order to make it easier to interpret, I would have special endings on nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles. So you would have the equivalent of:

> I see-ami the big-azi black-azi oak-azi tree-ali

In this sort of system, every verb would end in `-ami`, every adjective with `-azi`, and every noun with `-ali`. I keep on thinking I **need** such a system in order to make the sentences comprehensible. I would use this structure *in addition* to a **strict word order** to make it so sentences are comprehensible. So what I keep thinking I **need**, in summary, is:

1. **Specific endings** on nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles, to distinguish them easily.
2. **Strict word order** in sentences, so you can easily tell what is in the adjective place, in the noun place, in the verb place, etc.

But the problem is, *this is not how natural languages work*! Even in English which has a somewhat strict word order (even though you can be quite flexible with it if you want), like I demonstrated above, you **don't** have specific endings on words, and you don't have a super strict 100%-of-the-time word order. *(English has some word endings like `-ing` and `-ly` and such, but these are not even consistent 100% of the time)*

In addition, I am looking across a few languages, and nouns, verbs, and adjectives in each language might be allowed to **all** *start* or *end* with vowels or consonants, and might all have endings which are the same. That is, there isn't even a pattern which clearly separates nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles into separate categories based on the word's morphology! For example, let's use English. You have these words.

> Bully. *(Noun, "A mean sort of person", ends in `-ly`)*
> Clearly. *(Adjective, ends in `-ly`)*
> Sully. *(Verb, "to make dirty", ends in `-ly`)*

Some rules are more strict, like I can't seem to find any adjectives that end in `-ed`, which is used for past-tense or state sort of verbs, `created`, `acted`, `iced`, etc. But this `-ly` ending can go on any type of word. Same with other endings, like `-ing`.

> Bring. *(Infinitive verb, ends in `-ing`)*
> Clearing. *(present participle verb, ends in `-ing`)*
> Ring. *(Noun, or verb, ends in `-ing`)*
> Amusing. *(Adjective, ends in `-ing`)*

All kinds of other examples exist (of prefixes and suffixes) where they are used across nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.. In many other languages too.

Other words, which I'm using in English but might come from other languages, are nouns which have all sorts of endings.

> Man. *(Noun, ends in consonant `n`)*
> Joy. *(Noun, ends in consonant `y`)*
> Dao. *(Noun, "the Way", ends in vowel `o`)*
> Glee. *(Noun, ends in vowel `e`)*
> Rabbi. *(Noun, ends in vowel `i`)*

Then same for verbs:

> Assign. *(Verb, ends in consonant `n`)*
> Play. *(Verb, ends in consonant `y`)*
> Echo. *(Verb, ends in vowel `o`)*
> Free. *(Verb, ends in vowel `e`)*
> Ski. *(Verb, ends in vowel `i`)*

And same for adjectives:

> Green. *(Adjective, ends in consonant `n`)*
> Happy. *(Adjective, ends in consonant `y`)*
> Latino. *(Adjective, ends in vowel `o`)*
> Eerie. *(Adjective, ends in vowel `e`)*
> Pakistani. *(Adjective, ends in vowel `i`)*

So this basically shows, at least for English, there is no relation between the word ending and whether it is a noun, verb, adjective, etc.. *So it makes me think in my conlang, I don't need to add the constraint of having nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles have different endings to make them distinguishable*. Somehow we are able to tell the difference in sense of these words based on some other nebulous thing, like context or meaning/semantics during the flow of speech.

The question is, how do I use these facts when constructing a conlang? Can I pick any "base" word and attach *any* ending on any part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, particle)? And will the language still work? *How can I tell if it will work and not be confusing*? What do I do when developing the conlang to test if it is confusing or not how I have structured words?

Without having the conlang *completed* and working, (while it is being developed), as I try to generate example sentences, it seems like it would lead to pure confusion not having more rigid patterns in the words to distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles.

How should I be thinking about this to make some progress? I am stuck on the step of how to create words in different parts of speech, and place them in an order in sentences. I have created a pattern for how word "bases" are defined (i.e. they have to start and end with a consonant), but that is even limiting, I would like it if some can start or end with a vowel too...

How should I conceptualize the differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles, so I can generate words that flow together into a sentence but aren't confusing? It seems that adding specific word endings would remove the confusion, but what else will remove the confusion so I don't need to do that, and I can be like English in that words of various parts of speech can have any vowel/consonant start or end the word?

# Answer
Fundamentally, parts of speech are *lexically determined*. What this means is that in general, there is no way to find the part of speech of a word knowing only the word itself. You have to memorise it separately for each word.

A good way of seeing this is to observe that two languages may assign different parts of speech to exactly the same word when it is borrowed from one language to another. For instance, *boil* is a verb in English. But when it was loaned into the Papuan language Komnzo, it was borrowed as a member of the Komnzo class of ‘property nouns’ (Döhler 2018). There is nothing inherently ‘nouny’ or ‘verby’ about the form or function of this word; you simply have to memorise that *boil* is a verb in English and a property noun in Komnzo. And this can even happen within a language: the English word *release*, for instance, is both a noun and a verb.

So, if word classes cannot be reliably distinguished based on their form or their semantics¹, then what is the difference between different parts of speech? The answer is simple: parts of speech specify *the environments in which words can be used*. For instance, consider this sentence:

> I saw the \_____.

This sentence has a gap in it. You can make a grammatical sentence by filling this gap with nouns: *I saw the **dog***, *I saw the **cat***, *I saw the **chair***, *I saw the **release***, *I saw the **idea***. (Note that, even though the last example doesn’t really make sense, it still counts as it is a grammatical sentence.) On the other hand, if you try this with a non-noun, the result is ungrammatical: **I saw the sit*, **I saw the eat*, **I saw the is*. So we can use this example to give a definition of a noun: a word which makes a grammatical sentence when preceeded by *I saw the*.

This definition can be made a lot more general though: a noun is simply a word which can follow a determiner. What is a determiner? Well, you *could* define it as something which can precede a noun, but that would be circular. Instead, simply note that there are a fixed set of 20 or so words which can occur in such a position: *a*, *the*, *one*, *some*, *much*, *many* and the like. A determiner is then just one of these words. Determiners are thus a ‘closed class’: a part of speech which has a fixed number of words, and into which no more words can be added. Note that each language has a slightly different set of closed classes, though there are similarities: articles, numbers, adpositions and adjectives, for instance, are often closed. (Komnzo unusually has *verbs* as a closed class, explaining why my example of *boil* above was loaned as a noun rather than a verb.)

But you can go further. English nouns can be used after a determiner — but there are several other environments in which nouns can occur. They can take the plural marker *-s*: *dogs*, *cats*, *chairs*, *releases*, *ideas*. They can also modify another noun: *dog leash*, *cat collar*, *chair wood*, *release method*, *idea food*. (The last few examples are a bit contrived, but illustrate the point well enough). So, you can use this to define nouns in English: English nouns are that word class which can be used after a determiner, take a plural marker, and modify another noun. Or, to put it another way, if you find a word which can occur in all these places — why then, that word must be a noun!

So, to answer your question ‘How should I conceptualize the differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles?’: conceptualize it in terms of morphosyntactic environments (the fancy name for what I’ve been talking about). A word class is distinguished by the environments it can occur in: if you know what word class a word occurs in, then you know in which environments you can use in, and *vice versa*.

I will use one final example to illustrate the point. Consider the well-known example sentence:

> The gostak distims the doshes.

From this sentence, I can tell that *gostak* and *dosh* are nouns, while *distim* is a verb — even though I may never have seen these words before. Why? Just look at the environments:

* *Gostak* occurs in the environment ‘the \____’. Thus we know it is a noun.
* *Dosh* occurs in the environment ‘the \____’, and also takes the suffix *-s*. Thus it must be a noun.
* For *distim*, we can look at the position of the word in the sentence. It occurs between two noun phrases; this is obviously sufficient to make up a complete sentence. Any word with this property in English must be a verb.

(Further reading: François’s analysis of Hiw word classes is a particularly illuminating example of these ideas. I highly recommend reading through this paper for a detailed discussion of how word classes can be defined with reference to syntactic environments.)

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¹ Well, this is a slight lie. There are clearly semantic distinctions between word classes such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. Also, I vaguely remember that there are some languages in which some parts of speech *do* have phonological correlates, though I can’t remember their names. My point is that neither of these are particularly reliable ways to determine parts of speech, which should ideally be defined using only morphosyntactic criteria.
> 5 votes

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Tags: grammar, ambiguity, parts-of-speech
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# Question
Title: Has anybody created an Arabic inspired shorthand for english?
I'm thinking of a system where all fricatives look similar to each other, all plosives look similar, etc; the same base shape could be used for similar sounds using the dots placed above/below letters (see I'jām) to distinguish between voiced/unvoiced. For example ز and ژ could both be fricatives but one voiced & one unvoiced with the number of i'jām dots indicating voiced & unvoiced. As an example 1 dot (خ) could be unvoiced, & 2 dots (ت) could be voiced , 3 dots (ش/چ) could be digraphs(?) like sh/ch/th etc;. Their placement above or below could even mean something (پ/ث)? vowels could be diacritics like how Arabic harakat are used. I'm not really talking about *adapting* Arabic itself to write english. Plenty of those have been done, some good, some bad. I'm talking about a script *inspired* by Arabic, but that is really suited to write English because it is designed for English. Dots & vowels could even be omitted to further speed up writing if the dots/vowels could easily be inferred from context as in (Rasm). To use an example that can be typed: 'تُن' could be 'dot', but without diacritics could be 'date' depending on context & with i'jām reversed it could be represent 't-d'. 'O' wouldn't have to be ُ (damma), I'm just using that as an example. I like the look of connected letters but disconnected could be used too. It could be designed to be written in either direction by rotating certain letters to face in the direction of writing as was done with Egyptian hieroglyphs. It would be easier to learn because similar sounds would look similar which is rarely the case in Arabic. Has anybody created something like this or could it be created? The table is here

# Answer
> 2 votes
Do these count?

Anglo-Arabic

> Anglo-Arabic, created by Pangus Ho, is a fully phonetic writing system that can be used to write English. It borrows the shape of Arabic letters so that it looks like Arabic at a glance, however few of the letters have the same sound as they do in Arabic. For example the letter "nūn", which is used to symbolize the sound /n/ in Arabic, is pronounced /t/ in Anglo-Arabic. The main objective is to make similar consonants have similar letter shapes. Consonants, long vowels, and diphthongs are represented by letters, while short vowels are represented by diacritics.

