Can a conlang be used for machine-machine communication? On Wikipedia page we can read that constructed language is devised for human or human-like communication. Given the fact, that there are already some constructed language examples for human-computer communication such as Lojban, can constructed language be created by humans for machine-machine communication? Or it won't be a constructed language anymore?

One example could include a Droidspeak code (the fictional language spoken by droids).

Yes, but why?

Constructed languages would be better for machine communication than natural languages because languages evolve based on how people use them but machines have some difficulties learning how to interpret those changes. With a fully constructed language, the machine can understand exactly what things mean because all of the rules and details are well document and not allowed to change through natural processes.

However, machines already communicate by sending data in specified formats; why would using a constructed language be beneficial in any way?


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

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

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

Well, The Font of All Knowledge (a.k.a. Wikipedia) tells us several things:

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

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

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

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


Is there any importance of "dots" while constructing alphabets for a language? In English, there is a little dot over small letters of i and j. I am not sure what that dot signifies to - pronunciation or sound.

In Gujarati, Hindi and Sanskrit languages, there happens to be dot over letters which signifies to sound "-n" for example Ganga written in either of three with dot over "Ga" alphabet sounds "Gan".

Is there any importance altogether to have such notations? Why? How do you add the same while devising grammar rules for a constructed language?

In English, the dot does not carry meaning. It's just part of the lower case letters i and j. There is no dotless base form. Note that the letters i and j aren't dotted in every font or variant of the Latin alphabet. Notably, there is no dot in Gaelic type.

Turkish, on the other hand, does distinguish between dotless I/ı (representing the phoneme /ɯ/) and dotted İ/i (/i/).

Historically, the tittle was added to improve legibility. In late medieval blackletter, the letters i, m, n, and u were basically all made up of vertical strokes, minimum basically was ııııııııııııııı. So a dot was added to i: ıııiııiıııııııı.

Dots can be used for a variety of purposes: Inuktitut syllabics (a constructed script for a natural language) use dots to indicate vowel length, while the Hebrew abjad uses them as vowel marks (niqqud), so does Tengwar. In Arabic, they are used to distinguish letters that have come to otherwise look identical (i‘jām).

Dots are an easy way to derive one symbol from another.

As jknappen has already said: it's up to you what you want to use dots for in your script or if you want to use them at all.

A thing you might want to consider is the medium your script is supposed to be written on. Dots can be easily produced with ink on paper but they are harder to carve in wood where you might want to use a short line instead. Of course, if it is meant to be mainly printed or displayed by screens, reproducibility is much less of a concern.


What is opposite of "burzum", "darkness", in Tolkien's Black Speech? I'm aware that burzum means darkness in The Black Speech.

Do we know what the opposite is? How is lightness written?

As @Darkgamma says, we don't know.  The closest we have would probably be ghâsh, which means fire, and one could probably guess that the characteristic of being fire-like would be something like ghâshum, but there is no empirical evidence for that, except that the suffix -um seems to mean -ness, as in burz- (meaning dark) + -um (meaning -ness), put together to form burzum.

That said, ghâshum would literally mean "the characteristic of being like fire," not literally "lightness."


Is mathematics considered a constructed language? Mathematics consists of various names, relationships, etc. that have been consciously constructed and developed over time. On the other hand its a "formal" language whose scope is extremely specialized compared to a regular language. How else does mathematics compare/contrast with constructed languages?

I think Programming and Mathematics fail to meet the standard because, despite being more precise, they are ultimately nowhere near as expressive as a language like English.

Per request I will expand on my answer. Take, for example, the English sentence "Jane missed the bus this morning and couldn't get to the office in time her interview, needless to say, she was not selected for the position." There is no way to express that in any programming language that I know of.

var Jane = {Name:"Jane", Employment:"Unemployed", Bus:data.Buses[4]};
data.Buses[4].Depart("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
Jane.ArriveAt(data.Buses[4], "2019-10-05 07:45:00");

I won't go on trying the futile exercise of typing out a description of events in Javascript. Note that without knowing English the code makes no sense. Anything in code that isn't a keyword like "if" or "foreach" or "function" isn't part of the language and so you can only describe procedures for moving bits around, one way to illustrate this is to convert my Javascript to do the same thing, but with different variable names - the program will be exactly the same as far as the language specification goes and the resulting executable.

var x = {a:"", b:"Unemployed", c:y.z[4]};
y.z[4].dp("2019-10-05 07:30:00");
x.w(y.z[4], "2019-10-05 07:30:00");

If those two paragraphs mean the exact same thing as far as the language is concerned, you've completely failed to communicate anything useful. Computer scientists working on artificial intelligence are working to make systems where "bus" is a keyword, there is an idea of "bus" in the language. Until that technology is fully realized, we will be stuck with programming languages that are limited to describing things a computer can understand, a much lesser standard than what a human can. This is what I mean by less expressive.


What is a realistic *upper bound* on the complexity of nominals that can be incorporated into a verb? Some languages feature noun incorporation. Here's an example from Lahkota from the Wikipedia article on incorporation. I suspect the difference in meaning is similar to the man chopped the wood vs the man chopped wood, but I can't say that with confidence based on the short section of the article.
wičháša kiŋ čháŋ kiŋ kaksáhe
man     DET wood DET chop

wičháša kiŋ čhaŋkáksahe
man     DET wood.chop

In most of the examples I can find, incorporated nouns are devoid of the following features

overt case marking
overt number marking
possessive modifiers
adjectives

What are some options for allowing more complex nominals to be incorporated that are still somewhat naturalistic?

Part of the confusion here is that the loss of the grammatical markers you note are a logical consequence of the the semantic use of incorporation.
An incorporated noun may be best compared, in my opinion, to a nonfinite verb, which will also typically lack much of the morphological features of a normal verb. This alone makes it evident why the standard markers a noun may present will usually be absent. Marianne Mithun describes four major reasons to incorporate a noun (quoting summary from Rosenfelder, Advanced Language Construction, pp. 182-184):

Narrow the focus of a verb by adding some sort of descriptor to it. You may want to incorporate tools, for example. In Nahuatl, such incorporation often translate to "X like (a) Y(s)".

Allow an otherwise oblique argument (usually of a semantically, if not syntactically labile verb) to become its subject (cf. English, "My head aches" vs. "I have a headache").

Background an argument that has already been mentioned.

Adding a classifier of some sort. This is an integral part of verbal morphology in the Algonquian Languages, for example. Chinese also does it to create suppletive forms of single-syllable verbs that may be highly polysemous or homophonous.

Add to this the fact that in most languages, you cannot incorporate the subject noun of an unergative verb (probably no language at all allow it, but I haven't looked into it in details), it is easy to see why incorporated/nonfinite nouns have little need for all the bells and whistles of regular arguments: you are either generalizing or backgrounding the noun, so you don't want or need to add these syntactic elements.
Regarding possessive markers specifically, I should point out that even in languages without incorporation, possessive markers are liable to be dropped if the possessor is already a separate argument in the sentence: I stole money from him, It struck him on the nose, J'ai mal à la tête, Je lui ai cassé le bras.
Finally, if a language has incorporation, it is usually rare for it to have a fully separate word category of adjectives as we understand them to begin with! In many of these languages, adjectives take the form of descriptive verbs or adjunct nouns that can themselves be incorporated into themain noun (cf. English Bluebeard, whiteboard, blackbird...), and syntactically, it doesn't typically work to incorporate an entire relative sentence.
However, some languages, such as Chukchi do allow for the whole noun+adjective phrase to be incorporated, and quite a few languages allow for numeral markers to be incorporated, although this is actually part of the verbal paradigm itself i.e. if you incorporate "I saw two persons" you are incorporating the noun "person" to a verb root that means "see two X", not incorporating "two men". That's what happens in Southern Tiwa or Algonquian languages (Nishnaabemwin: Giibimdaaswishiniizhdaabaan’gizwag, "They came in twelve carloads").
So, in summary, I would say aside from adjuncts noun and adjectives (which itself would make your language unusual, though not outside the realm of human experience), any other grammatical attribute of the noun you want to "incorporate" you should do so as an integral part of you verb paradigm, not as part of the incorporated root per se. If you are seeking a language that looks as natural as possible, anyway.


