# Question
Title: What are some key languages which don't have distinctions between me, myself, and I?
I am working on a conlang and would like to treat "I" or "me" or "myself" as one thing, "me", as a noun I guess. Are there languages that do this, that don't have these distinctions? If so, what are some key examples? As a bonus, what are some things they do instead, or where can I look for more information?

I want to say something like:

> me - see - tree
> me - see - the - tree

But have it sound, well, not so caveperson like. So wondering if other languages do this, and how they can "cope" without these distinctions/features.

# Answer
> 3 votes
There are many languages without case distinctions on their pronouns. Mandarin, Japanese, and Arabic are some especially prominent examples (although Arabic does have special clitic pronouns that can be attached to verbs to mark the object).

To someone who speaks one of these languages, the lack of case does not sound at all cave-man-ish.

# Answer
> 1 votes
To add on to Tristan's answer, most Bantu languages also lack case.

In Swahili, for example, *mimi* can mean either "I" or "me", *yeye* either "he" or "him" (or "she" or "her" or…), and so on. Word order makes the relationship clear: objects come after the verb, subjects come before. So even ignoring agreement marking, it's clear that *mimi ninapenda yeye* means "I love him", not "he loves me".

Swahili also allows pronouns to be incorporated into the verb itself, as an alternate way of indicating subjects and objects. For example, in ***ni**na**m**penda*, the *ni* means the subject is first person singular, and the *m* means the object is third person singular: again clearly "I love him" rather than "he loves me".

English has a few lingering relics of case marking on pronouns, but if you look at nouns, it should be clear that they're not really necessary. In a sentence like "the scientist loves the engineer", there's no case marking at all, but it's completely unambiguous who's the subject and who's the object. The fact that we still have different forms for "I" versus "me" is more a historical accident than anything that actually carries functional load.

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Tags: vocabulary, pronouns
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# Question
Title: How important/useful is it to derive words from smaller parts in a conlang?
In a similar light to How do conlangs/natlangs have prefixes suffixes and not get them jumbled up? , what is the use or purpose of deriving words from smaller parts in a conlang, generally speaking? It appears that natural languages evolve to do this out of necessity, reusing parts and attaching things to parts to extend them ("ex-" extend, extra, extravagant, "inter-", etc.). But is it really necessary? What advantages does this provide us in language?

The only advantages I can see is that it *occasionally* can give use some ***clue*** as to the words meaning. But it will never give us an accurate definition of the word's meaning. So why even bother is my main question?

For example, you might have `bi-` meaning two, so you have biannual (2x per year) and biweekly (every two weeks (why not twice a week? another story lol)). So given you know "weekly" already, you might be able to guess that biweekly means twice a week or every two weeks or something. But even with `bi-`, you might not have an accurate guess. For example, bible, biography, billing, all start with bi, yet don't mean two.

Which brings me to my second point. Often times you have words which have the same spelling as the prefix (assuming we're talking about English), but which don't have any relation. **Bene**ath, **Bene**fit. Bell- (war), belligerent, bellyache, bell itself. *There are better examples out there.* So this seems like, more than adding a degree of helpfulness, it actually adds more to the confusion overall. In the end you need to memorize the meaning of every word, and then you can backtrace/recover the meaning of the "etymological parts" from the definition of the whole. But then it's like, if we're building a conlang, what is the purpose of deriving words from smaller word parts? Other than to resemble natural languages and their evolutionary dirtiness perhaps, I guess.

It seems that you would be better off just picking random words to mean different things. Especially for foundational concepts. So instead of "inter-x" like "internet" and "interconnected" and "interwoven", you would just have "foo", "bar", and "baz" (no `ba-` prefix lol). So there is no relation derived from simpler parts, thus removing the confusion. But does this make it harder to learn a language? That is, *do* the prefixes/suffixes (as in these English examples) actually aid in understanding/memory in some way or sort? Maybe there is some benefit after all, I am not sure.

**How important/useful is it to derive words from smaller parts in a conlang?**

Sandhi in Sanskrit (for combining words) seems related to this question in some way, is it necessary to do such a thing in a conlang though?

# Answer
All languages have some way to combine atomic units to make more complex or elaborate meanings. Sometimes the result is considered a single word; sometimes it's not. But the underlying principles are the same either way. The advantage is that it lets you express concepts that you don't have atomic words for.

The problem you're seeing is, most of your examples aren't formed within English. They're formed within other languages and then borrowed into English. "Belligerent" is a perfectly regular formation in Latin, from words meaning "war" and "carry". But in English it's pretty much opaque and has to be learned as an indivisible unit. If you look at a regular formation within English, like "uninteresting", you probably have no difficulty at all realizing it means "not interesting", and "interesting" means that it "interests" you. (The fact that "interest" is then made up of "inter" and "est" isn't an English thing, it's a Latin thing.)

English is also fairly unusual among the world's languages in that it doesn't like using regular English compounds for new technical terms (and will instead apply Latin or Greek compounding rules and then borrow the result into English). Most languages are more transparent in these sorts of compounds.
> 4 votes

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Tags: morphology
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# Question
Title: Looking for a conlang I once encountered
I am looking for a conlang I once encountered. Sadly I lack specific and reliable info, but I'll dump what I can recollect.

It was built from simple semantic units (syllables?), with the latter developing and specifying the meaning of the previous. Perhaps there was even more structure, in the grammar or how the syllables were initially arranged. In this regard it seems quite similar to Ygyde.

I think it had a concise and pretty name, possibly starting with D. When searching I came across Damin, but that is obviously not the one.

It was no toy project. It seemed like the author had put a lot of effort to it and the work was still progressing. He claimed the language was to be ideal in some sense, as if he was reconstructing a primordial universal language or if the current languages were to converge to this one. But I don't think it had any speakers, or any significant number of them.

I failed to find it through search engines and through public conlang lists. I looked into engineered languages at Wikipedia and I can tell I am not looking for Toki Pona, Loglan, Lojban or Ithkuil

# Answer
> 3 votes
I just came across an old bookmark leading to Dama Diwan and it is my mystery language! complete with the claims of minimality, optimality, construction through divination, ...

... case closed

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Tags: resource-request
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# Question
Title: How long do words get in other languages, and how hard are long words to say or read?
So I have a list of basic words in my budding conlang. I would like to construct compound words now, like we do with Latin/Greek in English (e.g. "hyacinthoides"). One word I can create in this conlang is "third fingered abnormality":

```
saloyowizitxihawinanoyotxa

```

That is 12 syllables(!) How do I tell if these compound words are too hard to say and/or remember? There is a word separator, `-wi-`, in that word, so you can tell how it is spliced together. Another option is to use hyphens, but I *love* how in English we have these long chemical/other names which are one word no hyphens, and I want to do similarly.

I tried asking about the languages with the longest words (like Latin/Greek in English), but it seems to come down to aggutinativity. Then what is it like speaking an agglutinative language with very long words in a long sentence, is it easy to understand? How about reading comprehension, is it also easy to read? Finally, what are some examples of languages which aren't agglutinative that have long words with as many syllables as my word above?

I think Sanskrit may be a close contender for long words. This list also helps.

# Answer
> 7 votes
The complexity of a pronouncing a word does not depend on its length, but more on its phonological structure. Even long words in a language you are familiar with will be quite easy to pronounce (provided you can remember them), whereas short words in languages with a very different phonology could be much harder.

In agglutinative languages you have the equivalent of a sentence or phrase in one word; that is essentially the same as writing a sentence in English without spaces and saying that -- this should not be any more difficult than saying the sentences in the 'normal' way.

The compound word in your language is only hard because to people not knowing the language it is a meaningless collection of letters. If you had "thirdfingeredabnormality", this would be easy to say for any English speaker, as you can make sense of groups of letters. If I gave you "Dreifingrigebesonderheit" (an approximate German translation), it's still easy for me (as I speak German), and you might find it easier (even if you did not speak German yourself) because there is some resemblance to English morphemes.

So, to summarise, it's familiarity, not length, which is the main factor in determining how difficult something is to pronounce. And reading comprehension of long words is fine, as long as you can make sense of their components, just as you make sense of the words in a (long) sentence.

For non-agglutinative languages: German forms compounds by simply joining words together (possible with linking morphemes), where English links them but keeps spaces or hyphenation. This is rarely taken to extremes, but you can form quite long words. One infamous example is the *Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän*, the "captain of the Danube steam boat company". You could easily expand it to refer to his daughter, the *Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänstochter*, etc. Any German speaker would immediately understand the meaning of those words without difficulty.

# Answer
> 4 votes
Be careful to distinguish the words of the language and the orthography - the latter can sometimes obscure the former¹. If the German orthography spelled it *Donau Dampfschifffahrts Gesellschafts Kapitän* (perhaps with some additional spaces in the second word) , the end result would be the same, it would just be more readable (cf. scriptio continua). Similarly English could equally well write it *Danubesteamboatcompanycaptain* and still be called English as we know it. This is just a convention and as a conlang author, you are free to pick one.

Though, if we dive deep enough, we find the very definition of "word" somewhat unclear and fuzzy - is the French *qu'est-ce que* four words, or just a simple single interrogative pronoun/particle? (that could be written *kesk* in some con-orthography)

Word stress can be helpful to determine what are the word boundaries, but then you have e.g. Slovak where stress falls on prepositions (and yet we do not call them inflectional prefixes); languages without word stress (above mentioned French, or Chinese); short "words" are often unstressed; there are clitics; there are exceptions (English *Baghdad*).

Modern Chinese (pǔtōnghuà) takes it to the extreme: the language is written without word boundaries, there is no word stress, there is an extremely limited number of syllables and almost each of them is a meaningful morpheme (often unrelated to the word it forms). E.g 中国 - 中 means "central" and 国 "country". Yet, 中国 means "China" - one word or two? Then, 共产 means "communist" - one word or two? (共 is "common,together" and 产 "produce"). And 党 is "party". Is then 共产党 (communist party) one word, two words or three words? And what about 中国共产党 (Communist party of China)? Why cannot we say it is one word?