Angrezi (انگریزی)

> Angrezi is a method of writing English using the Arabic script devised by Adnaan Mahmood. It is designed so that each sound of English is represented by one letter, and to be a standardised way for transcribing English in the Arabic script. Adnaan also thought that if the large population of English speaking Muslims want to write English in the Arabic script they could do so by using this version of the alphabet which includes vowels for easy reading and comprehension.

> The name of the alphabet comes from the Urdu name for English, انگریزی (angrezi).

# Answer
> 1 votes
I created a script, سۛٗط࣫ٮ࣭هَں࣪ٮ࣮ shorthand:

| Arabic | English |
| --- | --- |
| ط࣪ / ط࣫ | r / l |
| ک࣮ / ک࣭ | k / g |
| ح࣪ / ج | v / f |
| ٮ࣮ / ٮ࣭ | t / d |
| ٮ࣫ / ٮ࣪ | p / b |
| س࣪ | z |
| ی | y |
| و | w |
| ں࣪ | n |
| ں࣫ | m |
| ز | j |
| ه | h |
| س࣫ / س࣪ | z / s |
| عُ | u |
| عٗ | o |
| عِ | i |
| عؘ | e |
| عَ | a |

ٮِۛس࣫ عِس࣫ سۛٗط࣫ٮ࣭هَں࣪ٮ࣮/ٮس عس سطٮهںٮ

Unvoiced have one dot above/below, voiced have two. Letters don't match their sounds in Arabic in most cases.

Edit: Here's a spreadsheet. The keyboard is linked there also. I have a chromebook, so it installs as a chrome extension, then can be used as an input method.

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Tags: writing-systems
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# Question
Title: Alternate direction systems for spatial reference
What are some alternative direction systems besides egocentric direction systems (left, right, &c)?

Some natural languages use `{north, south, east, west}` like Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal (Maya) (source for Tzeltal). The situation in Tzeltal is probably more complex, since there's references to an uphill/downhill distinction too, but I'm having trouble locating a free resource for it.

Ithkuil uses the position of the sunrise and sunset. It does not appear to use the *current position of the sun*.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Okay. How about instead of an egocentric direction system, employing a listener-centric or "you"-centric system? We do this in natural language when we say "On your left" or "At your 3:00". Probably such a system would be developed among speakers from a highly empathetic and listener-oriented culture, where the individual's reference is considered secondary to the listener's.

# Answer
> 4 votes
All answers so far assume a system of orthogonal directions, each having an "anti direction". I suspect this predisposition is connected to our left-right symmetric bodies with natural forwards and backwards, as well as ups and downs. Languages constructed for aliens need not conform to this!

Take a starfish, for instance. If they have five distinct arms, that would give five directions in their plane, along with up and down.

For radially symmetric, disk-shaped creatures (or for communicating between radially symmetric spaceships or other vehicles) the only meaningful purely self-relative directions would likely be relative up and relative down (along with hither and away). For a creature shaped like a jellyfish, without any visual clues to other fixed directions, this could be combined with cardinal up and down.

Star or disk shaped creatures could of course point, either by turning their up or down towards something (which would be two different prepositions!), or by deforming themselves, shining a light etc. They could also use auxiliary phrases as "towards Alice" or "the way we came".

A more sophisticated option would also be to talk of the direction perpendicular to cardinal up AND to relative up, maybe like a cross product in mathematics? This would be sort of akin to our left and right, if the creature moves in its relative up direction, that is.

# Answer
> 3 votes
For directions on a galactic scale, much SF (and the Traveller RPG) use Coreward (toward the center of the galaxy), Rimward (away from the center of the galaxy), Spinward (moving about the center of the galaxy in the same direction as general stellar motion), and Antispinward or Trailing (moving about the center of the galaxy in the direction opposite to the general stellar motion).

# Answer
> 2 votes
So, one idea I was considering is a spatial reference system designed for indoor navigation. It's intended to coexist alongside an egocentric direction system which is much more typical.

There's a cardinal direction, let's call it `P` that refers to the direction towards the primary entrance/exit or "downhill" as a metaphorical extension.

If used in a room or house, the primary entrance is the front door to the house, the main door to the room, the door you used, or the door that is currently to your back.

If used outside on a hill or mountain, the foot of the hill is the primary entrance. Let `q` refer to a direction 90 degrees to the right of the current direction.

The idea, basically, is that if you are travelling uphill or into a room, `P` is the direction you would have to go to double back.

Here's a crude drawing of a room with the directions labeled with their symbolic names.

```
    +-------------------------------------+
    |                                     |
    |                                     |
    |                                     |
    |                                     |
    A                 Pq                  |
                       |                  |
                   P---+---Pqq            |
                       |                  |
    V                 Pqqq                |
    |                                     |
    |                                     |
    |                                     |
    +-------------------------------------+

```

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Tags: vocabulary
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# Question
Title: What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?
What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?

I'm curious as to if there are any full existing conlangs that allow you to do arithmetic or mathematical manipulations from a conlang perspective.

The closest that I've found for this is this set of short clips on YouTube, Inventing a Number System. But I'm curious as to if there might be more examples, especially examples that have a mathematical grammar of some sort.

(Note: I do apologize if this post is a bit fuzzy, as the idea is still kind of fuzzy in my mind. This is also my first post to this forum. I can revise the post if needed.)

Thanks.

# Answer
> 2 votes
There's a language based on stack-based programming languages (like Forth) that eliminates syntactic ambiguity called Fith. The name is a deliberate pun on Forth.

Basically, when parsing the language you have a stack of objects that you have to keep track of, as well as some global state like the default number that can be explicitly changed.

The idea of layering a human language on top of a Forth-like grammar is flexible enough that you could extend Fith or make radically different design decisions without losing some of its nice properties.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Slightly tangential, but Richard Feynman invented his own mathematical notation (mostly trigonometric functions), as mentioned in his autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!":

> While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didn't like the symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, "sin f" looked like s times i times n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square root sign. Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left -to-right reflected so that it started with the horizontal line with the value underneath, and then the sigma.

He stopped using his notation when he inadvertently slipped into it when discussing some math with his friend, because he realized the need for a common (even if inferior) notation.

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Tags: conlang-creation
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title: A biphonic language

text:
# Question
Title: A biphonic language
**How could a language evolve such that the vowels are biphonic (like in throat singing)?**

**Note:** Biphonicity is when two notes/tones are sung *simultaneously*.

There are languages that are whistled or toned, so I'd imagine it'd be possible, *just how?*

Perhaps, the language developes an unwieldy tone system that begins to overlap itself, creating vowels with two separate tones being used simultaneously?

# Answer
> 8 votes
In a way, vowels are already biphonic! Acoustically, vowels (and most sounds, actually) are simply combinations of formants: specific frequencies at which the vocal tract resonates. The differences between vowels are then caused by differences in the frequencies of the formants. This can be easily seen on a *spectrogram*, like this one from Wikipedia:

In this spectrogram, the vowel \[i\] has its first two formants at roughly 500 and 2500 Hz, while \[u\] has its first two formants at roughly 500 and 1000 Hz.

Now, it turns out that biphonic singing works on exactly the same principle! Biphonic singing works through shaping the mouth so that one of the formants becomes loud enough to be perceived as a separate note. Note that this uses exactly the same mechanism used in vocalising vowels; the only difference is that the shape of the mouth is changed slightly to emphasise the formants. To experience this yourself, you can try saying \[u͡ʉ͡y͡ʉ͡u\] very slowly; if you listen carefully to what you are saying, you should be able to hear a note growing higher and then lower in pitch. This note is one of the formants of the vowels (the first formant, I think); Biphonic singers simply emphasise this formant so it becomes loud enough to easily hear.

So, to summarise, languages already use vowels which could be described as ‘biphonic’ — the only reason we don’t hear it that way is because the formants aren’t as strong as they are in biphonic singing.

(For more information, you may find https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/voice.html and https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/xoomi.html interesting.)

# Answer
> 5 votes
You already hint a possible answer in the question: There is an art form named throat singing. A community where throat singing is practiced may carry over the some biphonic distinguishing features to their language. This may include borrowing a biphonic pattern for some formulaic expression from a throat song, or words with special poetic or religious meanings. Once established as a linguistic feature it may spread all over the language.

I think, linguistically this would be still described as a tone system, but with rather complex tones in it.

P.S. I once listened to a biphonic whistler who was able to whistle some classic music with two voices simultaneously. A flashing experience.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I'll take a stab at the "evolve" part. Throat singing might be a possibility, so we could look at the environment surrounding that.

"The popularity of throat singing among Tuvans seems to have arisen as a result of geographic location and culture. The open landscape of Tuva allows for the sounds to carry a great distance. Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing in these areas mark khoomei as an integral part in the ancient pastoral animism still practiced today."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan\_throat\_singing)

So in the context of conlanging, a landscape with sparse vegetation (or other... I'm not very familiar with geography) and perhaps combined with animist beliefs might explain the development of a polyphonic language, which would include not only specially spoken vowels, but also perhaps the use of false vocal folds and other throat singing techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone\_singing).

