# Question
Title: Is it plausible to set onsets and codas to be entirely different consonants?
Though I thought I confirmed the consonants of my conlang (**ѲКМНПҀСТФЦЧШ**), eventually, I found that I'm in disfavor of the syllable composition of CVC if the "C"s were meant to be arbitrary consonants. So while keeping CVC, I decided to add more consonants to act as codas. Namely approximants, or **ВЙЛР** to be exact. To give their exact pronunciation in IPA, **Ѳ** \[θ\], **К** \[k\], **М** \[m\], **Н** \[n\], **П** \[p\], **Ҁ** \[ʡ\], **С** \[s\], **Т** \[t\], **Ф** \[f\], **Ц** \[t͜s\], **Ч** \[ʈ͡ʂ~t͜ɕ\], **Ш** \[ʂ~ɕ\], **В** \[w~v\], **Й** \[j~ʝ\], **Л** \[l\], and **Р** \[ɻ\].

I wanted to take this further. Namely, **ѲКМНПҀСТФЦЧШ** should act only as onsets, and **ВЙЛР** should act only as codas. But is it plausible that onsets and codas are entirely disjoint sets?

Take Korean for comparison. It has **ㄱㄲㄴㄷㄸㄹㅁㅂㅃㅅㅆㅈㅉㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎ** as onsets, and **ㄱㄴㄷㄹㅁㅂㅇ** as codas; there is an intersection.

# Answer
> 3 votes
I don't know natural languages with that feature (when I exclude languages whose phonotactics is strictly CV¹, thus having C- as onset and -∅ (nothing) as coda) but I don't consider this feature unplausible.

The described feature can be useful to you conlang in several respects

* enables word segregation in a stream of sounds: Any coda/onset pair marks a word boundary
* adds flavour and style to your conlang and makes it more unique

Try it out.

¹The existence of such languages is disputed, for a discussion see https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/27194/9781

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Tags: phonology
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# Question
Title: Is it natural that "future possibility" is a separate tense?
I had some thought on how tenses work in my conlang. Eventually, I built a model and defined the tenses accordingly. But before showing that model, let be introduce the most basic tense in my conlang:

1. **Tautological tense**. This "tense" states that the sentence is an absolute truth independent to time.

* Example English sentence: **"One plus one equals two."**

The usual partition of time is **Past, Present, and Future**. But there is a problem. Since "present" is a single timestamp when taken literally, almost no statement will hold "at the present" and no other time.

So my model makes partition of time differently. It's **History, Progress, and Prospects**. That gives some more tenses:

2. **Simple past tense**. This tense states that the action in statement has happened before.

* Example English sentence: **"I went to swimming."**

3. **Present progressive tense**. This tense states that the action in the statement is in progression.

* Example English sentence: **"I am going to swimming."**

But unlike the history or the progress, there is a distinctive feature about the prospects. There is no guarantee how the future will become reality. In other words, I should treat the future as a multiple world, hence the plural "prospects". (You can compare this model to the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.)

This gives two future tenses:

4. **Universal future tense**. This tense states that the action in the statement *will* happen anyway.

* Example English sentence: **"I will go to swimming."**

5. **Existential future tense**. This tense states that the action in the statement *might* happen in the future.

* Example English sentence: **"I might go to swimming."**

But I wonder it's natural to give such distinction in the future tense. Is it?

Sidenote: There isn't going to be a simple present tense in my conlang. My conlang cannot just state **"I go to swimming."** However, my conlang can state **"I go to swimming everyday."** because the adverb "everyday" takes the quotient of time by each day. That enables the present progressive tense usable.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Instead of "tautological", the usual name for that in linguistics is **gnomic aspect**. Lingála, for example, has this type of marking.

Similarly, your "historical" marking is usually called **perfective aspect**, indicating that something is over and done with. The opposite, the "progressive", is also called **imperfective aspect**, from the Latin for "unfinished". Many languages have a basic distinction between perfective and imperfective rather than past and present (as in English): you find this in many Slavic languages, and also many Semitic languages.

As for your future, this is not uncommon: the marking used for hypotheticals and possibilities is usually called the **subjunctive mood**. This one is also found in Lingála, as well as Latin and various others. This name comes from the fact that, in Latin, it's often used in subordinate clauses; an alternate name that better describes its *meaning* is **irrealis mood**, from the Latin for "not a fact" (the opposite is **realis**, "a fact").

# Answer
> 3 votes
To address the "future possibility": Spanish subjunctive mood is used to describe possibilities, attitudes or wishes. Historically, future subjunctive was very much alive, but has almost completely disappeared from contemporary language (and the subjunctive itself, past or present, is slowly being eroded away as well.)

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Tags: natural-languages, tense-aspect-mood
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# Question
Title: Which categories of inalienable possession have conlangs expressed?
In many natlangs a grammatical distinction is made between alienable and inalienable possession. Inalienable possession is used for things which are in some way conceptualised as being inseparable from their possessor.

Lévy-Bruhl (and then later Chappell & McGregor) identified that natural languages with a morphologically distinct inalienable possession use inalienable possession for four categories:

1. spatial relationships such as the ‘top’ or ‘front’ of something
2. physical parts, especially human body parts
3. kinship bonds
4. objects which are essential for a person’s survival

For the conlangs with inalienable possession, do they also use it for all four of these categories? Do any conlangs have inalienable possession for a type of nominal relationship which doesn't fit into any of these categories?

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This is an **list of languages** question, which on this site means that multiple answers presenting different languages are allowed. However, if possible, do present as many languages as you can in a post. Conlangs newly constructed to answer this question are not allowed.

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Chappell, Hilary & William McGregor. 1996. Prolegomena to a theory of inalienability. In Hilary Chappell & William McGregor (eds.), *The grammar of inalienability*, 3–30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1914. L’expression de la possession dans les langues mélanésiennes. *Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris* 19(2). 96–104.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Lojban differentiates between inalienable possession, alienable possession, and association: *po'e, po, pe*. But Lojban does so because its design aspired to typological completeness: it's followed the textbooks in its differentiation between alienable and inalienable possession. See http://www.lojban.org/static/publications/refgram\_chunked/cllc/8/3/

> "Something is intrinsically (or inalienably) possessed by someone if the possession is part of the possessor, and cannot be changed without changing the possessor. In the case of Example 3.5, people are usually taken to intrinsically possess their arms: even if an arm is cut off, it remains the arm of that person."

So (2) physical parts. (Lojban deals with (1) as a predicate relation, not a possession.) Not (4), as far as I know. Logically (3) kinship bonds should be inalienable as well, but those too are represented in Lojban as predicate relations. (In fact the expression of relations between entities through overt predicates diminishes the role of possessives in Lojban overall.)

# Answer
> 1 votes
Ithkuil, a conlang known for having *way* too much grammar, has nine possessive cases, at least in the recently (as of 2023) published "New" version. They are known collectively as "Appositive Cases" because "Possessive" is one of them, used for alienable physical possession, and "Genitive" is another, used for inalienable possession in your first, second and third senses. I'm not sure about the fourth. The closest that comes to it is the "Interdependent" case, which expresses the relationship between the complementary participants in an action, but that's hardly "essential for survival", now is it?

But these are not the only Appositive cases. There's also the "Proprietive", for the "legal" owner of an object, the "Productive" for an object's creator, the "Originative" for its origin, and the "Attributive" for an action or state's experiencer, all of which can be argued to be a kind of inalienable possession. The other two Appositive cases are the "Interpretive" for an entity's interpreter and the "Partitive" for a container's contents, which I mention for completeness.

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Tags: typology, morphology, list-of-languages
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# Question
Title: Are there best practices for creating a lexicon or dictionary spreadsheet?
Mine has evolved over years and I'm sure I can still learn more about how to organize it. This might be an even more helpful question for folks starting out.

# Answer
It all comes down to preference, as long as the spreadsheets are neat and easy to read. Looking for other alternatives beyond spreadsheets is also a viable option. As an example, I used a bit of programming knowledge to take the data from my spreadsheets and represent them in a format that resembles old dictionaries. (That might not be for everyone, caffeine overdose is real :)
> 2 votes

# Answer
Although I've never tried it, it seems like a data structure other than a spreadsheet (a database of some form) would be more suited to the complex relationships between lexemes and definitions.

If presented sequentially, it seems like ordering the lexicon according to its writing system ("alphabetical order") is the only really workable method. Trying to order by meaning ignores just how messy meaning can be and doesn't account for figures of speech or semantic shifts.
> 1 votes

# Answer
I'll throw my hat in on the main best practices I have, anyway.

**In my view, the number one best practice in assembling a conlang lexicon must be:**

* **Get familiar with whatever filters, advanced find & replace, slicers, conditional formatting, grouping, sorting, and other organizational tools your medium has. 10 minutes per day for a week asking, "What does the next menu option do?" may save you days of tedious manual searching/organizing over time. I have learned new spreadsheet features and functions while conlanging that I could use elsewhere, too.**

Here I discuss an "alphabetically" organized google sheet, with the advantage it can expand indefinitely and organize numerous nuances.

The conlang-guiding spreadsheets @Ylahris made, Der Spracherfinder, has a theme-based starter words lexicon template. This could have the advantage over my suggestions if you're aiming to showcase relatively fewer words, or looking for prompts to get started.

**Notes on the template**

Why not just write all the parts of speech a word can do in one cell?

* So that I can more easily find or organize patterns/exceptions, I have definition columns for different parts of speech and different transitivity situations (to shoot, to shoot it, to shoot at it).

What's the benefit of the Type column? Why start with the filter there?

* I sometimes want to deal with or look among all words of a type. I could name quite a few more of these tags which I have found useful. But in short this tagging system saves me a lot of time and a lot of "I have fixed all the ones I could find. But could I be missing some?"

Why are certain cells colored in the template?

