# Question
Title: Is there an open-source set of topics and vocabulary for making a language tutorial?
Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and grammar by topic. Instead of stealing from Berlitz or Duolingo, I'd like to steal from people who give me permission to do so.

An example of what I have in mind, I'd like a set of topics and vocabulary like the following:

Lesson 1: Greetings

* Hello
* How are you?
* Fine.
* Thank you.
* Goodbye.

Lesson 2: Classroom objects

* pencil
* notebook
* textbook
* paper

Lesson 3: Simple sentences

* I
* You
* a
* have
* I have a pencil.
* You have a textbook.

Of course, given a standard template, I'm willing to adjust according to the needs of my grammar, but a starting point could help a lot.

# Answer
The *Fundamento de Esperanto* was published in 1905, so as far as I know it's in the public domain everywhere. It's one of the foundational documents of Esperanto, containing a short grammar description, a dictionary of thousands of words, and crucially a book of exercises (called the *ekzercaro*).

The *ekzercaro* fits what you're asking for. It is divided into sections, and every section after section 4 contains sample sentences and new vocabulary items. For example, this is one of the sentences in section 5:

> Leono estas besto.

And these are the English definitions of the terms introduced in that sentence.

> **leono** lion
>
> **esti** be
>
> **as** ending of the present tense in verbs
>
> **besto** beast

Some of the designs of this course may or may not be suitable for your needs. For one thing, the *ekzerzaro* does not aim to have a very complete vocabulary because it is assumed that you will check the dictionary for other words you used. That means that the exercises do not teach you the word for "cat" even though they teach the word for lion very quickly.

Some sections are paragraphs to read. My favorite thing about this exercise book is that it contains a short story about a fairy interspersed throughout it. Section 27 is a discussion of Esperanto grammar written in Esperanto, which will probably have to be completely rewritten for your language.

You'll have to make adaptations depending on your language and culture. If you use these exercises to teach contemporary American English, you'll have to adapt to the ways the world has changed in the last century. For example, early on, there is is a sentence about hitting a student, and I am thankful that that is not a typical part of my country's culture anymore.
> 3 votes

# Answer
One place to start is the Universal Language Dictionary. ULD Version 2.7 is listed on the Frath Wiki. ULD Version 3 is available in Google Sheet form.

The Universal Language Dictionary is a list of concepts that can be represented as a word in a conlang. Each concept belongs to a category such as "Function words", "Clothing", and "Foodstuffs". Each concept also has a level between 0 and 3.

To design your course, you can sort these by level, and then sort each level by categories as you wish. Level 0 has only 30 words and it make sense to do them in this order:

* Function Word
* Adpositions
* Numerals
* Degree

The other categories have dozens of categories and 100-1000 words in them, so they take more work to sort, but at least it's a start.

You'll probably want to deviate from this pattern some. I'd want to introduce some nouns and greetings before I get into function terms. I'd also introduce food items as soon as I introduce the word eat.

You'll need to introduce some terms that aren't on the list, and of course other grammar. There's no word for "the" or "a" on the list because those are not considered universal.

Some background information can be found here. This includes the relevant license for version 2.7 of the ULD:

> Copyright 1992-1995 by Richard K. Harrison. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for unrestricted use of these files by any individual for his/her own pleasure, private research, personal communication, etc. Use of these files by any government agency, business entity, educational institution, or any other organization requires permission.

I would guess that other versions of it have similar permissions, but I can't guarantee it.
> 1 votes

# Answer
I found a great blog post called Avoiding the "Boing" by author and conlanger E.M. Epps, in which she laid out a lot of information on conlanging that's helpful for new and experienced conlangers. One resource she recommends for vocabulary is the McGuffey readers. These are books that were used to teach English-speaking children to read. They're numerically ordered by difficulty, so that you can start with the Primer or start with the "New First Reader", and that's likely to be plenty of content for a lot of conlangs.

A few downsides to this:

1. It tries to focus on a small number of English letters at a time, so the vocabulary choices are affected by English. Solution: Don't follow this slavishly.
2. The subject material is intended for children, so adults may find it hard to connect. Solution: For a more adult vocabulary, replace "milk" with "coffee" and replace "play" with "awkward smalltalk".
3. It was originally intended for people who are already fluent in the language, so it doesn't directly teach the grammar. Solution: You can call attention to new grammar points as they come up. The primer does some of this for you in that it takes multiple pages before plural nouns, possessives, and conjugated verbs are introduced.
> 0 votes

# Answer
There could be errors in this since I'm not very familiar with it.

Fluent Forever's approach looks like it's adaptable to any language. Fluent Forever is a language learning app you can buy. Their approach involves the learning taking steps to make their own flashcards and get materials, so I think it's adaptable for new languages.

I'm going to highlight specifically their vocabulary learning approach because I think that's usable to conlangers. They provide a 625 word core vocabulary of easily pictured frequent words that you can copy from their website. It might not be exactly 625 words in your language, because you might divide up the semantic space differently. For each of these words, you can make multiple flashcards with example pictures. The learner makes their own flashcards by selecting pictures and example sentences. If you don't have the app, they recommend you create your flashcards in random order on the the Anki flashcard program, and then it will quiz you with spaced repetition.

They also have a method of teaching phonetics through recordings of minimum pairs. That could be worthwhile if you have the time to make many recordings.

Their approach to teaching grammar is with naturally occurring example sentences and just enough translations to give people their bearings. Since there aren't naturally occurring sentences in your language, you'll have to come up with your own. My opinion is that you can't learn a grammar solely from a small number of example sentences.
> 0 votes

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Tags: vocabulary, tools, resource-request
---


title: Naming language based on real language

text:
# Question
Title: Naming language based on real language
I apologize if similar question has already been answered, I tried to look for it but didn't find anything.

I'm trying to make a simple naming language that looks/sounds vaguely like nahuatl (if I manage it, I'd like to do this with more languages).

I tried Atwords, but I can't figure out the phonotactics and the results rarely look anything like the language I'm "imitating".

Real words tend to be long, hard to read and include lots of loan words.

Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?

# Answer
> 2 votes
> Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?

There is: look it up. For example: Nahuatl Phonology.

Nahuatl phonotactics turn out to be pretty simple: maximally one onset consonant, a long vowel, and one coda consonant per syllable. Here's an Awkwords script that'll give you 100 random 3 syllable words conforming to Nahuatl phonology:

```
#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV(C)
n:100
nle

```

If you don't care about the source language morphology, that oughta be good enough. Not all of the words will be winners, but you can generate tons and just pick the few you like best.

To get words that really look like plausible source-language words, though, you do need to care about morphology. In that case, you do have to learn something about the source language, but not necessarily "an insane amount". For example, a simple change to that Awkwords script will generate plausible dictionary-forms of Nahuatl nouns with 3-syllable bases and \<-tl\> or \<-tli\> suffixes:

```
#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV[tl/CVtli]
n:100
nle

```

It is not too hard to look up lists of other morphemes and add their patterns into your word generator. If you want to get really fancy, you can try to find a pre-made computational morphological model for the source language (e.g., a PC-KIMMO or KLEENE or HFST file) and then generate random underlying forms to run through it, but that probably does start to get into the realm of "an insane amount of linguistics"...