In addition, you mention the possibility of such a language being doubly tonal. In that regard, a humid area might be conducive to a tonal language, though the Tuvan language is considered a pitch accent language rather than tonal. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan\_language). Alternatively, tone can arise from contact with other tonal languages.

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Tags: naturalism, unnatural-features, vowels
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title: Is Russian a constructed language?

text:
# Question
Title: Is Russian a constructed language?
It is regulated directively by authorities even more strictly than programming languages!

E.g. During the reform of 1918 they just forbade letter Ъ аnd **removed** all those letters! In some cases letter Ъ was still needed, and they were replacing it by apostrophe during some period.

I think you would have been repressed if you had written something in the old Russian orthography...

# Answer
First of all, a language reform can be controversial, not widely accepted and even authoritarian in its implementation and even stupid - it still doesn't make the language constructed.

Second, the roots of the reform we are talking here can be found in proposals of Russian linguistic society that precedes revolution for more than a decade. It was a common understanding in linguistic circles that this way or another Russian spelling should me modernised. For God sake, up to that moment students and pupils were memorising by heart usage of "ѣ" because for them there were no logic behind it at all.

Third, even if we will consider this particular spelling reform as inefficient or redundant (which it wasn't) - there was no attempts to regulate by it how people are actually talking and which grammar rules they are using. It remained exactly the same language it was before the revolution.

This is not a constructed language by the very definition of a constructed language.

Also you are *very* wrong about how transition of Turkish to the Latin alphabet was generally approved. It wasn't and some people were quite opposed to it. Ironically, the example provided by you is closer (but it's still not) to a constructed language in that sense that Osmanic and modern Turkish differs way more than pre- and post-Revolution Russian.
> 6 votes

# Answer
No, this is language reform.

* In 1928, the Turkish government replaced the *entire alphabet* in use with a modified Roman alphabet, abandoning the previous Arabic-based alphabet. Vocabulary reforms (mostly purism) were also introduced at this time.
* In the late 19th century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda introduced reforms (simplifications, neologisms) in the Hebrew language to make it suitable for modern use.
* The government of the People's Republic of China introduced Simplified Chinese characters starting in the 1950's with a goal of improving literacy.

None of these activities are normally considered conlanging.
> 3 votes

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Tags: writing-systems
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title: How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?

text:
# Question
Title: How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation?
I'm trying to design a conscript for my conlang Atili and would like to create punctuation in order to deliminate sentences and transcribe limited prosody. However, I don't just want to create new symbols for the full stop, comma, colon, semicolon, etc. I am especially cautious of non-terminating punctuation and how it can be used differently from in English.

I'm aware of distinctions like the Oxford comma and Spanish inverted punctuation, so I know that punctuation is not universal. How do other languages use punctuation differently from English?

# Answer
In fact, each language has its own punctuation rules that have to be learned. German is very different in its punctuation rules from English (relative sentences **always** require a comma, dependent clauses are separated from the main clause by a comma, but no "Oxford comma" and no comma after sentence-initial adverbials. Studying the rules of punctuation for some non-English languages should give you an idea of how things can be regulated differently.

I also learned that Russian and Kyrgyz and probably other languages have more ellispis-type multiple punctuations like `!..` and `?..` and even `!?.` and `?!.`.

And than there are creative extensions to punctuation like the interrobang ‽, its inverted counterpart gnaborretni ⸘ and lots of proposals for an Irony mark.
> 8 votes

# Answer
Armenian is one of examples of modern language that has its own punctuation which differs quite noticeably from the Western one, which is nowadays widely adopted (of course, with variations).

Here's are some noticeable differences:

* Armenian question mark (՞) is placed on the stressed vowel of the word in question rather than at the end of the sentence, for instance: "Ինչպե՞ս ես:"
* Armenian exclamation mark follows the same pattern.
* There's a separate punctuation mark used to indicate a pause that is longer than that of a comma, but shorter than that of a colon.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Punctuation is not universal. Chinese and Japanese didn't used to have punctuation, nor apparently did Latin and Ancient Greek. So I'd say that's the first thing to consider: your proto-script needn't have had any punctuation at all. But over time, scribes found that it was a pain in the backside to write long continuous strings and just figure out by context where sentences end and begin. How they choose to delimit those sentences\* is up to them.

Maybe writers split up sentences using a vertical bar or a slash, or a middle dot like the interpunct used in Japanese and Chinese, or some other kooky character. Maybe sentences are grouped using something similar to brackets at the start and end. Or maybe ancient authors actually drew a circle or line around each sentence to delimit it from the next (it never had to be practical!) Future authors realised that, if all they wanted to do was tell where one sentence ended and another began, all they had to do is draw a circle around every *other* sentence.

> (So you might have a paragraph like this.) Where every other sentence is uncircled. (And the next sentence is circled again.) Imagine that these brackets are circles.

Punctuation within sentences is, again, up to you. It's perfectly possible that your script's writers never decided that they needed to split up clauses using commas, separate lists using colons, or mark speech using quotation marks etc. Maybe they mark speech separately with an underline, or a dotted line. Or maybe they write using different coloured inks depending on type of sentence being written.

Maybe, instead of little marks, your proto-script could have fully-fledged characters without any spoken value, but which are used to delimit clauses in the same way as commas are. Of course, over time these might have reduced and transformed into a small, easy to write character - in much the same way that Simplified Chinese emerged over time because some scholars somewhere were too lazy to write out 麗 every time, and went with 丽 instead.

The point is: free yourself from **all** constraints about how your writing should be written. Start with a blank canvas if you like, and add in features as you see fit. Think about your proto-script and how the first scribes might have written things down - then think about how later writers would have abbreviated those forms and made them shorter, simpler and easier. As Artifexian says: Iterate, Iterate, Iterate. Write down random scribbles and see how they pair with your script.

These are just a few random ideas. I hope some of them help.

* I don't know how your language works, but you might not even need to separate sentences. Maybe just clauses, paragraphs, or "logical ideas".
> 4 votes

# Answer
It's quite correct that punctuation only really became at thing after the printing-press. So it's be perfectly natural to go without it in many fictional settings. Even so, even though it was anachronistic, I worked on this question for my own last conscript because I enjoyed it.

I read what I could to find all the "functions" performed by every punctuation mark I could find. Then I picked which functions I wanted for my language.

I added one: a sentence-opener mark, in place of capital letters. For the river-inspired conscript in question, this mountain mark's slight angling helps orient the reader to the "river's" direction, too.

I remixed some: splitting the functions of semi-colon; combining em-dash, colon, and quotation under the function "hard parenthetical"; ending sentences/rivers with the "hard parenthetical" "cataratct" is an exclamation.

I left one out: questions are indicated by a clitic already, so there's no question mark.

In my opinion, my punctuation system relexes even less because many punctuation functions are done by how you write the thoughts with respect to each other, like rivers' tributaries. Information encoded by the angles of clauses isn't exactly punctuation, but perhaps it will suggest more possibilities for using text without relexing.

I could have relexed even less, I feel, because there are more nuances and "functions" languages could express by punctuation, though I don't know a language that does. Cantonese has grammar particles doing interesting tasks. English uses prosody for many expressions, and we write this with italics and such. I am sure other languages have features like these. Grammatical nuances like these could be done by punctuation in writing. It depends on what the bare sounds themselves leave ambiguous.

Setting other languages aside, have you found some ambiguous sentences in your conlang? Every language's rules leaves ambiguity somewhere; you just choose where. Perhaps your language has ambiguity in novel places, and so in the less expressive writing media would need a novel mark.

You could also have not-exactly-punctuation symbols. Consider where you might have a culturally important mark like $, or a short-hand mark like &. Culturally important information, short-hand: other common marks are surely potential hiding categories of punctuation job in front of your face :) In my conlang, the first time you mention the name of a god in a conversation or chapter or whatever, you have to use a respectful prefix reserved for this purpose. That "piety function" could have been done by a punctuation instead of morphologically. Some cultural quirk like that in your setting could have a punctuation mark in print :)

Hope one of these ideas helps!
> 4 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems, naturalism
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title: Lemmata in a prefixing language

text:
# Question
Title: Lemmata in a prefixing language
I'm developing a heavily prefixing language, and I'm trying to work out a lemma/citation form for my verbs. However, nearly all forms of the verb have a prefix. For example, the verb "to go" has the stem *m(a)*, but the standard infinitive is *um*, the first-person singular standing conjugation is *irim*, and the participle is *ënda*.

Obviously, the latter is wholly unsuitable as a lemma because it has a tendency to set off a number of phonological processes that can cause the stem to get lost, I don't really want to list words under any of these forms in my dictionary, because if I do, I'll end up with all of my verbs listed in the lexicon under "u," "i," or "e."

# Answer
> 5 votes
You could just list them under the stem in that case. If you can easily reconstruct the infinitive by a simple rule, then that would be the easiest way. There is no law that states that you always have to put the infinitive as the main dictionary entry. It's only common practice in most Western languages because it suits the way they work.

Another possibility would be to look at how other languages deal with this issue. For example, Indonesian verbs also tend to have prefixes; I'm not sure what they do in the dictionary. In Arabic, I believe the root is in the dictionary, ie the three core consonants from which the other forms are derived.

Just do whatever works for you: it's your language after all!

# Answer
> 5 votes
It's possible to use the infinitive as the citation form / lemma in your dictionary, but have collation rules specific to your language.

For example, if `um` is the infinitive, you can have it sorted under the `m` section in your dictionary.

Collation in Tibetan works this way and prefixes don't influence the collation order, but there's the further complication that Tibetan orthography is non-phonemic and the prefixes aren't pronounced anymore. Here's another source describing collation in Tibetan and there's a NativLang video on YouTube that covers Tibetan historical spelling generally.

