What is the difference between tense and aspect? Many conlangs contain tense, some contain aspect as well or instead, and much of the recommended reading for conlangers assumes that you know what tense and aspect are and what the difference between them is. What actually is the difference, and how would a word or morpheme be classified as a marker of one or the other?

When discussing tense, aspect, and mood, it's important to distinguish a given language's grammatical markers from the abstract concepts being described. Thus, linguists use the words temporal reference and aspectual reference to describe the abstract ideas being described, while the words tense and aspect are reserved for when such reference is marked grammatically.

The simplified explanation for tense and aspect usually given is that tense describes when an event occurs and aspect describes the internal temporal structure of an event. However, this doesn't give a ton of easy answers to "is this grammatical form marking tense, aspect, or both?" Formal semanticists actually have a relatively simple framework for how temporal reference and aspectual reference are defined, the basic concepts of which can be helpful when designing your conlang's own tense/aspect system.

The Neo-Reichenbachian Model

Imagine a timeline:

Earlier                                  Later
<-------------------------------------------->

Now, imagine there are two spans on that timeline (the fact that they're spans is important -- nothing is truly instantaneous). The time when you make an utterance is called the utterance time (or UT), and the time that you're talking about is called the topic time (or TT).

Temporal reference describes the relationship between the TT and UT. Past temporal reference is when the TT precedes the UT; future temporal reference when the TT follows the UT; and present temporal reference when they overlap.

Past:
    <-------------------------------------------->
                |--TT--|          |--UT--|

Future:
    <-------------------------------------------->
          |--UT--|                  |--TT--|

Present:
                            |--UT--|
    <-------------------------------------------->
                     |-------TT-------|

This seems pretty intuitive -- if the section of the timeline you're talking about precedes the time you make the utterance, you'll use the past tense; if it follows it, you'll use the future; and if they overlap, you'll use the present. Simple, right?

But what of aspect? Well, aspectual reference isn't as transparent at that. To describe aspectual reference, we'll need to pick out a third span that timeline -- the time when the event being described actually happened. We'll call this the eventuality time (or ET).

"But wait!" you might object. "Isn't that the same as the topic time? If I'm describing something that happened, surely the time I was talking about is the same as the time that it happened." However, there is a difference, and it's exactly this difference that gives rise to aspectual reference. Consider the English past perfect in a sentence like the following:

  Yesterday he had gone to the store.

The English past tense includes past temporal reference, and we've established that this means that the topic time is before the utterance time -- something which is explicitly confirmed by the temporal adverb "yesterday" giving us a more specific topic time. But when does the him-going-to-the-store happen? Probably not yesterday, right? Well, this is because perfect† aspectual reference is when the eventuality time precedes the topic time -- aspectual reference describes the relationship between the eventuality time and the topic time. It for this reason that the past perfect is used by English speakers for the past-in-past.

Past Perfect:
    <-------------------------------------------->
          |--ET--|    |--TT--|     |--UT--|

But you can also have the present perfect, right? Well, let's combine our descriptions of the present tense and the perfect aspect and see what we come up with.

Present Perfect:
                            |--UT--|
    <-------------------------------------------->
        |--ET--|     |-------TT-------|

Here, the topic time and utterance time overlap, which is why you can't say something like "Yesterday he has gone to the store." However, the eventuality time precedes the topic time, so you're describing an event that happened in the past in relation to the present. And indeed, this is how we see the present perfect used in English.

This is far from the most interesting thing aspectual reference can do, however. Let's discuss the popular aspectual references, perfective and imperfect. For those who don't know, perfective and perfect are two different things. Perfective is often described as simply viewing an event as a point on a timeline, and imperfect as viewing it as a span. How do we define this as a relationship between eventuality time and topic time?

Well, a simple way people do it (ignoring a few other related thorny semantic problems that few here will care about) is by defining the perfective as when the eventuality time is contained within the topic time and the imperfect as when the topic time is contained within the eventuality time.

Past Perfective:
               |--ET--|
    <-------------------------------------------->
        |-------TT-------|        |--UT--|

Past Imperfect:
               |--TT--|
    <-------------------------------------------->
        |-------ET-------|        |--UT--|

This results, at least formally, in the same sort of perspective shift we try to intuitively describe as changing the event from a "point" to a "span".

Note that tense and aspect vary between languages a lot, and even related languages can't be counted upon to have the same semantics here. After all, the French passé composé, while very similar in form to the English present perfect, does not share the same semantics (it's more of a perfective). Additionally, while a given language's system of tense and aspect will often combine a tense and an aspect in a certain inflection (such as the perfective past tenses in many European languages), this doesn't mean the two are wed cross-linguistically.

In fact, I hope this answer has given some conlangers the tools to try and invent their own tenses, aspects, or combinations of the two that they haven't themselves encountered cross-linguistically. Be creative!

In short:

Temporal reference is the relationship between the utterance time (when you say something) and the topic time (the time relevant to the discussion at hand).
Aspectual reference is the relationship between the topic time (see above) and the eventuality time (the time when the event being described actually occured).
Tense is the grammaticalization of temporal reference.
Aspect is the grammaticalization of aspectual reference.
Things called "tenses" in natural languages (as well as in conlangs, to be honest) are often conflations of tense and aspect (and sometimes even mood, but we're not here to talk about that).

†When I refer to perfect aspectual reference, I'm actually more specifically describing what is known in semantics as the existential perfect. Perfect forms in English and many other languages include other types of perfect aspectual reference (universal, resultive, etc.) that differ subtly in their semantics, and other aspectual and temporal baggage as well; this is, however, probably not particularly interesting or relevant to most people here at this moment.


Are there any Conlangs using Chinese characters? The Chinese character system is one that is universal to many Chinese dialects. Two people can pronounce the same character in two different ways, but when writing to each other it is intelligible.

Have people used this opportunity to create a sort of conlang dialect of the language, and in doing so making up entirely new sound for the characters, and perhaps even making up new grammar too. I could image it even being a serious bastardizing of the characters too take on new meanings that would bring it closer to, say, a European language. Like how one uses the Latin alphabet to create a conlang.

Toki pona is a minimalist language with a ~125 word vocabulary that can be written using a proposed system of either Chinese or Japanese characters, although it is officially written in the Latin alphabet.
On tokipona.net, click on "Word List" in the group of links at the top for the full list of words, or compress for ways to write it using different alphabets. 言良り良去私 (toki pona li pona tawa mi)='I like toki pona.', literally 'toki pona is good to me'.


If 'Amlonde' were a word in Sindarin or Quenya, what would it mean? I learned that in the real world Amlonde is a given name of South African origin (I cannot be more precise on linguistic background or meaning). But the word looks suspiciously like a word from Tolkien's Elvish languages. I looked it up in Helmut Pesch's dictionary, but it is not attested there.

