Is there any concept of "isomorphic" constructed languages? What I'm thinking is: if two conlangs have the same syntactical structure and can be translated by simply exchanging words while maintaining the same (or very similar) structure, is there are specific term for this scenario, and are there any examples for this? I'd imagine Lojban and Loglan would probably fit in this category as Lojban is, after all, a child project of Loglan. Are there any other examples of conlangs designed with identical (or very similar) syntactic features, and is there a name for this relationship?

There is the term relexification meaning that the words of a given language are replaced by new words without changing the structure of the starting language. Relexification does not only occur in conlangs but also in natural languages.


Which categories of inalienable possession have conlangs expressed? In many natlangs a grammatical distinction is made between alienable and inalienable possession. Inalienable possession is used for things which are in some way conceptualised as being inseparable from their possessor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Naming language based on real language I apologize if similar question has already been answered, I tried to look for it but didn't find anything.
I'm trying to make a simple naming language that looks/sounds vaguely like nahuatl (if I manage it, I'd like to do this with more languages).
I tried Atwords, but I can't figure out the phonotactics and the results rarely look anything like the language I'm "imitating".
Real words tend to be long, hard to read and include lots of loan words.
Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?

Is there any way to figure out the phonotactics of a language and
create words that sound like they fit in, without having to learn an
insane amount of linguistics/"source language"?

There is: look it up. For example: Nahuatl Phonology.
Nahuatl phonotactics turn out to be pretty simple: maximally one onset consonant, a long vowel, and one coda consonant per syllable. Here's an Awkwords script that'll give you 100 random 3 syllable words conforming to Nahuatl phonology:
#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV(C)
n:100
nle

If you don't care about the source language morphology, that oughta be good enough. Not all of the words will be winners, but you can generate tons and just pick the few you like best.
To get words that really look like plausible source-language words, though, you do need to care about morphology. In that case, you do have to learn something about the source language, but not necessarily "an insane amount". For example, a simple change to that Awkwords script will generate plausible dictionary-forms of Nahuatl nouns with 3-syllable bases and <-tl> or <-tli> suffixes:
#awkwords version 1.2
V:ii/i/ee/e/uu/u/aa/a
C:m/n/p/t/k/kw/h/ts/tl/tc/s/l/c/j/w
r:(C)V(C)CV(C)CV[tl/CVtli]
n:100
nle

It is not too hard to look up lists of other morphemes and add their patterns into your word generator. If you want to get really fancy, you can try to find a pre-made computational morphological model for the source language (e.g., a PC-KIMMO or KLEENE or HFST file) and then generate random underlying forms to run through it, but that probably does start to get into the realm of "an insane amount of linguistics"...
There are a couple of decent middle ground, rather than copying the source language morphology. One is to generate a bunch of short, one-or-two-syllable con-morphemes of your own that match the source phonology, and then use those as the base units from which you generate conlang words, rather than going directly from the phonology.
Another is to try to imitate the source language phonemic distribution. For that, you basically just need a big list of source language words, from which you can extract statistical information. The simplest way to do that is to just count up occurrences of each phoneme, but if you know a little bit more statistics, or are willing to learn, you can construct a conditional distribution model for which phonemes occur most often in different particular positions, and then generate random words based on those specialized distributions, rather than the default uniform distribution. Awkwords can't handle that kind of model sophistication, but other word generators, like Logopoeist, can, and it's also not too hard to write up a custom generator just for your particular naming language.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Are there concrete examples of slang developing within a conlang? One of the unique challenges of a constructed language, in my mind, is how they handle the way in which language longs to break rules.  In other words, how does constructed language handle slang?

For the most part, the entire notion of underground language runs entirely contrary to the notion of constructed language, where the rules are strictly prescribed.

However, in unique cases where conlangs have had time to brew with native speakers, such as with Esperanto, have we seen specific examples of slang develop within the language?  What conditions seem to prompt the development of slang terms in such circumstances?

Wiktionary has a list of Esperanto internet slang but most of these I've never seen or heard used before (at least in the main esperanto chats on Telegram).

Esperanto slang terms I've heard or used

krokodili - to speak in a language other than esperanto in a group of esperantists. No one really knows where it originated but the most popular story seems to be that it's because crocodiles have big mouths and small brains. "Ne krokodilu" is a very commonly used phrase.
sal - hi (short for saluton)
kvf - how are you (abbreviation of kiel vi fartas)
mdr - lol (multe da ridoj)
mns - idk (mi ne scias)

Interjections

ho ve (occasionally just "ve") - oh geez
(according to this post on Esperanto SE the literal translation is "oh woe" but who says that)
8, ok, okej - k, ok, okay
("ok" is the word for eight in Esperanto, mdr.)
ho - oh
jes ja - yes, indeed
(according to this post on Esperanto SE "ja" can be used in other situations, but I have never heard or seen it used other than after "jes")
Fek' - f*ck
Kio la fek - what the f*ck
(This is an obvious anglicism and considered "grammatically incorrect" by many esperantists, who will tell you it's actually kio feke)
Volap*ko - "the v word". More offensive than all the offensive words you know combined.


How could a conlang enforce subjective idealism in a constructed world Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.

How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?

My guess is that its semantic primes should consist of:

qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as  the redness of an evening sky, pain of a headache, the taste of wine, etc.
A pronoun like *I* to refer to one's self
Verbs such as *think*, *believe*, *know*
Adverbs such as: *now*, *before*, *after*

Objects (e.g. chair, table, etc.), other personal pronouns (you, he, etc.), matter and all the other things that do not really exist (in the view of subjective idealism) would be defined as paraphrases.

Edit: Note that this is not a question on subjective idealism in reality, but about subjective idealism in a constructed world. Therefore arguments against subjective idealism in reality are irrelevant.

You may be interested in E-Prime.

E-Prime is a version of English that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. This makes many objective statements like "Roses are red" impossible. Instead a person is required to use more subjective constructions like "Roses appear red to me".


On what license Lojban can be used? Given the fact that inventor of the Loglan language started to claim his copyright on the language's components, and Lojban is basically a successor to Loglan, on what license Lojban is published? Can it be freely used without any limitations?

Logical Language Group, Inc. retains the copyright, but grants permission to copy, redistribute, and create derivative works from the official book, under conditions such as attribution and a requirement to include a permission notice identical to the one below.

Copyright © 1997 by The Logical Language Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this book, either in electronic or in printed form, provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this book, provided that the modifications are clearly marked as such, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this book into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation that has been approved by the Logical Language Group, rather than in English.
The contents of Chapter 21 are in the public domain.

From the Boring Legalities section of the Lojban Reference Grammar
The Formal Grammar (chapter 21) is in the public domain, as the above license says.


What are the places where I can attach an indication of tense in relation to a conjugated verb action? Info
My conlang uses verb conjugations only in the present tense. To indicate other tenses (preterite/past imperfect/subjunctive/future/etc) I use the combined phrase "sona," meaning "in (the) time (of)" and then adding a various suffix to indicate the specific tense("sonasato"="in time past"). This means I only have the present tense of conjugations per verb, not changing the actions of the subject per tense. (In English, you have "I eat" (present) and "I ate" (past), as one example. In my conlang, you use "In the time of past, I eat." (Past, but using a present conjugation.) What I'm wondering about are the places where I should put this simple tense indicator in a sentence. The conlang's sentence structure is like this (using an example from English as translation):
English:
The dog drank from a bowl of water.
The dog(determiner+noun)-> drinks (conjugated verb, "it drinks") from (preposition) a bowl (determiner+noun) of (preposition) water (noun).
In my conlang, you would say
Sepyew ("(it) drinks", conjugated form of "to drink" in present tense) eu bítõe (the dog) de è roum (from a bowl, this would be contracted into "dè roum" or "dèroum.") de aqua (of water.)
This, however, was the present tense. The past tense (The dog drank from a bowl of water) involves the "sonasato"(in the past tense)  in some form, but I don't know where the most logical place to place it would be. Ordinarily, that wouldn't present a problem.
Unfortunately, my conlang has no punctuation, that is to say, sentences are one long string of words. I've not considered how to handle this with dialogue, but otherwise it hasn't presented a problem until now.  Pauses for breath within conversation are natural, but I'm addressing this question from the written aspect of language. Because the sentences are fluid, I don't know how to handle the abrupt changes between tenses other than using the "sona" variants excessively. And the rules of the language mean that the tense is always expressed, per statement (not sentence, because of the punctuation) by either ignoring the sona rule (indicating the present tense) or by using it (to indicate some other tense.)
Question
Keeping that in mind, what would be the most logical place to place the tense indicator so that I can change it relatively easily between tenses in a language with no periods or commas (pauses), and where?

