# Question
Title: How many unique sounds does the average conlang have?
At the moment I have 90 unique vowel/diphthong sounds that use tonal and length distinction in my conlang. In addition I've chosen 14 consonants, making my total of unique sounds 104.

I don't particularly want to drop any of them, but this seems a lot higher than the usual amount of unique sounds in a language. High enough to consider a more selective approach maybe.

I do want the language to have more vowel sounds than consonant, but how many unique vowel sounds does it have to have to be considered above average?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Depends what you want to do. If you want to be able to emulate all the words of real languages, add the whole IPA system. If you want nice melodic options, add in accordance with your preferred music system (Asian 5 tone, Western 7 tone, Modern 12 tone, each with steps and variations, and repeating form 20 Hz up to 20 000 Hz) and for each possible sound humans can produce - different voiced and voiceless sounds, whispered (ha) or normal (a), and so on. If you want to actually use it and keep it independent of other languages, I suggest keeping it simple - a movie language, for instance, is more effectful if you only choose in-character sounds.

Btw, you get a lot more sounds even in English and Italian if you include unusual words, regional dialects and so on - a large part of the IPA phonemes can be used in either language, though people often don't notice.

Here a few different English vowels (all mainstream):

Hut Hat Heroic Hellenic Hmmmh Hit Here Hot Hotel Herd Hoover

Alpha And Entity About e-in-Garden India Equal Oven Organ Earth Ultra

Iron Out Able Oil Over

Hi How Hey Hoist Holy

That's 32 distinct sounds. Some might be debatable, they are also dependent on dialect - "and" and "entity" start with the same sound for some, but I hear a difference - at least in some regions. The e in "Garden" isn't a sound at all according to some. And so on. The version on Wikipedia (English phonology) is slightly different. "Ha" is even in IPA written as two sounds, though it clearly is one sound (a whispered "a"), as you can see when stretching it, with or without adding a letter afterwards. I even ommitted a few vowels only the British/Australian/Canadian people use. According to Google, US English has 14-16 vowel phonemes, Australian English 20-21. And the whispered variety isn't even included.

If you multiply by three for tonal (add Up like we do in questions and Down like we do in some forms of emphasis or sounding defeated), you get 96. Asia also has a wavering tonal, but that can be emulated with two letters imo.

If you multiply by two for 2 different lengths, you get 192. If we ignore the h-sounds, we are still at 96.

So what you have is not that much.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I speak Finnish, which is one of the more vowel-oriented languages. Considering the 8 vowels, diphthongs, double-vowel (long) sounds... there's probably 2-3 dozen vowel sounds. 90 not only feels like overkill, but I wonder how effectively anyone could distinguish that many sounds. It's like asking someone to involve all the sounds in 5-6 U.S. dialects all at once.

# Answer
> 1 votes
If you have ninety vowels (including diphthongs), I'd say your invented language is already above average. English is probably at the higher end of the vowel spectrum with twentyish; but there are plenty of languages with far fewer (as few as two or three!).

Since your title question references invented languages specifically, you might consider trawling the CALS to find an approximation. Not every invented language is listed, so naturally the data & results can not be seen as accurate.

# Answer
> 1 votes
90 different vowels sounds a lot, but you include tone as a distinguishing feature. I don't know how many tone/length distinctions you have, but some natural languages have 6 tones. This brings the number of different vowel qualities down to 15 which is still a large number, but in the range of natural languages (German and Norwegian are in that range).

14 consonants is a rather moderate size for a consonant system.

For more information on consonant and vowel inventories of natural languages you can consult the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures specially chapters 1 and 2.

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonology, phonetics
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# Question
Title: How could a conlang enforce subjective idealism in a constructed world
Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.

How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?

My guess is that its semantic primes should consist of:

* qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as the redness of an evening sky, pain of a headache, the taste of wine, etc.
* A pronoun like \*I\* to refer to one's self
* Verbs such as \*think\*, \*believe\*, \*know\*
* Adverbs such as: \*now\*, \*before\*, \*after\*

Objects (e.g. *chair*, *table*, etc.), other personal pronouns (*you*, *he*, etc.), matter and all the other things that do not really exist (in the view of subjective idealism) would be defined as paraphrases.

**Edit:** Note that this is not a question on subjective idealism in reality, but about subjective idealism in a constructed world. Therefore arguments against subjective idealism in reality are irrelevant.

# Answer
> 2 votes
We can have two classes of nouns: souls, and the perceptions and ideas of souls. Ideas nouns must be inflected for who they are being perceived by: you, God, or whoever. This would have the effect of turning a sentence like "The dog is red" into "The dog seems red to me."

Secondly, instead of saying "The dog…" or "There is a dog…", you would say "I have the idea of a dog that…" Then to refer to that dog again, instead of using a pronoun like "it", you could say something like "my aforementioned dog idea". Idea nouns could exist only in a sort of object case, and not as a subject, to make speaking about it directly as if it really existed out there ungrammatical.

# Answer
> 5 votes
You may be interested in E-Prime.

*E-Prime* is a version of English that excludes all forms of the verb **to be**, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. This makes many objective statements like "Roses are red" impossible. Instead a person is required to use more subjective constructions like "Roses appear red to me".

# Answer
> 4 votes
Basically, your question is misstated.

In our own world, languages cannot enforce philosophies. You can be a Hegelian, a Tomist, a Berkelian, or a Marxist, in any given language, from Modern English to Ancient Farsi.

After all, all languages have this pesky word, "no", so that anything that can be affirmed can also be negated.

In a constructed world, everything is possible - negation of entropy, FTL travel, and all kinds of magic. So in your constructed world, language makes impossible for people to follow any other philosophy than subjective idealism. *How* language does this? It is better not to explain it, or only do it through applied phlebotinum - like SF writers do when describing FTL travel or the nature of *mana*.

---

I suggest this fiction, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luís Borges; it might be somewhat similar to - though somewhat more disquieting than - what you intend.

# Answer
> 0 votes
*Revised answer:*

There is a maxim of geopoesy: ***who makes the world makes the rules***.

In a secondary world, a world of your own devising, an invented language would not need to "enforce" subjective idealism at all. Only one thing is required, and that is to "set the dial" of your subcreation to subjective idealism.

In *that* world, only the mind and mental constructs have true existence. The language a mind devises for itself to communicate (within itself) and assuming the mind that exists is a human mind, will arise to describe its experience.

I think your semantic primes would probably be sufficient to describe both the *realia* of the mind-being's existence: the 1s pronoun, the concrete verbs such as "think", "know" and "believe", the qualia of phantasms created within the mind. Because sunsets and wine do not exist.

If the world you subcreate is, in actuality, a typological copy of the primary world, where things outside the mind have actual existence, then you run into the exact same issues I dealt with when your question was about the primary world itself.

Such a language, I hold, would not be able to "enforce" subjective idealism in any meaningful way. It would not be able to overcome the steak and eggs problem.

---

**Original response to unedited query (regarding subjective idealism within the primary world) retained for historical purposes:**

*Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.*

*How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?*

A very interesting thought experiment! But I believe is simply not practicable.

I don't think a language of any kind will be able to enforce that kind of (quite silly) perspective of reality.

In order to pull it off, I think you would have to first, absolutely and positively convince yourself that Berkeley was a) on to something and b) that a) is The Something.

Now, reason and common sense inform us that things do actually exist. Things outside the mind, things outside of mental construct. I can sit my weary bones down on a chair and be thankful that chairs exist. They're not mental constructs. They're articles of furniture made of wood and designed and built to be sat in. That's reason and common sense refuting Berkeley.

Now, I had a look at Mr Berkeley's picture in that article. He looks pretty well fed to me. Not emaciated, not dehydrated. I'll just bet he enjoyed a good steak and eggs for breakfast!

A true subjective idealist would also have to be a practical breatharian, because food does not exist. It's an insubstantial construct of the mind.

For your language to really function, you too would have to become a breatharian. You know: immerse yourself in the culture! Let us know how far you get in the practical application of this kind of philosophical language!

Specific to your last point re objects: I think, since objects do not exist and are therefore irrelevant to the thought and being of the mind, you could probably get away with a language where all substantives (apart from the 1s) are reduced to a single pronominal stem.

Trees don't exist, so you wouldn't really need a word for "tree". I don't exist, so you don't need a word for "elemtilas". This post doesn't exist, so you don't need words for "stack exchange" or "invented language" or "post" or "forum".

# Answer
> 0 votes
Look into the way Sanskrit works, and the words they use when discussing Hindu doctrines. I read somewhere that the Sanskrit word for meat, "Mamsa", is a word containing the words for "Me" and "You", referencing that as you kill and eat an animal, you will become an animal in a future lifetime that who you killed will hunt and eat.

The theological/metaphysical statement is right there in a common statement - So the implications of subjective idealism would have to be used to describe phenomena from the most accurate perspective of the worldview.

# Answer
> -1 votes
I assume that the inhabitants of your constructed world are humans (or at least have comparable minds to humans).

The is a famous hypothesis in lingusitics, called Linguisitc Relativity or Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that claims (to different degrees) that the language shapes the mind and the world view. Experimental studies only show weak effects, if any. We can assume that humans are able to develop every thought in any language.

On the other hand, authors have used this to some effect in fiction writing—in a constructed fictional world you have the licence to do so and to ignore hard science.

# Answer
> -1 votes
If you think about it, many existing languages do, albeit in a limited manner. In Spanish, for example, all nouns and pronouns are gendered; either male or female. This enforces the idea that all people are either male or female—which is not true. Your world might have two groups of people and the second group can only be described as 'inferiors' in the language; there is no other word.