* Conditional formatting can help color-code certain patterns automatically. Here, I have it highlighting duplicate/homograph words and certain tags.

What is the advantage of the +/- at left?

* When you have dozens or hundreds of words starting with each letter, the collapsible grouping saves a lot of time scrolling, either when initially alphabetizing and/or editing words. Sometimes you want to Ctrl+F search only certain letter sections, too.

What do I need the top "?" sections for?

* Often times working on thing A brings thing B to my attention. If I can make a note and place to put it in an "under construction" section at the top, I can follow through thing A without forgetting thing B.
* Sometimes I'm on a roll thinking up good-sounding words. It's not always when I'm on a row thinking analytically and defining new concepts/grammatical approaches for the same words. While I am on the aesthetic roll, having a separate workshop section for extra "sounds good, needs definition" words can save time and improve both goals over all.
> 1 votes

# Answer
Organizing a lexicon when it gets greater than 100 words is a problem. I tried text files, Markdown, and spreadsheets but they all seem to get harder to work with as the lexicon grows. I am working on the following hierarchy which may be implemented in a database. Note that each level may have more than one entry for the entry above.

1. word
2. etymology
3. pronunciation
4. part of speech
5. definition
6. example
7. gloss
> 0 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, conlang-documentation
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# Question
Title: Is it natural that different quantities with the same physical dimension are distinguished by adverbs?
My conlang is very literal to human perception, and I continued building vocabularies for physical quantities.

Though in a previous question, I brought an exotic trick to describe length (namely, give "red" for "long" and "violet" for "short"), I eventually found that, the presence of multiple eyes should exactly measure the usual length between two spatial points. Simple geometry and trigonometry; the distance between the two eyes and the four angular distances should give the said length exactly.

I took this further. Perhaps my conlang should use the same words when the quantities have the same physical dimension, only differentiated by the following adverb. This idea would be demonstrated in English like this:

* high = long up / low = short up
* deep = long down / shallow = short down
* far = long in front / close = short in front
* wide = long between / narrow = short between

Does any natural language do this?

# Answer
> 6 votes
Sure. Not to the extent that you're doing it here, but English uses "far away", "far down", "far up", "far apart", and so on to indicate physical length in different directions. (Not just "far", either: "a long way away", "a long way down", etc.)

Things that have the same dimensions in a physics sense but not in an intuitive sense *don't* generally work like this, just because most people don't consider them the same: you can measure color (well, *some* colors: not white or magenta, for example) in meters by referring to the wavelength of light, but to non-physicists there's no obvious connection between color and length. But this isn't necessarily an issue for a conlang.

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Tags: vocabulary, natural-languages
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# Question
Title: Do we have any conlangs which are "primitive" languages?
We have *minimal* languages with few words, like Toki Pona, and I have made a rough language with about 4000 words which covers most of what you would need to say as base concepts (4000 base concepts), as an extremely rough estimate. Then you combine these things to get the millions of specific concepts, roughly speaking. But these languages, as far as I know, have "modern" grammars roughly speaking.

In doing a conlang, and thinking of languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, or even Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili, you always want to make it speakable like a "modern natural language".

I have a line of imagination whereby I'm thinking that early in language evolution languages might not have been fully formed into "natural" languages like they are today. Instead they might have been, well, for lack of a better term, "primitive". By primitive I mean, they would have lacked subtle grammatical concepts and may not have even had "words" for highly abstract concepts. In thinking briefly about it, words like even "move", "make", "do", etc., these are all extremely abstract. Actions like "jump", or "sleep" or "climb" are easy to point to, as are comparing things to get adjectives like "red", or objects like "tree" and "leaf". So there is potentially a long gap in language development between realizing we need words for the *abstract concepts* to make it easier to talk about things, and when we just had things for the *obvious concepts* (things/features/actions which you can easily point to, for example).

In addition, I try and think how they could have even come to the idea of creating chains of sounds (like words), and it seems that would be a long evolution. Maybe they started realizing they could make individual sounds ("mm"), then two-sound chains ("ma"), then further 1-syllable sounds, then to two syllable sounds. Who knows. But in guessing, **I would like to build a conlang which takes 1 syllable words and sequences them into a thought, without making it flow smoothly like a modern natural language.**

Are there any languages like this (conlangs, creoles, etc.)? Any sources of inspiration I should take a look at?

What I'm imagining is something like:

> Tree. Climb. You. Me.
> Tree. Climb. You. Me.... Eat. Fruit... Take. Nap... Then. Walk. There (gesture point).

Well, really, "take" is an abstract concept. So it would be like "Nap" instead probably.

The order of the words seems like it would be more fluid rather than fixed (English is more fixed word order). You would talk slower because you need to let an imagination sink in for each word stated (in the listener), since all this is new.

* Tree (point to tree, pause for a few seconds)
* Climb (gesture climbing, pause for a few seconds)
* You (point to you, pause for a few seconds)
* Me (point to me, pause for a few seconds)
* etc..

I don't have a better way of thinking about how a "primitive" language might look. I don't mean it needs to be choppy and stereotypically "caveman-like", but that's what it seems like I'm saying. But no, I am trying to say something where each word has magical meaning, which you have to ponder to understand, and use other associations and gestures to get the meaning of the speaker, before there are grammatical niceties like adpositions and such (assuming English in this example), or affixes.

Are there any conlangs like this which I could look at? If so, knowing a quick example of how it works would be helpful. If not, what about creoles or pidgins, how do they compare? If nothing comes to mind, how could you string together concepts without modern natural language grammatical niceties, in your imagination?

# Answer
I don't know of any attested languages that work this way, constructed or natural. Humans are very good at finding ways to communicate, and if you put children together with no exposure to outside language, they will invariably come up with something complex and sophisticated with a full-fledged grammar. Look at how pidgins turn into creoles\*, for example, or the origin of Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN)\*. Indeed, some linguists (most famously Noam Chomsky) point to this as evidence that language is innate, and humans have a built-in "universal grammar" mechanism in our brains to make this work.

If you want to find a "primitive" language like this, you're going to have to look back tens of thousands of years at least, which means we're firmly in the realm of speculation. But you might find Ljiljana Progovac's work interesting; she analyzes certain "fossil" constructions that are remarkably consistent across living languages, looks at how they compare to early stages of infant language development (like the "two-word" stage), and speculates about how people might have once communicated using *only* these constructions.

Her basic thesis is that the first stage of communication was assigning names to things and actions ("tree", "run", "eat", etc), then stringing two of these together to express actions on objects ("I eat", "eat plant", etc; notably, she points out that most languages allow these sorts of two-word constructions where the noun is either the subject **or** the object of the verb, so a "turncoat" turns his coat but a "turntable" is a table that turns). Eventually, the next step was using one of these two-word constructions *as a component in a two-word construction*, introducing recursion to the system. She speculates that this would have been an evolutionary benefit since it would make someone better at insults, which could be used to resolve social disputes in a non-violent way (and thus not injuring other members of the group).

This is, again, *very* speculative. But it might be an interesting foundation for a conlang.

* These examples aren't entirely uncontroversial: there are a few different theories out there about how creoles form, and some linguists believe there was outside intervention involved in ISN. But the general consensus—and what we teach our introductory linguistics students—is what I've said here.
> 3 votes

# Answer
There is of course the Pleistocenese, somewhat plausible artlang meant for the Neanderthals. In many ways it breaks our preconceptions, it has no separate phonemes (word=morpheme=syllable≈phoneme), all the "words" are uninflected monosyllabic units, there are no regular word classes, no higher grammatical abstractions (the syntax is a patchwork of irregularities). The language is on one hand rather complicated for a modern human to learn, on the other hand quite incapable of conveying elaborate philosophical ideas (evenif you somehow added the vocabulary).
> 2 votes

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Tags: creoles, pidgin, evolution
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title: How to create realistic intonation?

text:
# Question
Title: How to create realistic intonation?
How would one approach creating a conlang with a system of intonation, like English? Specifically for a naturalistic a priori conlang.

Some sub-queries I have are

* What resources are there, if any, on creating intonation system?
* What systems of describing intonation unambiguously in written text exist, if any?

# Answer
> 1 votes
As far as I know, there isn't a good system in the IPA for rendering intonation. One way to do it would be with a graph (e.g. using Google Sheets).

Intonation is rather complicated, and I don't know too much about it. I do know that most languages on Earth mark questions with a rising intonation (though certain British dialects have a sharp falling intonation instead). There are probably other near-universals regarding intonation too, which you could also use. But you might also be okay borrowing intonation patterns from natlangs, as long as it's not just one language.

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Tags: conlang-creation, resource-request
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# Question
Title: What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
What sound changes are most common in natural languages, and in what order do they usually occur? Are there any factors to take into account when modelling sound changes for a conlang that is supposed to resemble a natlang?

# Answer
> 7 votes
By far the most common changes are *assimilation*, one sound becoming more similar to a nearby sound, and *lenition*, a sound shifting to require less articulatory effort. These are both broad categories that encompass a lot of more specific types of changes.

*Assimilation* can include:

* A sound taking on an adjacent sound's features, like md \> nd or zt \> st
* A cluster turning into a single sound, like ts \> ss (total assimilation)
* A sound becoming voiced between vowels (which are usually voiced), or voiceless at the edge of a word (next to the voiceless silence)
* A vowel taking on the features of vowels in other syllables, like uti \> yti (vowel harmony)
* And various others!

*Lenition* can include:

* Sounds using less of a closure, like k \> x or x \> h
* Sounds disappearing entirely, like h \> ∅ (deletion)
* Vowels moving toward the center of the vowel space, like a \> ə (laxing)
* Long sounds being pronounced for less time, like tt \> t (shortening)
* Multiply-articulated sounds losing one of their articulations, like kw \> k (or p)
* And more!