Since it’s your conlang, you can put it wherever you think is best—but my inclination would be immediately adjacent to the verb it applies to. Your sentence structure seems to be VSO, so my initial inclination is to place it immediately after the verb.

For your sample sentence, Sepyew sonsato eu bítõe de è roum de aqua.

For the translation of a sentence like "The truck carried the food Joe ate", you would need two tense indicators, one for each verb: "it-carry past-tense the truck [he-eat past-tense Joe the food] sentence-as-object-indicator". If only one verb is in a non-present tense (The truck carries the food Joe ate), you apply the tense indicator to the verb that is in the non-present tense:"it-carry  the truck [he-eat past-tense Joe the food] sentence-as-object-indicator".


What are the main limitations of Lojban? Suppose we want to translate the whole of Wikipedia from English into Lojban, what are the main known big limitations or concerns we should be aware of? In other words, does Lojban as a language have sufficient expressive power for being translated from English?

Length

A few things. First, Lojban often needs longer sentences to express something than it does in, for example, English.

Vocabulary

Secondly, Lojban's vocabulary isn't that big, especially in the domain of sciences. Words would have to be calqued, adapted from English, French, etc. or completely re-invented.

Loaning and naming

Thirdly, the English language (and many natural languages) loans words directly (for example, champagne could be *shampain and buoy could be *boy or *boi) without changing spelling (a slight counterexample would be German, which often changes the letter c pronounced [k] to the letter k, like Kanada and Vokabular).

Lojban doesn't. .Romas. is Rome (Italy), .xavanas. is Havanas (Cuba) and .lidz. is Leeds (UK). This makes it confusing in some cases. How would Lojban adapt Turra Coo or people like Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela? The name should stay recognisable but pronounceable.

Rhetoric

Furthermore, many rhetorical devices such as these would be boring, simply boring. Shakespeare would be an ordinary novel writer, the Bible no longer so majestic and this sentence boring. Language would be unambiguous: literature boring. Language needs rhetoric, rhetoric needs language. Epizeuxis. Epizeuxis. Epizeuxis. Alliteration acts amazingly when all aposiopesis achieves is... Aposiopesis achieves... Aposiopesis... Rhetoric is not unlike magic. What would we have without rhetoric? We'd have a boring and a world. Rhetoric, her voice is beautiful, her heart full of peace and her prosopopoeia angel-like.

Well, to finish that rant, try to translate this to Lojban.

  A shocking affair occurred last night. Sir Edward Hopeless, as a guest at Lady Panmore’s ball, complained of feeling ill, took a highball, his hat, his coat, his departure, no notice of his friends, a taxi, a pistol from his pocket, and finally his life. Nice chap. Regrets and all that.


By what means might the roots "let" and "ly" mean the same thing in a naturalistic conlang? I apologize for how this question may be perceived. I am casually learning linguistics with no curriculum. I can understand that this question may have many possible answers, but I am not quite sure how else to ask this question. I can also understand if all that may be provided to me is some resource on lists of natural ways languages evolve.

Basically, I've come up with two place names, "Yallet" and "Helverly". I'm trying to create enough of a naming language that would allow me to create names that seem to occur naturally in the setting.

Both Yallet and Helverly are locations, and so I was wondering if there was a way for the root "let", meaning town, to conceivably evolve to "ly".

Can this evolution happen naturally? If so, I would happily read on such transformations. If not, I would be very appreciative of an explanation as to why it would not be a natural evolution.

It is a two-step process, and both steps are very natural and frequently encountered in natural languages. The steps may occur in the other order as well, but the order here deems more common to me.

Loss of the final stop let -> le. This occurs very often, French is a prominent example of this because the final stops are preserved in writing, but lost in pronunciation (with some exceptions when there is a following vowel).
A vowel shift le -> li, in this case a raising. Again, this step is very natural because /e/ and /i/ are neighbouring vowels in the vowel diagram.

These two steps use your assumption that let is the older form that evolves into ly. A more sophisticated construction could assume a common ancestor for both forms, e.g., lit that evolves to li by the loss of the final consonant and to let by lowering the vowel.

EDIT: As you are generally interested in sound laws, there is a resource named Index Diachronica that lists a lot of sound changes collected from many sources.


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

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

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

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

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

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


Words for numbers in a language with bijective numeration Bijective base-k numeration (or k-adic numeration) is a system of writing numerals such that the digits are 1 through k. Thus counting in bijective base-12 (such as my conlang Atili has) works as follows, using X, E, and T for ten, eleven, and twelve, respectively:
 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9,  X,  E,  T,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1X, 1E, 1T,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 2X, 2E, 2T,
...

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

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


Should I include morphology in my proto language? Most, if not all natural languages have some form of morphology, such as noun case or poly-personal agreement. However, these features are usually evolved from prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and require time for them to appear. This was my original route for creating languages, to create proto languages without morphology and then to evolve them later on. I then started researching proto-indo-european and proto-afroasiatic, and I found out they had morphology such as noun cases, even though they were supposedly the original languages for their regions.

The main question is: Would it be naturalistic to insert morphology into proto-language(s)?

I am not at all certain why you would assume that protolanguages must have no morphology. PIE is just a language like any other before or since. If we review the relevant article, the Font of All Knowledge explains that morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

Whether your language has affixes, adpositions, or some other means of distinguishing roles all of that falls under morphology. Thus, I'd argue that it is "naturalistic" to insert morphology into your protolanguage. After all, it's already there! Else, your daughter languages most likely wouldn't have the concept at all. (And that kind of speculative invented language would be very interesting indeed!)

Standard examples, consider Latin & English:

john bit the dog
the dog bit john
the dog bit john
john bit the dog

johannem momordit canis
canem momordit johannes
canis momordit johannem
johannes momordit canem

Morphology tells us how the words are related to each other. Just because English got rid of almost all of its endings doesn't mean we did away with morphology! We just tucked it away somewhere else, in this case, word order. This is why Latin can put the agent or the patient before the verb, but English, except in unusual circumstances, can not. We expect that whatever noun comes before the verb is the agent, be it the dog or be it John.

Morphology has even been proposed for Nostratic, the protolanguage from which PIE descended.


Are there any grammatical aspects which do not have parallels in natural languages? In Describing Morphosyntax, Payne uses a number of diagrams for visually explaining aspects and what they say about actions relative to time.

Payne outlines the following, all of which occur in natural languages.

Perfective

[-----] He wrote a letter.

Imperfective

<-----> He writes letters.

Perfect

-----|x He has come from Aqaba.

Pluperfect

---|DC---(now) I had entered a congested zone.

Completive

>-----| She finished working.

Inceptive

[-----> She began working.

Continuative/progressive

>-----> He is writing letters

Punctual

x He sneezed.

Iterative

>-x-x-x-> He is coughing.

Habitual

<-----> He drinks.

Are there other Aspects that do not appear in natural languages which have been invented for conlangs, and could they be represented with a similar visual diagram?

Well, y'know, ANADEW and all that, but...

As far as I know, there is no natural language with a grammaticalized antiperfect aspect--i.e., an aspect where the time of the action is after the reference point, rather than before.

Present Perfect: "He has come."
Past Perfect (pluperfect): "He had come."
Future Perfect: "He will have come."

In each case, the event occurs before the reference time defined by the tense. In the case of future perfect, this may or may not be before the present.

An antiperfect flips that around

Present Antiperfect: "He is going to come." / "He is about to come."
 (approximately)
Past Antiperfect: "He was going to come." / "He was about to come."
 (approximately)
Future Antiperfect: "He will be going to come." / "He will be about to come." (approximately)

The various English paraphrases all have some extraneous additional implications (e.g., "He was going to come" implies that he didn't actually, "about to" implies that the action is nearby) that are not inherent to the antiperfect aspect, if it were grammaticalized. The important thing is that the action occurs after the reference time, but not necessarily after the present. Thus, just like a future perfect action could have occurred in the past, a past antiperfect could occur in the future.


Are there any examples of artificial creoles of natural languages? I remember reading somewhere of a creole-ish artificial language of two (possibly more) natural languages. In the text (I do NOT remember where it was) only one creole (I'm using the term loosely here, without regards to native speakers) was mentioned, without any usage/examples.

Are there any examples of constructed languages that are specifically designed to be creoles (again, with a very loose usage of the term creole here) of natural languages?

To name a few:

Da Mätz se Basa: High German.
Old Piscean: British English.
Kjā: Yoruba.
Cheyoon: Mandarin.
Al Mastizu: a creole of English, Spanish and Arabic.


