# Question
Title: What decides where is the break between syllables?
I'm getting started with creating a language and I run into trouble when I started using rules I devised for protolanguage (e.g. only open syllables).

However I run into trouble when I tried to apply it to string \[epse\] which I'd syllabilized as \[ep.se\] rather than \[e.pse\]. I'm assuming I did something wrong with sonority hierarchy but I failed to find resources about what exactly.

**EDIT:** I would prefer generic rules for syllabication but for the Y problem - the rules I set so far is (C)CV syllable where:

* If there are two consonants exactly one of them is a fricative (s, x or ʂ)
* Fricative must follow plosives, nasals and trills but must precede lateral approximants (l)

# Answer
I think as a general rule, a syllable comprises some combination of the following kinds of one or more of the sound types of your language: vowel, liquid, consonant.

You've decided on (C)CV. And if there are two C then one must be a sibilant and the sibilant must follow a stop. So you can have syllables like *sa*, *ta*, *tsa* but apparently not *sta*. You might then have a words like *tasa* & *satsa* & *tsatsa*.

In English, we'd probably break that into SAT-SA. Your language will likely differ, because everyone knows that a syllable can't end with a consonant! So, they'd much more likely break the word thus: SA-TSA!

I would argue that what little you've described of your language and its rules speaks in favour of E-PSE rather than EP-SE. The only thing you "did wrong" was to apply the English rule rather than the rules that apply to your invented language! The second thing you did wrong was to second guess yourself based on the English rule!
> 7 votes

# Answer
You are the conlang designer, and you are in power to decide that *epse* is syllabified as *e.pse* **by design of the language**. This is not as unnatural as it might look at first sight for a native speaker of English, in Classical Greek, the letter Ψ (psi) can occur word-initially and is always considered a unit for syllabification.
> 2 votes

# Answer
Syllables are inherent to the spoken language and a native of that language will take a certain grouping of letters and turn it into a set of syllables according to that language’s rules.

In German, hyphenation generally follows syllables boundaries. About a decade ago, an article in a newspaper talked about the Chinese city of Shenyang but hyphenated it *Sheny-ang*. From a German point of view that could have been an acceptable syllable grouping if y is considered a vowel as *ya* (or *ia*) is not an acceptable diphthong, but *Shen-yang* (y as a half-vowel) would also have worked. For Chinese, only *Shen-yang* is possible because of the very restricted set of syllables. In Japanese, *Shen-yan(g)* or *She-nyan(g)* (strictly speaking, Japanese doesn’t have an ng sound unless k or g follow) would be possible with a y in the spelling; *She-ni-an(g)* or *Shen-i-an(g)* would strictly require an i in there.

As you maybe see, what will be seen depends on the language, and only what is possible will be produced. Another example is Japanese again, which only has open syllables or those ending in n. So when a Japanese tries to pronounce *startling*, that tends to end up somewhere near *sutartolingu*, a five-syllable (seven-mora) word. Thus, a speaker of your conlang will not even consider *ep-se* a possibility but will default to *e-pse*, if that is all the language does.

For the record, some languages with loose syllable rules still tend to end up with ambiguity. For example, the Finnish place Yli-Ii will have to have a hyphen to signify the short-long sequence. The German word *Bakterien* has an unusual syllable boundary between i and e (*Bak-te-ri-en*) while *ie* usually just signifies a long /i/ sound. Those things will need to be learnt at school, there is no way to predict.
> 2 votes

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Tags: phonology, phonotactics
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title: Is there a Semitic zonal language?

text:
# Question
Title: Is there a Semitic zonal language?
I am familiar with zonal languages that attempt to smooth out and simplify the differences between languages within a family, such as Slovio for the Slavic languages and Folkspraak for the Germanic languages. Is there an existing zonal language or language project for the Semitic language family?

# Answer
This was not easy to find!

A bit of jazz Semitic auxlanging going on here.

Ayvarith seems to be an invented language based on Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic.
> 2 votes

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Tags: zonal-languages
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title: Are suffixes in Ido agglutinative?

text:
# Question
Title: Are suffixes in Ido agglutinative?
I was thinking what is the correct way to say "Little princess" in Ido.

(EN) Little princess - Little (indicates the "size") Princess (descendant of some royal crown and that descendant is female).

(ES) Princesita - Princes (root), -it- (suffix for "litte"), -a (indicates female gender).

We should translate as in english like "Mikra princino"? or in the Spanish way like "Princetino"?

If Ido suffixes are agglutinative, is there a particular order? "-et" suffix for little "-in" for female... we could get "Princineto".

# Answer
After a research, I finally found this example which explains this.

> si quieres decir una perra (adulta) pequeña, el orden adecuado es entonces perra+pequeña = hundineto. El orden contrario es poco natural y hace dudar al que oye la palabra *hundetino = perrito hembra*

So the valid ones for Little princess are: 1. Mikra princino = "Little" + "female descendant of some royal crown" 2. Princineto = A female descendant of some royal crown who is little.

"Princetino" would be like: A little descendant of some royal crown who is female.
> 1 votes

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Tags: morphology, typology, ido
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# Question
Title: Is there any evidence that learning a zonal Slavic conlang can help conversing with native speakers of Slavic languages
The relatively high degree of mutual intercomprehensibility of the Slavic languages has fascinated a lot of people for a long time. It was also a motivation in the design of zonal constructed languages based on Slavic languages (e.g., Slovio and Interslavic).

Are there studies or experiments showing that learning a zonal Slavic-based conlang enables communication with native speakers of Slavic languages at least to some degree?

# Answer
> 5 votes
Yes, they show. Slovio is not a zonal conlang, it is supposed to be a kind of Slavic Esperanto. It took place 20 years ago, but nowadays noone wants to use it.

Nevertheless, Interslavic is comprehensible for all Slavic people. Speaker of Interslavic went abroad to different Slavic countries and expressed their idea using Interslavic instead of native languages or English. And it worked. People understand the meaning, though the language can sound strange or event funny to them. And if it does, Interslavic is a viable project and succeeds in its challenge.

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Tags: naturalism, zonal-languages, slavic
---


# Question
Title: How does one write an easily decipherable language?
I'm writing a book about humans finding alien writing off-planet, which is why I want to know how—without referencing known human languages like the Rosetta Stone does—it may be deciphered.

Does it help to have children's books that teach aliens to read or spell, linguistic books with diagrams of alien phonology or morphology, or a Rosetta Stone with alien languages or dialects?

# Answer
> 9 votes
## It may be impossible.

All successful real-world language decipherments—Linear B, Egyptian, Hittite—have involved connections with other known languages. Linear B (Mycenaean) is closely related to Classical Greek, for example; Egyptian is related to Coptic and a bit more distantly to Hebrew and Arabic; Hittite is a distant relative to the whole Indo-European family.

Even if you only look at the writing system, figuring out Linear B involved connecting known place names like "Knossos" with words that were more common in inscriptions at Knossos than elsewhere. Ventris's biggest breakthrough came when he hypothesized that Kober's `??-C₄V₂-C₂V₂` might be *k-no-so*, which gave tentative values for C₂, C₄, and V₂, and extrapolated from there.

With an alien language, we have no idea what names they used for places. We don't have any loanwords or names transcribed in other languages to compare against. We don't know if they use anything resembling phonetics to communicate—or if their language is even fundamentally based on recursion like ours is.

## But…

Maybe humans and Thulians have never made contact before, but the Borean language is known, and an ancient Borean imperial decree—translated into Thulian—is found in the excavations.

Maybe Thulian and Borean are part of a language family—that hints to the linguists that Thulian might use a stack-based syntax (or whatever other weirdly inhuman feature you like) just like Borean does.

Maybe there's some old Thulian technology stored in Area 51, taken from a crashed spaceship; it contains records of an early Thulian attempt to figure out human languages (maybe even a rudimentary grammar of English written in Thulian).

Maybe they can find a live Thulian, or, failing that, an artificial intelligence of some sort, which can give them real-time feedback—a native speaker is orders of magnitude more useful than any inscriptions can ever be.

Maybe Thulian is related to some obscure Earth language(!). There used to be contact between Earth and Thule, which stopped millennia ago, and Thulian shares a distant ancestor of Etruscan/Sumerian/Pirahã/your favorite real-world language isolate. (Though be prepared for a lot of strong linguistic opinions if you decide to weigh in on the Pirahã controversy!)

Maybe universal grammar (in whatever form you like) is universal even across planets, and Thulian still has recognizable levels of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

None of these on their own would make decipherment *easy*—but the more you add, the easier it gets. At some point, it becomes *possible*, and that's what matters for a story.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I'm going to assume that the aliens' language is intentionally easy to decipher and that they are actively trying to allow other species to piece together the meaning of what they produce. I'm also going to assume that these are written or written-ish artifacts and what they look like might differ from how the aliens actually communicate in person.

I don't think the semantic content of individual signs is going to be obvious or easy to infer, but you can keep their overall number low.

One can have conventions in the orthography that make the grammatical structure really obvious.

One can have no irregular inflection and encode the parse tree directly in the orthography.

```
( and ( possible ( ( not have ) ( and [ Change Word ] ( not ( can predict ) ) ) ) )
    ( possible ( ( encode directly ) [ Tree Meaning ] ( in [ System Writing ] ) ) ) )

```

The example above consistently marks non-predicates with Capitalization and uses brackets to mark compounds where the meaning of the whole compound is pragmatically inferable from the meaning of its constituents but not directly implied by them.

---

Another idea is to make the thing that humans discover a *computer* or some other kind of interactive piece of alien technology.

It would be easy for humans to test their hypotheses about how the aliens' language worked if the computer was capable of answering questions formulated in the language or if the program would attempt to correct mistakes and either show the corrected response or prompt the user to pick a corrected response before answering.

# Answer
> 2 votes
There have been serious attempts at this by NASA: the Pioneer Plaque and the Voyager Golden Record. The intention is for them to be received by aliens, who will be able to use them to find out about human culture (and then hopefully won't come over to subjugate us with their superior technology!)

They use lots of universal physical and mathematical quantities as references, and with the understanding that any sufficiently advanced society will be able to identify them. For example the molecular structure of hydrogen, and a diagram of the solar system.