There are a couple of decent middle ground, rather than copying the source language morphology. One is to generate a bunch of short, one-or-two-syllable con-morphemes of your own that match the source phonology, and then use those as the base units from which you generate conlang words, rather than going directly from the phonology.

Another is to try to imitate the source language phonemic distribution. For that, you basically just need a big list of source language words, from which you can extract statistical information. The simplest way to do that is to just count up occurrences of each phoneme, but if you know a little bit more statistics, or are willing to learn, you can construct a conditional distribution model for which phonemes occur most often in different particular positions, and then generate random words based on those specialized distributions, rather than the default uniform distribution. Awkwords can't handle that kind of model sophistication, but other word generators, like Logopoeist, can, and it's also not too hard to write up a custom generator just for your particular naming language.

---
Tags: vocabulary, phonology, names
---


# Question
Title: What is a realistic *upper bound* on the complexity of nominals that can be incorporated into a verb?
Some languages feature noun incorporation. Here's an example from Lahkota from the Wikipedia article on incorporation. I *suspect* the difference in meaning is similar to `the man chopped the wood` vs `the man chopped wood`, but I can't say that with confidence based on the short section of the article.

```
wičháša kiŋ čháŋ kiŋ kaksáhe
man     DET wood DET chop

wičháša kiŋ čhaŋkáksahe
man     DET wood.chop

```

In most of the examples I can find, incorporated nouns are devoid of the following features

* overt case marking
* overt number marking
* possessive modifiers
* adjectives

What are some options for allowing more complex nominals to be incorporated that are still somewhat naturalistic?

# Answer
Part of the confusion here is that the loss of the grammatical markers you note are a logical consequence of the the semantic use of incorporation.

An incorporated noun may be best compared, in my opinion, to a nonfinite verb, which will also typically lack much of the morphological features of a normal verb. This alone makes it evident why the standard markers a noun may present will usually be absent. Marianne Mithun describes four major reasons to incorporate a noun (quoting summary from Rosenfelder, *Advanced Language Construction*, pp. 182-184):

1. Narrow the focus of a verb by adding some sort of descriptor to it. You may want to incorporate tools, for example. In Nahuatl, such incorporation often translate to "X like (a) Y(s)".
2. Allow an otherwise oblique argument (usually of a semantically, if not syntactically labile verb) to become its subject (cf. English, "My head aches" vs. "I have a headache").
3. Background an argument that has already been mentioned.
4. Adding a classifier of some sort. This is an integral part of verbal morphology in the Algonquian Languages, for example. Chinese also does it to create suppletive forms of single-syllable verbs that may be highly polysemous or homophonous.

Add to this the fact that in most languages, you cannot incorporate the subject noun of an unergative verb (probably no language at all allow it, but I haven't looked into it in details), it is easy to see why incorporated/nonfinite nouns have little need for all the bells and whistles of regular arguments: you are either generalizing or backgrounding the noun, so you don't want or need to add these syntactic elements.

Regarding possessive markers specifically, I should point out that even in languages without incorporation, possessive markers are liable to be dropped if the possessor is already a separate argument in the sentence: *I stole **money** from him, It struck him on **the nose**, J'ai mal à **la tête**, Je lui ai cassé **le bras**.*

Finally, if a language has incorporation, it is usually *rare for it to have a fully separate word category of adjectives* as we understand them to begin with! In many of these languages, adjectives take the form of descriptive verbs or adjunct nouns that can themselves be incorporated into themain noun (cf. English Bluebeard, whiteboard, blackbird...), and syntactically, it doesn't typically work to incorporate an entire relative sentence.

However, some languages, such as Chukchi *do allow for the whole noun+adjective* phrase to be incorporated, and quite a few languages *allow for numeral markers to be incorporated*, although this is actually part of the verbal paradigm itself i.e. if you incorporate "I saw two persons" you are incorporating the noun "person" to a verb root that means "see two X", not incorporating "two men". That's what happens in Southern Tiwa or Algonquian languages (Nishnaabemwin: *Giibimdaaswishiniizhdaabaan’gizwag*, "They came in twelve carloads").

So, in summary, I would say aside from adjuncts noun and adjectives (which itself would make your language unusual, though not outside the realm of human experience), any other grammatical attribute of the noun you want to "incorporate" you should do so as an integral part of you verb paradigm, not as part of the incorporated root *per se*. If you are seeking a language that looks as natural as possible, anyway.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: morphology, naturalism
---


# Question
Title: Is there a specific term for a constructed writing system purportedly used for a conlang but actually for a natlang?
Many constructed writing systems are purportedly used to write conlangs, but in reality are actually used to write English or another natlang.

For example, omniglot.com says that Kryptonian is "a transliteration alphabet containing symbols for each of the letters of the English alphabet. ... They just used this alphabet to write things in English in the comics."

Matoran has been called "similar to the English alphabet, being a simple substitution cipher".

And in Star Wars, Aurebesh is essentially the same, a different way of writing English, although technically it's actually "Galactic Basic". Apparently another script was also used to write Galatic Basic, called Outer Rim Basic, although there's very little information about it.

I'd consider these example to be a different kind of thing compared to something like the dancing men script from Sherlock Holmes as they're ostensibly constructed writing systems for other languages, whereas the dancing men script is explicitly another way of writing English.

In the conlang community, is there a specific term for this type of constructed writing system? Or should we just refer to them as "transliterations" or "substitutions"?

Please note that I am specifically asking if there is a term which excludes these categories:

* new orthographies for natlangs (ex. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics or Deseret for English)
* a new writing system actually used to write a conlang (ex. Tengwar for Quenya)

# Answer
## I don't think there's already a word for this exact subset of scripts.

However, I think such a term would be a useful one -- we certainly have to refer to these sorts of scripts in the conlanging community -- and I think there are a number of options here.

## 1. Circumlocution

We could refer to these sorts of scripts in paraphrastic ways, like how you have in your question. "Transliteration alphabet" and "substitution cipher" both work for this purpose. However, I don't think this is a particularly attractive option, as these are long and rather unwieldy. Shortenings of these phrases end up being pretty ambiguous, as well. "Transliteration" in particular is usually used to describe completely separate things entirely, so using it in isolation to refer to these scripts would be confusing at best, and "substitution" is too vague.

## 2. Neologism

Since these sorts of scripts are really the neographic equivalent of relexes, we could also coin a new term like "relex" to refer to these scripts. Just spitballing, here are a few examples of the sorts of coinages that could work:

* transbet (from "transliteration alphabet")
* subscript (from "substitution script" -- though this word does obviously already have another meaning so that might not be desirable)
* rescript (from analogy with "relex")
* keychain script (because these sorts of scripts are easily used to sell keychains with people's names on them 'in another language')

There are any number of ways that such a term could be derived beyond these, but I feel that in order to have a term that describes this subset of scripts, *some* sort of new coinage is necessary.
> 4 votes

# Answer
I would call this a **cipher**. Dictionary.com's 6th entry for "cipher" reads, in part:

> a secret method of writing, as by transposition or substitution of letters, specially formed symbols, or the like.

