# Question
Title: How should my conlang enable arbitrarily large integers to be said?
Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. It's named **Leksah**.

Leksah is heavily influenced by the programming language Haskell. As such, Leksah has only 3 parts of speech:

* **Literals**, which usually correspond to nouns. These are always written titlecased. (Yep, like German!)
* **Functions**, which usually correspond to verbs.
* *The* particle "**-el**", which applies a function.

As such, Leksah has word order **VSO**.

Yet there is a special kind of literals: **Numerals**. There are infinite number of integers, and I cannot make every single new word for every integer.

Furthermore, it seems no natural languages can spell every integers. The maximum units are "vigintillion" for English, "무량대수"(無量大數) for (Sino-)Korean and so on.

That said, let me introduce some aspects of my world. The main residents of my world are angels (dubbed **moderators** in my world), and some of those whose "duties" are related to math (cryptologists in particular?) has obligations involving huge numbers. That's why my conlang must enable such numbers to be said.

So here's a sketch of how numerals would be dealt. Integers shall be written and said in decimal. Here's how digits are said:

* 0 = "Nad" (from **NAD**AZERO)
* 1 = "Un" (from **UN**AONE)
* 2 = "Bis" (from **BIS**SOTWO)
* 3 = "Ter" (from **TER**RATHREE)
* 4 = "Kar" (from **KAR**TEFOUR)
* 5 = "Pan" (from **PAN**TAFIVE)
* 6 = "Sox" (from **SOX**ISIX)
* 7 = "Set" (from **SET**TESEVEN)
* 8 = "Ok" (from **OK**TOEIGHT)
* 9 = "Nov" (from **NOV**ENINE)

Though these are literals, as an exception, they can be applied by "-el". In this context, it concatenates digits to make bigger numbers:

* 42 = "KarelBis"
* 108 = "UnelNadelOk"
* 65535 = "SoxelPanelPanelTerelPan"

Note that the spellings are camelcased.

Yet I think there are some disadvantages compared to natural languages:

* This scheme wastes time when saying a power of 10. "10000" is spelled "UnelNadelNadelNadelNad".
* This scheme is very prone for a listener to accidentally omit or duplicate a digit, especially when the same digit is repeated.

How should I modify this scheme to avoid such situations? Is there any conlang can say arbitrarily large integers?

# Answer
> 1 votes
After some thinking, I think I can confirm how it should. Let me self-plagiarize from this post on Code Golf SE, with respect to the updated phonology and orthography.

Though this conlang's numeral system is still essentially decimal, it expresses run-length encoding on zeros. (Thanks @Austin for suggestion)

The basic words for the nonzero digits are:

* 1 = **uma**
* 2 = **piso**
* 3 = **terra**
* 4 = **qarte**
* 5 = **pamta**
* 6 = **soçi**
* 7 = **sete**
* 8 = **oto**
* 9 = **mowe**

Note that the vowels in these words are all positive. (Yep, now my conlang has vowel harmony.)

For every *positive* integer, with its decimal expansion, let **d** be the least significant nonzero digit.

* First, **d** shall be spelled out like above.
* Second, if **d** has any trailing zeros, the *length* of the zeros shall be spelled out recursively, with the lastly spelled word having its vowels replaced by their negative counterpart (represented by circumflexes).
* Third, if **d** was *not* the most significant digit, "wa" shall attach to the lastly spelled word as a suffix. And then **d** and its trailing zeros (if any) shall be stripped off, and the remaining digits shall be spelled out recursively.
* All the words spelling out an integer shall be hyphenated.

Examples:

* 1 = uma
* 2 = piso
* 7 = sete
* 10 = uma-ûmâ
* 11 = umawa-uma
* 12 = pisowa-uma
* 19 = mowewa-uma
* 20 = piso-ûmâ
* 42 = pisowa-qarte
* 69 = mowewa-soçi
* 100 = uma-pîsô
* 109 = mowewa-uma-ûmâ
* 440 = qarte-ûmâwa-qarte
* 666 = soçiwa-soçiwa-soçi
* 1945 = pamtawa-qartewa-mowewa-uma
* 2000 = piso-têrrâ
* 2022 = pisowa-pisowa-piso-ûmâ
* 2080 = oto-ûmâwa-piso-ûmâ
* 44099 = mowewa-mowewa-qarte-ûmâwa-qarte
* 44100 = uma-pîsôwa-qartewa-qarte
* 10^60 (one novemdecillion) = uma-soçi-ûmâ
* 10^63 (one vigintillion) = uma-terrawa-sôçî
* 10^63 + 2 × 10^33 (one vigintillion two decillion) = piso-terrawa-têrrâwa-uma-mowewa-pîsô
* 10^100 (googol) = uma-uma-pîsô
* 10^(10^100) (googolplex) = uma-uma-uma-pîsô

The asymptotic complexity of this numeral system has logarithmic upper bound. As for the lower bound, I haven't calculated it precisely, but it is at most super-logarithmic.

# Answer
> 8 votes
You could do what humans normally do when dealing with arbitrally long numbers - treat them as strings.
We don't normally use values higher than milion in daily life - would you dictate a 10 digit phone number\* as

"Six bilions\**, two hundred eighty three milions, one hundred eighty five thousands, three hundred seven"
Or as
"Six two eight three one eight five three zero seven"?

They could be grouped in sets of three digits (the holy trinity), and if you really wanted, you could prepend each set with triad ordering number (or names of saints if going for religious vibes)

"Six in 4th triad, two hundred eighty three in 3rd triad, one hundred eighty five in 2nd triad, three hundred seven in 1st triad".
OR
"Six in name of Michael, two hundred eighty three in name of Joseph, one hundred eighty five in name of Lucas, three hundred seven in name of Adam".

* Please don't call it. Using a beginning of very important constant as example.
\** Definition of bilion gets finicky based where you are, here means 1000 Milions.

# Answer
> 8 votes
In the spirit of functional programming, you can add run length encoding.

Practically speaking, we see that there is no more effective of a method for naming numbers than giving them a sequence of digits. This is exactly what we do in mathematics. 513843843246213513513813502162324713513541263 is simply best described as that series of digits.

So the issue is specifically that the people speaking your conlang come across cases with long strings of the same digit quite often (as we do).

The solution is to permit explicit run length encoding

The number 1000000 might be expressed as `1 (run 6 0)` a 1 followed by a run of 6 0s. This would also solve the issue of repeat numbers in a number. You might describe 16333333337 as `1 6 (run 8 3) 7`

If I can venture a guess as to how your Haskel based language works, I am guessing `1 6 (run 8 3) 7` would be read as "UnelSoxelConsRunelOkelTerSet," using "Run" as the phonem for this `run` operation, and inventing a new particle, "Cons" which starts a new cons list (you didn't mention this, but it strikes me as an essential particle for a Haskel based language. Haskell gets its power from directed acyclic graphs, not just sequences)

Note that the named quantities like million and billion are useful. They give us hints as to the rough size of the number before we hear every single digit. But for explicitness, run length encoding works fine. You might want to prefix large numbers with a number of digits as a hint.

For arbitrary large numbers, which may not run length encode well, a checksum may be in order. A well chosen check-summing scheme may also allow for correction of errors in communication, not just detection.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Both issues can be solved simultaneously.

Consider for a moment how you say 1 239 475 612 034 in English. It’s not (usually) said as:

> one two three nine four seven five six one two zero three four

Instead, it’s read out as:

> one trillion two hundred thirty nine billion four hundred seventy five million six hundred twelve thousand and thirty four

The ‘normal’ way to read it is much longer, but those extra words serve an important purpose, they provide information about where in the number you are, which in helps reduce errors (in information theory terms, they serve as a very limited form of in-band error correcting code).

The same feature of the language also makes powers of ten *very* compact.

For your language, you can go a step further, and make the names of the powers of ten composable. English does this to a limited degree for the tens and hundreds places (so, for example, you have ‘ten thousand’ and ‘one hundred million’), but there’s no reason that it needs to be limited to just a three-digit arrangement. The caveat is that I would expect digit grouping to match up with however wide this ends up betting before looping (so, for example, if you go with one million being the largest power of ten you have a special name for, I would expect the digit grouping in written form to separate digits into groups of 10).

# Answer
> 5 votes
For *precise* integers, I see no viable systematic alternative that covers them all up to arbitrary size. But often, you don't need precise integers with all digits specified, spelled out, and spoken. For *unprecise* integers you can design some spoken form of exponent notation (like 1.0E9 in some programming language notation).

# Answer
> 3 votes
If -el "applies", I'm not sure about using it between digits. By that logic, `KarelBis` would be `4` applied to `2`, so `2^4`. Going that route, and assuming base 10 is the more common counting system in your world, you would need a word for `10`, eg. `Dix` (from French). So `1001` would be `DixelDixelDixUn`: `10 * 10 * 10 + 1`. Or these moderators could use prime numbers (important in cryptography) to communicate among themselves. If -el is the concatenator for powers, and let's say -id is the concatenator for multiplication (and no concatenator for addition), then `4837560` would be **`TerelBisidTeridPanidSetidDixTeridKaridDixelDixKaridDixTer`**. That is, `2^3 x 3^1 x 5^1 x 7^1 x 13^1 x 443^1` with `443 = 4 * 10 * 10+4 * 10+3`, though I don't see a way to put that in parenthesis. Harder than spelling out the digits!

# Answer
> 1 votes
You can have some fun with this.

If the moderators resemble humans and are not good at repeating identical strings an exact number of times, then you can use something like Hebrew numerals or Greek numerals but with short syllables. The idea being that you effectively have multiple series of digits that cover different place value positions. Combining this idea with a simple collection of syllables that run in some order will give you a number system that's pronounceable but lets you skip zeroes when the gaps can be determined from context.

One problem with a system like this is that it takes up a lot of *space*. Either many numbers will be homophones with non-numbers or the numbers will be occupying some very important real estate and the rest of the language will have to adapt.

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# Question
Title: Language statistics and constructed languages
Natural languages are known to follow some statistical laws, the most famous among them is Zipf's law.