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Tags: conlang-creation, semantics, sapir-whorf, language-structure, cultural-influence
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# Question
Title: How would having a logographic writing system work in a conlang?
Creating a logographic writing system for a language can quickly become overwhelming; having a different symbol/image for each word can quickly become overwhelming; it’s why Sequoyah switched to a syllabary instead of a logogram. The more words there are in a language the more symbols there have to be.

However, there are historically successful uses of logograms - for instance, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese (when it first started). I’m not aware of any modern natural language that actually uses a logographic system as its primary writing system, though.

How would a conlang use a logographic writing system after the language grew to any extant? Would it be possible to create a conlang that actually uses a sustainable logographic system?

# Answer
The problem with pure logographies is that languages tend to have a significant amount of morphemes, be these bound or free, that mark relatively abstract concepts, such as posession, the roles of NPs, etc., and some abstract words are rather hard to draw symbols for. As such, a purely logographic system cannot really deal with natural languages to their full extent, and therefore pick up "impurities", not just out of convenience, but out of necessity, since without them they are generally at best mnemonic aids and not a full (or almost full) representation of the spoken language. If you want a pure logographic system to be realistically viable for your conlang, going the oligomorphemic route, like Toki Pona, is probably the most reasonable, as the low number of morphemes reduces the strain of learning a large number of symbols, as well as the issue of coming up with new ones for new or rarely written-about concepts, since morphemes are a closed class, and the necessarily relatively general meaning of these morphemes means that it would likely be relatively straightforward to represent the majority of them with mostly intuitive iconography.
> 10 votes

# Answer
The Tangut script is an example of a more pure logographic writing system, with only 10% of the characters having a phonetic component. The Tangut script was created in 1036 by one person, apparently *a priori* but inspired by Chinese, and used until to 1502. So far, 5863 characters are known, excluding variants.

Tangut characters are extremely complicated, but they're probably unnecessarily so. Blissymbolics, which is an ideographic writing system with much simpler characters, has over 5,000 official symbols.

After creating a couple hundred root characters, I feel like you create a character for a new word in a couple of seconds by combining the meaning of existing characters. If Toki Pona can build a full vocabulary with 120 morphemes, you should be able to do the same with a logographic writing system.
> 2 votes

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Tags: writing-systems
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title: Term for the converse of "instrumental"

text:
# Question
Title: Term for the converse of "instrumental"
We can make a noun for the instrument of an action, by taking the verb for the action and adding an **instrumental** marker.\[1\]

For instance, in English, we can add "-er",\[2\] like so:

> I **cut** the box with a box-**cutter**.

Conversely, we can make a verb for an action, by taking the noun for the instrument and adding... **what could you call it?**

In English, we don't necessarily have an affix, since we can just verbalise the noun, like so:

> I will **knife** you with my **knife**.

...but we might use "-ise" this way, at least jocularly:

> I will **hammerise** him if he comes at me with that knife.

So is there a term for such a marker, indicating the **use** of an instrument? "Usive"? "Usual"?

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\[1\] I was going to call this "instrumentive", on the pattern of "agentive" and "patientive", but the word doesn't appear in any dictionary I checked. It is used in some books on linguistics, though, per Google Books.

\[2\] This is also the agentive suffix in English, but I'm imagining a scenario where the agent and the instrument are clearly distinguished.

# Answer
I think you're conflating a/o confusing a couple different things here.

First, "cutter" is not "instrumental". (At least in English!) In English grammar, **-er** is (among zillions of other uses) the morpheme that indicates "agent noun"; so, *cutter* means "thing that cuts". It is the actual agent by which cutting happens.

The **Instrumental Case** is a grammatical function that indicates the means by which the agent or subject of the verb does the action:

* I-subj cut-verb the.box-obj (with.a.box.cutter)-instr.

If English had case endings like Latin, you could see the difference easily:

* Puer-NOM cistam-ACC cultello-ABL secavit-VERB

Latin uses the ablative case to denote the instrumental case, due to ancient case syncretism of the old ablative, locative and instrumental cases.

**-ise / -ize**, in English, is a grammatical morpheme that indicates the word is a denominal verb. This means that the verb in question is made from a noun. We already know that English weirds. It verbs nouns at the drop of a hat.

* I will **hammer** him if he attacks me with the knife.

Your example, "I will hammerise him if he attacks me with a knife", doesn't actually make sense in context. This is because **-ise** doesn't mean "use something as an instrument", it means "turn something into something else".

* Immigrants ought to be *Americanised* through educational programmes.
* The machine *pulverises* large pieces of stone into gravel.

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I think your best bet, as far as "converse" of or "opposite" of the instrumental case, would be the

**noninstrumental case**, which I just made up. It does what the instrumental case does, only in the other direction. Essentially, the speaker denies the instrumentality of the named article.

* Puer-NOM cistam-ACC cultellei-NONINST secavit-VERB

I considered "deinstrumental", but that's already a thing (a noun or verb made upon an instrumental form).
> 5 votes

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Tags: grammar, terminology
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title: Structure only conlang? Nouns?

text:
# Question
Title: Structure only conlang? Nouns?
Are there examples of conlangs that are used by applying their structure such as grammar, sentence structure, intonation, means of combining words, etc… with other features of a given language or given member of a class of languages?

This has the disadvantage that for understanding one would have to know both the language in question, call this X, and the language it's adapting, call this Y.

For example and in particular I'm thinking that X could use the alphabet and all the single morpheme nouns and verbs of Y, but replace every other aspect of the language with its own.

A possible advantage could be in allowing the speaker more reachable access to an unfamiliar linguistic environment, be that a conlang or a natural language, where different modes of thought are the most natural.

# Answer
> 4 votes
It happens with sign languages - often there are two "versions" of a sign language, the first one (less official, natural) is generally used by the community and has its own grammar, the second one (more official, heavily constructed) parallels grammar (syntax) of the corresponding spoken language.

E.g.there is the natural Polish Sign Language, and a rather artificial constructed Signed Polish, following closely the syntax of spoken Polish, so somewhat the opposite of the question, a natural language imposing its grammar over the conlang. But it could be said that the signing system (obviously) imposes its own "phonology" over the spoken language.

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Tags: grammar, verbs, conlang-learning, language-structure, nouns
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# Question
Title: How could my to be constructed language reflect a culture of carefulness?
For a role-playing setting, I want to construct an elven language. The society of these elves strongly values being careful, thinking things through, taking one’s time and preventing mistakes. This is not a recent development but has been that way for centuries.

I feel that the language should somehow reflect their culture of being careful and preventing mistakes — somewhat like the Japanese language mirrors the importance of showing respect to the other party with a wide range of respectful address suffixes, respectful grammatical features and a respectful vocabulary.

In what way could I implement my elves’ carefulness and mistake-preventing ideal in their language?

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As requested in the comments, here is some further elaboration of what I have in mind.
In cultures, certain behaviour is considered acceptable, certain behaviour is considered well-mannered and other behaviour is considered rude. For example, in Germany coming straight to the point is considered the normal, accepted behaviour while giving white lies is frowned upon to different degrees leading to Germans outright stating what they observe even in other languages in what is elsewhere considered an unfriendly manner.

On the other hand in China, not being able to provide an answer to a question is considered rude so accepted behaviour instead is to provide an answer even if one has no idea if it is true or not. (That is the impression I got from interaction with previous Chinese colleagues.)

In the culture of my elven society, it would be perfectly acceptable and even considered well-mannered to let a deadline pass or let somebody wait in order to perfection a good or a service. On the other hand, providing someone with a flawed product or a not fully thought-through piece of advice would considered disrespectful because one should have taken the time to ensure the error within does not exist. (Such behaviour would be entirely unacceptable in Germany where it is expected for the finished product to arrive five minutes before the deadline.)

A number of common — to them — proverbs would underline this expectation. Maybe something along the lines of ‘the time you lose from a bad result outweighs the gain from finishing quickly’ or ‘even the king will gladly wait for his crown’ etc.

I hope I have made the general idea more clear.

# Answer
> 9 votes
My idea on that would be very close to what you suggested yourself: introducing suffixes / prefixes which would indicate the uncertainty of the word. For instance, let's suppose that your word for "strong" is `hariq`, your word for "I sit down" is `brumo` and your word for "house" is `niptug`, and the word for "in" or "inside" would be `bomp`.\*

Now I would invent some prefixes, such as `ar-` meaning "with great certainty," no prefix meaning something along the lines of "a certain degree of certitude, but not absolute certainty," (such as, it is supposed that; it is presumed that) and `fun`, meaning, "a large amount of uncertainty" (such as "we think" or "it appears possible that")\**

Now let us suppose that I want to say that I that I sit down in the house, with an extreme certainty that it was a house that I was sitting in, but the fact that I was sitting or that I am actually inside is assumed to be true, though it could be theoretically disproved. I would say,

```
arniptug bomp brumo

```

In this fictive language,

```
funhariq niptug arbomp brumo

```

would mean, "I sit down in a place definitely inside a house which appears to be strong."

Note that these suffixes / prefixes could theoretically be added to any part of speech, or made different for nouns, verbs, adjectives, interjections, etc.

You could also possibly devise a way to make the order of the words show a carefulness about exactly how accurate what is being said is.

* Words invented totally randomly.
\** Again, randomly selected; more or less prefixes could be used, with different definitions. This is just an example.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Culture shows up in languages by a few routes:

**Specialized jargon**. They might have a lot of specialized words for "carefulness". Láadan is just a bunch of specialized jargon, imho.

**Metaphysical obsessions**. In most languages, we have to care about these issues like when it happened and the gender of the speakers and we have to care about it in every sentence, even if it isn't otherwise topical. In English, you have to choose a gender or animacy status for a pronoun even if the distinction is irrelevant. Japanese making honorific/politeness markers obligatory is a perfect example. If I ever get around to writing a language, I plan to use this strategy, although, it only works with features that everything has. For example, if I make "edibility" a necessary grammatical marker, I may have to waste a lot of air on "inedible" and "doesn't apply".