This gives us two requirements for being a cipher:

* **Secrecy**
* **Substitution**

Since this sort of script is ostensibly used to write a constructed language while actually just transcribing English (or another natlang), the requirement for secrecy is satisfied. As the conscript comprises symbols that stand in for Latin (or other natural script) letters or symbols, the requirement for substitution is satisfied.

Let's look at the examples of scripts you want to exclude:

* Deseret: This is explicitly for the purpose of writing English and is widely published for such purpose and thus it fails the requirement of secrecy.
* Tengwar: Tengwar are not primarily used to replace otherwise extant letters or symbols and thus fails the requirement of substitution
> 1 votes

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Tags: writing-systems, terminology
---


# Question
Title: Alternatives to independent verbs for encoding desiderative meaning
English uses an independent verb to encode desiderative meaning, namely *want*. It normally takes an infinitival complement, although I can take a direct object as well if the subject of the infinitival clause is not the same as *want*'s subject.

```
I want to swim tomorrow.

```

and

```
I want you to swim tomorrow.

```

However, there are some limits to its flexibility in English. It cannot take a dependent clause headed by *that*.

```
*I want that I find a yellow pencil soon.

```

Some languages use a verb similar to *want* in English, and others use dedicated verb morphology to encode the same meaning. I can't think of any natural languages that use a strategy for encoding the meaning of *want (Y) to X* that isn't one of those two.

What are some alternative constructions for expressing desiderative meaning, particularly those unattested in natural languages?

# Answer
Quite a few languages have desiderative as an affix within the verbal system (whether it is analysed as an affix or a full mood being irrelevant here). Japanese and Sanskrit do, for example. It is fairly common (as one would expect) for agglutinating or polysynthetic languages to have one such as Quechua, Finno-Ugric or Turkic languages. It is by no mean universal for these languages: while Hungarian has such a suffix Finnish (and I believe Estonian) lacks it.

Desiderative construction otherwise tend (again not unexpectedly) to be mediated via an auxiliary verb (in Nahuatl, that verb is one of a couple that can be directly integrated into other verbs).

Note that desiderative applies (typically) only to the *subject*. That is, a form like "I want X to Y" is *not* a desiderative per se. More accurately, in most language with derivational desiderative affixes, these affixes do not have a "separate" argument structure the way an auxiliary verb an have, so they cannot insert an additional argument. Indeed in Nahuatl, that is exactly what you'll see:

> Ticchīhuaznequi (*You want to do it*)
>
> Ticnequi nicchīhuaz (*You want me to do it*)

I have not found an easy way to search for information about the three-argument version ("I want X to Y") cross-linguistically, but I'd wager it tends to be formed with some form of Optative or Subjunctive structure.
> 4 votes

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Tags: unnatural-features, tense-aspect-mood
---


# Question
Title: How to distinguish [i] from [iː] in Cyrillic
Renglish/Рэнглиш (not mine) is an adaptation of Cyrillic for English. Most of the sounds seem ok, but how would you normally differentiate \[i\] in b**i**t from the \[iː\] in b**ee**t using Cyrillic or would they both just use 'И'? The sample text they give is:

Ал Хйюмън бееингз ар борн фри энд еекўъл ин Дигнити энд Райтз. Ђей ар ендауед ўић Реезън энд Каншънс энд шюдд якт тъўордс ўун ънуђер ин ей Спирит ъв Бруђергхюд.

In the Latin alphabet that is:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal declaration of human rights)

I know some characters are very differenṭ from their normal sounds, like я for 'æ' instead of 'ja' & ц for dʒ instead of 'ts' (стяк ексчэнц would be 'stack exchange'.) I use џ instead of ц for dʒ. I thought about using ы for \[i\] and и for

*I previously posted this in the Linguistics community but was told this was a better fit.*

# Answer
> 1 votes
If ы is otherwise unused, it seems like the best fit here to me. It certainly seems at least as close a match as some others you've accepted (e.g. ц for dʒ)

# Answer
> 1 votes
One potential obvious answer would be to use double letters for long vowels like Mongolian does. (And e.g. Finnish does in the Latin alphabet.)

# Answer
> 0 votes
This adaptation seems to use either **"ее"** (as in "бееингз" *beings* or "еекўъл" *equal*) or **"и"** (as in "фри" *free*) for /i/ and **"и"** (as in "ин" *in*) or **"ъ"** (as in "Каншънс" *conscience*) for /ɪ/. In particular, the word "Дигнити" *dignity* uses "и" for both sounds.

It seems this transcription has retained a number of etymological spellings, such as the retention of certain silent letters, like the second "е" in "ендауед" *endowed* or the "ъў" in "тъўордс" *towards*, the use of "с" and "з" seemingly interchangeably for word final /s/ and /z/ ("Райтз" *rights* and "бееингз" *beings* vs. "Каншънс" *conscience* and "тъўордс" *towards*), and the distinction between stressed ("у" as in "ўун" *one* or "ей" *a*) and unstressed /ʌ/ ("ъ" as in "ънуђер" *another*).

Here is a chart of how English vowels are spelled in your sample:

```
VOWEL  LETTER SAMPLE WORD     POTENTIAL CYRILLIC SPELLING
TRAP      э   (энд)           трэп
          я   (якт)           тряп
BATH
PALM      а   (ал)            пам
LOT
CLOTH     а   (Каншънс)       клађ
THOUGHT
KIT       и   (ин)            кит
          ъ   (Каншънс)       кът
DRESS     е   (ендауед)       дрес
STRUT     у   (ўун)           струт
          ей  (ей)            стрейт
          ъ   (ънуђер)        стрът
FOOT      ю   (Бруђергхюд)    фют
FACE      ей  (ђей)           фейс
GOAT
FLEECE    ее  (бееингз)       флеес
          и   (фри)           флис
GOOSE     ю   (Хйюмън)        гюс
PRICE     ай  (Райтз)         прай
CHOICE
MOUTH     ау  (ендауед)       мауђ
NURSE
START     а  (ар)             старт
NORTH     о  (борн)           норђ
FORCE     о  (тъўордс)        форс
NEAR      и  (Спирит)         нир
SQUARE
CURE
COMMA
LETTER    е  (ънуђер)         летер
HAPPY

```

---
Tags: writing-systems, phonology
---


# Question
Title: Have language regulators ever made concessions and changed the language to adopt naturally occurring changes?
A few conlangs have language regulators or academies. Have any of these ever been faced with naturally occurring linguistic change and changed the official version of the language to match?

Please consider only grammatical, morphological, or syntactic changes, and not simply the inclusion of new words, as I expect that to be very common.

# Answer
> 9 votes
It would seem that Esperanto is one such that not only has done so, but actually has an Academy to guide and legitimize the process.

*This article* makes note of several, such as new ungendered pronouns (ŝli \< ŝi au li; ri = they s.) and the degendering of formerly masculine nouns (dentisto =/= male dentist).

I'm sure that these proposals are coming from the community of speakers themselves and are being agreed to by consensus before any kind of official blessing.