Are there published studies of some conlangs with respect to statistical laws of language, not necessarily restricted to Zipf's law, and what are the results of them?

# Answer
Zipf's Law and other similar laws regarding the statistical behaviour/properties of languages are studied in Quantitative Linguistics. Using QL as a search term together with the name of a conlang (eg Esperanto) will likely lead to some relevant results:
> 1 votes

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# Question
Title: Two different symbols representinɡ a phoneme
How would I represent multiple transliterations for one phoneme in a chart?

I was thinking something like this: `⟨k~q⟩ /k/`

It might work, though it doesn't make the most sense, and I would prefer to use the more common method \[if there is one.\]

# Answer
I would use a comma: `⟨k⟩, ⟨q⟩`.

The tilde is a reasonable option, since it means "alternates with depending on context" (i.e. `/k~q/` is a phoneme where `[k]` alternates with `[q]`), but I also associate it very strongly with phonology; when first seeing `⟨k~q⟩ /k/` I mentally transposed the brackets and thought the glyph `⟨k⟩` meant the phoneme `/k~q/`.
> 7 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, phonology, phonetics
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# Question
Title: How to structure sentences to be able to distinguish between verbs, nouns, and adjectives etc.?
In my budding conlang called Tune, I have "base" words which start and end with a consonant, either 3, 4, 5, or 6 sounds, with 1 or 2 vowels. Examples:

* tun ("tune")
* tunan ("tunahn")
* torvan ("torvahn")
* twin ("tween")

*(where each Roman/Latin letter has a specific sound associated with it).*

I was initially thinking of having these "bases" mean simultaneously a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Basically they would mean the full range of possibilities of that concept. Then you would append a `-a` to make it an explicit noun, append a `-i` to make it a verb, and a `-u` to make it an adjective. But the problem with this is that every word now is *at least 2 syllables*. I noticed that at least in English, most words are 1 syllable, if I were to guess, most words in regular English conversation are:

* 1 syllable (50%)
* 2 syllables (25%)
* 3 syllables (15%)
* 4+ (10%)

Just a feeling there, but the feeling is many words are simply 1 syllable. I would like to make most words one syllable if possible. But that means ditching my idea of the suffixes potentially.

So I'm wondering, if every word starts/ends with a consonant and is one or two syllables, how will you be able to tell which is a noun, verb, or adjective (or determiner/etc., if it's similar to English or Chinese in structure). What do I need to do to make sure I don't run into complex problems down the road when the language gets more vocabulary? It seems like some sort of fixed sentence word order with word "slots" would be required, but I'm not sure what the possibilities are. Can you outline some things I could do if I get rid of the suffix (or only use it in some cases) to make sure I can effectively include nouns, verbs, and adjectives without confusion? I am not sure what to imagine in trying to solve this.

If I make it so all words fit these patterns (start and end with consonant, 3-6 sounds long), and each word can be used as a noun, verb, or adjective "noun modifiers" (or adverb for verb modifiers), then I could do like `buffalo buffalo buffalo...` sentence, if there are no suffixes to distinguish in the common case. I am just not sure if I need to fix the word order or something like that.

It seems hard because:

> The tree-y tree treeified treeily.
> The \[adjective\] \[noun\] \[verbed\] \[adverb\]

If tree was written/pronounced `dip` ("deep"), then:

> dip dip dip dip.

That could mean anything. So it seems like you need in certain context to add the suffixes, but I'm not sure what the possibilities are. The suffix system might have it be:

> dipu dipa dipu dipi.

Which would make more sense, but then we are at 2-syllable words for everything again.

What I'm considering doing is the following. Making each "base" mean the most common frame of reference (noun vs. verb vs. adjective), and then the suffixes turn it into the other forms. So the most common reference for a "tree" (base), would be the tree as a noun, not treeify (verb). Then there is "walk" which is most commonly considered an action, but could also be a noun, so the default base means the verb, not the noun in that case. But some cases are in between like "calm" (to calm or the calm?), so those perhaps always distinguish with the suffixes -i or -u. But maybe you are allowed to add the extra information to specify if desired or to disambiguate, but otherwise you can use the base form to mean the most common form of the concept.

# Answer
There are plenty of languages that require explicit marking on certain categories of word. In Latin, for example, all nouns need to be marked with case and number, and all verbs need to be marked with TAM and person. This means that all nouns and verbs are polysyllabic; Latin-speakers just spoke faster to compensate for the longer words. Esperanto famously works this way, with *-o* for nouns, *-a* for adjectives, *-i* (or some others) for verbs. Or you can change something inside the root to indicate the category; in Akkadian, *parās-* is a noun, *pāris-* is an adjective, *purus* is a verb, all from the stem P-R-S (along with a good dozen other patterns).

(Well, technically all Latin nouns and verbs are *sometimes* polysyllabic. Occasionally the ending combines with the stem and makes a single syllable: *falc* \+ *-s* = *falx* "sickle", *da* \+  =  "I give". But forms with different endings still end up being multiple syllables: *falcī* "for a sickle", *dare* "to give".)

There are also plenty of languages where there's no explicit marking on these parts of speech, and you have to rely on syntax to know which is which. In English, pretty much any word can be used as a verb. And the fairly-rigid syntax means this is seldom an issue. "Index this file by tomorrow" is unambiguous that "index" is the verb and "file" is the noun, and vice versa for "file this index". Some languages require the verb to be the first phrase in the sentence, or the second, or the last. In toki pona, the first phrase in a construction is always the subject, then the predicate (separated by *li*), then the object (separated by *e*).
> 5 votes

# Answer
Apart from adding syllables, you could use word order in combination with with prosody (tone, emphasis, pausing...) and other pronunciation differences.

Some brainstorming examples for you to remix:

* nasalize the vowel for an adjective; one tone (even without being a tonal language, like English uses tone for questions, sarcasm, emphasis, etc.) marks nouns; do neither for verbs
* mark a verb by saying its first consonant distinctly: hold it for nasals, eject it for stops; do the same with the final consonant for nouns; mark an adjective by stressing it
* words are nouns by default; the final word in an utterance is always the verb; a word with a short pause {before, after, within} it is an adjective
* the noun is *tun* (unvoiced, unaspirated), the verb is *dun* (voiced, unaspirated), the adjective is *tʰun* (unvoiced, aspirated)
* let one vowel never appear in nouns; make all adjectives verbs

In my own work I have "bases" like you had in mind. I know nouns come after declension particles and verbs come after conjugation particles. The only morphological change in the language is to mark an adjective: say the first vowel twice.
> 3 votes

# Answer
If you don't want to introduce another syllable, have your markers be final consonants, so you get e.g.,"tunant" is a noun, "tunans" is a verb., "tunansh" an adjective, etc. You may have to jigger things to keep the final cluster pronounceable, or have multiple final consonants that serve the same role (e,g., using "-d" or "-t" to match the voiced/unvoiced last vowel of the root).
> 2 votes

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# Question
Title: Can a lone superorganism develop an internal language?
I'm imagining a hypothetical lone organism on a planet. Something like Avatar, the movie's Eywa. I am envisioning it as a massive organism covering the entire surface of the planet but biologically one single coherent entity. It was always the only living thing in the planet. Language, to what I understand is a means of communication, be it chemical signalling between two rather un-intelligent, or sign language communication between chimpanzees or advanced vocalisation in case of humans - there are multiple entities in involved. This raises few questions, what would the alien's intellect, whatever it would mean for it be like ? From what I have searched from the internet, having a language is not a compulsion for having rational thought, so if presence of other entities is a roadblock, in having the urge to 'communicate' and thus develop a language, then communication can be entirely circumvented because there is only one organism here, still there could be rational thought. But even that would be a dubious scenario, would this 'internal language' be like human internal monologue ? There would also be important considerations involved here, being a lone entity will there be a concept of linguistic/ psychological 'I' and 'You' ? Will there be a concept of 'motive' ? What I'm asking it here and not elsewhere is because I'm more interested in investigating the evolution of linguistic artifacts in such a setting rather than psychological ones and I'm looking for answers discussing the questions I have come up with.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Reminds me of the movie Arrival. At this point we can only speculate, so it’s tough to say. Perhaps as research on Cephalopoda and mycelium network communication grows, we can better answer this question.

Personally, I consider dreaming to be Homo sapiens innate form of communication. Also when the majority of us are taught our primary language during adolescence, our brain’s language centers are structurally changed. However if we are to talk about a single entity then one may reason that Nature falls under that category. As a spiritual naturalist, I almost certainly believe that Nature does communicate but in a “language” that is nothing alike humanity’s concept of it. More… idk - body-language like. Energy, kinetic motion, is the common denominator at the root of my unsubstantiated viewpoint.

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# Question
Title: For a strict SVO language, how do you handle complex sentences?
All of the SVO example sentences I see are very basic, such as this from Mini:

```
[subject] i [verb] a [object]
Tu i manja.              You eat.
Man i bibe a vasa.       Someone drinks water.
Bobi i vasa a veji.      Bob waters the plants.

```

However, in English at least, you can have very complicated sentences and I'm not sure how to start going about mapping the number of edge cases, and how the patterns can boil down to this SVO system?

Just off the top of my head:

> I keep wanting to start reading that big book after I sit down for lunch in the middle of the park late some days, just before my usual walk where I causally make my way across the forest.

Where is the SVO here? What is the acronym for this sentence? Or sentences that are just as complex or even more complex, or even simpler yet with many verbs and nouns and adjectives scattered about?

> This is a sentence that is just as complex or even more complex, and others are even simpler yet with many verbs and nouns and adjectives scattered about if you know what I mean.

The first sentence is like:

> I \[S\] keep \[V\] wanting \[V\] to start \[V\] reading \[V\] that big book \[O\] after \[...?\] I sit down for lunch in the middle of the park late some days, just before my usual walk where I causally make my way across the forest.

I don't see how you say a language is SVO and have complex constructions like this? Are they *nested* somehow? Are they *chained* instead? Or some combination? I don't get it.

If my examples break the SVO mold, what is an example of a strict SVO sentence in some language, which involves much more than just "I love apples" type sentences (obviously-SVO)?