**Sapir-Whorf**. This is all pseudo-science bunk anyhow, so you just assert that this or that feature, say through sympathetic magic makes your speakers this way or that way. German words fit together like a car engine and that is why they make such great cars. You have to form these sentences very carefully, so the people who speak the language must be very careful.

As for the mechanics—these show up as prefixes/affixes to nouns, adjective etc, or lexical distinctions, or a lack of lexical gaps. For example, just having a short simple word instead of needing a paragraph to discuss varieties of "carefulness"

**Corpus**. A language shows its culture in the corpus of text. If the language has lots of sample text that says, "gosh, we are very careful people," then that is good enough. But anything can be said in any language, so such a language wouldn't be, by corpus, any more "careful" or suited to talk about the "careful life" than any other language.

# Answer
> 6 votes
Apart from the already mentioned *evidentiality*, you could look at *modality*. This expresses a speaker's attitude using a variety of aspects, such as obligation, possibility, probability, etc. The exact set depends on the language and the linguistic framework you are using.

You could have a default modality of 'optionality', so the sentence *I am going to the shop* could actually mean "I might perhaps go to the shop" -- notice how in English we use adverbials (*perhaps*) and mood (*might*) to express this. In your language you would have modals for *definitely*, or *actually*, so you make explicit that you are performing an action, rather than contemplating it.

As dithering is the default behaviour, your linguistic features should express the **opposite**, ie the rarer cases where dithering does not apply. So in a way the answer to your question of how to implement this in your language is "not at all". Because that's what you do anyway, you don't need to talk about it. But you do make explicit where it doesn't apply.

# Answer
> 5 votes
## Make expressing something uncertain less concise

Let's say that, by "default" in the languge, all verbs are completely certain. For example, let's say your word for *car* is *chicho*, your word for *red* is *hoeng*, and your word for *is* is *sherr*\[1\].

Now the sentence *chicho sherr hoeng* translates as *the car is red*, but it carries more certainty than it would in English—the car is *surely*, *indisputably*, *provably* red, and for that not to be true would feel very unnatural. Finding that one's assertion was false would cause a feeling of discomfort and mild panic comparable to realizing one had skipped a sentence or phrase while delivering a speech.

Then, add an adverb *hunnyokenung* which lowers the certainty of a verb to something closer to English. Now the sentence is *chicho sherr hunnyokenung hoeng*. The clunkiness of the phrase reflects the fact that this construction is not used often (the elf children are taught "if you don't have anything sure to say, don't say it at all!").

A side note: literature in this language would not be able to express something surprising unless any statements that were later refuted were written using the *hunnyokenung* form, or else the author would risk angry letters from readers complaining about the improper assertion.

1 The phonetics of these words (though not the grammar) were taken from Mandarin.

# Answer
> 4 votes
What you wrote made me think of a method called **nonviolent communication**, which argues for expressing yourself very clearly and straightforwardly with regards to your emotions and needs in order to be understood. It recommends phrasing things in such a way as to always be objectively true. That boils down to expressing observations without judgment (e.g. "the sky is blue") and substituting judgmental expressions with expressions of inner emotions, basic needs, and requests.

It's hard to capture the breadth of the theory behind it (I recommend this video if you're interested), so I'll give a few examples of what it argues for and against:

The violent way of putting things:

* "You're an idiot" (judgment)
* "I feel taken advantage of" (not an emotion, but rather a judgment)
* "You make me angry" (it's one's own mind that creates anger, not a person)
* "I need you to go away." ("you to go away" is not a basic need; needs in general should not involve specific people)

The nonviolent way of putting things:

* "When you said 'You're an idiot', I felt angry." (expressing an observation and a past emotion)
* "When I think about you saying 'You're an idiot', I feel angry." (expressing an observation and a current emotion)
* "I feel angry, because I'm needing understanding" (expressing the need behind the emotion)
* "I'm needing peace and quiet. Would you be willing to leave the room?" (expressing a basic need without referencing a specific person)

**So how can this translate to a constructed language?**

A few ideas:

* **Get rid of judgmental words.** Get rid of words like "good", "bad", and "ugly".
* **Get rid of the word "feel", use verbs for emotions.** That's to avoid using the word feel in cases where it's not an actual emotion that one's expressing (like feeling "taken advantage of"). The verbs should be intransitive, as to get rid of the idea that something external is responsible for a person's emotions.
* **Have a rich vocabulary of emotional words.** Here's a list to get you started.
* **Center the language around basic needs.** Here's a list of needs for reference. Remember that basic needs never involve specific people, actions or things. (Those should be included in observations and requests.)
* **Have most expressions stick to the four components of NVC: observations, emotions, basic needs, and specific requests.** Sentences might be variations on the form "When I \[see/hear/smell/...\] \[observation\], I feel \[emotion\], because I'm needing \[basic needs\]. Would you be willing to \[request\]?" (All components are optional, one can use any subset.) See this page for details.

# Answer
> 0 votes
# Express probabilities

Instead of saying "It appears that…" or "I think that…" your elves could express how certain they are in exact numerical terms: "I believe with a 65±6% probability that…" By default, a sentence conveys a confidence level of 80%, let's say. If people want to express a greater level of confidence than that, they have to explicitly say it; we don't want it to be too easy for people to be overconfident. Of course, this is a pretty clunky statement in English; in your language it could be as simple as "65% that…".

Then, the speaker can state their evidence for their statement: "…based on the evidence of its physical appearance", "…based on the impression it gives me", etc. To be extra precise, the speaker could state their prior probability and go through their calculations for Bayes' theorem.

This is going beyond language and more about culture, but perhaps every elf could be scored on whether their stated probabilities turned out to be accurate, neither overconfident nor underconfident; e.g., 70% of their "it is 70% like that…" statements turned out to be true.

# Clearly define words

Even a simple sentence like "The girl is good" is ambiguous. Does that mean she is morally good, and if so, is that according to the standard of virtue ethics (virtuous), deontology (follows all the rules), or consequentialism (has a positive impact on the word)? Does it mean that she is obedient, and if so, does that mean she obeys orders? What percent of the time does she obey orders? Does it mean that she ranks in the 80th percentile of children her age in terms of obedience?

These sorts of questions could be resolved by a standard prescriptive dictionary which everyone must read. Sentences should use words by their dictionary definition as literally as possible, and listeners should interpret it literally. If any speaker deviates from that dictionary definition, they should say so explicitly. You could have a prefix or suffix indicating that a word is being used inexactly or metaphorically.

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Tags: conlang-creation, design-goals
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title: Famous a priori auxilary languages?

text:
# Question
Title: Famous a priori auxilary languages?
Most auxiliary languages I know of, especially Esperanto, are primarily *a posteriori*—that is, their vocabulary or grammar are derived from other existing languages, and most are fairly Eurocentric. While many might have *a priori* grammar, but not vocabulary, I have yet to see another language that is entirely *a priori*—not derived from other languages. Do any such languages exist? Note I am talking about languages designed to be an international auxiliary language.

# Answer
Short answer: **I've never seen or read a description of what you're seeking**.

Long answer: **What you're seeking is a most unlikely beast, reason being**...

Generally speaking, auxiliary languages seek being completely or nearly completely a posteriori for reasons of simple expedience. Common design goals of an auxiliary language are *ease of learning* and *simplicity of use*. These goals are best met when vocabulary and grammar are familiar to the target audience. This is why Interlingua and Esperanto are considered "easy" languages to learn and have gained considerable user communities, with Esperanto boasting a small community of native level speakers.

What you're describing, a completely a priori invented language is most usually the domain of the artistic language, the engineered language and the philosophical language. With the exception of the philosophical inventors, most glossopoets are not interested in propagandising their languages as auxiliary languages. Occasionally a philosophical language inventor will propose his language as a means of general communication, but this is usually done from a position of ignorance as to how language works (accomplished auxiliary language proponents are usually quite well aware how language works in the wild!).

Auxiliary languages tend not to be classified as a priori simply because they impose layers of difficulty that run contrary to the usual design parameters of the genre. However, it can potentially be argued that a priori invented languages can become auxiliary languages after a fashion and if the appropriate stars align. For example, it may be that Klingon has seen some use as an ad hoc auxiliary language if, for example, two groups of Star Trek fans who do not share a language in common other than Klingon happen to meet at a SciFi convention.

Needless to say, even if there were an actual auxiliary language that is classified as purely a priori, it certainly isn't famous. Otherwise, we'd know about it!
> 5 votes

# Answer
There are various "a priori" constructed languages, though they are not as successful as "a posteriori" languages have been.

They include:

> 1. Spokil
> 2. Ro
> 3. Kotava
> 4. Solresol
> 5. Babm
> 6. Blisssymbols (Written, ideographic language only)
> 7. Nal Bino (modification of Volapuk)
> 8. Sona
> 3 votes

# Answer
We will have to go back some centuries in time to find a language like this. Since the success of Esperanto (and, to a lesser degree Interlingua, Glosa, and Toki Pona) it seems to be clear that an auxiliary language has to be naturalistic in some way to catch on. Nowadays, a priory languages (e.g., Loglan and its forks) are only designed with other purposes.

With this in mind, probably Solresol (1817) is the most famous a priory auxiliary language.
> 2 votes

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Tags: list-of-languages, auxlangs
---


# Question
Title: What symbols should I use for phonemes when I have many vowels?
Most conlang examples I find in tutorials use a small set of vowels, but the one I'm working on has 13 and I'm having trouble finding the simplest transliteration to work with. Here are the IPA symbols:

```
Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]      | [u]
[y]      |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]
[ø]      |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯]     |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]      | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |

```

My keyboard only allows me to type àâäùûüèêëéìîï but not œɛɑø or the diacritics used in the IPA for nasal vowels and diphthongs.