Since these both reduce the amount of articulatory effort needed, they're very common types of changes. But they also generally involve losing information, so other types of changes will work to counteract this over time (for example, morphological changes to restore some of this information).

# Answer
> 3 votes
Things are probably hard to quantify, but some specific sound changes seem to be more frequent than others, most notably:

/h/ -\> /∅/ (loss of /h/)

The consonant system often has gaps at /p/ and /g/:

/p/ -\> any: is mostly /p/ -\> /f/ or /p/ -\> /ɸ/, can go further via /h/ to nothing /∅/

/g/ -\> any: lots of choices, e.g., /g/ -\> /ʤ/, /g/ -\> /k/, /g/ -\> /ɣ/ (and further to nothing /∅/)

# Answer
> 3 votes
Here are a couple sound changes I use when I'm not sure what to do:

* Voiceless consonants becoming voiced between two vowels (intervocalic voicing)
* \[u\] and \[o\] becoming \[y\] and \[ø\] in the environment \_Ci (that is, when the next vowel is \[i\])
* Voiceless nonsibilant fricatives becoming \[h\]
* \[h\], \[x\], \[ħ\], or other weak consonants being lost and lengthening the previous vowel (compensatory lengthening)
* Clusters of two voiceless stops becoming geminated forms of the second one (this is sometimes called Italian-style gemination)
* Weakening voiced stops to liquids (e.g. \[b\] to \[w\])

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Tags: diachronics, natural-languages, sound-change
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# Question
Title: Is there a general strategy to build vocabulary for chemical elements?
I continued building vocabulary for my conlang, and now I'm trying to name chemical elements.

Here's the concept: The major speakers of this conlang are angels, and some of them have lived for a long time. Some have lived since when ancient Greeks lived, and as such, I imagine my conlang to incorporate modern theories of chemistry to ancient alchemical concepts, prominently the theory of 4 elements; earth, water, air, and fire.

So here is the sketch.

**Earth-like elements:**

The composition of the earth's crust gives a way of vocabularizing some elements. I name these elements **earthlings**, which are:

* Second earthling = Silicon(Si)
* Third earthling = Aluminum(Al)
* Fourth earthling = Iron(Fe)

**Water-like elements:**

Though water itself is a compound, the **salt** in the sea water is what to be called **waterlings**. Those are:

* First waterling = Chlorine(Cl)
* Second waterling = Sodium(Na)
* Third waterling = Magnesium(Mg)
* Fifth waterling = Calcium(Ca)
* Sixth waterling = Potassium(K)

**Air-like elements:**

Earth's atmosphere gives some elements as well:

* First airling = Nitrogen(N)
* Third airling = Argon(Ar)

**Fire-like elements:**

There is only one element that is worth to be called **fireling**. It's oxygen(O).

Furthermore, since water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, I subtract the oxygen to acquire hydrogen. Hydrogen(H) is **disfired water**.

**Others:**

So what about other elements? I put infra-/sub-/hypo- prefixes to subtract periods, and put ultra-/super-/hyper- prefixes to add periods (similar to Mendeleev's "eka-"). For examples:

* Hyposecond earthling = Carbon(C)
* Hypothird earthling = Boron(B)
* Superfourth earthling = Osmium(Os)
* Hypofirst waterling = Fluorine(F)
* Hyposecond waterling = Lithium(Li)
* Hypothird waterling = Beryllium(Be)
* Ultrafirst airling = Phosphorus(P)
* Subthird airling = Helium(He)
* Hypothird airling = Neon(Ne)
* Ultrafireling = Sulfur(S)
* Hyperfireling = Tellurium(Te)

**Question:**

Yet still, I have a majority of elements uncovered. How should I name the rest? Is there a general strategy, or are they gonna be arbitrary choices?

# Answer
This system of element names has one major flaw: it's anthropocentric in all the wrong ways.

Yeah, the angels making this language up are trying to communicate with us plebeian humans, but the angels themselves aren't human and I imagine they are trying to get us to break free of the shackles of Earthly life (if they aren't, why are they trying to be so precise? Just keep us in the dark ages with straight-up alchemy). This system is tailor made to apply only to our own planet, and will be useless once we leave.

Worse, the Western Four Element schema is just that: Western. The East Asian civilizations of the time (and still to this day in traditional medicine) used the Five Phases.

It would be far more useful to emphasize the Periodic Table first, and get us plebeian humans asking the right questions. Why is the part of the air we breath called the second chalk? Because it is the chalcogen in period two. Table salt is composed of the second halo and the third soda. The second chalk combines with the prime element in a ratio of 1:2 to form water. The sun transmutes the prime element into the first noble.

In general, the system works like this: Name the columns, number the periods. Hydrogen gets special treatment because it can behave as if it belongs in column I, IV or VII. The transition metals and the rare earth metals will also need special treatment because the columns get muddled together so deep into the Periodic Table.

And if you really want to keep the classical connection, the four elements do map rather cleanly to CHNOPS, the elements of life: H and O compose water, P and S are both associated with fire, and C and N spend most of their bio-cycles in the air, with the trace metals like Fe and Ca as earth.
> 4 votes

# Answer
For having a notion of a chemical element at all, you need to know a solid amount of chemistry (real chemistry, alchemy known for millenia isn't enough here). With this background, the theory of the ancient four elements (specific to the Classical Greek culture and its successors) is just anachronistic. Modern chemistry informed element naming would use some of the following features

* Number of protons/electrons. This is a blunt but straightforward naming scheme giving us names like *unnilhexium* for element 106
* Use periods and/or valency groups. This allows for some creativity (we like it in conlangs) but becomes difficult with the Lanthanides and Actinides

BTW, Fluor is a fireling to me, in Flour atmosphere everything burns (almost, OK).
> 2 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary
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# Question
Title: How to romanize velarization, palatalization, and labialization?
I started a conlang inspired by Marshallese and Navajo, and have taken several labialized, palatalized, and velarized consonants from them. However, I am unsure how to romanize these consonants.

# Answer
> 4 votes
You have three main options here:

* Use new letters for each one. Latin does this, with *C* `/k/` vs *Q* `/kʷ/`. This will get infeasible if you have a lot of them.
* Have diacritics for palatalization, labialization, and velarization. This is common in Eastern European languages that use the Latin alphabet, contrasting *T D N* vs *Ť Ď Ň* and so on. The downside to this method is that they can get difficult to stack, if you can have e.g. a palatalized labialized stop.
* Have separate letters that mean "palatalized", "labialized", and "velarized". Most modern forms of Cyrillic do this, with the letters Ь and Ъ indicating whether the preceding consonant is palatalized or not. IPA also does this: tʲ, tʷ, tˠ.

Which one you choose mostly comes down to your sense of aesthetics, and how you expect the language to be written/typed.

# Answer
> 4 votes
In addition to the methods given by others, you could also try the Irish approach (which has similarities to the Cyrillic systems): divide your usual vowel letters into sets for each coarticulation, then only allow vowel letters that match the consonant's coarticulation to be written adjacent to it.

This works perfectly nicely when you have palatalising vowels before and after palatal consonants, but when you don't you end up needing to insert additional vowel letters that are not present as distinct vowel phonemes in order to ensure that no vowel is next to a consonant it doesn't match coarticulation with.

This is why the Irish form of the name Mary, Máire has an \<i\>, despite being pronounced with an /ɑ:/ or /a:/ in the first syllable (depending on dialect). The r is soft (palatalised) and so cannot appear next to the \<á\>, and so an \<i\> is inserted.

This process is also one major factor that can make Irish vowels difficult to predict from the spelling (even within a given dialect), as it's not always clear which of the vowel letters are phonemically present, and which are just there to mark coarticulation of the consonants.

Depending on your goals that could be either an advantage or a disadvantage.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Here's another option:

If basically every consonant has a palatalized (resp. labialized, velarized) form, consider transforming the following vowel letter instead of the consonant letter itself. This is what Cyrillic does, in addition to the "hard" and "soft" signs that Draconis mentioned. It has ten vowel letters, five "hard" (un-palatalizing) and five "soft" (palatalizing). It's a bit more complicated than that, since the Slavic languages have evolved considerably since the Cyrillic alphabet was invented to accommodate them. Case in point: the letter I only appear in digraphs now, to the point that those digraphs are in the alphabet, but I itself is not.

# Answer
> 2 votes
If you have a separate -ized form for each one, digraphs are probably your best bet. Depending on what other sounds you have and how you romanize them, you could use *j*, *w*, and *x* (i.e. tʲ tʷ tˠ are *tj* *tw* *tx*). But of course, it's up to you.

Another way you could do it (this is Mark Rosenfelder-style) would be to use the IPA characters themselves (i.e. tʲ tʷ tˠ are   ). This is another aesthetic, and works really well if that's the aesthetic you're going for. I find it gives exotic vibes. But it comes down to personal preference overall.

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Tags: conlang-creation, writing-systems
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# Question
Title: Are mora and syllable weight the same thing?
I'm researching syllable structures to learn better ways to construct words. I've come across mora and weight, and upon first glance they seem to describe the same thing in different words.

Mora is described as a measure of timing. For example, ba = 1 mora, baa/bai = 2 mora, and baab = 3 mora. (Source)

Compare this with weight which seems to describe mora, but with words like "light", "heavy", and "CV, CVC, CVCC, etc." (Source)

Are these the same thing, or is there a vital difference I am not understanding?

Edit: I don't know why, but the phonology tag pops up when I click the phonotactics tag. I've tried fixing it to no avail.

# Answer
Moras and syllable weight are the same *type* of thing: they're a way to explain why different syllables behave differently, in certain languages. But which one is more useful depends on the details of the language in question.