Why are sign languages considered to be natural rather than constructed languages? Linguists consider sign languages to be natural languages. Surely they had been invented/constructed at some point in time by someone.

So why are they not categorized as constructed, but as natural languages? And in what circumstances could they be considered to be constructed languages?

The history of sign languages is more akin to that of creoles than that of a constructed language which later gained native speakers. Consider the following two examples:

The grammar of Esperanto and a large chunk of its vocabulary was created, codified and written down by L. L. Zamenhof. People who were interested learned his language according to his rules and later passed it on to their children, creating the first native speakers of it.

The development of Tok Pisin is described as follows: Contact between English speakers and locals of Papua New Guinea gave rise to a pidgin, an incomplete and bare-bones not-quite-language that was just good enough to communicate - everyone would have spoken it a bit differently at that point in time. It became used more commonly and was passed down as a native language to children, creating a full-fledged language. At no point however did its speakers sit down and decide on what grammar Tok Pisin ought to have.

Now compare these with the case of the Nicaraguan Sign Langauge, the currently only natural langauge which we have actively seen develop. Deaf children of Nicaragua previously communicated with the people closest to them with improvised home signs and gestures (in other words they had at best something akin to a pidgin). When they were brought together in a new school for the deaf, they had the need to communicate with each other. The school encouraged use of mouthing or fingerspelling Spanish, but the students, who were not native speakers of Spanish failed at learning these skills. Instead, they started communicating by using their own home signs, forming a pidgin that developed over the following years and was taught to younger students who later arrived. Over time, the language developed complexities similar to what you would find in other signed languages - evidence that it had developed beyond the initial pidgin stage.

It is clear that the example of Nicaraguan Sign Language is much more similar to that of Tok Pisin than that of Esperanto.


How many words should I create in a conlang? Question 1: How many words are minimal for a naturalistic conlang? (1000, 1500, 3000 or even more)

Question 2: How many words do the conlangers usually create?

The answer to both of these questions lies somewhere between "it depends" and "let's speculate a little".

The act of inventing a naturalistic language does not necessarily mean that you must also create a naturalistically large lexicon. After all, it's the grammar, the syntax, the usability in a wide variety of normal contexts that determines naturalism.  A natural language might have anywhere between 15000 and 1,000,000 words. And as you can see from the several English entries, there's not even a consensus as to how many words there are in a language. The number of words you should create is entirely up to you. A more interesting question, interesting in the broad sense of course!, is how many words is enough words to create? This is not only more interesting to consider, but also harder to answer because there is no pat response and any answer given will be purely opinion.
I'd argue that 2000 is a bare bones lower estimation, given that this is the lexicon size for Basic English. But B.E. isn't exactly "naturalistic", so that figure is undoubtedly low. Somewhere between 3000 and 6000 gives you a little more than dry bones to gnaw on!, but still hardly approaches the naturalism of a natural language, to say nothing of the works of the more gung ho kind of lexicophilic glossopoets!

As for the second question, we do have some recent figures. The results of a recent survey of language inventors determined a spread of approximately 500 (+/-) to >5,000 over 246 respondents. Of note are the lowest and highest categories, with about 70% of respondents falling into the <500 & >5000 categories. The remaining 30% fall between 500 and 5000 words.


Borrowing from conlangs into natural languages Are there known cases of borrowing of words from a constructed language into a natural language?

Words constructed arbitrarily in a natural language don't count here. For example, the Estonian word relv "weapon, firearm" coined in the 20th century (probably influenced by English revolver) wouldn't count.

The verb "to grok", having been coined by Robert Heinlein for his Novel Stranger in a Strange Land has gained significant popularity and is used with the same meaning as in the original language.

I am however not sure whether this meets the criteria of coming from a constructed language: To my knowledge the martians' language is clearly stated to be a full fledged language inside universe of the book, but "to grok" is one of the few (if not only) word to be given explicitly and there does not seem to be a full-fledged grammar or lexicon anywhere.

See also [1]; [2]


Is there any easy way to find out how multiple unrelated languages express the same concept? As any linguist (and anyone who knows unrelated languages, probably), not all languages express things the same way. Worse yet, its not possible to express everything logically, so all languages are forced to rely on something arbitrary to express certain concepts.

I try to find out how other languages do things, but I rarely meet with any success. Most dictionaries I find online assume you already know the language, which of course makes sample sentences useless.

It seems like the only way to find out how a language does anything is to know it. This means that as a conlanger, its nigh impossible to make a conlang that doesn't in some way resemble the languages you know. This can obviously be quite a problem if you're monolingual, as most Americans are. I'm not monolingual, but even I have a problem avoiding Euro-centrism since the only other language I know well is German. Yeah, German does some things differently, but its not that different from English since the two are closely related. They tend to overlap more often than not.

Is there any convenient way to get information on specific things in languages without just having to learn half a dozen unrelated languages?

Unfortunately not.

There are a few concepts (like colour terms or kinship terms) that are regularly studied in linguistic typology and where one can find a lot of publications including high-level overviews including a lot of unrelated languages.

For the most concepts, there is nothing comparable available. Maybe one can find studies (e.g., from translatology) comparing a certain concept in a pair of languages or a small group of languages, but those languages tend to be the well-known big ones (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese).


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?

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.


Is is okay that most consonant assimilations result in a phone whose dedicated letter doesn't exist? Whilst worldbuilding, I decided to make a conlang. A lot of consonant assimilations happen in this language. This language is supposed to be spoken by angels.
My native language is Korean, btw. Korean also has many consonant assimilations.
Orthography and phonetics
My conlang uses Latin alphabets except W. No diacritics. All of them is pronounced as their IPA counterpart, except four:

C = [qʼ] (Voiceless uvular ejective)

N = [ɴ] (Voiced uvular nasal stop)

Q = [ʔ] (Glottal stop)

X = [ǃ] (Voiceless alveolar click)

Sounds exotic, huh? That makes 19 consonants and 6 vowels.
Plosives are tenuis by default.
Consonant assimilation
In my conlang, syllables have structure of (C)V(C). So two syllables can make two adjacent consonants. Every combination of two consonants can occur. That's where consonant assimilation happens, and also where this question arises. Let's call CC "former consonant" and "latter consonant", respectively:

Plosives as the former consonant get no release. Examples: "BK" to [b̚.k], "KB" to [k̚.b].

"H" as the former consonant usually assimilates to [x].

"V" as the former consonant usually assimilates to [ʋ].

"H" as the latter consonant...:

...turns voiced plosives to implosives. Example: "BH" to [ɓ].

...makes fricatives pharyngealized. Example: "FH" to [fˁ].

...makes nasal stops voiceless. Example: "MH" to [m̥].

...makes voiceless plosives aspirated. Example: "KH" to [kʰ].

"J" as the latter consonant usually makes the former consonant palatal or palatalized. Examples: "MJ" to [mʲ], "SJ" to [ɕ].

A plosive followed by "L" has lateral release.

"V" as the latter consonant usually makes the former consonant labialized. Example: "XV" to [ǃʷ].

"CH", "DJ", "DZ", "PF", "TJ", "TS" assimilate to affricates.

To show all combinations:

I set these consonant assimilations to make pronunciation easier, but my concern is that these introduce too many new phones that lacks their own letters. Are they tolerable?

I would argue that the orthography of your conlang is not just OK but really excellent given your description of the phonology.
Why is this the case? It keeps the number of letters needed to write the language in a very comfortable range. The additional sounds are given by digraphs, a method that is often preferable over adding more letters to the basic alphabet or adding diacritics to the base letters.
I also imagine that the orthography keeps morphemes recognisable assuming that at least some morphemes are just CVC syllables and combining them results in assimilation.