# Answer
> 1 votes
L'Académie has done this in the past, and is dealing with the blowback today.

French, as people tend to know, uses gender in its grammar. Originally, there were feminine forms such as *philosophesse* in widespread use, but in the 1600s, around the time L'Académie was founded, the idea that "the masculine prevails over the feminine" became a standard French published grammars and dictionaries used, and they explicitly declared this to be the case not because it was an existing linguistic rule in French but because the language should reflect the "natural" male-dominant society of the time. So words such as *la philosophesse* was declared grammatically incorrect: *le philosophe* was the only proper term. (Besides, they probably chuckled, it's not like the little ladies could really think anyway, amirite?)

No really, they said that. And L'Académie, who still don't like girl cooties, was on board and kept enforcing that. So you'd see situations where, for instance, if you had an symphony orchestra of entirely female musicians, they'd be referred to as *les musiciennes* (fem.pl). If they added a single man to the orchestra, now the group is *les musiciens* (masc.pl), even though the man is outnumbered 100:1.

The blowback happening now, which *les immortels* (of course, never *les immortelles*) are fighting hard against, is to tweak French to be a bit more inclusive, by doing things like creating constructions analogous to the "Latinx" term, changing some nouns so that the feminine form is fully accepted as grammatically equal to the male, and perhaps even considered the default; to use an example I just made up, if you referred "an engineer" as a generic, you'd use *une ingénieure* instead of *un ingénieur*. And even stopping that stupidity where a single man changes the entire grammatical gender of a group, regardless of how outnumbered he is.

---
Tags: language-change, regulation
---


# Question
Title: Is there a structured toki pona dictionary/thesaurus?
I'm currently working on an NLP project using toki pona, analysing and generating sentences. I was wondering if there was a structured dictionary available for it, or whether people have attempted to create one.

Let me explain what I mean by "structured dictionary":

There are only 120-odd words in toki pona. The word *jan* refers to a person. Compounds are used to be more specific, ie *jan pona* is "friend", *jan utala* is "fighter", *jan alasa* is "hunter", etc. This is reminiscent of expressing the meaning of nouns through semantic primitives, a bit like Wilks (1975). So the set of words described by *jan* would be {"person", "friend", "fighter", "hunter", ...}. There are subsets which are more specific, so *jan utala* is {"fighter", "soldier", "mercenary", ...}. *jan utala pi ma* would be {"soldier", "private", "general", ...}

You can envisage it as a tree structure, where the leaves are the word meanings, and the roots (as there would be multiple trees: one for each 'top' primitive) encompasses all of them. As you wander down the tree, the path is an ever longer chain of toki pona words, and the set of meanings covered by those words becomes smaller and smaller.

Another example would be *ilo*, "tool". *ilo toki* is a tool for communication: {"telephone", "telegraph", "vhf radio", "loud hailer", ...}; *ilo toki uta suli* (tool talk mouth big) could be a loud hailer. Another sub-tree would capture wireless communication devices, perhaps *ilo toki pi kon*.

I know this somewhat goes against the toki pona philosophy of being a simple and small language, but it seems to me to more or less accidentally provide a useful set of semantic primitives that can be used to describe word meanings in general. So before I embark on creating such a structure, has anyone already attempted something similar? Surely there must be dictionaries of mulit-word toki pona expressions? I haven't been able to find a good one yet.

Wilks, Y (1975) *An Intelligent Analyzer and Understander of English*, Communications of the ACM 18(5):264-274

# Answer
> 4 votes
Proving a negative is always difficult, but as far as I can tell there is no obvious candidate for what you're looking for and if you made one yourself it would presumably fill an empty niche in the Toki Pona universe. At least I haven't found any sites written in English yet that seem to fit the bill.

The closest thing I can find to what you are looking for is a Toki Pona corpus search tool, which seems like it would be useful for tracking down examples of usage and might help you find compounds containing a particular word that have already been coined.

Also, I have yet to find two simpler things that would be good stepping stones for a hierarchically organized Toki Pona dictionary.

* A non-minimal dictionary
* Toki Pona-English parallel texts

All of the Toki Pona dictionaries I have found so far define just the basic vocabulary and do not provide entries for *any* multi-morpheme lexemes, even famous ones like `jan utala`.

Many of the dictionaries out there are more or less copies of the official dictionary, such as this one. Other dictionaries like this Wiktionary appendix do not provide definitions for whole Toki Pona expressions at a time.

Toki Pona-English parallel texts would help distinguish lexeme boundaries within complex phrases, since the presence or absence of `pi` is not a completely reliable cue as to whether a "real lexeme boundary" was intended.

# Answer
> 3 votes
It sounds like you're after a trie.

The closest example I can think of is this glosbe site. It has a search tool, which orders matches in the way you want, but not in the structure you want.

.

The only issue is that there are fan created/added word combinations which may not be 'official'.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I think you may find some of what you're looking for in the paper Basic concepts and tools for the Toki Pona minimal and constructed language by Renato Fabbri.

> A first Toki Pona Wordnet was constructed relating each of the TP words in the dictionary to English Wordnet synsets \[19\] through the English lemmas. The canonical (i.e. Princeton) Wordnet only contains nouns, adjectives,verbs, and adverbs. Thus, particles were not considered. Numbers were considered adjectives. Words presented as adjectives in the dictionary were considered both as adjectives and adverbs. Prepositions were considered inall classes. \[19\]
>
> The TPWordnetclass \[10\], provides such tentative TP Wordnets in their simplest form: the TP words are keysin a dictionary that returns the corresponding synsets.

A "synset" in WordNet is a set of cognitive synonyms, so this seems like a start towards what you want. pali pona!

The references are:

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Tags: toki-pona
---


title: Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible?

text:
# Question
Title: Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible?
I and other people are making a collaborative conlang. It features mood/evidentiality contrast. There are 4 moods:

1. Indicative
2. Imperative
3. Optative
4. Conditional

There are also 6 evidentials:

1. Direct
2. Hearsay
3. Egophoric
4. Gnomic
5. Inferential
6. Dubitative

The problem is we disagreed whether Imperative/Optative/Conditional (i.e. Irrealis moods) are compatible with evidentials. I feel they are incompatible, but the other conlangers think they are.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The most prototypical evidentials are a class of verbal affixes. They are not commonly tenses or moods of their own (though they can be). As such, they are not structurally incompatible with the irrealis/conditional, and ultimately it really depends on what exactly that mood is *being used for* by a language.

In Quechua, counterfactuals (*If I had hooves, I'd be a horse*) use the irrealis marker -man, but cannot (as I understand it anyway) take evidentials, but a statement of probability (*She may be at school*), which also uses the same marker, definitely can.