Soudwegian: A Swedish-German process similar to what happened to English and French? The idea is that the Swedes retain a small bit of what is nowadays German territory that they conquered in the 17th century. This is now independent territory, Soudway, with a language of its own named Soudwegian.

Their vocabulary is basically German with a lot of phonetic changes, plus a huge amount of Swedish loans (and smaller but important contributions from Polish and French), while the grammar is very simplified, like Middle/Modern English as opposed to Old English.

Is that a realistic choice, or was the grammatic simplification that characterised the process between English/French unique—not something that we should expect from other similar fusions?

Yes, that is a realistic choice in fictive works.

Abstractly
Nobody can be 100% sure of how realistic it is, and in conlanging—or even fictive worldbuilding in general—you may always be a bit unrealistic. Think about some fictive works or conlangs you know placed in another world; they make many assumptions that extraterrestrial life has two eyes, hair on their head, ~1m–2m tall, and their mouths have lips, teeth, an alveolar ridge, a glottis and a tongue. (Your idea takes place in our (but alternative) world, but the point of the example still stands.)

Linguistically
There could be many ways of forming such a language, of which the most realistic are (chiefly from Mark Rosenfelder's Advanced Language Construction):

A creole. A creole is, by definition, a pidgin which has native speakers. A pidgin is formed when two languages try to communicate, for reasons of trade or otherwise. If you read about Tok Pisin (etymologically "talk pidgin", a creole), you'll see a lot of simplified grammar (and, as you say, English is already quite simplified).
From Swedish, but developing independently from main Swedish. As a native English speaker born in Holland, informal English I use to talk to my family is very different from main English. For example, I'd say *How late is it? (from Dutch Hoe laat is het?) by accident. Also, lots of sound changes happen. Even though I don't merge /w/ and /ʍ/, many people I know that used to be able to can't anymore, and my rhotic in both Dutch and English is [ʁ], even though neither Dutch nor the Scottish dialect of English has it.
A combination of the two. After a period of isolation (independent development), the Swedes start talking more like the Germans (like creoles, but slightly different)—a combination of the two.

So, even though it might be somewhat unrealistic, within the dome of fiction it isn't unrealistic enough to stop you.


What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language? This question is different than the previous one titled “Which features make a language easier to learn?” in that I'm not interested in making it easy for L1 learners. For them learning the language spoken by their society is an inevitability.

Specifically, I'm interested in making a language that is objectively as easy to learn as possible for people learning it as a second language. And these features should help people regardless of what language they speak natively.

It seems intuitive that there would exist features that would help to create that.

For example, take French or German and remove the genders. This seems like it should make the languages easier to learn without losing any communicative power. Another example would be phonology. If English were to remove the 'th' sound it would be easier for speakers of other languages to learn.

I also realize that it may be the case that there just isn’t enough research on this topic to know definitively what features are best for this.

It depends very much who your target audience is.

It is easier to learn languages that are similar to your own; as a German speaker, learning English is not that hard, apart from the grammatical features (aspect, for example) that don't really have a German equivalent. It's mainly a matter of learning the huge vocabulary with all its not-quite-but-almost synonyms.

Same with Esperanto. Grammar is easy, and most of the vocab is not too hard either. Here it's the particles which are the tricky bit.

I'm currently learning Dutch and Swedish, which are both similar to German, in some respects. No big deal. But both Arabic and Korean are a lot harder, and I gave up on Russian. These languages are very different from German, and thus harder for me to learn (the different alphabet is not the issue).

Klingon is hard for me to learn, because it has a different sentence structure (OVS, as opposed to SVO). If my native language had OVS as well, for example Apalaí or Hixkaryana, I think I would find Klingon much easier. Especially since Apalaí is also agglutinative, like Klingon.

There is a list of languages ordered by difficulty (from the Foreign Service Institute). The 'easy' languages are all Indo-European, and the hard ones are Asian/Semitic. You can imagine that the same list produced by a Chinese or Japanese institution would look very different.

Languages have no 'absolute' difficulty, but only relative. So to answer your question, you can make a language easier to learn for people if you make it more similar to their L1. Which, I guess, is the reason why there is no universal 'easy' language that we all speak...


Has any nation ever employed a constructed language in the military as code talkers? Esperanto was once used in the US army to realistically simulate the language situation when training.
Has any nation ever employed other constructed languages in the military as code talkers?

From Wikipedia article:

  Code talkers are people in the 20th century who used obscure languages as a means of secret communication during wartime. The term is now usually associated with the United States service members during the world wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages. In particular, there were approximately 400–500 Native Americans in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages. Code talkers transmitted these messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formal or informally developed codes built upon their native languages. Their service improved the speed of encryption of communications at both ends in front line operations during World War II.

The Israeli military uses a relexification of Hebrew called "NADBAR", according to Conlang Wikibooks†. A relexification of a language remains the grammar (by definition) and writing system (in practice) but gains new words. Your first (semi-)conlang was probably a relexification of English or another language.

Many languages used in the military are not immediately conlangs; rather, they fall into the dome of cryptology and cryptography. Quote:

  Some use the terms cryptography and cryptology interchangeably in English, while others (including US military practice generally) use cryptography to refer specifically to the use and practice of cryptographic techniques and cryptology to refer to the combined study of cryptography and cryptanalysis.

The military also uses (forms of) signed languages. Here are some common signals:

Common army signals (link instead of image, for image is too big and distracting)

†Note: (from comment by b a):

  According to Hebrew Wikipedia, "Contrary to the popular notion, the goal of Nadbar is not concealing information" (so not really cryptography) See the corresponding English Wikipedia page for its use in the US military.


Are constructed languages intellectual property? Do they ever stop being IP, once people use them? Are conlangs intellectual property? Can they be copyrighted?

The second question is a little more complicated. Does a certain level of public, common usage cause a conlang to become public domain, even when the language was created by a select group?

I know there has been some debate over the Klingon language regarding this, especially since there are a few people who were raised with Klingon as a secondary natural language. But I'm not certain about its legal status.

For the purposes of location, consider the US generally. If a state is needed, in California.

The short answer is that there are no mechanisms in place by which one could credibly copyright, patent or otherwise secure ones language. Works you create about the language (such as a grammar document or a poem) of course fall under the same copyright laws as any other works of their kind and as such generally belong to you, but your language as of now is just as copyrightable as English.

For a long answer, I recommend watching this talk by Sai (founder of the LCS) about exactly this topic.


What are some real world data on the numbers of speakers of constructed languages? What are some real world data (e.g., from census data, membership data, visitors of conlang related events, other estimates) on active speakers of constructed languages?

There is some basic data at Ethnologue for Esperanto.
The Font of All Knowledge lists some statistics for other invented languages (Hungarian & Russian census data).

Not much, but a (small) start.


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

the same question on worldbuilding.SE

I guess this is up to you as the world builder.

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

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

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


Sciences in toki pona I managed to translate a lot of things but I'm stuck on a word.
How to say "physics" (knowledge of the nature) in toki pona? A proposition for "nature" would also be appreciated.

linguistics: sona toki
geology: sona ma
medicine: sona pimejo
mechanics: sona wawa
quantum mechanics: sona lili
...

I did not find any solution on https://glosbe.com/en/mis_tok/.

It might be sona ijo tawa —knowledge of moving things— or sona ijo ante —knowledge of things that change.


I'm constructing a language with some rather hard-to-produce symbols. Computer or paper? My constructed language has 26 English letters and 30 special characters (plus four different accent marks.) The characters are slightly abstract. The closest I've gotten to producing them is with LaTeX/MathJax (Which offers a  wide enough range to produce most of them.) As I go along building vocab/conjugation lists, I've hit a roadblock where I want to write a word down, but it has a symbol in it that I can't reproduce well on whatever sticky note app (or Word!) that I'm using.

Is there any good platform for me to be able to build these lists on, or do I have to do it on paper?

Well, LaTeX is a great platform for writing anything, and you already seem to use it to some success. So I suggest using LaTeX and creating pdf out of it for distribution.
What helps in the long run is creating a font with all the special characters for your conlang. TeX and LaTeX come with a reasonably usable font creation program called METAFONT, but the so created fonts are only usable in the TeX universe—which may be sufficient for you. I have successfully created fonts with METAFONT, and our partner TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange has a lot of people that are willing to help with METAFONT.


Has any conlang ever replaced the use of a pidgin? I've read that being a simple, yet more expressive, substitute for a pidgin language is one of the possible applications of Toki Pona.