(EDIT: Note that my question really is all about the transliteration I'll be using for practical typing. Sure, I can just use fancy unicode symbols for my actual writing system in the end if I want to, but copypasting symbols isn't very practical for writing long texts.)

The language uses a (very simplified) subset of Quebec French for sound inventory, but I wanted to avoid using too many digraphs or diacritics which French relies on heavily. I know I can always come up with a custom font and writing system later on which brings in more glyphs for vowels, but I need something practical to use during conception.

I'd be interested if you have a generic answer as to what your own process is when you have a similar problem or a specific suggestion in my case.

My incomplete solution for now is this (**updated to include jknappen's suggestion which I like for the German-style umlaut**). I could add a macro to my text editor to allow for tildes, but I still need to figure out how I want to distinguish \[œ\] and \[e\] or \[a\] and \[ɑ\].

```
Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]  /i/ | [u]  /u/
[y]  /ü/ |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]  /o/
[ø]  /ö/ |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] /ä/ |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]  /a/ | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |

```

# Answer
> 3 votes
I ended up using the following:

```
  Front  |          |   Back
---------|----------|-----------
[i]  /i/ |          | [u]  /u/
[y]  /ü/ |          |
---------|----------|-----------
[e]  /e/ |          | [o]  /o/
[ø]  /ë/ |          | [õ]  /õ/
---------|----------|-----------
[aɛ̯] /á/ |          |
[œ]  /œ/ |          |
[œ̃]  /ĩ/ |          |
---------|----------|-----------
         | [a]  /a/ | [ɑː] /aa/
         | [ɑ̃]  /ã/ |

```
* Many vowel variants were written using something similar to the German umlaut following jknappen's recommendation.
* ĩ, ã, õ and œ were chosen because they work in many fonts and are close to their IPA representation. I set up an AutoHotkey script to allow typing them easily.
* I really didn't want to introduce a diacritic to represent \[ɑ\], so I just made that sound longer so it makes sense to represent it with /aa/. This will make it easier to tell apart too.
* **Update:** After reading the beginning of Mark Rosenfelder's LCK again, his warning about the same diacritic having more than one meaning made me realize using an umlaut for the diphthong \[aɛ̯\] was not right, so I chose to replace that with á, which makes it much easier to remember.
* **Update:** I decided to move the umlaut from ö to ë and to represent \[œ̃\] with ĩ. These are debatable choices, but I like how it means I now have only one possible diacritic for each glyph, except for \<a\> which can have either a tilde to indicate nasalization or an accent for the diphthong.

# Answer
> 4 votes
One possibility is to use German-style umlauts, i.e., *ü* for /y/, *ö* for /ø/, and *ä* for /æ/; you can keep the symbol *œ* for /œ/. I'd recommend against having both *ae* and *œ* in the writing system because of confusability. The choice of tilde for nasalisation is a good one, IMO. The most problematic case are the two different kinds of a-sounds, but there are some African languages just going with a and ɑ (and there is also an uppercase letter for the ɑ in Unicode, it is named Latin Alpha). All the symbols are readily available in Unicode and should not pose insurmountable difficulties in text processing.

# Answer
> 2 votes
On my computer I have a custom keyboard setup that allows me to enter all sorts of combining diacritics. This allows you to make combinations that are usually not present, including multiple diacritics on the same letter. The only downside to this is that they do not render well in some fonts. I'll give some examples of what I can do with my keyboard setup.

umlaut with a: ä

circumflex with e: ê

macron over u: ū

acute and under ring with o: ó̥

caron above and below i: ǐ̬

There are a lot of options, see the wikipedia page I linked above for all of the different options. To type them you just need to press ctrl-alt with whatever you assign the key to.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I've thought about re-purposing some letters which have vowel-like properties. For example, the letter /w/ can sometimes be arm-wrestled into a vowel-like state. Then there's /r/, which is almost like a schwa sometimes, and /n/, which sometimes sounds like... well, like a nasalized null vowel-like thing...

It's often not great, but it's okay.

I know you mentioned being constrained, but unicode has letters in other alphabets that could help. Cyrillic for example has letters that might be re-useful.

---
Tags: phonology, vowels
---


# Question
Title: Can Root Words Be Derived From Other Root Words
If I said "I" was "Zha" would it be plausible to say "you" is "Zho" and from there naturally begin forming grammatical gender, or would that be too early in the language to add complexities? Also, could the word "we" not be a root word but instead be derived from "I" (Zha-\>Zhasa)?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Sure. And like always, real languages got there first.

In Quechua, for instance, fist person singular ("I/me") is *Ñuqa*. 1st person plural inclusive (we, all of us) is *Ñuqanchik*, and exclusive (us, but not you) is *Ñuqayku*.

Second person singular is *Qam*, plural *Qamkuna*. Third person singular is *Pay*, third person plural *Paykuna*. *-kuna* is simply the Quechuan plural suffix. "House" is *wasi*, "houses" *wasikuna*.

"You, the person I'm talking to" *Qam*, "You, the people I'm talking to" *Qamkuna*.

It's quite common in many languages that "I" and "you" are distinct; after all, I'm usually the most most important person in the universe, and you just live there. Third person pronouns seem to often be derived from pointing words: "that thing over there" becomes "that person over there".

# Answer
> 0 votes
It looks to me that I, you, and he/she are typically not derived from one another. So Zha "I" might typically be quite different from the word for "You". But beyond that, inflecting these base pronouns is certainly fair game.

English I and you, for example, are unique as far back as we can go (Proto Indo European).

---
Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, gender
---


# Question
Title: By what means might the roots "let" and "ly" mean the same thing in a naturalistic conlang?
I apologize for how this question may be perceived. I am casually learning linguistics with no curriculum. I can understand that this question may have many possible answers, but I am not quite sure how else to ask this question. I can also understand if all that may be provided to me is some resource on lists of natural ways languages evolve.

Basically, I've come up with two place names, "Yallet" and "Helverly". I'm trying to create enough of a naming language that would allow me to create names that seem to occur naturally in the setting.

Both Yallet and Helverly are locations, and so I was wondering if there was a way for the root "let", meaning town, to conceivably evolve to "ly".

Can this evolution happen naturally? If so, I would happily read on such transformations. If not, I would be very appreciative of an explanation as to why it would not be a natural evolution.

# Answer
> 6 votes
It is a two-step process, and both steps are very natural and frequently encountered in natural languages. The steps may occur in the other order as well, but the order here deems more common to me.

1. Loss of the final stop *let* -\> *le*. This occurs very often, French is a prominent example of this because the final stops are preserved in writing, but lost in pronunciation (with some exceptions when there is a following vowel).
2. A vowel shift *le* -\> *li*, in this case a raising. Again, this step is very natural because /e/ and /i/ are neighbouring vowels in the vowel diagram.

These two steps use your assumption that *let* is the older form that evolves into *ly*. A more sophisticated construction could assume a common ancestor for both forms, e.g., *lit* that evolves to *li* by the loss of the final consonant and to *let* by lowering the vowel.

EDIT: As you are generally interested in sound laws, there is a resource named Index Diachronica that lists a lot of sound changes collected from many sources.

# Answer
> 3 votes
In order to see whether *-let* and *-ly* are related, there are several options:

1. One of them is the 'original' morpheme indicating a settlement, and the other one is derived from it. Maybe the /e/ in /let/ was pronounced \[i:\] at some point, and then the /t/ dropped.
2. They both have a common ancestor, maybe /ley/. In distinct geographic regions it ended up being pronounced differently, and so it developed into distinct /let/ and /ly/. Or some clerk mis-spelled it /let/ by accident and it stuck.
3. They are unrelated, maybe coming from different languages historically.

You would be most interested in 1 or 2. Language often changes to make things easier to pronounce, so think about how you would pronounce a word in a lazy or sloppy way, slurring the sounds, so that it is still intelligible, but not exactly as it was spelled. And then think how you would write it down.

In the past, spelling was not normalised, so differences like you describe can easily crop up. It was only (in the West) with the emergence of dictionaries and printing presses that spelling really mattered.

---
Tags: phonology, morphology, diachronics
---


title: Is latino sine flexione dead?

text:
# Question
Title: Is latino sine flexione dead?
Latino sine flexione is a variant of Latin created by Peano in 1903. As far as I know it was used in scientific literature but since forgotten.

I found this site and a few discussions on Duolingo but not a single speaker. A quite complete grammar can be found here.

Is this wonderful project dead?

*Note*: I posted the same question here and was suggested to "address a different community".

# Answer
> 4 votes
It is obviously not completely dead, there is at least one blogger posting short news items in Latino Sine Flexione here http://nuntios.blogspot.com/search/label/Latino%20sine%20Flexione

I don't know whether there is a functional speech community for this language left.

EDIT: There is another life sign of Latino sine flexione: Someone created a LaTeX package for it!

---
Tags: history, natural-languages
---


title: Creating Fictional Slavic Place Names

text:
# Question
Title: Creating Fictional Slavic Place Names
I have a very simple question regarding a small problem I cannot find a single satisfying answer to. I am trying to create a country with a prominent Slavic culture. In my story, an alien world has been colonized by the nations of Earth. Respectively, each name their lands and territories how they see fit and in their own language. As for this country, it was colonized by the Slavic nations and is rightly given a Slavic sounding name. In fact, the entire continent it exists on shares the same name.