To take it slightly more generally, how can I go about deciphering an arbitrary sentence into something like these acronyms? If I say "my language is strictly SVO", what does that mean about all the possible sentences I can construct, how do I figure out all the possible patterns that exist?

# Answer
> 3 votes
The short answer is that "SVO" is shorthand for "the subject comes before the verb and the object comes after". It doesn't mean that every sentence consists of exactly three components.

But for the long answer…

To understand this, you'll need to know the basics of theoretical syntax. The gist of it is that words in spoken language always come in a linear sequence (that's just a universal constant of how spoken language works), but mentally, these word-sequences seem to be processed recursively—more like a tree than a list. Sometimes words that are next to each other can be manipulated as a whole unit, and sometimes they can't:

> This box of chocolates may have been opened.
> See \[this box of chocolates\]? It may have been opened.
> \*See \[of chocolates may\]? This box it have been opened.

The standard explanation is that "this box of chocolates" is a single unit in the tree (a single node and all its children) and "of chocolates may" is not.

Phrase-based syntax (as opposed to dependency-based syntax) tends to model this behavior with a context-free grammar, which you're probably familiar with from CS. (If not, you'll want to read up on this.) You can imagine "SVO" being an example of a context-free grammar rule:

> S → N i V a N

And then the nonterminals N and V handle all the details of noun phrases and verb phrases, with their appropriate modifiers. For example:

> \[This\] i \[is\] a \[a sentence that is just as complex or even more complex\]

All the complexity would be handled by the N (noun) nonterminal, which would have a recursive rule that lets you stick a whole clause into a noun phrase, and so on. How do you stick sentences together? Well, there's another recursive rule for that:

> S → S Conj S
> Conj → and | or

And it turns out this works fairly well. The actual rules used to describe English (or any other natural language) are incredibly complicated compared to this toy example, but quite a lot of English syntax can be modelled this way, with CFG rules.

A slightly more sophisticated version doesn't stick the subject and verb and object all on the same level, because syntactically, verbs and objects seem to be stuck together more tightly than verbs and subjects (read up on "constituency tests" to learn more about this). So you could instead say:

> S → N VP
> VP → V N

Or if you wanted your language to be SOV:

> S → N VP
> VP → N V

And now suddenly the grammar produces "this a sentence is" instead.

The full details of phrase structure syntax take at least a semester to properly explain. But if you want to explore this theory further, I recommend Adger's "Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach", which walks the reader through building a model of English and does a good job of justifying a lot of the theoretical assumptions behind that model.

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# Question
Title: How to tell if having trailing noun/verb/adjective modifiers will work?
I have basically landed on the desire to create a conlang with the following features (for now):

* Only one syllable base words, which have the form `cvc` `ccvc` or `cvcc` (consonant and vowel). There are only about 1k-2k possibilities based on my phonology.
* All other words are derived from these base words.
* I might add `cvcvc` words, of which there are at least 50k possibilities.
* But in essence, words never end in a vowel.

These "base" words symbolize the union of the 3:

1. Verb: `i` (action)
2. Noun: `a` (object)
3. Adjective: `u` (feature)

So to make it into one of these 3 forms, this is what my question is. On one side, looking at Mini lang, adding a *leading* standalone vowel makes it so it clearly says "what comes next is a noun/verb/adjective phrase". However, I don't really like the sound of it given all my words end in consonants, it sounds too choppy. I much more like the sound of languages like italian or spanish, which mix ending in vowels with ending in consonants. The vowel-ending makes it seemingly more fluid.

So instead of doing it exactly like Mini lang, I was thinking of have a *trailing joined* vowel, at the last word of the noun/verb/adjective phrase.

So take this English sentence:

> I quickly walked with the big gray wolf.

So while in Mini lang, (I think) you would write it sort of like this (I don't know Mini lang, so this just uses the standalon vowel letters and makes up the remaining words according to my patterns):

> a mim u kwik i wak u kon dan big a gris wolf.
> *(\[object\] I \[feature\] quick \[action\] walk \[feature\] with the big \[object\] gray wolf)*

So it's choppy sounding. But *prefixing* with the standalone vowel makes it clear that what follows fits a certain pattern.

However, change it up and make the vowel *joined* to the end of the last word in the pattern, and it sounds smoother:

> mima kwiku waki kon dan bigu gris wolfa.

But my question is, will this work out? Will it create confusion? I don't know how to reason about this and tell if it would work in the end for an SVO language. What should I learn to figure this out ,or if you know if it will work or not, what is your thinking?

Basically this is a question about the viability of two similar approaches:

1. *Prefixing* a phrase with a *standalone* vowel.
2. *Suffixing* the last word of a phrase with a *joined* vowel.

# Answer
Putting a marker onto an entire phrase to indicate its role in the sentence is fairly common. We see it in English for example, where we stick *'s* onto a noun phrase to indicate it's the possessor of something else. In English, we specifically put this marker on a *phrase*, not a *word*, unlike in Latin:

> The (king of England)'s name
> \*The king's of England name

The main thing to watch out for is that you can end up with a lot of these markers piling up. In English, we avoid this by always putting the marker *after* the phrase, and the marked phrase *before* its head (the thing it's attached to), which means the markers always end up inside the phrase. Sumerian puts the marker after the phrase, but puts the phrase *after* its head, so the markers end up on the edge of the phrase and can pile up:

> *mu ensik ŋirsu=ak=ak=še*
> *mu (ensik (ŋirsu=ak )=ak )=še*
> name (ruler (Girsu=of )=of )=for
> "for the name of the ruler of Girsu"

But this isn't necessarily a problem. Sumerian did just fine with these stacks.
> 2 votes

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Tags: grammar, syntax
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# Question
Title: How to decide if you should create complex words, or multiple words?
I am thinking of examples like these (in English and Vietnamese from Google Translate):

* creationism: thuyết sáng tạo
* create: tạo
* creatable
* creatively

When do you make it one word, and when do you make it many words? Is it the particular language style (agglutinative vs. isolating, etc.)? What about when you combine those words with other words:

* creationist people

It seems to me that "concepts" broadly defined don't always map to one word. Only a few concepts map to one word, and it depends on the language. Concepts can be many words, and somehow by saying when to make it one word vs. many words, we can aid in the memorization process of mapping new concepts to sequences of (fuzzily-defined) "words".

In my conlang, I am thinking (initially) about making it so you can do like English and create a single word for "creationism" by combining:

* bam: create
* yan: -tion
* yog: -ism

And maybe connect them with an `-e-`, like:

* bameyaneyoga

But then why not make "creationism team" one word too:

* bameyaneyogetima

In fact, why not make all noun phrases one word? Are there languages like this?

Or the reverse, why not make all noun phrases be composed of separate words/atoms?

* bam yan yog tima

Side note: Is there any research outlining the mental toll either approach takes, or the benefits it provides to learning, memorization, or speaking?

I am having a hard time deciding, from a *purity* standpoint, what would be better for a minimal language, something like English where we have a mixture of separate words and complex-multi-part-words, or something like Vietnamese (or something even more atomic) where everything is composed of individual words (even all just one syllable each).

My question is, what factors should be weighed when making this decision on how to structure more complex concepts?

# Answer
This is mostly about the 'look and feel' of your language.

Some languages (eg Japanese) are 'analytic', where you have many different words/particles to express grammatical relationships. So you will have texts containing lots of short words. Other languages (eg Finnish) are 'synthetic', ie you express grammatical relationships by adding affixes to the word stem. Here you get fewer but longer words in your texts. This applies to a certain degree to all languages.

It is the same with compound nouns. In English you can say *bottle of beer*, using *of* to express the relation between *beer* and *bottle*, whereas in German you simply say *Bierflasche*, where the ordering of the morphemes within the word determines their relationship. So in English you have on average shorter words, in German longer.

As for cognitive effort: I have not seen any research, but I would assume the difference must be negligible, otherwise on type of language would have died out in favour of the other -- either you learn more words, or you learn rules that form more words (and the frequent ones you'd memorise anyway).

So think about how you want your texts to look like: few long words -- favour complex and compound words; many shorter words -- use particles to bind the items together. Also, you could bake in some cultural associations: many Asian languages are analytic, so having short words might evoke associations with Asian cultures with your target audience. This is something to bear in mind when using your conlang.

As an aside: depending on how you define "word", this is one of the reasons for the eskimo-words-for-snow myth: as far as I know, Inuit is very synthetic, so phrases ("the snow that falls in the morning and is powder dry") would be expressed in a single "word", where English uses a whole phrase instead. And thus it appears that there are many words meaning "snow", when it's really only "many phrases that describe different kinds of snow".
> 3 votes

# Answer
The difference really comes down to how you define a "word".

You've got a lot of units that you're combining together to convey more elaborate concepts. Are you putting "words" together to make "phrases", or are you putting "morphemes" together to make "words"?

One common definition is that, the separations between words are the boundaries phonological processes can't cross. Under this analysis, French noun phrases are actually just words with some spaces inside them.

Another common definition is that, the separations between words are wherever people write a space. But this depends on the writing system, not on the language itself.

A third is, words are put together by one set of rules (morphology) and phrases are put together by a different set of rules (syntax). But there are definitely commonalities between how these two sets of rules work; how do you decide which group to categorize a certain rule into?

Fundamentally, the definition of a word is "whatever is the most useful for explaining the data". And since you're inventing the data, you can have it be whatever you want it to be.
> 3 votes

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Tags: morphology
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# Question
Title: Why does English have the word "say", "talk", and "tell", on what to create words for in a conlang?
I am going through word lists in a few different languages and am noticing what they make into words. In Hebrew, for example, they have words both for `to x` and `to be x-ed`, like "to merge" and "to be merged". So that could in theory double the vocabulary count. Those revolve around the same base concept and could be done by adding the equivalent of `be` to the base word.

In English, similarly, we have words like "to say", "to talk", and "to tell". I am getting the sense that synonyms (while these may not be synonyms they are close) are basically words which have the same base concept underlying them, but have a different *history* associated with them which they mentally invoke (like what I said here about "calculus" vs. "logic" vs. "algebra"). That is, they invoke a slightly different set of mental imagery, even if the base concept they are representing is the same.