You can also pick an inflected form arbitrarily, like the first person standing form, maybe, and use that as the head entry. You can then add entries for common forms like the infinitive and participle and have a cross-reference for the first person standing form. Latin entries on Wiktionary, for example, use the first-person present singular as the citation form.

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Tags: conlang-creation, conlang-documentation
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# Question
Title: Maximizing the distinction between affirmative and negative sentences
What are some strategies for making affirmative and negative sentences as distinct as possible?

The motivation for this question is an annoying pair of words in English: `can` and `can't`. They frequently sound very similar in rapid speech.

There's also one attested language, Wyandot, described here, that appears to lack dedicated negative morphemes and instead has an irrealis morpheme and a contrastive morpheme that can convey negation in certain contexts but don't have to.

If you wanted to do the opposite and *maximize* the contrast between affirmative and negative sentences, what are some strategies for doing so?

# Answer
> 7 votes
To ***maximize***, it seems like at least you'd want to associate negation with:

* independent words
* conjugation/declension
* your loudest phonemes
* distinct word order
* distinct prosody

You could have a number of independent markers/words as mentioned above.

Turkish has verbs which always negate, and Turkish verbs usually end the thought: e.g., 'değil' for "is not \[noun or adjective\]"; 'yok' for 'there is not \[something\].' For negating verbs, it has an infix as part of the conjugation. Reflecting back your point about 'can'**t**,' as a non-native speaker, I can miss this negative infix sometimes. This, even though it is higher on the sonority hierarchy (easier to hear) than the plosive T you point out in 'can't.' (It uses M and a variable vowel.)

So, if you wanted to change a conjugation to express "not," say, instead of a T or even an M, you could try using the loudest sounds in your set (usually wide-mouthed vowels?), ha ha.

You could change word order for negated sentences. We do that for questions. I have noticed. Have you noticed? \[rhetorical ;) \]

Also, you could reserve a certain, unusual tone, pitch, stress pattern, etc., for negating, like how it's pretty easy to hear the lilt we put at the end of a question? Not that this is exclusive of the other options, but imagine to say, "You can't have a muffin," you deepen your voice as much as you can and borderline-sing, "You can have a muffin." If people associated deep voice with negation like we associate that rising tone with questions, that'd be pretty hard to miss.

# Answer
> 6 votes
Looking a bit further down that WALS page you linked, I come across the Noni language, which allows as many as three negative markers in the same sentence:

```
***kɛ́**  bɔ́   nǔ  géé  kfun .*
**NEG** 3p **NEG** FUT FUT₁ hit  **NEG**

```

*They will not hit (later today).*

It seems to me that you can’t get much more distinct than this! (Though there is such a thing as having *too* much marking: all examples of triple negative marking on WALS, including Noni, have at least one marker optional.)

# Answer
> 6 votes
Here are two solutions to this problem that haven't been mentioned yet

* suppletive negative forms
* a large collection of negative polarity items

One famous example of a suppletive negative form is 有 vs 没(有) in Mandarin. Also, sign languages frequently feature *many* suppletive negative forms. Sign language existentials are especially prone to having suppletive/irregular negative forms. Suppletive negative forms have the advantage that the corresponding positive word form does not even appear in a negative sentence.

Negative polarity items are words that are only licensed in negative contexts, such as certain uses of `yet`, `even`, or `anyone` in English.

A language could have only a few words that are intrinsically negative, but many more that reliably indicate the presence of negation but don't carry a negative meaning themselves.

The language could also have many *positive polarity items* too; the idea being that the presence of a positive polarity item reliably indicates the absence of negation ... so by hearing one you know you're in an affirmative sentence.

# Answer
> 4 votes
One strategy that comes immediately into my mind is the use of multiple negative markers like in French *ne ... pas*, if you miss one of them, you will catch another one. Multiple negation being equivalent to single negation is a frequent feature of natural languages, but it is often optional to use more than one marker of negativity.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Use double negative, such as in Slavic languages (note that the Romance variant is weaker) - this is actually a misnomer, it is a *negative concord* where in a negative sentence, everything that depends on the negated verb and can be negated has to be negated. This is usually limited to certain pronouns and adverbs, though.

For example, Slovak for *nobody ever helped anyone* would be

```

nikto     nikdy  nikomu     nepomohol
nobody    never  nobody-DAT help-PAST-3P-NEG

```

It helps most of those negated pronouns and adverbs (and verbs) begin with *ne-* or *ni-*.

# Answer
> 2 votes
If you want to go extreme, you could use different roots for negative and positive verbs.

I don't know if this is done in any natural language, but it wouldn't be too strange if you consider how Engish treats adjectives: 'more large' is typically expressed by 'larger', while 'less large' is expressed by 'smaller'. Many, if not most, common adjectives have antonyms with completely different roots! You can of course also have a negative affix (circumfix and/or transfix for maximal contrast!) to use with verbs without a proper "verb antonym", much like un- and non- are used to form English antonyms, even ad hoc ones like "non-blue" or "unpunishable".

Eglish has a few pairs like "end"/"continue", "sink"/"float" etc, but you could easily imagine there being antonyms for nearly any verb. This would drastically reduce the need for negations, and a speaker of such a language might find English use of negations for verbs as silly as we'd find "The non-ugly car is rather un-cheap, and too non-small to fit in my non-unlimited yard".

This can of course be combined with other mechanisms, but I think it goes a long way by itself as well.

# Answer
> 1 votes
This can be accomplished in English, although it's usually looked down upon by grammarians as low class speech:

> *I ain't done nothing to noone / I didn't do nothing to nobody.*

Although some people might feel smug pointing out that double negative theoretically cancels itself, in practical terms, if someone heard that sentence there ain't no way they'd confuse it for anything other than the speaker being very emphatic in saying "no". As I just did, when I used "*ain't no way*" instead of the more "proper" "*isn't a way*" or something similar.

So for your conlang, simply load it down with multiple negative terms or forms as it reduces the possibility of confusion of intent. To use my example again:

> *I didn't do something to anyone*: single negative term.

Miss the contraction on *did* (or miss the word *not* if you didn't contract) and the sentence reverses in meaning.

> *I ain't done something to anyone*: single negative term

Now the negative term is very distinct from the positive, lessening the possibility of confusion.

> *I ain't done nothing to anyone*: two negative terms.

Harder now to extract a positive statement from that (aside from the aforementioned snooty-nosed linguistic logisticians).

> *I ain't done nothing to noone*: three negative terms.

Again, the grammarians may have a seizure seeing that sentence, but there is no way to mistake the intent of what is being stated.

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Tags: conlang-creation
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# Question
Title: What are language concepts that could be considered to be based on human anatomy?
I'm in the early stages of creating an alien language for a personal writing project. I'm trying to avoid the aliens' language having properties that human languages do that are somehow linked to our anatomy. One of the most obvious examples of such a feature is a numerical system with base ten due to the number of digits.

What are language concepts that are linked to our anatomy in comparable ways that I should find alternatives for when creating a language for aliens who are not humanoid? Any references for links between our anatomy and such language concepts or features are much appreciated.

# Answer
Some obvious ones:

**Phonetics**, be it of spoken or signed language, is obviously constrained by the body of humans - both in the channels (aural, visual) employed and also in how they are employed.

**Metaphors** often make use of body parts. Spatial prepositions and adverbs are often derived from relevant body parts: front from face, forehead, nose, chest; back from back or butt; up from head… you get the picture. Basically every organ has been referred to as being the cause of emotions etc as well in metaphors.

Words for **directions** in particular are also somewhat based on human anatomy. We have lateral symmetry (left-right) but an alien could likely have some form of radial symmetry in their bodies, which would make the concepts of leftness and rightness very weird to them. Aquatic beings would also likely have a different concept of directions altogether, probably based more on the orientation of their own bodies than relative to the ground.

Those are the things that come to mind. However, much more importantly, the inner workings of language as a whole would likely be different from a human’s. There are some things in human language that you really wouldn’t assume to be necessary. Just to make two examples:

It seems pretty clear that humans take the raw audio input, break it into **segments** (phones) then further abstract those phones into **phonemes**, which are then in turn used to build more complex words. One could just as well imagine skipping the segmentation step and going directly from audio to meaning. There appears to be evidence however that some songbirds also employ what could be considered phonemes in their songs, so perhaps it is to be expected.

Another thing is in syntax: human language does not appear to allow circular dependencies, that is word¹ A modifying word B, which in turn modifies word A again. From my fairly limited understanding of syntax, human sentences can be structured in a tree structure. It seems plausible that an alien language might have more or less freedom, perhaps allowing cyclic graphs in their syntax… or in the other direction, only linear dependence. An example of an alien conlang playing around with this is Europan, which I personally consider one of the most interesting conlangs I’ve ever encountered.

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¹or clause
> 16 votes

# Answer
I think the question is not well formulated. Mostly because "language concepts" (e.g. tense-aspect-mood systems, animacy, verbal valence, case systems...) reflect the workings of the *human mind* far, far more than they could ever reflect the human anatomy. Anatomy/biology of course influences massive swathes of *semantics*, but I don't think anything other than pure phonetics or sign language is influenced by anatomy.

Facial expressions and body language probably belong there, but tend to have a huge cultural element. Position of the ears, for example, is not something humans make (or can make) use of, but maybe elves could.