In English, syllables come at a mostly-consistent pace. But in Japanese, they don't. A syllable like *taa* or *tan* takes approximately twice as long as a syllable like *ta*, and a syllable like *taan* takes approximately three times as long. As a result, the "syllable" ends up not being a very natural unit for talking about prosody. Instead, we talk about a smaller unit, the "mora"; *ta* is one mora, *taa* and *tan* are two, *taan* is three. This ends up being a useful system for analyzing Japanese prosody.

In Latin, on the other hand, syllables like *ta* and *tan*/*taa* act differently—but there's no difference between the behavior of *tan*/*taa* and *taan*. In other words, the only distinction that matters is between syllables that have *either* a long vowel or a coda (or both), and syllables that have neither. Furthermore, the number of consonants in the onset and coda don't matter; all that matters is *if* a coda is present or not. In this case, it's more useful to say that syllables have a binary property: they're either "heavy" or "light". The actual number of morae doesn't really matter: once a syllable is heavy, thanks to having either a coda or a long vowel, adding the other makes no difference.

Sometimes both of these are useful. In (Old Babylonian) Akkadian, there are three types of syllable: light syllables have a short vowel and no coda, heavy syllables have a long vowel *or* a coda, and ultraheavy syllables have either a long vowel *and* a coda, or an ultralong vowel. The exact number of morae still doesn't necessarily matter: adding a coda to an ultralong vowel makes no difference. But it's convenient to define these categories of syllables in terms of morae: one mora is a light syllable, two morae is a heavy syllable, three *or more* morae is an ultraheavy syllable.
> 3 votes

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Tags: phonology
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# Question
Title: What is a plausible lexical source for the remote past?
I've always had a huge focus on utter realism, so I require lexical sources for all of my morphology. In my most recent project, the Thakina \['tʰa.ki.na\] family. The proto-language has four tenses: recent past (unmarked), present (assumed to be imperfective), future, and remote past. I have lexical sources for the present and future, but I don't have any ideas for the remote past.

(I did check the *World Lexicon of Grammaticalization*, but I didn't find anything on the remote past.)

Edit: This is not a far-past thing, it's anything that didn't happen *just now*.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Honestly, I would probably explain it as the pre-proto having had a generic past tense, and then when the proto developed a near past from a lexical source, the generic past got reinterpreted in contrast as the remote past.

Alternatively: some Indo-European languages, like Attic Greek, had in common this weird quirk where verbs rendered in past tenses of various aspects - aorist, imperfect, perfect, whatever - were obligatorily prefixed with with a vowel, called the "augment". Compare e.g. *λυομεν* "we release", present vs. ***ε***-*λυομεν* "we were releasing", imperfect past. The PIE augment is thought to have descended from what was earlier a separate word meaning "then; at that time" that got glommed onto the start of verbs.

This demonstrates the feasibility of deriving temporal deixis (tense) marking from spacial deixis markers like demonstratives, like the remote past from "that time" and the near past from "this time". This probably works better with a 3-way proximity distinction like Georgian has instead of English's 2-way: the remote past from "that (distal) time" and the near past from "that (medial) time".

# Answer
> 1 votes
The World Lexicon of Grammaticalization has YESTERDAY \> PAST as one way to get at a generic past. You can take a marker of remote past like "Once upon a time" as a source for a remote past grammaticalization.

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Tags: morphology, naturalism
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# Question
Title: Do I really need plural grammatical number when my conlang deals with existence and uniqueness?
I continued building my conlang, and it's time to deal with grammars of nouns. In my conlang, nouns are categorized into three: **countable**, **measurable**, and **abstract**. This question is about countable nouns.

As this conlang heavily takes concepts of mathematics, there are two things this conlang deals seriously with: **existence** and **uniqueness**. Those already give three grammatical numbers.

1. **Null**: Zero or more.
2. **Existential**: One or more.
3. **Unique**: Exactly one.

The "null" quantification poses the noun without specifying its number. The "existential" quantification poses that the noun exists, not necessarily singular or plural. The "unique" quantification has effect of specifying a single object; this doesn't mean there uniquely existed the object to specify from the start, and should not be confused with definite articles like "the".

The motivation of the "existential" quantification is like this: For example in mathematics, when we say "They share a vector", we really mean "There exists a vector they share". I thought it'd be good to have a separate quantification for what "a" really means here.

There is another quantification I want to introduce:

4. **Optional**: Zero or one.

This states that there is no guarantee that the noun exists, but it'd be unique if it does.

The main question is: Do I need a plural quantification? This doesn't seem to be much used in mathematics. When we say "They share vectors", we really mean "Their vectors coincide". It's not that there are two or more vectors they share, and in my conlang, I'd just say about them coinciding.

Furthermore, the "optional" quantification serves as the negation of the plural quantification, so I can negate it back. Though, I don't see a good English demonstration.

# Answer
No, you do not. Plenty of natural languages get along fine without a grammatical plural. On any situation where it actually matters, you can just use an explicit numeral.
> 6 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, grammar, nouns
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# Question
Title: Should I analyze these consonants as codas or onset clusters?
In my conlang, the proto-language had a CVR (R standing for a resonant) syllable structure and no voiced obstruents. Later, **unstressed vowels were lost between voiceless obstruents** (i.e. all obstruents). After this, obstruents were voiced when between two other voiced segments (/s/ became /r/, which was not present in the protolang), and **all clusters with any voiced segments were split by an epenthetic vowel /a/**.

The result is that the new language appears to be CVC, but only permitting voiceless obstruents to serve as codas, and only word-internally before other voiceless obstruents. Which made me wonder: does it make more sense to analyze this syllable structure as CCV? This doesn't end up working exactly (the protolang had uniform initial stress, preventing words from starting with clusters), but it feels like it makes more sense. So how should I analyze the syllable structure?

# Answer
> 1 votes
As already noted in the question, the answer is: It depends on the analysis. However, there are some tools to inform the analysis, most notably the sonority hierachy. The sonority sequencing principle describes a syllable as a sequence of sounds with peak sonority at the syllable core (a single vowel or a diphthong) and falling sonority towards the beginning and the end of the syllable. So, a syllable boundary is at the troughs of sonority. It is not necessarily uniquely determined by this requirement and there is another heuristic often invoked, the maximum onset principle: Put as many consonants as possible to the second syllable. This is not the only possible way to determine syllables, Ancient Greek grammarians used the heuristic to move the maximum possible word initial consonant clusters to the second syllable and Greek has a lot of interesting consonant clusters in this respect, e.g., /mn-/, /pt-/, /ps-/, or /kt-/.

Applying it to the conlang described in the question, we arrive at some words with the structure CVPPVC where P stands for a voiceless plosive. Since all voiceless plosives are on the same level of the sonority hierarchy, a syllable boundary between the two plosives is the choice suggested by this analysis. Putting the syllable boundary before the consonant cluster is not completely outlandish, compare the Greek words starting with /pt-/ or /kt-/, but the described conlang still does not have word initial consonant clusters, so it looks unnatural to me.

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Tags: phonology
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title: What is R'lyehian based on?

text:
# Question
Title: What is R'lyehian based on?
In his Cthulhu Mythos, H. P. Lovecraft includes several snippets of the R'lyehian language, including the "Cthulhu chant":

> Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

We have a vocabulary list available, that gives us a decent taste of the words - for instance, *'ai* means *speak* or *call*.

Does this bear any resemblance to any natural languages? Do we know the inspiration for the words?

# Answer
> 19 votes
Ostensibly, the transcription we have of R'lyehian is supposed to be a crude attempt to represent utterly inhuman sounds with the Latin alphabet. Most of what I can find on R'leyhian claims that it attempts to be an un-Earthly language: it does not distinguish between parts of speech, for example. It seems likely to me that Lovecraft at least attempted to invent a fully *a priori* conlang here.

I've found a Quora answer claiming the language "has basic elements of Welsh and German glottals," but it's unclear what exactly that means and where they got that information from.

# Answer
> 5 votes
R'lyeh isn't really based on anything. To my knowledge, based on a documentary, Lovecraft would walk in the woods and just try out sounds. Like he did for Cthulhu.

> Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

is really Lovecraft just trying to transcribe inhuman, alien sounds in the Latin alphabet. So there really *isn't* a proper R'lyeh language, however that doesn't stop Lovecraft's fans and inspired writers from "reverse engineering" the sentence and creating something tangible.

EDIT: The documentary was *Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown*

Credit to Mast for finding the documentary.

# Answer
> -3 votes
Anyone who has read Lovecraft knows that he liked to play with words, so inevitably that would have included playing with them in sound. So, we could simply assume that the well-known phrase is nothing more than a jumble of letters; or we could assume, as Lovecraft presented in many stories, that the phrase has a definite meaning in English - but coded to hide the meaning. For example, the use of an apostrophe denotes letters that have, quite literally, been hewn away - so, Ph' could well mean 'Few'. Go to an etymology website and look up 'ng': again, quite literally, it refers to Angles or English. Then there is the jumble of letters, mglw': through German-Hebrew, those letters mean moglisherweise which translates as possibly/potentially.

Over time, language (its usage and pronunciation) changes. Being something of an antiquarian (among other things), Lovecraft would have known this and he clearly drew from a lot of sources for his stories. So, for example, the Necronomicon may well have been inspired, at least in part, by the Shams al-Ma'arif; the Great Race clearly has references to Madison Grant's work; there are the remains of megalithic structures in continental North America; and Nan Madol and the structures of Pohnpei in the South Pacific clearly had an influence in such stories at The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Dagon, and The Call of Cthulhu.

Cthulhu. There was a time when the 'h' was a silent letter making, from a speech perspective, CTulu. So I present the following: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=ketchup More South Pacific and Chinese references. Chew Tulu. C'Tulu. Brine of fish.