In situations where people from multiple languages come together they need to be able to communicate with each other. Pidgins are introduced or developed in these situations, but there is a limited scope to what can be said in pidgins. Over time, pidgins creolise into full natural languages. I would like to know if a language like Toki Pona (or a similarly minimal conlang) has ever successfully replaced the use of a pidgin to allow more to be said, rather than letting the pidgin creolise naturally.

Basic English is minimal in that it limits the number of words in the language (though not as extremely as Toki Pona). It was intended to be an international auxiliary language (although it never really caught on).

The language was used in 1945 in order to quickly teach Chinese sailors to understand naval orders. This was reported at the time in a Time magazine article (paywall beyond first two paragraphs; the reference to the article comes from Wikipedia).


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

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

Factors to consider:

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

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

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

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

-Availability- Online dictionaries readily available.

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

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


How would you say "good morning" or "hello" politely in Klingon? Klingons from Star Trek aren't very polite, and the language developed for them reflects that - they don't exactly have many polite ways to say things. The closest think I've found to a polite greeting is "Nuq'nuh", which translates to "What do you want?", which... isn't very polite, IMO.

Is there any way to approximate a polite greeting in Klingon?

This answer is based largely on my copy of The Klingon Dictionary (written by Marc Okrand, who created Klingon), which is reliable and good if you need a quick translation from English to Klingon or vice-versa. I'm going to cover most of the same ground as rotaredom's answer, just in more detail.
The book notes that there aren't really any greetings in Klingon; they're simply unnecessary. Klingon as a language is somewhat utilitarian in its application, and exchanges typically start with a straightforward statement or query by one party. Saying the Klingon equivalent of "How are you doing?" when you just want to figure out the new ship's departure time is simply wasteful. One answer to your question, then, would be to simply avoid a greeting. The less you talk, the less time you take up. That said, if you want to truly greet someone, you have two options. . .
Choice 1: Be utilitarian.
This utilitarianism is why all Klingon "greetings" are just introductory phrases. "nuqneH" is the one that seems to be commonly used, as rotaredom said. Its translation is "What do you want?" "Nuq" itself can be treated as an interrogative sentence on its own, simply meaning "What?"1. It can also be used as the start of a sentence, such as

nuq legh yaS

which means

What does the officer see?

Additionally, "neH" is used as a form of "to want" (though it also used as an adverbial, to mean "only"). Therefore, we have the compound "nuqneH", properly an exclamation that stands by itself as a sentence.
Choice 2: Use an honorific.
The Dictionary notes that "neS" is the only honorific suffix in Klingon, used as part of larger words. For instance, "qaleghneS", coming from "qa" ("you"), "legh" ("see") and "neS", translates to

I am honored to see you.

This states a fact, and gets to the point. It may be used towards a superior, but this is not mandatory, and I don't think it's commonly used. If you wish to open the conversation with an inquiry, "HIja'neS" (which includes "HIja", normally used as an affirmative) can work. Its translation is

Do me the honor of telling me [about something].

Again, use this when asking a superior something, but only if you really want to be respectful.
Miscellaneous
Though I have yet to see any of the following used as a greeting, I imagine you could modify them to create some sort of opening remark.

"bel" is the verb for "to be pleased", so when greeting someone, you could conceivably say "jIbel" ("I am pleased", with "jI" for first-person). Likewise, "Quch" is the verb for "to be happy". Using "jIbel" or "jiQuch" to indicate satisfaction upon meeting someone is a possibility.
"maj" ("Good") or "majQa'" ("Well done") are exclamations used as praise. You could use these - preferably "majQa'" - when welcoming an inferior who has successfully completed a task, like blowing up an enemy spaceship.
"toH" is another exclamation, meaning "Well!" or "So!" You would use this in, for instance, a sentence like

Well! I didn't expect to see you back alive.

1 Appending "Daq", to make "nuqDaq", yields "Where?"


How could the future "Kesh" language from the book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K. Le Guin develop from modern languages? In the book Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin, the author created the future Kesh language and Aiha alphabet. Does anyone with an anthropological or etymological background and experience with this book have any idea how modern languages would evolve into this? Could it just be English + 5000 years, or does it seem like there's other languages that got mixed in?
From the back of the book it is stated that their written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable which is quite a shift from modern English, but it seems like they may be many thousands of years in the future which would allow for such drastic changes. Some words such as "kailikú" for "quail" have the similar hard /k/ and "sleep" is translated to "lahe" which seems to be pronounced similarly to "lay". These seem to be fairly rare and most words have no obvious connection or similar pronunciations.

5000 years is a really long time for linguistic evolution, and after such a long time little resemblance between the original and the final outcome is left. So almost anything is a plausible outcome.
The feature "written language and spoken are completely separate things and are not interchangeable" has a nice scientific name alloglottography and it was quite common in the Ancient Near East. I wonder how it can survive in a society Ursula LeGuinn describes for the Kesh people because it is definitely harder to maintain than the knowledge of a simple alphabetic writing of the spoken vernacular.
The alphabet looks like a new invention but it shows some superficial similarities to Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and may have evolved from them. Or it was just reinvented at some point of time after a period of illiteracy.


Are there constructed languages with a tense system inspired by Theory of Relativity? For readers who aren't familiar with the Theory of Relativity, here is a sketch of how the Special Theory of Relativity structures space and time:

There is a point "here and now" where the observer is located
There is an "absolute past" meaning the region of space and time wherefrom light signals can reach the point "here and now". This region is also termed backward light-cone
There is an "absolute future" meaning the region of space and time whereto the observer can send light signals. This region is also called foreward light-cone
There is a "disconnected" region that can neither be reached by light signals nor send light signals to the observer.

While present, past, and future are commonly found in natlangs and conlangs of all flavours, the disconnected region is a new feature brought in by the Special Theory of Relativity. Are there conlangs with a tempus system including such a region?

EDIT: In real life, the disconnected region is not determined by the speed of light but by the availability of direct communication channels. Thus a sentence like My husband is in his working office now is about the disconnected region (assume no smart phone stalking to verify the sentence).

I think you are looking for the constructed language called Lojban
According to an earlier reference to its grammar,

Technical note for readers conversant with relativity theory: The Lojban time tenses reflect time as seen by the speaker, who is assumed to be a ``point-like observer'' in the relativistic sense: they do not say anything about physical relationships of relativistic interval, still less about implicit causality. The nature of tense is not only subjective but also observer-based.

Here is a specific reference to its use of a "relativistic tense"

There's been a proposal to have words expressing relativistic tenses that are different > from usual past, current and future used in most historical natural languages.
How this 4th tense would work? Consider we are 3 light years away from a star that explodes. And in 3 years we see the explosion. So what? How do we use this 4th tense?
It would be a tag with a modifier ue'ei.
ue'ei = [MOhI] 4th relativistic tense modifier

There's also an interesting set of charts describing in detail the use of relativity theory in Lojban on the current lojban language site.

Lastly, in the Lojban Reference Grammar site, there is this little intriguing tidbit on Lojban tense usage.

In Lojban, the concept of tense extends to every selbri, not merely the verb-like ones. In addition, tense structures provide information about location in space as well as in time. All tense information is optional in Lojban


I'm creating a constructed language. Does this type of conlang exist? Is there a type of conlang which tries to combine and simplify French and English?
(Few word examples)

I- Mi
You- Vu
We- Nu
This- Di
That- Do
Who- Ve
What- Ku
No- No

Note:- This language is not just French and English combined. It also makes up similar sounding or entirely different words.

Probably something similar already exists. Languages of this type are called somewhat despectively Euroclones in the conlang community and the field of such languages is pretty well trotted out, though most designers prefer English-Spanish blends with simpler phonology over English-French blends. Euroclones are often marketed as International Auxiliary Languages by their respective proponents.

For the personal pronouns, Ido looks like a good match.


Are there any free online conlang creation tools? I was wondering if anyone knows of any conlang creation websites that are free to use.

I know this sounds silly but I have little experience to go on as for creating a custom language.

There are some syntax "toys" online, eg http://www.zompist.com/gtg.html. This will help you write a (formal) grammar of your language, but you will need a good understanding of Generative Linguistics to use that.

Otherwise, what else do you need instead of pen and paper? Maybe a spreadsheet to enter vocabulary? There are so many choices to be made on so many levels that it is not really possible to automate much of it. It's not as if you would enter a few characteristics into a form, press a button, and out comes a conlang :)


How does Láadan aim to express the views of women more than natural Western languages? Láadan was created, according to Wikipedia, to try an experiment in seeing if a constructed language designed specifically for women could better express the views of women better than natural Western languages:

  Láadan is a feminist constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women.