So "say" to me means "express words", "talk" means "create words", and "tell" means "inform with words". Something like that, that's at least my initial impression.

So my question is, why do languages have words which can easily be expressed by 2 or 3 other words (and then some other languages *do have* those concepts expressed in 2 or 3 other words)? I'm not really talking about agglutinative languages, but analytic languages or even fusional languages with inflections, but still they have base verbs.

Is it simply because they are so common that distilling it to 1 word was advantageous? Is it just random evolutionary chance? Or is it something central to certain concepts which make it more natural to encapsulate into a single word?

In going through a Hebrew word list, here are some which were 1-word verbs (and sometimes also 1-word verbs in English), which for a conlang I think could be 2 words:

```
to strike            fight work
to illuminate        to light up / be lit up
to honk              make horn sound / sound horn
to murder            kill person
to bake              oven cook
to mock              make fun of
to raise             make high
to reduce            make less
to snatch            evil take
to blind             not see
to flatten           make flat
to disfigure
to unpack
to incense           scent stick
to enact             make active
to urinate           drop liquid
to fatten
to enjoy             feel joy
to deport            send away

```

So I'm wondering why languages don't do this, just having the base concepts represented as solo words, and then the derived concepts using multiple words (for the non-agglutinative languages)?

This is not even to address the fact that words only cover a fraction of the "base concepts" that we know about as human beings. By that I mean, there are certain concepts which we isolate as distinct "things" philosophically, which are usually described as multiple words for whatever reason. This is things like "to dry out", "to open a door" (create opportunity), "to tone down", "to cast a spell", "to deal with", "to hop over", "to put away", "to block someone's view", "to get up early (לְהַשְׁכִּים)", "to wake up", "to take a risk", "to slow down", and many things which I can't think of off the top of my head. If there are 100k words roughly speaking in a language, then there are at least 10m "terms" (multi-word concepts) I would say, if not way more.

And also not to even address the fact that in some/many languages, we have words for things which are highly specific (like "samsara" in Sanskrit, meaning "the cycle of birth and death", and a lot of other intricate meaning in there).

But so my question is, why would a language have many different words for roughly the same concept coming at it from a very slightly different angle (say, speak, talk, tell)? Why not just use multiple words? And do languages sometimes do these sorts of things in multiple words? It would just help show, yes, it's arbitrary and you can go either way, or no, there is some rhyme/reason making words for certain things. I can't tell how language works in this sense.

# Answer
Your question touches two themes in linguistics.

**1. Zipf's law**

The law states (in some mathematical language) that more frequent words are shorter and less frequent words are longer. A language has a single short word for a concept that is needed frequently. This is culture dependent: In a Christian country, there is a short word *church* while in a polytheistic country the same concept may be expressed as *praying place for Christians* or even as *praying place for adherents of Christianism*. Short words that are rarely used get archaic and forgotten (by playing wordle and quordle I discovered how many 5-letter-words exist in the English language that I never encountered consciously until I saw them there) and are replaced by a circumlocution or a transparent compound word.

**2. Style**

The many English words for *to say* are in fact a consequence of an ancient style dictate (in classical terms ***variatio delectat***: variation enjoys the listener/reader). Semitic languages are different is this respect, Arabic goes mainly with only one word for *to say* and there is nothing wrong with that.
> 2 votes

# Answer
It's a matter of frequency and language contact I would think. Obviously this is speculative, as we can't *know* how these issues developed.

However, I would guess that the reason is that individual words are more precise and concise. To *tell* includes aspects that *say* doesn't cover, for example that it is directed towards another person, and it would be a longer utterance. And *speak* is different again. If you wanted to express all these nuances using just a basic common word (or morpheme) for 'utter', you'd have to be very long-winded. Just have a look at toki pona, which has exactly one word for all this (*toki*), and try to express "I told him about my new car", "I said that I was going home", "I speak Spanish". It is possible, but it is not very efficient.

Similarly, an English person goes to France, and sees their various types of bread. Of course you can call them all *bread*, but that is a very broad term. So you call the long thin one a *baguette*, and that saves you saying *long thin French bread that you eat in the morning because it is stale by lunchtime* all the time when you label your Instagram holiday breakfast photos.

It seems that humans can cope more easily with having a multitude of similar yet subtly different terms to express nuances of meaning than with being long-winded with a set of basic words that need to combined to express the same meaning. I guess long sentences are harder to keep track of (see the concept of the seven items in short term memory), so you compress these long-winded descriptions by having a single short-hand word for it.

Of course there are no true synonyms, as that would be wasteful. Words that mean the same differ either in their pragmatic use (*eat* vs *wolf down*), or their regional distribution (*cob* vs *roll* and a multitude of other terms for small baked goods), or nuances of meaning.

What does that mean for a conlang? I think it makes it more natural if there are near-synonyms. Having just one word per broad concept makes it look very planned and artificial. Unless, of course, you want to achieve that; it'd be easier to deal with for learners (initially) and also machines. Having a more complex vocabulary with multiple words for similar concepts makes the language more sophisticated and natural.
> 3 votes

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Tags: vocabulary, terminology
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# Question
Title: Can you reuse the same word (sound) in multiple unrelated contexts?
Starting to get a word list together for Tune. As described, words can be either one or two syllables, starting and ending with a consonant, and with simple vowels in between. Words are then sometimes suffixed to disambiguate their POS. I am introducing the idea of saying a word to distinguish between a "formal" name, and an arbitrary descriptive phrase. The descriptive phrase is casual, doesn't need the prefix term ("gray wolf"), but a formal name is prefixed with a word like "form" ("Gray Wolf", so "form Gray Wolf").

That word list is coming up on 3000 words, I imagine there will be another 1000 necessary foundational words, which are just super abstract and generic words (mostly conceptual words, as opposed to animal names like "rabbit", though I have a few animal names which I need to probably delete). What I was thinking is, allocate some number of words (say 4000 additional words, so the total is \<= 10k, so it would be possible to learn them all), and use those words for proper names. Sort of like how "Brian" and "Paul" (in today's world) don't meaning anything, likewise "foo" and "bar" might be "names" which can be applied to say, the gray wolf. So the gray wolf would just be called "foo", let's say. And a rabbit would be called "bar".

Well what I'm wondering is, what if you *reused* these names, in unrelated contexts. Like calling an oak tree "foo" as well, and calling a granite rock "foo" as well. Well maybe, "foo rock", "foo tree", and "foo animal". As long as you don't reuse the name in too similar a context/scope, then it seems like this might be fine?

The reason I think it might be fine is, **usernames**. There are millions of usernames just introduced in the past few years since Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, and a hundred other social media sites came out. Usernames might be a person's name like `@jack`, or full name like `@BarackObama`, or might be a thing like `@DrumPlayer123` or something random like `@asdf123`. We can even speak these, same with **hashtags**, `#IsItMeOrIsThatWeird`, etc.. There are an unlimited set of possibilities here. You might have `@Wolf1` and `@Wolf2` and `@Wolf17`, all in your little group. Basically, words are used out of context for a unique identifier. It's not like we get confused that `@Wolf1` might be a wolf.

So likewise, I am thinking we can have arbitrary names applied to the millions of species, molecules, etc., even if that name is used in some base context. But instead of arbitrary symbols, just limiting it to a set of a few thousand words. Maybe these words have a base meaning, maybe they don't.

I think this would work because you can create scopes, and within each scope, have a few thousand things with unique names. Maybe there are 2 or 3 levels for the "formal" names. That is 1000x1000x1000 or a billion possibilities at least. So maybe you'd need 4 levels, the "dark gray wolf animal" essentially, for formal names. You can leave out context if it's apparent, "dark gray wolf", or even "dark gray" when talking about wolves.

Would something like this system work? What are the main pros and cons of this approach? Would it create confusion? Do any natlangs or conlangs do anything like this? It seems English does to some degree with people names, which are used to label mathematical things (Schrodinger's equation, Lie groups, etc.).

# Answer
### The word you are looking for is *homophones*, words that sound the same but have different meanings.

**It would work.**

**Pros** include that you get a lot of words, that you could get by with fewer roots, and that you get a lot of room for fun word play. As for the latter, the Japanese are fond of this.

**Cons** include that it might be a little harder for others to learn, and that you as a creator would need to be careful not to introduce confusion.

**Would it create confusion?** I suppose it depends on how well you build the language, but in natural languages it isn't too bad. Look at English!

English reuses words, as do all languages I know. And not just for names.

A *file* could be something you store in a computer or actual papers you store in a filing cabinet. You could use a file to remove rough edges from an object, unless it's a file of soldiers. If you go back to Shakespearean times, the verb *file* was used in a similar meaning to the modern word *defile*, which is not the opposite of the verb *file*.

If you don't fixate on spelling, there are other kinds of \_file\_s as well, such as *Francophiles*, *pedophiles* and others.

It's not hard to imagine a plant and a kind of rock both also called "file", without adding more confusion than there already is.

In my native Swedish, the word *fil* takes almost all of the meanings above, including the ones that English spell with ph-, and is also the word for a kind of sour milk I like to have for breakfast.

English is even sort of extreme in this context, as many words are used as verbs, nouns and adjectives, in what we looking at it from the outside might perceive as a chaotic manner. You can *fish* for *fish* and *drink* a *drink* made from an *orange* *orange*.

If you haven't seen it, search for a poem that starts "Dearest creature in creation". It's main aim, as I see it, is to ridicule English orthography, but it does a pretty good job at demonstrating the abundance of homophones as well.
> 3 votes

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Tags: terminology
---


# Question
Title: What are all the ways you can modify the base "number" concept in a language?
I can think of these examples of numbers, but maybe there are more?

```
one,two,three
single,double,triple
first,second,third
primary,secondary,tertiary
,couple,triplet

```

How should I think of these, how do they relate to each other? In my conlang like I have mentioned, I have a base word and then append `-i` for verbs, `-a` for nouns, and `-u` for adjectives/features. Say the base concept of "one" is `zen`. One sounds like it would be a noun to me, so `zena`. First is a modifier/feature so it gets the `-u`, `zenu`. A single can be like a "single" (single shot at a coffee shop, so a noun or an adjective?) But so now we have let's say 2 adjective forms. Same with primary, so that is 3 adjective forms. So I'm unsure how to fit this into my pattern, and not sure if there is even more I should be aware of.