R'lyeh. Rule. Yeh is an interesting bit. It has several different meanings. As yeh-teh it means 'small manlike animal' in old Tibetan (a place that often features in Lovecraft's stories) and is linked to the Yeti (or Mi-Go). However, it is also linked to the various names of the Abrahamic deity: Yehovah and Yaweh being two - and those names are derived from the Egyptian Moon Goddess, Iah (from which we also get Al-Iah: the true Roman script being what it is, a lower case 'l' is indistinguishable from an upper case 'I'). Ia(h), Ia(h), Shub-Niggurath. Think 'black ziggurat'. Another play on words.

And what of Yog Sothoth? Yog comes from the Turkish, in which the -g- is a "soft" sound, in many dialects closer to an English "w" and means roughly "to condense". Which makes Yog Sothoth a condensed or agglutinated being - much as would be the case if, for example, all the Abrahamic faiths came together under the roofs of masonic lodges (of which, some of the oldest are in the Far East and Tibet).

Lastly, Lovecraft's works are focused on cosmic horror. In modern times, cosmic refers to outer space - but it used to mean worldly or of this world. It comes from the word 'kosmos' which means 'world order'.

However, all this aside, these things could simply be my way of entertaining myself and there really is nothing but a good yarn in Lovecraft's tales.

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Tags: inspiration, rlyehian
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# Question
Title: How to prevent all of my words being eroded away to nothing
My latest project is a full language superfamily (the Thakina languages). I'm now at the fourth generation with Highlands Têyisa, and I'm noticing that most of the words are getting far, far shorter ─ for example, **ukomaj* became simply *we* in HT, and probably would be further eroded in the future. Now, this is an extreme case (a more typical example might be **lokanu* becoming *lwe*), but since I have two more generations to go, I'm beginning to get worried. Is there a way that I could restore some of the length and complexity of the words I started with through sound change, or would I have to use compounding / new words?

# Answer
As a general rule, regular sound changes wear away at words, reducing their information content.

Countering this, morphosyntactic changes restore the lost information.

For example, let's look at Latin. Classical Latin has lots of case marking on nouns; *amīcum* means "friend" as a direct object, for example, while *amīcō* means "friend" as an indirect object. But in later Latin, coda *m* turned into nasalization on the vowel and then disappeared, and *u* and *ō* merged into *o*. Now these two forms were indistinguishable.

As they become less and less distinct, though, Latin-speakers still needed to convey this information. So during this period of merging, Latin-speakers started adding extra words to disambiguate: putting *ad* "toward" in front of the indirect object. As a result, by the time the forms had entirely merged, Latin had a new way to distinguish them: *amico* for the direct object and *ad amico* for the indirect object.

This is how it goes in general. When there's a difference that conveys important information, and that difference is getting worn away by sound change, people will add extra words to disambiguate. Wait long enough, and these extra words will get merged into the original ones: that's how we got "inkpen" in English. Southern US dialects merge `/ɪ/` and `/ɛ/` before nasals, so "pen" became confusingly similar to "pin", and was disambiguated as "ink pen". Eventually these two words merged into a single one.
> 5 votes

# Answer
Sound shifts are to some amount irreversible. Long before your words are completely gone, the rate of homophones rises and the speakers of the language have to deal with it in some way or another.

The most common way of dealing with it is *lexical innovation*, one part of the homophone pair is replaced by a new word. Sources for that new word may be internal (formation of a compound, using another semantically related word that is already in the language, using some derivational morphology) or external (borrowing from some other language in your world).

There are other possible exits from the dilemma, e.g., using more and more conventionalised multi-word expressions like "to burn with fire" instead of simply "to burn", because your words for "fire" or for "to burn" have become too ambiguous to be used in isolation.
> 3 votes

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Tags: diachronics, sound-change, evolution
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# Question
Title: From what could I derive a morpheme that explicitly marks a noun as being a phrase head?
I have a number of languages I want to combine into a macrofamily, and one thing they have in common is nouns that ending the the pattern *\*-(V)nVm*, e.g. *\*-n-om* in a PIE-esque language, *-unum* in an Akkadian-esque language, etc. This really looks more like two morphemes smooshed together, and since *\*-om* is a core argument case marker in the PIE-esque language, *\*-(V)n-* is presumably something else that isn't a case marker, but that can stack with a case marker. Like what?

One idea I thought was cool was to use this *\*-n-* to indicate that the noun is a phrase head. Semitic languages have something *similar* with the "construct state", which marks the possessee, i.e. the head of a possessive phrase, e.g.

```
*gi     iki
 1.SG   father
"I am a father"(?)

gi     iki      -n
1.SG   father   EA
"my father"

```

But my idea generalizes this to other noun phrase types, like a noun modified by an adjective or locative expression:

```
*es      geneš   -a
 fish    canal   LOC

es     -in   geneš   -a
fish   EA    canal   LOC
"the fish in the canal"

*ilu     mulkud
 white   pearl

ilu     mulkud   -un
white   pearl    EA
"a white pearl"

```

Or a noun modified by a relative clause:

```
giš     g     -ab    ua    -du
house   1.SG   ERG   see   PST
"I saw the house"

giš     -en   g      -ab   ua    -du
house   EA    1.SG   ERG   see   PST
"the house that I saw"

ukku        -a    eguš        -ar   deb   -ek
saltwater   LOC   blue_crab   PL    sit   3.PL.S
"there are blue crabs in the water"

ukku        -n   -a    eguš        -ar   deb   -ek
saltwater   EA   LOC   blue_crab   PL    sit   3.PL.S
"the water in which there are blue crabs"

```

I'm glossing the *\*-(V)n* here as EA for *état d’annexion* "annexed state", a term used in grammars of the Shilha Berber language for a vaguely similar marking.

This begs the question of where the hell this EA morpheme evolved from, since not all of the macrofamily has it. The World Lexicon of Grammaticalization doesn't give an origin of the construct state. I considered maybe the construct state might be derived from a 3rd person possessed marking which might in turn be derived from a pronoun or a verbal person marker, but none of the languages that have this EA morpheme also have any pronouns/person markers with /n/ at all.

Also, assuming it was originally a separate word that cliticized onto the stem... why does it occur *before* the case ending *\*-om*? I guess it's just so ancient it preceded even the development of case markers? Or did it metathesize into the stem, and if so, why, since *\*-om-Vn* is not particularly hard to pronounce?

# Answer
How about a topic marker, like Japanese *wa*? You could start with a deictic of some sort ("this thing right here"), which got semantically bleached into a general marker of new information ("this thing is important" \> "this is the core of the clause"), and then got bleached even further into a head marker ("this is the core of the phrase").
> 3 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, morphology, diachronics, evolution
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# Question
Title: How much of the irregularity caused by sound change (e.g. vowel loss) will be retained in inflectional paradigms?
In creating a language family with multiple generations, I'm noticing a huge buildup of irregularity in my inflectional paradigms, mostly caused by things like vowel loss etc. How long would it take for these strange rules of the inflection to be ironed out? Would they be at all? Is it a safe assumption to make that people will, over time, generalize the most common rule?

# Answer
The way I put it in historical linguistics classes is:

* Sound laws are entirely regular, and create irregularity
* Analogy is entirely irregular, and creates regularity

In other words, neogrammarian-style sound laws apply perfectly, uniformly, and without exception across the language, and often create irregularities when they interact with each other (as you've seen). Analogy happens sporadically and unpredictably, and serves to smooth out those irregularities and make them regular again.

So the answer is yes, people will regularize things via analogy, but how quickly, how frequently, and just generally *how* they do that is unpredictable. Proto-Indo-European verb conjugation was a mess of irregularity; Ancient Greek preserved most of that irregularity, while Latin regularized it down to just a handful of paradigms (the five "conjugations"), plus a handful of exceptions (common words which didn't get regularized). Conversely Latin had many different ways to mark case and number on nouns, while Ancient Greek simplified these down to three (the three "declensions").

For conlanging, that means it's entirely up to you how much you want to regularize! As a general rule, the most common words are the least likely to get regularized—that's why we have odd forms like "am" and "is" and "be" in English, when practically every other verb follows a regular pattern in the present tense. But beyond this, it happens exactly as much as you the creator want it to happen, whether that's "the entire language" or "not at all".
> 3 votes

# Answer
Define "huge amount". Let's say this is for verb conjugation (maybe it's avtually for nouns; you didn't specify). If there's some commonality - e.g. vowel syncope as you mention - among enough the irregulars to number, say, half of the average size of your regular verb classes, at that point I would just call it a new verb class.

I just made up that "half of the average" metric, you could choose some other threshold, but my point is what it sounds like you're describing is a pretty common mechanism to create multiple conjugation paradigms in the first place. Then you don't have to level the irregularity if you just *redefine it as regular* \- the regular conjugation of the "loses-its-vowel" class.

If a sound change is frequent enough, you don't even have to think of it in terms of irregular vs. regular. In Georgian, verb stems very often get a vowel or two elided. e.g. look up the word for "to kill" and you'll be told it's მოკლავს *mo-k'l-av-s*. The stem, which looks like *-k'l-*, is really an underlying *-k'al-*, but good luck guessing that when the /a/ gets elided in almost all conjugations... until it suddenly reappears in მოვკალი *mo-v-k'al-i* "I killed him". Georgian is so replete with this vowel tomfoolery that its dictionaries just don't even bother trying to keep track of which elisions are "regular" or not. There's not really a *rule* to determine when you do or don't elide, but calling it "irregular" belies how it's so pervasive that it resists analogical levelling.
> 2 votes

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Tags: diachronics, sound-change
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# Question
Title: Is placing the preposition before the verb natural?
*Disclamer: I have a very limited knowledge about linguistics, so the things I'm talking might be completely nonsense.*

In German we can form new verbs by attaching prepositions (?) to it:

> *schlagen**zu*schlagen
> *denken**nach*denken

Sometimes we see this in English too:

> out + live = *outlive*
> over + take = *overtake*

I'm wondering what if my language puts every preposition before the verb, like

> I give my pen to him. → I *togive* my pen him.