Some more semantics example:

* We make distinctions useful to us *at our given size*. We cannot tell apart things by smell, or by UV light the way other animals (or measuring instruments) can. We do not tell apart very tiny things by basic names (e.g. ants, mites, sand). If we could sense, say, gravitic variations or psychic energies, we might have entirely different ways to describe position or time.
* *Time is linear to us*, cause precedes effects and so on, we cannot watch again a past event. This obviously affects how language models time and mood. Consider the Observers from Fringe or any other species with a different perception of time. Their possibly utterly alien perception of time may well be the reason their writing is (apparently) indecipherable.
* "Fish" is not a proper biological class (and whether marine mammals are excluded from it in common parlance is debatable!) because we don't feel a need to be any more precise about it, but we would have better concepts for it *if we were a marine species*! Similarly, plants are divided, roughly, into, flowers, lianas, grass, trees and shrubs. This system is not even very efficient for Earth ecology!
* Expanding on the UV thing, *color words are constrained by our visual capacity*, and typically distinguish a surprisingly limited number of basics. Forget the hierarchy part, nonderived terms usually stop around 6-8 words, why? A species with different color perception would do things differently. Mark Rosenfelder spends an entire *chapter* on this point in his *Conlanger's Lexipedia*.
* As far as *number base systems*, decimal and vigesimal are most common in humans because we have 10 fingers, and 20 fingers and toes. (although a huge number of bases have been documented, I don't think any languages have a binary or ternary one)
* *Kinship terminology* is based off our own reproductive biology (and our gregariousness). What of a species where the embryo must be incubated in a member of a different species? What about a species where reproduction requires gametes from more than two individuals?
> 6 votes

# Answer
Just a couple of sci-fi examples:

Niven and Pournelle's *The Mote in God's Eye* has a race with two small manipulating arms on one side, and a large "gripping hand" arm on the other. Even the humans pick up the phrase "on the gripping hand" to mean a third alternative to two possibilities.

One of Spider Robinson's Callahan's Place stories has an alien species with trilateral symmetry. Having full 360-degree vision eliminates many ideas about distrust- "Blind-sided", "Stabbed in the back", etc.

And, going the other direction, L.Neil Smith's *Converse and Conflict"* has a scene where a human is explaining to an alien how Cold-War-ish Earth politics is causing friction among the multi-national human crew, and the alien observes that, if war breaks out on Earth, the captain

> "...will have a headache on his hands. Can you really say that? What an amazing language!"
> 5 votes

# Answer
Much of by is based upon anatomy. Mostly that of Phonetics, and, by extension, phonological change and glottochronology. If you look at the IPA, the various phonemes are based upon point of articulation and such. Dental, Bilabial, Palatal, Glottal, etc. So I would recommend looking at the structure of the mouth of the aliens in question, and looking at the IPA in order to see what sounds would be possible with them and which would be impossible. For example, if they have no teeth, they would not be capable of dental consonants.

This by extension can effect the way in which their sounds change, based upon what sounds are easier for them in any given situation.

The amount of digits can also effect what the most common radix would be for the languages, for example, in Humans the most common radix is 10 due to us having ten fingers. But, it is still not the only one used. Look at:

Mesopotamian: Base-60

Mayan Languages: Base-20

Pamaen: Base-8

Yam Languages: Base-6

Chumashan: Base-4

And so on. But more languages use Base-10 than any other base, due to the ease of counting in Base-10 compared to other bases, due to our ten fingers.

Note: If you want better bases, it is easier to divide and multiply numbers in Bases with a greater amount of factors. This is the main reason behind the Duodecimal Movement, due to 12 being a superior highly composite number, with four non-trivial factors (2,3,4,6) compared to Base-10's two non-trivial factors (2,5). You can find multiple bases and their mathematical properties on wikipedia
> 4 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, biolinguistics
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# Question
Title: Is there any general rule for constructing a word? Example: "q" or "w" should not end a word, something like this
I am developing 4 conlangs (sparish, old sparish, elvian and barrish (need a new name)) for a story which is used by humans of Spar, Northern Sparian, Elves/Aspian, Barrians of south respectively. I have no knowledge about developing language whatsoever, I have learnt some few things from youtube and google(youtube was much helpful). I have the constants and vowels that I want to use in my language, but I am facing trouble with the letters.

1. The sound of "q". I don't understand how to pronounce any words that have "q" in it. According to IPA pulmonic consonant chart (with audio), it sounds like /ka/. So how should I pronounce a word like "qakt"
2. Are there any kind of rules for word building? Like a word should never end with certain letters, or shouldn't start with certain letters.

I want these languages to sound and feel as natural as possible. I am asking because some of my created words exist in one language or the other, and I want them to be as distinct as possible.

Moreover, I want sparish to have a word like "re(letter)". This letter helps them to in poetry, its intonation depends upon the letter that is placed inside the bracket, but it does not feel write when you pronounce it. Can anyone help me with it too?

How to Create a Language

How to Create a Made Up Word

Conlang Case Study

How to Make a Language

Artifexian (channel)

How to Create a Language

# Answer
Yes, there are but they are language-specific. These are called phonotactics. They are well explained in the book of David Peterson "The Art of Language Invention"(E-book download link). Actually, these rules include:

* structure of a syllable. E.g. in Hawaiian language closed syllables are impossible. So words like "heck" are not allowed. ;)
* stress. The Finnish language always stresses the first syllable.
* What consonants/vowels can be combined. "st" is quite common in English but not in Hungarian. But "ts" is quite common in Russian but not in English. But on the other hand Russian allows "st" too.
* there are many other things. I suggest reading this article on Wikipedia.

**P.S.** I'm not good at linguistic terms in English, sorry for possible wrong use of words ;)
> 10 votes

# Answer
Yes, there are various rules to the structure of words, this is a mix of syllable structure and phonotactic rules. These, however, are not universal, but rather, are language-specific, as mentioned above.

For example, in Japanese, it is a Open Syllable language, but it can have -n or -m serve as a Coda. But no other consonant can act as such.

無限 (Mu-gen)

月讀 (Tsu-ku-yo-mi)

This is quite universal in structure in Japanese, CV or V, and CVC2 only when C2 is -n or -m.

You can simply set these rules, but it is more complicated if developed naturalistically, where it is based around specific phonological changes that lead to this consistent rule emerging.
> 3 votes

# Answer
(Side note: asking multiple questions at once is not recommended here. I see that @VictorVosMottor has already given a good answer to your question (2), so I will restrict myself to answering (1).)

> The sound of "q". I don't understand how to pronounce any words that have "q" in it. According to IPA pulmonic consonant chart (with audio), it sounds like /ka/. So how should I pronounce a word like "qakt"

The sound /q/ is a *voiceless uvular plosive*. By contrast /k/ is a *voiceless velar plosive*. We can compare the two:

* They are both *voiceless*: produced without vibration of the vocal cords.
* They are both *plosive*: produced by blocking the mouth and then releasing it.
* They differ only in their *place of articulation*. /k/ is *velar*; that is, it is produced with the tongue touching the back of the soft palate. By contrast, /q/ is *uvular*; that is, it is produced with the tongue touching the uvula. (Another way to think about it: /q/ is produced towards the back of the mouth compared to /k/.)

So, to summarise: /q/ and /k/ are very similar sounds, except /q/ is slightly backer than /k/. Due to this similarity, it is not surprising that they will sound the same to you if your native language does not distinguish the two.
> 2 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonology, naturalism, vocabulary
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# Question
Title: Naturalness of different universal quantifiers based on the size of the domain you're quantifying over
English has a few determiners and determiner-like things that express *universal quantification* including *all* and *every*.

How *naturalistic* is it to have different sets of quantifiers based on features of *the domain* such as its number (and possibly other features like animacy or remoteness).

---

The noun governed by the determiner can be either singular or plural with little change in meaning.

```
Every rose has thorns.

```

```
All natural numbers are odd or even.

```

These sentences have the same meaning as `All roses have thorns` and `Every natural number is odd or even`.

In some languages, such as French, have something that can be analyzed as a determiner inflecting for gender and number of the noun: `tous/toute/tous/toutes` which means `all`. Although French also has `chaque`, analogous to the English `every` and `each`. The distribution is similar to English, but I can't provide any examples that I can independently verify because I'm not a native French speaker.

Anyway, I'm wondering about the naturalness of having different determiners depending on the number of the *domain* rather than the thing directly governed by the quantifier.

For instance, suppose we had `every(0) every(1) every(2) every(paucal) every(plural)`

`every(2)`, `every(paucal)` and `every(plural)` are all(paucal) fairly natural.

`every(2)` seems to map onto English `both` more or less directly, although `both` cannot be used with a singular noun.

```
every(paucal) continent has a name starting with a vowel or a glide.

```

```
every(plural) electron is small.

```

However, a construction like `all(0)` does have uses that aren't jokes and aren't related to logic or math.

A construction like the following seems reasonable and fairly easy to interpret.

```
I have done all(0) of my homework.

```

# Answer
> 4 votes
This is not inherently unnatural. As you point out, English "both" (and reasonable translations such as Spanish "*ambos*") easily fit the role of `every(2)` (I would argue that whether the noun is marked as singular or plural isn't particularly interesting here).

`every(1)` can be reasonably analyzed as a definiteness marking and is encompassed in most Indo-European languages by the definite article ("the", "*el*", "*i*", *το*), as shown by the sentence "The sun is shining." (This sentence can be used without explicitly introducing the sun into the conversation specifically because there is only one reasonable referent.)

In particular, I could see one set of forms evolving from the definite articles in a language with heavy number marking (i.e. "the (singular)" becomes `each(1)`, "the (dual)" becomes `each(2)`, etc.).

What I would be very surprised to see in a natural language is a fully consistent system of these, where `each()`, `every()`, and `all()` all cover the same numeric distinctions in the vein of the Esperanto correlatives.

I would also be surprised to see more than a couple of these in any language that does not make at least as many number distinctions elsewhere.

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Tags: conlang-creation, naturalism
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# Question
Title: Syllabic restriction/word boundaries set by IPA? Or it is decided by language creator
When creating syllables we basically require an *onset*, *nucleus*, and a *coda*. Now, usually, all language have an onset, and the coda is fairly optional. Before creating a phonetic system, we first decide the word order, and rules about what sounds are allowed in the onset, nucleus and coda positions.