How do other languages handle these situations? Do they add extra words perhaps (for isolating languages)? If so, what is an example? I feel like I must have to add a particle or modifying word to some of these to make it a differently scoped adjective in the other cases, but it's hard to pinpoint how they are different.

# Answer
Traditional grammar usually talks about four types: cardinal ("one"), ordinal ("first"), distributive ("one by one"), and adverbial ("once"). These are, not coincidentally, the four types of numbers that are distinguished in Latin morphology: *ūnus*, *prīmus*, *singulī*, and *semel* respectively. The first three are all adjectives, the fourth is an adverb.

But of course these aren't the only options. Even in Latin you also have the "multiplier" numbers, like *simplex* "single" and *duplex* "double", which are traditionally not grouped in with the other numbers. Or you could talk about fractions, like "half" and "third". English has two separate series of ordinals, one from Germanic and one from Latin, with slightly different meanings: "first" versus "primary".

English generally uses different words for each of these classes, but Swahili for example has a much more regular system. Swahili just has one\* word for each number, the cardinal: *mtoto mtatu* "three children". To make the ordinal, you use the associative marker *-a*: *mtoto wa tatu* "third child", literally "child of three". For the other constructions where English and Latin have special words, just attach the number to a different noun: *mara tatu* "thrice", literally "three times"; *mara tatu zaidi* "triple", literally "three times more"; *sehemu ya tatu* "one-third", literally "(one) portion of three".

* Well not perfectly regular, because natural languages never are. "First" has a special form, *kwanza*, derived from the verb "begin"; "two" has a special form, *pili*, used in counting. But these are the only exceptions I know of.
> 3 votes

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Tags: terminology
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# Question
Title: What similarities does The Black Speech in Tolkien have to Hurrian?
I've just come across this quote from Wikipedia:

> Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski claimed a strong similarity to Hurrian, which had recently been partially deciphered at the time of the writing of *The Lord of the Rings*, E. A. Speiser's *Introduction to Hurrian* appearing in 1941.

How similar are they, actually? What similarities do they have? Grammatical structure? Vocabulary? Is it even possible to tell, seeing how few examples of the Black Speech we have?

# Answer
> 5 votes
Well, The Font of All Knowledge (a.k.a. Wikipedia) tells us several things:

* There is not much similarity as far as phonology, as Hurrian seems to lack consonant voicing distinction (except in certain circumstances). BS clearly has this distinction.
* There's not enough BS to determine much by way of grammar, but Hurrian seems to be extremely agglutinative; BS doesn't appear to be at all.
* Hurrian seems to have more vowels.
* BS has more consonant clusters.

Upon reading *this analysis of Black Speech*, I think it is clear that Professor Tolkien must have taken some words & grammatical forms into BS from Hurrian. For example:

* -at \< Hurrian -ed- formant of jussive/intended future in verbal form formant of future in verbs
* -ûk \< “All”, “completeness”; Hurrian -ok, formant with a meaning “fully, truthfully, really” in a verbal form.

Hurrian texts were known since discoveries in the 1910s & 1930s. A grammar wasn't published until 1941. Based on the Analysis, I think it very likely that Prof. Tolkien gained inspiration from the Hurrian direction. I'm not sure I'd agree with "strong similarity" based on the extreme paucity of BS evidence. More evidence, a lost grammar, those would be more convincing one way or the other.

# Answer
> 1 votes
My translation and analysis of A. Nemirovsky's Hurrian hypothesis: http://blackspeech.ru/new/wiki/doku.php?id=hurrian\_hypothesis

> There's not enough BS to determine much by way of grammar, but Hurrian seems to be extremely agglutinative; BS doesn't appear to be at all.

Black Speech is definitely agglutinative (but to a lesser degree than Hurrian) - all ring inscription analyses agree on that. The quote from Tolkien himself (Parma Eldalamberon journal #17, taken from a letter to Mr. W. R. Matthews, 1964):

> The Black Speech was not intentionally modeled on any style, but was meant to be self-consistent, very different from Elvish \<...\> **It was evidently an agglutinative language**, and the verbal system must have included pronominal suffixes expressing the object, as well as those indicating the subject...

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Tags: tolkien-black-speech, typology
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# Question
Title: New examples for Black Speech in Rings of Power
In the latest episodes of *The Rings of Power*, several orcs say something in Black Speech, which is not translated in the subtitles. I had a brief look on the web, but cannot find anything about the meaning of these phrases.

Has anybody come across an analysis of that, and whether/how it fits in with previous attempts at reconstructing Black Speech from known fragments?

# Answer
> 3 votes
My lame attempt at analyzing Black Speech in Amazon's show: https://un4givenorc.blogspot.com/2023/07/orcish-black-speech-in-amazons-rings-of.html Would be glad, if anyone corrects misheard phrases or suggest other Elvish etymologies.

**EDIT:** Neo Black Speech for Amazon's show is obviously not based on any previous attempts. But whoever was responsible for it, seems to have an approach similar to Shadowlandian: some words are derived from other languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien. Neo-BS in ROP has a higher degree of agglutination.

Some phrases that have clear meaning:

* Nampat! - wasn't translated in English, but official Russian subtitles and some media articles have a translation: "Death!", but the correct one would probably be "Die!".
* Nampak uglursha - in the context probably some equivalent of "Rest in peace", "nampat" (see above) seems has meaning "die"; other options include: Gnomish "nam-" (to withdraw, retire); "ak" is probably some grammatical or objective clitic pronoun; "uglur" may be derived from Adunaic "aglar" (glory), however "ugl-" in other Neo-BS dialects means "to frighten, scare"; "-sha" is probably postposition "with", used as preposition in Orc-curse
* Izmûmbogh - I smell him! - my guess was "I can feel (him)" \< Gnomish "ist-" (feeling, sense), "og-" (can, be able / adjective suffix / agental suffix); Sindarin "im" (I, 1st person singular pronoun)
* Kishdibatoth! - Search it! \< Quenya "ces(ta)" (to search for, examine); "ib" - probably some grammatical suffix; "-at" BS infinitive/gerund/participle suffix expressing intention or purpose; "oth" \< Sindarin "eth" (any 3rd person pronoun) or "ed" (it), could be also from early Noldorin "os" (around)

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Tags: tolkien-black-speech
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# Question
Title: What is the difference between city, county, state, and nation (and others)?
This is kind of along the lines of my last question on why words for "say", "tell", and "talk", etc.. But it is more philosophical, not sure if it's better for the world-building community.

I am working on a conlang for a world, and am wondering if I should include these listed words (city, county, state, country/nation). Zipcode is a clear physical boundary with a number. City, county, state, and nation seem simply like "government boundary" or "administrative boundary". I know Google Places API supports these:

```
administrative_area_level_1
administrative_area_level_2
administrative_area_level_3 (also possibly city)
administrative_area_level_4
administrative_area_level_5
administrative_area_level_6
administrative_area_level_7
continent
country
locality (city when supported)
sublocality
sublocality_level_1
sublocality_level_2
sublocality_level_3
sublocality_level_4
sublocality_level_5

```

So to me that tells me these names for these administrative areas are *legacy*, based on an evolutionary vocabulary talking about the size of the place and how the rules get structured. For a nation, it controls states. A state controls counties, counties control cities. But why did we call them these names? Why not just have "admin level 1" and "admin level 4", etc.? And also, the first civilization (like Sumer) were city-states? Or cities, within an empire? It is so convoluted and confusing.

"Neighborhood" makes sense, because that is what surrounds your house (like mathematical neighborhood). But there are two uses of neighborhood, that mathematical definition, and admin level 5 or whatever boundaries (sub-city casual boundaries).

Must these terms be defined? How can I avoid defining them?

My conlang is an auxlang, but I don't want a 1-to-1 mapping from English/US to the conlang. I would like to "clean up" some of the legacy terms, like this case, if necessary. City seems like an arbitrary boundary which is extremely hard to define. And like Google Maps shows, it doesn't work in all places. So having it be a tree of nested administrative boundaries makes more sense. Do any languages do it like that?

I am thinking for equivalent conlang words:

* globe
* globe-government-1 (nation)
* globe-gov-2 (state in some cases, county or province or city in others)
* globe-gov-3 (city, or county or province).

This doesn't make it clear that in China "city" is level 4 or level 5, while in the US it is level 3 or whatever. But I don't think you really need that distinction, do you? Not sure what to make of this complicated situation, how to simplify it.

# Answer
The simple answer is we have these words because they're useful. People find it easier to talk about state government vs city government, rather than talking about level two government vs level four government. And governments are not all alike! In America, a "state" and a "territory" are both administrative units smaller than a "nation", but the difference between them is very politically important—states get representation in Congress, territories don't. Or, English has borrowed the word "satrapy" to describe a certain level of ancient Persian administration, simply because they functioned differently enough from "states" or "counties" that it's easier to use a different name for them.

The specific words we use exist for historical reasons, such as a "county" being the region governed by a count. But the existence of different words for these different levels is simply something that speakers have found useful. It's often important to be able to distinguish between a state, a territory, a province, and a region, and these words have specific implications (and sometimes specific political meanings) that "hierarchy level 3" does not.
> 4 votes

# Answer
The first word of the set to exist was likely some form of city or village, since that was where humans lived permanently. Most cities have pretty clear, if not sharp, unofficial borders. Where they don't, it's often because they've grown together. Note also that cities aren't a subset of any of the above, except in a purely administrative sense; Kansas City is in Kansas and Missouri, Sault Ste. Marie is in the US and Canada, and Baarle is in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Some sort of word for kingdom probably came next. Note that this doesn't map directly to the modern idea of nation, as kings were often the subjects of emperors and thus the kingdom part of an empire. The concept of empire changed between the Roman Era and the Victorian Era, but the resulting entities were both called empires.