(The two objects should be distinguished by dative / accusative case, but there's no such thing in English.)

Is this acceptable / natural?

# Answer
You're conflating a couple different things here.

First are *phrasal verbs* in English, where attaching a preposition to a verb gives it a different meaning: "call" vs "call off", for example. In other Indo-European languages, it's very common to use a prefix on the verb instead; German does this (with its separable prefixes) but so do Latin and Greek.

Second are *prepositional phrases*, where a preposition indicates how a noun relates to the action. You can generally have as many of these as you like: "I read **about** badgers **for** six hours **at** the office **on** Friday…"

Rather than using prepositions like this, some languages do mark their verbs to indicate the roles of the nouns that follow them. For example, in Lingála, you can put a special marking on the verb to indicate that the next noun will be the beneficiary of the action. I'm not aware of any language that lets you do this with an unlimited number of nouns, though; at some point you'll have to use prepositions (or some kind of marking on the noun rather than the verb) for that level of specificity.
> 4 votes

# Answer
You've observed a very real phenomenon; it sounds like you just haven't learned the name for it yet.

This:

> I'm wondering what if my language puts every preposition before the verb, like
>
> > I give my pen to him. → I togive my pen him.
>
> (The two objects should be distinguished by dative / accusative case, but there's no such thing in English.)

is called an **applicative** construction.

The **applicative** is an example of a "valency-increasing operation" - similar to the causative, and opposite to the passive - that you do to a verb to promote an *oblique object* to a *direct object*. ("Oblique" in this context is a catch-all term basically for anything that isn't the subject or direct object.) In German, since direct objects are marked by the accusative case, this means the applicative would be a modification you make to verbs that take a dative or genitive object, and transforms that verb into a verb that takes an accusative object.

Applicatives are probably most famous in Bantu languages like Swahili, but they're common worldwide. WALS' survey implies that ~45% of the world's languages have a morphologized applicative construction - although their methodology is kind of wonky; the sample size is only 183 (for comparison, the object-verb word order survey has a sample size of over 1500) and doesn't count English and German even though both arguably do have an applicative.

Your particular example of \*"I togive my pen him." is a little awkward though in that it has two direct objects simultaneously. You promoted the oblique object "to him" to the direct object "him" - good - but then you also kept the old direct object "my pen". Not all languages with an applicative necessarily allow that - they might require you to delete the existing direct object, or else relegate it to an oblique role. But some languages, called **double-object** languages, don't distinguish direct vs. indirect objects in ditransitives anyway - they're all just "objects" - so for them, the applicative really *is* equivalent to just slapping an extra object onto the verb.

If we go back to WALS and combine the maps for 109B (Other Roles of Applied Objects) and 105A (Ditransitive Constructions: The Verb 'give'), you get this map. With "Legend" in the top left corner, we can filter for just the languages that have an applicative construction (a value of anything other than "No applicative construction" in the first column) *and* double object marking in ditransitives ("Double-object construction" *or* "Mixed" in the second column), and we find that e.g. Swahili and Indonesian would theoretically allow something like your example sentence. I speak neither so I can't really personally confirm that though.
> 2 votes

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Tags: morphology, naturalism, syntax
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# Question
Title: What features should I include in a presentation of a heavily inflected conlang that copies the format of 19th century grammars?
I'm toying with an idea for my next project:

Remember those old-fashioned grammars of heavily infected languages with reams of paradigms for declensions, conjugations, and agreement rules--not to mention irregular forms? Generally, these grammars had a teeny tiny half-page about syntax at the end. I am thinking of writing a grammar of a fictitious language called "Old High Middle Arcanian" with a similar format, though the syntax section is going to have to be longer than in the actual grammars I referred to.

Since this project is (ultimately) tongue-in-cheek, I wonder what other features I should add to my reference grammar to do justice to the old-fashioned format that I've chosen.

# Answer
### General Scheme

You've pretty much got it! I use the same general framework found in Wright's grammars (Germanic) and Allen & Greenough (Latin):

Introduction
Phonology (pronunciation, accentuation)
Morphology
Accidence (all the paradigms)
Syntax
Prosody
Miscellaneous (writing system, numerals, etc)
Texts
Two Way Lexicon
Topical Index
> 3 votes

# Answer
I'm not sure I'm familiar with the particular format you have in mind. When I think of a "grammar of heavily infected languages with reams of paradigms for declensions", I think of *The Georgian Verb* by Tamar Makharoblidze (pdf), which is 645(!) pages along of which *at least* 500 is just conjugation tables.

Some tidbits I notice about it:

* One page on the orthography (p.10) that consists of nothing beyond just showing you the alphabet, and then assuming you can read it fluently for all the conjugation tables thereafter. (If you think that's that not that bad for *Georgian* with only 33 lettters to memorize, I remember an *Amharic* grammar doing this too that required you to have *all of the Ge'ez abugida* memorized before you could read any of the Amharic, because absolutely none of it was romanized.)
* Half a page on word order (p.99) that basically just says "Georgian is usually SOV but it doesn't have to be"
* Throw in some opinions out of the blue that sound extremely confident despite being completely unsubstantiated. From the above orthography page: *Mkhedruli has 33 letters. The number of sound is equal to the number of letters: We read as we write. There are 33 letters for 33 sounds. **That's why Georgian alphabet is considered one of the best among 14.***
* 3 pages of "additional items" at the end of the non-conjugation table pages that just say "oh by the way you could classify verbs according to this scheme instead", drop several tables out of nowhere without explaining what any of the cells correspond to, say nothing more about it, and then go straight into the bibliography
* Use one and only one example for each new grammatical concept you introduce
* Explain how a conjugation is *formed* without explaining what it *is* or how it's used. e.g. the book's treatment of so-called "dynamic passives" in 2.11.4, which... from the one example verb per subsection, it sounds like "dynamic passive" is what they're calling an obligatorily intransitive verb in the active voice, but I don't know for sure because they don't actually tell you what they mean by "dynamic passive", they just show 1 conjugation table for each of 3 ways to form the "dynamic passive", and none of those examples sound like a passive.
> 3 votes

# Answer
Not having my Latin School grammar anymore I remember the following structure and features:

First comes a section on phonology, but it is not called that, but something like "Writing system and pronunciation".

Second part is a longish section on morphology (called *Formenlehre* in my German based school grammar, but that is essentially the same) Exposing the morphology and inflection paradigms of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The fully irregular verbs (like *ire*, *ferre*, *velle*, *nolle*, *malle*, and *fieri*) are included here, and there is mention of defective paradigms and deponent verbs. The long list of verbs with their principal parts is relegated to an appendix in the end of the grammar.

Third comes a part on the usage and translation of the different forms, differentiating the cases in many subtypes like objective and subjective and partitive genitive, and so on.

Fourth comes a part on some famous Latin constructions, like accusative with infinitive, double accusative, absolute ablative, and joined participle.

Fifth is a part on conjunctions and what mode of the verb they govern. It was rather lengthy, especially on conjunctions like *ut*, *cum* and *quod*.

There is also a chapter on relative clauses.

Somewhere was a list of prepositions with the cases they govern, but I don't remember its placement. Also a list of basic parts of speech was somewhere.

That's what I remember right now.
> 1 votes

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Tags: grammar
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# Question
Title: How to reconcile the large number of similarities between my languages' morphemes
All of the languages I've made so far are placed on the same continent of my conworld, and it's a different continent from where humans evolved, so they would have had to migrate into it. For basically worldbuilding reasons (e.g. having certain mythologies preserve a deep cultural memory of this migration and how one initial population gave rise to the myriad of current ethnic groups), I want to limit the number of migration events/number of initial hunter-gatherer populations everyone else eventually descends from. This *maybe,* but not *necessarily*, suggests that all the current language families descend from just a handful of ancestral macrofamilies.

Now, a lot of my languages (from different families) have enough morphological similarity to suggest... *some kind* of connection, but if a phylogenetic one, it's not at all clear which ones are supposed to be grouped together, and it's slowly driving me insane. There don't seem to be two that are obviously more related to each other than to the others.

To take 4 example languages from 4 different families, which I'll just call A, B, C and D:

* *\*-k* derives adjectives in B, genitives in C, and some sort of oblique marker in D that could conceivably come from a genitive. It has no discernable analog in A though.
* *\*-(V)S* (probably *\*-ʃ*) reflexes as an productive accusative + non-productive nominative in A, but a productive masculine singular nominative in B, productive masculine nominalizer in C, and some sort of core argument marker in D
* *\*-Vr* in C is an ablative that became an ergative-genitive, an agentive marker in B, and a participle marker in A that might derive from one of those other functions. D has no obvious analog.
* Instead, *\*-(a)r* shows up as a plural marker in D, and sort of in A too
* C and D both have *\*-om* as a core patientive argument marker, plus the related *\*-(V)n-om* where I haven't yet quite decided what the *\*-n-* does
* A, B, and D all have a 2nd person pronoun derived from *\*-ɣ-*
* A and B both have 1st person verb subject marker derived from *\*-(V)S*
* A and B both have a 3rd person verb subject marker derived from *\*-o/-a*
* B has a bunch of obligatory verb infixes, some of which like *\*-ɣ-* and *\*-β-* match up with verbalizer suffixes in A, others of which like *\*-l-* match up with verbalizers in D
* B and C both use *\*-l-* in a benefactive or related oblique case; A has *\*-l-* show up genitives/adjectives and it's uncertain whether this is related
* A, B and D all seem to derive an oblique case from *\*-ʕə* or something like it
* A has a dative *-t* and D has a locative *-ta*, perhaps both derived from an allative
* A and D both have a definite marker derivable from *\*-jə-*
* B, C and D all mark gender from something derived from *\*-jə-*, but D marks the opposite gender with it that B/C do

etc. There are plenty of parallels, but seemingly no consistent grouping to be made.