My question is focused on the 2nd part. For example, in *English*, the sound \[ŋ\] isn’t allowed to begin a word, but it can begin a syllable; and in *Dothraki*, the consonants \[ɡ\], \[q\], and \[w\] can’t end a word.

So these restrictions, do they arrive because of some IPA rule? Or is it the developer that creates these rules?

# Answer
The *phonotactics* of a language, what you have described, is the silent partner of phonology. The analogy I like to use is that a language's phonology is its periodic table (with individual phonemes as individual elements), while its phonotactics are the entire rest of its chemistry. Higher level stuff, like morphology, semantics, pragmatics, are things like biology, psychology, sociology.

**Just like every language has its own phonology, every language has its own phonotactics.** There are languages that can put /ŋ/ in onset (for example, Vietnamese) or /h/ in coda (Arabic). There are languages that can't make /s/ clusters, or any clusters for that matter (Hawaiian).

The IPA is the "Grand Unified Periodic Table of Linguistics"; it's stated purpose is to label every sound used in a human language, and does not restrict their arrangement in anyway. There is no "Grand Unified Chemistry of Linguistics"; phonotactic laws are usually described in plain language, although there is a notation to succinctly describe allophonic variation (that is, how phonemes are realized as phones in different environments) and phonemic evolution (how a language's phonemes evolve over time).
> 7 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonology, vocabulary, morphology
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# Question
Title: Can Kēlen truly be considered verb-free?
It has been claimed that the conlang Kēlen, winner of the 2009 Smiley award, is supposed to challenge Greenberg's universal of always having a noun-verb distinction by eliminating verbs. In light of the fact that Kēlen has a special word-class called relationals, which are four predicating words that take noun phrase arguments, is it not more factual to analyse the relationals of Kēlen as a very limited and closed class of verbs? They do seem to fulfill the same function words called "verbs" do in other languages, and are necessary for predication — another domain typically reserved for verbs (even if we assume zero-copula).

# Answer
Using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a good baseline of what a human language can communicate, there are several core verbs:

* Mental predicates: THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
* Speech: SAY
* Actions, events, movement: DO, HAPPEN, MOVE
* Location, existence, specification: BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)

*LA* is clearly polysemous for THERE IS, BE (SOMEWHERE), BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING), and probably also marks PART in reverse.

*NI* probably covers DO and MOVE.

*SE* is even higher level, expressing the verb of *give*, as well as primes like FEEL and SAY.

So the claim that Kēlen does not have verbs is patently false.

There are in fact natural languages with even more restricted verb inventories than Kēlen, such as Jingulu, which has been analysed as only have verbs for *go*, *come*, and *do*. (I haven't seen an NSM style analysis of Jingulu, I wonder how they would see the verbs like THINK etc being expressed in Jingulu?)
> 11 votes

# Answer
## Relationals in Kēlen have no other purpose, so are verbs in all but name.

Kēlen is an engineering language, masquerading as an art lang. It doesn't have a history or proto-lang like some other art langs, so it is obvious that the relationals are a one for one replacement of verbs, but without any verb-like conjugation seen in english (e.g. run -\> running).

Compare tenseless languages, which make use of other ways of conjugating the verbs (aspect or mood) or other words (verbs/adverbs/preposition). Kēlen uses both of those schemes.

Take the Kēlen relational word LA for instance

| pattern | english equivalent |
| --- | --- |
| LA NP | NP exists, there is NP |
| LA NP LOC (NP) | NP is at a location |
| LA NP (ñe) NP | NP is (the same as) NP |
| LA NP pa NP | NP is/has/contains NP |

In the examples the role LOC is performed by sū, which is a preposition. The Kēlen word ñe modifies the relational to be possessive rather than stative. The relations between verbs and relationals go on. It even has inflections for LA.

Why is this significant? It's because the relationals serve no other purpose that they have to be considered direct relations to verbs. For a comparison that shows how a word having multiple purposes could denote verblessness, see how Salishan Languages can be considered nounless:

> Words with noun-like meanings are automatically equivalent to \[be + NOUN\] when used predicatively, such as Lushootseed sbiaw which means '(is a) coyote'. Words with more verb-like meanings, when used as arguments, are equivalent to \[one that VERBs\] or \[VERB+er\]. For example, Lushootseed ʔux̌ʷ means '(one that) goes'.

In natural languages, where words evolve in meaning over time, you can see meanings change over time. See how the words Be, Is and Am come about:

> Old English bēon, an irregular and defective verb, whose full conjugation derives from several originally distinct verbs. The forms am and is are from an Indo-European root shared by Latin sum and est . The forms was and were are from an Indo-European root meaning ‘remain’. The forms be and been are from an Indo-European root shared by Latin fui ‘I was’, fio ‘I become’, and Greek phuein ‘bring forth, cause to grow’. The origin of are is uncertain.

\- Google.

It should be possible to make a language where your verb is a primarily a noun/adjective/adposition but can be considered a verb only secondarily, as it's meaning changes over the imaginary history of the language. Maybe the word LA primarily means SEAT or GROUND (specifically a noun, not another verb). But when it's used with another word, it's meaning changes from the noun to a verb-like sense.

This way you could have a verbless language, where it's verb-like words evolved out of non-verbs.

But Kēlen has no such evolution of relationals, so they can serve no other purpose than to be one for one verb replacements.
> 3 votes

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Tags: verbs
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# Question
Title: In compound words/suffixed words, does the stress change?
I'm creating a language where the stress is on the third to last syllable and I have a sound change where an unstressed short vowel at the beginning of a word is deleted. (so in 'a.ta.ra. the word vs (a)'ta.ra.ra. where the first vowel would be deleted) My entire language so far hinges on this sound change to be a thing please help?

# Answer
> 5 votes
This is really one of those times where the only viable answer is *"it's completely up to you!"*

Sometimes the stress changes, sometimes it doesn't. This depends on the stress rules of the language. In your case, I'd suggest that if you like that vowel deletion, then you should codify the rule to indicate that addition of a suffix that causes a shift of stress will also cause the deletion of unstressed short vowels.

If you don't address the rules regarding stress, then you'd leave yourself open to words like atárara remaining in the language.

This could give you some interesting consonant clusters word intially: tálipo \> \*talípora \> tlípura. Nothing unusual there, really.

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Tags: phonology, phonetics
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# Question
Title: Are there conlangs designed to be whispered?
We all know that natural languages can be whispered and we use whispering for several purposes, e.g., to avoid someone unwanted listening, or in order not to disturb a larger audience. But are there conlangs that are designed to whispered and don't have a "fully voiced" form?

I am aware of Dritok and I'd like to hear from more of them!

# Answer
**Yes.**

The Whispering Language is designed for communicating with deaf-mutes -- a language that can easily be lipread.

Ahtialan came to be used as a whisper language.

Xylphika only rarely demonstrates voicing.

Parseltongue seems to be compounded of sibilants and voiceless vowels.
> 4 votes

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Tags: phonology, list-of-languages, unnatural-features
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# Question
Title: What glyph to pick from alternatives in Kēlen script?
The Kēlen alphabet as given on https://www.terjemar.net/kelen/writing.php shows variants for some letters. Here is an example:

Are there rules on when to pick which form?

# Answer
As far as I can tell, no such rules are mentioned anywhere.

However, the general orthography page only seems to mention one form for each letter, and those forms are also the only ones I can find in any Kelen word of the day entry I've looked at - granted, I haven't looked at all that many of them, so I may have missed some that use the alternate forms. It does, however, seem to me like those forms are the only ones in use.
> 1 votes

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Tags: writing-systems
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# Question
Title: How much of Slovio is based on Esperanto?
According to Wikipedia,

> Slovio (from the Slavic word "slovo") is a constructed language begun in 1999 by Mark Hučko. Hučko claims that the language should be relatively easy for non-Slavs to learn as well, as an alternative to languages such as Esperanto which are based more on Latin...
> \[...\]
> Slovio has a relatively simple grammar based on a mix of Esperanto grammar with Slavic elements. Just like in natural Slavic languages, new words can be formed with a variety of suffixes and prefixes.

I'm not familiar with Slovio or Esperanto at all. How much is Slovio based on Esperanto? Does Slovio just borrow some parts of Esperanto's grammar, or does it go to a further extent than that?

# Answer
In terms of the vocabulary, not much is based on Esperanto.

From the Slovio website:

> **Esperanto?** While Esperanto is a simple language its main problem is the fact that it is made up of too many unrelated languages and thus, if you speak Esperanto, no-one will understand you only other Esperantists. On the other hand Slovio, since it is made up of only closely related Slavic languages, can be put to an immediate use. Using Slovio, you will be understood by some 400 million people, most of whom have never ever heard of Slovio, but who will understand you.

So, it looks like the only inspiration Slovio has taken from Esperanto is the grammar.
> 9 votes

# Answer
Slovio isn't intended to be an IAL right? The fact that Esperanto is derived from many languages, is why it is suitable as an IAL. Otherwise It's just another Interslavic. That's what Esperanto was originally intended to be, but Zamenhof realized that it could be beneficial to the rest of the world, so he reworked to it into a suitable IAL.
> 1 votes

# Answer
* **Esperanto** took its vocabulary from different European language families, especially Romance and Germanic languages. Beside that it ensured the word choice did not lead to ambiguities like homonyms and plural meanings. (Slovio will not need this.)

Also there is a strong word creation mechanism in Esperanto. You will need to know a fraction of the word stems in comparison to other languages, and be able to actively create new words, that you know are correct. A child, a mentally handicapped, an aged person will all be able to be fluent in the language.
* **Slovio** unites the Slavic languages, with appropriate simplifications. It has the advantage to be "immediately" readable by users of the Slavic family. One may compare this language with **Interlingua** for Romance languages. But Slavic languages seem to be even more similar.