Now, my problem rests in the fact that I'm American and know little Russian except simple greetings. I want to create a genuine sounding Slavic name for the land but do not know where to start. Honestly, I do not understand the Slavic tongues' structures and vocabularies. I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this question so I'll be blunt. Simply, I want to know how to create a genuine sounding Slavic place name. Particularly, I want a name that describes the land itself (just as Belarus means "White Russia") or named after an important figure (just like how the U.S. state Pennsylvania is named after William Penn).

# Answer
> 6 votes
Unfortunately, the English Wikipedia does not have an article on Slavic toponymy yet, the best attempt I am able to find is Bulgarian placename etymology giving at least some hints. You can find interesting Slavic roots to play with in the article on Slavic given names.

Additionally, there are some Slavic based conlangs out there, you can honour one of them by employing it in your fictional world, to drop just names Slovio, Interslavic, see also Pan-Slavic language for an overview.

---
Tags: vocabulary, geography, slavic, names
---


title: Is Toki Pona a fast language?

text:
# Question
Title: Is Toki Pona a fast language?
There are well-known and notable differences in speed for natural languages: While a fast language like Spanish is spoken at a speed of about 6–7 syllables per second, a slow language like German, English, or Mandarin is spoken with 3–4 syllables per second. Language speed correlates with the amount of information carried by a syllable: The more information in the syllable, the slower the language speed.

Since Toki Pona has only a limited number of very simple syllables, limiting the amount of information that they can carry, and it seems to have a speech community as well: Is it spoken at a fast pace like Spanish (or even faster) in real life? Or is it spoken at a slow pace like English?

# Answer
Based off the audio file from this website, and the audio files from this website, we can infer that Toki Pona is a "fast" language. It uses 6 - 8 syllables / second, except with punctuation, where you delay for the same time as English.

Some Youtube videos stick to the contrary, but their speed is slow to make it easier for nonexperienced Toki Pona speakers.
> 4 votes

---
Tags: toki-pona, speech-communities
---


title: what kinds of vocal sounds echo less?

text:
# Question
Title: what kinds of vocal sounds echo less?
Please bear with me as I elaborate. I'm looking to create a language for humanoids that live in a set of cave systems and tunnels. While their language may have been 'born' on the surface, they have moved under the ground ages ago. The Ecosystem under the ground is very hostile, and so they had to adapt their language to carry less when spoken. For this purpose, I'm trying to find out which of the known vocal sounds would be more prevalent in such a language. (I am a true novice in the field, mind you, so I'm, reading several language construction guides to help in this endeavor) So, what I'm asking, essentially, is which of the vocal sounds (labial, dental, palatal etc etc) would echo more, and which would echo less. I've searched in vain for an answer, and I don't have a convenient cave to test that in. Thank you!

# Answer
It would probably be a question of volume and frequency pattern. Loud sounds would travel further (and thus have more potential for echo). I would like to stress that I too have no cave to try this out, so there is a certain speculative aspect to this answer.

So, avoid vowels (obviously), and voiced sounds (prefer /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/ over /b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /z/).

However, such a language would be pretty hard to use, so you'd need to compromise. Assuming low frequency sounds have less energy, the vowels /u/ and /o/ might be suitable, and perhaps the schwa.

Plosives (/p/, /b/, /t/) feature a burst as the air is released, which might also not work well, so you're probably better off using fricatives.

That leaves you with voiceless fricatives: /f/, /th/, /s/, /S/, /h/. Though voiced, nasals might also be suitable, as the mouth is closed during the articulation and thus it is possible to pronounce them without releasing too much acoustic energy.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, phonology
---


# Question
Title: Has anyone analysed the invented languages in the Earthsea books?
Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea stories contain vocabulary and utterances from three invented languages. The first step to fleshing these out into fully developed conlangs would be to list all the examples from the books and make some notes on any regularities or inconsistencies. Has anyone done this and put it up online?

# Answer
> 5 votes
There is some information on one of them, *Hardic*, and a fragmentary word list.

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


# Question
Title: Is there a toki pona hieroglyphics font?
For the toki pona language there is a writing system where each word is replaced by a single logogram or hieroglyph. There is also a web-based converter which allows you to enter a text in toki pona and converts it into a single PNG rendering in said hieroglyphs.

However, I was wondering if there was a way to directly produce texts in hieroglyphs, either as a font, or as a set of individual image files (ie one per word/hieroglyph), which could be used to render texts on webpages etc.

# Answer
> 5 votes
toki!

a, mi jo e sitelen tawa toki pona. nimi ona li *linja pona*. sina ken anpa e ona kepeken nimi tawa ni.

Hi! Yes, I have a script for toki pona. Its name is *linja pona*. You can download it by using this link.

---
Tags: writing-systems, toki-pona
---


title: Sciences in toki pona

text:
# Question
Title: Sciences in toki pona
I managed to translate a lot of things but I'm stuck on a word. How to say "physics" (knowledge of the nature) in toki pona? A proposition for "nature" would also be appreciated.

> linguistics: sona toki
>
> geology: sona ma
>
> medicine: sona pimejo
>
> mechanics: sona wawa
>
> quantum mechanics: sona lili
>
> ...

I did not find any solution on https://glosbe.com/en/mis\_tok/.

# Answer
> 2 votes
*sona lon*. science of existence

# Answer
> 5 votes
It might be *sona pi ijo tawa* —knowledge of moving things— or *sona pi ijo ante* —knowledge of things that change.

# Answer
> 4 votes
*sijelo* is "body, physical state", so you could use *sona sijelo*; physicists would probably like *sona ale* or *sona ali*, "knowledge of everything" :)

# Answer
> 4 votes
To capture all of physics, perhaps "sona pi pali ijo" or simply "sona pali" (a knowledge of action). I prefer the former, since persons may tend to think only of human action with the latter, which may translate to "behavioral science", whereas the former is a bit more precise.

Physics is a general field that focuses on the behavior of things in our universe, finding explanations for their actions and the interactions that occur between things. The term is also a little more precise than "sona ijo", since Physics doesn't (correct me if I'm wrong) really answer questions like 'what structure a thing has', but would rather more specifically answer 'how did the thing's structure come to be'.

---
Tags: toki-pona, translation
---


# Question
Title: Constructing a language based on existing languages from different families
I wonder how it is possible to construct a language based on the existing languages. My country has Indo-European, Altaic, Semitic, and a small portion of Dravidian and Caucasic languages. I am thinking of a constructed language based on all these languages.

# Answer
There should be no problem in doing so -- mix and match features from the various source languages. A precedent for this, for example, is English:

* The syntax/grammar is mainly Germanic, including many function words
* The vocabulary is mixed (Latin, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Indian, etc.)

I would choose one language as the "base" (in the English case, it's Old English/Anglo-Saxon) and then modify it by replacing/adding some of the vocabulary from the different languages. Also, some grammatical features (morphological endings, etc.) could be mixed up.

If you do it iteratively (i.e., revising the language multiple times, simulating contact between the current version and another influencing language), you can also take into account other types of changes, such as dropping endings that are harder to pronounce or making higher frequent words shorter and less regular.

What you do exactly is up to you, but there shouldn't be any problem from a linguistic point of view.
> 4 votes

# Answer
Possible? Definitely yes!

But I want to give you some more hints on how to do it:

*Based on common features:* When choosing the sounds for your conlang, prefer those that have broad coverage in your language base, and avoid those that are specific to only one. Do the same for syllable structure; look at what consonants can cluster with each other in a lot of your base languages.

*Select common words:* Look what words already have crossed the language boundaries and appear as loan words in other languages. These words are hot candidates for inclusion in your conlang. Note also that the process of loaning words tends to result in phonological and morphological simplifications; consider adopting these simplifications as well.

*Morphology:* Look for common categories expressed by morphology in the base languages and use a simplified system. While Arabic morphology (inflectional and derivational) is elegant and impressive, it does not carry well over to languages with a different structure (no triconsonantal roots). But you still can borrow some elements from it (e.g., prefixes and suffixes). Make sure to create at least some derivational morphology; it will simplify the language and the process of creating the vocab.

*Syntax:* Check out the basic word order and how to form relative and subordinate clauses in your base language and create a syntax from this information. Also, look for *word order* phenomena (adjectives before or after the noun, prepositions or postpositions, genitives before or after the noun) and decide how to do them.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, naturalism, zonal-languages
---


title: Is this sonority hierarchy correct?

text:
# Question
Title: Is this sonority hierarchy correct?
I need to sort these phonemes properly before I get into clusters and making syllables, but I'm not sure I did it right.

# Answer
Sonority refers to the amplitude of the sound signal; ie the louder a sound is, the higher it ranks. Vowels are loudest, as they are voiced and generally less constricted than most consonants. Within the vowels, the open ones (eg /a/), are louder than the closed ones (/i/, /u/). Then laterals, nasals, fricatives, and finally plosives. Within each of these groups (where applicable) the voiced variant is higher than the voiceless one (eg /g/ \> /k/, and /d/ \> /t/).

This matches the ranking in your image, so I would say it is correct.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: phonotactics
---


# Question
Title: Are there any constructed languages designed with a constructed script, both aiming to be international and auxiliary?
Hangul is a beautiful constructed script, used to write the natural languages of Korean, Jeju, Hokkien, and Cia-Cia, perhaps others. The shape of the letters mimic the shape of the mouth, and a letter for a voiceless consonant is directly related to the letter for its voiced counterpart. Personally, I think it's brilliant and should be adopted worldwide, perhaps with some additions to consider sounds that do not exist in Korean (by far the most dominant language using it).

One idea of constructed international auxiliary languages is that those languages should have a simple and logical grammar to be easy to learn. But it appears most of those languages are still written with the Latin alphabet, which doesn't have much or any connection between the look of a letter and its pronunciation — this still needs to be learned by heart. A learner cannot derive the pronunciation of a previously unknown letter from its shape.