So one key element for easy decipherability would be to have texts available describing something universally known across the universe.

Another would be to have a simple writing system. Hangul is based on the positions of the vocal tract, which would be an aid for deciphering. It is somewhat complicated by combining multiple symbols in blocks, similarly to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

A simple grammar like toki pona would help to quickly discover regularities in the language. There are separators between the verb and the object, and there is usually only one verb per sentence. Complex sentences are broken down into a sequence of multiple sentences. Even without understanding the words, it is easy to identify the syntactic structures.

Texts could be formulaic in structure. One clue that helped decipher German messages encoded with the Enigma machine was their fixed structure, and the fact that they always ended in the same phrase, "Heil Hitler" -- that served as a useful anchor point when trying to work out the code. If your alien texts also have a similar structure, then you could use that to identify greetings or other formulaic expressions.

The most difficult aspect would be the vocabulary, especially abstract words, or polysemous words (ie words with multiple meanings). For this simple texts, or even encyclopedias and (monolingual) dictionaries would provide a good entrance point.

Most human languages follow certain quantitative regularities, which we now know about. There has been some work on the Phaistos Disc which concluded that if it is a text in an unknown language, it is most likey to use a syllabic writing system, ie the symbols stand for syllables rather than letters. This can be derived from the frequency distribution of the symbols. Of course it might not be a text -- my pet hypothesis is that it is part of a board game :)

In short, there are a number of aspects you could take into account for this. With what we know about languages and their properties nowadays, it should be quite convincing for a space mission to have a linguist as part of their team who could work on deciphering any foreign languages without too many problems. Of course it would also depend how close the alien culture was to human cultures. Language is only part of the puzzle.

# Answer
> 1 votes
It is even almost impossible for human languages. For all successful decipherings of historical writing systems some kind of clue was needed in the form of a related extant language or dictionaries and/or bilingual documents with one already known language.

When a human group wants to leave something long-term decipherable, maybe they can prepare some teaching materials with rich illustrations to convey the gist of their language. Later readers may come up with some artificial pronunciation for their script not unlike Egyptological pronunciation.

Throwing in aliens makes it even more difficult: Even when the aliens follow the procedure outlined above, will humans be able to understand the graphical representations and pictures they use? Their body parts and their home environment may be very different from ours.

# Answer
> 1 votes
"Omnilingual" was mentioned in comments, and there's your answer; assuming you have two technologically and scientifically advanced cultures, there are universal constants that can be used as a basis that historical examples on Earth didn't have, and thus we can't use to decipher old languages. The story used the discovery of the Martian periodic table as the clue that allowed the breakthrough because there is only one periodic table; chemistry and atoms are the same everywhere. To use an example inspired by that story, if you see something like "frazzlump + frazzlump + bork = blarg", and "frazzlump" is the first entry in the table and "bork" is the eighth, you know "blarg" probably means "water".

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Tags: conlang-creation
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title: International Language

text:
# Question
Title: International Language
I was reading International Auxiliary Language, but I don't like their setups.

Because, mostly, they use Latin alphabets!

And that, my friends, cause confusions!

No matter what the letter was intended to be pronounced, EVERY country (especially those use uses Latin alphabets such as English, German, French, Spanish, etc.) WILL pronounce it in their own way!

'J' is pronounced 'h' in Spanish, 'z' in French, 'y' in German.

Many country also have different pronunciation for 'H' and 'R'.

Other than that, many countries are even "incapable of" pronouncing letters such as 'RR' in Spanish or 'Ü' in German!

Due to those drawbacks, the invented language bound to be less efficient than it was intended to be!

So, I was thinking, is there a way to overcome such drawbacks!?

First of all, the most obvious approach is to find a set of alphabets that "Nobody had in common"! At least, find those letters that are used by "only one country"! Such as some letters in Greek alphabets (As far as I know, Greek are the only country that use Greek alphabets).

Second, I think it's better to divide that alphabets into 2 group. First group are those letters that "every people in every country know how to pronounce". I think it's good to base it on Japanese, because Japanese has the least amount of pronunciations as far as I know. I believe they are the easiest language to learn pronunciation-wise.

This group of letters build up the "basic and conceptual words", where all other words are the "combination product" of these words. You can think it as the "building block" of the words.

Thus, I think it's better to make the words "a word a syllable" such as Chinese. And 1-syllable words made from the "Basic letters" are the "building block" of the words. More complicated words are the combination of these "basic conceptual words". Such as "Refrigerator" are actually "Electronic Ice Box" in Chinese.

I also think it's better to make the letters "phonetic"! 'A' is always pronounced 'a' NO MATTER WHAT! Unlike English, 'A' has 2 million ways of pronunciation!

The second group of letters are those pronunciations that "All the countries in the world that **COULD EVER MADE**! I know this might sounds like far fetching, but the idea is "Easy for everybody to learn such language. And for those who are familiar with the language, it will be easy for them to learn **EVERY LANGUAGE**"!

You can think it as "The first group letters are the intersection of the pronunciations of every language, and the second group are the union of the pronunciations of every language".

And the second group of letters are only used for those more advanced, probably grammatical, concepts. Which is "Unnecessary for basic conversations but critical for literature".

So, my question is:

Are such ideas feasible? What's the ups-and-downs, pros-and-cons of my ideas? Did I miss something? What else should I pay special attention to?

# Answer
> 3 votes
You seem to be confusing sounds with their representation in writing; similarly, countries and languages are not equivalent either.

There is an inventory of sounds that are used in human languages; though most languages only use a small portion of it. If you are aiming for an international language, you should probably select those sounds that are common to most or all languages. I believe that toki pona comes close to that.

Representing these *sounds* in writing is a completely different matter. Because different languages use the same letter to represent different sounds, your best bet might be to make up a completely new alphabet; then you don't have any pre-conceived notions of pronunciation to struggle with. On the flip side, everybody then has to learn the letters and how to pronounce them, which makes your language harder to learn.

In your question you also touch on morphology: that is a whole different field, which you should probably put in a separate question.

So, to summarise:

* each language has an inventory of sounds it uses, these are called *phonemes*.
* phonemes are represented in writing by letters; this is not a 1:1 mapping, and also depends on accents and dialectal variation.
* Letters can have diacritics (such as the dots on top of the *ü*) — these usually make them separate letters from the base form.
* the letter-phoneme mapping is arbitrary; there is nothing inherent in the letter that determines how it should be pronounced.

In general I would recommend that you read up on some of the concepts of linguistics, as that would make it easier for you to express what exactly you want to achieve.

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Tags: writing-systems, auxlangs
---


# Question
Title: How would I make an efficient, written, language while still providing the least ambiguity that is reasonable?
I plan on having some ambiguity for stuff like wordplay (and to make the language feel natural). By efficient, I mean the language takes up little space on the document it is conveying information on.

The idea is the language would be "alien" or "magical" as I am planning on using this language I am making in my game for magical symbols. I plan on eventually adding a spoken equivalent of it later, but I am not concerned about that now. It is also going to be part of the lore of my game, so the naturalness of the language helps a lot (so it can have a history to it).

The wordplay can be used to have magical mishaps from using a similar, but wrong word. The last thing I plan on adding is since it is a magic based language, I only need to have one symbol per word.

The idea behind the grammatical structure would convey: `Subject, Verb, Action`. I would then use adjectives to modify the meaning of the subject, action, or verb. However, I don't know if I am going to include articles in the languages, but that depends on how I make the characters for the subjects, verbs, and actions.

This is not meant to be a romance language as its purpose is for use in spells and potion recipes.

**I guess what I am asking for is how to make the language use grammar and structure that can be read and written efficiently. How would I make grammar and language structure that can be read and written efficiently?**

# Answer
First a in this form brand new fact from natural languages: All natural languages are of approximately the same efficiency despite their quite noticeable differences (some languages are spoken at a rather fast pace in syllables per second, but than the information content of a syllable is lower than in other languages that are spoken more slowly). The reference is Christophe Coupé, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu, and François Pellegrino, Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche and they give a value of `39 ± 5 bit/s`.

So you can expect that a naturalistic constructed language will fall in about the same range; maybe somewhat less efficient, because it is difficult to get things just right by construction that have been optimised by language evolution over a long time.

For completely symbolic languages, look up the term pasigraphy and take a glimpse on some systems that have already been invented.
> 1 votes

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Tags: grammar, ambiguity, language-structure
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# Question
Title: What setting for the dropoff rate in a language generator will produce a natural English phoneme distribution?
In creating an ancestral lang for a hard-fantasy world that is based on the language of your home, you first have to understand that language. And for an impatient worldbuilder like me, the Vulgar Language Generator seems the best place to go. Click the "English" choice, and you automatically get the following consonant clusters:

**Word initial**: b bɹ d dj ʤ f fj fɹ h j k kj kw kɹ l m n nj p pl pɹ s sm sp st t tɹ ʧ v w ð g gɹ ɹ ʃ ʍ θ θɹ

**Mid-word**: b bl d f ft fɹ h k l ldɹ lm ls lw lɹ m mb ms mθ n nd ndɹ nl ns nt ntɹ nɹ p pl s st sʧ t ts tw ʧ v w z zn ð ŋgl g ɹ θ

**Word final**: b d dz ʤ f ft k ks kst kt l ld lf lp lt lvz m md mz n nd ndz nst nt nʧ nz p ps pt s skt st t ts ʧ v vd z ð ŋ ŋk ŋz g ɹ ʃ θ

**Vowels**: aɪ aʊ eɪ i iə iː oː u uː æ ɑː ɒ ɔ ɔɪ ɔː ə əʊ ɛ ɛː ɜː ɪ ɪə ʊə ʌ ʊ

And there are some things in English that came naturally before knowing about it, like affixes, sound-verb-object and adjective before noun.

However, there are some things about English that I know nothing about, like its dropoff rate. Vulgar defined dropoff rate as follows:

> Phonemes are ranked by frequency from left (most frequent) to right (least frequent). **Medium** makes the frequencies slightly more even than **fast**. When using **equiprobable**, phonemes can be custom weighted by writing **=multiplier**, eg: **p=10** makes p ten times more common than a phoneme without a weighting.