Concrete **Esperanto** I consider a more powerful language, but with its **claim on more heterogeneous language origins**, it has coincidental choices (Tuesday = *mardo*, month = *monato*), and a hard phonetical spelling (peace = *paco* \[pátsoh\]). Also Esperanto has its own accented letters for phoneticism: *ĉĝĥĵŝŭ* (she = *ŝi*).

And **Slovio** is a more acceptable, familiar language, though non-Slavic loan words risk getting purged. Though not to the degree as in Interlingua.

Myself I am Esperanto user, and merely have read a bit on Slovio. It seems there are some small reforms (?) on Slovio, say on verbs. But that is less important (than with Esperanto). As Slavic languages can have their difficult parts, which in Slovio are simplified, I would be interested how Slovio would compare to **Basic English**, an English without unneeded, superfluous terms, and inflections.

***The Question***

Slovio is based on the ideas of Esperanto. The alphabet for instance, including the x-system. Suffixes, prefixes. It is also simplified.

Remains the "ideology:"

There is the (contestable) fact that when one first learns Esperanto and then French, one learns French faster, than immediately learning French.

I see this also for Slovio: it might make learning faster and more pleasurable, so when after that learning a more complicated Slavic language, one progresses better. Not sure whether faster.

A Serbian and a Bulgarian will be able to communicate, even without Slovio. Slovio as common *lingua franca*? Who knows. With respect to Russian it might have a harder political stand. It might be a more homely language.
> 0 votes

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Tags: typology, esperanto, inspiration, zonal-languages
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title: Has anyone made image based languages?

text:
# Question
Title: Has anyone made image based languages?
This is my first visit here. I have been writing machine/computer languages for about 8 years now. I am completely self taught and use my own tools. I have many languages that I have completed that work wonderfully.

I have a program that I use with each language that translates in real time. Everything works nicely. My languages are around 56k words each. I use a combination of Excel and various custom tools to generate the languages.Language creation is not a easy process, but it is fun.It takes me about 4 hours to create one from scratch. I believe what I am creating is more like machine languages? I am certainly not knowledgeable about how to properly create languages as most on here. Its just a fun obsession.

Lately I have been into creating image languages. Languages based on images. I was curious if anyone has ever made a image language? How did you do it? Did you create your own custom font to go along with your language? Did you program a translation tool or app? What have you experimented with?

This is kinda the package I build with my languages. I even experimented with a meme language. A silly language using 500 of the most popular internet memes in .jpg format. With a tool to translate to and from English. It would be cool if others are doing stuff like this.

# Answer
This is only an answer to the first part of the question

> I was curious if anyone has ever made a image language?

Yes, there are such languages. They are called **pasigraphy** or **logographic writing system**, and the most successful among them is Bliss symbolics (also known as **Semantography**) by Charles K. Bliss.

I am not aware of automated translation tools or other tools helping in creating pasigraphies.
> 7 votes

# Answer
There is a esoteric programming language (neither a conlang, nor a mainstream programming language) called Piet, whose source code is in the form of pixel art. Maybe it can inspire you.

If you can accept emoji as sort-of images standing for names, maybe adding conventional images (or other Unicode characters) to serve as verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, can work.
> 4 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems
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title: History of world language

text:
# Question
Title: History of world language
If we look at world history—I am speaking a little vaguely, since it is not possible to be completely accurate. The human race began from a single region, as you can see in the bottom image.

---

**What kind of effect did these migrations have on language?**

The first humans that were in Africa had to use some kind of language for communication, and when these people migrated from Africa to European regions, the migrants created new languages. Now, what I am wondering, since they were not expert linguistics, the languages that developed in these regions must have some kind of influence from their predecessor.

If we look at the languages that exist today, they differ greatly from other regions—here I am talking about the root languages (I am not sure "root language" is the right word here, if someone knows the right word then please edit it.), like Latin, Sanskrit, etc.

So how did these changes occur? The reason why I am interested in this is, I am creating cultures from languages, you can say the influence of language on culture. The first language, Vietrian, splits in two to create Old Viereian and New Vietrian. The basic difference is: "old" is used for spells making, and "new" is used for communication, this also vague since it is a five-page long difference. New Vietrian was enchanted so that the listener listens to it in their mother-tounges. This new language was passed down as "Zirian". From Zirian, every language emerges, except for Necromancers and Elves.

# Answer
> 2 votes
No language (present company excluded) is *created*. All languages change over time, and as parts of the same language get separated geographically (or socially), they diverge. At some point they have diverged so much that they become separate languages (after having been different dialects/sociolects of the same language).

In fact, there are no 'languages': all there is is the capability of an individual to transfer mental phenomena/thoughts into speech, and the reverse capability of transferring speech back into thoughts. This is negotiated by individuals, and if they can successfully communicate, they speak the same 'language'. My speech changes when I always speak with the same group of people, and when I then meet someone from another group I haven't seen for a while, communication might be more difficult, as we use different words or pronounce words differently.

Some languages get preserved, mainly for ritualistic reasons: if you believe that your words invoke magic, or address a deity, you are careful about not changing this, as the words might lose their power. This relates to your 'old' variant. A writing system also helps to ossify a language, so Latin and Ancient Greek still exist (but notice how modern Greek and all the Romance languages have evolved from them).

Languages are commonly traced back to proto-languages (like indo-european), but a lot of this is conjecture, and made difficult by the lack of evidence (spoken variants are not usually preserved over time).

So languages differ if they are isolated from each other. Geography is a strong factor, so mountain villages often have their own dialects. Similarly with islands (though trade would then link them up again). Social class is also important: if peasants don't talk to knights or aristocrats, their language (sociolects) will grow apart. A writing system (if there is sufficient literacy) might slow that down, especially use of different words, while purely spoken languages would diverge faster between separate groups. Isolated countries are also different from countries that are well-connected with their neighbours. Shared culture also preserves linguistic coherence.

On the other hand, social factors can also play a role: you might want to imitate a higher-prestige sociolect, and your language then changes as well. Many learners of English want to speak with a British accent, but are mostly exposed to American English through films etc, so they might speak a mixture of American and British English. These might then become different dialects and eventually languages (though English-speaking cultural domination would preserve some cohesiveness here).

So there are plenty of options for you to decide how and why your languages diverge, based on the civilisation you want to model.

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Tags: conlang-creation, history, morphology, language-change
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# Question
Title: Do we know languages which think about subordinate conjunctions (like 'as,' 'even,' 'while') differently than English does?
for my conlang, I am trying to think of how to do the subordinating conjunction 'as,' 'even,' 'while' (and related: 'even though,' etc.).

In the languages that I know well enough to use these words (English, Spanish, and Turkish), they are separate words. I wonder, do we know languages which use other constructions for 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' other than with a separate word linking two clauses?

Example: *We ate **as** we ran.*

I have covered quite a lot of grammar so far with systems of agglutinating clitics and affixes, so I'm trying to get my mind around how 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' could be handled without separate words. I guess I could just have like a "simultaneity clitic" for 'while' like I have a "conditional clitic" for 'would'...?

This has been difficult for me to conceptualize quietly in my head, so I really appreciate input and discussion :)

# Answer
In Inuit languages, there are no separate subordinating conjunctions. In Inuktitut, you identify the subordinate clause by an affix that indicates a conjunction.

For example, take the sentence "While Mary was eating, John was walking." In some Inuktitut dialects, you'd only indicate time tense for the superordinate phrase ("John was walking"), while the subordinate verb wouldn't have a tense marker, but instead use the conjunctive affix *-tillu-* (with the appropriate person marker)

> Mary niri-tillugu John pisu-lauq-tuq (Mary eat-CONJ.3s John walk-Past-Part.3s)

It obviously gets a lot more complicated, but that gives one example of how to do it. If English had a similar setup, you might see something like this:

> Mary eat John walked.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to relate them serially (Mary ate then John walked), you might see this sort of construction:

> Mary ate John walked.

And you'd obviously reverse them for the other sequence, so "John walked Mary ate."

Obviously it would have to get more sophisticated, but you get the idea.
> 4 votes

# Answer
What you describe reminds me of Latin enclitics *-que* 'and' and its less used counterpart *-ve* 'or', both attached to the first word of the subordinate clause (except prepositions). These are both co-ordinating conjunctions, not subordinating, but the basic idea could certainly be applied to any sort of conjunction.

> *ego domum ii tuque Romam iisti.* 'I went home and you went to Rome.'
>
> *si ruber sive purpurus fias, mirer.* 'If you should turn red or if you should turn purple, I would be surprised.'

It also makes me think of participial constructions, including the ablative absolute. These allow not only simultaneity, but also anteriority and posteriority to be expressed without any conjunction at all; although they can also be paired with a conjunctive adverb in the main clause (note *tamen* 'nevertheless' in the second example).

> *domum ambulans, bovem vidi.* '(While I was) walking home, I saw a cow.'
>
> *urbe capta, rex tamen altus stabat.* '(Although) his city (had been) captured, the king nevertheless stood tall.'
>
> *moriturus te saluto.* 'I (who am) about to die salute you.'

As a bonus, there are also Old English correlative conjunctions. In OE, the same conjunction would often be repeated at the beginning of both clauses, with their relationship denoted by word order: the main clause usually took verb-second order, whereas the dependent clause usually took verb-final order.

> *þā hē hām cōm, þā wæs hē glæd.* 'He was glad when he got home.' (*lit.* 'When he home came, then was he glad.')