¹ Although written languages are generally considered somehow "inferior" or "derived", I do not think that by today this is entirely valid - written languages have their own life, their own rules, ecology and sociolinguistic standing, ever since near 100% literacy. Just consider how much communication (including this one) is predominantly in written form.

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Tags: vocabulary, typology
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# Question
Title: How to break out of the English mold when creating a conlang (specifically in regards to word modifiers)?
I am working on a conlang. I have to some degree (i.e. a little bit) studied the grammar of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, and know Spanish relatively well in comparison from school, though my main language is obviously English. By "study", I don't know all of the grammatical structures of these languages, but I get some of the basics and have gathered inspiration from them. I have decided I like Chinese (Mandarin) and Vietnamese for the "atomicity" (analytical language), where every word is an atom and there are no word conjugations or the like, even for things like making it past tense ("wanted" vs. "want" in English).

But such an atomic/analytic language comes at a cost, you have an extra word for very common things like the past tense of a verb. So I am making some of these common things be turned into a suffix. But it turns out, just by making tenses, plurals, and a few other things into suffixes, it is already starting to look a lot like English or Spanish. Also, I learned from Hebrew that they have the definite article (like "the" equivalent) prefix every word if you have a complex noun. I think that is repetitive, so I like the way English does it just saying "the" once at the beginning of a phrase. Now, Chinese doesn't use "the" at all, they omit the word entirely. I don't really like losing that extra information (even though in theory you can regain it from context, but I don't know Chinese well enough to see how this really *feels* omitting the word "the"). So I am opting to have the concept of "the".

Sanskrit has way more verb and noun inflections, but I want to keep most of the words atomic so I don't do anywhere near as many as they do.

That gets us through the words pretty much.

After all of this, we are left with sentence structure. I like the idea of SVO rather than VSO or VOS because SVO seems like (in principle) it *flows* from one thing to the next, like a programming language. You start with the subject, it "pipes" into the verb as input, and then you pipe in the object from the other side. I mean technically with "piping" you might think "SOV" might make more sense, but splitting the subject and object with a verb means it's easier to distinguish between them. But this is, again, like how English (and Spanish and Chinese) does it. So it *seems* like I haven't even looked at other languages to mix it up and not be so "English-centric".

So then my sentences are basically like English in the end (since I have "the", "a", and SVO, with a few word suffixes):

```
<the> <tree> <fall> <down>

```

However, this gets to the main question. The last real big piece is how to deal with noun modifiers ("adjectives") and verb modifiers ("adverbs"). In English, they appear *all over the place* in the sentence. Sometimes they appear before the word ("the tree **actually** fell"), sometimes after ("the tree fell **down**"). Sometimes both ("the tree **actually** fell **down**"). That is for adverbs, but for adjectives too ("I see the **big tree*", which I guess is an *attributive* adjective, vs. *predicative* adjectives which I can't think of an example of adjective appearing after a noun).

So I am wondering, what are all the ways these "inspiration" languages (in terms of my project) handle adjectives/adverbs ("modifiers")? Are there any languages which greatly *restrict* their placement in the sentence to only one position (either before or after the noun/verb)? If so, what are some examples in either Chinese, Vietnamese, Sanskrit, and/or Hebrew (or all 4 of them), of if they don't have that feature, what is a language that does (with an example)? If there is a good conlang which demonstrates it, that would be an interesting comment too.

Basically I am trying to not make this language feel like "I just slightly modified English". I thought about the word/sentence features of many other languages and feel I like this structure I have landed on the best so far, but there is still room for improvement and getting better/more *influence* from these other few languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Sanskrit).

# Answer
In the long term, learning another language reasonably well is probably the only way to get a "real feel" for how things can sound natural or not in other languages. That's a very ambitious project though, and there are easier things you can do that take you a long way!

Separate **what** to say from **how** to say it.

For instance: Being a native English speaker, you are accustomed to having a definite article in your language, as you like being able to separate "the cat" from just any other cat in every sentence. Fine. You know what you want to say. If you want your language to seem more exotic, ask yourself if the way the English language expresses this feature is the only way, or if you could come up with something else.

My native language is Swedish, and we also make the distinction between definite and indefinite. We don't have a word like your "the", however, but instead use different endings to convey the same meaning. Much like English does with the plural. Consider the following translations from English to Swedish.

"cat" -\> "katt", "the cat" -\> "katten", "cats" -\> "katter", "the cats" -\> "katterna"

When I started learning English at school I was faced with this strange structure (the English "the"), but the underlying concept was familiar. I could thus relatively seamlessly translate one construction to the other. If my native language had not had the same distinction it would likely have been much harder.

You mention that you know some Spanish, and though definite articles work the same you could observe differences from English there as well. One is that pronouns are not necessary in a Spanish sentence, since this information is expressed in the verb endings. "Voy a comer" translates readily to "I'm going to eat", but take a look at the two sentences and you'll find they are **very** different. The Spanish one has no pronoun. The English one has the unit "I'm", which could either be interpreted as a pronoun and a verb not present in the Spanish one, or as a unit corresponding to Spanish "soy". Then follows the word "going" which has the same basic meaning as Spanish "voy", a word that *is* used in the translation, but in a completely different form. You *could* translate "voy" to the English unit "I'll" and make the whole sentence "I'll eat", but even then that doesn't constitute an exact word-by-word translation as the word "a" would have been taken out.

So: How could you express your desired distinction between definite and indefinite? One way would be to keep the article, but place it *after* the noun instead. You could use suffixes, like Scandinavian languages, or why not prefixes? Word order? Keep this particular feature the same as in English, but change something else? You have lots of possibilities!

The same procedure can be used for other things you want your language to express.

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A comment on SVO word order:

Are you really sure your interpreting this as the most *logical* word order has noting to do with English being a SVO language? Couldn't you just as well argue that verb-first structures are "more like programming" in that you first state a function and then its inputs? And if not, wouldn't your comparison to piping fit better with OVS word order? If I tell my terminal to "ls | grep .pdf" it first gets the list of files, the "object", and then feeds this to grep, which could be seen as either the subject or the verb, which filters out the lines containing ".pdf".
> 11 votes

# Answer
Perhaps you'd be interested to see how other languages do things here: https://wals.info/ .

If I do not overlook anything, then all the features you are thinking about are discussed here with examples from throughout the world.

Without being exhaustive of the topics you mention, here are some examples that this site covers your questions.

> Now, Chinese doesn't use "the" at all, they omit the word entirely. I don't really like losing that extra information

Chapters 37 and 38 discuss ways of marking definiteness and indefiniteness (English 'the,' 'a').

* If you wanted to skip having a separate word to show definiteness, you might read how some languages use 'one' or 'this' to do the jobs.
* Distinct from doing this job with any dedicated words, one strategy you may not have considered is reordering or omitting grammar elements to indicate definiteness. Turkish distinguishes 'a' from 'one' with word order "I saw \[one\] red \[a\] car," changes the noun case to do what 'the' does in "I saw the car," and lets the absence of {a, this, that} to indicate "the" in "Car was red."
* Using omission and word order, you can also come up with something which is not explicitly related to markers of definiteness per se. If I understand the Ngiyambaa (Pama-Nyungan; New South Wales, Australia) example of doing without a 'the,' folks usually indicate 1st and 2nd person, so could indicate 3rd person by omission; therefore, when they do mark 3rd person, it also means 'the,' even though this marker's explicit job is not being a definite article.

> So I am wondering, what are all the ways these "inspiration" languages (in terms of my project) handle adjectives/adverbs ("modifiers")? Are there any languages which greatly restrict their placement in the sentence to only one position (either before or after the noun/verb)?

I do not see that this is discussed explicitly as the topic of a chapter, but there are 19 chapters on word order, 7 on syntax for noun phrases, and 31 more on either simple or complex clauses.

Here is one on Order of Adjective and Noun. On its (or any) map page, on or below the map you can search up each of the languages you want to see. I don't think that Sanskrit is included in any of the surveys, though.

I have often satisfied "What are all the ways..." questions there. It can help you be aware of how English does things so that you can pick the English way only when it does stand out to you in comparison.

Lastly, if you'd like some food for thought from somebody who has worked on similar goals of breaking out of his English mold, I can tell you how my conlang does some of these things in not-English ways.

Otherwise, altogether, I can definitely tell you there are still possibilities for you to enjoy discovering :)
> 7 votes

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Tags: grammar, vocabulary
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# Question
Title: What is the variety of ways one can deal with absorbing words from different languages in a conlang?
The conlang I am working on has very strict rules on word formation:

* They must start and end with a consonant
* They can only have single vowels between consonants (which can be in consonant clusters).
* They can't end in h, w, or y (since they don't make a highly distinct word-ending sound.
* The only use a smallish subset of consonants (missing the "th" sounds, the retroflex sounds, etc.).
* End word with vowel to convert it into a noun/verb/adjective (convert it into speakable form).

But, I want to be able to talk about other languages in the conlang, hence the tone guide. That will make it so you can say the "j" in "measure" even though that is not in the consonant inventory. And other sounds as well. And you should be able to pronounce any sound from any language. But that's about as far as I want to go.

I don't want to allow you to use any word from any language in a sentence necessarily (at least I don't think so as of this time). So if you have a word with the "harsh h" sound like in Hebrew/Arabic, you need to do some slight transforming of it before it fits into the language. Likewise, it only supports 5 vowels in the main language, although you can say 15+ vowel variations to cover all languages when speaking about other languages. However, the "e" sound in English "pet" is, for example, not in the vowel inventory, so you might have to change it to "peyt" (like Spanish accent) or something along those lines.

The question is though, how would you absorb new words into the language? What is the process? Say I give a guide to someone to learn this language. They go out and speak it in front of friends. They are out to a sushi dinner. Now they want to say "maguro" or "sashimi" (well, it turns out these words fit well into the language, sort of). But imagine these words didn't fit in, what would they do? There must be rules of some sort to guide the transformation of any word, is that correct? How do natural languages do it, or a few of them covering the different approaches?

Basically, I am wondering if it would be better to "borrow" the word (morphing it slightly), or just come up with a completely new word and map it to the foreign word.