Vulgar gives us choices for our phonemes: "fast", "medium" or "equiprobable" for dropoff rate and "naturalistic ranking", "natural with randomness", "alphabetical" or "previous" for how to arrange the phonemes. Which of these choices matches English in real life?

# Answer
> 1 votes
Note that by synthesising vocabulary using a tool like Vulgar Lang, you will not even approximate English even when using the same distributional laws for phonemes. You will get a lot of words that could be English, but are just unused, you get known words but with other meanings, and you don't get morphology or syntax at all.

Of course, "naturalistic ranking" is the best approximation, all other rankings lead to feelable statistical distortions given your conlang an engeneered touch.

As an alternative I suggest looking at the questions and answers under : Start with real life English and apply systematic changes to the sounds and the grammar. For an example using projection of current trends into the future, you can look at Futurese.

# Answer
> 1 votes
If you're wed to the idea of using Vulgar to make English nonsense words, the best idea would likely be to manually set the dropoff rate using "equiprobable" and custom weights, as it's unlikely that any of the default options precisely match English text. If you can find out what the rate of occurrence of different English phonemes is, putting them in manually in this way would almost definitely be more accurate than relying on the defaults.

I don't have any resources that list explicit measures for the rates of occurrences of various English phonemes on hand, but they likely exist; I'll certainly edit some into this answer if I find any.

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Tags: phonology, tools, english
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# Question
Title: Is Schleyer's first sketch of Volapük available as a reprint?
Johann Martin Schleyer published the first sketch of Volapük in 1879 in a rather obscure catholic newsletter named *Die Sionsharfe*. This newsletter isn't easily accessible, as far as I know. Is this first sketch available as a reprint in some more accessible work?

# Answer
To my big surprise the relevant issue of *Sionsharfe* is now digitised and freely available from *Digitale Bibliothek München*. The first sketch of Volapük at this moment still named only *Weltsprache* or *Allsprache*, the word *Volapük* itself can be found a few month later, occurs in Nr. 35, Vol. IV (1879) Beilage as a supplement.

What a fascinating document!

Following issues of *Sionsharfe* also contain shorter or longer fragments of Volapük, unfortunately the digisat ends with Nr 48 (1880), there are four more years missing.
> 4 votes

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Tags: history, resource-request, volapuk
---


# Question
Title: Is it possible to make a declension system that DOESN'T limit what nouns can end in?
This has always been a conundrum for me. I like how grammatical case frees up word order, but hate how it puts a limit on what nouns can end in. Years ago someone told me of a natlang that uses 6 declensions, one for each vowel and the 6th for nouns that end in consonants. This allowed nouns to end in any phoneme in the language, though from my own research only plurals were allowed to end in -u. Sadly, I haven't been able to find that language again.

Such a language, if it were to exist, would make it abnormally important to remember each noun's declension class, because what would be the nominative for one noun may be another case entirely for a different noun.

I find it annoying that I can't find that natlang again. I *think* it was a part of the Slavic family, but I'm not sure. I think it was spoken like somewhere around Eastern Europe or the Caucus mountains.

# Answer
Ignoring the lost natlang, I'll just answer the title question:

There are several possibilities to let nouns end in any phoneme of the language and still have case inflections:

* Most simple: Have a zero ending in the nominative singular
* Base your inflection on prefixes (like in Bantu languages) or infixes (like in Semitic languages)

BTW, inflections with thematic vowels (like in Latin and Greek) aren't particularly difficult to remember, because the thematic vowel is easily recognisable throughout the whole inflection paradigm.

PS Many natural languages have only a restricted set of allowed phonemes at the end of a word. Classical Greek is an extreme example of this kind of restriction, but also German has *Auslautverhärtung* aka *final devoicing*: Final consonants are always devoiced. This feature does not show up in writing but only in the spoken language.
> 7 votes

# Answer
There are some languages with unusually irregular plurals or verbal forms, but I don't think any language has something quite as stark as what you're demanding here. Mostly because, as you point out yourself, a system that basically makes it impossible to recognize what case a noun is in unless it was previously learned by rote would be so taxing on the mind that it would inevitably regularize to at least some degree within a few generation (French verbs in middle/old French had a very high degree of root alternation, which are now greatly reduced, and English strong verb tend to regularize too).

**However** have you considered a system of vowel/consonant harmony? I don't think consonant harmony is a widespread feature in any natural language, but for conlanging, the sky's the limit. This would create endings that are affect by the last sound(s) of the root and increase the options.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Here are some possible solutions to this problem that haven't been listed already.

1. mark case with tone or another suprasegmental feature
2. case disfixes
3. have a large class of indeclinable nouns
4. achieve free word order via noun classes and agreement

### 1 Case Tone

Maasai marks case with tone. It's predominantly VSO, but frequently uses VOS order if the object is more topical.

### 2 Case disfixes

Some languages like Alabama (Muskogean, North America) delete phonemes in a root to indicate pluractionality (plural subject/plural object/multiple repetitions), basically verbal number. You can repurpose this feature for case.

Here's a strawman example in a 3-case language (direct, oblique, and genitive).

```
direct case: unmarked
oblique case: delete the final phoneme
genitive case: delete the final 2 phonemes

```

Suppose `chopal` means house.

```
house                 chopal
to/from/&c the house  chopa
the house's           chop

```

### 3 have a large class of indeclinable nouns

You can have a fair number of nouns that *don't decline at all* before the declension system breaks down completely.

Indeclinable nouns can end in whatever you want them to.

This might work well if your language has optional prepositions or postpositions with the same meaning as certain cases so that the role of an indeclinable noun can be clarified if necessary.

### 4. noun classes and agreement

Some languages such as Swahili have many noun classes and require verbs to agree with their arguments. Many Bantu languages like Swahili have agreement with direct objects as well, but don't require its usage in all situations.

You can also achieve the same effect with obligatory clitic doubling, such as in Macedonian. The idea is that you must have a pronoun referring to various verb arguments (such as the direct object) even when a full noun phrase is present. Clitic doubling is more effective at disambiguating sentences if you have more noun classes or more grammatical numbers.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Any declensional system that involves suffixes will limit "what nouns can end in", because nouns can only end in the declensional terminations of that language!

Even if you maximise by disallowing repeats, you can come up with say eight stem formations and say eight cases across four numbers. If you make each of these 256 forms "unique" (such that -am never repeats) that's 256 possible syllables.

English has something like *ten to maybe fifteen or more thousands of syllables*. The number of distinct monosyllabic words in astounding. *This source* lists hundreds if not several thousand.

I don't see how it could be possible to *both* create a reasonable declensional system *and* do anything but limit what nouns can end in.

Any solution to this query will involve something silly like having tens of thousands of discrete morphological forms for nouns. One for each possible syllable. Or, the equally silly notion of restricting the number of valid syllables to, say, 256, thus equalling the number of nominal case endings.
> 2 votes

# Answer
In my opinion, the obvious first step is having a base form (be it nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive or intransitive) with a null ending so that the root form with all its final sound variety actually shows up and can be identified.

Second, instead of attempting to find a declension pattern for each possible final sound, group them together. For example, you might have one (or many) declension groups that include words ending in consonant clusters; their feature may be that the ending tacked on always begins with a vowel to ensure a pronounceable syllable. On the other hand, you might decide to group together words ending in Vs, Vz, Vd and Vt (V = vowel sound) and have all their declension patterns be Vt + ending. These strategies reduce the potentially very high number of patterns to a more managable set – and are likely to have happened in natural languages anyway.

Finally, I would like to point out that Finnish and German are each rather close to what you have in mind. While native Finnish words can only /t, s, n, r, l/ or a vowel, loan words from other languages do not necessarily abide by this rule and newer loans have resisted change to fit Finnish phonotactics somewhat. In declensed forms, an /i/ is added between stem and ending to turn it into a fully allowed syllable. In German (subject to terminal devoicing) there aren’t any restrictions on final sounds that I am aware of. Indeed, declension is usually very simple being made up only of a sometimes optional filler-e plus a case-marking consonant so declension is not as complex as found in other languages.
> 1 votes

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Tags: morphology, case
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# Question
Title: Are there languages with five conjugations? If not, how would one construct one?
Most languages I am familiar with have six different person/number combinations for verbs:

*Singular*

* 1st (*I*)
* 2nd (*you*)
* 3rd (*he*/*she*/*it*)

\*Plural

* 1st (*we*)
* 2nd (*you (all)*)
* 3rd (*they*)

Obviously, verb conjugation is more complicated than just these combinations (other features include tenses, aspects, mood (eg imperative), and gerunds), but for now, just focus on person/number. Is there some way to collapse these six combinations into five? On a related note, are there any natural languages with five conjugations?

Also, I need exactly five conjugations. Are there normal languages with only five conjugations? If there aren't, what would be the most realistic way to implement this?

# Answer
If you have two features (number/person), it seems tricky to have five options (or any other odd number for that matter). However, there is an easy way: simply collapse singular and plural for one of the persons.

There is actually a real example in English (and several other languages): the *pluralis majestatis* ("Royal We"). Simply discard the first person singular and use the first person plural instead.

We are not sure what other languages use this, but we have definitely heard it in English and German. It would not be surprising to us if it occurred in other languages as well.

Sounds a bit odd, but would be an easy option.
> 4 votes

# Answer
## Existing Other Person Conjugations

The wikipedia page on Grammatical Person, has this to say (emphasis mine):

> Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts: **proximate for a more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third person**. The obviative is sometimes called the fourth person.
>
> The term fourth person is also sometimes used for **the category of indefinite or generic referents**, which work like one in English phrases such as "one should be prepared" or people in people say that..., when the grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms. The so-called "zero person" in Finnish and related languages, in addition to passive voice may serve to leave the subject-referent open. Zero person subjects are sometimes translated as "one," but the problem with that is that English language constructions involving one, e.g. "One hopes that will not happen," are rare\[citation needed\] and could be considered expressive of an overly academic tone to the majority of people, while Finnish sentences like "Ei saa koskettaa" ("Not allowed to touch") are recognizable to and used by young children in both languages.

---

I think the grammatical persons of a language would be based on how the speakers of that language interact.