Implications of secundative alignment There are two different ways to handle ditransitive verbs like "give." For the purposes of this post, in the sentence "John gave Bill the ball," John is the donor (D), Bill is the recipient (R), and the ball is the theme (T).

Indirective

With indirective alignment, the theme is marked the same as the patient of a monotransitive verb and the recipient is marked differently (often with a dative case).

John-a   read the book-i  .
John-NOM read the book-ACC

John-a   gave the book-i   Bill-e.
John-NOM gave the book-ACC Bill-DAT.
"John gave the book to Bill."

Secundative

With secundative (or daechtycatiative) alignment, the recipient is marked the same as the patient of a monotransitive verb and the theme is marked differently (often with an instrumental case).

John-a   read the book-i  .
John-NOM read the book-ACC.

John-a   gave Bill-i   the book-e.
John-NOM gave Bill-ACC the book-INST.
"John gave Bill with the book."

What other grammatical features are likely to be affected by secundative alignment? What considerations do I need to make?

So, here are some of the implications of choosing secundative alignment. They aren't really strict implications so much as Stuff You Might Consider Thinking About™. I think the effects of choosing secundative alignment are pretty local overall and won't have cascading effects on your grammar. In my opinion, the thorniest issue here is dealing with valence-changing operations on verbs.

What do secundative languages tend to look like in the real world?
How does secundative alignment manifest itself in morphology or syntax?
Valence-changing operations
Relative Clauses

Real World Secundative Languages.
If you want your language to be naturalistic, I suggest taking a look at WALS to see what kinds of combinations of features are typologically uncommon. If you are not trying to make a naturalistic language, knowing what natural languages tend to do is a good way to spend your "weirdness budget" wisely.
This map marks the strategy used for the verb to give. This analysis could be misleading because it's possible for the verb give to use a different strategy from other verbs, but I think this feature is the best fit for what you're after of the available WALS features.
Looking at the map, my assessment of the broad areal trends is that Eurasia is dominated by the indirect object construction. The secondary object construction seems to be common in North America and in New Guinea.
The WALS Chapter for this feature provides some examples of the different types of constructions as well as a note about what other features commonly co-occur with secondary object marking, excerpt below:

...head-marking languages with verb indexing of two core arguments tend
to show the secondary-object pattern...

How does secundative alignment manifest itself?
Basically, there are four ways your language can manifest secundative alignment.

word order
presence of dedicated adpositions
case markers
verbal agreement

I think most of the real world secundative languages are secundative because the recipient in the verb to give or other similar verbs gets indexed in the verb the same way that a prototypical direct object would.
This can occur in a language with no case marking. So, I give you the book might be something like
book.sg  give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj

In this example, book bears no case marking but is clearly the theme.
The case marking strategy is covered in your example.
For word order, we can take an example from English.
I give you the book

you is the recipient, but occupies the position directly after the verb. In English you have a choice between using a preposition like to or for instead. If no such option existed, this would be a pristine example of syntactic secundativeness.
Note that the language can be partially secundative.
For instance, the following is possible.
you.sg.DAT book.sg.ACC give.1sg-subj.2sg-obj

In this example, the two non-agent arguments book and give receive indirect-object-style case marking, but the verb shows secundative alignment.
Valence changing operations
It is important to think about how the passive voice, if it exists, should behave.
Suppose we have a language with secundative alignment in its cases.
I.NOM you.OBJ book.INST give.PST
I gave you a book.

If you were to passivize the verb, which argument would be promoted to the agent? Would (101), (102), or neither be acceptable?
(101) you.NOM  give.PSV.PST
(102) book.NOM give.PSV.PST

Do you have an anti-applicative voice that deletes the recipient and promotes the theme to primary object? As far as I know, anti-applicative voices do not exist in the real world, but applicative voice does exist. It's possible to allow this promotion without an explicit voice for it.
I.NOM book.OBJ give.ANTIAPP.PST

This situation gets murkier if the language is both ergative and secundative.
I.ERG you.ABS book.INST give.PST
I gave the book.

In this case, the antipassive voice would delete the absolutive argument and promote the ergative argument.
I.ABS book.INST give.ANTIPSV.PST
I gave the book (to someone).

Some ergative languages mark instruments and agents the same way.
I.ERG book.ERG you.ABS give.PST

In this case, the antipassive voice could potentially target either argument.
I.ABS give.ANTIPSV.PST

or
book.ABS give.ANTIPSV.PST

Relative clauses
Deciding how relative clauses in secundative languages should work might present some subtle issues.
Languages frequently have a limit on what kinds of arguments can be targeted by relative clauses.
You may want to choose to make only the agent and the primary object extractable, but not secondary objects.


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

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

It may be impossible.
All successful real-world language decipherments—Linear B, Egyptian, Hittite—have involved connections with other known languages. Linear B (Mycenaean) is closely related to Classical Greek, for example; Egyptian is related to Coptic and a bit more distantly to Hebrew and Arabic; Hittite is a distant relative to the whole Indo-European family.
Even if you only look at the writing system, figuring out Linear B involved connecting known place names like "Knossos" with words that were more common in inscriptions at Knossos than elsewhere. Ventris's biggest breakthrough came when he hypothesized that Kober's ??-C₄V₂-C₂V₂ might be k-no-so, which gave tentative values for C₂, C₄, and V₂, and extrapolated from there.
With an alien language, we have no idea what names they used for places. We don't have any loanwords or names transcribed in other languages to compare against. We don't know if they use anything resembling phonetics to communicate—or if their language is even fundamentally based on recursion like ours is.
But…
Maybe humans and Thulians have never made contact before, but the Borean language is known, and an ancient Borean imperial decree—translated into Thulian—is found in the excavations.
Maybe Thulian and Borean are part of a language family—that hints to the linguists that Thulian might use a stack-based syntax (or whatever other weirdly inhuman feature you like) just like Borean does.
Maybe there's some old Thulian technology stored in Area 51, taken from a crashed spaceship; it contains records of an early Thulian attempt to figure out human languages (maybe even a rudimentary grammar of English written in Thulian).
Maybe they can find a live Thulian, or, failing that, an artificial intelligence of some sort, which can give them real-time feedback—a native speaker is orders of magnitude more useful than any inscriptions can ever be.
Maybe Thulian is related to some obscure Earth language(!). There used to be contact between Earth and Thule, which stopped millennia ago, and Thulian shares a distant ancestor of Etruscan/Sumerian/Pirahã/your favorite real-world language isolate. (Though be prepared for a lot of strong linguistic opinions if you decide to weigh in on the Pirahã controversy!)
Maybe universal grammar (in whatever form you like) is universal even across planets, and Thulian still has recognizable levels of phonology, morphology, and syntax.
None of these on their own would make decipherment easy—but the more you add, the easier it gets. At some point, it becomes possible, and that's what matters for a story.


How does one express "want to want" in toki pona? For example, "I do not want to want opium"

For example, this doesn't work, it is a yes-no question!

  mi wile ala wile e ijo nasa
     Do I want a drug?
      ? Do I want not-want a drug?

The positive doesn't seem to work either

  mi wile wile e ijo nasa
      * I want [in a wanting manner?] a drug.

mi wile ala e     ni:  mi wile e     ijo   nasa.
  I  want not <obj>-this I  want <obj>-thing crazy

The same principle as in "I do not want to drink water."

  mi wile ala e     ni:  mi moku  e     telo.
  I  want not <obj>-this I  drink <obj>-water


What significant traits are found in conlangs and not in natlangs? Recently I encountered the acronym ANADEW, which I found to mean A natlang's already dunnit, except worse. Pondering a comment from Logan R. Kearsley where he speculated that "... it's mildly positive in naturalistic circles, since if a natlang already does it, you know you're justified in using it." I began to wonder what did not eventually fit in the ANADEW concept.

I gather that Lojban might be unique in its strong attention to being logical, as explained in two excellent answers to What makes lojban such a “logical” language?. If it is not unique, at least it still is something that I don't thing any natlang has as a strong point.