Have there been any designs of constructed languages, aiming to be international auxiliary languages (thus not counting fictional alien/fantasy languages), which from the start had a dedicated constructed script designed to be as simple as possible, yet universally applicable?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I found one language called Bliss Symbolics that is

1. It is an International Auxiliary Language
2. It has its own character set, not based on Latin characters or any other character set.

I also found another IAL that doesn't use latin characters called Temenia that uses Greek characters instead of Latin. While this language doesn't apply exactly to your question, you seem to be interested in NON-Latin based character IAL's.

---
Tags: writing-systems
---


# Question
Title: How to describe a purely symbolic writing system?
Before I jump headlong into constructing a language, I'd like to do some research and see what others have done before me and learn from their experiences/mistakes. The keywords I'm currently using are sub-optimal, so I need help tightening them up.

The "communication method" I am thinking of:

* is purely for reading and writing
* has no need to be spoken and is thus not based upon letters/phonemes
* uses symbols to represent concepts
* each symbol/concept corresponds to something like an English word or sentence (e.g. 'a cat', 'the sound made by flying bees', 'the feeling that results from being beaten by a lesser foe', 'move quickly', 'why?')
* symbols are arranged relative to each other (in 2D space) to communicate more complex concepts and provide context
* symbols are highly domain-specific and exclusive — mining, carpentry, fishing, etc. would have exclusive symbols that only have meaning in their contexts
* is not meant to be signed, hummed, whistled, grunted, tapped or transmitted in any other way except for being printed on, and read from, a two-dimensional surface
* is not based on any existing language
* would permit deaf people, and people with no common language, to collaborate on very specific tasks

Wikipedia defines pasigraphy as 'a writing system where each written symbol represents a concept (rather than a word or sound or series of sounds in a spoken language)' but also defines a writing system as "any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication". That seems a bit contradictory and confusing.

What are some good/accurate keywords that describe this 'thing' I am trying to develop?

# Answer
I think you're overthinking this a little. While what you're considering is unusual, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't just be a written language in a logographic script.

> * is purely for reading and writing
> * has no need to be spoken and is thus not based upon letters/phonemes
> * is not meant to be signed, hummed, whistled, grunted, tapped or transmitted in any other way except for being printed on, and read from, a two-dimensional surface

It has no need to be, sure. But if humans or human-like beings are there they would most likely develop an oral way of "reading" it eventually.

> * uses symbols to represent concepts
> * each symbol/concept corresponds to something like an English word or sentence (e.g. 'a cat', 'the sound made by flying bees', 'the feeling that results from being beaten by a lesser foe', 'move quickly', 'why?')
> * symbols are highly domain-specific and exclusive — mining, carpentry, fishing, etc. would have exclusive symbols that only have meaning in their contexts

Sounds like a logographic writing system. Now it's not clear if the symbols for phrases are made up of component symbols for the things they represent or are unique singular symbols. Building symbols from other symbols would make sense, otherwise the number of symbols would grow exponentially.

> * symbols are arranged relative to each other (in 2D space) to communicate more complex concepts and provide context

This is on the surface the biggest difference between your proposal and human languages, which for both spoken and written language are linear.

However consider that some branches of linguistics believe that all language is representable by binary trees alone. If your language has a syntax (and if it doesn't it really couldn't be considered language) then we'd expect that it would be possible to develop a tree-based representation of it, perhaps using multiple levels of deep structure below the surface. And a non-binary tree could be converted to a binary tree.

I just spent some time looking at 2D languages, both conlangs and programming languages, and all the ones I found consisted of linear paths to follow or a tree structure. Conlangger Sai has explained their ideas for a non-linear fully 2D writing system, but they don't give an example of such a writing system. But they do say that their version of non-linearity is distinguished from linear design systems only by inelegance or convolution. I'd take this to mean that actually it is serialisable (and therefore could in theory be spoken) if not by humans then by some being of great intelligence. The essay is worth reading anyway if this topic continues to interest you.

> In fact, I believe I can say that it is not possible, short of crippled or very simple specialty cases, to directly convert a linear writing to a non-linear one without either loosing a lot of meaning (NLàL), being extremely inelegant by virtue of failing to take advantage of better design (LàNL), or becoming functionally incomprehensible (e.g. the list format in which an Nth-degree array is stored in the C programming language).
>
> So, what is non-linearity?
>
> At its core, NL has to do with how concepts are arranged, both on physical paper and in their more abstract form. A NL system is a multigraph; its components are, or can be, extremely interconnected. There is no single traversal method, though there may be some conventional ones. There may not be a ‘traversal’ method at all, as such;
> 9 votes

# Answer
I have a lot to say on this subject, as I've been working on such a project for 30 years.

The terms vary, but "pasigraphy" is one of the terms, as you mentioned. "Ideographic writing" or "ideography" is another term; and "realle carracter" (various spellings) is a 1600's term. LaVan Martineau claimed that Native American rock-writing was a non-sound-based writing; he used the term "pictography" for this. And don't forget "hieroglyphic writing".

I was initially inspired by Francis Lodwick's (various spellings) *A Common Writing...*" of 1647. Blissymbols (mentioned above) is one of the more fleshed-out projects; but there are others. John Wilkins' *Essay Towards a Real Character...* was a classificatory system, similar to the Dewey Decimal System, with abstract symbols assigned to the classifiers. Other projects: Pictopen by Juan Garay, Locos by Yukio Ota, Unideo by Eric Cattelain, Book from the Ground by Bing Xu, IRC (International Realle Carracter) by me.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Your "2D" system sounds rather like old-fashioned sentence diagramming or Frege's Begriffschrift, using specific types of connectors for specific relationships. I should think just running out of room to put more words in the correct spatial relationships to express complex ideas would be a problem.
> 2 votes

# Answer
There is such a *natural* written language. Chinese. One reason that Chinese is not based on pronunciation is that there are a lot of local dialects that sounds very different from the official mandarin. The Chinese characters are pronounced in a certain way in **mandardin** but totally different in say **cantonese**.

Complex characters are built from smaller radicals, and make use of 2d arrangements. (Forest = three tree radicals spread out).

Written Chinese fulfills basically all your points, except perhaps that it is based on an existing language (mandardin, but perhaps one might say that mandarin is based on the written language, or that these co-evolved).
> 1 votes

# Answer
Perhaps you are looking for **Blissymbols**. According to Wikipedia:

> Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
>
> Blissymbols was invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) ... \[who\] wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese characters, with which he became familiar at Shanghai.
> 1 votes

# Answer
To add a completely different answer, which certainly is constructed, but might not really be classified as a language as such, but it still conveys meaning in a non-verbal fashion: *formulas in mathematics*.

Equations, and logical statements can be conveyed in this fashion. I think for example proofs in Euclidean geometry can be presented entirely without English words, and be perfectly understandable by a mathematician. Proofs are "pictorial" (using symbols for rather abstract concepts), and the figures used to present related ideas are 2-dimensional.
> 0 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems, terminology
---


# Question
Title: Valyrian - what living languages does it resemble the most?
I'm interested in knowing what living languages Valyrian from *Game of Thrones* resembles the most in its **grammar** and/or **vocabulary**.

I've gathered here some very basic examples of what kind of similarities I would like to know of:

* **History/Culture**
    + To the layman the history of the language group seems to resemble that or *latin* (and maybe *arabic*).
* **Vocabulary**

+ If I have understood correctly the Valyrian vocabulary is formed so that it shouldn't sound like any living language so probably there's not much similarities there.
* **Grammar**

+ It seems to contain many word inflections which would mean it bears more similarity to *Latin* than for example *English*, right?
    + It has four grammatical genders and here the Wikipedia article mentions some kind of similarity to *Bantu languages*?
    + Any other aspects of Valyrian containing significant similarities?

I'm aware that David J. Peterson, the creator of the language for the series didn't base Valyrian on any existing language. Yet it does seem to resemble in many aspects some languages much more (Latin, also Lithuanian comes to mind) than others (Chinese). It might not be a complete language but it has hundreds of words and what seems to be a well-thought-out grammar (see the Wikipedia article) so it should be possible to compare linguistic similarities.

# Answer
> 5 votes
It is probably impossible to say which language resembles Valyrian most, lacking a metric for similarity. But there are clearly identifyable influences of other languages, both constructed and natural.

Let's start with the catch phrase *valar morghulis* from GRRM: It just sounds like Tolkien's Elvish languages, with *valar* being a word from Quenya and *morghul* a word from Sindarin. Both Quenya and Sindarin have well-known influences from natural languages: Finnish for Quenya and Welsh for Sindarin.

Looking at High Valyrian, some Finnish feeling is still retained in the language: There is a distinction between long and short consonants as well as vowels, the case endings still have some Finnish feel (and a Latin feel, too, especially the vowel alternations), the phonotactics resemble Finnish. It is further away from Finnish than Quenya in its phonology contrasting voiced and voiceless stops and featuring the sound /q/. There is little Welsh in High Valyrian left, maybe the frequency of "the defining fantasy vowel" ae (Laura Wattenberg) can be traced to Welsh.

The 8-case system may be insprired by Languages like Russian or Sanskrit, with the commitative case being typologically rare, but occurring in Finnish again.

The four noun classes are a creative invention (but not far of, as natural language, especially Native American languages, are concerned) and I see no closer resemblence to Bantu languages (they have a lot of noun classes, but the noun classes are marked by overt prefixes that are also used as agreement markers).

The syntax with head-final relative clauses may be inspired by languages like Japanese.

P.S. While Peterson has stated some linguistic influences for the Dothraki language, I have not found a similar quote for Valyrian. So all the observations above are mine.