In the modern day, nations have started forming unions, like the Commonwealth of Independent States and European Union. Will this congeal into another administrative block? If so, a simple numeric tower doesn't have space for it. One could tag it an empire, but there's strong social reasons they aren't using the word "empire".

I don't know your goals. This would give an auxlang a very "a priori" feel. For a bureaucratic race, I can see them obliviating all previous distinctions. (I would think city would exist, though, since most places aren't tiled into cities; there's still a lot of farms and wilderness out there.) For a real-world language, there's no way it could match reality, which is more complex than even the current vocabulary. Puerto Rico is a territory, not a state (which is a big difference in the US), and a lot of times gets its own entry in lists of nations. Hong Kong is a SAR (special administrative region), not province. Flattening everything is easy but problematic.
> 3 votes

---
Tags: vocabulary, terminology
---


title: Anti-Newspeak, making a language harder

text:
# Question
Title: Anti-Newspeak, making a language harder
So, the government of Oceania in *1984* creates a new, altered cersion of English to make its people easier to control.

What about the opposite?

A dictator wants to make his people harder to control, so that any invading nation would have to go through an ungodly amount of trouble to subjugate them.

Could he do it?

I'd imagine he'd start by gradually altering the language to be more complex, more foreign to neighbouring languages, and popularizing words or phrases that are harder to interpret by an outside listener.

He has already completely isolated this nation from the surrounding region, and the language present there is pretty unusual for the region, think Hungarian or Basque.

I am however unsure if this'd be enough; other ideas would be helpful if you think it could be done.

# Answer
> 12 votes
Implement some "levels of trust" in the language: Design phrases or word choices that signal the initiated that you are talking to non-trusted people or that non-trusted people may be listening, design other phrases that signal that you can talk more freely.

I have heard (but I don't have hard references for this) that travellers and gypsies in Europe have such devices in their languages.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Incomprehensive languages on themselves never stopped conquering by brute force; the winner's language being imposed on the conquered people.

Forbidding the local language. Out of respect for many fine people in China, I will not mention China. China itself was under colonial suppression with even Opium, though Chinese is hard to master for an European. The colonial past of the Western countries has similar phenomena. There was also the persecution of Esperanto by dictators like Stalin; a language to *contact* with the rest of the world. As I thinks your proposed self-isolation may have a contrary weakening effect too.

A (pseudo) secret language like from gypsys, or a (high-level) signal language at least caused a cultural identity. But your argument of "ikh ken dir nisht farshteyn" (I cannot understand you - and you not me), would require a stoicism, like in Gordon R. Dickson's sf universe "Soldiers, Ask Not."

Without a culture ready to encorporate pride, stoicism, self-sacrifice it would be hard. Never done with success (native Americans), but alluring as theme in science-fiction.

One scenario: the dictator could oppress his people, and let his secret agents launch a secret revolution language against oppression. *That* could be feasible.

A further bit of science fiction too: Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao.

# Answer
> 3 votes
The purpose of Newspeak (control) is not achieved by making the language simpler; it is by making it impossible to think certain undesirable things. If the ideology of an invading force is aligned with the ideology of the previous system, then Newspeak would just continue to work fine.

However, if the invaders have an opposing ideology, then the now occupied citizens would presumably not be able to communicate with them at all, as they lack the concepts and means to express the invaders' ideas.

So the complexity of the language is not really related to the issue of control (or non-control), which is achieved by other means.

# Answer
> 1 votes
Couldn't the dictator just impose a completely new language? If all children were taught this new language at school from a young age, and if all teaching materials and literature they had access to was in that language, they'd eventually forget their parents' tongue. It happens all the time with kids that move to a different country when they're young.

Imposing a new language through the education system would make it easier for the dictator to control access to information and therefore to control the population. At the same time it would create an artificial language barrier with the surrounding nations. Still, it wouldn't be the language itself that makes a population easier or harder to control, only the fact they use a different language.

If you really want a language whose grammar makes it inherently harder to lie and manipulate people, as a thought experiment you could perhaps try to create:

* A language even less expressive than stereotypical caveman speech, where the grammar is so ambiguous it is impossible to understand a sentence outside of its context. Take these words for example:

> Anger death flower friend.

This could mean many things: It angers me that my friend stepped on the flowers and ruined them / My anger ceased since I was brought flowers by a friend / The death of this person angers me, so I brought flowers to his relatives.

I don't see how you could incite a revolution or plot a coup while speaking such an ambiguous language. But then again, I don't see how someone could cause a society's communication skills to devolve to that point.
* A very verbose language with a complicated grammar that makes it hard to write short sentences that leave part of the context out, so anyone trying to lie would have to be extremely careful not to contradict themselves. Again, I'm not sure how you could force people to speak such a language for long without it evolving to be more functional.

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Tags: language-change, sapir-whorf
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# Question
Title: Why have words for above/below top/bottom but not left/right front/back?
I am working on the directions and spatial stuff in a conlang currently, and wondering why conceptually we have words for the y-axis, but not the x-axis or z-axis?

* above/on top of (that one isn't a word for some reason)
* below/under
* top
* bottom

But we don't have words for these:

* beyond the right side (like above/below)
* beyond the left side
* beyond the front side
* beyond the back side
* on the right side (like top/bottom)
* on the left side
* on the front side
* on the back side

We have right/left/up/down/forward/backward, but for some reason in English at least we don't have simple words for this. Why is that, is there some fundamental reason? Do any languages, conlangs or not, have words for these sorts of things? Wondering what the spectrum looks like.

Top/bottom are like because of gravity pulling everything "down". So you can stack on the top, or put below. But put to the right side of, there's no force of gravity tugging in that direction, so maybe that's why?

# Answer
> 3 votes
We have an absolute frame of reference for up and down (namely which direction gravity pulls), but no absolute frame of reference for left and right. What I consider to be "left" as I type this is almost certainly not the same direction you consider to be "left" as you read it.

We do have words like "behind", using relative directions. Swahili treats "on top of" (*juu ya*) and "in front of" (*mbele ya*) the same way it treats "beneath" (*chini ya*) and "behind" (*nyuma ya*); Latin has a single word for "in front of" but no single word for "behind". It's really just a historical accident that English has a single word for some of these and needs multiple words for others (we used to have "before" but it's seldom used with that meaning now).

Using relative directions for horizontal things is not universal, though. Some indigenous languages of Australia use absolute directions for everything, with basic words for "north of", "south of", "east of", and "west of" (or equivalent in their coordinate system).

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Tags: terminology
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# Question
Title: How do languages distinguish formal and casual noun phrases?
It turns out that it appears Chinese has about 100 "base" (1-character) words for various foundational animals, and then the rest of the animals are combinations of those bases (or other adjectives):

* hippo: river horse
* lemur: fox monkey
* giraffe: long neck deer
* etc.

I am doing similarly for other areas of the lexicon (games/sports, plants, rocks, etc.). So I have stuff like this:

* antelope: even-toed ruminant
* wren: hole-dweller bird
* emu: camel bird
* ibis: wading bird
* etc.

I am still stuck on the problem of figuring out how to distinguish **common** noun phrases vs. **formal** noun phrases. I tried asking how Chinese does it but I still don't get how Chinese distinguishes between the two. Like, how do you say "long neck deer" but *not mean "giraffe"*? Likewise, how can I say "the wading bird caught a fish" and mean the *generic/casual* noun phrase "wading bird" which is not the same as the *formal* noun phrase "wading bird \[ibis\]".

How do some natural or conlangs handle this? Oh, in Chinese, the name for "gorilla" is "large monkey" and chimpanzee is "black monkey". But gorillas can be black, and chimpanzees can be "large". So how would you say "large monkey" and not mean gorilla, or black monkey and not mean chimpanzee? How does this work?

The only way I can see this working is by doing something like a prefix particle meaning "the noun phrase next is a *formal* phrase", so "formal large monkey" means gorilla, but "large monkey" is just a large monkey. But that would mean to talk about things like dogs and cats you have to prefix every word with "formal", "the formal curly-haired dog \[poodle\]" or "the formal hairless cat". I don't think that is ideal, but not sure. So wondering how other languages (natlangs and conlangs) can handle this situation.

*How do you use the terms of the formal noun phrase in a casual way?*

I'm thinking of doing this:

```
smale kalime markat - small black monkey - bonobo (formal)
smal kalim markat   - small black monkey - (generic)

```

Adding the `-e` to the preceding words so they are like joined in the formal case.

# Answer
> 7 votes
In English, we use stress. Think about how you say "greenhouse" versus "green house", or "redwood" versus "red wood": English doesn't allow two stressed syllables in a row within a lexical unit, but it's just fine if they're in different units.

Also, different syntactic options. A "whale that is blue" is unambiguously about its color, not its species, because "blue whale" (the species) is a fixed phrase that cannot be rearranged.

# Answer
> 4 votes
This works mainly through context. That is a bit difficult to give examples for without actual context:

Situation: a (very) large aquarium with whales of different species. If you say "the blue whale eats a lot more krill than the humpback", then it is clear that the "blue" is not an adjective, but part of the phrase "blue whale". If there was a blue whale and a green whale, then it would be different.

Situation: you're in a zoo at the gorilla enclosure. "This large monkey is the alpha male" -- should be obvious if your term for gorilla was "large monkey". If it's not obvious, you could ask "Do you mean *large monkey* or *large* monkey?"; but this would only happen infrequently. Otherwise the terms would change over time to be less ambiguous. If you're in front of the chimpanzee enclosure, it would be obvious that *large* was an adjective (unless agorilla was also there and had taken charge of the tribe).

Situation: your in front of a row of houses. "I like that green house" is obvious, as there's no greenhouse. Even if you say "that green house is full of plants" there is no scope for misunderstanding. If there was a greenhouse visible, that would change, and again if it wasn't obvious (eg if there was also a green house with many plants), you can ask for clarification.