I would like to control exactly how each word/meaning is sounded out. So sushi would be like "sushim" as the base (start and end with a consonant, single vowels in between), and "sushima" as the food, etc.. (end with vowel to convert into speakable word from base word). But what about more complicated words like "hannukah" with the harsh h (I am pretty sure it has a harsh h, correct me if I'm wrong), or some french word with the guttural r sort of sound, or "crouch" with the compound vowel sound. Basically, wondering what sort of things I should put into place so you can use words from other languages quickly and painlessly, yet they still fit into the language paradigms/rules.

Another example would be proper names like the store Macy's, or Outback, those words don't fit directly into the conlang, so how would they be transformed or redone?

# Answer
If you want to be strict, coerce them into your phonological rules.

*Macy's*: that would fit as `macys`; if /y/ is not a vowel, then `macis`

*Outback*: start with a consonant, so use one that is not too pronounced, such as /h/: `hotback` \[\*\]. Also drop the /u/ from the diphthong. Or use `hatback` if your /a/ is pronounced more open (in that case `hatbeck` might work better). Looking at *Elopa* below, you could also use `holdback` to approximate the English pronunciation.

It will look strange, but not to speakers of your own language.

Here are some examples of country names from toki pona (leaving out the *ma* signifier):

* *Amerika*: `Amelika`
* *Africa*: `Apika`
* *Europe*: `Elopa`
* *Egypt*: `Masu` \- if you can't coerce it, come up with a new word
* *Canada*: `Kanata`
* *Grenada*: `Kenata` \- sometimes you might end up with identical forms for different places/people: that's not a problem, happens in natural languages as well.
* *Greece*: `Elena` \- you can also use the 'local' name for a country as a starting point.

\[\*\] This is similar to Spanish speakers sometimes adding an initial schwa sound when words start with a consonant when speaking English.
> 6 votes

# Answer
> There must be rules of some sort to guide the transformation of any word, is that correct?

If you believe in optimality theory (OT), this comes down to the *constraints* on valid words in the language. For example, "must begin with a consonant", "can't include `/θ/`", and "must end in a consonant other than `/h/`" are all constraints. But the language would also include constraints like, say, "don't insert an `/h/`" (to keep `/h/`s from appearing in random places). And the relative ranking of these constraints would determine what happens to foreign words.

For example, maybe "must begin with a consonant" outranks "don't insert an extra `/ʔ/`". So given the choice between letting a foreign word start with a vowel (violates the first constraint) and inserting an `/ʔ/` at the beginning (violates the second constraint), speakers would choose the second option. Why an `/ʔ/` rather than any other consonant? Well, maybe "don't insert a `/q/`" outranks "don't insert an `/ʔ/`" too, so inserting `/ʔ/` is preferable to inserting `/q/`.

According to optimality theorists, every language includes a vast, near-infinite set of these constraints, with a strict ranking, and speakers will unconsciously modify words to comply with them. One advantage of this explanation is that the same constraints are used for native words as for foreign words, so you don't have to invoke any special machinery to make it work.

If you don't believe in OT (i.e. you prefer rule-based systems over constraint-based systems), you'll generally have a set of *repair rules* that are invoked whenever a word violates a language's phonotactics. These rules are specific to each individual language, and their goal is to fix all the violations. If your phonotactics don't allow `/ħ/`, for example, you might have a repair rule that says "replace `/ħ/` with `/h/`". If your phonotactics require consonants at the start of a word, you might have a repair rule that says "insert `/ʔ/` before an initial vowel". And so on.

This explanation has the advantage that it clearly explains why all languages seem to have their own idiosyncratic repair rules, which aren't generally necessary for native words. For example, all Swahili words must end in a vowel. When a foreign word doesn't, an `/i/` is generally inserted. An optimality theorist would say this is because of some special constraint that's never needed for native words, while a rule-based phonologist would say there's just a repair rule that inserts that `/i/`. (Māori and Japanese similarly *usually* require words to end in a vowel; Māori inserts `/a/`, Japanese inserts `/u/`. So this doesn't seem to be something universal.)
> 4 votes

# Answer
You can look at how it is done in real languages. What typically happens is that the word is phonologically morphed to match the phonotactics of the adopting language.

Japanese provides some obvious examples. The form of a Japanese syllable is stereotypically (C)V(n): Consonant or Consonant+y plus a vowel, with /n/ as the only final consonant. So what does Japanese do with English?

* ice cream \> aisu kurīmu
* mansion \> manshon
* pray \> purei

Inuktitut (some dialects) also does the same thing:

* coffee \> kaapi
* Ottawa \> Aatuvaa

To use the last example, Inuktitut only uses the vowels /a, a:/, /u,u:/, and /i,i:/. and there's no /w/. "Ottawa" is normally pronounced \[ˈɒt ə wə\], so \['a:t u va:\] is actually pretty close: if I used it while speaking English, must people would either not hear the difference or assume I was pretending to speak with a comedic German accent by replacing the /w/ with a /v/.
> 3 votes

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Tags: vocabulary, borrowings, sound-change
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# Question
Title: Are words based on acronyms treated differently when the language changes over time?
Do sound and grammar changes affect acronyms, that can be pronounced as words, differently than other words in a language?

Are words based on acronyms treated differently or not when sound/grammar changes evolve?

* more immune to the sound changes that the rest of the language undergoes.
* not immune but more resistant (taking longer before being treated like any other word).
* treated exactly the same from the get go.
* dependant on the language/s in question and as such, do what you want as long as you are consistent.

I want to figure out if I need to make special exceptions, or not, for words in my conlangs that are originally based on acronyms.

For example, English acronyms that can be pronounced as words:

* LiDar
* Sonar
* fubar
* Nato
* Noaa (I've always internally pronounced it "noah", but a quick Google search says other people may pronounce it phonetically)

Not so much English acronyms that you still pronounce out loud phonetically:

* eg
* wtf
* gis

# Answer
> 5 votes
It depends on the word in question. Not that many English speakers would recognise *laser* as an acronym, so it has effectively become a 'normal' word. And it can be inflected, as in *She was lasering away that old tattoo*.

It is different for acronyms that are spelled all in upper case, I think; NATO is kind of 'frozen' in that respect, and I doubt it will ever undergo the same process as *laser*.

In the past, *SPQR* was a common acronym, but I don't know of any acronyms that morphed into words, so it is difficult to give any historical examples regarding sound changes.

I would make a distinction between 'word-like' acronyms (*radar*, *laser*, ...) and clear abbreviations (*NATO*), and treat the former like other words, but keep the latter fixed. It can also depend on what the acronym describes: a tool (*laser*) is different in applicability from a group of countries (*Benelux*). You can't easily turn the latter into a verb.

Regarding the need to be consistent: you don't need to. Languages are not logical, they evolve. There is no requirement to be consistent at all. Have as many irregularities and exceptions as you like!

# Answer
> 3 votes
Acronyms are, for the most part, a relatively recent phenomenon (as they make the most sense with a high level of literacy), and so it's hard to really look at what's happened in natural languages.

Prior to the modern era, we have a small number of initialisms (e.g. SPQR), but as these do not seem to be pronounced as words in their own they're not a good point of reference. They also don't seem to have remained in continuous use, also limiting their usefulness.

An exception to this is Hebrew. The Jewish community has had a high of literacy for a long time, and many acronyms have been attested since the Middle Ages or earlier (e.g. Tanach "Hebrew Bible" \< TNK \< Torah 'Instruction', Neviʾim 'Prophets', and Ketuvim 'Writings'). Unfortunately to my knowledge, none of the sound changes to Hebrew since these acronyms are first attested would have affected them, and so we can't actually see if they behaved like normal words or not.

My hunch would be that acronyms would behave like normal words (at least in the short/medium term), but also be more liable to spelling pronunciations.

---
Tags: phonology, grammar, diachronics, sound-change
---


# Question
Title: Is it possible to have consonant followed by Uvular sound
I am thinking of creating a language that has a sound system a little similar to Latin, with a guttural feel like German. The people who are going to speak this language are harsh and sound annoyed at all times. At the same time, they are very much attached to their roots; they perform little to no interaction with other races. So there is little influence of foreign languages on theirs.

I thought the sound /q/ would be great here, but the consonant clusters are too hard for me to pronounce. Hence, I am finding it difficult to form words. I am wondering if there is any kind of rule in syllable structure that helps or obstructs this kind of sound system building.

# Answer
> 5 votes
Uvulars can absolutely go in clusters. As some examples, Georgian **წყ**ალი (***ts'q'****ali*; "water"), Arabic القراءة (*a**lq**ira'a*; "reading"), or Inuktitut ᖃᓂᐅᔮ**ᖅᐸ**ᐃᑦ (*qaniujaa**qp**ait*; "syllabics").

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


# Question
Title: Is lowering the tongue at word-ending a voiceless vowel?
In my conlang, some consonants can cluster with l at the end. For example, 'story' is 'coánl'; following dictionary.com's IPA for 'metal' as / ˈmɛt l / I had set out pronouncing this like /koˈa:n l/. So trying to be the most clear since I am no expert in how to write these things, (for relevant consonants C) -Cl ending sounded like \[Cəl\].

Pronouncing over time, I happened to hit on a different way. I like this a lot better. I don't know how to describe it in IPA, though. I have done my best here to use notation correctly and understandably and made my best analysis after trying to figure it out. Maybe the difference is now I'm ending the word with a voiceless vowel? I'd appreciate guidance.

Using *coánl*, I'm going to make a contrast with what my mouth is doing.

When I end the words / ˈmɛt l / or /koˈa:n l/, my tongue

* drops from the alveolar ridge
* stops behind my upper teeth
* my lips do not keep broadening with the \[a:\] after the \[n\]
* it sounds like the /l/ ends the syllable.

In contrast, my new way of saying 'coánl,'

* my tongue continues downwards and forwards past my teeth
* while my lips do continue to broaden in the motion they were making for /a:/
* I think I stop my vocal cords with the L sound, same as before.
* With these motions, now the \[l\] itself sounds like it does at the start of a \[-la\] syllable rather than the end of an \[əl\].