In the short time that this site's been open, it has struck me that conlangs might be improvements in one way or another over natlangs, yet despite their diversity, they haven't matched the diversity, and utility, of natlangs.

So, what I'm wondering is, other than Lojban and its "logic" is there some other significant traits that some human conlang has which is not found in a natlang somewhere?

I wouldn't consider using never-before-heard sounds as significant, though that's been mentioned in another question. I would have considered having a super minimal verb set significant, as in Kēlen, except that, well ANADEW, or in this case maybe better.

Full disclosure, I am not a conlanger, likely never will be. Nonetheless, I find many fields interesting, and created languages is one of them. With that in mind, please excuse some of my oversights or misconstrued concepts.

There are a broad range of answers possible here and it would be impossible to list everything. In general, it is rather easy to come up with a feature that does not seem to occur in natural languages: simply take a feature every language appears to possess (for example: phonemes, verbs, hierarchical syntax that can be described with syntax trees, a very large amount of words) and reject it. Then see what you can do with the language. This leads to so-called Engelangs, short for “Engineered Languages”.

Alternatively, one can from the ground up decide to build structure from a different “philosophy”, e.g. build on predicate logic, or stacks (the CS concept), or… well, whatever you can think of that can organize information, really.

To make an example, there is Ithkuil. Ithkuil does not strive to be a naturalistic language. Instead, its goal is to allow for unambiguity. Among the things it does to provide that are a range of grammatical inflections not found in any natural language - too many to list, but one example I can make is its case system. In most natural languages, case is something of a helper to syntax. Case marks words for their syntactic roles and thus helps create the structure necessary to understand a sentence. In Ithkuil however, case marks semantics. The sentence “I hit you” in ithkuil would require different cases for “I” and “you” depending on whether e.g. I was a volitional actor, or whether the hitting was an unavoidable circumstance, or an accident, or mediated by someone else… While traces of such systems are found in natural language, none get even close to the extreme of Ithkuil.

Finally, an interesting anecdote is the Conlang Trigger System, a novel way of structuring languages employed in naturalistic conlangs (i.e. ones striving to be mistakable for natural languages). The trigger system developed from misunderstandings of the way certain Austronesian languages (such as Tagalog) work. It’s a perfectly plausible system… just not actually attested in natural languages. I believe there’s a nice writeup on the whole topic, but cannot find it right now.


How developed is the Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time series? Robert Jordan's fantasy novel series The Wheel of Time includes a lot of short quotes in the Old Tongue, a fictional ancient language from a previous Age. Translations are provided for these, either in the text itself or in the glossary at the back of each book, but we never see more than a few sentences at a time.

How much was this language actually developed by Jordan?

Did he create an entire fictional language, as Tolkien did for his Middle-Earth books? Or did he just create some plausible-sounding fictional words and put them together to form the quotes he needed? Would it be possible, either from the text of the books themselves or from his unpublished notes, to actually learn the language properly to any extent?

From here on Theoryland:

  Is there a complete language of the Old Tongue, and if so how long did it take you to develop it?

  ROBERT JORDAN
  There are basic 880 some words—maybe 900. I got a list of what is considered basic English—which are the 800 odd words of a basic English vocabulary. Removed the words that were of no use in the context of my world. Came up with words in the Old Tongue in each of those English words and then added those words that did have a specific context in my world.

Elsewhere on that page is an interview where he said this:

  What language is the Old Tongue based on? Gaelic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and some additions of my own—bridging material, if you will. Grammar and syntax are a blending of English, German and Chinese, with some influences from a set of African languages, read about long ago and all but the oddities of structure long since forgotten. There are inverted constructions, for example (as in Mordero dagain pas duente cuebiyar!—literally, "Death fear none holds my heart!") and places where the article is omitted, especially where the word is a title or has gained enough importance to now incorporate the article; the absence of article indicates that it is the important or special meaning of the word that is intended. Though even then, it is not a hard and fast rule; the same inconsistencies of English are incorporated here. I am attempting to create a language which has grown, not one which was made.

It seems to be a complete enough language in terms of grammar and authentic enough for Jordan to use, though lacking in vocabulary.  From these quotes I get the feeling that he created the language well enough at one point that he didn't have to spend hours conlanging to be able to put a few sentences into his novels.

In the Wheel of Time Companion there was an English-Old Tongue dictionary, which is uploaded on Tor.com here.  At the beginning on the website (not sure if this is also in the book as I don't have it on me) this is written:

  While it is reminiscent of Tolkien’s ground-up creation of Elvish languages for The Lord of the Rings, The Old Tongue differs in that Jordan took a top-down approach, creating a dictionary of terms from which some basic suffixes, roots, and usage rules emerged.

I didn't bother scrolling all the way down or counting the words, but it doesn't seem to have much grammar aside from the suffixes and stuff.  Although we don't have access to this, Jordan seems to be implying that the grammar does exist.  All I could find was this on the Tar Valon library.


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?

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.


Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn? Auxiliary constructed languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages.
Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn than natural languages?

Some auxiliary languages are easier to learn than natural languages. There have been many experiments that show that Esperanto is both easier to learn than other languages, and also makes learning future languages easier.
Two quotes from some of the experiments on Esperanto:

"It is possible for the average student to understand written and spoken Esperanto in 20 hours better than he can understand French, German, Italian, or Spanish after 100 hours."
"A child can learn as much Esperanto in about 6 months as he would French in 3–4 years... if all children studied Esperanto during the first 6–12 months of a 4–5 year French course, they would gain much and lose nothing."

However, it's not necessarily true that auxiliary languages are meant to be learnt faster than natural languages. Esperanto is a very regular language, and that makes it easy to learn. Other languages, such as Interlingua, are not as easy to learn, but are meant to be more recognizable to someone already familiar with the vocabulary of Romance languages. It is still more regular than the natural languages it's based on, so it likely is easier to learn, but it sacrifices some regularity in order to have a more familiar vocabulary.


What things can `la` mark in Toki Pona? I was under the impression, until recently, the la in Toki Pona is a topic marker of sorts similar to the Japanese topic marker wa but used less frequently since Toki Pona is not topic-prominent.
In particular, I thought that la

Requires the noun phrase it marks to appear at the beginning of the clause.
Does not give the noun phrase it marks a particular semantic role.

However, a section about it on Wikibooks suggests that its usage is much more limited.

Time-Manner-Place Schema
Time comes first in a la fragment, manner is a modifier to the main verb, and place is always last in a lon prepositional phrase.
Time la S li V Manner lon Place

What is la in Toki Pona? What are the limits on the noun phrases la can mark and the roles they can have in the clause?

The particle la in Toki Pona is used mainly for two scenarios.
The first scenario is for the If/when something, then that condition. The la particle is placed in the second half of a sentence. Some examples:

mi lape lili, la mi pilin ike (If I sleep a little, then I feel bad
or When I sleep a little, I feel bad)
sina moku e telo mute, la sina anpa e telo mute lon tenpo lili (If
you drink much water/liquid, you are going to pee much in a short time)

The second scenario is for the context, like time, possibilities, or even non yes/no questions. The la particle is placed in the first half of a sentence. Some examples:

tenpo pimeja ni la, mi lukin e lipu sin (I am going to read the new book tonight)
tenpo suno pini lili la, mi kute mute e kalama musi (Yesterday I listened to much music)
ken la, pilin pi meli lili li pilin ike (Maybe the girl's sad —literally, "Maybe the heart of the girl feels bad")
tan seme la, kulupu pi jan lili sona li tawa ala tomo sona? (Why are the scholars not going to the school?)

Hope this helps!


What do double consonants specify in Esperanto? The Esperanto word for 'Finland' is Finnlando. What does the doubled consonant specify? The Esperanto alphabet is phonemic. Why are there two consonants? Is it gemination (which doesn't appear often elsewhere in Esperanto)?

There are two questions (with answers) on the Esperanto stackexchange dealing with this problem (and yes, it is perceived as a problem even among Esperanto speakers):

Double letters in Esperanto
Asking specifically about Finnlando

The conclusion is: The double letter should be pronounced differently from the single letter, and it should be a true double consonant (not just a long consonant). Finnlando becomes hard to pronounce by these rules, and Esperantists are in fact shifting to the word Suomio.