I would personally collapse singular and plural, and then think about what other possible persons there could be, adding **fourth** and **fifth** person conjugations as is fitting, but you could also remove a person.

## No First Person

For example, you could have a heavy emphasis on an ego-less society, which would do away with the first-person. Pravic would refer to the `"I"` or `"me"` in the third person, as `"The speaker"`.

## Class-Based Person

Or you could have a language with a strong sense of caste or class, where there are separate second-person conjugations for people in higher, lower, or the same class.
> 1 votes

# Answer
There is of course Esperanto, conflating 2nd person singular and plural (let's ignore *ci*), very much the same as in English. Although, since the verb does not change (by person/number), I would not call this a conjugation.

There are other ways how to achieve *exactly five* conjugations. E. g. in pre-1953 Slovak in the past tense (that is also used for the conditional), the singular distinguished three genders (masculine, feminine, neutrum), but the verb form stays the same for each person. While in plural, only two different forms are present - masculine animate and "everything else". 3+2=5.

Example:

Singular:

* masculine: 1st person *chodil som*, 2nd person *chodil si*, 3rd person *chodil*
* feminine: 1st person *chodila som*, 2nd person *chodila si*, 3rd person *chodila*
* neutrum: 1st person *chodilo som*, 2nd person *chodilo si*, 3rd person *chodilo*

Plural:

* masculine animate: 1st person *chodili sme*, 2nd person *chodili ste*, 3rd person *chodili*
* other: 1st person *chodily sme*, 2nd person *chodily ste*, 3rd person *chodily*

(*som/si/sme/ste* is an auxilliary verb).

Contemporary Czech has also exactly 5 conjugations in the past tense, but distributed differently (singular masculine, singular feminine+plural neutrum, singular neutrum, plural masculine animate, plural masculine inanimate+feminine)
> 1 votes

# Answer
Modern High German is like that: The verb endings for the 1pl and 3pl are always the same (e.g., *wir sind*, *sie sind*; *wir haben*, *sie haben*). Some dialects of German are going even further having the same endings for all plural forms.
> 0 votes

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Tags: verbs
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# Question
Title: Are there conlangs using constructed sounds?
Usually, constructed languages of all kind (naturalistic or not) draw their sounds from existing natural languages.

Are there conlangs with *constructed sounds*, i.e., sounds that do not occur in natural languages (or are at least very rare in natural languages)?

# Answer
> 21 votes
Click consonants are rare in natlangs, but rather popular in conlangs, though despite this, given the existence of things like !Xóõ reality is stranger than most fiction in this specific regard. Language-game/conlang(?) turned actual spoken register Damin had several phonemes not seen in (other?) natural languages, such as an ingressive glotally interrupted unvoiced lateral fricative /ɬ↓ʔ/, an egressively released bilabial click /ʘ↑/ and stuttered bilabial trill /ʙ\ʙ/.

Searching for the various hypothetical combinations as well as ext-IPA sounds on google turns up a fair few instances of conlangs using sounds such as percussives, implosive fricatives, velopharyngeal and nareal fricatives, etc.

Outside of these humanly-possible, but non-attested outside of disordered speech phonemes, some languages made up for non-humans include sounds that are impossible for humans to make, such as this one spoken by a race of giants, including a special type of whistle-like sounds, or this one made for creatures with bird-like anatomy, differentiating between 4 different types of contraction of muscles in the throat overlaid with 5 different pitch contours.

# Answer
> 16 votes
There's also the brilliant masterpiece kay(f)bop(t), which features

* the dextral lateral click (a click made on the right side of the mouth)
* the sinistral lateral click (a click made on the left side of the mouth)
* the manual stop (a clap, which may only occur in morphemes pertaining to penguins)
* the faciomanual click (a facepalm, which may only occur in function words)

<sup>(note that these aren't actually official names but come from the Conlang Critic video on kay(f)bop(t))</sup>

These are already stretching it, so I don't think kay(f)bop(t)'s phonemic hats could be counted as "sounds" per se.

(And yes, this is a joke language, but I couldn't resist a chance to mention it.)

# Answer
> 14 votes
In Ithkuil, a geminate /h/ can be produced as a bidental fricative, a sound which is only attested in a single dialect of a single natural language.

> **hh**
>
> > The geminated version of Ithkuil **h** is pronounced in either of two ways: (1) as a “bi-dental” fricative, in that the jaw is completely closed and the upper and lower teeth are in near-contact along their entire length; the resulting sound is somewhat similar in timbre to both a voiceless interdental fricative (as in English ***th****in*) as well as the English *f*-sound, however there is absolutely no contact by the tongue with the teeth or gums when pronouncing this sound; no IPA equivalent; or (2) as the voiceless pharyngeal fricative found in Arabic (spelled **ح**)and in various Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages. This second allophone should not be employed if the resulting pharyngealization distorts the timbre of the adjacent vowels to the extent that their place of articulation changes (e.g., the vowel **û** being made to sound like **ô**).

# Answer
> 6 votes
I recall some years ago, someone submitted a greeting for Conlangery that was a bunch of insect sounds. According to the conlanger it is meaningful, though I don’t vet greetings too thoroughly.

Also, in my earliest conlang, Yeltax, there is a harmonic tone, with two simultaneous pitches. It’s impossible for humans to produce in normal speech, as the aliens who speak Yeltax have a syrinx, which makes two base frequencies possible. (Note: I made that before I learned any phonetics, and now I think I’d want to think about the acoustics here to distinguish this from the harmonics we use for vowels.)

In general, though, most conlangers don’t make up too many sounds. Many of the gaps in the IPA chart are physically impossible, and it’s questionable that we’ve missed a major articulator. I think most of the true inventions will be for non-human languages.

Leaving behind sound, though, it could be said that Rikchik has a robust alien phonetics that was invented from scratch. Since the aliens have many tentacles for signing, and a very non humanoid appearance, their signs can’t be related to any of the features of signs in human sign languages. Once again, invented phonetics is probably going to be for aliens.

# Answer
> 2 votes
**Old Entish** is a possibility, though not really by direct attestation. The Professor says of Old Entish that it is *"...slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the loremasters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing"* (LotR Appendix F)

It is after all spoken by Ents and Huorns (sentient tree-like beings). Lots of deep, rolling hoomhomming and baruurundillanding, possibly with subsonic undertones.

# Answer
> 0 votes
I am currently working on a conlang making heavy use of:

-Interdentalized sounds, like what @J. Siebeneichler pointed out

-Fully Interdental sounds, where you literally have to bite your tongue

-A Rounded Schwa

-and a plosive that isn't quite a pharyngeal plosive but sounds like it as it requires the speaker to press the back of their tongue directly against the back of their throat.

Given, this language isn't really meant for humans, so many of it's other oddities are downright unusable to humans.

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Tags: phonology, list-of-languages, phonetics
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# Question
Title: Sona: how complete it is and how alive it is?
I find the basic ideas of Sona very appealing, but, from what I see in the web, it is not, by far, as popular as Esperanto or Lojban or other well-known conlangs. Therefore my question: Is it a complete language with a community of fluent speakers, translations of literary works available..? Or is it basically dead?

# Answer
> 4 votes
**I think it's pretty much dead**.

There is~was a Yahoo group. It has 80 members and no recent activity. But Yahoo groups are all screwed up now, so it's difficult to tell.

There is a dead Sona forum with 14 members. There are a couple translations. No activity since 2010.

There is a dead Sona twitter feed with 13 members. No activity since 2013.

There is a dead Sona tutorial website archived by the Wayback Machine. Not reachable by ordinary means.

The grammar book was hosted online in a now defunct location archived by Wayback Machine.

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Tags: speech-communities
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# Question
Title: What is the meaning of this Toki Pona sentence?
I found a sentence written in order to prove that Toki Pona is a complete language. As far as I know it is a foolish nominal sentence.

What is the English translation?

> pona sona pi (wawa pi ma Lipija) poka toki lawa mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Atilanisi.

# Answer
I finally got an answer from the author. The sentence meant:

> pona sona pi (wawa pi ma Lipija) poka toki lawa mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Atilanisi.
>
> The influence of Libyan power on the election of Atlantis' vice president.

The closest translation was "The strength of Libya beside many commands of vice president of Atlantis" by `jastako`.

Here's a word-for-word translation for what I understand.

* **pona sona** was in fact **pana sona**: influence (idea sending)
* **wawa pi ma Lipija**: Libyan power
* **poka**: on, about
* **toki lawa mute**: elections
* **jan lawa nanpa tu**: vice president
* **ma Atilanisi**: Atlantis

# Suggestions

Feel free to explain how you would have translated that phrase into toki pona.

## John Clifford's (Facebook)

> kama pi wawa pi ma Lipija pi wile pi jan mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Alansi.

## Mine

> pana nasin pi wawa pi ma Lipija tawa wile kulupu pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Alansi.
> 3 votes

# Answer
A rough, non exact translation could be something like this:

> The good folklore (the strength of Libya) near \[probably "are part of"\] many thoughts of second director/general/Vicepresident of Atlantis.

It's weird, I know. If there's any verb there, I can't see *li* anywhere. I think *toki lawa* ("talk of head/mind") means *to think*, but in the official book of Toki Pona, *to think* is also just *toki*.
> 1 votes

# Answer
If I were to translate, I'd say

> The intellect of (the strength of Libya) the many head advisers of the second director of Atlantis...

Reasoning:

* "pona sona" - goodness of knowledge (intellect/sensibleness), good knowledge-wise (the intellectually adept)
    + *jan ni li pona sona - this person is intellectually adept (brilliant / intellectual)*
* "wawa pi ma Lipija" - power/strength of Libya
* "poka toki lawa mute" - many head/main talking sides/companions (the many head advisers)
* "jan lawa nanpa tu" - second head person (second director/ruler/president)

---

Some issues I have with the phrase:

**Incomplete**

* The phrase doesn't have a "li" phrase, or verb phrase, as was mentioned, making it, as far as sentences go, incomplete, which doesn't give much any clues for context. Personally, I generally parse sentences like this as a reduced form of "ni li ...", but that's also given conversational context (really "*conversational subject* li...").