A lot of language use is contextual (which is why isolated sentences are often ambiguous, since they are lacking context), so I wouldn't worry too much about making your own language too precise and unambiguous. Just look at toki pona, which is so vague that you can not really use it without actual context.

If you're using language out of context (eg an encyclopedia article), then you need to define initially what it is you're talking about, thus providing context. "The blue whale is a species of whale that eats krill. Blue whales live in the oceans." -- it is clear that in the second sentence you're not using *blue* as an adjective. Imagine writing a toki pona Wikipedia article about apples: *kili* is fruit, so you need to be more specific. *kili sike*? That's round fruit, which could still be anything. But if you are in an apple orchard, then talking about apples is a lot easier.

# Answer
> 4 votes
In addition to what @Draconis say, many of the compound names don't make sense grammatically unless they are read as a unit. A river horse could not be interpreted as "a horse that is river", it wouldn't make any sense. You *could* get an ambiguity if you referred to one as a horse of the river, but riverhorses are safe to talk about.

These sort of compounds are common in other Germanic languages as well, and are generally distinguished by stress. In Germanic languages outside English, we typically indicate this altered stress in writing to a much larger degree. In Swedish, the word 'flod', meaning river and the word 'häst', meaning horse, nicely combine to 'flodhäst', which is what we call hippos.

This is sort of similar to your suggestion of a special form of adjectives used only in formal phrases! If you don't want a special verb form, which might feel a bit contrived, you could instead use different constructions, just as we do when we combine two nouns. Maybe adjectives normally come before the noun, but are placed after it in case of formal phrases?

The special forms for adjectives are interesting though!

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Tags: vocabulary, terminology
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# Question
Title: How to structure verb phrases (as opposed to noun phrases)?
In my question about formal vs. casual noun phrases, I got to the point of distinguishing between causal and formal nouns.

Notice that the noun phrases all end with `-a`, the noun-creator affix. That is because in English at least, to my understanding, noun phrases have the form:

```
[preceding stuff] [trailing noun]

```

So we can get by with always appending `-a` to the last word, making the whole thing a noun phrase.

But I'm not sure it works the same with "verb phrases" in English.

```
grow up
wake up
burn bridge
raise a glass
make a toast
...

```

I can only think of 2-word examples, but in these examples, the verb is *first*, not last. These are what I would call "formal" verb phrases, because they are basically standardized idioms or something like that. They go together. But you can extend the verb with modifiers/adverbs, like:

```
eventually quickly wake up
[preceding casual modifiers] [verb] [following formal modifiers]

```

Do I have this correct?

Are there languages which are more strict and make it so all "verb phrases" and noun phrases have the same general form?

```
[preceding formal modifiers] [verb/noun]

```

If that would be the case, then I would say (in the conlang), something like:

```
When I was young I wanted to up grow
I just up wake
Please don't bridge burn

```

That would greatly simplify the system, because you could join words in a formal chain with a simple suffix on each preceding word, like `-o` or `-e` in the image above, and then the final word in the verb phrase would end in `-i`. But if I have to allow for putting things on either side, then I might need to have *prefixes* in addition to suffixes, and it might get more complex. So looking for inspiration how other languages have handled this.

# Answer
Verbs like "wake up" and "turn on" are known as *phrasal verbs* in English, and they have some very interesting syntactic properties. For example, "turn on" (phrasal, meaning "betray") acts differently from "turn on" (not phrasal, meaning "activate"): "she turned on him" versus "she turned him on".

For the most part, these are a peculiarity of English syntax. German has its own version, known as the *separable prefix verbs*, since a piece of them sometimes detaches and moves to the end of the sentence (*aufgehen* "to get up" → *ich gehe auf* "I get up").

But most other Indo-European languages just represent them by adding a morpheme to the verb, like Latin *gradior* "walk", *ingredior* "go in", *ēgredior* "go out", *transgredior* "go across", *regredior* "go back", *dīgredior* "go away", and so on. Pretty much any English word ending in -gress was formed this way: ingress, egress, transgress, regress, digress, etc.

Another option, more common in East Asia, is known as *serial verbs*. You put multiple verbs together in a row to form a more complex meaning. Here's an example from Maonan (taken from Wikipedia which cites Lu Tian Qiao 2008):

> ɦe2 sə:ŋ3 lət8 pa:i1 dzau4 van6 ma1 ɕa5 vɛ4 kau5 fin1 kam5
> I want walk go take return come try do look accomplish ?

Very literally, "I want to walk, go, take, return, come, try, do, look, and accomplish. Okay?" More idiomatically, "Could I walk over, bring it back, and try it out?" Those more elaborate verbs are formed from several simpler verbs strung together without any nouns or other elements in between.

Phrases like "make a toast" are just idioms, and they act like any other verb and object in English. You can "make a quick toast" or "make another toast", for example. There's nothing special about them syntactically.
> 3 votes

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Tags: syntax, verbs, semantics
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# Question
Title: Technique to use lots of homonyms and not make things confusing in a conlang?
I just learned today really how prevalent homophones are in Chinese, some of which are listed here. I asked a similar question about how to say Chinese sentences using all the variations of meaning of a homophone here.

> We **dried** the **sweet** smelling **anhydride** into a **liver** powder.

It would be like:

> We gān the gān smelling gān into a gān powder.

Now I'm curious. If there are only 400-something Chinese syllables, times 4 tones, so about 1600 possible 1-syllable words. Yet there are at least 10k characters in use, meaning roughly 5 meanings are possible per phonetic syllable. I am not sure I am doing calculations right, but that is at least true for gān from my other post, which has at least 5 unrelated meanings.

My question is, how far can you take this? What other languages have such a high degree of reuse of phonetic words? Natural or constructed languages. English has some, but IMO to a much lesser extent (I know of a handful of words with 2 distinct meanings, like "bear" the animal vs. "to carry", but 99% of words have 1 general meaning, as opposed to Chinese which has way way more homophones). How do you not create confusion when devising a system like this?

English avoids confusion when using the multiple meanings of a single homophone by the use of affixes, as in:

> The bear beared the bear bearing bears.

But if there were 5 unrelated meanings of the word "bear", then I don't see how it could not create confusion.

I have ported 4,000 words to the conlang I'm working on so far, but they are all highly generic words, plus *animal* names (so far). In Chinese, they have about 100 1-character animal names, then the rest of the animals are derived from these 100 combining them together or with adjectives (hippo = river horse, panda = cat bear, etc.). But now I am thinking of how to port things from these categories, each which have thousands if not way more "types" of things:

> body parts (tongue, bones, muscles), diseases (malaria), rocks (emerald), occupations (ballet), material (cotton), food (vegetable, bread, etc.), building type, land forms, flowers, trees, fish, molecules, etc..

I was also looking at the Organic Chemistry nomenclature in Chinese, which has seemingly random and meaningless names for various organic compounds, with barely any phonetic resemblance. In essence, they are just reusing existing sounds/homophones, adding one more meaning to the sound/word. If I could do this, and do it well, then I could basically pick a word like "wolf" and call a specific animal a "wolf", a molecule a "wolf molecule", and a building a "wolf building", basically creating new unrelated meanings for the same underlying word, and theoretically there would be no confusion. But this is a very foreign concept to me, so (a) I'm not sure it would even work out in the end, or (b) how confusing it could be come, and (c) how to proactively avoid creating confusing scenarios.

How did Chinese not make things confusing when creating these homophones? Coming from a programming/software background, the only way I could see this reliably being done is to have millions of sentences in a database, and every time you add a new homophone, you would check if it would create confusion against the millions of sentences. Even that wouldn't be enough, you would have to try and construct sentences from each homophone to make sure no confusion would take place. But that seems like an insurmountable challenge, so curious how a natural language like Chinese has accomplished this. And also curious if there are other constructed languages that have created a high degree of homophones like this. But more generally, wondering how I could take advantage of this sort of high-homophone-density system in the conlang I'm working on.

# Answer
> Coming from a programming/software background, the only way I could see this reliably being done is to have millions of sentences in a database, and every time you add a new homophone, you would check if it would create confusion against the millions of sentences.

That's basically how it works. Remember that the purpose of every natural language is to communicate, and every natural language is under enormous evolutionary pressure to fulfill this purpose.

Suppose I want to bring a new word into English; perhaps I want to talk about the purviews of ancient Sumerian deities, so I borrow the Sumerian word *me*. It turns out that the purviews of ancient Sumerian deities are very cool and come up in conversation all the time, and soon everyone in my social circle wants to talk about them.

Will the borrowed word *me* catch on, or will the homophone with "may" (or the homograph with "me") be too confusing? Well, speakers will find out pretty quickly. If it's causing problems and impeding communication, they'll switch to "purview" or "domain" or borrow another word like *partzum* that's less ambiguous. After all, their goal is to convey some particular meaning, and they'll choose their words to achieve this goal. If a word doesn't help with this purpose, it won't be used.

We see this happen all the time in language evolution. If a word is too ambiguous to be useful, it will be replaced. In most varieties of Occitan, the word for "rooster" is a descendant of Latin *gallum***except** in Gascony, where it's been replaced by a word for "vicar". Why? Because sound changes in Gascon caused the descendant of *gallum* "rooster" to sound the same as the descendant of *cattum* "cat" (compare *castellum* \> Gascon *castet*). This ambiguity was apparently unacceptable to the Gascon farmers, who started calling their roosters "vicars" instead; the context makes it clear enough if you're talking about a farm animal or a priest, so this homophone wasn't an issue.
> 3 votes

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Tags: phonology, vocabulary
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# Question
Title: How can my conlang say "hot/cold" without ambiguity?
I'm creating a conlang for worldbuilding, and I'm building vocabulary for basic physical adjectives such as "long/short", "heavy/light", and "hot/cold". The major speakers of this conlang are *angels*, whose "duties" are to teach people science. As such, I imagined this conlang would have *no* chance of miscommunication. I thought one way of achieving it would be to let the said vocabulary very literal to the human perceptions. Here's the sketch:

**Length:**

Though one might think the human vision can measure distance between objects well, it actually doesn't measure that; it actually measures the *angular* distance between them, and angular distance is a dimensionless quantity.