I pronounce \[la\] with only the start of an \[a\]? Or to put it another way, the /a/ goes through both consonants now? Is this what you call an voiceless vowel, or something else?

Thank you for your thoughts

# Answer
Ultimately, if your vocal cords stop vibrating and you're still pronouncing the word (i.e. there's still breath moving through your vocal apparatus), then whatever phoneme you're pronouncing will be voiceless.

This article has not only a review of the mechanics, but also some IPA notation to help you notate. Particularly initial vs final voicing or devoicing. And this video has good examples of voiced vs voiceless vowels in Cheyanne.
> 3 votes

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Tags: phonology, phonetics
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# Question
Title: List of segment usage based on how many people use it?
The great Phoible 2.0 has exclusive list of segment usages based on "Languages", but since some languages such as Lak are only used by handful of people, it won't make any sense if I employ their pronunciations/segments in the language I'm creating , is it?

For example, /k͈ʷ/ sounds are ONLY used in Lak, this sounds would definitely not recommended to be put into my collection of alphabets of my language.

After all, what's the point of making a language if "only handful of people in the whole Earth knows how to pronounce it correctly"!?

And, English and Japanese are both count as "one" language, but we can't never deny the fact that "English speaker" is WAY~ more then "Japanese speaker"!

(~400M native speaker against ~128M according to Wiki)

So, if I choose some sounds that "only" English speakers knows how to pronounce over some "Japanese-only" sounds, you could bet that there are about 272M more people knows how to pronounce that sound correctly.

So, I was wondering if there is some other "outstanding" list out there based their list on "the amount of people using it"?

Much appreciated!

# Answer
> 2 votes
Well, you need to add numbers of speakers from another source (e.g. Wikipedia or Ethnologue, or some other list with speaker estimates). Pro-tip: Use a list where the languages are ordered by the number of speakers. You can use a cut-off (no matter whether you choose 10k or 100k speakers) and set that cut-off for the number of speakers (in statistical lingo, this kind of adjustment is termed smoothing). This frees you from looking up the numbers for languages with fewer speakers.

Be aware of the following: By weighing the languages by the numbers of their speakers you are putting a bias into your language design, heavily favouring Mandarin, English and Hindi/Urdu over the rest of the languages. This kind of bias may be or may not be a good thing in your conlang.

# Answer
> 1 votes
All consonants in 50% or more languages:

m, k, j, p, w, n, t, l, s, b, ŋ, g, h

All vowels in 50% or more languages:

i, u, a, e, o

I hope this answers your question

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Tags: conlang-creation, list-of-languages
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# Question
Title: How did Tolkien model diachronic changes in his Elvish languages?
Wikipedia explains that Tolkien modelled changes to his Elvish languages, something we'd call diachronic conlanging these days:

> Tolkien conceived a family tree of Elvish languages, all descending from a common ancestor called Primitive Quendian. He worked extensively on how the languages diverged from Primitive Quendian over time, in phonology and grammar, in imitation of the development of real language families.

What is a summary of the major changes he modelled? For example, did he describe something akin to the Great Vowel Shift?

# Answer
> 9 votes
OK, here are some details on classical Quenya and classical Sindarin (based on Helmut W. Pesch, Das große Elbisch-Buch, Bastei-Lübbe 2009)

The phoneme inventory of Primitive Quendian was

```
p   t   k
pʰ  tʰ  kʰ
b   d   g
m   n   ŋ
    r,l
        ɣ
w     j
a, e, i, o, u, ai, oi, ui, au, eu, iu

```

An early addition to this repertoire were prenasalised consonants `mb, nd, ŋg` that developped differently in Quenya and Sindarin.

**Sound shifts for Quenya**

```
pʰ   tʰ   kʰ  -> f   θ   x  (later: θ -> s)
b-   d-   g-  -> v-  l-  Ø
-b-  -d-  -g- -> -mb- -nd- -ŋg-
mb-  nd-  ŋg- -> m-  n-  ŋ-   (later: ŋ- -> n-)

```

The loss of almost all b's, d's, and g's makes Quenya phonological similar to the Finnish language.

Quenya has some old compounds that preserve the pre-shifted state of a root, e.g., for *dome \> lome* "night, darkness" there is an old compund *tindome* and a newer regular one *Aldalome*. This adds to the diachronical depth of the language.

**Sound shifts for Sindarin**

```
p    t    k   -> b   d   g
pʰ   tʰ   kʰ  -> v   ð   ɣ (later: ɣ -> Ø)
mb-  nd-  ŋg- -> b-  d-  g-
kʷ  -> p
w-  -> gw-

```

Sindarin also has a lot of lenitations (i.e., in certain contexts the initial consonsonant of a word is changed to some "softer" consonant) inspired by Welsh. The lenitations are different for original `b d g` and `b d g` that come from `mb nd ŋg`. Sindarin also has acquired an umlaut `y`.

EDIT 3: **Evolution of initial *sp-*, *st-*, and *sk-***

Both in Sindarin and quenya, consonant clusters with an initial s were simplified in two steps: First, the stop became aspirated and the s was dropped

```
 sp st sk -> pʰ tʰ kʰ

```

and than the aspirated stops became voiceless fricatives

```
 pʰ tʰ kʰ -> f θ h

```

In Quenya, also the so-created *θ*'s became *s* later, such that the net development of Quenya is

```
  st -> s

```

EDIT 1: Some more information gleened from the dictionary

**Quenya** Words beginning with `h-` derive from Primitive Quendian roots beginning in `kʰ-`. The initial consonant cluster `stʰ` was simplified via `θ` to `s`.

Some words beginning with `ç-` like *hyarmen* "south; left side" come from roots beginning in `kʰj`.

**Sindarin** has simplified some consonant clusters like `kl- kr-` via intermediate voiceless l and r but in classical Sindarin those l's and r's are the usual voiced ones (despite being retained in orthography as *lh rh*).

EDIT 2: The grammatical changes aren't explained in great detail. It seems that Tolkien applied some *handwavium* here when he states that Quenya was consciously changed for greater clarity. On the other hand, Sindarin has evolved naturally (in Tolkiens internal history) in the woodlands of Middle Earth where everything is interwoven with everything.

# Answer
> 8 votes
I don't know the exact changes Tolkien enacted, but here are a few in no particular order. You can tell they are quite inspired by real world sound changes in Celtic languages, which I'll mark in brackets. A good summary for quenya can be found here.

* Aspirates /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ become fricatives /ɸ θ x/
* Lots of syncope, especially the second vowel in trisyllabic words
* In Quenya /kʷ/ is retained (Irish), while in Sindarin it becomes /p/ (Welsh)
* Vowels are reduced or lost finally, especially in Sindarin (Welsh)
* Sindarin features i-affection (Welsh)
* Various forms of lenition (Irish, Welsh)
* Plenty of assimilation in clusters
* Quenya features some palatalization with *y* /j/
* Syllabic consonants become non-syllabic
* Some sounds such as /ɣ/ and /ŋ/ are lost or merge with other sounds
* In Quenya usually /w/ \> /v/, while in Sindarin initial /w/ \> /gw/ (Welsh)

Hope this answers your question somewhat.

# Answer
> 2 votes
> What is a summary of the major changes he modelled? For example, did he describe something akin to the Great Vowel Shift?

For Sindarin, there are some big changes in vowels comparable to the Great Vowel Shift.

For example, under certain circumstances and in different periods:
á \> au
au \> o

That's one of the reasons why Sindarin looks quite different from Quenya sometimes. e.g.
Q. - S.
náre - naur
anar - anor

If you want a more detailed "summary", or rather "study", David Salo spent some forty pages to analyze Sindarin's historical sound changes in his book: a Gateway to Sindarin. And here's an essay by Helge K. Fauskanger discussing the Evolution of Quenya.

Or if you want the description from Tolkien himself, you can get Parma Eldalamberon #19, where you can find big phonetic tables by Tolkien.

The biggest Elvish dictionaries made by Tolkien himself are organized by roots - Words in different Elven languages are listed under the proto root from which they are derived. Here's an example from the Etymologies.

> KHER rule, govern, possess. Q\[uenya\]. *heru* master, *heri* lady ... O\[ld \]N\[oldorin\] *khéro* master ... N\[oldorin\]. *hîr*. N. *herth* house-hold ...

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Tags: diachronics, tolkien-elvish
---


title: Where do the words in Láadan come from?

text:
# Question
Title: Where do the words in Láadan come from?
Láadan is a language created as an experiment in seeing if a constructed language designed specifically for women could better express the views of women better than natural Western languages.

As explained in @RaceYouAnytime's answer, in Láadan there are several different words for different types of love, for example.

> **The language has many affection words**, for example, of love.\[...\]
>
> * **a** love for inanimates
> * **áayáa** mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome
> * **áazh** love for someone sexually desired in the past, but not anymore
> * **ab** love for one liked but not respected
> \[...\]
> * **oham** love for that which is holy
> * **sham** love for the child of one’s body

Excerpt from the above mentioned answer. Parts have been left out (\[...\]) for brevity

How were these words created? Were they created arbitrarily or did they have an inspiration/something they were based on?

# Answer
Everything in this answer is taken from the website of the Láadan language (link to the page). I am by no means an expert, but this is directly from the mouth of Laáadan's creator. The following quote contains pertinent excerpts of the article, parts of which I have put in bold:

> Another goal I had for Láadan was that **it should be as easy as possible to figure out what a particular word or morpheme means just by looking at it**...I wanted the language to work like a Tinkertoy® set works, so that people could take the pieces and fit them together easily to make larger forms. For example: the Láadan word for “bee” is “zhomid”; that word is made from “zho” — the Láadan word for “sound,” and “mid” — the Láadan word for “creature.” **The meaning is transparent from the word’s parts.**
>
> **First, however, I had to construct the most basic elements of the language — the words/ morphemes that are called “roots” and can’t be taken apart into smaller meaningful pieces**. When linguists begin working with a language for which no grammar or dictionary is available, they ordinarily start with a set of roughly 100 very basic words made up of items like “eat” and “sleep” and “food.” I followed that practice, and began by constructing a core vocabulary of those basic words; when I had those done I began adding additional roots that I felt were needed. **Sometimes I can explain to some extent how I chose a particular shape for one of those words; much of the time I can’t.**
>
> For example… I can explain that I chose “oódóo” for “bridge” because when pronounced its tune makes the shape of a humpback bridge. I can explain that I chose “rul” for “cat” because the purring of a cat sounds to me like “rulrulrulrul…” But the choice of “ana” for “food” and “ina” for “sleep” was arbitrary; **I have no explanation for those choices other than that I tried to give them a shape that could easily be combined with other morphemes.** For any constructed language that isn’t based on some existing language, the hardest part will always be putting together the inventory of roots.