So my question is: Can this word be analysed in Sindarin and/or Quenya, and what would it mean than?

EDIT: Some clarifications on possible answers: I am not looking for arbitrary suggestions of a meaning. Any analysis shall be based on published material on Sindarin and Quenya, including diachronic development and lesser known dialects. An answer that the word is in fact impossible in Quenya or Sindarin with some argument why this is the case is also a legitimate answer.

There is actually a neat analysis in Quenya according to a Tolkien Dictionary Site:

am-: is a prefix that means "up"
londë: means "(landlocked) haven"

So you can imagine it describing a place that once was a harbour, but through geographical changes has become landlocked, and is possibly on a hill or mountain. Or it could be a refuge, a safe place in the mountains.


Famous a priori auxilary languages? Most auxiliary languages I know of, especially Esperanto, are primarily a posteriori—that is, their vocabulary or grammar are derived from other existing languages, and most are fairly Eurocentric. While many might have a priori grammar, but not vocabulary, I have yet to see another language that is entirely a priori—not derived from other languages. Do any such languages exist? Note I am talking about languages designed to be an international auxiliary language.

Short answer: I've never seen or read a description of what you're seeking.

Long answer: What you're seeking is a most unlikely beast, reason being...

Generally speaking, auxiliary languages seek being completely or nearly completely a posteriori for reasons of simple expedience. Common design goals of an auxiliary language are ease of learning and simplicity of use.  These goals are best met when vocabulary and grammar are familiar to the target audience.  This is why Interlingua and Esperanto are considered "easy" languages to learn and have gained considerable user communities, with Esperanto boasting a small community of native level speakers.

What you're describing, a completely a priori invented language is most usually the domain of the artistic language, the engineered language and the philosophical language. With the exception of the philosophical inventors, most glossopoets are not interested in propagandising their languages as auxiliary languages.  Occasionally a philosophical language inventor will propose his language as a means of general communication, but this is usually done from a position of ignorance as to how language works (accomplished auxiliary language proponents are usually quite well aware how language works in the wild!).

Auxiliary languages tend not to be classified as a priori simply because they impose layers of difficulty that run contrary to the usual design parameters of the genre. However, it can potentially be argued that a priori invented languages can become auxiliary languages after a fashion and if the appropriate stars align. For example, it may be that Klingon has seen some use as an ad hoc auxiliary language if, for example, two groups of Star Trek fans who do not share a language in common other than Klingon happen to meet at a SciFi convention.

Needless to say, even if there were an actual auxiliary language that is classified as purely a priori, it certainly isn't famous. Otherwise, we'd know about it!


How to say, 'Haters gonna Hate' in Toki Pona The closest I could find was

  jan ike | awen pali e ona | pilin ike tawa
  enemy | continue | hate

But I've not figured out if that the right way to combine those phrases

The consensus answer (thanks Oliver Mason) for how to translate Haters gonna hate into Toki Pona is the following:
 tenpo ale la jan ike li ike

Tenpo ale la translates as at all times and captures the sense of inevitability in haters gonna hate in English. It also serves to rule out other possible readings such as the tautological bad people are bad. Here ike is used as "commit evil acts", one of which is presumably hating.

I interpret Haters gonna hate as a phrase for dismissing all criticism as inevitable or unfounded regardless of its content.
I don't think hate in this context literally refers to feeling hatred/enmity, but to hating on, which is not quite the same thing and covers things like insults and ridicule.
I think we strip out a lot of the detail of haters gonna hate and get something reasonable.
jan    ike    li   ike
person bad    PRED bad
bad    people are  bad

Since jan ike is so much broader than bad person in English, I think this does a good job of conveying the intent of the expression. People predisposed to ridicule or insult you are going to ridicule or insult you regardless of what you do.

The right way to combine the phrases you gave above would be
jan ike li awen pali e pilin ike tawa.

However, there are a few constructions in there I'm not sure about
li   awen  pali
PRED keep    do

I don't know whether you can use awen like this as an auxiliary verb of sorts to mark habitual or progressive aspect, as you seem to be doing here.
pilin   ike  tawa
feeling bad  towards

I don't know whether you can use an objectless preposition attributively like this. My guess is yes since prepositions besides e (if analyzed as a preposition) do not form a distinct word class in Toki Pona. I'm having trouble finding an explicit citation for the non-existence of prepositions as a distinct word class, this is the closest I can find.


Language with nominal TAM and no verbs: Ergative or tripartite? I'm working on a language with nominal tense–aspect–mood (TAM), i.e. inflecting nouns instead of verbs. So, a sentence like "the woman sees the man", could be roughly translated to something like "the womans see the man".

This type of sentence shows an ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment: the subject of a transitive sentence is marked (ergative case), while the direct object is unmarked (absolutive case).

I also like the idea of removing verbs as a class (since tense, aspect and mood can be expressed by the subject) and "reclassify" those words as nouns. So "the womans see the man" could actually mean something like "the woman makes sight of the man", in the sense of "making eye contact". In other words, having ungrammaticalized verbs.

Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

So my question is: does the language need a marking for the direct object (accusative case), having then a tripartite alignment? Or can I simply get away with only TAM marking (absolutive case) and no markings for verbs or direct objects?

I have the feeling that I'm forgetting something. I think that the idea of "not having verbs" makes sense to me, since many languages like English, French or Spanish actually lack of inflections and employ only word order, but I might be wrong.

What do you think? Thanks!

In your example:

  Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be
  "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man"
  are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

...sight is a verb.

In order to have a verbless phrase, you'd want something like "the man within the woman's sight", making it clear you're using the noun "sight" and not the verb "sight".

However, and I've seen this pointed out, if you end up needing particular constructions in order to indicate actions, all you're doing is making an overly complicated verb.


unique agglutinative root system? The language of The Old Ones is described as "an agglutinative speech
with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages" (H.P.
Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time", Chapter 4). What techniques
could a conlanger use to devise a unique root system for an
agglutinative language?

In my opinion, it reflects, if anything, more on Lovecraft's lack of linguistic understanding than anything about the language of the Old Ones, since the roots in human languages get pretty damn ridiculous, so it's really hard to imagine something "utterly unlike any found in human languages". You would have to design a phonology produced by speech organs completely unlike those of humans to approach this.

Where I to tackle this, I would go for a system not unlike Arabic, but where the root is constituted of a set of vowels instead (with maybe "consonant harmony"?).

Alternatively, Mark Rosenfelder's Kebreni has roots where vowels are swapped around a whole lot, and I doubt that metathesis as a base derivational system exists in any human language.

Generally, I'm not sure designing something literally outside the boundaries of what the human mind can handle is by definition possible, which is what Lovecraft truly was after in his poor description attempt.