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Tags: typology, song-of-ice-and-fire
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# Question
Title: How to naturally evolve verbs into adverbs or dependent clauses?
Currently I have a very simple proto-language which I'm trying to evolve. For example:

```
slishi  hu      ho    shofli  shofli pfufi   tushi
repair  person  tool  fish.V  fish.V succeed cause
Person repairs fish net to have abundant catch.

```

However, this seems to be confusing and unwieldy, so I'm assuming that native speakers would feel the same and would attempt:

* To change *tushi* into something similar to 'so that' combining two sentences where one causes another.
* To change *pfufi* into an adverb - *successfully*

Something like (for example):

```
slishi hu      ho    shofli tushu   shofli  nshi     pfufe         he
repair person  tool  fish.V so.that fish.V  AUX.FUT  successfully  3.PRO
Person repairs fish net so that he will have an aboundant catch

```

Note that *tushi* (to cause) has been changed into *tushu* (so that) to make a conjunction and *pfufi* (to succeed) into *pfufe* (successfully) to make an adverb.

However I'm not sure what a natural way of doing this would be. Most guides for conlangs suggest to apply phonological evolution rules universally, so I'm not sure if it is natural to diverge \[-i\] into \[-ɨ/e\] and then \[-u/e\] to derive an adverb/preposition/conjunction and suggest to evolve the adverbs from nouns or verbs, but they don't provide guides for creating a derivation systems (that I found).

If this helps, the language later/earlier evolves tenses by adding the pronouns - ignoring other changes that happened in between:

```
slishi-he  hu     ho   shofli  tushu   shofli nshi    pfufe         he
repair-1   person tool fish.V  so.that fish.V AUX.FUT successfully  3.PRO
Person repairs fish net so that he will have an aboundant catch

```

# Answer
> 2 votes
This is more a lengthy comment on your question than a real answer, but comment space is restricted ...

You are undertaking a very difficult task by setting a starting point and an end point and asking for natural development between the two. This is difficult even when it is known that such a natural development exists because the two languages are attested natural languages and not constructed.

We know sound laws really well, and also the process of grammaticalization is fairly well understood. The evolution of different basic word orders is still under research, we know that it has happened but how exactly it happened, is less clear.

It seems that your are needing some grammaticalisation to get from the verb *pfufi* to the adverb *pfufe*. Here's a suggestion: Add a particle *ye* meaning roughly "like" to your proto-language, and the phrase *pfufi ye* will fill the role of an adverb. It is easy to conceive, that *pfufi ye* evolves to *pfufe* by just dropping one syllable (syncope). To make *tushu* from *tushi* a particle like *vu* might be applicable, but I have some difficulties to define its original meaning.

I think that language change is easier to "grow" than to "plot", i.e., it is easier to just apply changes to a proto-language and watch where they lead to than to interpolate between two stages of a language.

Of course you can invoke language contact to achieve a particular change in your language evolution, as kind of last resort to save the plot. Just don't overuse this.

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


# Question
Title: How do lists of three or more items work in Klingon?
Concerning compound subjects and such, I'm not exactly sure how lists of nouns work exactly, especially with three or more items. How would "bears and metal drums" be distinguished from "bears, metal, and drums"? Wouldn't both be `mIl'oDmey baS 'Inmey je`?

*The Klingon Dictionary* says that `je` follows two or more nouns, so I wouldn't think you use multiple, and I've only seen commas used in dependent clauses. Is there a way to clarify your meaning?

# Answer
I think it depends on the context. If it is "I can see bears and metal drums", then you would have to repeat the subject and verb, effectively saying "I can see bears and I can see metal drums".

As per The Klingon Dictionary (6.2, *Complex Sentences*):

> When the subject of both the joined sentences is the same, the English translation may be reduced to a less choppy form, but Klingon does not allow this shortening.

If you are just talking about lists of items without having a complex sentence, then I would think this sentence from 5.3 (*Conjunctions*) applies (even though it is about the post-verbal meaning of *je*):

> As in English, the meaning of such sentences is ambiguous: \[..\] The exact meaning is determined by context.

If there are bears and metal drums, then presumably you're not talking about bears, metal, and drums. An oft-quoted example where there is an ambiguity in English is *I am dedicating this work to my parents, the Queen of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury*. Without a comma before *and*, the list could be mistaken for an apposition. Obviously, the context makes this interpretation highly unlikely!

Just remember that language is rarely unambiguous and independent of context; any attempts to avoid this make it very unwieldy. Which is why legal language is typically so hard to read.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: klingon
---


# Question
Title: How to translate the word "lost"/"loss" into Klingon?
Say for instance I want to say something like, "I'm looking for bears and the lost sheep." I would think that would be to use the genitive case, making something like:

> `mIl'oDmey chIlpu'ghach DI'raqmey je vInejtaH`
> `bear-<pl> lose-<perf>-<nom> sheep-<pl> too <I-them>-look for-<continuous>`

But that looks kind of odd, and I've heard that using the nominalizer suffix "-ghach" is often discouraged, and should replaced by using sentences as objects if possible. Would

> `mIl'oDmey DI'raqmey 'e' chIlpu' je vInejtaH`
> `bear-<pl> sheep-<pl> that lose-<perf> and <I-them>-look for-<continuous>`

work and make more sense?

Also, how would "I can bear the loss of sheep." be translated? My first guess would be to just reverse the noun-noun-construction so that "DI'raqmey" is the genitive noun:

> `DI'raqmey chIlpu'ghach vISIQlaH`
> `sheep-<pl> lose-<perf>-<nom> <I-it>-endure/bear-<ability>`

Would some sort of subclause make more sense here too? Just the same one?:

> `DI'raqmey 'e' chIlpu' vISIQlaH`
> `sheep-<pl> that lose-<perf> <I-it>-endure/bear-<ability>`

# Answer
1. I would translate it as *I am looking for bears and I am looking for the sheep that are lost.* — I don't know the word for *sheep*, so I assume from your question that it's **DI'raq**:

> `mIl'oDmey vInejtaH 'ej DI'raqmey chIlpu'bogh vInejtaH`
> `bear-<pl> <I-them>-look for-<cont> and sheep-<pl> lose-<perf>-<rel> <I-them>-look for-<cont>`

See: Klingon Dictionary 6.2 (*Complex Sentences*) and 6.2.3 (*Relative Clauses*)

2. Your second sentence, *I can bear the loss of sheep.* — I would opt for a subordinate clause, *If I lose sheep, I can bear it.*:

> `DI'raqmey vIchIlpu'chugh vISIQlaH`
> `sheep-<pl> <I-them>-lose-<perf>-if <I-it>-bear/endure-<ability>`

See: Klingon Dictionary 6.2.2 (*Subordinate Clauses*)

Disclaimer: I'm not a Klingon expert, so this might not be 100% accurate.
> 2 votes

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Tags: klingon, translation
---


# Question
Title: Which sounds could a lipless humanoid produce?
In my world, I have a race of humanoids who speak a language called *Gé̃kt*, which is derived from various Eastern Iranian languages such as Khotanese, Ossetian, Yaghnobi and Bactrian with a dash of Persian (a Western Iranian language) thrown in for good measure. However, these humanoids lack lips and I have no idea how this traits would affect their speech.

For reference, here are Gé̃kt's constants and vowels.

* **Consonants:** pʰ p p' b f v m w tʰ t t'd tsʰ ts dz s z n r rr l ṭʰ ṭ ḍ ṭsʰ ṣ ẓ ṇ ṛ tsʰ tṡ dż ṅ y kʰ k k' g x y ṅ h q qʷ m t͡s t͡sʼ d͡z t͡ʃ t͡ʃ' d͡ʒ χ χʷ ʁ w j ɫ
* **Vowels:** ι \[i\] ο \[u\] ε \[e\] α, ο \[ə\] ο \[o\]? α \[a\] ει, ι \[iː\] ο \[uː\] η \[eː\] ω \[oː\] α \[aː\] e æ o u ɨ ɛː ɔː

**What sounds may they use to communicate?**

# Answer
> 5 votes
At first sight, it seems that it is impossible for the lipless humanoids to produce any sounds that involve the lips in their production, this concerns the following groups of sounds:

* bilabial consonants: pʰ p p' b m w
* labiodental consonants: f v
* labialised consonants: qʷ χʷ
* rounded vowels: o u ɔ

But: There is a known art, named ventriloquism, where replacement sounds for those sounds that require visible lip movement are used to produce understandable speech. Maybe the lipless humanoids can cope with this and even learn to produce the Gé̃kt's sounds using such techniques.

---
Tags: conlang-creation, phonology, biolinguistics
---


# Question
Title: Can programming languages be categorized as conlangs?
Would it be correct to say that the majority of computer programming languages (such as functional or procedural) are the form of constructed languages? If so, what makes it a constructed language in this case?

Let say a "Hello, World!" program as the example.