Grouping them all under the umbrella of one macrofamily seems to either require 1) way more convergent evolution than seems likely, or 2) case markers - not like, the rules of role marking, but the *actual morphemes themselves* \- getting constantly loaned between different families, which I thought was highly unnaturalistic.

On the other hand, *not* grouping under the same macrofamily makes it seem really suspicious why all these families seem to share the same morphemes - something I thought even Sprachbunds can't accomplish, only converging on the same structure and not literally the same phonetic value for analogous morphemes.

So... what does that leave? How do I explain a bunch of families being too similar to not be related, but also not consistently similar enough to be related?

# Answer
> 1 votes
So your continent is a bit similar to the Americas in the real world. Let me recapitulate some theories about the language families of pre-columbian America. After his highly successful classification of the languages of the African continent, Greenberg went on to classify the languages of the Americas and he came up with just three families: Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind. This classification was harshly criticised and never generally accepted, while Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene are well established language families, Amerind isn't. Instead, almost all relevant linguists hold up some dozens of independent language families for the languages of the Americas with no provable relationship among each other, plus a good number of isolated languages.

So a time of ca. 15.000 years was enough to create dozens of apparently unrelated language families in the Americas.

Given enough time, a quite chaotic picture with seemingly many unrelated languages is not too unplausible and there is not need to tweak them into the Procrustean bed of one macrofamily with all sound laws and roots spelled out. And working diachronically backwards from already existing conlangs is much harder than going forward from a protolanguage.

To your closing question: The explanation is probably something like: The languages of my constructed world are probably related somehow, but the time since their split is too long to tell how exactly and to give definite proof of this.

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Tags: conlang-creation, morphology, naturalism, language-families
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title: How do tones disappear from a language?

text:
# Question
Title: How do tones disappear from a language?
There have been many good writeups on *Tonogenesis*, i.e. how language acquire tones. But never have I seen such a writeup on the opposite phenomenon, which one might call *Tonoexodus*. Obviously, one way for tone to get lost is to simply have tones merge until there’s only one left. However, doing that without any thought to a highly tonal language would be rather disastrous. If any Chinese language suddenly lost all its tones this would likely make communication rather challenging. This makes me think that perhaps, there is more to tonoexodus than just a disappearance of tone. So my question is:

Are there any phenomena which go hand in hand with the loss of tone, analogous to how the acquisition of tone goes hand in hand with the loss of consonants or phonations?

# Answer
> 11 votes
I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I think it may be because that while tonogenesis is a "special" process, in that it produces a whole new dimension to the phonology (as opposed to something more "trivial" like clusters becoming new single segment phonemes), whereas tonoexodus seems to not be much different from other processes of loss in segmental contrasts. Yes, a sudden collapse of the tone system in a Chinese language, or any other language with a high functional load on tonal contrasts would be rather challenging to deal with, but so would any sudden collapse of significant scope, whereas a slow collapse, where contrasts are lost slowly, one after one, in some environments before others gives plenty of time to resolve any disasterous mass ambiguity with innovations.

I have tried looking around for examples of tone loss, and this seems to be the pattern I have been able to find. The Oto-Manguean languages with fewer tonal contrast that the reconstructed protolanguages seem to simply come from mergers of tones, either consistently or only in some environments (e.g. unstressed syllables) though the data is not quite clear\[1\].

Classical Chinese had 8 tonal categories divisible into *yin* and *yang* registers occuring respectively after voiced and unvoiced consonants, and into four different categories, *ping*, *shang*, *qu* and *ru*(checked syllables). While some modern lects such as Songjiang maintain all of these as seperate categories (Songjiang also retains contrastive onset voicing), others collapse the system in various ways. Beijing Mandarin collapses the *yin/yang* distinction of the *shang* and *qu* tones and merges *ru* into the other tones, while the relatively nearby Tianjin Mandarin keeps *yin shang* seperate, while merging *yang shang* with other tones. Along similar lines the different Chinese lects have radically different distinction-dimininshing sandhi processes, from the well-known relatively limited `214 > 35 / _214` rule of Beijing Mandarin to the complete loss of surface realisation of all but one dominant lexical tone in Northern Wu variants such as Shanghainese. Again, there does not seem to be any phonological compensatory measures associated with any of these losses of contrasts.\[2\]

Tonoexodus that isn't a simple collapse seems to be hard to find, though the Danish glottal suprasegmental feature *stød* likely originates in a pitch accent system (note that some dialects have pitch-accent and some collapse the distinction entirely), and it seems reasonable to expect that other collapses of a two-way tone system to a phonation system could be found. As for other things, the largely autosegmental nature of tone means that it doesn't leave much room for other segmental changes, however there seem to be a few cases of such influences, primarily on consonant voicing discussed in sections 2.6 and 2.7 of Yip's *Tone*\[3\] and references therein, though she notes that it has been argued by Thurgood that *all* such alternations are a product of phonation types (which may then coincidentally be associated with tone) influencing voicing rather than tone itself.

In conclusion it seems that the most likely process of tonoexodus is simply a slow gradual loss of contrasts in an increasing number of environments, with the associated lexical replacement/innovation that comes with language change, and a tone system evolving into something else rather than just being lost entirely is likely to become a phonation system, possibly with a minor influence on consonant voicing as well.

# Answer
> 2 votes
One well-known example of tonal loss is Swahili; unlike other Bantu languages, it is not a tonal language. In the absence of historical data, all we have left is reconstruction and (not unfounded) speculation. One rather plausible way of tone erosion is the sandhi, where the tones are influenced by neighbouring syllables.

According to *Hyman, L. M. (2018). Towards a typology of tone system changes. In: Tonal Change and Neutralization, 27(7).*, tone changes and "wandering" in multisyllabic environments leads to the tones being realized syntagmatically at the phrase level, and then it is an easy way for them to disappear completely.

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Tags: phonology, diachronics
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title: Convergent evolution in languages

text:
# Question
Title: Convergent evolution in languages
Are there any examples of languages in totally different parts of Earth having similarities in such things as grammar and words? As one example, I've noticed 'Mama' and 'Papa' seem to be common across the globe, though that might just be due to colonisation.

# Answer
Some words are very consistent across the world for non-linguistic reasons. For example, "mama" consists of the earliest sounds infants are able to make. This is the same reason languages on opposite sides of the world have words that sound like "mow" or "meow" for "cat".

Some linguists have also proposed that particular sounds or groups of sounds are fundamentally associated with particular concepts in the human brain, though this hasn't met with wide acceptance.

Words can also be borrowed from one language into another; this is especially common with words for trade goods or new technologies, which can easily become so-called "Wanderworter" (or *Wanderwörter* if you're German) spreading across the world along with the things they describe. That's why so many languages have similar words for "tea", and also for "internet". Cognates of "cannabis" appear all the way back in ancient Sumerian.

Grammatically, certain structures are extremely common across the world, which some linguists attribute to "universal grammar" built into the human brain. For example, languages that put verbs before their objects, also tend to put nouns before relative clauses. When one of these features changes in a language, the other tends to change with it.

Grammatical structures can also be borrowed between languages. A lot of languages in western Europe have the same structure for expressing "perfect" verbs (ones that describe the aftereffects of a past action): English says someone "has eaten", while in French, someone *a mangé* ("has eaten"), and in Greek, *ekhei phaei* ("has eaten"). This is an "areal feature" that has spread between languages due to a long period of contact; when languages are in long enough contact to accumulate a lot of these shared features, they become a "Sprachbund".

And of course, some things end up converging due to sheer coincidence. There are a lot of languages in the world, and only so many different ways to arrange words. English and Akkadian and Swahili all put prepositions before nouns, not because of some ancestral relationship (or any direct contact), but because there aren't that many different places to put prepositions, and "before the noun" is a common choice.
> 6 votes

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Tags: evolution
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# Question
Title: If I want my conlang's compound words not to exceed 3-4 syllables in length, what kind of phonology should my conlang have?
I've thought about using phonemic tones and permitting lots of clusters as ways of keeping my words short, but I don't want the syllables to be so heavy that every compound becomes a tongue-twister.

How should I go about making a happy medium between a phonology that generates only very heavy single syllable words vs. a phonology that is so simple that compounds must each comprise 6 or more syllables?

# Answer
If you want fewer syllables per word, you'll want a larger number of possible syllables. (For a metaphor, think about how many letters vs how many kana vs how many kanji you need to represent a particular Japanese word. The more possible glyphs/syllables you have, the fewer of them you need to convey the same amount of information.)

Some good ways to do this:

* Allow lots of different coda consonants.
* Have lots of different vowels.
* Allow clusters of two consonants in onsets or codas, instead of just one.

For example, if you start out allowing only CV syllables, and then you decide to add long vowels, that doubles the number of possible syllables. If you allow CVn instead of just CV, that doubles it again. If you allow sC instead of just C, that's another doubling…

This is why English has over ten times as many common syllables as Japanese (Oh's corpus analysis gives 6,949 vs 643 in the 20k most frequent words), and thus why English words consist of fewer syllables than Japanese ones. We have a whole lot of vowels, many possible codas, and very elaborate clusters in both onsets and codas (consider "strengths"). Japanese only allows two possible coda consonants (N and Q) and the only valid onset cluster is Cj.
> 4 votes

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Tags: phonology, compounding
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# Question
Title: Should prenasalized consonants be distinct from nasal+obstruent sequences?
I have a language with CVC syllable structure and a series of prenasalized consonants. As written, therefore, a word like /anda/ would be distinct from /aⁿda/. I can barely grasp the difference here, and even less so how to romanize this. Is it realistic to have an allophonic process turn /anda/ into \[a.ⁿda\], or vice versa?