An update to the Láadan dictionary shows that not all of the words were created by Suzette Haden Elgin (the creator of Láadan) but all that are not roots in and of themselves--roots which seem to have been created rather arbitrarily--can be figured out from these roots. For example, in the dictionary I linked, the word for beaver is "eduthemid." This contains the rood for animal, "mid," and some other root, I presume "eduth." I do't know what this means, but it was constructed in this way so that someone who knew these roots but did not know the word could discern that it means beaver.

The original creator of Láadan made a couple of arbitrary roots that could then become a lexicon through a logical process of morphology, with help from multiple other people.
> 6 votes

# Answer
I don't know how to add comments to other answers, but this is just to say that 'eduth' means 'engineering' (because beavers engineer their dams and lodges, presumably) and is itself constructed from the prefix 'e' meaning '-ology' or 'science/study of', and 'duth' meaning 'use'.

Although Láadan is an *a priori* language and therefore does not derive on the whole from existing natlangs or other conlangs, it has a few loanwords from both:

* buda/óobuda/óobudahá (a buddha / the Buddha, Buddhism, Buddhist) -- Sanskrit
* Muhamad -- Arabic, 'Muhammad'
* Thóra/óothóra/óothórahá (Torah, Judaism, Jew/Jewish person) -- Hebrew
* wísha/wíshahá (wicca, wiccan)
* Zheshu/óozheshu/óozheshuhá (Jesus, Christianity, Christian/Jesusist) -- Aramaic/Latin, 'Jesu'
* sháam (psalm)
* Arahanesha/Aranesha -- Arkansas
* emeth (to clown) -- based on famous clown Emmet Kelly's name
* mathom (knick-knack, useless object) -- a Tolkien conlang
* shé (with regard to) -- French, 'chez'
* théle (television) -- ancient Greek 'tele'
* thera (Terra)
* anahelilith (feminist angel) -- Greek/Akkadian, the character Lilith from the Apocrypha
* modem -- English, 'modem'
* shenéedera (metaphorical sister, one who shares not only hearth and home but lover and child-loving) -- Mercedes Lackey fantasy works

Sources are laadanlanguage.org and laadanlanguage.com and some words were contributed by others than SHE.

I'll lastly note that Suzette attributes partial inspiration for the phonology and phonotactics (particularly the 'lh' phoneme) to Diné, and the comparison mechanism to Kumeyaay.
> 3 votes

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Tags: history, laadan
---


title: How to Indicate Idea Flow

text:
# Question
Title: How to Indicate Idea Flow
# Are there any other schemes to indicate the flow of words/thoughts in writing? (Outside of what I have researched.)

I am *specifically* asking about how languages present complete grammatical statements and controlling which statements a reader is to comprehend first. Were I not looking for other solutions, I would ask 'how do you order sentences to create paragraphs?', but this assumes structures like sentences and paragraphs. It seems most writing systems indicate the flow of thoughts and ideas by have a general rule, like always reading "from left to right, top to bottom" (Indo-European), "from bottom to top, left to right" (Japanese), or "along the line" (Ogham).

If you are curious, this constructed language is built around the idea of sentence diagramming. Add to regular diagramming the option to branch new diagrams off of words already in your diagram, and you can chain these to express paragraphs as networks of connecting ideas. (So "I caught a fish this morning", "The fish costs 50 shells", "It will be delicious", and "The fish was blue" all come together around the symbol for "fish".)

The problem then comes with ordering ideas with no obvious relations. (Ex: "The king likes dancing. A camel spat." Vs "A camel spat. The king likes dancing.") With how things currently are in this conlang, the writer has no control over which order the reader interprets grammatically complete statements. What are approaches to ordering thoughts/grammatically complete statements?

# Answer
> 5 votes
#### On Swamps and Morasses

There are a couple of schemes that come to mind immediately that might provide some grist for the mill, if not a full English breakfast.

**First**, of course, is the one we already use! You assume the existence of sentences and paragraphs already, but I think we should quickly look at them for efficiency sake. We generally learn to write a text, like an essay or a thesis, beginning with the thesis statement, the sort of summation of the whole problem the essay addresses. This is considered to be ***the statement a reader is to comprehend first***. Next down from the entire essay in hierarchy is the paragraph. Likewise, we're taught to begin each one with the main sentence, that one that introduces the main idea to be discussed or revealed in that paragraph. Lastly in the hierarchy are sentences themselves. Interestingly, we don't order sentences "logically" but rather grammatically. Even though one might write a dissertation in Latin and put the thesis statement first, the sentence itself might not actually get to the point until you get to the verb way down at the end.

This scheme is both Linear in the spatio-temporal sense and Top Down in the hierarchical sense.

**Secondly**, we could consider extending this basic scheme by standardising and increasing the power of punctuation and section markings. Many technical documents do this by noting every paragraph with what amounts to a unique serial number. Often in historical grammars we find references to things like P4a.2.N3 which denotes paragraph four-A (a subset of lesser importance than para 4 itself), section 2, note 3. All in all , a very low importance reference as it's relegated to a foot or end note.

We have lots of interesting, unusual and unused punctuation marks that could be regularised, standardised and ammended to fulfil several key roles from marking importance to speculation or editorialisation. We have things like interrobangs and exclamation commas and the like; some languages have sectional punctuation. All of these could be incorporated into the existing scheme relatively easily.

**Thirdly**, we should take a look at other systems entirely different. First, let's take a look at music and in specific the conductor's score. Unlike an individual musician, the conductor has access to all the parts that are playing at any moment in the piece of music. Very much like what you're looking for, the conductor needs to be aware at any moment of "what is to be comprehended first" and "how does the whole text flow". Although music itself is linear, and the most important theme or idea isn't necessarily the first thing you hear!, the reader of the score needs to comprehend all the different sections, moving parts, thematic ideas and when they all occur.

As you look in the images in the link, the conductor has marked up the "text" of the music by coordinating various divisions by colour, notes when various themes, motifs and entrances occur and the like.

Even in an individual musician's score or in a piano work, you'll find plenty of "flow" markings: dynamic changes, pedal settings, phrasal markings, accentuation types as well as stylistic & tempo markings.

Some types of music rely heavily on flow marking, for example the genre of unmeasured music. Melodic and harmonic flow are indicated by the composer through the use of sweeping and flowing lines, but the interpretation and execution of the flow is the work of the player.

Another system to look at is hypertext. We've all used it when we hover over highlighted key words and clicked on links to supporting data. And we've all wondered why the composer chose to link two things together that don't make sense just because the other word is spelled the same.

This system allows the writer to make use of the linear nature of reading to ensure that more important topics are marked and read first, but also allows freedom to move between sections and also to dive deeper into a topic through the system of links and hovertext.

Wiktionary puts this to good use by ordering the Important Stuff on the main article page, while linking to supporting data, historical changes, usage quotations, and hiding grammatical apparatus and the like in spoilers.

Take at-baill for instance, an Old Irish verb meaning to throw. The key points and flow are handled here on this primary page with its sections delineated (word, etymology, pronunciation, parts of speech, declension/conjugation, descendants, etc. Clicking on the spoiler bar opens up a whole new view into the agony of grammar. Especially for anyone who thinks Greek verbs are truculent.

The links in all the sections lead one down rabbit holes of time and space and history into other languages, other peoples' perceptions, related forms, semantic drift and all kinds of other interesting inquiries that don't have anything at all to do with the basic thesis you started out with!

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Tags: grammar, writing-systems
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# Question
Title: How do I change the word order of this complex sentence?
I have an English sentence that I need to switch the word order of so I can translate it into my conlang smoothly, but the sentence is pretty complex and I’m not sure how to go about it. The sentence is “ I feel like he would like to try it after then.” I would like to switch the word order to SOV. Thanks in advance!

# Answer
Perhaps the best way is to transate it into a different natlang, preferrably one with the intended word order.

While German is not your typical SOV language (what is typical, after all?), it is close:

```
Ich habe das Gefühl, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde. [1]

```

Note there are aready some idiomatic differences from English: "to feel like" is "das Gefühl haben", i.e. "to have the feeling", and the subordinating conjunction is obligatory (as in majority of European languages). Also note that "to try it" is kind of ambiguous in English.

To turn it into a better SOV sentence, let's rearrange the word order a bit:

```
Ich das Gefühl habe, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.

```

No longer syntacticaly correct German, but a good start for the translation. Also note that word order classification does not creeate hard constraints - especially in complex sentences, some constituents just like to stick together or to the clause boundaries\[2\]. So we can turn it into:

```
Das Gefühl habe ich, dass er es danach gerne versuchen würde.

```

which in fact is again better German (a bit poetic perhaps).

Remove pronouns as fit if your conlang is a pro-drop one, and you can start translating...

\[1\] corrections are welcome, this is just my best bet

\[2\] let's try the sentence in Slovak: "Mám pocit, že by to rád potom vyskúšal". (have-1P-SG feeling-ACC that-CONJ would-AUX it-ACC like-MSC then try-PAST). Almost perfect SOV, despite Slovak being prototypically SVO. Note that the "by" auxilliary particle turns the verb into a conditional, but it does not have to be next to the verb itself. And as a very happy pro-drop language, there are almost no pronouns left, and the word order is quite fixed (changing it would remain grammatical, but bring emphasis to different parts of the sentence)
> 3 votes

# Answer
#### Presto Didgo Abbaca da Barabba Ortem Changeo!

> “I feel like he would like to try it after then.”