Irrealis statements about future events or hypotheticals, on the other, can also reasonably be said to be semantically unsuitable to use evidentials: in *I will try to feed her some soup*, the "feed her some soup" subclause is not really a statement you can really describe the source of the information (unless you have a dedicated evidential for that case, but natural languages don't). Nonetheless, WALS notes that some languages do:

> Because evidentials are used to describe the speaker’s involvement with events, they tend to occur in realis contexts, especially in past tense situations. Nevertheless, evidentials do occur in what can be described as irrealis situations. Example (9) from Barasano (Eastern Tucanoan; Colombia; Jones and Jones 1991: 116) shows an interrogative evidential, and (10), from Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Daghestanian; Georgia; Holisky and Gagua 1994: 180) shows an evidential with a future event.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Remember that "grammar is born hungry" (attr. to W. Annis). While evidentials probably won't mix with the conditional mood in an additive fashion, they may produce other non-combinatorial meanings. So ("if" + conditional + direct) might be a normal condition, while ("if" + conditional + hearsay) might end up meaning that the scenario is especially unlikely, and ("if" + conditional + inferential) could indicate that the scenario would be bad.

Similarly, evidentials could be added to imperatives more directly to indicate the knowledge on which the command is based. (imperative + inferential) could be a normal imperative, while (imperative + direct) implies authority and (imperative + hearsay) indicates that you're passing down a command from your superior.

Wikipedia mentions that the same particles that indicate evidentiality are not infrequently also used to indicate mirativity, modality, tense, or aspect, though it doesn't give any examples, so take that with a grain of salt.

Of course it's also absolutely possible (or even probable) that certain combinations of modality and evidentiality are simply disallowed in your language. I would be very surprised if all 32 potential combinations of modality and evidentiality in your language were permitted (for example, a gnomic optative seems pretty contradictory to me).

# Answer
> 1 votes
I think it could be argued that some of your evidentials may be compatible with some of your moods.

Expressing something hoped hoped for or wished for (optative) seems it might pair nicely with the dubitative marker, perhaps expressing unlikelihood. It would also pair naturally with the direct marker, as, obviously, the speaker has direct knowledge of that which she hopes for!

Conditional seems to be compatible with hearsay, gnomic, and perhaps inferential markers.

Imperative, I think, subsumes direct evidentiality to the exclusion of the others. It would be a pretty poor general who commands his men "Charge-*I think, maybe?*"

I think it could also be argued that evidential marking of those other moods would be redundant, because *obviously* the source of information regarding a command is the one who issues the command! Perhaps evidential marking in those instances could be put to other uses?

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


# Question
Title: Are there differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show?
Belter Creole is a conlang creole spoken in the novel series *The Expanse* by James S. A. Corey. When the novel was adapted into a TV series they got linguist Nick Farmer to develop the language.

Are there substantial differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show? Or is what is in the books just less developed, and Farmer created a more complete but still fully compatible version for the show? Do the later novels, from after the show started to be produced, use Farmer's version or Corey's original version?

# Answer
Yes they are totally different.

### In the books

Maybe because Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck are not language experts, the Belter language in the books is very simple, and not really a con-lang. It does not exhibit a plausible grammar and etymological evolution. In short, it's just words from different languages pieced together.

You can find a good list of examples inside the fan wiki https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter\_Creole\_(Books), with also the real languages the Belter expression come

A couple examples that pop up often in the books:

Bist Bien: "Are you okay" from German `bist` and `bien` spanish

The usage of "dui" from Chinese to say "yes!" "correct!"

### In the TV

In the series, maybe producers had a bigger budget and commissioned the creation of a real con-lang, even if it is seldom spoken.

The words you hear in the TV are not in the books, and instead sound very plausible from etymologycal analysis:

Beltalowda = from "belter", corrupted in "belta" and "lowda" people

And this is a good example, you see the consistensy in how the word component is used:

Inyalowda = from "inner" corrupted in "inya" and "lowda" again! = Inner people.

The spelling corrupt from Belter -\> Belta and Inner -\> Inya is *plausible* in a language evolution context in the future.

Another example:

Welwala = from "well-dweller", the person who live in a gravity well

And in the TV movie, Belter language is also speak in longer sentences with full grammar rules. When in books it's always just random foreign words in the same sentence, but mainly in English

I hope this help you solving your doubt. English is not my mother language, sorry if is not clear.
> 4 votes

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Tags: belter-creole
---


# Question
Title: Are there any successful conlangs using information density as a design goal?
I'm interested in the idea of a conlang which could be used to create extremely information dense statements - such that, for example, a single word could be built up from morphemes to express a complete sentence. It would probably be a highly agglutinative language, similar to Eskimo-Aleut languages.

Are there **successful*** examples of conlangs which have been created with this principle in mind? I'm interested in seeing how other people might have applied this principle in creating another language.

\*When I say successful: I'm aware of fictional examples like Speedtalk, where each phoneme is meaningful, and has incredibly complex and subtle distinctions. I don't consider that successful, because it's far too complex for anyone to reasonably learn. Japanese verbs can be informationally-dense in the way that I mean in terms of its inflectional morphology, e.g. the single word 行かせられたくなかった (ika-se-rare-ta-kuna-katta) can express the complete sentence "\[I/he/she/they\] didn't want to be made to go," using inflectional morphemes.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Answering this question is tricky. As you obtain higher and higher levels of information density, you have to sacrifice some naturalism or some simplicity in order to get there.

Marking the point where you've sacrificed too much naturalism or simplicity to be learnable is a judgment call.

Short answer:

Possibly guaspi, but it's obscure.

---

One famous example of this is Ithkuil. Parts of Ithkuil are reasonably naturalistic, such as its phonology, which is less complex than Ubykh or Chechen (which also has a large number of vowels). Other parts are not, such as the very fine-grained case distinctions or how meanings are organized into roots, which is more complex than the system of triliteral roots in Semitic languages that it is based on.

Is Ithkuil learnable? I really don't know. My guess is `no` but I don't have proof.

---

An example of an informationally-dense written language is Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is not a conlang, but it *was written centuries* after it stopped being spoken and *uses a heavily abbreviated style where nearly everything that's pragmatically inferable is dropped*.

If you want to make an informationally dense conlang, Classical Chinese is a good starting point. It has pervasive zero marking (although you can optionally mark possessors and relative clauses with an overt marker) and the reconstructed roots are monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic.

---

One possible example of an *intentionally information dense language* is guaspi, a tonal derivative of lojban.

I don't know whether lojban is considered learnable or not and I don't know whether to consider guaspi successful or not, but efficiency is one of its stated goals.

> Gua\spi is efficient. Words are short, and extensive defaults on articles and modal cases eliminate the majority of structure words.

In my personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, a human can speak "informal" lojban riddled with logic errors and this should count as speaking lojban.

---

Closing remarks:

Looking at some of these examples reveals an *important design decision* that creators of an informationally-dense language face: whether to allow the speaker to drop things that are pragmatically inferable and how to account for that when evaluating how well their language achieves its goals.

For instance, suppose a language has very specific tenses that are marked on all verbs or person marking on all verbs. Tense information is frequently recoverable from context, as are pronominal arguments. If information is recoverable from context, does the language *get any points* for encoding it directly, however efficiently it may do so?

# Answer
> 5 votes
There is a general trade-off between two aspects of any encoding or language: redundancy versus information density.