# Answer
It's perfectly reasonable to get rid of that distinction, and have `/nd/` and `/ⁿd/` be treated exactly the same. Many languages in the Bantu family (the family that's most famous for its prenasalized stops) lack that distinction.

If you want to keep the distinction, it would probably be considered *contrastive syllabification* (the way the consonants are grouped into syllables is significant), which happens but is pretty rare. Googling that term will get you some more information on how that tends to work.
> 3 votes

# Answer
I don't think there is a difference between /aⁿda/ and /anda/.

There doesn't need to be any difference. If a diphthong can constitute a single syllable (as in "aisle," "boy," and "cow") so can a prenasalized consonant. A little practice can get you used to saying and hearing \[nda\] or \[mbe\], for example, as single syllables.

But if you WANT there to be a difference, you can make a distinction between non-syllabified nasals in prenasalized consonants vs. syllabified nasals that precede obstruants--with the phonetic difference being the length of the nasal.

So, for example, \[anda\] and \[an̩da\], which would be two- and three- syllable words respectively.
> 1 votes

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Tags: naturalism
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# Question
Title: How do swear words work in real languages?
How many swear words should you have in a conlang, and how are they designed? What is their purpose really? And should any other "regular" words be constructed out of them? Like if "bar" was a swear word, then "foobar" was a goose or "barfoo" was a house, is that a problem? Also, what *are* swear words actually, do they have a consistent meaning across cultures?

# Answer
> 6 votes
As jlawler mentioned in a comment, every culture has "taboos" (also sometimes spelled "tabu", borrowed from Polynesian). The term usually refers to objects and actions that are somehow culturally forbidden or repulsive, but it can also refer to concepts and words.

What words are taboo varies a lot by culture. Nowadays in American English they tend to refer to sex and bodily functions (fuck, shit, ass, slut). In other, usually older varieties of English, they had more to do with religion (damn, hell, bloody). In Classical Latin you would swear by a god or a demigod (one of the most common expletives is usually translated "by Hercules"). In some long-ago ancestor of English, the Proto-Indo-European word for "bear" seems to have become taboo, which is why we say "bear" (possibly from a root for "brown", possibly from a root for "wild animal", there's not a consensus) instead of some cognate with Greek *arktos*.

The one constant, though, is that there'll always be *some* sort of taboo (both culturally and linguistically). If you're inventing a conculture, decide what they consider forbidden. If you're tying your conlang to an existing culture, look at what words they swear by. But in a natural language, there will always be *something* that's considered offensive.

# Answer
> 8 votes
Swear words can be indeed a problem for the rest of the vocabulary. German once had a whole wealth of verbal compounds with the prefix *after-*. They fell out of usage when the noun *After* "anus" became widely used a medical term. The process behind this is called *taboo*.

# Answer
> 7 votes
Swear words can mean different things in different cultures & languages. I speak English as my first language, where most of our swear words are known as "potty language" & for good reason. Most of the English swears are about sex or the body.

In French, the language of my dad's family, a bunch of the swears are evangelical. I'm not sure that's the right word. What I mean is that most curse words are about the church. Now there's an interesting point to be heard there! What do we call swears? "Spitting oaths"? Promises basically. Using the Lord's name in vain.

Using the Lord's name in vain does NOT primarily mean "oh my god lol", it means "I swear to God" or when you put your hand on the bible in a courtroom & say "I swear to speak the truth" or whatever. If you keep your word, then good for you. It is "bad" when you swear on the bible or God's name & then break your promise/oath. So that might be why French swears are often religious. Similar to the religion argument, bad words are often called "curse" words.

I recommend watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU comedy sketch & I think he has done a few more acts about curse words too.

I had read a book series (Codex Alera) where they use "crows" as a swear word. I think this is because crows are a motif throughout the books & might have some sort of special power, which means that they always end up on battlefields, feasting on the carrion & fallen friends. I believe Carrion & Maggots might also be swears. "Crows take it/you" means "god-damn it/you". They even just use "(oh) crows" to mean "(oh) heck/shit".

They use "Bloody" (as in "bloody crows" to mean "holy shit/smokes/cow/crap" or "bloody/fucking hell") which is a word used in this world. Bloody is used as an intensifier.

In relation to the religious swear/curse words, they also say "great furies" as in "oh my god". The furies are basically (pokemon crossed with spirit guides crossed with the concept of animism) who give powers to the owners like bending in ATLA. The great furies are like the spirit who lives in the mountain & his wife the storm/wind/bad weather on top of the mountain. So they can swear by the Great Furies as the folks on earth say "I swear to the Fae" or "God help me".

Another concept to consider is slurs. Slurs are usually based on or used against marginalized communities. (Black people & any marginalized racial/cultural/ethnic group; down syndrome, autism, learning disabilities, & other mental illnesses, neurodivergencies, & disabilities; Romani/Roma (this one is actually a huge issue bc I know people **named** the G slur); trans, gay, otherwise queer, & intersex; etc.)

So to answer your questions: **How many swear words should you have in a conlang,** You only really need one or two source words, but you can use as many as one curse for every noun, verb, & adjective you invent. You could also choose a source category (religion, sex, even smth like plants or careers). Having a category might be able to limit you to a degree.

**and how are they designed?** I believe they usually come up naturally. Maybe through mistakes. Maybe some teen afraid of sexual maturity tries to desexualize things by thinking of different words (like "feet" in the bible, or maybe pull smth out of ur ass like "hawthorn berries") & then they accidentally pavlov themself into sexualizing hawthorn berries & now hawthorn berries are a euphemism for sex. As mentioned with the crows, they could be related to undesirable topics like death. In cultures where nudity is natural I would assume that sex swears are less common. (They sexualize people less in those cultures than cultures where modesty is the norm. Typically. I'm generalizing.) So if sex is a taboo topic, swears would be about sex. If death is a taboo topic, then swears about death would be more common. If the taboo topic is malicious magic, then curse words might actually be about curses! Slurs have more defined or easily assigned sources. Swears can be considered a subset of slang. I also had a thought while answering one of the later questions: Things that used to be ok are now slurs because the people are still hated. "coloured" used to be the correct term, but since society still hated POC it stopped being a proper term. "L\**e" used to be the used term, but it is a slur, so people started using "handicapped", but that term also started feeling offensive & now "disabled" is the correct term. It is in part due to inaccuracies in language I suppose. Like how "hermaphrodite" is a perfectly useful term for hermaphroditic animals but is not an accurate term for humans (with disorders/differences in sexual development or who are intersex). This is more slur based than swear based though.

**What is their purpose really?** Their purpose is to emphasize. I don't usually swear, but sometimes, sometimes there is a situation that really warrants an oath. Promises (swear to god) are used to create honesty & binding. As in they are bound to their word. I think swears are also used as catharsis or emotional indicators. You use swears when you're angry, when you're courting someone, when you're really really excited... They are for emphasis, usually emotional. That's my opinion at least! My experience is my own.

**And should any other "regular" words be constructed out of them?** "Like if "bar" was a swear word, then "foobar" was a goose or "barfoo" was a house," I think maybe the other way around? As a mentally ill baker I deal with the term "retarded fermentation" because the word "retard" (the e is pronounced like "look") means "late". Tardy. I mentioned I speak french lol. A retarded fermentation is a fermentation (in sourdough) that takes extra long to develop more flavour. Slow. Late. When this term applies to a person, it means they are "mentally slow" I guess. Which is kind of true. You know how your brain is not fully developed until age 26? A ton of mentally ill/neurodivergent people don't finish brain development until age 30 ish. I think that it is more likely that words (that have related words) turn into slurs. Whether or not the related words are considered slurs is really a societal/cultural thing & can depend on the worldview of the people. Sam hill versus damn hell? Idk. One last thing to note: Basement is not a sexual word even though it has "semen" in the spelling.

**is that a problem?** It depends. I said it was a cultural thing. If you use a slur in a hockey name (Like the new york n\*****s or smth) then yes that is a problem & a slur! If the word "semen" is in the word "basement" then no that is not an issue, they have different etymologies. For things like "retarded fermentation"? Well that's a touchy one. I dislike the term because the source word is now used as a slur, but it was chosen for its accuracy. Maybe changing it to "Fermentation retardé" would be better because it has a different pronunciation & placement & maybe that would be enough. For words like "asshole" to mean "anus" I would say that yes it is still considered a swear word because the first part, "ass" is used **because** it is a dirty word for bum. "pussy hair" would also be considered like that because it is the hair of the swear word, unlike pubic hair which is a perfectly fine term. So in general I would say it depends on how the words relate & how society reacts.

**Also, what are swear words actually,** I feel like I answered this ok throughout this answer. A swear word is a word with a connotation of unprofessionalism that is used colloquially to add emotional emphasis. Although the connotation of swears/swearing can change throughout cultures & time.

**do they have a consistent meaning across cultures?** Ah yes I just answered this! They do not have a consistent meaning! From my experience they have the connotation of rudeness & emphasis, but to other cultures they can be related more to spiritual impurity or the keeping of promises. They almost definitely have even more meanings in other cultures & languages. What is considered a "bad word" might not be what we consider "swear" words or "potty" mouth.

I hope this helped!

# Answer
> 4 votes
In Chinese, the most common insults are directed at a person's family, such as: "fuck your \[insert relative\]!" or "his mom!" is used as a general exclamation. It's not very common to say "fuck you" to a person, you would direct it at who you believe is their closest(?) relative.

(I believe this is also shared by other languages from cultures influenced by Confucian ideas.)

Also I noticed a lot of the other answers mentioned how profanity is based on a culture's taboos but I'm wondering if this is more of a eurocentric perspective because using people's relatives as insults isn't exactly a taboo.

Another thing that may be worth mentioning is the Chinese equivalent of "fuck off" is "roll away!" which also not a taboo.

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Tags: vocabulary
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