**I as if he would like to try it after then feel**.

This example changes the main verb only, leaving the relative clause SV.

**I as if to try it after then would like he feel**.

This example makes the main clause SOV and the subordinate clause OVS.

**I as if he to try it would like after then feel**.

This one changes both the main and subordinate clause SOV.
> 1 votes

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Tags: vocabulary, translation
---


title: Can entire words be silent?

text:
# Question
Title: Can entire words be silent?
Most people will be familiar with the idea that naturalistic spelling can be tricky. Some examples of natlangs with annoying spelling that come to mind are English ("ough" can be pronounced /ʌf/, /ɔf/, /ʌp/, /au/, /u/, /ɔ/, or /o/), French (*"Qu'est-ce qu'il mangent ?"* /kɛs kɪl mãʒ/), and Modern Greek (/i/ can be spelled "η", "ι", "ει", "υ", "οι", or "υι"). But how bad can it get? Are completely silent words (that is, written but unpronounced) words attested in any language? I'm aware that Irish mutations developed from completely lost particles, but I don't think these particles are still written as separate words.

# Answer
> 5 votes
In terms of spelling opacity, there's a continuum between *exactly* mirroring speech at the phonetic or phonological level and writing in a different language. Historical spelling normally refers to writing segments, especially consonants in clusters or inflectional morphology, that have been lost over time. I think adding back lost morphology or undoing sound changes in a much more common kind of historical spelling than adding back lost syntax.

There are some historical changes that cause words to be dropped without turning into affixes, though. For instance, a language can develop a null copula construction like Russian did for the present tense.

It would not be too much of a stretch to imagine a language where the null copula is a fairly recent innovation, and therefore the copula is usually written despite not being spoken. This may have been the case for Russian at some point in time.

I don't know of any examples, but you might create a language where things such as *articles* or *measure words* existed at one point but were lost. I think spontaneously losing articles or measure words is uncommon, so it would probably be a contact-induced change.

# Answer
> 9 votes
*Dropping words* happen (the *ne* of negation notoriously drops pretty systematically in spoken French) and commonly a that, as Gregory points out. However, I believer a true "silent word" is a nonsensical concept.

For starters, Silent letters are historical *artifacts of a writing system*. They are not a feature of the spoken language, so right there, a "silent word" cannot be something that happens in the spoken language unless the words in question are composed of phonemes or features that are merely difficult to hear from locutors of a different language. Still not silent *in their native language*. If a writer writes down a word, they typically do it with some sort of communicative intent (even if not consciously so).

Second, in the spoken language, something that isn't pronounced in one way or another *literally doesn't exist* by definition (we can argue about stuff like sandhi and the side effects of sound change, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion IMO).

So unless your language has a need to transcribe something that is literally not said (and we usually have punctuation and emoticons for that), then a "silent word" is, in my opinion, a self-contradicting concept.

# Answer
> 5 votes
I'll start by saying I'm not an expert, only an enthusiast.

But I believe this could be entirely possible. Written languages such as Egyptian never had punctuation. So they would not be capable of using punctuation to indicate certain moments in speech indicated by them. I could see how a similar constructed language would be capable of having a silent word being used that represents these punctuation moments.

For example, a sentence where you want to indicate a emphatic pause could simply use a word that might not have a normal use, like combining the words for "wait" and "moment" into a new word that when written symbolize the spoken need for a pause of emphasis.

# Answer
> 5 votes
The archaeological site L'Anse aux Meadows is pronounced (in English) /lænsi mɛdoʊz/, i.e. the *aux* is silent, if random internet sources can be believed. Of course, it is not quite a typical example - a proper name, derived from another language, and English speakers unaware of the local pronunciation are likely to read differently. But that's the fate of the English orthography.

# Answer
> 1 votes
There's a phenomenon in Chinese where two different written words are pronounced the same way in a sense, but a word is inserted in spoken speech. For a made-up example (because I don't know Chinese and but vaguely remember this), the words for chemistry and science are both pronounced the same way, so when the word for chemistry is read, "chemical" is inserted in front. A silent word could be the reverse; if two words were pronounced differently but written the same (either historically, or due to a very deficient writing system), a disambiguating word could be inserted.

A better example might be Egyptian; Egyptian hieroglyphics end in a determinative that shows meaning but isn't pronounced. If that's not enough of a silent word for you, they could evolve to be more word-like; if words are separated by spaces, they could be spaced out, perhaps become more complex; e.g. English snspt ☀⚫.

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Tags: writing-systems, naturalism, natural-languages
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# Question
Title: Words for numbers in a language with bijective numeration
Bijective base-*k* numeration (or *k*-adic numeration) is a system of writing numerals such that the digits are 1 through *k*. Thus counting in bijective base-12 (such as my conlang Atili has) works as follows, using `X`, `E`, and `T` for ten, eleven, and twelve, respectively:

```
 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9,  X,  E,  T,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1X, 1E, 1T,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 2X, 2E, 2T,
...

```

What are reasonable ways to assign names to these numbers, specifically combining tens? Obviously, I could just name the numbers the way English does and just have the names for numbers not line up with how they are written (so "a dozen" would be `T`, but "a dozen and one" `11`), but are there other solutions for naming that better align with the way that numbers are written?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Just have two different words, like "twelve" (T) and "dozen". Than the number 1T is one-dozen-and-twelve.

# Answer
> 4 votes
The solution I've gone with is to use two different words as jk suggests in his answer. In speech, both "one-dozen and twelve" (*"rurinye-tendi"*) and "two dozen" (*"barinye"*) are acceptable, but have slightly different meanings. *Rurinye-tendi* means exactly 24, while *barinye* means at least 24, but not more than 36. The latter is frequently used for approximations and estimations. In writing, *rurinye-tendi* can be either written as 1T or fully spelled-out, but *barinye* must be spelled out because there is no way to write it with numerals.

# Answer
> 3 votes
1. if the base system is deeply ingrained in the language (in most (all?) natlangs it isn't, numbers predate modern positional notation by millennia; let's say your language had the notation for a long long time and historical language changes made the language conform to the notation), then the most natural system is just to read the digits - T is *dozen*, 11 is *one-one*.
2. or make the base multiplier obligatory for numbers bigger than the base - T is *dozen* but 11 is *one dozen (and) one*

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary, syntax, number
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title: Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?

text:
# Question
Title: Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon?
Exactly what it says on the can - I'm looking for a word in `tlhingan-Hol` (Klingon) for "skull".

Fallback: In case there isn't a canon word, I'm defaulting to using "head bone" as a replacement. I know from TKD that `nach` is "head" and `Hom` is "bone". Is this combination `nach Hom` correct? e.g. is `jaghpu'ma' nach HomDu'` a reasonable translation for "our enemies' skulls"?

# Answer
> 3 votes
\[Update from 2022\]

Turns out the word was (semi-officially?) added to the lexicon a few months after the question and @Richard's answer - at **qepHom** 2019 (an annual meeting of Klingonists in Germany).

## The word for "skull" is `DughrI'`

(Added on 11/17/2019)

See kli.com New Klingon Words (not in the original lexicon) page as citation.

# Answer
> 3 votes
Indeed, there doesn't seem to be any canon word for "skull" in Klingon, so a compound should be fine.

Note, however, that some compounds are constructed without separation between their parts (see for example Wiktionary's list of Klingon compound words) with no apparent rule as to why, so "skull" could conceivably be `nachHom`.

BUT, since `-Hom` is also the diminutive suffix, `nachHom` would primarily mean "little skull", making `nach Hom` is the less ambiguous translation.

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Tags: translation, klingon
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# Question
Title: Were Tolkien's languages used in the works of C. S. Lewis and other inklings?
It is well-known that J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and others were members of an informal club named *inklings* and spoke which each other about their literary work. I also remember that some of the inklings used Tolkien's languages to create names for places and figures in their works but I forgot about the details.

Is there a list of words from Tolkien's languages used in the works of C. S. Lewis or any other member of the inklings?

Can someone provide examples of such words?

# Answer
Tolkien addresses the use of some of his words by C.S. lewis in a letter to Dick Plotz on September 12, 1965. The letter is numbered 276 in *The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien*.

This is the relevant part of the letter:

> *Núminor*. C. S. Lewis was one of the only three persons who have so far read all or a considerable pan of my 'mythology' of the First and Second Ages, which had already been in the main lines constructed before we met. He had the peculiarity that he liked to be read to. All that he knew of my 'matter' was what his capacious but not infallible memory retained from my reading to him as sole audience. His spelling *numinor* is a hearing error, aided, no doubt, by his association of the name with Latin *nūmen*, *nūmina*, and the adjective 'numinous'. Unfortunate, since the name has no such connexions, and has no reference to 'divinity' or sense of its presence. It is a construction from the Eldarin base √NDU 'below, down; descend'; Q. *núme* 'going down, occident'; *númen* 'the direction or region of the sunset' +*nóre* 'land' as an inhabited area. I have often used *Westernesse* as a translation. This is derived from rare Middle English *Westernesse* (known to me only in MS. C of *King Horn*) where the meaning is vague, but may be taken to mean 'Western lands' as distinct from the East inhabited by the Paynim and Saracens. Lewis took no pan in 'research into Númenor'. N. is my personal alteration of the Atlantis myth and/or tradition, and accommodation of it to my general mythology. Of all the mythical or 'archetypal' images this is the one most deeply seated in my imagination, and for many years I had a recurrent Atlantis dream : the stupendous and ineluctable wave advancing from the Sea or over the land, sometimes dark, sometimes green and sunlit.
>
> Lewis was, I think, impressed by 'the Silmarillion and all that', and certainly retained some vague memories of it and of its names in mind. For instance, since he had heard it, before he composed or thought of *Out of the Silent Planet*, I imagine that *Eldil* is an echo of the *Eldar*; in *Perelandra* 'Tor and Tinidril' are certainly an echo, since Tuor and Idril, parents of Eärendil, are major characters in 'The Fall of Gondolin', the earliest written of the legends of the First Age. But his own mythology (incipient and never fully realized) was quite different. It was at any rate broken to bits before it became coherent by contact with C. S. Williams and his 'Arthurian' stuff – which happened between *Perelandra* and *That Hideous Strength*. A pity, I think. But then I was and remain wholly unsympathetic to Williams' mind.