How does the language aim to express this difference? What differences make it better for women to express their views than in natural Western languages?

What steps are the creators of Láadan taking to make sure that women can express themselves better in Láadan than in natural Western languages, that it will be different from those natural languages?

I am not an expert on Láadan but I was also researching it in the context of feminist communication.  This is what I found based on that research.

The idea behind creating Láadan as a "feminist" language was to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to see if natural languages were biased toward expressing male communication, but the language's creator, Suzette Haden Elgin, was unable to prove or disprove the hypotheses she set out to study because of low adoption of the language.  As far as I can tell, even Elgin remains uncertain on the effect of these approaches to facilitating feminine communication.

The distinctive characteristics that strike me are

It is a tonal language - This seems to have been very deliberate in the development of Láadan. Does this facilitate feminine thought with particularly more clarity than non-tonal languages?  I am not sure, and I couldn't find any reputable research indicating whether or not that is the case, but I suspect that when the language was being developed by Elgin she did not make it a tonal language by accident.  Since her hypotheses about the implications of Láadan on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis remain unconfirmed, we probably don't know for sure.
The language has emotional context markers.  This is presumably meant to aid in the expression of subtle emotional context to avoid ambiguity that leaves a dialogue open to interpretation and reliant on context clues.

-d anger marker
-th pain marker
-li love marker
-lan celebration marker
-da joke marker
-di education marker
-ya fear marker

The language has many affection words, for example, of love.  Like the other aspects, whether this is truly a facet that favors female communication over male based on empirical evidence is unclear to me, but it certainly satisfies many widely accepted assumptions about differences in male and female thought.  However, it should be noted that many of these assumptions are widely challenged today.  Perhaps men desire more nuanced emotional communication as well but suppress this impulse for cultural reasons.

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
ad love for one respected but not liked
éme love for one neither liked nor respected
am love for one related by blood
ashon love for one not related by blood, but kin of the heart
aye love that is unwelcome and a burden
azh love for one sexually desired now
oham love for that which is holy
sham love for the child of one’s body

These text examples were taken from this online PDF resource.


How similar are Loglan and Lojban? Loglan is a predecessor to Lojban, and Lojban apparently directly grew out of Loglan.

How similar are the two languages at this point? Are they more like dialects of the same language, or more like Anglo-Saxon and English at this point?

Lojban vocabulary was deliberately constructed from scratch, in an attempt to get around James Brown's copyright on Loglan (Brown was the creator of Loglan, but continued to retain control over it. The Logical Language Group was formed to reinvent the words, beginning in the late 1980s, while retaining Loglan's grammar.

The words LLG created are the gismu, the roots that make up Lojban. They generated over 1300 of them, taking source words from Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian and Arabic and scored many potential gismu by their similarities with the source words. The highest-scoring gismu were used; from there, the rest of the vocabulary was generated.

Now, this was similar to Brown's original process, although he used Japanese, French and German as three more reference languages, while leaving out Arabic. This algorithm was quite similar to the one used to generate Lojban's gisme. Brown's scores - and, in a sense, the LLG's - were explicitly based on learnability, which is why these languages were used. However, the implementation of the Logban algorithm resulted in a completely new lexicon, due to different weightings, quantification of similarity, and the differing source languages.

Since the relexification, the grammar of Lojban has changed in certain ways. While it would have been easier for speakers of Loglan to learn shortly after its inception, it has now diverged enough that the two languages, while based on the same principles, are now very different. I think the analogy of Anglo-Saxon and English is a good one.


How to make names in a conlang? So, draconic in the setting is used to name places, people, and communication in general. I skipped through most of the phonotactics as I'm using the Hungarian template. So as I filled out entries in my Swadesh list, I ran a small experiment:

arán (sun) + kile (feather) = Oh, f@ck me! How am I supposed to combine two words, this incompatible, into a pair of names?

More precisely, I had a name, Amrar (pronounce: Ámrár), created before through a different method and without having a whole conlang in mind. Compared to Aránkile (which I  modified into Áranki/Árenkil, a male and a female form) its soft m, loud and clear á, and grizzly r does a good job of giving off the vibes you'd expect from a golden dragon, regal, powerful, intimidating but still kind. This worked when I was going for vibes, even if it had no meaning or roots in a language at the end. However, I feel like I'm writing myself into a corner with this vocabulary.

I don't want my language to sound like it was generated on vulgarlang.com. I have to maintain my control over the "loudness" curve of each word, their length and which phoneme I use, based on their place of articulation. What should I do to balance the "sounds like an orc/elf/typical politician" with the "names have a meaning"?

Note that you as the conlang designer control both ends of the chain: The final wordform and the etymology. So you can play with both parts until the result meets your wishes.

So you can start with the wordform Amrar and search for an etymology, splitting it up as Am-rar and find some meanings for Am and rar, say am is short for amon "hill, mountain" and rar is "roar, load noise", making your mighty dragon a "moutain-roar(er)". Tolkien used this approach a lot. The backside of this approach is that the conlang becomes difficult to maintain.

EDIT: Going the other way, starting with arán and kile, you can vary the order of the two stems, Maybe Kilarán sounds better than Aránkil?  It is your decision. You can also throw in some sounds between the two stems, say Aránskil with an inserted s, you can insert a vowel, say a, to yield Aranakil, you can assimilate the n to the k giving Arángkil.

Starting with roots from your conlang, there are still a lot of creative possibilites to combine them in compounds: Inserting a Fugenelement (example from German Herz-ens-sache "affair of the heart", from Herz "heart" and Sache "thing, affair", ens being the Fugenelement without meaning), applying some assimilations or dissimilations, dropping syllables from long words (syncope), ...).


What are sounds that I have to include in my phonology for it to be naturalistic? Additionally, are there any such things as hierarchies, where if I want to include one sound, I should also include another?

Most if not all phonemes in a language will share something with at least 2 other consonants. For example, if a language has a plosive, then it'll probably have several. Likewise, if it has a voiced plosive, it'll probably have other voiced consonants, possibly of other points of articulation.

Of course, this just the majority of the time. English, for instance has only one palatal consonant (the 'y' sound) and only one lateral (our 'l'). Though few languages have more than one lateral consonant (assuming they have any at all), and 'y' is the only common palatal consonant. All the others are rare.

There, however, a few universals. All languages have voiceless stops. They may only have one (and there are that do), but they will always have one. Also, all languages have monophthongs. So that means that there aren't any natural language out there that only have diphthongs for vowels. Note however, that diphthongs in a language can be made up of monophthongs that don't exist in the language. Take note that the English 'o' sound is actually a diphthong. English doesn't have the monophthong 'o' for some reason. This is why books that teach you foreign languages often tell you cut off the last part of the 'o' sound. What they're actually trying to get you to do is not do the off-glide that our 'o' normally has.

Beyond that though, there are no universals. No one phone is found in all languages. And exactly how many phonemes a language has varies widely. The most common is 5 vowels (the standard 5-vowel array you see everywhere) and 20 to 25 consonants. But there's languages with only half a dozen consonants, and others that have dozens. Then there's the case of Ubykh, which not only has dozens of consonants but only contains 2 vowels, which are of course prone to considerable allophony. In general, its hard to find languages that have fewer than 5 vowels, but they do exist. Several native languages up in Canada only have 4 vowels. The Semitic languages only have 3 vowels (well, modern Arabic also has 2 diphtongs, and its three monophthongs distinguish length, though classical Arabic only had 3 monophthongs, I don't know about Hebrew).


Do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds? In order for me to ask a higher quality question, I need to know, do constructed languages need to have their own letters, words, & sounds?

No, a conlang does not need any of it. You can construct a language based on gestures (a sign language) or on whistles, or on other signals transporting information. You can construct a Pasigraphy, i.e., a written-only language.

But for a more conventional design that meets our intuition of language, you will probably use sounds and words, and letters to write the language. It is up to your creativity to come up with original sounds and letters, but there is definetely no need to do so. Many conlang designs rely on sounds (and complete phonologies) that occur in natural languages, and use usual letters (mostly Latin, but also Cyrillic or other existing writing systems like Runes) for writing. The words of a conlang are most often original but I even can imagine a conlang without original words: Draw existing words for natural languages in an eclectic way or create a conlang closely based on a natural language or a group of natural languages. The vocabulary of IALA Interlingua is hardly original.