E.g

> * jan Sanato: "jan o! jan sina li kama anu seme? ike a!"
> * jan Mikanle: "o awen! o!... a, kama!"
> * .
> * Johnatho: "hey! Is your guy coming or what? He's terrible, eh!"
> * Mickanley: "Just wait!... oh look, here he comes!"

Of course, either way, I can't say if there is any official basis for such a parsing.

---

**Addressing other suggestions:**

* It was suggested that the parenthesis are to ensure the "wawa pi ma Lipija" isn't mis-parsed separately, however, I don't think this is the case for two reasons:

1. **Unconventional**
        + I have never come across round brackets being used in this manner in toki pona, and it doesn't seem likely since, it would be too confused with the more standard use of round brackets (holding a phrase that isn't part of the sentence, but clarifies it in some way). More likely if this were the case, square brackets or commas would be employed.
    2. **Unnecessary**
        + Brackets wouldn't be needed for this purpose since one could not parse "pi wawa" seperately from the subsequent "pi ma Lipija". The reason for this is that "pi" cannot be followed by a lone word, in this case "wawa".
> + \[ pona sona pi \[ wawa pi \[ma Lipija \] \] \] - The intellect of the power of Libya
>     + \[ \[ pona sona wawa \] pi \[ ma Lipija \] \] - The strong intellect of Libya

+ - To say "Libya's *something* of/concerning strength", it would likely be structured "pona sona pi ma Lipija pi ijo wawa" or "pona sona pi ma Lipija pi wawa ijo", the second being a bit more on the mark ("concerning strong things" vs. "concerning the strength of things"). Although we translate "pi" as "of", "pi wawa" cannot be used to mean "of strength", and would rather be grammatically incorrect.
* The previous translation translates "pona sona" as "the good folklore" and "pi poka" as "near".

+ Like jan Kipo, I can't quite see where "good folklore" came from, given the basic definition of the words as well as their structure in the sentence, but I can't say if it would really be accepted I guess (\*tilts head 90°). For "good folklore", I'd probably use something along the lines of "sona kulupu pona", or perhaps even "sona mama pona".
    + As for "pi poka", it is conventional to translate it to "near", though, I would shy away from that translation in favor of "of a side(noun)" since I would more use "pi poka pi" for near, though I'm again unsure if it'd be acceptable. If so, in this case though, it's a bit 50/50, since there's no other head noun besides "poka" to clarify. If you wanted "side person (adviser/companion)", you'd more likely say "jan poka".
> 1 votes

# Answer
I don't know what the person who wrote that sentence intended, but pona sona or sona pona, the proper order, is usually translated as 'wisdom'. I also wouldn't use toki lawa to mean think. That's usually part of pilin (mi pilin e ni: = I think/feel this:). I would use toki lawa as demand/command, as in a way of saying somebody is speaking with authority, and expecting their order to be followed. jan lawa li toki lawa. li wile e ni: wile ona li kama pali. A boss/leader gives an order. He expects his wishes to be done. "Atilanisi is not even acceptable in toki pona either because "ti" is considered an 'illegal' syllable. If that is intended to say 'Atlantis' it would be something more like 'Alansi'. According to the transliteration rules, the most prominent consonants are used, replaced for similar sounds if neccesary (g becomes k, r becomes l or w, d becomes t, j becomes s), & the rest are dropped if deemed not necessary. Sometimes letter pairs are reversed to make a CV syllable as in the case of Israel (Isale). The 'el' becomes 'le'. You are also generally discouraged from using more syllables than the original word. As far as the meaning of the sentence, I would translate it as "The wisdom of (strength of Libya) beside much/many Orders/commands(?) of vice president of Atlantis."
> 1 votes

# Answer
Well, it’s not a grammatical sentence and the context doesn’t provide any clue about how to fill it out if it’s an abbreviated one. Not ure where “folklore” came from (well, ‘pona sona’ but how?) and the rest is is a single noun phrase that I cannot render into English in an intelligible way, though it does apparently belong to the assistant chief of Atlantis. I have no suggestions about how to fix it.
> 0 votes

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Tags: toki-pona, translation
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# Question
Title: Languages where the part of speech of a root is "fixed"?
By way of introduction, this question is about a quirk of Esperanto, but there is a general conlang question at the end, I promise.

In Esperanto, every root has a natural grammatical part of speech, much like how nouns have a grammatical "gender" (or noun category) in many other languages.

For example, "ŝoveli" means "to shovel". It is naturally a verb. The same root with a noun ending, "ŝovelo", does not mean "a shovel". Rather, it is the noun-of-the-verb, that is, it refers to the act of shovelling. To refer to a shovel, you have to say that it's the tool of the act of shovelling, that is, "ŝovelilo".

Similarly, "humana" means "humane". It is naturally an adjective. The same root with a noun ending, "humano", does not mean "human", it is the noun-of-the-adjective, that is, "humaneness".

This was an interesting design choice, and one that's puzzled me. For an Esperanto speaker, this is something you have to learn about every root, like noun classes in many IE languages.

Are there any analogues to this in natural languages, or is this a device that has been used in other conlangs?

# Answer
> 6 votes
This is pretty common in natural languages. Think about English words -- most of them have an inherent part of speech and require derivational affixes to change that. "Anger" is inherently a noun and requires "-y" to become an adjective, whereas "excite" is inherently a verb and requires "-ment" to become a noun or "-ed" or "-ing" to become an adjective. This sort of thing is incredibly normal in natlangs -- the reason it seems a bit abnormal in Esperanto is that Esperanto derivation is far more productive than even derivation-heavy natlangs, leading to irregularities in these sorts of changes being much more noticeable.

Also, as an aside, because "human-" is inherently adjectival, you would not say "humano" to mean "humane-ness", but "humaneco" (source). Adding the "-eco" suffix, meaning "the quality of" or something to that effect, is necessary for adjectival Esperanto roots. This is the very reason *why* Esperanto roots are said to have inherent part of speech, and it's a large part of why the "-eco" suffix exists in the first place.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Esperanto *roots* principally can basically form nouns/adjectives/adverbs and adverbs (and are not words themselves):

Endings:

* -o noun
* -a adjective
* -e adverb
* -i verb, infinitive

Roots and derived words:

* naci- "nation" - 'noun' root

+ nacio = nation
    + nacia = national
    + nacie = nationally
    + naciigi = nationalize, suffix -ig' = make ~
* pens- "thought" - 'verbal' root

+ penso = thought
    + pensema = thoughtful, suffix -em' = inclined to ~
    + pensi = think
    + pensado = thinking (the ~, noun), suffix -ad' = act of (repeated) ~ing
* hom- "human men/women" - 'noun' root

+ homo = human being
    + homa vivo = human life
    + homaro = humanity, -ar' = collection, the collection of humans
* human- = humane - 'adjective'

+ humanisto = humanist, -ist'
    + humaneco = humanism, the quality of being humane, -ec' = ~ity
    + humanismo = humanism, the philosophical movement

So actually the endings do not always guarantee a meaningful word, and the same for suffixes. Suffixes come into play. The hard thing is to know whether the root refers to a noun/adjective/verb. And for a verb whether it is transitive or intransitive.

***Weird*** in Esperanto is that the root itself is not used; say as noun/adjective/verb. It consistently requires an ending, despite the root often having an identifiable category. National languages have the same usage problems (roots not being flexed to every category), but do not have this redundancy of endings. For that they have ad-hoc pseudo-suffixes like -al and -ive.

One might argue that Chinese and English often do not make a distinction between parts of speech. The English *success* can either be noun or verb. However Esperanto was made similar to the European languages but clear.

Note for a conlang one cannot simply drop then noun ending and assume every root to be a noun. You would then have to determine whether always a noun is present.

The exceptions to non-standalone roots are prepositions, numbers and such.

* kun = with, in company of; a word, "preposition"

+ kuna = common, communal
    + kune = together
    + kuniĝi = come together, -iĝ' = become
* tri = three, a word

+ trio = trio, group of three
    + tria = third
    + trie = thirdly
    + trioblo = threefold, -obl' = multiple
    + triono = a third 1/3, -on' = fraction
    + triope = by three, in threes, -op' = group of ~

Sorry if this answer is a bit Esperanto heavy, but a conlang might benefit from this nice system. How about just -a for nouns: *scola, biblioteca, bulgaria*?

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Tags: grammar, esperanto, list-of-languages, parts-of-speech
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title: Is there a middle-written language?

text:
# Question
Title: Is there a middle-written language?
## Real languages

I am aware of several types of writing systems.

The first one would be **left to right** and a prime example is **English** and also most of other languages, no matter if they use letters or other symbols.

Another type would be **right to left**, which can be seen in *Hebrew* writing:

As you can see, the text in the image selected by me for illustration, a digital user interface of a Hebrew keyboard, is right bound.

In the above image you can see Japanese text, which is traditionally read from **top to bottom** in either horizontal direction, in which I mean that both existed, not that you can read one text both from **right to left** and **left to right** after going **top to bottom**.

## Constructed languages

Now I am wondering whether there is a *constructed* language that reads from the middle. I am pretty sure that there is no traditional language that does this, hence I am attending here.

Let me just create a concept here for you to understand. In such a language *above rows* would have the *same meaning*. In that case it is read horizontally, but from the middle, so that it does not matter if something appears on the left or right side.

Another example:

You might be able to understand what I mean by saying "*middle-written*", i.e. you always start in the middle.

### Conclusion

I think that a language like this should be really interesting and maybe useful, thus I am curious whether or not a constructed language written quite like this exists.

# Answer
The best possible approach to a writing system "from the middle" is probably a text spiralling outwards.

One famous artefact, the Phaistos Disk, shows a spiral layout of the text, but is is unknown whether it should be read inwards (most scholars prefer this) or outwards and the writing system is still undeciphered.

Your graphical samples suggest a symmetric progression of symbols to the right and left—I think this is unrealistic because lazyness and economy of writing will soon lead to the abandonment of one of the symmetric halves, leaving either right-to-left or -left-to-right writing.
> 16 votes

# Answer
There is something about language, which seems so obvious to us humans that it is rarely stated: Language is encoded in a linear, one-dimensional fashion. The words you utter (and the sillables in those words; and the phonemes in those sillables) form an ordered sequence in time. Imagine e.g. dicating a table to someone else: You have to pick a certain manner of saying each item in the table (e.g. "each row after one another" vs. "each column after another") You have to come up with a *map* (and agree upon with your correspondent!) from the two-dimensional paper to the one-dimensional verbal language.