Name of a group of languages with has "less is more" property Is there a name of a group of languages that try to remove instead of adding things?
Examples:

Newspeak: reduces words (e.g. bad will be ungood (prefix "un" meaning not), eliminate expression that are not "good" (more here
the Sij: according to author it has 10 word (or at least morpheme).

So in other words makes a language that (one or more):

is less complex
has less word
has less tenses
just "less" of something

I have only found term "Micro (artistic) language" in the wiki but it was deleted. Here is the last version that mention it. I am not sure if such term is even used.

These languages could be called minimalist conlangs. This term has been applied to languages like Toki Pona quite regularly, as a Google search will bear out. The term has also been used to describe a number of languages on the CBB, such as Sint and Nomadic.

The same word can be applied to parts of a language, e.g. Davush on CBB refers to their Shiruitoan language as having a minimalist phonology.


How does one determine the date a constructed language was invented? Some constructed languages list a date, or at least year, of creation. Is there any official or unofficial standard to determine that date for any given conlang? The way I see it, there are several possibilities, at least the ones I thought up:

The date that work began on the language
The date of the first evidence of work on the language, if the prior date is not known
The date of the first usage of the language (this could be broken down into public or private usage)
The date of the first publication that mentions the language
The publication date of the first dictionary and/or grammar

For auxiliary languages it's usually publication date of the first grammar/dictionary released to the public or the first work dedicated to the language, whichever comes first.

For Esperanto this was Unua Libro, which was published in 1887 - more than a year after Zamenhof began working on the language. Wikipedia also lists the year of creation of Occidental as 1922, the year de Wahl published the first edition of the Kosmoglotta magazine, despite there being evidence that the language was used much before then, both in private conversation (letters etc.) and even a publication written entirely in Occidental.

The "date of creation" for other types of conlangs seems to be less well-defined, although I'd expect that fictional languages would be associated with the publication of the first book/movie/game that uses them (perhaps with the exception of Tolkien's languages). Wikipedia also uses the day Lojban began being developed as its creation date.


How do I do interlinear glosses for a conlang? Already, in the meta there are discussions about if people should gloss their sample text. I find their argument persuasive that foreign text without a gloss is useless without several thousand hours of study of the language in question.

The professional linguists are using the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

Should we expect Leipzig Glossing Rules to work for all invented languages?
How does one handle grammar that may not match up with the "standard abbreviations"? Lojban comes to mind, since they as a community reject that grammatical classes in Lojban have any counterpart in natural languages.
Conlang audiences are just as likely to be an amateur audience, unlike the readers of linguistics academic journal. Is there a better way to gloss for a popular audience?

Should we expect Leipzig Glossing Rules to work for all invented languages?

No, not all of them, but the set of languages for which they will not work is exceedingly restricted. Basically, just ask yourself "can my language be written in a primarily linear format?" If so, the Leipzig Glossing Rules are for you. If it is carried by sound, you can gloss it. That right there covers very nearly every language that has been asked about on this site so far. If it's a manual sign language, there's still an exceedingly good chance that you can gloss it. If it's a fully-2D non-linear writing system, the alterations you will have to make to the conventions to make it work then become sufficiently large that it would no longer make sense to call the result "Leipzig glossing". But those aren't exactly common.

How does one handle grammar that may not match up with the "standard abbreviations"? Lojban comes to mind, since they as a community reject that grammatical classes in Lojban have any counterpart in natural languages.

Exactly the same way the professionals do: by providing a glossary of your non-standard abbreviations.

Conlang audiences are just as likely to be an amateur audience, unlike the readers of linguistics academic journal. Is there a better way to gloss for a popular audience?

That depends on what you are trying to communicate to that popular audience. In some cases, a full gloss may not be needed, even for a professional audience. A simple set of parallel translations demonstrating the effect of a straightforward morphological or syntactic alternation, for example, may be sufficient for its purpose. But in the general case... I don't think so. Leipzig glosses are intended to be easy to understand, and they succeed at that about as well as it is possible to do in most cases.


How do you determine a New Letter's sound? I'm trying to create a new language, but I need some advice. How do you determine what a new letter sounds like? Is there a pattern, or do I just make it up?

If you're designing a fully new language, it's usually better to pick phonemes (sounds) before even thinking about orthography. Writing should really come after even grammar.
If you're just designing a new writing system, then yeah, you just make it up.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


How do you pronounce the ":" in Wede:i? Looking at the zompist page for Wede:i, I don't see any instructions on how to pronounce the ":" that we see in the name of the language and other places.

Am I missing something? How are you supposed to pronounce the ":"?

The phonology table shows it quite simply, it modifies the e to indicate that it is a long vowel. I don't know why the vowel table shows the dipthongs a:i and a:u but not e:i (or any others).

Note that although this may seem to be a common colon, the actual IPA diacritic is two triangles, flat sides on the outside: U+02D0 ː. But as the colon doesn't have another meaning in the IPA and it's much easier to type, a lot of people just use it instead.


21st century International Auxiliary Languages What are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) created and promoted in the 21st century?

I am aware that many people think that Esperanto and Interlingua are in some sense "the last word" on International Auxiliary Languages and that other projects have no realistic chance in succeeding against the established ones. This does not prevent authors to invent new conlangs purposed as IALs, and I like to hear of recent projects fulfilling this criterion.

I am only interested in projects that are worked out to a certain degree, including a grammar, a sketch of derivational morphology, a substantial word list, and some sample texts. Mere conlang stubs don't qualify as answers.

The target group should be really international, conlangs designed for specific subgroups (like interslavic or intergermanic languages) don't count.

The only legitimate examples from the Wikipedia article International auxiliary language are Nerrière's Globish (2004) and  Interslavic (2006). Both of these fail OP's criteria, since they are specific to one language branch. Other instances either predate 2000 (Kotava, Lingua Franca Nova), or were not intended as auxlangs (Lojban) or both (Toki Pona). To these, Wikipedia's list of constructed auxiliary languages adds Sambahasa (2007) and Lingwa de planeta (2010), both of which pass OP's criteria.
Ironically, the Interslavic wikipedia page says that "the language" dates from 1665—but what that actually means is the first Slavic-based auxlang, rather than Interslavic (initially Slovianski-N), which was created by Jan van Steenbergen in 2006.
(The Wikipedia page is also confusing in that it discusses the multiple variants of Slovianski and preceding and subsequent efforts together, rather than highlighting the lineage of the language now labelled Interslavic. But since work is ongoing to unify all those variants, that confusion is not surprising.)


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Is there existing terminology for distinguishing multiple imperative moods? I have found a conlang, Klyran, which has a rather interesting feature: multiple imperative moods. Quoting from the documentation:

  For imperative mood there are number of suffixes that correspond to different sort of request from begging to ordering with threat of killing in case of refusal. These suffixes can be omitted.

(For the case of an suffixless imperative form, a "default" form of the imperative mood is presumed, similar to a real-world imperative in meaning.)

While this part of the language has not been fully fleshed out (nobody yet has bothered to define the various imperative mood affixes) -- is this feature (multiple imperative moods) something that has existing terminology surrounding it?

I don't think there is any really reliable cross-linguistic labelling system that would include all of these. There are terms for most of them, but they're often used for only a few languages, and perhaps not very consistently. For someone who is created a conlang, they have flexibility then to adapt these terms for their language, however the important thing is to clearly describe in detail the full semantics of the language, rather than just assigning labels.

The broad category for all of these is deontic modality, which covers the modality of how the speaker thinks things ought to be. Within deontic modality there are many subtypes. The SIL Glossary has a very useful section giving a hierarchical description of deontic modality.

English actually has a very large number of modal verbs, with subtly different senses, so with examples from English we can illustrate a lot of the subtypes, even though they're usually not given clear labels. The English modals are however very complex, most of them being used in different contexts to mean very different things.