How to link extraterrestrial animal names from other language with terrestrial languages? As title states; how to name extraterrestrial fauna/flora to human languages, would reffering to animals similar to cows as to cows and to plant that bears round red fruits as to apple be linguisticly acceptable? Or maybe new words would have to be put in place to describe those creatures?

I think, the more generic a term is, the better you can use a known term in your native language. The more specific a term is, the greater is the need for some circumlocution or some conlang term.

Examples: Specific kinds of flowers and trees in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" have constructed names like mallorn, niphedril, or simbelmyne. He consistently used pipe-weed (the word tobacco is used by the narrator, but not in dialogues). Already on the level of genera, Tolkien uses terms like pine tree, oak, ... and of course there is grass, there are trees, there are horses and so on.

Whether you want to call some space creatures "cows" depends on the picture the word "cow" evokes and the uses of cows (Do they give milk and flesh? Can you use oxen for ploughing or driving a cart?) in your fictional culture.


Could a language with no voiced fricatives exist? I am working on a language and I am trying to bring it down to seventeen consonants. One of the ways I am trying to do that is by removing all voiced fricatives. Is this even reasonable?

According to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), a large database of various world languages' structural properties gathered from descriptive materials like grammars, around a third of the surveyed languages have a voicing contrast in plosives but not fricatives, and another third have no voicing contrast in either plosives or fricatives. Based on this, it seems that by raw numbers you're more likely to have only voiceless fricatives than you are to have both voiced and voiceless fricatives.


Constructed languages or dialects for Time travellers Time travel is a standard trope in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Since time travel disrupts the normal perception of time time travellers may develop some linguistic means to deal with this situation.

My question is: What are examples of either constructed languages for time travellers or constructed varieties of natural languages used by time travellers and how do they deal with aspects related to time travel?

Ted Chang wrote "Story of Your Life" which was the basis for the movie Arrival. I thought both the book and the visual representation in the film were excellent examples of languages based on a travelers use of time. In this story understanding the language is to understand your life as a simultaneous event, and thus have access to all moments at once.

You may also want to consider Jargon specific to your vision of time travel. Do paradox occur, and if so what is the resultant outcome? Do parallel realities exist, are there different types? Can futures be erased or overwritten, if so, what do you call a future that no longer exists, or a person lost in one? Do you have some sort of McGuffin for the travelling part? Is the language the means of travel? Do bodies travel or only minds?

You might consider leveraging something like Hobo signs, notes left by other travelers, with help or warnings, that type of thing. Alternatively, Signals of fealty and place, such as a question and response or sing the local anthem to identify other travelers as friend or foe. Flushing out what you want them to communicate, as well as the mood or archetypes of the speakers, might help drive the sound and appearance of the language.


Mixed writing systems - which words should have their own symbols? Assume that a conlang is written partially with an alphabet and partially with pictograms. The idea is to have something like the Japanese writing system.

Does it follows the structure of natlangs to have symbols for the words which are of particular cultural importance for the speakers of this language? Is there a common pattern or system for a categorisation of words which have their own symbols in most of the natlangs using such a mixed writing system, e.g. man, woman etc?

There is already a conlang that kind of does that. In toki pona you can write the words in a set of pictograms (actually, there are several pictogrammatic writing systems, I'm referring here to the 'hieroglyphs' from the official book). As there are only 120 words, it's easy to have pictograms for all of them.

The only problem is what happens with other words. Names, for example. The toki pona solution is to select a hieroglyph whose word starts with the respective sound. This leaves some choice, as you typically have several pictograms available and you can choose a word whose meaning is somewhat relevant to the name. For example, Kanata (Canada) could start with the pictogram for kasi ("plant, leaf"), to link to the maple leaf; Nokisi (Norway) would start with nena ("hill, mountain"), etc.

Here you are using pictograms to spell a word, but it is easily conceivable to have a separate script for names and foreign words.

If the vocabulary of your language is substantially larger than toki pona's 120 words, you might not want to use pictograms for everything. In this case you could use them either for 'core' words (whether you define them by meaning, age,  etymology or frequency), or it could be words that have no inflections (and thus don't change, eg function words like and and for in English).

In the end it's your choice how you solve this, but there are certainly some possible justifications for different choices that you could explore.


Are words for "machine" and the like in Tolkien present in Elvish/Westron? Tolkien was very much known to be a bit of a Luddite - no fan of technology; Treebeard says in reference to Saruman

  He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.

Which just about sums up his attitude towards technology. I'm curious if as a consequence words for "machine" and the like only show up in, say the Black Speech/Orcish, or if they are known to be rarely used, or derived from Khuzdul.

Quenya has tanwë which means "device, craft, construction."  A search for "machine" on this site which may or may not be reputable gives a couple of other words in Quenya, Sindarin, and Noldorin.

Tolkien did once use the word gun in the Hobbit.  This question on sff explains that, and the top answer to it includes this quote:

  The Common Speech, as the language of the Hobbits and their narratives, has inevitably been turned into modern English. In the process the difference between the varieties observable in the use of the Westron has been lessened. Some attempt has been made to represent these varieties by variations in the kind of English used ... (LOTR: The Return of the King, Appendix F, "II. On Translation")

I'd recommend reading the entire answer.

Anyway, it seems that, logically, there should be no words for "future" technologies in Middle earth; any translation of them by Tolkien can be explained as Tolkien trying to make it easier for us to understand.

The other point I want to bring up is that many of the words found in modern Quenya dictionaries are not original creations by Tolkien, but derivations from his notes.  I doubt he created these words intentionally to violate the technology level of the world.

In the Black Speech, we have only a very limited number of words, as seen here; in Dwarvish, as you pointed out in your own answer here, Tolkien has a very limited vocabulary, and only one word has been borrowed from Khuzdul into the Elvish languages.

I think the quote you have about Sauron being a robot is not literal--the orcs' tehnology was no more advanced than the men and the elves'.  I'm sure that "mind of metal and wheels" is meant to be some Entish idiom that references being hasty.


Is the Voynich manuscript written in a natural or constructed language? The Voynich manuscript is dated to the early 15th century.

  It is a medieval handwritten book of almost 250 pages, and even today the text cannot be understood. It has become quite famous, and it is recognised as one of the main unsolved problems in the history of cryptography.

Can we tell whether it is written in a natural or constructed language?

We don’t know. It is written in an unknown script, by an unknown author. We don’t even know whether it is even in any language at all, or just random scribbles. Any attempts to connect it to a known language (such as Latin) have failed thus far.


Is there evidence that any natural languages were actually constructed? Is there any evidence that a ‘natural’ language that exists today was created by somebody a thousand (or two) years ago. And that it evolved till today?

Possibility? Of course, there is always a possibility, but rather remote one, if you mean a full featured well-known modern language.

The best candidates are "taboo languages", where the lexical items are replaced because of taboo/religious pressure. Perhaps the best known is Dyirbal, where a special version of the language is to be used in front of "tabooed" persons.

Though it probably does not go millennia into the past, and it's questionable if it should be considered a language, since it is just a vocabulary encoding.


Is Tolkien's Dwarvish really based on Hebrew? Many sources say that Tolkien's Dwarvish resembles the Hebrew language.  The Lord of the Rings Wikia states that:

  It appears to be structured, like real-world Semitic languages, around the triconsonantal roots: kh-z-d, b-n-d, z-g-l.

Also, from folk.uib.no:

  The basic structure of Khuzdul resembles that of Semitic languages, like Arabic and Hebrew. The stems from which words are derived are not by themselves pronounceable words, but consist of consonants only. Nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. are derived not only by prefixes and suffixes (if such devices are used at all), but also by inserting certain vowels between these consonants, sometimes also by doubling one of the consonants. Often the words are actually inflected by internal vowel-changes instead of adding affixes: Rukhs means "Orc", but plural "Orcs" is Rakhâs. The root consonants - the so-called radicals - remain the same, like *R-Kh-S in this case. In Khuzdul as well as in Semitic languages, there are usually three radicals in the root; several such roots are mentioned in TI:174 and RS:466: B-R-Z "red", B-N-D "head", K-B-L "silver", N-R-G "black". An example of a biconsonantal root is Z-N "dark, dim" (RS:466).

and:

  Baruk Khazâd! is said to mean "Axes of the Dwarves!" Baruk is usually taken to be an example of something similar to the Hebrew "construct state": the state a word is said to be in when it is placed in front of a noun to express a genitival relationship: X Y meaning "X of Y" or "Y's X". (Compare Hebrew סוס (sûs) "horse", המלך (hammelekh) "the king", סוס המלך (sûs hammelekh) "the king's horse, the horse of the king".) Of course, we cannot be certain that baruk is the normal plural "axes" and not a specialized form meaning "axes of". It may be significant that all the other attested plurals contain a long vowel: Khazâd "Dwarves", Rakhâs "Orcs", tarâg "beards", shathûr "clouds", ûl "streams", dûm "excavations, halls", bizâr "valleys". Could the normal plural "axes" be *barûk? Shathûr "clouds" may represent a plural pattern in -a-û-. In Hebrew, the vowels of words in the construct state are often shortened.