Fortunately, there is an unexpected feature of human vision that measures the actual length of something; it is the **wavelength** of the perceived light, which is expressed as the **hue** of a color.

And thus I decided to say "long in length" as **re** (from "red"), and say "short in length" as **wi** (from "violet").

**Time:**

Though humans can perceive the *flow* of time, humans don't have a direct sense to measure the length of a duration. Yet there is an unexpected sense that has something to do with time. Our *hearing* can perceive the **pitch** of a sound, which is physically the **frequency** – the reciprocal of the duration of a cycle.

And thus I decided to say "high in frequency" as **hi**, and say "low in frequency" as **lo**. Of course, these refers to frequency and not to time. To refer to time, or to flip the dimension of a quantity in general, replace the positive vowels to negative;  for "long in duration" and  for "short in duration".

**Mass:**

Okay... This is where things get exotic. There is absolutely no perception measuring mass; this fact can be seen by going to the outer space, where there is no g-force to create *weight*.

Yet there is a physical quantity involving mass that we can perceive by some means. It is **pressure**, which we perceive by the pressure of the atmosphere, subtracted by the inner pressure of our body.

And thus I decided to say "high in pressure" as **mo** (from "at*mo*sphere") and "low in pressure" as **wa** (from "vacuum").

So how I say "heavy in mass" and "light in mass"? Since the physical dimensions – length, frequency, and pressure – form a basis, I can combine the words created so far to indicate multiplicative combination of dimensions, like this:

* **rehi** "fast" / **wilo** "slow"
* **rehihi** "high in acceleration" / **wilolo** "low in acceleration"
* **rere** "wide in area" / **wiwi** "narrow in area"
* **rerere** "big in volume" / **wiwiwi** "small in volume"
* **reremo** "strong in force" / **wiwiwa** "weak in force"
* **rereremo** "high in energy" / **wiwiwiwa** "low in energy"
* **rererehimo** "strong in power" / **wiwiwilowa** "weak in power"
* **remolôlô** "heavy in mass" / **wiwahîhî** "light in mass"
* **mowîwîlôlô** "dense" / **warêrêhîhî** "sparse"

**Temperature/Electric current:**

And this is where I have a problem. As for temperature, our sense of heat doesn't actually measure temperature. It actually measures the transferred heat per time, which is power.

Electric current is even more troublesome. Does anyone know what sense we use when electric current passes through one's body? The sense of pain maybe?

I supposed that, I should employ some *other* physical quantities to refer to them. For instance, if I meant **ra** (from "igno*ra*nce") for "high in entropy" and said **no** (from "k*no*wledge") for "low in entropy", "hot in temperature" would be **rereremonô** and "cold in temperature" would be **wiwiwiwarâ**. What would be the best options?

# Answer
> 5 votes
Well, you should not confuse *entropy* and *temperature*, they are different physical concepts. Temperature is, like pressure, an intensive property that is independent on the size of the system. Entropy, on the other hand, is an *extensive property* like volume that doubles when you double the size of the system. So when your conlang is aware of those physical concepts, it should have different terms for both of them.

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary
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title: sama pi or sama e?

text:
# Question
Title: sama pi or sama e?
I would like to say something like

> These are the same as my house.

I'm not sure if this should be:

> ni li sama **e** tomo mi.

or

> ni li sama **pi** tomo mi.

My understanding is that you only use *e* for verbs acting on an object, and don't otherwise. *sama* does not seem like a verb that is acting on *tomo mi*. But I'm more used to this with *ken* and *wile*. For example

> mi ken kepeken e ilo tu.

> mi wile moku.

I'm not sure if it is natural to use it with *sama* especially when I would need *pi* to indicate that *mi* modifies *tomo* not *sama*.

What would be the "correct" option here?

# Answer
I would use

> ni li sama tomo mi

Technically, according to *Toki Pona: The Language of Good*, *sama* is an adjective. So the overall structure of the sentence would be **NOUN + *li* \+ ADJECTIVE** (p.20). The adjective in this case would have a complement *tomo mi*, to be "like my house"

As you correctly say, *e* is only used with verbs, and *pi* only connects noun phrases, so perhaps *sama pi tomo mi* could be interpreted as a literal translation of "the likeness of my house", but it would be rather weird (and probably ungrammatical)
> 2 votes

# Answer
You could also phrase it as "ni li tomo sama tawa tomo mi", kind of like "these are the same house from the perspective of (/ compared to) my house".

I feel like I should mention too that toki pona doesn't really have a true correct or wrong way to say things. If I remember correctly (don't have my ku with me right now), Sonja herself said that any toki pona that makes sense to the speaker is correct toki pona. Think about which phrasing best reflects how you intuitively think about what you're describing, and pick that one.
> 1 votes

# Answer
toki a! mi jan Kasikusa

sina sona ala sona e ni: sama is also a preposition, at least in common use. You can use it as such. It thus might be said, as a translation of the English phrase "These are the same as my house", "tomo ni li sama tomo mi".
> 0 votes

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Tags: toki-pona
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# Question
Title: How to turn "with", "and", "together", and related words/constructs into verbs or nouns?
I am trying to have every word have a corresponding noun and verb, to see if it's possible. Currently I am focusing on prepositions, which need some massaging for the conlang I'm working on, as I don't want a direct clone of English haha.

I'm currently wondering about the words like "with", "and", and "together". I would make them into the same verb like "join", and after thinking about it, I'm not sure how these words are really different! You say stuff like "red **together with** blue", but I don't get how to describe/delineate the true underlying meaning of these 3 or 4 (+join) words.

How could these 3 words (and potentially others) be nounified and/or verbified, and how would they at the same time retain their unique features (if there are any)?

# Answer
> 1 votes
I don't think that there is a definitive conceptual scheme for ensuring that prepositions all have cognate nouns and verbs. Your way would work fine, but you should bear in mind that there are other schemes as well. For example:

Root #1:

P = with (comitative)
Adv = together
Conj. = and
N = companion (widest definition)
V = accompany

Root #2:

P = with (instrumental) Adj = useful, handy Adv = usefully, handily N = use /jus/ V = use /juz/

Root #3:

P = meaning "joined.to" Adj. = joined, conjoined N = juncture V = join

# Answer
> 1 votes
If you have a strategy for generally verbing nouns, then I recommend using it on prepositions' noun meanings. One such strategy might be making the (transitive) verb of a noun mean "to \[the noun in question\]-ify x."

Regarding noun meanings, those are usually simple enough. For example, the word for "with" might mean "thing that is used, tool", or "usage, use". The word of "like" might mean "similarity". The word for "and" (which is approximately equivalent in meaning to "together with") might mean "togetherness, withness".

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Tags: vocabulary
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# Question
Title: Ways of having the equivalent of -ed (past participle) or -ing (present participle/gerund) in conlang?
You can turn verbs/nouns into adjectives using participles like this:

> * The big-**eyed** monkey.
> * The **jumping** spider.
> * The **loved** rabbit.

However, I don't think these structures exist in Chinese, for example, so I would imagine they would just be said sort of like this:

> * The big-**eye** monkey.
> * The **jump** spider.
> * The **love** rabbit.

It doesn't quite get across the same meaning though. So how would a language outside of English say these sorts of things? Do they have their own participle/gerund forms, or do they just leave them off, or do something else? Wondering if you need to be this specific or can just leave them off.

# Answer
Every language has ways of turning one category of word into another. For turning verbs into adjectives, for example, English has very regular active participles (-ing), slightly less regular passive participles (-ed), and some much less regular derivational processes (-able).

Other languages do it differently. Ancient Greek *loves* its participles and can express all sorts of things like "belonging to the people who have finished \___ing for themselves" in a single word. Swahili on the other hand doesn't really do participles at all; instead it uses relative clauses, turning an entire clause into a modifier ("a living person" → "a person who lives").

English often lets you turn one category into another without any special marker, because our syntax is very strict and that generally shows what category you mean ("you can verb any word"). Languages with less strict syntax generally don't allow this because it gets confusing. As a rule of thumb, strict syntax correlates with simpler morphology, and lenient syntax correlates with more complex morphology.
> 3 votes

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Tags: vocabulary
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# Question
Title: How to tell what feels good in terms of sentence structure (like we do in English)?
I am basically finished with the first draft of the conlang, having figured out how to handle nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, gerunds, participles, particles, and other features from English and Chinese and a few others. Mostly stuck with what feels to be SVO structure, but generics are stacked before the main specific noun/verb, so instead of "crea-tion", it is more like "result create". But similarly it follows "big tree" (generic first).

However, now I'm wondering how to make the language "feel good", like poetry. How does that even work?! Not how to make complex Shakespeare-like sentences, but how to just do regular sentences and make sure they don't feel "clunky" or, like in English, ungrammatical. What does that even mean to "feel ungrammatical". Is it a statistics-based thing, where we get a bunch of sentence templates in our brains, and if it doesn't fit the template it feels "out of place"? I wonder how languages with highly flexible word orders work then, like Latin (I guess). It seems people say even those languages have "*preferred*" word orders, so maybe it is also a statistical thing as to what feels good.

Is there any research on this topic? I am wondering what the next steps to take are to make sure things "sound good" (I know that is subjective, but at the same time, it's kind of not, many in English agree that certain phrases "feel weird"). After browsing through examples in a variety of languages from around the world, it appears that things can be said in almost any way imaginable, with word orders covering every permutation pretty much, some with more detail, some with less, etc.. So I'm not sure how to tell if it feels good.

How does it even work in natural languages? Does it just take a lot of speaking and refining it so we create statistical patterns basically? How much work would it take for a conlang to have that natural feel?

# Answer
> 2 votes
This is the field called "syntax": the study of how words are put together into sentences. The simplest explanation would be that every language has rules for this, but what those rules are, and how flexible the results are, varies from language to language.

If you're interested in the theory, I recommend Adger's *Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach*, which you can find online. There are a lot of different theories of syntax out there, but I've found Adger's explanation of his version of minimalism compelling and also understandable.

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Tags: speaking
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