The imperative is actually one of the least marked ways of issuing a directive/command. In English it is a structurally different way of forming a sentence, but in other languages it may have a more regular structure with a particular verb form that fits into a wider affix paradigm.
Should is usually weaker than the imperative, giving a recommendation. Possible labels include hortative and propositive.
Have to, need to and must can all be stronger than the imperative, but they also often imply that the person giving the instruction needs to plead to some extent with those they are instructing; an autocratic dictator would never tell their servants that they need to do something, they would simply tell them to do it (with an imperative sentence.) Labels include precative for requests, and directive and obligative for commands that emphasise obligation.
When will or shall are emphasised and stressed in English they are used to indicate a serious instruction, which sometimes sound almost sinister with an implied threat for those who disregard them: "You will do this... (or else!)" The label commissive is used for threats, but not exclusively, as it's also used for promises.


Languages where the part of speech of a root is "fixed"? By way of introduction, this question is about a quirk of Esperanto, but there is a general conlang question at the end, I promise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Features of unlearnable languages In this article about miniature artificial languages on motherboard.com experiments are described where children learn carafully designed miniature artificial languages. It is also said that children give up on learning "unlearnable" languages. A mentioned miniature artificial language is named "Sillyspeak" or "Sillysprochen".

What features of languages make them unlearnable? Is the full documentation of Sillyspeak available?

If you search for the researchers mentioned in the article, you can find some of their research papers. In those, they describe their methodology. In one paper that I looked at briefly, for example, they mention that they varied the consistency by making the placement of determiners random. (This is actually also mentioned in the Motherboard article).

Their research seems to be focused on finding out how children can learn languages, and what universal features of languages there are, so they up the difficulty of their experimental mini-languages by using rare elements, such as OSV word order (most (Western) languages use SVO). Discovery that some mini-languages are unlearnable is thus a side-effect of pushing the limits as to what are possible human languages. From a cursory glance at several papers I'd think that you can make a language 'unlearnable' if you add some random variation and choose a lot of rare grammatical features.

PS: in the Motherboard article they actually give a reason why no documentation of Sillyspeak is available: they want to avoid it 'escaping' into the wild, as its purpose is to be a completely unknown language to the subjects of the experiments.


How can I become a professional conlang designer? There is some market for constructed languages in film, television, computer games and literature. Some conlangs designs were commissioned to linguists who did the real word.

Is there a possibility to become a professional conlang designer? What prerequisites are needed?

The list of ways to make money with a conlang is short, so step one is to be creative.

Write Genre Fiction Books.
Authors do make a living writing and selling books, sometimes with an artificial language bundled with it. Wardesan, Láadan, Tolkien's books are good examples. I'm guessing the conlang part though is reducing their income, they could write more books if they skipped writing a conlang. Personally, I'd buy a book with a conlang if the author tried to make it simple enough to enjoy for 10 to 20 hours. Instead we get unusable languages that require 2000 hours of study to appreciate them, same or worse than a natural language. And I'm an outlier, so I'd imagine regular genre fiction buyers see a bundled language as a low value gimmick.

Communication Systems for the Disabled.
Blissymbols made money, albeit in a rather dishonorable way by suing the institution that was trying to help the profoundly disabled communicate with a symbol board, which was in essence an artificial language. I spoke with a specialist in the more modern versions of these, and often vendors don't even bother to acknowledge that symbol boards are not English, but conlang-like systems with all the challenges.

In the realm of conscripts, there is a commercial writing system for ASL. I'm failing to re-find the link.

Historical BSL was essentially a franchise and BSL was something of a trade secret.

Movies.
Movies have been hiring professional linguists (Klingon, Na'vi) The Klingon dictionary and Avatar handbook sold a lot of copies, but the authors both became professional linguists first, and these books are really side projects.

Selling learning materials.
This has got to be the worst way to monetize a conlang. The artificial language section of any large library has to be littered with books of people who thought they could sell a lot of copies of their grammar summaries, workbooks and dictionaries. No one wants the grammar summary. What they want is to meet their significant other by learning a language which brings me to...

Esperanto
Esperanto actually has economic activity, but the language is already written. Building a language starts with grammar and vocabulary, but to extract money from people, people need to learn it. If your interest in conlang building is in the community building part, then it might make more sense to make a living working with an existing conlang that has attracted a community, complete with conferences, etc. That said, I'm guessing no one is getting rich off of Esperanto, but there are teachers of Esperanto, etc.

Games
There have been reports of people writing full languages for computer games, card games. Magic the Gathering's Phyrexian comes to mind. So far, these have been gimmicks and the amount of money, I'm guessing is not a lot. Some of the game makers don't even bother to publish the grammar and dictionary! This makes it sort of into a laborious game of decipherment.


Designing a mildly weird phonology I want to design a mildly weird phonology with the following features

Not particularly difficult to pronounce for speakers of average European languages
Feeling somewhat unnatural or weird

The weirdness should be noticeable (like the OSV word order in Klingon is). It may include statistical effects (some phones are used more frequent than others thereby producing the effect of weirdness).

What techniques can I use to achieve this effect?

Probably the best technique is making the language weird by absence. Instead of giving the language weird phonemes, make it lack the most common phonemes. A language with 5 vowels but no /a/, /i/ or /u/. A language with several consonants, but no /p/, /t/, or /k/. Or totally without bilabials. Or with no stops.


Can Pokemon language encode enough information to be a language? I know that like Star Wars' droid, Pikachu's language is just nonsense with emotionally appropriate intonation, that said...

Can suprasegmental features (accent, tone, etc) encode a single three syllable word in enough different ways to get the vocabulary up to toki pona size? (about 100-125) Or up to a natural language size lexicion (say 7000-15000)

The question occurred to me because Alexa has a "speak to pikachu" feature where it then pretends to let you converse with Pikachu in Pikachu-ese.

From what I remember from the cartoon, Pikachu could only say certain permutations of its name, with any combination of vowels elongated.

3 syllables   pikat͡ʃu   8 words
2 syllables   pika      4 words
1 syllables   pi        2 words

Pikachu is also capable of producing at least 4 different tones:

Tone     IPA   Made when
High     ˥     Excited
Mid      ˧
Rising   ˧˥    Curious
Falling  ˧˩    Disappointed

So, knowing this, Ash's pikachu should be able to say at least 584 distinct "words", which is well above the toki pona threshold.

Sadly it's pretty much impossible for this system to match the lexicon size of a natural language. Using an 8 tone system and adding primary and secondary stress brings the number of distinct words up to 25104, which is significantly larger than the Esperanto lexicon but still far away from that of a natural language, which is around 200K words.

From here on you could introduce some questionable features like 8 more tones, 7 different vocal registers, or the ability to say different permutations of its name (which is probably not as dodgy but also imagining pikachu say /ka.chu.pi/ makes me extremely uncomfortable).
The best way in my opinion would be to introduce the syllabic thunder shock ⚡, which would require pikachu to release up to three thunder shocks whilst saying a word, all for the good cause of bringing the lexicon size of Pika-ese to a final 198688 words.

(No wonder Meowth learnt how to speak a human language, imagine being stuck with a one-syllable name.)


Is there a stroke order for any of the Klingon alphabets? Is there an order in which you write the strokes making up a letter belonging to the Klingon alphabet (apart from the Latin alphabet)?

Are letters from Klingon alphabets intended to be written manually, as opposed to solely being printed?

I looked at Klingon alphabets and pIqaD but neither had information about this.

There have been stroke ordering proposals by fans devising handwriting of pIqaD. One is http://klingonska.org/writing/examples/pic/zrajm-piqad.jpg , from  Zrajm of Klingonska Akademien: http://klingonska.org/piqad/. Another had been proposed by the late Glen Proechel's group:

  Interstellar Language School (lead by Glen F. Proechel) has published “An Alien Writing System Primer” explaining how to write pIqaD in longhand. (It is non-canon, of course – and to my knowledge not endorsed by the KLI.)