This was mentioned in the 2005 paper "The Inklings: Connecting the Unconnected: Genre, intertextuality and intersemiosis" by Tommi Nieminen (Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki, Finland):

> When Tolkien and Lewis made an mutual agreement to write two science fiction stories—Tolkien of a time travel, Lewis of a space travel—, and Lewis produced the first part of the *Ransom* trilogy, *Out of the Silent Planet* (1943), it was just as much an allegory as were his previous works, or the later ones such as the *Narnia* series (1950–56). Even the names borrowed from Tolkien to the *Ransom* novels—taken not from Tolkien’s writings but his reading aloud *The Silmarillion* stories in the Inklings meetings—were given so different second-world interpretations that they do not carry anything of Tolkien’s world to Lewis’s.

This was the only confirmed use that I could identify. Others have theorized that other words were borrowed from Tolkien's conlangs, such as the name of the palace in *Narnia*, Cair Paravel. "Cair" in Sindarin means "ship". This is discussed in more depth on TheTolkienForum.com, but ultimately it looks like both sources of Cair come from the welsh word "Caer", which means a stronghold.

The only confirmed use I found was the use of names by Lewis in the *Ransom* trilogy mentioned above.
> 3 votes

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Tags: tolkien-elvish, tolkien-dwarvish
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# Question
Title: How can I format a dictionary that mixes vertical and horizontal scripts?
My conlang Atili is written in a vertical script. I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how to write out words in the Atili script within my dictionary. This is important because Atili spelling is not predictable, and the normal Romanization that I use for Atili is phonetic and thus does not convey how a word is meant to be spelled in the Atili script. Right now, I'm using a secondary Romanization as a proxy for the native script that does convey the spelling of words in the conscript, which leads to dictionary entries like the following:

> **azih** ÄZYIH *n.* (A) hand; (B) the first letter of the Atili alphabet, which represents the consonant /∅/

I would rather just write the Atili word in the native script, but I'm not sure how to sensibly mix the horizontal Latin alphabet with the vertical Atili script. I'm not looking for technical details about implementing such a thing, just how to lay out the entries on the page.

# Answer
> 5 votes
If you have a situation where the entry in the conscript is taller than the textual material discussing it, you’ll have to accept ‘wasted’ white space filling out the rectangle. Really, the only sensible way to do this if your textual material is in English is to have your conscript entry run down on the left edge of the rectangle, and fill in the English on the right.

If you have an alternative horizontal orthography (even if it uses the same characters, like happens in Chinese and Japanese), I would recommend using *that* for the dictionary/lexicon.

# Answer
> 3 votes
One possibility, if the vertical words are fairly long, is to have multiple parallel columns on a page. Gives you rather short line-length for English, but since you are just writing dictionary definitions, most of those are probably very short.

Example:

(Image Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/darkangel8980/art/Vulcan-Script-Pon-Farr-212492799)

# Answer
> 1 votes
In a dictionary, you'll sometimes want to mix text from the languages concerned within a block, or perhaps even a sentence. At that point, I believe there really is only one viable option: Rotating one of the scripts entirely. Yes, the one you rotate *will* be a bit misrepresented, but it works. For an example, see this picture from what seems to be a French book on the Mongolian language:

This is *not* me trying to discourage you to change, or even downplay, your conlang's directionality. Indeed, rotating the English is also an option. Though I'd probably suggest rotating whichever one features the least, and from your snippet that seems to be the Atili.

One last thing to keep in mind.
If Atili text runs top-to-bottom right-to-left like Chinese traditionally did (or bottom-to-top left-to-right), rotating it 90 degrees to match Latin alphabet text is simple, as is doing the opposite. But if it runs top-to-bottom right-to-left like traditional Mongolian (or bottom-to-top left-to-right), it gets a little bit more complicated. Assuming you rotate the Atili, then it either ends up as right-to-left text in the middle of your left-to-right Latin script text or you end up with the side normally facing the next line being the upper side rather than the lower side - neither is ideal, but either is fine.
The book from the example picture seems to have gone with the latter approach.

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Tags: writing-systems
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# Question
Title: What is the word-grammar transcription thing called?
What is the thing used under a sentence in a conlang that looks sort of like this: NOM-he.F-PAST said.F-PAST called? I know I probably used it completely wrong in that example, but what is this called, and how does it work? Thanks in advance.

# Answer
> 10 votes
The thing is called a gloss. There is a widely used standard for such glosses, the Leipzig glossing rules.

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Tags: conlang-creation, tools, glossing
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# Question
Title: How do conlangs/natlangs have prefixes suffixes and not get them jumbled up?
When thinking how to build a conlang *system* of prefixes/suffixes, I get stuck right at the beginning: how do you prevent clashes within the prefix/suffix/base system?

By that I mean the following. Say you have these prefixes:

* a
* an
* ani
* amo
* am
* ami
* amo
* ach
* acho

Then say you have these word "bases":

* ma
* man
* mother
* noise
* nose
* norm
* match
* cheek
* chim
* chin
* aman
* amish
* achy
* norma
* macha

And you have these suffixes:

* chum
* ma
* ama
* amo
* ana
* vana
* chana

I just picked random ones for demonstrative purposes. These will come into conflict in the following scenarios:

* a + amish = aamish?
* an + noise = annoise?
* am + macha + ama = ammachaama?

The point is, some of them won't be able to combine:

* If one ends with a vowel and the other starts with the same vowel (or even *a* vowel at all), and you don't have long vowels, then what do you do?
* If one ends with a consonant and the other starts with the same consonant (and you don't have long/geminate consonants), then what do you do?

I am vaguely starting to imagine a system where you have two forms to each prefix/base/suffix, so like:

1. If ending in a consonant, it can end in a sibilant/fricative like s or f, or a nasal like m or n, so you have pairs like "mas" and "mam", and you pick one depending on the following word chunk you are working with.
2. If ending in a vowel, and the next begins with a vowel, you put a y or w between. So a + ama would become "awama".

Otherwise, if you just let them *merge* together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.

How do natural languages (or conlangs for that matter) deal with this problem? Like in Sanskrit, or Latin, I see these sorts of prefixes/suffixes like my examples, and yet somehow the system seems to work (I haven't studied enough examples in each language though to know how/why it seems to work). What constraints do they place on the system? Etc. How do they create a prefix/suffix system that just works?

I ended up making all prefixes/suffixes/bases have to start/end with a consonant, and to combine you join with a vowel. That means for extra syllables, which I would like to get rid of. So instead of "kan" and "van" combining to form "kanavan", for example, I would like to just do "kanvan". Or even better, just have things that don't start/end with consonants, like "ka" and "an", and have them be, I don't know, "kan" or "kawan". How do you accomplish such a system? What are the range of possibilities which you can use (taking inspiration from natlangs or conlangs the like)?

# Answer
> 5 votes
> If ending in a consonant, it can end in a sibilant/fricative like s or f, or a nasal like m or n, so you have pairs like "mas" and "mam", and you pick one depending on the following word chunk you are working with.

This is called "allomorphy" and it's quite common. For example, in Ancient Greek, the negative prefix is `/a/` before a consonant (asymmetric, atheism) but `/an/` before a vowel (anemia, anorexic). Inuktitut, a famously agglutinating language, has a lot of allomorphy rules.

Usually this sort of thing results from some sort of phonological pattern. The negative prefix in Greek came from PIE **ṇ-*, which historically became `/a/` in certain environments and `/an/` in others. But by the time of Plato, it no longer seems to be a part of the language's phonological system; it's just a quirk of this one prefix.

> If ending in a vowel, and the next begins with a vowel, you put a y or w between. So a + ama would become "awama".

This is called "epenthesis" and it's one type of phonological process, which is also quite common. The difference between this and allomorphy is that these phonological processes seem to happen at a different level; it doesn't matter that it's specifically the prefix *a-* being used here, it just matters that two `/a/` phonemes ended up next to each other, and that's not allowed.

> Otherwise, if you just let them *merge* together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.

Sure, but natural languages have a high degree of redundancy, so losing a couple bits of information here isn't a problem.

> How do natural languages (or conlangs for that matter) deal with this problem? Like in Sanskrit, or Latin, I see these sorts of prefixes/suffixes like my examples, and yet somehow the system seems to work (I haven't studied enough examples in each language though to know how/why it seems to work). What constraints do they place on the system? Etc. How do they create a prefix/suffix system that just works?

In Latin, at least, only the last phoneme of a prefix ever gets changed when it attaches, and there usually isn't much functional load on this last phoneme. This makes sense, because if the assimilation had ever created an unacceptable ambiguity, speakers would have found some way to fix that (by, say, ceasing to use one of the ambiguous prefixes).

So when we do occasionally see a high functional load on the last phoneme of a prefix (*ad-esse* "to be present" vs *ab-esse* "to be absent"), the system must have some way of keeping them distinct; in this case, *ad-esse* is able to assimilate in forms like *assum* "I am present" and *affuī* "I was present", while *ab-esse* is not (*absum*, *abfuī*). If it didn't, speakers would have found, created, and used workarounds over the centuries.

# Answer
> 3 votes
> Otherwise, if you just let them merge together (and remove the head/tail of the joining pair), then you lose some information.

This happens in natlangs all the time. Consider French: the overabundance of silent letters at the ends of words means, for example, chien (dog) and chiens (dogs) are pronounced exactly the same. The language gets around it through the articles; you know that "le chien" is "the (male) dog" and "les chiens" is "the (male) dogs", thus in this case the difference is indicated by the difference between \[lə\] and \[le\].

And in some cases, it can get ridiculous. Consider the conjugations of the present tense "to run":

* je cours (I run)
* tu cours (you run)
* il court (he runs)
* elle court (she runs)
* ils courent (the males run)
* elles courent (the females run)

Every single one of those verbs are pronounced exactly the same, \[kuʁ\]. The only way you can differentiate them in speech is by the pronouns. Except, well, il/ils is pronounced the same, as is elle/elles. So there is, just from isolation, no way for someone to differentiate between "he is running" and "they are running".