How can I make my conlang's borrowings naturalistic? As something of a follow-on to my question about “naturalizing” conlangs, I’m looking for any information - actual tools would be nice, too, if available - for “borrowing” from one conlang into another in a realistic manner. There would be a number of subsidiary questions for this, some of which I include here:

Assuming that I’m borrowing from sourcelang to destlang, should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form (ignoring issues of orthography relative to different writing systems)? By destlangize, I mean things like…

Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?
Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?
Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?

What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow?
What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?

(At the suggestion of a commenter, I wish to make it clear that I am interested in this issue primarily with respect to “naturalistic” conlangs and natlangs.)

Should I destlangize the word, or leave it in its “native” form?

In natural languages, borrowed words are almost always "destlang-ized" to some degree, but it won't necessarily always to the same degree. Even within the same language, often some borrowed words will be more integrated into the language than others. The more recently a word was borrowed, the more speakers of the language will treat it as a "foreign" word and be willing to make exceptions for it, but as its use becomes more and more common, speakers will inevitably begin to treat it as a native word if it doesn't fall out of use.

Does the borrowed word take on the conjugation/declension pattern of destlang?

Sometimes, sometimes not. There are examples of both in natlangs.

The English verb "to google" has been borrowed into many languages, and it seems to typically conform to the conjugation patterns of those languages. Even in Japanese, a language with a famously closed class of verbs, borrowed "to google" as a verb ググる(it may have become a verb after being borrowed as a noun, but either way, it's quite remarkable).

Yet it's also possible for exceptions to be made. This happens with some English noun borrowings (most English speakers won't try to pluralize edamame or Pokémon with English plural morphology), but not with others (many English speakers will pluralize zucchini as zucchinis, and you'll pretty much never heard zucchino).

In my experience, verbs are more likely to take on the native conjugation patterns than nouns are native declension patterns, but I don't have any data to back that up cross-linguistically. A borrowed word is definitely more likely to be conjugated or declined like a native one the longer it has been in the language (the pedantry about pluralizing Latin borrowings in English is an exception to this, but that's more because of the social prestige associated with having studied Latin).

Does the borrowed word get re-spelled to conform to destlang’s orthographical conventions?

This really is a case-by-case thing. If the language uses a completely different writing system, almost definitely, but sometimes the orthographical conventions won't be the same as native words. Japanese uses katakana for borrowings, for instance, and English borrowings from Japanese and Chinese tend to follow whatever romanization scheme was most popular when they were borrowed, even if the pronunciation is pretty opaque. For instance, the Chinese word 道 was borrowed as "Tao" in English based on older Chinese romanizations, even though the Chinese word now romanized as dào and the English derived word "Taoism" is more often pronounced /ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm/ in English (though a spelling pronunciation /ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm/ has arisen due to this).

Does the borrowed word’s pronunciation get changed to conform to destlang’s phonemic conventions (e.g., elimination of consonant blends, all syllables must end in a vowel, etc.)?

Almost always yes. While sometimes educated speakers or upper-class speakers will try to pronounce a borrowed word with its "original pronunciation" rather than its borrowed one ("gyro" is a good example of this), even those pronunciations are almost always somewhat changed to fit the destlang's phonology better, and often they aren't even closer to the pronunciation in the sourcelang. How exactly the word is altered to fit the destlang's phonology depends on the particulars of the borrowing situation, however.

What sort of methods exist for choosing which words to borrow? What causes a “native” word to fall out of use in favor of a borrowing, or, contrariwise, why would both the “native” word and the borrowed word stay in use?

I've combined these questions because I feel there's a lot of overlap in the answers. Often, words are borrowed to fill a semantic gap in the destlang, which is why words for new technologies are so often borrowed (think of how many languages borrowed the word "television"!)

Borrowings are also often used to refer to the "versions" of certain things from the part of the world that speaks that language -- consider how anime, a generic word for all animation in Japanese, was borrowed into English as a word for a style of Japanese animation, or how English borrowed "chai" from the Hindi/Urdu word for tea, चाय (cāy) / چای (ćāy) to refer to tea with certain spices based on Indian recipes.

Also, sometimes words are borrowed because they carry some social value seen attractive by the speakers of destlang. Maybe destlang speakers think sourcelang sounds refined and sophisticated, and so upper-class destlang speakers borrow words from sourcelang to sound fancy. Of course, this sort of situation depends on a lot of social and sociopolitical factors wherever the languages are spoken.


From known languages, what are the expected features of a Generation Ship Language? Pandorum is a generation ship movie. Generation ships are a fairly big sub-genre of sci-fi where people live for many generations in a ship while travelling to a distant star.

The movie Pandorum did not use a conlang at all, despite the ships residents devolving into a tribe of "primitive" natives. What sort of features would we expect to find after 1000 years of travel in space, using real world island languages as a guide?

The idea that language would not change over 1000 years of travel in space is absolutely ludicrous. 1000 years ago was before Middle English existed. Massive amounts of language change can occur over such a long period of time. Even very conservative languages change significantly over such a long period of time. No language will remain unchanged after 1000 years. Based on natlangs, it's more likely than not that the language will not be mutually intelligible with its predecessor after 1000 years.

How exactly the language changes depends a lot on the details of the situation -- how multicultural is the ship? What is the lingua franca of the ship? How are other languages viewed relative to the lingua franca? If there is enough of a divide in where different languages are used (such as if everything for official purposes is in English but a great number of native, say, Spanish speakers speak Spanish with their families at home), you may end up with diglossia arising. If there are significant numbers of multilingual people on these ships, you can bet there will be a lot of borrowing from minority languages into the dominant language, at least in less formal contexts. As in real life, there may be stigma against using such borrowings.

Honestly, language change in this situation won't likely differ that much from language change anywhere else. A conlanger has a lot of freedom in how they want to deal with the diachronics in this situation. The only real difference is that you don't have any chance of outsiders suddenly arriving and bringing with them waves of loanwords. ...Well, at least, you probably don't.


Maximizing the distinction between affirmative and negative sentences What are some strategies for making affirmative and negative sentences as distinct as possible?
The motivation for this question is an annoying pair of words in English: can and can't. They frequently sound very similar in rapid speech.
There's also one attested language, Wyandot, described here, that appears to lack dedicated negative morphemes and instead has an irrealis and a contrastive morpheme that can convey negation in certain contexts but don't have to.
If you wanted to do the opposite and maximize the contrast between afifrmative and negative sentences, what are some strategies for doing so?