If you have an information-dense language, that means there won't be much redundancy (as every symbol has a distinct meaning). This makes for efficient communication in perfect conditions, but as soon as there is any noise (in the widest sense of 'noise'), communication could get disrupted. If any symbol is changed during transmission (ie misheard, or dropped), then the meaning of your message will change in a way that cannot be recovered. It would also require perfect production, ie no typos or other mistakes, as they would all change the meaning. Because there is no redundancy, you cannot even recognise a typo, as it would simply be another, different, word. That of course is in the extreme case only. Imagine you numbered all the words in your dictionary and would simply transmit a sequence of numbers.

Another aspect of information density is not in the language but the texts created in the language. Any text requires shared context between author and recipient for the receiver to be able to interpret the message. Anything not shared between the sender and receiver needs to be contained in the message itself. So even if your language itself is very information dense (or redundant), your messages don't have to be the same.

There is probably a natural limit for information density in human languages. If every letter you write has an impact on the meaning of your message, you need a huge cognitive effort to create it (either when learning the language, or when writing a text in it). And similarly, the receiver needs to spend a lot of effort into decoding/understanding your message. So while it is space efficient (you get away with shorter messages), the time efficiency is pretty poor. And if your message content gets lost in the process, you need to re-transmit, which adds to that as well.

For those reasons languages tend not to be on the extremes of density (or redundancy). And any conlangs that would go there, would be hard to use. So it doesn't really make sense to have this as a design goal for a language.

# Answer
> 4 votes
To use your example from Japanese: *ika-se-rare-ta-kuna-katta* Yes, all one word. A word of 10 syllables, 6 morphenes. What, precisely, is the advantage over "didn't want to be made to go" (8 syllables, and 8 morphenes)? It only works if you decide that "word" is the most basic unit to measure against, but "word" can be a very arbitrary concept.

In a 2010 paper, a study was done looking at the "information density" of speech; that is, given the same text translated into multiple languages, so everyone is conveying the same information, how long would it take a fluent speaker of that language to transmit that information, speaking at a normal cadence (and using multiple speakers to get an average, of course). As part of that process, one step was determining how much information was conveyed per syllable. They used Vietnamese as a baseline, arbitrarily giving it a value of 1.00. If a language conveyed the same information in more syllables than Vietnamese, it would be lower than 1 (you need more syllables to communicate the same information). English was 0.91. Japanese was 0.49. In other words, you needed nearly twice as many syllables to communicate the same thing in Japanese as you did in English, Mandarin (0.94), or obviously Vietnamese (1.00).

When you compare speaking rates (how fast those syllables are spoken), it turns out that most languages are about the same when it comes to transmitting information per time, between 0.9 and 1.1 (Vietnamese again being 1.00). Except Japanese, which although having easily the fastest speaking rate of the languages tested, because of the extremely low density of information per syllable, they had the lowest rate of transmission by far, at 0.74.

So Japanese is significantly *less* information dense than many other widely spoken languages.

You see the same thing in other agglutinative languages. Just because a given language can pack more information into a single word doesn't mean that it will necessarily be shorter to communicate. I work with Inuktitut translations all the time, and I just pulled up an example I've dealt with:

> The Proponent intends to conduct a mineral exploration program including drilling, sampling, magnetic surveying, and mapping.

The Inuktitut translation is:

> ᐱᓕᕆᔪᒪᔪᖅ ᐅᔭᕋᖕᓂᐊᕐᕕᒃᓴᖅᓯᐅᕈᒪᒐᒥ ᐱᓕᕆᓇᔭᖅᓱᓂ ᐃᑰᑕᖃᕐᓂᖅ, ᐲᔭᐃᖃᑕᕐᓂᖅ ᖃᐅᔨᓴᒐᒃᓴᓂᒃ, ᓇᐅᒃᑯᑦ ᓂᐱᖓᓂᖃᕐᓂᖏᓐᓂᒃ ᓄᓇᐅᑉ ᐃᓗᐊᒍᑦ ᐅᔭᕋᖏᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓄᓇᖑᓕᐅᓂᕐᒥᒃ.

Which transliterates as:

> Pilirijumajuq ujarangniarviksaqsiurumagami pilirinajaqsuni ikuutaqarniq, piijaiqatarniq qaujisagaksanik, naukkut nipinganiqarninginnik nunaup iluagut ujarangit ammalu nunanguliunirmik.

Obviously the English is much more concise simply based on inspection even though it has more words. Now, an argument can be made that the English has some terms which might require a longer word to explain it in Inuktitut, so that's a fair argument. So here is a more "common language" example from the Government of Nunavut's website (https://livehealthy.gov.nu.ca/en/health-topics/injuries/preparing-hunt-land):

> Telling someone at home where you are going. Even if you are going out on the land for just a few hours, you should tell at least one person at home the names of all riders and passengers, where you are going, and when you plan to come back. If you do not return in time, this person will be able to send for help.

And here is the Innuinaqtun version:

> Uqaqlugu kimut humungauliqtutin. Aulaaqhimanahuaqtillutin ikituni ikaangnini, uqaqtukhauyutin atauhinaugumi inuk aimavingni kitkut aulaaqatiniatatin, humungauliktutin, humi utiqnahuaqtuninlu. Uttinngitkuvin mikhaatigun, tamna inuk ikayutikhangnik aullaqtittniaqtuq.

The Innuinaqtun is 21 words compared to the English 67. If, however, you look at the *syllables*, there's 109 compared to English's 73. English clearly has the higher information density per syllable. Just because the average word is longer doesn't make the language more information dense.

Part of the issue with Inuktitut, just as with Japanese, is that the number of possible different syllables is limited due to the phonotactics of the language, which means you have to use more syllables to compensate for the limited inventory you have. Standard Inuktitut has at most 210 possible syllables. Japanese has, depending on who you ask, about 400 possible syllables, so you could have that number of possible one-syllable words. With English phototactics, for "standard" English, you have about *316,800* possible one-syllable words (there is about 9,300 in use).

The reason for this difference is the number of consonant clusters allowed and the ridiculous number of vowels in most English dialects.

tl;dr summary: to have a more information dense and still practical language (so you allow some natural redundancy and not have so many near-homonyms that mininterpretation due to missing something is a constant problem), you need a language with a lot of possible syllables and phonotactics that allow those syllables to be used or combined into sufficiently many distinct morphenes, however you put those morphemes together or not in any kind of language, whether isolating or agglutinative.

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Tags: morphology, design-goals
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# Question
Title: Designing realistic pragmatics, particularly with respect to answering questions
Coming up with new kinds of pragmatics is sort of fun, but it's hard to tell when an idea is *incompatible with how people work psychologically*.

For instance, what are the limits or universals around asking and answering questions?

I had an idea the other day for a particle that can be used to refuse to answer a question without giving an excuse such as `I don't know`, but that also isn't rude.

I can think of a couple of non-specific ways of refusing to answer a question in English, but they're all rude or combative.

```
1. None of your business.
2. Don't ask me that.
3. What a great question.
4. No comment.

```

The idea behind the question-refusal particle is that it shifts some of the social burden of *asking appropriate questions* from the asker to the recipient. The other part of the idea is that, in the larger pragmatics/\[fake culture\] surrounding this language, asking a question that the recipient cannot decline to answer is considered inherently hostile. Therefore, most questions in an ordinary conversation would not come with an expectation of being *answered* merely *considered*.