So, what can you do? Well, context. Sometimes it's clear what you're talking about. Sometimes you have to add words to make the context clear: "Ils courent" (They are running) vs "Louis, il court" (Louis, he is running). Sometimes you can use other adjective which may have different words for male/female or singular/plural. All the normal tricks languages use.

***ADDENDUM***

I just realized, with my example of the conjugations of "courir", that it provides a good example of how someone trying to understand the linguistics of another language could get it really wrong from a limited sample size. We know French is written that way because of its historical development, and that it conjugates the verbs for different persons, and has gender and number coded in the pronouns, which the written language maintains. But if French wasn't written down (or it was written in a script that was strictly phonetic), and you only had a small sample size, you might come to the conclusion that the verb "to run", *koor*, wasn't conjugated in the present tense, and that French didn't differentiate between singular and plural in the third person.

Similarly, if you only had the written text, you might think that my examples above were pronounced *je koors*, *too koors*, *ill koort*, *ell koort*, *ills koor-ent* and *ells koor-ent* (or maybe *koo-rent*).

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Tags: vocabulary, morphology
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# Question
Title: Are there any thesauri that use a small controlled-language to define terms?
I have been looking for what I believe would be a very valuable resource in language construction. Ideally, this would be a full-size dictionary, where every description is a short list of words that approximate the meaning.

Ex:

Sleep: Still, Human, State, Noun.

Or something like this? Seems like this could be a good guide to creating more complex portmanteau words from a smaller base.

# Answer
> 3 votes
You are probably thinking about WordNet, where a *synset* is a set of words with exactly the same (not just approximate) meaning. But WordNet is much more than this, it also contains informations about relations of hypernym, hyponymy and more...

The original Princeton WordNet was created for English, but there are WordNets (of different sizes, quallity and level of usefulness) for many different languages.

Modern take on the idea is the approximation of semantic closeness in word embeddings models, which has the advantage that it needs "just" a big corpus and no human annotation (and a disadvantage that lacking human proofreading, it contains a lot of errors). See e.g. here (disclaimer: I am the author of that webpage and models).

# Answer
> 4 votes
Looking for a controlled vocabulary to bootstrap the semantics of a conlang brings Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) by Anna Wierzbicka and other authors to my mind. I'm not sure how far any language description in NSM is really worked out and written down, but it may give you a starter for thought.

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Tags: resource-request
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# Question
Title: How to decay (remove) vowel harmony system by conlang evolution?
So I have a Back vowel harmony system in my conlang, where front and back vowel cannot occur in the same word. Now that I am evolving my conlang, How can I decay the harmony system giving space to more morphological vowel diversity?

# Answer
A constant annoyance for vowel harmony are borrowings from languages that don't have it. So let your conlang be in contact with another conlang without vowel harmony and borrow words from it. Make sure that the words cannot be regularised without creating homophones. Once the vowel harmony is perturbed, it may be dissolved entirely.
> 4 votes

# Answer
In addition to loanwords as raised by JK, you can also have consonants colour neighbouring vowels.

Consider a language where /i/ & /u/ form a harmonic pair with no word containing both, and that has the consonants /c/, /k/, & /q/ (amongst others). Let's also include some nonce words nutaculu & saqimi, and a suffix -fi/fu.

You might then have /c/ front an adjacent /u/ to \[i\], and /q/ back an adjacent /i/ to \[u\]. This would mean that our nonce words would be pronounced \[nutacilu\] & \[saqumi\]. At this point, the colouring is allophonic, so people would likely still understand the underlying forms of these words as harmonic, and would likely still take the expected suffixes -fu & -fi respectively.

If we lose the opposition between the dorsals now though, we have \[nutakilu\] and \[sakumi\] with no obvious trigger for why the anharmonic vowels appear. If enough of these oddities build up, at some point remembering all the exceptions to harmony becomes untenable, and the system will collapse.
> 3 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, diachronics
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title: phonology design for a nonhuman species

text:
# Question
Title: phonology design for a nonhuman species
I'm working on an alien species for a fantasy-ish world I'm making, and I recently started on making a language for them. For the most part, their consonant-making abilities are very similar to humans, but with one very key difference: alveolar plosives can only appear in affricates, and not by themselves, due to having their tongue operate with two muscles conjoined in parallel instead of meeting at a point, making all alveolar plosives (or any other similar consonants that involve pressing the tip of the tongue against something) be affricates. What I'm curious about is, with that in mind, would it be reasonable for such a species to naturalistically have all of (in xSAMPA) /ts s dz z tS S dZ Z/, or even have alveolar affricates at all?

additional question: if not, would it make more sense for the language to have only palatal consonant analogs, but not any alveolar consonants?

(also I'm not entirely sure this is the right stackexchange branch to go to for help on something like this, so if it would better fit on the wordlbuilding one or something, please let me know so i can move it)

# Answer
Those are some very good question!

On your first question, I'd say yes. In fact, there are natural languages that contain all these phonemes together! (e.g. Czech) Since your species does not have any alveolar plosives, one could even say that the affricates would be proportionally more common than in natural human languages (where they take a back seat to plosives) to compensate.
The one thing I'd recommend against is including voiced affricates without their voiceless counterparts; it is very rare for a language to have any voiced consonant without its voiceless analogue (this is also a language universal in the Universals Archive).

On your second question: That would be imaginable, but /s/ is among the most common consonants in natural human languages (9th most common acc. to Phoible), while /C/ is much rarer (similar for other alveolar vs palatal analogues), so I'd say lacking the former and having the latter would be rather unlikely.

Of course, this analysis is based on human languages; it's your species and language, and things could be completely different in whatever way you choose! (Like, if you want your aliens to like alveolar consonants less, maybe giving them shorter tongues, or putting their tongues further back, would be possible? I'm not an expert here, that's just a guess.)
> 3 votes

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Tags: phonology, naturalism
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# Question
Title: What resources are there on tone system creation?
What resources are there on tone system creation? Resources could include

* Documentation on conlangs that have tone systems
* Guides on tone system creation
* Resources on tone in natural languages, for a posteriori naturalistic conlang creation

# Answer
Artifexian has a decent pair of videos (#1, #2) on tones which discusses various types of tone systems, how they work in natural languages, how they developed there, and ways you could work them in to a diachronic approach to conlanging. I don't think it discusses conlangs that do have tone systems though.

The Wikipedia page for Four Tones (Middle Chinese) also does a decent job of discussing the evolution of tone across the Sinitic languages.
> 4 votes

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Tags: list-of-languages, resource-request
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# Question
Title: I want to build a language that expresses the maximum amount of information with minimal words spoken
I'm trying to come up with a conlang for a setting where spoken word casts magic etc. In this case, a group of wizards, etc. Develop arcadian, which functions to give the most information with the least amount of time spoken. I'm very new to conlangs, but I got a crude idea of how this could work. You start with a base, maybe a verb. Then, you add modifiers to designate direct objects, adjectives, etc. I know that this is pretty difficult, especially for a beginner. But, I'm hoping I can get some good tips and feedback on approaching this.

# Answer
One already-existing conlang that goes in that direction is Ithkuil, a language made to compress information as much as possible, mainly by having a big number of phonemes (including tone) and short morphemes.

The most impressive example given by the author (in my opinion) is

> Aukkras êqutta ogvëuļa tnou’elkwa pal-lši augwaikštülnàmbu.
> ‘An imaginary representation of a nude woman in the midst of descending a staircase in a step-by-step series of tightly-integrated ambulatory bodily movements which combine into a three-dimensional wake behind her, forming a timeless, emergent whole to be considered intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically.’

On the other hand, Ithkuil also strives for perfect exactness, so I'd suggest you could take some inspiration from it, but should cut e.g. some of the 96 cases, to make your language actually usable in practice.
> 6 votes

# Answer
First of all, natural languages seem to have a rather constant rate of information (measured in information per time), independent of genetic relations and of the typological classification of the language, for a scholarly reference see this answer on linguistics.se.

But as a conlang designer, you can strive for a higher information rate, specially when your conlang is used by people with some superhuman powers. As an example to achieve higher information rate, you may look at Dutton Speedwords.
> 5 votes

# Answer
This sounds like a bad idea to me. Redundancy (ie "superfluous" information) improves the robustness of transmission of a message, so while you can reduce it in artificial languages to increase the bandwidth, you trade this off against a higher rate of errors and failed transmissions.

Now imagine you had a list of spells, and in order to reduce the time needed to cast them, they are all abbreviated with a six-digit/letter code. Now you have a noisy environment, say during a storm or a battle, and you want to cast a particular spell. How likely is it that one of the letters or digits is coming across wrongly to the receiver of that spell? And then, instead of a fireball, you might create a bunch of flowers instead. Or you summon the wrong demon. There's a reason why phonetic alphabets ("alpha", "bravo", "charlie"...) exist. Similarly, a single spelling mistake (no pun intended) can achieve the same disastrous outcome in writing.

If you want to increase the robustness of your words, you could reduce the number of phonemes (as there is, say, no danger of confusing /k/ and /g/ if they don't make a distinction in your language); then either the words need to be longer (see eg some Hawai'ian words), or you need longer phrases (as you will have fewer words available that are not long) or multiple sentences (see eg toki pona).

Unfortunately there are certain quantitative properties of language (or any code for that matter) which cannot be overcome: you can't increase the amount of information transmitted without also increasing the danger of corrupting the message. Natural languages seem to have found a good balance over time to ensure adequate speed of information transmission overall.

If your message can be transmitted repeatedly (eg in a casual conversation), getting it wrong occasionally might not be a problem (as long as you notice it), but for a high-stakes, one-off communicative event (spell casting, military comms \[see Charge of the Light Brigade\], safety warnings, ...) I would want enough redundancy to make sure the message comes across correctly the first time.
> 2 votes

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Tags: conlang-creation, vocabulary
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