Was it actually based on Hebrew / Semitic languages, or is that simply an impression?

Yes.
According to this interview with Tolkien, he really did design it to be Semitic.  He says,

The dwarves of course are quite obviously,  wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.

In other words, he did design their tongue to be very like the Semitic language, possibly since their history resembled that of the Jews.


In what ways are grammatical genders useful? In a previous question about making a language easy to learn as a second language I suggested that grammatical genders have very little usefulness. A couple of people, however, suggested that grammatical genders have more usefulness than I think. Because of this I am interested in hearing about any potential uses for grammatical genders.

Usefulness can be identified by looking at what happens when the grammatical gender is removed. If the speaker needs to communicate the lost information through other means then the grammatical gender is deemed useful.

The generic term for genders is "word classes". In some languages male/female isn't the main way to divide up the world.

Word classes are useful for co-ordination. If a language lacks gender, (or animacy, what have you), then you need some other way to know what adjective goes with what noun, which antecedent a pronoun refers to and so on. A language with lousy coordination might be English, with things like "He saw him hit him with it."

They make languages hard for language learners because the semantic relationship between the word classes overtime becomes increasingly arbitrary and creates a lexical burden for language learners, i.e. you just have to memorize the word class for each word. Also, gender marker is obligatory, so you have a high entry cost-- you can't say anything until you work out the genders of the relevant words.


How do I naturalistically merge two languages without a clear Substrate and Superstrate? For my latest worldbuilding project I'm trying to create a naturalistic language for a fictional empire I've been creating. This empire was born at the end of the Bronze Age when various kingdoms and city states voluntarily united to defend against the growing power of a thalassocracy.

Though the story of the people who speak this language is more or less ironed out, I can't figure out how to proceed when devising a language for this multiethnic, multilingual and not-very centralised empire.

Though the languages spoken within the empire would all be related sister-languages derived from the same Proto-Lang I don't know how to determine wether one of these languages becomes more "prestigious" while the others remain as dialects.

Do I just pick the language with more speakers? Do I just pick the language that the Emperor speaks, even if the rest of the (very powerful) nobility might speak another language entirely? Do I unite the languages in a single koinè? If so, how?

In fact, there are a lot of possibilities, and many of them are attested in the history of natural languages.

Majority language wins. This happened in China at least twice, it was conquered and ruled by foreign people (Mongolians, Manchu), but the ruling class became sinified. It also happened in medieval France and Spain, they were conquered and ruled be Germanic tribes (Franks and Burgundians for France, Vandals and Goths for Spain), but the majority language of the residents won out.
Most prestigious language wins. This happend in antiquity in the Roman empire, and we see it in many post-colonial states in Africa. There are some prerequisites for that such as a working educational system helping that.
Pidgins and Creoles emerge, and a Creole wins. This can be watched in Papua New Guinea, where Creole languages like Police Motu and Tok Pisin are becoming the de facto standard of communication.
Something else happens. The case of English is not as clear as my points 1.–3. suggest: While the majority language finally won, it was heavily impacted and changed by the languages of the conquerors (Normans and Danes).
EDIT Stable multiliguality. Quite rare in the wild, but Switzerland with a coexistence of Swiss German, French, and Italian is an example. The fourth language of Switzerland, Romansh, is under pressure, despite attempts of language preservation.


What symbols should I use for phonemes when I have many vowels? Most conlang examples I find in tutorials use a small set of vowels, but the one I'm working on has 13 and I'm having trouble finding the simplest transliteration to work with. Here are the IPA symbols:

Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]      | [u]
[y]      |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]
[ø]      |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯]     |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]      | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |

My keyboard only allows me to type àâäùûüèêëéìîï but not œɛɑø or the diacritics used in the IPA for nasal vowels and diphthongs.

(EDIT: Note that my question really is all about the transliteration I'll be using for practical typing. Sure, I can just use fancy unicode symbols for my actual writing system in the end if I want to, but copypasting symbols isn't very practical for writing long texts.)

The language uses a (very simplified) subset of Quebec French for sound inventory, but I wanted to avoid using too many digraphs or diacritics which French relies on heavily. I know I can always come up with a custom font and writing system later on which brings in more glyphs for vowels, but I need something practical to use during conception.

I'd be interested if you have a generic answer as to what your own process is when you have a similar problem or a specific suggestion in my case.

My incomplete solution for now is this (updated to include jknappen's suggestion which I like for the German-style umlaut). I could add a macro to my text editor to allow for tildes, but I still need to figure out how I want to distinguish [œ] and [e] or [a] and [ɑ].

Front    | Back
---------|----------
[i]  /i/ | [u]  /u/
[y]  /ü/ |
---------|---------
[e]      | [o]  /o/
[ø]  /ö/ |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] /ä/ |
[œ]      |
---------|---------
[a]  /a/ | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃]      | [õ]
[ã]      |

One possibility is to use German-style umlauts, i.e., ü for /y/, ö for /ø/, and ä for /æ/; you can keep the symbol œ for /œ/. I'd recommend against having both ae and œ in the writing system because of confusability. The choice of tilde for nasalisation is a good one, IMO. The most problematic case are the two different kinds of a-sounds, but there are some African languages just going with a and ɑ (and there is also an uppercase letter for the ɑ in Unicode, it is named Latin Alpha). All the symbols are readily available in Unicode and should not pose insurmountable difficulties in text processing.


How do languages manage to make sense with a free word order? Many of the world's natural languages, and some conlangs, have a free word order, so that the words can be put in any order with it still making sense.

If they can't use word order to indicate the structure, what strategies do they use instead? Have any conlangs used strategies not found in natlangs?

It should be noted that in addition to relying heavily on one strategy, it's also possible to mix strategies is various different ways, relying on different strategies to back each other up. For example in Fore(Kainantu-Goroka(TNG), PNG), there is a hierarchy like this, where if each strategy fails, the one lower in the list can be relied on. I'm putting "case" in quotation marks, because the "ergative" case marker in Fore is not really a case-marker as much as it is an often optional and occasionally prohibited derivational marker:

Verbal agreement
Animacy
"Case"-marking
Word order

Point 2, "animacy" means that referents higher on the animacy hierarchy are interpreted as being more likely to be agents, as such the NPs in a sentence like aebá nanita: yaga: amiye he pig food 3sg:gave_to:3sg "he gave the pig food" can be freely reordered without a change in truth value, despite the fact that the verbal agreement is wholly inadequate to disambiguate the roles of the participants. Only in the few instances where the other strategies fail is word order a primary disambiguative device.

There are some languages where a primary disambiguation strategy is marking on the verb whether such a hierarchy a broken or not, called direct/inverse marking (this can disambiguate situations with two 3rd persons of equal animacy as well by considering e.g. topicality or obviation).


Have language regulators ever made concessions and changed the language to adopt naturally occurring changes? A few conlangs have language regulators or academies. Have any of these ever been faced with naturally occurring linguistic change and changed the official version of the language to match?

Please consider only grammatical, morphological, or syntactic changes, and not simply the inclusion of new words, as I expect that to be very common.

It would seem that Esperanto is one such that not only has done so, but actually has an Academy to guide and legitimize the process.
This article makes note of several, such as new ungendered pronouns (ŝli < ŝi au li; ri = they s.) and the degendering of formerly masculine nouns (dentisto =/= male dentist).
I'm sure that these proposals are coming from the community of speakers themselves and are being agreed to by consensus before any kind of official blessing.


How does mood relate to tense and aspect? Moods are often intertwined with tense and aspect. In fact, the triad is commonly referred to in linguistics as tense-aspect-mood or just TAM. Aspect and tense are relatively straightforward, but how does mood relates to them exactly?

(For tense and aspect in general, see this answer)

I'll summarize what Mark Rosenfelder says in Advanced Language Construction, pp. 146-156 (some of which referring back to Mood and Modality, F.R.Palmer 2001).

First we start with modality, which is concerned with the status of the proposition, i.e. "how true it is, and whether it's subject to obligations and intentions". In contrast tense (at its most basic degree, ignoring semantic expansion) is interested to whether it happens before or after now, and aspect with overall temporal relation (hence the possibility of contrast between tenses within a given aspect).