Now, picking a direction of writing is perfectly analogous to drawing a curve (a line) on your writing material. There are many different ways you can do such a thing, the ones that natural languages use have a tendency to be *sensible* by virtue of being simple to write down, and not too ambiguous to read. Some examples (with no claim to completeness):

* left-to-right (see e.g. Latin script)
* right-to-left (see e.g. Arabic script)
* top-to-bottom (see e.g. Japanese)
* spiraling inwards, both clockwise and anticlockwise
* spiraling outwards, both clockwise and anticlockwise
* in the manner of the furrows a plough makes; (also with arbitrary starting directions, and perhaps vertically instead of horizontally)

Unfortunately, I did not quite understand your own examples, as they seem to violate that basic rule of being linearly encoded and not redundant. You can of course come up with orderings like "975312468" or "864213579"; which can certainly be described as "reading from the middle in a horizontal way". The problem with those is that it feels very cumbersome to write or read in such a fashion, as your eyes have to skip around way too much.
> 7 votes

# Answer
Some of Trent Pehrson's ornamental scripts (for conlangs) fit this description somewhat, in that they lack a sense of formal arrangement and can be organised in very creative ways which sometimes appear to focus on a central hub. Trent is a gifted calligrapher and I urge you to check out examples of his outstanding work: http://idrani.perastar.com/ISMS\_orthography.htm

Maybe start here: http://idrani.perastar.com/orthography/ksatlai/eikiyo.html

I have designed concentric systems, where an utterance is written beginning with a central shape, enclosed in another shape, enclosed in another shape, and so on. Both Mayan glyphs and Jonathan Gabel's Mayan-inspired Sitelen Sitelen script for writing Toki Pona use enclosure to some degree, though not to the same extent as my example, which produced interesting but unwieldy heavily concentric text objects. (I started to think about making 3D realisations where the text would be read by cutting through the object and reading it in various ways sort of like tree lines.)

Recently I started work on a hub-and-spoke type script with no attached spoken language, where sentences are conceived of as wheels with different areas of the wheel being reserved for different syntactic roles, using a small glyph set of symbols whose meaning alters depending on its position in the wheel. These spokes can have spokes of their own. These sentence wheels can be combined around a central hub to create multi-sentence texts: the central hub contains emotional information about the writer's attitude towards the meaning of the text, and organisational information to help the reader decode the whole.

I also designed a phonetic abugida (originally for Pandunia, not that it needs or wants it!) arranged something like hangeul, with the oddity that words with more than three syllables are written with double glyphs which combine left- and right-facing halves: the left-most syllable cluster marks its vowels to the left, and the right-most syllable cluster marks its vowels to the right. The overall arrangement of each glyph is also bottom to top (I was sick of scripts assuming that you must always start at the top for everything...) See this bizarrely coloured example made in Pics Art of the Pandunia word 'musikosake', music bag, written first without vowels, and secondly with. The left-most half encodes 'musiko', the right-most 'sake'; m is at the bottom left, above it s, above it k; s appears again on the right, then k above it. Aesthetically the vowels are meant to look like bubbles floating upwards, and the letter shapes are designed so as not to impede the flow of the eye even though information is encoded on both sides of the main glyph.

This gave rise to the idea that words in a sentence should be arranged similarly, in balanced pairs or pyramidal shapes starting from the centre of the base. One could write on a square page by turning it lozenge-way, beginning above the middle corner-to corner line, writing from the middle first one way then the other, then going above, creating a pyramid fitting into the paper shape; then repeating under the line by turning the page upside down. Or by writing in upwards columns up to four glyphs wide, where the central or centre-left glyph is the first, aiming to keep syntactic groups such as phrases within one row of, at a maximum, 24 syllables. This would produce columns of glyphs read as 1, 12, 213, and 2134 depending on their weight. Whichever macroarrangement one might choose, overall its arrangement as a script is centrally focused in various ways, inspired by the central focus of each glyph.

I would say this has some precedent in various South Asian scripts such as Thai in which, whilst there is a firm left-right directionality in the flow of the syllabic characters, within each character there is a much more chaotic flow of information.

Rikchik's fascinating writing system is also arguably graphically 'middle-leading': https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/rikchik.htm

As to whether any natural scripts do what you're asking about to any significant extent, other than the example about re Egyptian hieroglyphs and the minor concentric features of Mayan about which I am no expert, I am not aware of any examples - which doesn't at all mean they don't exist.
> 4 votes

# Answer
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written in any direction (LTR, RTL, TTB, BTT). On ornamental pieces and buildings, writing was frequently started at the center (e.g. the central temple gate) working outward in both directions. The best readable example I can show you is a replica of this writing style mimicked on the Memphis Zoo entrance:

You can derive the reading direction by checking in which directions the human and animal glyphs are looking.

Some of the hierglyphs are modern inventions for animals unknown to Ancient Egypt, but most of it checks out.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Since most text is by its nature sequential, then if you start in tthe middle you will have to go in some direction from there, hence the various suggestions of spirals, top to bottom, boustrophedon, etc. But all of these methods have a direction, even if that direction changes as you go along. Even in normal writing you could start in the middle, just by leaving the first half of the first line blank.

The only way I can see to avoid this directionality is to set off in two directions *at once*. You could print something along with its mirror image, but in practice you would read one bit or the other. You could divide the information, for example by printing the vowels on the left, right to left, and the consonants on the right, left to right, but this would be hard to read.

But there is one other possibility which might count: how about a parallel text. You could print the Koran (Q'uran) in Arabic on the left, with a line-by line translation in English on the right, or, similarly with the Hebrew Bible. I can't find any on the internet, but there must be one somewhere? Anyone interested in the translation *per se* would have to look at both sides to see how something was translated.
> 2 votes

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


# Question
Title: Did a majority of followers of Ido indeed switch over to Occidental?
The Wikipedia article on Occidental/Interlingue says (in this version):

> According to the Occidental magazine Cosmoglotta in 1928, a majority of Ido adherents took up Occidental in place of Ido.

Obviously, *Cosmosglotta* isn't an unbiased publication venue. Is there any independent evidence that this switching of language actually took place?

# Answer
I'm as pro-Occidental as they come (it's the only auxiliary language that I support) but I came across that article in 1928 during my typing up the archives of Cosmoglotta and that article is nothing more than Ric Berger wishful thinking. He unfortunately spent just as much time attacking Ido as he did supporting Occidental, and kept on proclaiming it to be moribund and ready to collapse for some 20 years.

Here's the article in question that he wrote in 1928 on the Ido conference from which he concluded that Ido was on its last legs:

http://cosmoglotta.pbworks.com/w/page/132587775/Cosmoglotta%20A%20053%20%28oct%201928%29 (Title: Raport del Occidental-Observator Ric. Berger al Association «Cosmoglotta», Wien.)

So the answer is no. However, it's also true that the majority of the Occidentalists at that time were once Idists, from Berger to Gär to Ramstedt to Pigal to de Guesnet and all the rest. There was definitely a large influx from Ido to Occidental, and Occidental as far as I can tell was the most active auxiliary language after Esperanto by the late 30s and into the 1940s. Matejka and Berger had a lot of back-and-forth in the 1920s to early 1930s until Matejka decided to move over to Occidental, which he stayed with until his death in the late 1990s. He's probably the most prominent example of a major Idist who went full in on Occidental. But Berger hadn't taken into account the other source for new Idists, namely new users who weren't satisfied with Esperanto but still liked the overall concept (i.e. the people that thought that Zamenhof *almost* got it right).

Anyhow, I removed that sentence from Wikipedia last year when going through the Cosmoglotta archives because it certainly isn't backed up by anything besides Berger's wishes.
> 7 votes

# Answer
r/Ido has twenty times as many subscribers as r/Interlingue. While comparing reddit subscribers may not be the most scientific method, it's probably fair to assume this reflects their popularity in general. It's impossible to really know if most Ido-ists switched to Occidental back in the 1920s, but even if they did I think it's fair to say that later generations preferred Ido to Interlingue. Perhaps confusion with the more popular Interlingua is to blame.
> 4 votes

---
Tags: history, speech-communities, ido, occidental
---


title: Transliterating toki pona to hebrew

text:
# Question
Title: Transliterating toki pona to hebrew
What would be the best choice of niqqud to transliterate toki pona vowel sounds using Hebrew? I'm trying to use the niqqud that would be closest to what is normally used in Hebrew. Should 'e' be אֶ or אֵ? Should o be וֹ or אֹ? Should 'a' be אַ or אָ? Is there a real difference between them or is it important? I would normally omit the niqqud, since toki pona is minimalist & somewhat ambiguous anyway, but I would prefer to use the most phonetically accurate niqqud, when I do use them. There is stress on the first syllable, but no long vowels. would it be unusual to write 'pana' as ַפָנה to show that the first 'a' is stressed?

Normally I would write 'seli' as סלי, but with vowels would סֶלִי or סֵלִי be better?

toki would be טוקי, but should I want to use vowels, should I use טוֹקִי or טֹקִי

I did find this tool for transliterating to hebrew, but it ignores niqqud altogether. 'O' is always written as 'ו', & 'E' isn't written at all, even at the end of a word. At the beginning of a word it's just 'א'.

The vowel sounds are: a: father e: get o: more i: peel (I would use either ִא or אִי. Is there a difference?) u: food (I would use וּ. Would it be better to use אֻ instead?)

# Answer
Here are a few ways to deal with the problem of marking the vowels unambiguously:

### Style 1 - normal Hebrew orthography

Considering the fact that there are no length distinctions or gemination, a transliteration into Hebrew would normally use exclusively these diacritics to represent the vowels:

```
a אָ *
e אֵ **
i אִי
o אוֹ
u אוּ

```

`*` add ה at the end of a word; and after letters other than א, add א in the middle of a word

`**` add ה at the end of a word

In addition, on נ (the only possibly coda in Toki Pona) the diacritic נְ would be used (except as last letter of word). Stress isn't normally marked even in vowelized Hebrew (apart from liturgy or texts for learners), and it's entirely unnecessary in Toki Pona, since there is no phonemic stress.