To maximize, it seems like at least you'd want to associate negation with:

independent words
conjugation/declension
your loudest phonemes
distinct word order
distinct prosody

You could have a number of independent markers/words as mentioned above.
Turkish has verbs which always negate, and Turkish verbs usually end the thought: e.g., 'değil' for "is not [noun or adjective]"; 'yok' for 'there is not [something].' For negating verbs, it has an infix as part of the conjugation. Reflecting back your point about 'can't,' as a non-native speaker, I can miss this negative infix sometimes. This, even though it is higher on the sonority hierarchy (easier to hear) than the plosive T you point out in 'can't.' (It uses M and a variable vowel.)
So, if you wanted to change a conjugation to express "not," say, instead of a T or even an M, you could try using the loudest sounds in your set (usually wide-mouthed vowels?), ha ha.
You could change word order for negated sentences. We do that for questions. I have noticed. Have you noticed? [rhetorical ;) ]
Also, you could reserve a certain, unusual tone, pitch, stress pattern, etc., for negating, like how it's pretty easy to hear the lilt we put at the end of a question? Not that this is exclusive of the other options, but imagine to say, "You can't have a muffin," you deepen your voice as much as you can and borderline-sing, "You can have a muffin." If people associated deep voice with negation like we associate that rising tone with questions, that'd be pretty hard to miss.


Transliterating toki pona to hebrew What would be the best choice of niqqud to transliterate toki pona vowel sounds using Hebrew? I'm trying to use the niqqud that would be closest to what is normally used in Hebrew. Should 'e' be אֶ or אֵ? Should o be וֹ or אֹ? Should 'a' be אַ or אָ? Is there a real difference between them or is it important? I would normally omit the niqqud, since toki pona is minimalist & somewhat ambiguous anyway, but I would prefer to use the most phonetically accurate niqqud, when I do use them. There is stress on the first syllable, but no long vowels. would it be unusual to write 'pana' as ַפָנה to show that the first 'a' is stressed?

Normally I would write 'seli' as סלי, but with vowels would סֶלִי or סֵלִי be better?

toki would be טוקי, but should I want to use vowels, should I use טוֹקִי or טֹקִי

I did find this tool for transliterating to hebrew, but it ignores niqqud altogether. 'O' is always written as 'ו', & 'E' isn't written at all, even at the end of a word. At the beginning of a word it's just 'א'.

The vowel sounds are:
a: father
e: get
o: more
i: peel (I would use either ִא or אִי. Is there a difference?)
u: food (I would use וּ. Would it be better to use אֻ instead?)

Here are a few ways to deal with the problem of marking the vowels unambiguously:

Style 1 - normal Hebrew orthography

Considering the fact that there are no length distinctions or gemination, a transliteration into Hebrew would normally use exclusively these diacritics to represent the vowels:

a אָ *
e אֵ **
i אִי
o אוֹ
u אוּ

* add ה at the end of a word; and after letters other than א, add א in the middle of a word

** add ה at the end of a word

In addition, on נ (the only possibly coda in Toki Pona) the diacritic נְ would be used (except as last letter of word). Stress isn't normally marked even in vowelized Hebrew (apart from liturgy or texts for learners), and it's entirely unnecessary in Toki Pona, since there is no phonemic stress.

The advantage of this is that it follows ordinary conventions and is most easily intelligible to someone reading in Hebrew. The disadvantage is that implementing this kind of orthography is far from algorithmic and includes unnecessary information in the spelling.

Style 2 - minimalistic Hebrew orthography

Since Toki Pona is a minimalistic language, I think that a different transliteration convention would better suit it, to avoid redundancy in writing it. There is precedent for a more minimalistic transcription in the convention used for transliterating, e.g., Akkadian into Hebrew. Modifying it to suit Toki Pona's vowels, we get something like this:

a אָ
e אֵ
i אִ
o אֹ
u אֻ

Style 3 - Yiddish orthography

A third option, if you want to minimize use of diacritics, is to follow Yiddish spelling conventions. The only required diacritic is to distinguish between the two forms of א. The Yiddish convention of using וו instead of ו as a consonant can be safely ignored in Toki Pona. And actually, since there are no o/u minimal pairs in Toki Pona, you could get rid of all diacritics if you instead choose to use ו for both vowels, at the price of losing some information (style 4).

a אַ or א
e ע or ע
i אי
o אָ or ו
u ו

Sample differences

Roman x Hebrew x Minimal x Yiddish x 4-vowel
a     x אָ      x אָ       x אַ       x א
akesi x אָקֵסִי   x אָקֵסִ    x אַקעסי   x אקעסי
anpa  x אָנְפָה   x אָנפָ    x אַנפאַ    x אנפא
mije  x מִייֵה   x ֵמִי     x מייע    x מייע
mute  x מוּטֵה   x ֵמֻט     x מוטע    x מוטע
seli  x סֵלִי    x ִסֵל     x סעלי    x סעלי
toki  x טוֹקִי   x טֹקִ     x טאָקי    x טוקי
wawa  x וָאוָה   x וָוָ     x ואַואַ    x ואוא


Are there works composed in Quenya or Sindarin by people other than Tolkien himself? Are there any works composed (e.g., peoms, songs, short stories) in either Quenya or Sindarin by other authors than JRR Tolkien himself?

I am already aware of some dialogues in the Lord of the Rings films, these do not count here as an answer.

Attolma
Poems in Quenya
Some more poems in Quenya
Pater Noster in Sindarin
Poems in Sindarin

NB: I am not competent to guarantee that any of these works are "correct" or "grammatical".


Klingon: does anyone actually use pIqaD, or is the Latin transliteration sufficient? Having just started the Duolingo Klingon course, I'm wondering if anybody is using the Klingon writing system (pIqaD) at all, or whether the Latin transliteration is always used?

As the characters look pretty hard to learn for someone with a Western background, I tend towards the transliteration only; I guess one issue is a cursive (ie handwriting) script, as the original characters seem hard to write by hand.

The official Klingon orthography according to the Klingon Language Institute is the Latin transcription. It is what Marc Okrand, the language's creator, developed and uses.

The Klingon script used in from Star Trek: the Next Generation on, known as the Okuda script (Michael Okuda was the set designer for Next Generation), is used, but it's worth noting that while the sounds of Klingon have been mapped onto these letters, the movies and shows just put random jumbles of letters on signs and things (this may not be true of Star Trek: Discovery, however -- I've heard they may actually have translated the signage). It's also not the only Klingon script to have been used -- according to an article in HolQeD, the Klingon Language Institute's journal, the 1980 U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual (now out of print) featured a completely different Klingon script, though this one was a mere way of encoding English text rather than being mapped onto Klingon phonemes (Okrand did not publish The Klingon Dictionary until 1985, after all).

Given this sort of background, you can by no means take for granted that the Okuda script is the "real" Klingon pIqaD, even though it will be occasionally used to write Klingon. The Okrand transliteration is the only truly official orthography.