Rosenfelder describes Palmer's classification of modals like so:

Factual

Epistemic: speculative, assumptive & deductive
Evidential: reported, sensory & deductive

Deontic

External: obligative, permissive, commissive
Internal: abilitive & volitive

(Most discussions bundle all of the "factual" branch as one "evidentials" category because languages with evidentials tend to have only one of the two sub-branches, which is also why deductive is listed twice without being self-contradictory)

Basically working from that, a mood is what happen when modality bundles up with tense, and there it gets a little messy. Terminologically, Rosenfelder believes that indicative/subjunctive and realis/irrealis systems are separated more clearly by geography (specialists in given language families prefer one or the other) than grammatical reality.

In any case, realis/indicative applies protoypically to real events, irrealis/subjunctive to "less real" stuff. What is included in each category may vary considerably (future events and imperative may categorize in either one, for example, depending on individual languages). Conditionals are irrealis in virtually all systems, but in Indo-European linguistics are traditionally treated as a third mood separate from both indicative and subjunctive.

In practice, moods are often more of a semantic division within the verbal paradigm owing to the lack of a separate marker for them (in most European languages I'm aware of, for example). When an explicit irrealis marker exists, it often takes over separate marking for tense and aspect, that is, there will be no overt marking of the subcategories like future vs. imperative (both only irrealis) or past vs. present (both realis). Manam is such a language (how unusual this is is unclear from Rosenfelder's writing).


What is an overview of sound changes? One of my works-in-progress is a language called Proto-Oreadin.  As the name suggests, it is a proto-language, which eventually I am hoping to expand into a family of languages.  Currently I have a completed phonology, most of the grammar, and I'm beginning the lexicon.  My plan to create these daughter languages is by using the zompist.com sound change applier app to evolve the words of my language into multiple daughter languages, and then apply semantic shifts, borrowings, and other pieces of worldbuilding context—but that's a separate issue.

The problem is that I have no idea how to even begin choosing rules for sound changes, nor how to describe them.  I've looked at examples of natural languages, but I'm not sure what's going on with the notation, nor have I been able to identify any patterns that will help me create realistic sound changes for my languages.

How are sound changes notated?
What are the general categories of sound changes?

To answer part a), the basic syntax of the notation goes like this:

  [before] > [after] / [context]

The part after the slash gives the situations in which the sound changes occur. For example, the hypothetical spirantization of [b] to [v] intervocalically could be notated as follows:

  b > v / V__V

This rule indicates that b becomes v when surrounded by a vowel (V) on each side. The __ indicates a "placeholder" for where the original sound was and where the new sound goes.

Some other common notations are # for word boundaries and [+feature] or [-feature] to indicate the presence or lack of a certain feature respectively. For example, final-obstruent devoicing in e.g. Russian could be

  [+stop][+voiced] > [-voiced] / __#

where the __# means that the stop in question (__) is at the end of a word (#).

As for b), the best way to get an idea for what kinds of things generally happen in languages is honestly probably just by reading about lots of different languages and seeing what tends to happen. Some of the most common general processes are:

Lenition, probably one of the most common sound changes, in which a "softer" sound becomes a "louder" sound. (There are some general rules that determine what this actually means, although it can vary between languages). A few examples are intervocalic flapping in many English dialects (/bɛtər/ → [bɛɾɚ]) and the pronunciation of /b, d, g/ as fricatives or approximants, roughly [β, ð, ɣ], in most contexts in Spanish.
Assimilation is another frequent sound change. This occurs when features of a given phoneme are influenced by the phonemes around it. For example, in English and Spanish, /n/ becomes [m] before bilabials and [ŋ] before velars (e.g. <rainbow> [ɹ̠ʷejmbow], <concordar> [koŋkoɾðaɾ]).
Similar ideas are umlaut and vowel harmony, in which vowels change depending on other vowels in the word. Remnants of Germanic umlaut can be seen in English, e.g. foot/feet, and vowel harmony is prominent in e.g. Turkish, where all of the vowels in a word have to harmonize (for the most part) so that affixes have several different forms (for example, the genitive suffix is [in] after front unrounded vowels, [ɯn] after back unrounded vowels, [yn] after front rounded vowels, and [un] after back rounded vowels).

While there are general patterns, it's also important to note that some sound changes seem completely illogical and random, and just... sort of happen. The most infamous examples are the ruki rule, where [s] became [ʃ] but only after [r, w, k, j] (?), and strangest of all, Proto-Indo-European *dw to Armenian erk (???). So you really have a lot of room for creativity here, while still being able to be naturalistic.


Designing a vocabulary for geographical features I want to draw a map of a fictional world resembling Europe in climate and basic geographic features (so there are rivers and lakes, alpine mountains, mittelgebirge, marsh lands and bogs, some plains and forests).

I am thinking of dithematic words (similar to typical endocentric compound words where the second part denotes the general feature and the first part gives a distinguishing detail), so I need words for river, lake, mountain, marsh, bog etc. and some determining words.

However, I want the words to look naturalistic and not overly schematic. What techniques can I use to make the geographical features look naturalistic?

EDIT: Assume that I have already designed a phonology for my conlang stub, and that I have already some phonotactics and candidate root words. What I am interested in is some natural looking variation of the names to generate.

The first thing is: Design not only one word for each geographical feature, use several of them. To give some examples from a natural language (German in this case): A mountain may have a name in -berg (which is frequent in the mittelgebirge) but also -spitze, -horn, -kopf, or -kuppe. Some beacon mountains have names of their own without an element meaning "mountain" (e.g., Brocken, Großer Belchen, Kahler Asten, or Eiger). Similarly, cities are not just -stadt "city", but there are also cities in Germany with names in -burg, -berg, -heim, -reut, -furt, or -hafen.

The second thing is: Hydronyms are special. The names of larger rivers often reflect an older substrate and are not taken from the current language of the place and don't have any transparent meaning. Examples are Potomac, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri in the USA or Thames, Rhine, Rhône, and more in Europe.

With this in mind, the names on the map should show some interesting variation.


"Turing-completeness" in conlangs Programming languages & programs are often said to be Turing complete when it's possible to simulate any Turing machine with it.

I'm now designing a constructed language for my game and I want everything to be possible to say in it. How can I know if the language is "Turing complete", that  is possible to say/describe everything using it? What would be the requirements for it? What words does the language need to have to be able to speak in it?

For now, everything I thought about:

It's possible to describe the past, the present and the future (ex. "I bought a car", "I'm buying a car", "I will buy a car")
It's possible to describe something (words?) (ex. "The cat is red")
It's possible to describe nearby area/terrain (ex. "There is a tree")
It's possible to describe plans (ex. "I want to buy a car")
Any more ideas?

The best parallel for Turing completeness in human languages is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The NSM proposes that there is a limited set of basic semantic concepts which all human languages have, and which are not reducible to other concepts. They call these "semantic primes", because you combine them to get all other meanings, and because they can't be broken down. The list of primes, currently numbering 65, is a work in progress as new primes are proposed and evaluated, but after over 45 years of work on the theory the list has proven to be very reliable and new primes are only rarely proposed.

The NSM is a good guide therefore for judging whether a conlang is "complete" - whether it would be as capable for expressing human thought as any natural language. If a conlang has vocabulary items (they can be words, affixes, or phrases) for each of the semantic primes then I would judge it to be complete.


Is there anyone that has a conlang as their first/only language? It seems that people generally use constructed languages in very limited circumstances, or within small communities that speak the language.  Thus it seems to me unlikely that one of these languages would every be someone's first or only language.

Are there any documented cases of a child learning a conlang as their first language?

Yes. According to Wikipedia, Esperanto has 350 native speakers (data 1996). There is also a story about a linguist only speaking to his son in Klingon, but even though the child picked it up somewhat, later in life the child stopped speaking Klingon. Currently, he doesn't.

Also, see Esperanto native speaker AMA on reddit and a blog I enjoyed about speaking Esperanto natively.


Do any conlangs have verbs that change form depending on the object? Are there any examples of constructed languages that have verbs with different forms depending on the object of the verb?

Yes.

I am not familiar with any “well-known” conlangs, but a quick search reveals that Klingon verbs inflect for both subject and object. This is a phenomenon called polypersonal agreement and it is very common in natural languages, and so it is only expected that it would also crop up in several conlangs. Among them, for example also my own, for which I just yesterday put up a puzzle that involves decoding the verbal system here.

I cannot currently think of any examples of a language which inflects for only the object, but it’s a rather low-hanging fruit and I cannot imagine that it has never been done before.