Let's assume with a generic verb-initial language with a few case suffixes for the purposes of this question

```
y/n.ques INT-see-FIN-REALIS   story-ACC
Did you see the movie (lit: story)?

NONRESPONSE
No comment.

```

Is it unrealistic to design such a language and then insist by fiat that the various ways of explicitly not-answering a question are not rude?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Consider the following:

"I can't answer that." "I'd rather not say." "I don't understand the question." "It's not that simple." "It depends."

All of these are examples of non-answers which, as far as I'm concerned, are not rude. So I see no problem with designing a language that just has a non-rude particle for any or all of those situations.

---
Tags: semantics
---


# Question
Title: How does one express "want to want" in toki pona?
For example, "I do not want to want opium"

For example, this doesn't work, it is a yes-no question!

> mi wile ala wile e ijo nasa
> Do I want a drug?
> ? Do I want not-want a drug?

The positive doesn't seem to work either

> mi wile wile e ijo nasa
> * I want \[in a wanting manner?\] a drug.

# Answer
> 11 votes
> `mi wile ala e ni: mi wile e ijo nasa.`
> `I want not <obj>-this I want <obj>-thing crazy`

The same principle as in "I do not want to drink water."

> `mi wile ala e ni: mi moku e telo.`
> `I want not <obj>-this I drink <obj>-water`

# Answer
> 2 votes
I think you can express something like this as (101). If we imagine a speaker addicted to using their smartphone, they might say something like this.

```
Mi  wile ike    e  ilo  toki. (101)
1sg want bad D.O. tool speak

```

I think *to want badly* in English would map to `wile mute`, since you're talking about extent rather than making a value judgment.

Making a value judgment and describing wanting something as egodystonic are not *exactly* the same thing, but they are similar, at least when talking about oneself.

# Answer
> 1 votes
mi wile e ni: mi wile tawa.
I want this: I want to go.

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Tags: toki-pona, translation
---


title: Words for Mercy in Toki Pona?

text:
# Question
Title: Words for Mercy in Toki Pona?
I would like to translate Bismillah Ir-Rahmani Ir-Rahim into Toki Pona.

The parts I'm struggling with are the Rahma part, and the Raheem part, as they encompass similar but subtly different meanings of Mercy.

Rahma is more closely associated with motherly love. Rahim is more of an extreme mercy regardless of what is being forgiven.

I haven't found a translation for mercy, let alone one that encompasses these subtle differences.

# Answer
toki!

Toki Pona has a word for mercy, and it is simply *olin*, just like love, tenderness, warmth, etc.

For instance:

> mi jo e olin tan sina

(I have mercy because of you), or

> mi jo e olin tawa sina

(I have mercy for you).
> 5 votes

# Answer
Maybe something like: "jan sewi li pana e olin tawa jan li lawa pona la lon nimi ona."

If you wanted to write it in what looked like arabic there is an adaptation of Arabic for English that could be also used for toki pona here.

یاَن سِوئ لئ پانا اِ اُولین تاوا یاُن لئ لاوا پُونا لا نئمئ اُونا.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: vocabulary, toki-pona
---


# Question
Title: Is it attested for noun classifiers to be coopted for directionality?
A noun classifier marks on the verb some information about the form of one of its arguments. For example, Atili has a handful of "stationary" classifiers that produce semantic distinctions:

```
Emanyo bu-vahkin-us azven<k>o.
Emanyo ball-cook-P/3;PFV cow<3>
Emanyo cooked the meatball.

```

vs

```
Emanyo mal-vahkin-us azven<k>o.
Emanyo board-cook-P/3;PFV cow<3>
Emanyo cooked the brisket.

```

Atili also has "motile" classifiers that indicate manner of motion:

```
Yeredol many-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol run-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol runs to the beach.

```

vs

```
Yeredol ib-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol climb-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to.
Yeredol climbs (down) to the beach.

```

Is it attested for a language to use a similar system for encoding whether motion is towards or away from the speaker, as in the following hypothetical examples?

```
Yeredol ko-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol go-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol goes (away) to the beach.

```

vs

```
Yeredol kom-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol come-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol comes to the beach.

```

# Answer
Such a system is indeed attested! And not only that, it’s actually surprisingly common. Usually the category is called andative and venitive, for ‘going’ and ‘coming’ respectively (though I prefer ‘translocative’ and ‘cislocative’). Here’s an example from Komnzo (Döhler 2018):

> **Yfathwroth.**
> *They hold him away.*
>
> ```
> y-          fath     -wr -o   -th
> 3SG.MASC.α- hold.EXT -ND -AND -2|3NSG
>
> ```

And one from Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (Oto-Manguean, Anderson 2017):

> **Rata rsily rityug Lia Petr gyia.**
> *Every morning Petra goes and cuts flowers.*
>
> ```
> rata  rsily   r-  i-  tyug Lia  Petr  gyia
> every morning HAB-AND-cut  Miss Petra flowers
>
> ```

Many languages have even more elaborate systems, distinguishing many different directions beyond just ‘coming’ and ‘going’. For instance, Yagua distinguishes ‘upriver’ and ‘downriver’ directions (Payne 1997):

> **Sąąnaa suutiimuníí.**
> *Wash him/her downriver.*
>
> ```
> sąąna -a   suuti -imu -níí
> 2DL   -IRR wash  -DR  -3SG
>
> ```

While Southern Pomo has an exceedingly large array of around 15 directional suffixes, which may be applied to verbs of motion (Walker 2013):

> **ʔapʰ꞉alméčʼin**
> *climb down from above*
>
> ```
> ʔapʰː -alamečʼ -Vn
> carry -DIR     -SG.IMP
>
> ```
> 2 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, naturalism, verbs
---


# Question
Title: Where should I start planning my grammar?
I'm about creating my first conlang grammar, I know a few general characteristics yet I don't truly know where or how I should start to outline it. I only have messy pieces of informations about. From your experience, what could you advise me?

# Answer
> 3 votes
It would probably be a good way to start with the *features* you want to express through grammar. Many features can be expressed in different ways, lexically, through morphology, or through syntax. For example, 'subject' could be done through a particle, an affix, or through the position in the sentence.

You first come up with the list of features, and then you look at the inventory of forms in the grammar. Do you want a complex morphology? English, for example, marks very few features through morphology (plural for nouns, 3rd person singular for verbs, tenses, …) and a lot through word order or by adding auxiliaries.

The inventory will define the shape of your language; you can also start with that and then assign features to it. But be clear what kind of features you want to be able to express – not every possible distinction needs to be expressed in language. Do you want to mark the gender of the subject in the verb? Perfectly possible, but probably not very useful, unless your language is for a very gender-segregated society.

Obviously, the more features you want to express, the more complex your grammar will be. As an extreme example, toki pona pretty much only uses word order and a few particles to distinguish between subject/verb/object, and ignores number or gender markers. In Esperanto most work is done by the morphology, which encodes the role in the sentence, gender of nouns, number, and even a range of semantic relationships (eg "room where you do a particular action").