In any case, resources and activities written in Klingon are more often written using the official Okrand transliteration than with the Okuda script -- the Klingon subtitles on Star Trek: Discovery, for one example, are in the transliteration (can't make Unicode add new characters for such things, after all!) In general, you'll be fine with just the transliteration -- in fact, you may have an easier time, as the transliteration is easy to type. That said, no one will judge you if you use the Okuda script because you want the writing to feel less Terran or something.


Can programming languages be categorized as conlangs? Would it be correct to say that the majority of computer programming languages (such as functional or procedural) are the form of constructed languages? If so, what makes it a constructed language in this case?

Let say a "Hello, World!" program as the example.

  Hello World! by Brian Kernighan, from Artsy's Algorythm Auction based on a 1978 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version. 2 lines of C Code. -
   Wikipedia

No. "Constructed languages" on this site refers to artificially created languages for intelligent beings, not machine languages. In the absence of another qualifier a "language" is, as I wrote on another site, a system for communicating propositional and conceptual information to other beings. This is different from communication. Programming languages can definitely be used to communicate - and they carry meaning - but that doesn't make them languages. Purely referential communication (using symbols to directly refer to things in the world without metaphorical extension) is not enough to be a language, language must be able to communicate abstract concepts that are beyond any sensory or referential basis. Programming languages are systems for encoding instructions for machines, and not general purpose concept exchange systems.


Term for the converse of "instrumental" We can make a noun for the instrument of an action, by taking the verb for the action and adding an instrumental marker.[1]

For instance, in English, we can add "-er",[2] like so:

  I cut the box with a box-cutter.

Conversely, we can make a verb for an action, by taking the noun for the instrument and adding... what could you call it?

In English, we don't necessarily have an affix, since we can just verbalise the noun, like so:

  I will knife you with my knife.

...but we might use "-ise" this way, at least jocularly:

  I will hammerise him if he comes at me with that knife.

So is there a term for such a marker, indicating the use of an instrument? "Usive"? "Usual"?

[1] I was going to call this "instrumentive", on the pattern of "agentive" and "patientive", but the word doesn't appear in any dictionary I checked. It is used in some books on linguistics, though, per Google Books.

[2] This is also the agentive suffix in English, but I'm imagining a scenario where the agent and the instrument are clearly distinguished.

I think you're conflating a/o confusing a couple different things here.

First, "cutter" is not "instrumental". (At least in English!) In English grammar, -er is (among zillions of other uses) the morpheme that indicates "agent noun"; so, cutter means "thing that cuts". It is the actual agent by which cutting happens.

The Instrumental Case is a grammatical function that indicates the means by which the agent or subject of the verb does the action:

I-subj cut-verb the.box-obj (with.a.box.cutter)-instr.

If English had case endings like Latin, you could see the difference easily:

Puer-NOM cistam-ACC cultello-ABL secavit-VERB

Latin uses the ablative case to denote the instrumental case, due to ancient case syncretism of the old ablative, locative and instrumental cases.

-ise / -ize, in English, is a grammatical morpheme that indicates the word is a denominal verb. This means that the verb in question is made from a noun. We already know that English weirds. It verbs nouns at the drop of a hat.

I will hammer him if he attacks me with the knife.

Your example, "I will hammerise him if he attacks me with a knife", doesn't actually make sense in context. This is because -ise doesn't mean "use something as an instrument", it means "turn something into something else".

Immigrants ought to be Americanised through educational programmes.
The machine pulverises large pieces of stone into gravel.

I think your best bet, as far as "converse" of or "opposite" of the instrumental case, would be the

noninstrumental case, which I just made up.  It does what the instrumental case does, only in the other direction. Essentially, the speaker denies the instrumentality of the named article.

Puer-NOM cistam-ACC cultellei-NONINST secavit-VERB

I considered "deinstrumental", but that's already a thing (a noun or verb made upon an instrumental form).


Is the alien writing in "Arrival" really a language? Can we form custom sentences? Here are few examples of words written in the alien language from "Arrival" (film):

Image source: Pinterest.

Does this alien writing have some logic in order to construct some custom meaningful sentences?

The short answer: no, the language from Arrival is not a full conlang.
The logographs were designed by artists and designers, and, while some components of the logograms were assigned meaning, they did not define enough of its rules for it to be possible to make new symbols with definite meanings.
They did hire linguist Jessica Coon to consult on the film, and she annotated printouts of the logograms so the set designers would know what to put in the background and on the whiteboards (If I remember correctly, they consulted physicists for similar work as well). They also had Stephen and Christopher Wolfram provide some analysis and design the computer program used to analyze and generate the logograms in the film.
However, in the end, the movie was not for linguists or conlangers, so they did not design it as a fully fledged conlang—given that it's supposed to be a mystery they don't quite solve in the film, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
These articles might interest you if you want more information.

How Arrival's Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Alien Alphabet
'Arrival' nails how humans might actually talk to aliens, a linguist says


Syntactic word that carries no meaning - is there a name for that? Is there a name for words that exist purely for syntactic reasons and carry no lexical meaning?

Reason:
Some forms of sentence in my language don't have verbs, but information such as tense and mood are indicated by affixes on the verb. So, in cases where you need to modify the verb, a meaningless verb fills in; the verb carries no meaning on its own, existing just to hold affixes.

Example:
Here is a sentence without a verb. No verb is used for just applying an adjective to a noun. Adjectives are applies directly to the noun.
Mopifa-di-mopi
Life-(adj-on)-wood
The wood is alive.

But (for example), past tense is marked by a suffix on the verb so it needs a verb to attach onto; ta "stands in" for the absent verb, giving -to (past tense) something to attach to.
Ta-to mopifa-di-mopi
(null)-(past) life-(adj-on)-wood
The wood was alive.

"Ta" is the word I'm talking about.

One general term would be function words; these are words that do not carry any lexical meaning, but are used to link content words together and clarify their relationships (eg in the case of prepositions or conjunctions).

It is indeed difficult to see exactly what you have in mind without any examples; other possibilities would be particle, which is eg used in Japanese to mark certain grammatical features (such as 'direct object').

Some people use the term empty verb for the auxiliary in phrases like to have/take a shower, where you could just use to shower directly; here you can add the tense feature to the auxiliary as in She had/took a shower.

As an aside: there are no words that "carry no meaning". If a word has no meaning, it is redundant, and would not be there at all. In linguistics you distinguish between lexical meaning and functional/grammatical meaning: the former you would find in a dictionary definition, whereas the latter is not always easy to put into words, as it describes relationships between elements in and structure of a sentence.

Update after example: Hard to say. A particle usually doesn't change its form (at least in English and most other natural languages I know), so the fact that the marker -to is attached to it would rule that possibility out in my view. That would leave empty verb as the most likely option, but then it is not really necessary when the marker is not used. I guess it would still be my preference, though.