You could conceivably do something similar while omitting the conjunction altogether.
> 3 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar
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title: IPA for Voiced Velopharyngeal Stop?

text:
# Question
Title: IPA for Voiced Velopharyngeal Stop?
A conlang I am working on contains the nasal syllabic consonants \[m̩\] and \[n̩\] fairly frequently. It seems like it would be a natural step for the language to develop what I would call a voiced velopharyngeal stop occurring before those syllabic consonants are used some of the time, to add emphasis. This stop is formed by stopping air from flowing into the nasal cavity with the velum while the mouth is in position to form the following consonant, and then releasing it into the nasal cavity. Think of it as trying to make a “g” sound through your nose only.

Ex: \[ĩɲ'tⁿn̩\] =\> \[ĩɲ't̚?ⁿn̩\], where the ? represents the consonant in question.

<sub>**Note**: This is **not** a glottal stop, though that sound can occur as well in this language.</sub>

I have been trying to transcribe the language with the IPA since it helps specify pronunciation of the weird vocabulary of sounds, but I cannot find a symbol in the IPA that represents this sound, even though it seems to me fairly plausible for a language of this type.

The closest I have found is the symbol for a velopharyngeal fricative \[ʩ\] in extensions to the IPA. However this still is clearly distinct from the sound I am describing. Additionally, it appears to only occur as a speech defect and never as a proper consonant in a language.

**What is the best way to transcribe this specific sound using the IPA?** Is there an allotted symbol that I just could not find? What would be the best way to go about phonetically transcribing the sound if there is no exact symbol in the IPA? Is there a better approximation than \[ʩ\]? Additionally, what about the unvoiced counterpart?

I apologize for any mistakes in my use of the IPA, I am still learning.

# Answer
What I think you meant to ask is to create a stop consonant by stopping air flowing through the nasal cavity while the mouth is open, then releasing it only through the nose while the mouth is closed.

The problem is that having no airstream block in the mouth can mean one of two things: producing an oral vowel, such as /a/, or making no sound at all. There isn't a plosive-like sound for stopping air flowing through the nose, as there is with the mouth (in multiple places). The way you can test this is by producing a sound like /aãaãaãa/, in which you are repeatedly stopping the nasal airflow, and yet the vowel sound remains continuous because there is no stop of air in the mouth. So a stop created solely by blocking the nasal passage is impossible.

The example you give for this sound is \[ĩɲ't̚?ⁿn̩\], where the \[?\] is supposed to represent the unknown sound. This has a \[t̚\] with the diacritic for no release after the consonant, and a nasal release \[ⁿ\] after it. However, there can't possibly be anything between \[t̚\] and \[ⁿ\]. The \[t̚\] means that when the consonant ends, you are still blocking both oral and nasal airflow, and the \[ⁿ\] means that you are releasing nasal airflow while keeping oral airflow closed. There is no articulation possible in between these: if there were an oral release, the diacritic on \[t̚\] would have no meaning, and there could no longer be a nasal release \[ⁿ\] after it. The only possibility is to add another consonant, or extend the \[t\] as a long consonant \[tː\], which continues to block all airflow.

Going through your definition, nasal release seems to fit (another possibility that fits just as well is a pre-stopped nasal, if the nasal consonant is supposed to be more prominent than the stop):

> This stop is formed by stopping air from flowing into the nasal cavity with the velum

Stopping airflow is a property of a stop consonant. A stop consonant stops the airflow in the mouth as well as the airflow in the nasal cavity. (Stopping only the airflow in the nasal cavity is impossible here, as explained above.)

> while the mouth is in position to form the following consonant

Simultaneous articulation is possible, but it depends on what the following consonant is. If the following consonant is in the same place of articulation, that means there's no change.

> and then releasing it into the nasal cavity.

Releasing the stop only in the nasal cavity means producing a nasal sound. Nasal release (and nasals in general) would continue to block the airflow in the mouth, but allow it to pass through the nose.
> 4 votes

# Answer
I think I would transcribe this as a kind of pre-stopped nasal where the stop part is velar, like /ᶢn̩/ (and possibly implosive, if I understand your description correctly). Ordinarily, you’d expect it to be homorganic with the following nasal, or influenced by the preceding one. So this seems pretty unstable, in that I don’t know quite how a natural language would *get* here and *stay* here. I’d try to reinforce it with another phonological feature, allow an epenthetic vowel, or maybe take it as an opportunity to turn it into a click, for example, in words that lose an initial vowel and end up with this cluster at the beginning of a word/morpheme.
> 1 votes

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Tags: phonology, unnatural-features
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# Question
Title: What is the minimum number of words needed for a conlang?
What would the minimum number of words needed for a conlang, while still being able to speak with about the same level of information passed as a natural language?

# Answer
> 6 votes
It's really impossible to pick a specific number, like "you need at least 3,427 words to make yourself understandable", without making such claim look ridiculous. The easy rejoinder --- "well, my invented language can make itself perfectly understandable using only 3,426 words: *so there!*" --- only serves to demonstrate the somewhat absurd nature of the argument.

That said, minimalist invented languages are a thing! (And so are maximal...)

We could look at a couple historical examples of both kinds of language to see what answers our fellow language inventors and natural cultures have come upon:

* Basic English is a good starting point as it's an old project (nearly a century old) and is what the Simple English version of Wikipedia is based on. Basic English seems to get by with 2000 words or so.
* Toki Pona, on the other hand, a philosophical language rather than an international auxiliary language or an artistic language, makes do with about 120 root words. In the article, it's noted that speakers have to resort to combining these root words in order to get their meaning across when they wish to communicate anything that isn't, strictly speaking, minimalist in nature.
* Esperanto has somewhere between 2500 and 5000 basic roots, but again, combining roots allows for greater understandability.
* At the other end of the spectrum, English probably exceeds a million words. And even then, we are as prone to forming compound words as anyone else!

**Analysis:**
I'd argue that that actual answer to your marquee query is **NOT ENOUGH BY HALF**.

Obviously, 120 words is far too few to really properly communicate anything but the uttermost basics in the most simplistic terms. 2500 is not enough either, because speakers of languages with so few root words end up relying heavily on affixes and compounds to improve communication. And lastly, I'd argue that even a million words is not nearly enough! Even with a million words, English speakers make use of affixes, compounding, abbreviation and we're sprathingly good at just plain making up words on top of everything else.

# Answer
> 2 votes
It depends on your definition of 'word'.

Tokin pona has 120 word forms, but they are routinely combined into compounds which express more specific information. In Esperanto, as elemtilas said, there are roots which are combined into words — effectively similar to toki pona, only with no spaces in-between:

English: *queen*
Esperanto: *reĝino* (*-in-* indicates 'female')
toki pona: *jan lawa meli* ('person' 'lead' 'female')

English has a single morpheme, Esperanto has three morphemes, and so does toki pona. But both Esperanto and English have one word, wheras toki pona has three. So the question of the number of words is not really all that meaningful, as it depends on the structure of your language.

The real question is how many morphemes you need, but even then it's difficult. In toki pona you can combine morphemes to form bigger elements, and each morpheme arguably has a whole range of meanings; from the context you choose the one that is most likely. The word *lili* means little, small, young, etc. so you cannot know whether *jan lili* is a young person or a small one. You will typically know from context.

So when thinking about vocabulary size there are several aspects to consider:

1. Language structure: do you have self-standing morphemes that are combined to phrases (like toki pona), morphemes that are stuck together in compound words (like Esperanto), or single morphemes that express multiple meanings at once (like English *king*: 'ruler' and 'male' vs *queen*: 'ruler' and 'female'). If — like Esperanto — you stick to one basic meaning component per morpheme, then the gender of the ruler would have to be expressed in a different morpheme (or it could be omitted altogether). The same also applies to verbs and tenses, pronouns, etc.
2. Specificity: How accurate do you want your language to be? If you want to be able to express exact meanings, then you need different morphemes. In English there are many words such as *Earl*, *Duke*, *Count*, *Margrave*, etc. which in toki pona would just be *jan lawa* ('leader'). Toki pona is good for epics, where such distinctions are not relevant, but if you want to write a detailed history of the Norman conquest, then maybe choose a different language.
3. Target domain: It also makes a difference what you want to use your language for. If it is an intergalactic *lingua franca* to be used for trading, then you'd need to be specific about prices and descriptions of objects, but not so much about family relationships. Klingon famously has a vocabulary dominated by words related to fighting and killing, so it might be hard to write a love poem in it (though not impossible). A general purpose language needs to be able to express a wider range of meanings than a domain-specific one.
4. Overall complexity of your language: How many cases do you have? How many numbers? Grammatical genders? Any such feature needs to be expressed in some way, which could result in more words. If you have singular/dual/plural, you might need three pronouns *I*, *us-two*, and *us-more-than-two*. But you could choose not to have that at all and simply use *us-any-number-from-one-to-many*. Hawai'ian has a different set of pronouns to distinguish between *us all, including you* and *us all, but not you*. If you have a politeness system based on relative ages, then you might want to distinguish between *you-who-is-younger-than-me* and a more polite *you-who-is-older-than-me*
5. Aesthetics: you can make do with one word for *move-from-A-to-B*. And one word for *ingest*. But any story you write will quickly become very boring, as you will use the same word over and over again. So you want synonyms to introduce some variation (see the remarks about Klingon above). The more synonyms you have, the more words. They're not strictly necessary, but make your language more pleasant to use. In AI, the opposite is actually used to make it easier for computers to handle events: you have a small set of semantic primitives for the basic events (movement, transfer of objects, etc). But you wouldn't want to read such representations for fun.

To summarise: The right number of words for a conlang is how many you need for it to work, given the purpose and structure of the language. It is a bit of an irrelevant question, really, because you won't know that you have enough words until you're happy that your language is usable. And even then, new words are likely to develop over time. In my view, number of words is not a useful metric when developing a language, unless you want to use it as a constraint (as in toki pona).

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary
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