It was 20 years ago, I've seen it, and I don't remember it. (I do remember not liking it. ;^)


What verbs should be irregular in a naturalistic conlang? I've read that the most commonly used verbs in a language are almost always irregular, and for the most part the irregular forms of verbs can be traced to an archaic form being preserved in the language, or to the influence of other languages.
When creating a naturalistic conlang, what verbs should be irregular? I'm already aware that 'to be' is almost always irregular, but are there any general patterns for which verbs are most often irregular in a natlang? (For example, are verbs involving movement more commonly irregular than not?)

The first class of verbs that is often highly irregular are the auxiliary verbs. This does not only comprise to be and to have but also the modal auxiliaries (like must, can, shall, and will). They are used very frequently and tend to erode phonetically, and they are also prone to suppletion (showing a mixture of different stems from originally different words).

A quick check (for my native language German) seems to confirm your intuition that verbs of motion are more often irregular than average. They are also used quite frequently. In Romance languages, the basic verb for to go (e.g., French aller or Italian andare) is very irregular and mixing several different stems ((vulgar) Latin ambulare/allare, vadere, ire).

Some verbs are irregular because they rhyme with an irregular verb, e.g., German schreiben, schrieb, geschrieben "to write", borrowed from Latin scribere, became irregular because of rhyming verbs like bleiben "to stay".


Is there a practical lower limit to the number of morphemes required in a language? Many conlangers have tried (and occasionally succeeded in) creating oligomorphemic¹ languages. What are the most minimalistic successful attempts?
From this, can we extrapolate a lower bound?

¹also called oligosynthetic, a bit of a misnomer in my opinion

Outside of Toki Pona, there haven't been any "majorly" successful attempts at making an oligomorphemic language — as far as I know. While derivational and inflectional morphology could be done away with (and its information load transferred to syntax I guess), the question is how many semantic morphemes is too few before a language becomes incomprehensibly vague.

I'm guessing the theoretical lowest lower limit is the set of 63 semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see also Goddard's Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 2010). Wierzbicka and Goddard propose that you could theoretically explain almost all necessary concepts by building up from this set of primes, and lacking ways to express some of them will leave you incapable of expressing at least a subset of all possible topics.


Naturalness of different universal quantifiers based on the size of the domain you're quantifying over English has a few determiners and determiner-like things that express universal quantification including all and every.
How naturalistic is it to have different sets of quantifiers based on features of the domain such as its number (and possibly other features like animacy or remoteness).

The noun governed by the determiner can be either singular or plural with little change in meaning.
Every rose has thorns.

All natural numbers are odd or even.

These sentences have the same meaning as All roses have thorns and Every natural number is odd or even.
In some languages, such as French, have something that can be analyzed as a determiner inflecting for gender and number of the noun: tous/toute/tous/toutes which means all. Although French also has chaque, analogous to the English every and each. The distribution is similar to English, but I can't provide any examples that I can independently verify because I'm not a native French speaker.
Anyway, I'm wondering about the naturalness of having different determiners depending on the number of the domain rather than the thing directly governed by the quantifier.
For instance, suppose we had every(0) every(1) every(2) every(paucal) every(plural)
every(2), every(paucal) and every(plural) are all(paucal) fairly natural.
every(2) seems to map onto English both more or less directly, although both cannot be used with a singular noun.
every(paucal) continent has a name starting with a vowel or a glide.

every(plural) electron is small.

However, a construction like all(0) does have uses that aren't jokes and aren't related to logic or math.
A construction like the following seems reasonable and fairly easy to interpret.
I have done all(0) of my homework.

This is not inherently unnatural. As you point out, English "both" (and reasonable translations such as Spanish "ambos") easily fit the role of every(2) (I would argue that whether the noun is marked as singular or plural isn't particularly interesting here).
every(1) can be reasonably analyzed as a definiteness marking and is encompassed in most Indo-European languages by the definite article ("the", "el", "i", το), as shown by the sentence "The sun is shining." (This sentence can be used without explicitly introducing the sun into the conversation specifically because there is only one reasonable referent.)
In particular, I could see one set of forms evolving from the definite articles in a language with heavy number marking (i.e. "the (singular)" becomes each(1), "the (dual)" becomes each(2), etc.).
What I would be very surprised to see in a natural language is a fully consistent system of these, where each(), every(), and all() all cover the same numeric distinctions in the vein of the Esperanto correlatives.
I would also be surprised to see more than a couple of these in any language that does not make at least as many number  distinctions elsewhere.


Four vowels, with no /i/ sound. Is it possible? My vowel phonemic inventory would be just /a/, /e/, /o/ and /u/ with no /i/ sound. Is this possible or not?

This would be very unstable in a human language. For an example of what happens when this vowel is missing, let's look at English's Great Vowel Shift. One of the first things to change was /i:/ becoming /aj/, leaving it without /i/. Within less than a hundred years, /e:/ had migrated to take its place.

In your specific case, I would expect /e/ -> /i/, /a/ -> /e/, and /o/ -> /ɒ/ in fairly short order.

This is because vowels like to spread out on the vowel chart and become more distinct to improve understanding. Because of the limitations of your mouth making it difficult to have highly fronted low vowels, the general rule is that you will have more high vowels than mid or low vowels. Your vowel system violates this universal (with more mid vowels than high vowels).


How would one describe different tones on paper? In my new language, I use tones, such as those in Mandarin and Cantonese, to diversify my words. When I try to make a dictionary, I do not know how to describe these tones. I have tried using parts different English words to describe what a tone sounds like, but that is not very efficient. Is there a simpler way to describe these tones?

I think vowel + shift in tone is key. If you'd just have different tones (as in notes) for vowels, that would conflict with expressions of pain, surprise, etc. In Asian Philology, when we talk about "tones", we actually mean a change in pitch for a vowel. Chinese has 4: Same, Up, Down and Down+Up. Thai for example has more.

Here's a grid of the most used tonal notation systems for Chinese:

The most common in use today is Pinyin


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Does Volapük contain any elements (order, participle, etc) not present in its European source languages? Volapük was designed back in the 1800s to be a 'world language', but at first glance, it appears to the layman (me) to just be a mixing of Romance languages, English, and maybe High German. Are there any new ideas or concepts that were presented in this conlang, or were all of its rules simply derived from these parent languages?

The Volapük panoply of mood suffixes contains distinctions that were familiar to its audience through classicising education, but I think it fair to say they weren't in the immediate source languages: the optative, jussive, and potential moods as suffixes don't correspond to what German or English or French does morphologically; nor does giving a suffix to the apodosis of conditionals (if... then). In fact, while the optative is Ancient Greek and the jussive is Sanskrit, the potential in Europe is limited to Finnish, and the apodosis suffix seems to be completely made of whole cloth.

I'll add that, as with Esperanto, a lot of the compounding was schematic and not inspired by natural languages; the notorious example of lu- "derogatory prefix" is probably the most obvious (bien 'bee' > lubien 'wasp'; vat 'water' > luvat 'urine').


What reasons would there be for not having a human conlang with only vowels? All natlangs have both consonants and vowels, but it's not immediately obvious why a human language couldn't be made from only vowels.

Has anyone theorised about why natlangs always have consonants?

Have there been any attempts to create conlangs with only vowels, and were they considerably harder to learn than languages with both vowels and consonants?

A vowel-only language is surely constructable (and I think, learnable, too), but I am afraid that it will be instable against evolutionary pressure.

Vowel sequences like /aua/ or /aia/ tend to develop into glides /awa/ and /aja/ giving raise to the first consonants in the language, and at the hiat between two vowel a third consonant, the glottal stop, may materialise.

Efficiency of the coding is also a concern, maybe tones can take over the role of consonants in creating more different syllables from the vowels.


What is the meaning of ANADEW? The acronym ANADEW is quite popular among conlang enthusiats, but what does it mean?

For an answer, I'd like to see not only an expansion of the acronym, but also some good usage examples.