Good cultures to base a robotic language off of I've created a race of nomadic robots, but am having trouble finding a culture to base their language off of. They're peripatetic nomads, meaning they travel around offering goods and services to any friendly people they come across, but most nomadic peoples of this style either use the languages of their country, or the language is too fluid and natural to be suited for machines.

Humans in such kind of situation devolop a Pidgin specifically for trade. It is arguably easy not only for humans but also for robots: no complicated ingredients in syntax nor morphology, and also usually a simple phonology.


Dealing with core argument loss from syntactic applicativization If a language limits its relative clause heads to core arguments of a verb such that item 1 below is ungrammatical, it may become necessary within discourse to use an applicative to promote an auxiliary argument into object position as in item 2:

1) *  1 see Bill with the telescope that is on the hill
      "I see Bill with the telescope that is on the hill."

2)    1 see-APP the telescope that COP on the hill
      "I see with the telescope that is on the hill."

However, since this is getting done for syntactic reasons, it is not desirable to lose entirely the normal object. How can I reintroduce Bill to the sentence while maintaining the applicative construction that allows the telescope to be relativized?

I don't think there are any attested languages that limit the role that relative clause heads can have in the matrix clause. The accessibility hierarchy is a theory explaining the capabilities of various languages to produce relative clauses where the head has specific roles in the relative clause.

If we take your example and exchange  the matrix and embedded clauses, you get the following examples. I'm changing the first example also to use a resumptive pronoun.

1a)  *The telescope that I see Bill with it is on the hill.

2a)   The telescope that I see-app is on the hill.

If you want to reintroduce the demoted argument Bill, you can use an adposition or a case. Suppose you reuse the preposition towards for this purpose.

2b)   The telescope that I see-app towards Bill is on the hill.

One interesting choice would be to use neither cases nor adpositions.

2c)    The telescope that I see-app Bill is on the hill.

Since the embedded clause already has a subject and obliques can't be relativized, that forces the interpretation of Bill as an oblique.


Why do I have such a problem with my conlangs being ugly? This is a perpetual problem I have and I find it quite annoying. Yes, I know its kinda subjective, but that doesn't change the fact that, to me at least, my conlangs are always hideous.

For a recent example, my most recent conlang has agglutinating pronouns. For instance, the word for 'I' is 'ta' and the word for 'we' is 'tai' (pronounced like 'tie', minus the aspiration of course). That's not too bad. The issue is when I add the nominative marker -s: 'tas' and 'tais'. To me, 'tais' just sounds hideous.

In past I think it was because I used the voiceless velar fricative far too often. But even if I don't include the phoneme my language sounds hideous, and artificial to the point that its sounds robotic. Though the latter is probably because I have a hard time NOT making conlangs 'logical'.

There are of course nice-sounding conlangs out there, and even natlangs, but I just can't seem to imitate the sound of any other language for some reason, and I don't get why. And I specialize in phonology, so I don't get why I can't get the sound right. Even if my conlang has the exact same phonemes, allophony, intonation, and phonotactics as a natlang, it will sound completely different and I can't figure out why. I mean, how can I screw up the latter? What am I missing?

What you need is to adjust your phonotactics. Since you mention it in your question you apparently know what they are, but you aren't using them to get the sounds you want.

You say you find "tais" to be hideous, but you don't explain why, so let's say you don't like the way that a diphthong sounds in a closed syllable. (If this isn't the case, take this as an example for whatever the problem is.)

Once you've located the problem, you have to determine how to eliminate it by making rules for new phonotactics. You can think of lots of ways:

The diphthong becomes a monophthong: tais > tas,  tis or tes in a closed syllable (tas might be problematic since it creates ambiguity with the singular). Or, alternatively, two monophthongs: tais could be [ta.is] instead of [tajs]
A new consonant could be placed to separate the diphthong: tais could transform into tayis, maybe taus could be tawus (based on a simple rule of adding y before a front vowel and w before a back vowel)
The diphthong could monophthongize and simple color the next consonant: tais could be pronounced [taɕ]. You could create a pattern with other consonants, e.g. tait > [tac], taid > [taɟ]
Even if some of these options are problematic in your case (maybe you don't want to "contaminate" your agglutinative language), you could still retain the phonemes /tajs/ and just have some of these options as allophones of it (so e.g. [e] or [e:] could be an allophone of /aj/ in a closed syllable, [ɕ] could be an allophone of /js/)

What you need to do is just determine what sounds ugly to you and create phonotactic rules that cover whatever the problem is.


Is Toki Pona a fast language? There are well-known and notable differences in speed for natural languages: While a fast language like Spanish is spoken at a speed of about 6–7 syllables per second, a slow language like German, English, or Mandarin is spoken with 3–4 syllables per second. Language speed correlates with the amount of information carried by a syllable: The more information in the syllable, the slower the language speed.

Since Toki Pona has only a limited number of very simple syllables, limiting the amount of information that they can carry, and it seems to have a speech community as well: Is it spoken at a fast pace like Spanish (or even faster) in real life? Or is it spoken at a slow pace like English?

Based off the audio file from this website, and the audio files from this website, we can infer that Toki Pona is a "fast" language. It uses 6 - 8 syllables / second, except with punctuation, where you delay for the same time as English.

Some Youtube videos stick to the contrary, but their speed is slow to make it easier for nonexperienced Toki Pona speakers.


Which types of conlangs are the most popular to construct? For example, can it be shown that there are more auxiliary than artistic conlangs? Note that I'm not talking about use, but about which type is more popular to create. The answer can address any level of specificity; i.e. it could address types, subtypes, very broad generalizations, etc. (I'm afraid I don't know very specific categorizations to be more clear; feel free to edit or suggest better words in the comments.) I would prefer answers focused on conlangs from more "modern" times; say, starting with the introduction of Tolkien's languages forward.

If no answer is possible because the data doesn't exist or isn't organized in a way that allows for such an inventory to be taken, that is also acceptable.

My experiences are largely the same as those of Adarain, though I have access to a data-set that perhaps better shows the predominance of artlangs, as I moderate a moderately sized discord server in which users can request roles that show what kind of languages they make and at the same time get a fancy-coloured name. Many users have more than one roles and the roles are not mutually exclusive either. The first number is the amount of people who have the role, the second number is the amount of people who have it as their primary colour:

A posteriori: 24, 8
A priori: 73, 19
Artistic: 66, 43
Auxiliary: 11, 8
Engineered: 16, 16
Joke: 8, 4
Secret (for secret communication): 12, 4

These numbers clearly show the dominance of a priori artistic languages. Additionally, all but one of the people with auxiliary as their main colour are relative beginners, though this a rather small sample and it may come down to server culture as much as anything.