The advantage of this is that it follows ordinary conventions and is most easily intelligible to someone reading in Hebrew. The disadvantage is that implementing this kind of orthography is far from algorithmic and includes unnecessary information in the spelling.

### Style 2 - minimalistic Hebrew orthography

Since Toki Pona is a minimalistic language, I think that a different transliteration convention would better suit it, to avoid redundancy in writing it. There is precedent for a more minimalistic transcription in the convention used for transliterating, e.g., Akkadian into Hebrew. Modifying it to suit Toki Pona's vowels, we get something like this:

```
a אָ
e אֵ
i אִ
o אֹ
u אֻ

```

### Style 3 - Yiddish orthography

A third option, if you want to minimize use of diacritics, is to follow Yiddish spelling conventions. The only required diacritic is to distinguish between the two forms of א. The Yiddish convention of using וו instead of ו as a consonant can be safely ignored in Toki Pona. And actually, since there are no o/u minimal pairs in Toki Pona, you could get rid of all diacritics if you instead choose to use ו for both vowels, at the price of losing some information (style 4).

```
a אַ or א
e ע or ע
i אי
o אָ or ו
u ו

```

### Sample differences

```
Roman x Hebrew x Minimal x Yiddish x 4-vowel
a     x אָ      x אָ       x אַ       x א
akesi x אָקֵסִי   x אָקֵסִ    x אַקעסי   x אקעסי
anpa  x אָנְפָה   x אָנפָ    x אַנפאַ    x אנפא
mije  x מִייֵה   x ֵמִי     x מייע    x מייע
mute  x מוּטֵה   x ֵמֻט     x מוטע    x מוטע
seli  x סֵלִי    x ִסֵל     x סעלי    x סעלי
toki  x טוֹקִי   x טֹקִ     x טאָקי    x טוקי
wawa  x וָאוָה   x וָוָ     x ואַואַ    x ואוא

```
> 3 votes

---
Tags: toki-pona
---


# Question
Title: State-based analogue to distributive case
I am developing conlang that has grammatical cases system for nominals that for each spatial case there is state-based case.

In Finnic languages grammatical cases that denote states occur, examples in Finnish:

* **Essive** (ESS) with the ending *-na*/*-nä* denotes being in state, corresponds to the combination 'as X' in English. *lapsi* \- 'child', *lapsena* \- 'as child / being a child'
* dialectal **Exessive** (EXESS) with the ending *-nta*/*-ntä* denotes a departure from state, corresponding to English 'from being X...'. *lapsi* \- 'child', *lapsenta* \- 'from being child'
* **Translative** (TRANSL) with the ending *-ksi* denotes a transition into state, corresponds to English 'to (becoming) X'. *aikuinen* \- 'adult', *aikuiseksi* \- 'to adult'. *lapsenta aikuiseksi* = '\[maturing\] from child to adult'.

There is clear spatial analogy:

* Locative ↔ Essive
* Ablative ↔ Exessive
* Allative ↔ Translative

You can construct state-based analogues to other spatial cases. For example, for the Prolative case ('through X') we can make Essive-Prolative, which would mean 'passing through a state of being X / through way of being X"

There is a Hungarian grammatical case called **Distributive** (DISTR) with the ending *-nként*, which is equivalent to 'per X'. For example, *hét* \- 'week', *hetenként* \- 'weekly, once per week'. It has a clear spatial-temporal nature.

I am trying to come up with a state based analogue for this case. Let's call it '*Essive-distributive*', but I am stuck with the expansion of the analogy. What exactly can 'per being in state' mean? Can anyone suggest a meaning and usage for such a case?

# Answer
Interesting concept for a case. In my interpretation this kind of an abstract distributive case would apply in sentences like this one (a probably very clumsy reformulation of a famous first sentence in literature)

*Every unhappy family is different **in their unhappiness***.

I looked up the really case-rich conlang Ithkuil and did not find a precedent for this kind of case. Feel free to name it by any name you like. When you don't have an own idea, I suggest *respective case* for that one.
> 4 votes

# Answer
I suspect you could just make up a name. That's certainly a legitimate glossopoetical strategy.

In English, i'd just call it a distributive sense of the state-noun and have done with it: *Such-and-such only happens thrice per childhood, you know!*

Or ...*thrice childhoodly* if you prefer!

I frankly don't get the difference between LOC/ABL/ALL & ESS/EXESS/TRANSL, which I'm guessing must be a Finnish Thing.

I would understand "in the child" and "in childhood" to be locative senses of the thing-noun and state-noun respectively; "from the child" & "from childhood" likewise are ablative. So it is for "per child" and "per childhood", being the distributive sense.
> 3 votes

# Answer
If I understand you correctly (big *if* there!), you are looking for a periodical state that repeats, not necessarily at the same time interval (though the two might in reality be linked) — as it happens we are using the sun rising as a proxy for the time passing.

This could be a tree blossoming, or losing its leaves. It could be the tide coming in. It could be birds migrating and passing through. It could be a woman's menstrual cycle. It could be being asleep/awake.
> 2 votes

---
Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, morphology, case
---


# Question
Title: Good Real World Languages to Base Proto-Lang Vocabulary
I'm working on a conlang that requires a LOT of work, particularly in the sound changes from proto-lang to the current version.

Instead of creating a whole set of words from nothing, I am considering using lexicon from an existing language and just putting it through sound changes to break it up and save time.

Factors to consider:

-Meaning simplicity- few to no double-meanings or idioms.

-Rare- Relatively few speakers, perhaps under 5 million to greatly decrease the chances of someone picking up on it (that may be too high or low, I'm not sure myself)

-Phonology- Complex enough to do some interesting sound changes but simple enough to easily transcribe (15 to 25 maybe?)

-Phonotactics- CVC ? This should be easy to copy but also to evolve.

-Availability- Online dictionaries readily available.

Note: I do not want to use a random word generator, as I am terrible at asigning meanings to words just from looking at them.

# Answer
> 5 votes
One suggestion I'd give: use Proto-Indo-European lexicon for the words you want in your own proto-language, then use a word generator to create the actual roots of your language. That way you're not going to run into the problem of a having a word list that accidentally includes terms your proto-speakers would be unlikely to have.

# Answer
> 2 votes
I would probably go for a fairly homogeneous language, ie one that hasn't had too much contact with other languages.

English, for example, contains words originating from many other languages (German, Norse, Latin, French,...), so your resulting language will probably also appear mixed wrt to word roots. Other languages (eg maybe Icelandic) will have had less external influences (especially if they are politically controlled), and so the vocabulary will generally be more homogeneous, and might be a better source for you. Unless, of course, your conlang is meant for a trading/colonial society.

# Answer
> 2 votes
Try Khmer, (Cambodian) it has about 17 million speakers, a fun alphabet (abugida) where the two different series of consonants changes the vowel marker's sound. There's no inflection, it's very analytical, and it has a ridiculous number of glottal stops.

For the most part the phonotactics are CVC, but you don't say most of the consonants at the end of a word and instead do a glottal stop. It's an asian language, but it's not tonal.

As a bonus it also has a completely different vocabulary depending on whether you are talking about the king or not.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Well, you could use any language that has a lexicon...

If someone working out your source language by following the sound change bread crumb trail is problematic or undesirable, what is preventing you from simply using a word generator? Good ones allow you to define phonology and syllable shapes.

I used Awkwords for a recent project (creating a long text of gibberish) and found it quite suitable. I think it would work for your needs as well.

# Answer
> 1 votes
A lot of good suggestions are already in here, here are some more

* Use another conlang as a base for your vocabulary, for an unusual feel I suggest Volapük or Lojban
* Independent of the base you choose, apply some unnatural transformation to the roots to make them look unfamiliar. Potential unnatural transformations include reverting the roots (spelling them backwards), syllable swapping like in Verlan, or a cyclic permutation of the letters (putting the first letter at the end or the last letter at the start)

---
Tags: conlang-creation, naturalism, list-of-languages, vocabulary
---


# Question
Title: Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works?
Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works, that made extinct all fallacies that could be made extinct by creating a language from scratch to avoid them?

Some example of those fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Verbal\_fallacies

# Answer
> 6 votes
Looking at the list of fallacies you quote, I would say this is not possible — most of them have got nothing to do with the language itself, but with the way it is used. It's a bit like making a kitchen knife that you cannot use to hurt someone with.

The Fallacy of Composition is related to reasoning. I cannot think of any way that a language can make that impossible. As long as you have expressive power in the language to express anything, you can express incorrect reasoning as well. The same goes for False Attribution, which is about how you use language, not anything in the language itself.

Loki's Wager refers to the absence of clear definitions or boundaries. The world is not clear-cut, so language cannot be like that either. Defining where the head starts and the neck ends is unrelated to language. Unless you want to accompany each word in that language with a *book* that defines exactly what it means.

Even the Fallacy of Accent is a problem, unless you take stress patterns out of the language, which then is a lot less usable, as stress is a good way of expressing nuances of meaning.

Syntactic ambiguity is about the only one which could be avoided through careful language design. But most 'usable' languages have some of that as well, especially if they are reasonably complex.

Most of these verbal fallacies are to do with the way you use language and express meanings, which you could do in any language. Syntactic ambiguities crop up more often than you would think, but unless you are a linguist, you won't even notice most of them, as it is usually very clear which meaning is the appropriate one in the context.

So, my answer is no, because it is not even possible to do that.

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


# Question
Title: Do toki pona speakers, in practice, permit compounding more than three words?
In toki pona, compounding multiple words together is possible. For example:

> tomo: room/box/structure/home
> telo: water/fluid
> tomo telo: bathroom

It also allows compounding three words together:

> tomo pi telo nasa: a bar
> kiwen mun laso: blue moon rocks

This is where the official grammar stops, and the official stance is that larger statements are ungrammatical. However, I am wondering if it is common *in practice* for people to compound more than three words.

Suppose I wanted to say “the broken yellow dome hut.” The official grammar would have me say something in a full sentence:

> tomo sike pakala li jelo.

However, despite the rules of grammar, do people ever say:

> tomo sike pakala jelo.