# Answer
> 3 votes
It's probably best to start at broad strokes and clean up the detail later. The first question you should ask yourself is "*Do I want to have an analytic, agglutinative, fusional, or polysynthetic language?*" This will decide whether your language will be making sentences by putting a lot of words together in a specific order (like English or Mandarin), putting a bunch of affixes on a moderate number of words (like Korean or Navajo), putting a few very specific affixes on a moderate number of words (like Spanish or German), or stringing together a large number of component pieces to make a few very specific words (like Coptic or West Greenlandic).

Next, you should ask "*Should my language be primarily head-initial or head-final?*" A head-initial language will probably have Verb-Subject-Object or Subject-Verb-Object word order, put auxiliary verbs before matrix verbs (e.g. *have gone*), use prepositions (e.g. *at home*), put adjectives after the nouns they modify (e.g. *house new*), and mark the start of a relative clause. A head-final language will probably have Subject-Object-Verb word order, put matrix verbs before auxiliaries (e.g. *gone have*), use postpositions (e.g. *home at*), put adjectives before the nouns they modify (e.g. *new house*), and mark the end of a relative clause. Of course, as these examples show, you don't have to pick one exclusively, but nearly all languages are predominantly one or the other.

Third, you should ask "*Should my language be primarily head-marking or dependent-marking?*" A head-marking language will be more likely to use polypersonal agreement instead of case marking, mark possessa instead of possessors, and have adpositions that agree with their referents. A dependent-marking language will be more likely to have case marking, mark possessors instead of possessa, and have demonstratives and adjectives that agree with their referents. Again, you don't have to go all in here, but you should lean either one way or the other.

For these last two especially, it's very helpful to learn which word is going to be the head of a given phrase. For example, the head of a sentence is the verb, the head of a noun phrase is the noun, the head of an adpositional phrase is the adposition, the head of a possessive construction is the possessum, etc. These aren't really intuitive (at least to me), so it's best to just memorize them.

Knowing these three things right from the start will help you avoid some of the most common typological pitfalls that will make your language feel clunky to use. But choose carefully, because these choices will end up so ingrained in the language that it will be a royal pain to try to change them later. From here, you can move to making more specific decisions, like what grammatical distinctions you actually want to make, and how specifically you're going to make those distinctions.

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar
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# Question
Title: Is there anyone that has a conlang as their first/only language?
It seems that people generally use constructed languages in very limited circumstances, or within small communities that speak the language. Thus it seems to me unlikely that one of these languages would every be someone's first or only language.

**Are there any documented cases of a child learning a conlang as their first language?**

# Answer
Yes. According to Wikipedia, Esperanto has 350 native speakers (data 1996). There is also a story about a linguist only speaking to his son in Klingon, but even though the child picked it up somewhat, later in life the child stopped speaking Klingon. Currently, he doesn't.

Also, see Esperanto native speaker AMA on reddit and a blog I enjoyed about speaking Esperanto natively.
> 19 votes

# Answer
I’m going to try to avoid any kind of argument about politics, religion or what does or does not count as a “conlang,” and just give this as a historical case that I think is relevant to the spirit of the question.

Biblical Hebrew was a natural language, and Rabbinic Hebrew a scholarly one, but modern Hebrew needed a vast number of neologisms, greatly exceeding the number of ancient words in the Bible. Since most of the early revivalists were native speakers of Central and Eastern European languages, those also influenced its development. So Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s dictionary of modern Hebrew words, many of which he himself invented or extended the definitions of, bears some similarities to creating the vocabulary of a conlang.

He and his wife were famously the first parents in modern times to raise their child to know only Hebrew and nothing else. Their son Ittamar Ben-Avi, born in 1882, would later recall that he was sent to his room whenever any guests came over who did not speak Hebrew, so he would not hear another language, and that his father became enraged when he caught his mother singing lullabies to him in her native Russian.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Kim Henrickson is one example of a native speaker of Esperanto, however, I'm certain that there are hundreds of others.
> 0 votes

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Tags: history, conlang-learning, language-acquisition
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title: Simplified Version of IPA?

text:
# Question
Title: Simplified Version of IPA?
In IPA, the sounds of many symbols are so close that they are indistinguishable to me! For example, \[bʊk\], \[ɓʊk\], or \[βʊk\]. Even though they *do* have some minor differences, but all a listener like me hears is "book".

So is there any "Simplified IPA" where they contain all possible pronunciations but yet omit all those phonetically indistinguishable symbols?

# Answer
> 9 votes
The reason that all the different characters for “the same sound” exist is because they’re *not* the same sound, and trained linguists/linguistic researchers *can* hear the difference. Any “simplified IPA” wouldn’t be a true “IPA”, and would not be able to accurately represent the difference in sounds; you would end up with the present situation where the spelling of words in a language not suited for the alphabet being used does not accurately reflect the actual pronunciation of the word (for example, Spanish *vaca*, cow, which some people hear as though it should be spelled *baka*, because neither ***b*** nor ***v*** in the Latin alphabet is an accurate representation of the sound used).

# Answer
> 18 votes
If you're notating a language that uses \[β\] or \[ɓ\] *but does not distinguish it* from \[b\], that is, if there are no words such that changing one of these consonants to the other changes the meaning of the word (perhaps because \[β\] occurs only between vowels and \[b\] elsewhere), then for most purposes you write them all as /b/; so that is a “simplified IPA”. This is called **broad** transcription, written with slashes to distinguish it from **narrow** transcription using brackets. A famous example: English /p/ includes both \[p\] and \[pʰ\], which are distinguished in many languages including Zulu, Hindustani, Mandarin.

No language makes phonemic distinctions between *all* pairs of phones represented by distinct symbols in IPA; but every symbol exists because *some* language contrasts it with others.

# Answer
> -2 votes
There is SaypU, which tries to creates a universal phonetic alphabet for all languages with only 24 letters, many of which can be used to represent slightly different sounds in different languages.

"a" in SaypU can represent /a/, /æ/, and /ɑ/, depending on the language. "y" represents /j/, /ʎ/, and /ʝ/. "w" represents both /w/ and /ɥ/.

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Tags: phonology, writing-systems
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# Question
Title: Has anyone tried learning and speaking Kesh?
The book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K Le Guin is an anthropological account of the Kesh, a people that "might be going to have lived" in future California. It includes short stories, songs, poems, recipes and sacred texts of the fictional people; but relevant to the question is the section at the end of the book which contains the script, numerals, and punctuation of the language, as well as an extensive glossary. I don't think there are any details on grammar written there, but there are example sentences in different places in the book. So, my question is, is there anyone that has tried to learn this language or studied it much? And, if so, what is it like?

# Answer
I have the novel, but haven't yet read it, so can't say that I've tried learning Kesh.

I used to (and may still) have the cassette tapes that came with some work about the Kesh. As I recall, it was recordings very much as you describe for the texts: songs and lore of various kinds. As I recall it was a pretty sounding language. I think this is it.

I think it's therefore safe to say sòmeone has tried to learn it! Well enough to record it, anyway!
> 3 votes

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Tags: history, conlang-learning
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