ANADEW means "a natlang already did it even worse" or "a natlang already did it, except worse". In essence you thought of a strange feature for your conlang, but there is actually a natlang that has that (or a very similar) feature and did it worse than it is in your conlang.
If, for example, Pythagoras had made a click conlang (which somehow survived one or two millenia) with simple and easy clicks, then the "discovery" of the Khoisan languages with very complex click systems (worse for Europeans) would have made an ANADEW case.
I don't think that's the best possible example, you can find a few more at https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/6yxo6k/anadew_game/ .


How to keep track of a language? At the moment I have my fictional language written down in a notebook, but as the vocabulary increases its becoming harder and harder to find words.

I am adding new words all the time, so writing them in alphabetical order doesn't last long.

How can I keep a track of this language and still be able to find the words I need?

Edit: I have seen this question has been marked as a possible duplicate, but it is different as I am also open to paper-and-pencil methods.

One way, while working on paper is to divide things into multiple sheets, making sure to have plenty of extra space at the bottom of dictionary sheets, or alternatively grouping things via e.g. semantic field to not run into the alphabetisation issue to quite the same extent (though this can have the issue that the semantic field of some items might not be easily determineable).

You can also use a computer program to manage your vocabulary, which offers the benefits of easy searchability and ordering. A simple spreadsheet program of your choosing is enough to work in a lot of cases, and otherwise there is the possibility of using actual vocabulary management programs. There are several free ones availible, both conlang-specific ones such as Polyglot (which also has a bunch of other functionality for organising a bunch of other conlanging-related stuff) or one developed for natlangs but still useful for conlangs, such as SIL FieldWorks (which is quite powerful but has a bit of a learning curve).


How much Dothraki was created prior to "Game of Thrones"? Reading A Song of Ice and Fire and watching Game of Thrones are two different experiences. One difference that pops out to me is the language that the Dothraki speak, known by the same name.

Naturally the show seems to include much more of the language than the books do, as you need to have actors speak aloud for the audience to interact, where as in writing you can have the audience see the thoughts of the character.

This has me wondering how much of the language George R. R. Martin had developed prior to the production of Game of Thrones and/or how much was created for/by the show?

The majority of Dothraki was indeed created for the show.
George has stated the he is not quite a linguist in that sense (comparing himself against Tolkien).

I don't have a whole imaginary language in my desk here, the way Tolkien did.
Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail. I, alas, am only a hardworking SF and fantasy novel, and I don't have his gift for languages. That is to say, I have not actually created a Valyrian language. The best I could do was try to sketch in each of the chief tongues of my imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spelling.
 So Spake Martin, YET MORE QUESTIONS, July 22, 2001

He mostly just makes words as needed.

"DO YOU HAVE THE LANGUAGES ALL PLANNED OUT?"
No he'll make up a word here and there but he does NOT have the whole language written.
 So Spake Martin, BOSKONE (BOSTON, MA), February 14,2003

Even going as far to say that now he will have refer to the creator of the language for the show in his future writing.

Of course, he then added that with HBO having created Dothraki through the work of David J. Peterson, he feels like now if he wants to have Dothraki (and Valyrian as well) he'll have to refer to Peterson's work to get it "right", or ask Peterson himself how to say something in Dothraki.
 So Spake Martin, STOCKHOLM AND ARCHIPELACON REPORT, June 28, 2015

The show selected David J. Peterson, an expert language creator from the Language Creation Society to create Dothraki for Game of Thrones

Peterson drew inspiration from George R.R. Martin’s description of the language, as well as from such languages as Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili. However, the Dothraki language is no mere hodgepodge, babble or pidgin. It has its own unique sound, an extensive vocabulary of more than 1,800 words and a complex grammatical structure.

Which as of September 21, 2011 has over 3,000 words

Also, for the curious, Dothraki is now up to 3,163 words: More words than Mr. Padre Tony Gwynn has hits, but still a ways to go to catch Pete Rose (and my guess is Dothraki will have double his number before he gets even a sniff of the Hall of Fame).


What's the purpose of vowels and consonants? Other than making words easier to pronounce, is there any purpose to having the letters divided like this? Should they or a similar concept be added to a constructed language?

This is somewhat similar to "what's the purpose of odd and even numbers".

Looking at the sounds produced in human languages we can distinguish two different ways of articulation, one where sound waves are produced by the glottis, modulated in the vocal tract through opening of the jaw (open/closed) and position of the tongue (front/back), but otherwise pass through unrestricted.

The other type of sound does not depend on the glottis (whose action is optional), and an airflow is generated coming from the lungs, passing through the vocal tract; but this time, there are constrictions at various places of articulation, which modulate the frequency spectrum of the resulting sounds to produce significant differences. Depending on whether the glottis is active, these sounds can be classified as voiced or unvoiced.

The former are called vowels: they are always voiced, and are defined through the positions of jaw and tongue. The latter are consonants, and are defined through the place of the constriction (glottal, dental, labial, ...), the nature
of the constriction (fricatives, stops) and whether they are voiced or unvoiced.

As it happens, you kind of need both kinds of sounds in a language to make it pronounceable. Just like you need odd and even numbers to do maths.

You can see this in syllables: a syllable has to have a vowel as its central element, and is surrounded by consonants. You can have different syllable structures: CV, VC, CVC, etc., and depending on language some structures are more common than others. But this is more of an emergent feature than some deliberate decision.


What is a constructed variety of a natural language called? What would a conlang created to be an alternate version of an already existing natural language be classified as?

For example, a version of English that could have been spoken in an alternate steampunk-era Victorian England, or a conlang of the Finnish language in the year 2349. To be clear, I'm assuming that the conlang would be an actual, dedicated one, and not just a few "alternate" words thrown in for flavor; the examples I picked were just the first ones that came to mind.

(Bonus: is there a classification for a conlang created to be a conlang of a conlang in this same way?)

That would be an a posteriori conlang, in contrast with an a priori one. Wikipedia. The process of changing a language through time is called diachronic conlanging.

An example of a very well-done a posteriori conlang would be Carisitt which has been developed as if it was a natural language deriving from PIE (that is, it is also an example of diachronic conlanging). Examples of an a priori conlang are abundant, for instance all of Tolkien’s works.


Constructing a language based on existing languages from different families I wonder how is it possible to construct a language based on the existing languages. There are Indo-European, Altaic, Semitic, and a small portion of Dravidian and Caucasic languages in my country, and I am thinking of a constructed language based on all of these languages.

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

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

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

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

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


Strategies for dealing with limited/simple phonologies What problems arise when creating a language with an extremely simple phonology and what are some good strategies for dealing with them?
I'm calling this type of phonology extremely simple for the purposes of this question, but limited or rigid might be a better fit. I'm also not sure whether "phonology" is the right term here or if something like "phonological inventory" would be better. Using "phonemes" or "phonemic inventory" is close, but does not cover phonotactics and suprasegmental features.

An extremely simple phonology is one that does not allow the speaker to pack many bits of information in each syllable/mora/unit of speech time. Prototypical extremely simple phonologies have some or all of the following features:

Few segmental contrasts
Restrictive phonotactics
Limited or no phonemic use of gemination or vowel length
Limited or no phonemic use of tone

Phrased another way, a simple phonology in the sense of the question is what you would get if you started with an inventory like Hawaiian's, Rotokas', or Pirahã's and removed contrastive vowel length or contrastive tone.
Conlangs like Toki Pona have extremely simple phonologies.
What are some common problems that appear in languages with phonologies like this?
What are some strategies for dealing with them?
One example of a possible "problem" might be a large number of homophones.

One major problem is that a small phoneme inventory leads to longer words, as you have fewer short ones available. This kind of relates to the point you already mention, namely homophones: here you simply re-use a word form for multiple meanings.
Words would also sound more alike, even if different. This is one of the main problems I have with Hawai'ian (of course the vocab is mostly unrelated to the Western European languages I know), that words are hard to recognise for a learner, and then it's even harder if individual phonemes are different and completely change the meaning of the word.
This is fine for toki pona, which only has a small inventory of words anyway, but any more extensive language would quickly run into longer words or phrases.