Is the language of The Gostak more than just relexified English? Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.
But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

So begins The Gostak, an Interactive Fiction game based on the classic phrase "the gostak distims the doshes".
The game is filled with words with no meaning in English, but which are used consistently, such that the player can at least learn their functions and relationships, if not what they actually mean. The grammar of the text seems to just be normal English, but are there places in the game where it starts to transform its grammar as well?

Well,

it is pretty clear that this is just relexified English, just look at the function words: at, the, of, where, but, is, with, .... Also the syntax is 1:1 English syntax, and even the inflections (plural in -s, perfect participle in -ed, third person singular present tense in -s) are the original English one. All in all, it sounds like a strange kind of English slang.


Are there speech communities for Tolkien's Elvish languages? Has anyone tried to put one of Tolkien's Elvish languages Sindarin or Quenya into everyday conversational use? I can imagine fan groups doing this, but I can also imagine big problems with the available vocabulary (and potentially also with the available grammar).

Are there documented events where Elvish was spoken conversationally?

Any additional information (e.g., on how to deal with the vocabulary) are also welcome!

It is not possible to speak Tolkien's Elvish Languages.

This may confuse some people, considering how much nonsense there is online for "how to speak Tolkien's Elvish" (there's even a wikihow article about it). But according to the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, an organization dedicated to the study of Tolkien's invented languages, even Quenya and Sindarin are simply not learnable:

  The vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Tolkien's invented languages, even of Quenya and Sindarin, are far too incomplete to allow its casual, conversational, or quotidian use. As Tolkien himself stated, "It should be obvious that if it is possible to compose fragments of verse in Quenya and Sindarin, those languages (and their relations one to another) must have reached a fairly high degree of organization — though of course, far from completeness, either in vocabulary, or in idiom" (Letters p. 380). Indeed, it was never Tolkien's intent to make Quenya, Sindarin, or any of his languages into spoken, written, auxiliary, or otherwise "useful" forms; rather, they were done for purely personal enjoyment. As Tolkien wrote, "It must be emphasized that this process of invention was/is a private enterprise undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my personal linguistic 'aesthetic' or taste and its fluctuations" (ibid.)

-- the aforementioned E.L.F.'s FAQ, emphasis mine

An article entitled "Elvish As She Is Spoke" goes into more depth about the history of Tolkien's Elvish and the problems with trying to learn to speak it.

"But don't they speak Elvish in the films?"

The lines and lyrics from Tolkien's languages in the Peter Jackson films were written by David Salo, a linguist who wrote a grammar of Sindarin. He built the dialogue he needed on the limited available attested vocabulary, coining some new words himself but with the goal of making it intelligible to any viewers familiar with Tolkien's languages. To quote him:

  Why is there Elvish in the movie? Why did Peter Jackson care enough to strive for some accuracy in the way language is presented? (...) The Elvish in the movie is addressed to the minority of viewers who know something about the languages. And what are they going to want to do when they hear the Elvish sentences?  They're going to want to figure out what they mean, and why they mean what they mean. Part of my intention, my particular vision and contribution to this movie, was to create sentences which would be intelligible to the people who study the languages (...) I'm enormously happy to see some people saying based on their knowledge of Elvish, great or small, that they recognized and understood some of what they heard on the screen. That's great - that's exactly the kind of effect that I was looking for.

Here is a collection of the translated dialogue from the LoTR films, with the attested and unattested vocabulary in each line listed. As you can see, a lot of it is attested in Tolkien's works, but there is quite a bit that needed to be invented for the film by Salo. There have been other projects based on Tolkien's Elvish languages in the past as well, but the real fanatics tend to view these as "pseudo-Elvish", since anything not invented by Tolkien can't really be said to be part of Tolkien's Elvish. That said, there's nothing wrong with seeking out resources for and learning these expansions on Tolkien's conlangs -- just know that calling any one an authentic recreation of Tolkien's Elvish is pretty flawed.

Tl;dr

  Since Tolkien never fixed his languages firmly or described them completely enough to provide any such comprehensive and corrective model (that never being his goal), ... it is consequently a further inescapable fact that no one has or ever will be able to speak Quenya and Sindarin, any more than anyone will ever (again) be able to speak, say, Etruscan or any other fragmentarily-attested non-living language.

Look into the E.L.F.'s resources (though they do seem a tad outdated) if you're interested in further exploring what information we have about Tolkien's Elvish.


How can boustrophedon writing systems be published? Boustrophedon writing systems are ones in which the direction of writing swaps after each line.

At least one conlang is intended to be written as a boustrophedon (in that case vertically.)

Now if you manually typeset a document your could reverse the lines, but that doesn't allow for plain text boustrophedon writing, nor does it allow for reflowable text (such as on a webpage.)

Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon? There are multiple text direction control codes in Unicode, can any of them be used for boustrophedon text? Or has anyone proposed a control code to be included in Unicode, or designated one in a Private Use Area?

Or are there any other practical ways of publishing boustrophedon text (because a custom PUA code wouldn't be supported by most software) such as some kind of CSS filter for a webpage?

Are there any ways of encoding text in Unicode to mark it as boustrophedon?

From the unicode.org FAQ about bi-directional text[1]

  The Unicode Standard does not provide formatting codes to signal boustrophedon text. Specialized word processors for ancient scripts might offer support for this. In the absence of that, fixed texts can be written in boustrophedon by using hard line breaks and directionality overrides.

I don't know of any online method of inputting reflowable boustrophedon text, however there seems to be a LaTeX package[2] availible that offers automation of the process at least in LaTeX documents, both for "regular" boustrophedon and the Rongorongo style where glyphs are rotated rather than mirrored, which would allow for relative ease of publishing pdf documents at leat.


Is it attested for noun classifiers to be coopted for directionality? A noun classifier marks on the verb some information about the form of one of its arguments. For example, Atili has a handful of "stationary" classifiers that produce semantic distinctions:
Emanyo bu-vahkin-us azven<k>o.
Emanyo ball-cook-P/3;PFV cow<3>
Emanyo cooked the meatball.

vs
Emanyo mal-vahkin-us azven<k>o.
Emanyo board-cook-P/3;PFV cow<3>
Emanyo cooked the brisket.

Atili also has "motile" classifiers that indicate manner of motion:
Yeredol many-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol run-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol runs to the beach.

vs
Yeredol ib-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol climb-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to.
Yeredol climbs (down) to the beach.

Is it attested for a language to use a similar system for encoding whether motion is towards or away from the speaker, as in the following hypothetical examples?
Yeredol ko-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol go-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol goes (away) to the beach.

vs
Yeredol kom-az-a ranhal<k>o la.
Yeredol come-go-P;IPFV beach<3> to
Yeredol comes to the beach.