Or include other compounds of many words with *pi*?

(Note: I am **not** asking whether this is grammatical according to official rules. I am asking whether colloquial toki pona permits this.)

# Answer
> 16 votes
In general, we don't want to make descriptions so long and complicated as to be difficult to follow. That is more important than exact word count, in my experience (as an admin of the "toki pona taso" group on Facebook). For example, if someone mentioned a "poki kala suli pi telo ala", I wouldn't find that at all strange as a description of an empty aquarium. However, if someone spoke of an "ilo sona lili pakala laso", I'd probably have to read it a few times to figure out what they're talking about (in this case I'm thinking of a dysfunctional blue laptop). So compounds with "pi" tend to have a bit more leeway because that groups the words together somewhat, making it easier to decipher. But shorter, simpler descriptions are generally preferred, and in practice this usually does turn out to be three words or less.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Yes, but when this happens, you have to consider two possibilities:

1. This is really a content word followed by many, many modifiers
2. A particle has been omitted.

For the toki pona parse I wrote, I have an arbitrary cut off of something like 5 modifiers.

```
telo kala seli jelo waso wawa kulupu soweli jan li suli.
The beasty, familial, powerful, bird-like, yellow, hot, fish water is big.

```

(that doesn't really mean anything, it just makes the parser blow up)

http://tokipona.net/parser/L?i=C

In the corpus of public texts, heads followed by 4 or more modifiers almost never legitimately happen, unless someone forgot a necessary particle.

That said, they are valid, e.g.

```
mi jo e soweli lili lili lili lili lili lili lili lili lili lili lili lili.
I have a small...small animal.

```

# Answer
> 4 votes
Some of the coffee circumlocutions are rather long like "telo wawa pimejo seli", but in practice you can find shorter ones sufficient in the context

There is even a Reddit about the question: Toki Pona coffee.

# Answer
> 0 votes
(I do think this would be more appropriate as a comment somewhere, but sigh)

As the others have pointed out, the primary reason for a rarity of noun phrases beyond three words is due to an increasing difficulty to understand the phrase with each added modifier, however it is my hypothesis at least that this may only truly apply to written communication as opposed to verbal.

Though I have little experience verbally communicating with toki pona (I can't find much anyone who wants to learn in my vicinity TT^TT), it isn't hard to imagine that the aid of body language, and vocalization, perhaps among other things, could make longer strings possible, without being too difficult to grasp.

The only thing beyond that is how reasonable the phrase is. I think in jan Masiju's example, whether using verbal or written communication, my brain would always break at "waso".

# Answer
> 0 votes
I don't know if it's "pu" (official) or not, but the whole point of toki pona is that it's very simple/minimalist so the idea is not to say any more than is absolutely necessary to describe something so I would think it would be discouraged. 'coffee' is generally translated as 'telo pimeja wawa'(dark water/liquid of strength/energy).

---
Tags: toki-pona
---


# Question
Title: What is the word “li” in Toki pona, grammatically?
In Toki pona, words are never inflected, and many words can act as a noun, verb or adjective in different contexts. The word "li" usually separates the subject from a predicate, and “e” goes before the object (in SVO order). With soweli (animal), moku (eat, food) and kili (fruit), one can say:

> soweli li moku e kili

The animal eats the fruit.

This is the usage listed in the dictionary section of the official book, Toki Pona: the Language of Good:

> li. PARTICLE (between any subject except *mi* alone or *sina* alone and its verb; also to introduce a new verb for the same subject)

But there is **another** usage, as seen in phrase:

> soweli li ijo

Animals are things (*ijo* means thing).

It seems that this usage increases the ambiguity, because

> soweli li moku

can mean both ”The animal is eating” (with moku as an intransitive verb), or ”animals are food”.

What role does the *li* actually have in this phrase?

# Answer
*Li* in these examples could be described as a copula \- this is the name for a word whose function is to link a subject and predicate.
> 6 votes

# Answer
Calling `li` a *particle* or *predicate marker* is correct and not misleading. A Toki Pona clause can have more than one predicate. `li` never marks a non-predicate. It also appears on every predicate except when that predicate *is the first one in the clause and the subject is* exactly *`mi` or* exactly *`sina`* (101) or when preceded by the vocative/imperative particle `o` (102).

I think a good way to analyze this would be to say that every indicative predicate obligatorily has a predicate marker, but sometimes it's null.

```
mi  moku  li   pakala. (101)
I   food  LI  mistake.
I eat and destroy.

o   lukin     e    ni. (102)
IMP   see  DObj  that.
watch this.

```

Here's a fragment of (my best guess of) the Toki Pona grammar. I haven't seen any examples of stacking imperative phrases, so I don't know whether *look and say* would be `o lukin li toki` or `o lukin o toki`.

Also, in Toki Pona verb phrases and noun phrases are different syntactically. For instance, `*sina moku e soweli ala soweli.` cannot be used to mean *are you a vegetarian*.

```
LI        := 0 | "li"
PredInd   := LI VP {PP} | LI NP
ClauseInd := NP [PredInd]
PredImp   := "o" VP {PP} | "o" NP
ClauseImp := NP PredImp | PredImp

```

I'm not thrilled with this analysis because of the asymmetry between indicative and imperative clauses. Unifying the clause types, however, would predict that `*li moku.` is valid. As far as I can tell, Toki Pona does not permit null subjects in indicative clauses.

I can think of two potential alternative analyses for `li`: A) it's a pronoun (like in Example 4 Longgu on this WALS article or B) it's a preposition. I'll try to show that both of those analyses lead to bad predictions.

A) `li` as pronoun.

This falls apart for a couple of reasons. It predicts that `mi moku li pakala` would be invalid and that the correct form would be `mi moku mi pakala`. In reality, both forms are fine.

`li` as a pronoun also predicts that `*li moku` would be valid since it would contain an explicit subject under that analysis.

Also, `*mi moku li.` cannot be used to mean *I eat it*.

B) `li` as preposition.

If `li` were a preposition, (103) and (104) would both be valid.

```
Mi pakala e moku. (103)
I ruin the food.

*Mi e moku li pakala. (104)
*I ruin the food.

```

If `li` were a preposition, the following would be invalid.

```
Ona mute li toki ala toki? (105)
Are they speaking?

```
> 7 votes

# Answer
Mapping word class jargon from one language to another is a dicy project. Lojbanists decided that they needed to invent entirely new words for word class jargon. That said...

All the toki pona particles (o, li, e, pi, la) act most similar to Japanese particles or English clitics, eg. "the". Clitics bind to a phrase. There are other tests for what counts as a clitic.

They are semantically bleached, do not act like *content* words. "li" in particular introduces a noun phrase or a verb phrase.
> 6 votes

# Answer
The syntactical li structure was inspired by Toki Pisin ...

and in an online Tok Pisin grammar I found :

\[...\] Tok Pisin has its own grammatical rules.

First of all, look at the following sentences:

Mi wok. 'I worked.' Yu wok. 'You worked.' Em i wok. 'He/she worked.' Tom i wok. 'Tom worked.'

Note that the last two sentences have the little word i before the verb. (Remember that in Tok Pisin, i is pronounced something like "ee".) This little word is called a "predicate marker", and it must occur in a sentence when subject is em or a noun (like "Tom" or "the bicycle"). This rule is certainly different from anything found in English.

http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/tokpisin.html

So I presume that 'li' is also a "predicate marker" ...
> 3 votes

# Answer
In some sentences it's a lot like 'は' in Japanese 'タナカさん先生です' Mr Tanaka **is** a teacher. The toki pona equivalent would be 'jan Tanaka **li** jan pi pana sona'.
> 0 votes

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# Question
Title: what real world language does this look like?
This isn't really about a conlang, it's an alternative orthography but I didn't know where else to ask it. I found an alternative orthography for english called 'EBEO'(Even Better English Orthography) at https://alternatescriptbureau.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/ebeo-a-phonetic-orthography-for-english/. it uses the letters á, à, ā, ȧ, é, è, ē, í, ó, ò, ō. ú, ū, ù, đ, ŋ, ś, ŧ, ŵ & ź in addition to the standard english letters. What language does that look like (ŵat láŋúaj das đát luk lāk?)

Here's the Universal Declaration of Human Rights & the days of the week in EBEO:

Ól hùmen bíŋs ar born frí ánd ikūl in dignití ánd rāts. Đē ar éndàd wiŧ rízen ánd konśens ánd śud ákt tòerds wan enađer in e spirit of brađerhud. (Artikel 1 of đe Ùniversal Déklárēśen of Hùmen Rāts)

dēz av đ wík

* mandē
* túzdē
* winzdē
* ŧerzdē
* frādē
* sáterdē
* sandē

dē is day

# Answer
Well, it looks like a sample of an English based creole language written down by an amateur linguist or a missionary in a private orthography. It looks like a first attempt on a writing system for a previously unwritten language, it does not look really ripe: Too many diacritics on the vowels, and some confusable diacritics, too, e.g., **á, à, ā, ȧ**, what do they become in handwriting?

EDIT: Also important: What happens when all diacritics are left out, is this writing system still readable and understandable, or does it fail under such circumstances?
> 2 votes

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# Question
Title: Should languages spoken by two similar races have the same protolanguage, or can they be not related by protolanguage?
Should languages spoken by two similar races have the same protolanguage, or can they be not related by protolanguage? I guess they should be similar for example in phonetics or in some other features (grammar?). But should they be created from one protolanguage?

the same question on worldbuilding.SE

# Answer
> 4 votes
I guess this is up to you as the world builder.

Note that there is no known connection between language and race, all human beings no matter of of skin colour, hair, or other characteristics used to define "race" can learn any human language as their first language. Large language families like Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, or Indogermanic cross the boundaries of continents and races.

So again, it is up to you, depending on the in-world history, geography, and your personal preferences (some conlang inventors like modelling diachronics, other prefer to invent unrelated languages).

Note also that there is a phenomenon called *sprachbund*: genetically unrelated languages develop common features due to close contact. There is a famous *sprachbund* on the Balkan, there is Standard Avarage European, there are the Pacific Northwest languages forming a sprachbund with some interesting and maybe insipiring common features.

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