> Hello World! by Brian Kernighan, from Artsy's Algorythm Auction based on a 1978 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version. 2 lines of C Code. - Wikipedia

# Answer
No. "Constructed languages" on this site refers to artificially created languages for intelligent beings, not machine languages. In the absence of another qualifier a "language" is, as I wrote on another site, a system for communicating **propositional** and **conceptual** information to other beings. This is different from communication. Programming languages can definitely be used to communicate - and they carry meaning - but that doesn't make them languages. Purely referential communication (using symbols to directly refer to things in the world without metaphorical extension) is not enough to be a language, language **must be able to communicate abstract concepts that are beyond any sensory or referential basis**. Programming languages are systems for encoding instructions for machines, and not general purpose concept exchange systems.
> 18 votes

# Answer
Programming languages are constructed, but they are not languages, in the sense English or Esperanto or Klingon are languages, as curiousdannii shows. We cannot translate things like "I will be late for dinner" into a programming "language". And a characteristic of all "languages", properly speaking, is their mutual "translatability".
> 10 votes

# Answer
As a programmer and a conlanger, I'd say "no". As noted above, programming languages cannot convey metaphor, emotions, sensory impressions, and other such human-relevant messages. Abstraction they can handle, but only abstractions that are relevant to the processing going on inside the machine. Such languages have an extremely limited sphere of reference: bits, bytes, and data structures inside the machine, and operations upon them.
> 7 votes

# Answer
In the novel "Autonomy", when robots speak to each other, they author expressed it in a source code-like English, with a few things you'd see in coded implementations, like mentions of files, message headers and acknowledgements, and so on. Obviously this wasn't a full implementation. If a hobbyist did do a working implementation, I figure it would be a conlang.

In Star Wars, the droids are supposed to speak a language. The attested text can't possibly be anything like a conlang, except maybe as a language of just "oh!", "ah!" "ha-ha!" and other emotive exclamations. If someone hobbyist tried to make a droid language, it would be a nice feature if it could both work as a natural language and a programming language.

People have speculated that Lojban could serve as a programming language, as things like Prolog are programs made out of logical statements. I haven't heard of anyone doing so. Lojban syntax is describe with the same tools as are used for writing compilers, YACC.

Obviously, since this website doesn't need to reproduce Stack Overflow, things that are *only* programming languages and don't have a way to be used as a natural language (except maybe in jest?) are not only not conlangs, but off topic.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Going along curiousdannii's idea of languages for *human idea exchange*, there's an old joke that Python can be used in place of pseudocode, because of its use of English keywords, relatively little punctuation, and ease of understanding.

Here is an example of Kadane's algorithm, expressed in Python (from Wikipedia):

```
def max_subarray(A):
    max_ending_here = max_so_far = A[0]
    for x in A[1:]:
        max_ending_here = max(x, max_ending_here + x)
        max_so_far = max(max_so_far, max_ending_here)
    return max_so_far

```

aruslanovych asserts that languages have to convey emotion, metaphor, sensory impressions, etc. but I think this is a Romantic view. Is the Greek Linear B was used to write not a language since it was used for administrative record-keeping and probably tax purposes?

I take a liberal view in that yes, programming languages can represent metaphors, abstraction, and idioms, just maybe not in the sense we're used to. In fact, computers are excellent at abstract concepts and generalizing, with duck typing, object-oriented programming and reflection. Off-topic, I daresay with deep learning, computers can generalize even better than humans can. And, sci-fi speculation, when robots become just as intelligent as humans, we have to consider their languages as "real".
> 2 votes

# Answer
Conlangs and programming languages are different things. Conlangs are languages designed for human communication. For human to human communication.

No programming language can be regarded as a language in that sense.
Riley Martine's example uses python-like syntax. But at the same time it uses real English words to convey the meaning.
Computer is not able to understand the meaning of these words, it just runs code.

Simple Python example:

```
greetingString = "Hello"

print(greetingString)

```

Computer just set string "Hello" to variable greetingString and prints it to the screen.
Computer does **NOT** understand the meaning of the word . For computer it's just a computer variable value, nothing else.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I'm trying to be Devil's Advocate here: In a way programming languages are constructed languages, but they are usually very specific and narrow in focus: one could view them as sublanguages aimed at expressing algorithms or annotating other information. An example for a human sublanguage would be the language of recipes. Words that have multiple meanings in English generally have only one specific meaning in a sublanguage. The syntactic structures are simplified, and often different from general English. Certain aspects of the range of human expressions are left out or limited (you might talk about emotions or feelings, but they would only relate to the food mentioned).

You could design a programming language that is suited to expressing recipes, and it could be used to drive a cooking robot. That programming language could also be read by humans, who would understand the meaning of it, and could translate it into other languages. In this sense 'programming language' is a bit of a red herring: it's just a formal representation of meaning. And (propositional) meaning can easily be expressed in predicate calculus or related formalisms. Is CD representation a conlang, or just an abstract representation of actions/states? It can certainly be transformed into any number of other languages (natural or constructed), and it can express a reasonable range of human activity.

Where do you draw the line? At what point does a constructed language cross the boundary between being simply a mark-up or programming language to being suitable for human communication? What is the essence that, say, HTML, is missing, but that toki pona, Klingon, or Esperanto have? Note: I'm not suggesting that HTML is a conlang, but it can be used to encode a specific kind of meaning, and XML can even encode semantic relationships. But they might not be very suitable for inter-human communication.

You could, though, envisage two people with no common language between them who use a programming language to work together on solving a problem. It would be tough, but should be possible.

In my view there is a continuum between 'fully formed' languages on the one hand, and restricted or sublanguages on the other. While it is difficult to formally represent the more complex languages (because they are so complex), the simpler end of the spectrum can be encoded in such a representation. Predicate calculus is one representation, and any programming language is another one. There is no hard boundary between the two, so in a way (even though nobody would really 'speak' in a programming language) the answer is: yes, programming languages can be categorised as conlangs.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I would say, to a very limited extent, that yes, they can be, but only as a proxy grammar for other languages. For example,

```
from sys import exit as stops ; import os
thing = [] ; me = can = remember = False ; this = open(__file__)
def terrible(v): return v

# ==== start song snippet

me = can = remember = not any(thing)
can = not this.tell(), [True, "dream"]
locals()["deep"] = {"down":{"inside":{"feel_to":"scream"}}}
if `this` + (terrible("silence")): stops(me)

# ===== end song snippet

```

(source: Coding in song - Representing music lyrics in a programming language of your choosing)

However, this isn't a great method of communication. Programming languages are not designed with the same intentions as conlangs.
> 1 votes

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Tags: terminology, classification
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# Question
Title: How common are reflexive pronouns in natlangs?
I'm working on the pronoun system of one of my conlangs, and I can't find any resource that can tell me how commonly reflexive pronouns occur in natural languages.

Is a reflexive something I need to add to be naturalistic? And if it isn't is there a specific reason/way a lack of reflexive pronouns occurs?

# Answer
> 6 votes
Generally speaking, you need a reflexive pronoun of some type if not having one causes ambiguity in who did what to whom. Assume English had no reflexives. "I tossed the ball to I" and "You tossed the ball to you" (assuming singular "you") are quite understandable as one person tossing the ball to themselves, thus no reflexive needed. "She tossed the ball to he", acceptable. But suppose you had "She tossed the ball to she", and it's been previously established there is more than one woman present. Did person A throw the ball to Person B, or did she toss the ball up in the air and caught it herself? There's no way to tell. An example like that is why German only has a distinctive reflexive in third person; first and second person don't have that same ambiguity.

You can get rid of the reflexive entirely if your verb system, to use one possibility, allows a given verb to indicate if it takes a direct or indirect object, or if it does not. Let's say that English verbs used the affix *a-* to indicate the verb is ditransitive (it has both a direct and indirect object) and no affix to indicate purely transitive (it only has a direct object).

> "Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She a-threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.
>
> "Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.

Under a system like that, English wouldn't need a reflexive pronoun because the verb would make it clear whether the subject was performing the action on themselves, or using themselves as the indirect object, or whether something else was the recipient of the action. One could argue the affix *a-* is similar to the single Icelandic reflexive pronoun that's used for everything.

In Inuktitut, verbs that are are equivalent to English intransitive verbs use one suffix attached to them to indicate the subject:

> pisuk *to walk*
>
> pisuktunga *I am walking*
>
> pisuktutit *You (singular) are walking*
>
> pisuktuq *He/She/It is walking*

Specific verbs, equivalent to transitive verbs, use a different set of suffixes that indicate both subject and object:

> qukiq *to shoot something*
>
> qukiqtagit *I shoot you*
>
> qukiqtara *I shoot him/her/it*
>
> qukiqtarma *You shoot me*
>
> qukiqtait *You shoot him/her/it*
>
> qukiqtaanga *He/she/it shoot me*
>
> qukiqtaatit *He/she/it shoot you*
>
> qukiqtanga *He/she/it shoot that other he/she/it*

Here's where the reflexives come in: if you don't use the second set of suffixes, but instead use the first set, then the verb becomes a reflexive: the subject did something to themselves.

> qukiqtunga *I shoot myself*
>
> qukiqtutit *You shoot yourself*
>
> qukiqtuq *He/She/It shoot themself*

Attaching the suffix that goes on intransitive verbs onto a transitive verb turns that verb into a reflexive.

So, if your verb conjugation allows that sort of thing, then you can get away with not using reflexive pronouns. The verb indicates it.

On the other hand, if your verb doesn't allow you to do that, then you need reflexives in order to remove the ambiguity when you get into situations where it's not clear who is doing what to whom.

Another way: go back to that first English example I used. Suppose English had multiple third person singular pronouns, such that you didn't just have "she", but "she-1", "she-2", and perhaps more. Then what does the example look like?

> "Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-2." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.
>
> "Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-1." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.

No ambiguity. The context makes it clear that Mary is she-1 (Mary had the ball, she-1 threw the ball, therefore Mary is she-1, so Susan is she-2).

A third option is context. You might have a language where you do need to gather more information in order to determine what's going on.

> "Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan threw it back." - Mary obviously threw the ball to Susan.
>
> "Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan then asked for the ball." - Mary apparently didn't throw the ball to Susan, since Susan asked for it after it had been thrown and caught.

So, three possible ways to get away without reflexive pronouns. So it's not a matter of how common or uncommon it is, but does the grammar of the language allow you to get away without them, or is it necessary because there's no other way of providing the same information?

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Tags: naturalism
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