Such a system is indeed attested! And not only that, it’s actually surprisingly common. Usually the category is called andative and venitive, for ‘going’ and ‘coming’ respectively (though I prefer ‘translocative’ and ‘cislocative’). Here’s an example from Komnzo (Döhler 2018):

Yfathwroth.
They hold him away.
y-          fath     -wr -o   -th
3SG.MASC.α- hold.EXT -ND -AND -2|3NSG

And one from Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (Oto-Manguean, Anderson 2017):

Rata rsily rityug Lia Petr gyia.
Every morning Petra goes and cuts flowers.
rata  rsily   r-  i-  tyug Lia  Petr  gyia
every morning HAB-AND-cut  Miss Petra flowers

Many languages have even more elaborate systems, distinguishing many different directions beyond just ‘coming’ and ‘going’. For instance, Yagua distinguishes ‘upriver’ and ‘downriver’ directions (Payne 1997):

Sąąnaa suutiimuníí.
Wash him/her downriver.
sąąna -a   suuti -imu -níí
2DL   -IRR wash  -DR  -3SG

While Southern Pomo has an exceedingly large array of around 15 directional suffixes, which may be applied to verbs of motion (Walker 2013):

ʔapʰ꞉alméčʼin
climb down from above
ʔapʰː -alamečʼ -Vn
carry -DIR     -SG.IMP


How to translate the word "lost"/"loss" into Klingon? Say for instance I want to say something like, "I'm looking for bears and the lost sheep." I would think that would be to use the genitive case, making something like:

  mIl'oDmey chIlpu'ghach       DI'raqmey   je  vInejtaH
  bear-<pl> lose-<perf>-<nom>  sheep-<pl>  too <I-them>-look for-<continuous>

But that looks kind of odd, and I've heard that using the nominalizer suffix "-ghach" is often discouraged, and should replaced by using sentences as objects if possible. Would

  mIl'oDmey DI'raqmey   'e'  chIlpu'     je  vInejtaH
  bear-<pl> sheep-<pl>  that lose-<perf> and <I-them>-look for-<continuous>

work and make more sense?

Also, how would "I can bear the loss of sheep." be translated? My first guess would be to just reverse the noun-noun-construction so that "DI'raqmey" is the genitive noun:

  DI'raqmey   chIlpu'ghach      vISIQlaH
  sheep-<pl>  lose-<perf>-<nom> <I-it>-endure/bear-<ability>

Would some sort of subclause make more sense here too? Just the same one?:

  DI'raqmey    'e'  chIlpu'     vISIQlaH
  sheep-<pl>   that lose-<perf> <I-it>-endure/bear-<ability>

I would translate it as I am looking for bears and I am looking for the sheep that are lost. — I don't know the word for sheep, so I assume from your question that it's DI'raq:

  mIl'oDmey vInejtaH                 'ej DI'raqmey  chIlpu'bogh       vInejtaH
  bear-<pl> <I-them>-look for-<cont> and sheep-<pl> lose-<perf>-<rel> <I-them>-look for-<cont>

See: Klingon Dictionary 6.2 (Complex Sentences) and 6.2.3 (Relative Clauses)

Your second sentence, I can bear the loss of sheep. — I would opt for a subordinate clause, If I lose sheep, I can bear it.:

  DI'raqmey  vIchIlpu'chugh          vISIQlaH
  sheep-<pl> <I-them>-lose-<perf>-if <I-it>-bear/endure-<ability>

See: Klingon Dictionary 6.2.2 (Subordinate Clauses)

Disclaimer: I'm not a Klingon expert, so this might not be 100% accurate.


What to do when my conlang has a word that means something in one of my languages? This is a bit subjective problem. As a Hungarian who knows English, I have the high ground when it comes to making up words, as I can mush the English and Hungarian words together with some outliers (usually Japanese-sounding words) and things I make up. However, first, let's take a look at a composite I created with my WIP Swadesh list:

rén+kile = red feather = rékile/régile

Red Feather is a rare genetic mutation among tengu (based-off of Japanese mythology;  anthro birds, six-limbed variant). Those who are born with this mutation have striking red plumage, yellow/golden beak and eyes, along with an unusual pointy crest, similar to that of a cockatiel. Rékile is often translated to phoenix in Common (British English). While the resemblance is hard to deny, rékile tengu don't set themselves on fire, nor revert into younger forms.

Now, régi means old in Hungarian. And Ré is Hungarian for Ra, who just happened to be a god with a bird's head and is associated with the Sun (which is a deadly laser). Rékile is still passable, but some words are so reified in my mind that even lookalikes carry unwanted connotations.

who? (“?” not) = námó (I keep hearing nani)
what? (“?” not) = názá (Názáreti Jézus)

dog = gadór (csador Oh no! or csahol I'd prefer to go with that one)

I know it sounds and is dumb, but I can't concentrate when I look at my language and I can still see the anime references and Hungarian words in my mind. I don't want to throw out Hungarian entirely, but I'm still afraid people will pick up these accidental collisions of my languages. How can I minimize the number of those collisions?

These sorts of coincidences are somewhat inevitable. Just try to accept that there's a limited number of ways to arrange sounds in your language, and some will sound similar to words in other languages.

When I was trying to learn Hungarian, I came across a number of words that reminded me of words I knew in English and other languages. Some examples:

 repülőter "airport" /  re-polluter
 csillag"star" /  ceiling
 és "and" /  es "it is"
 a nap "the sun" /  a nap
 a bolt "the store" /  a bolt
 öt "five" /  otto "eight"

I also had a recent case on the CBB where I posted my conlang Atili's word for "citrus" zilu, and immediately got asked if I borrowed that word from Kankonian (another conlang) tzelua "citrus." I hadn't. CBB thread

Then there is the fairly well-known case of the Mandarin filler phrase 那個 / 那个 nèige, which sounds to many English speakers like a racial slur. See this posting on the Chinese language stack for more details: Very frequently used word in Mandarin that sounds like "nica" or "nigah"


IPA for Voiced Velopharyngeal Stop? A conlang I am working on contains the nasal syllabic consonants [m̩] and [n̩] fairly frequently.  It seems like it would be a natural step for the language to develop what I would call a voiced velopharyngeal stop occurring before those syllabic consonants are used some of the time, to add emphasis.  This stop is formed by stopping air from flowing into the nasal cavity with the velum while the mouth is in position to form the following consonant, and then releasing it into the nasal cavity.  Think of it as trying to make a “g” sound through your nose only.

Ex:  [ĩɲ'tⁿn̩] => [ĩɲ't̚?ⁿn̩], where the ? represents the consonant in question.

Note:  This is not a glottal stop, though that sound can occur as well in this language.

I have been trying to transcribe the language with the IPA since it helps specify pronunciation of the weird vocabulary of sounds, but I cannot find a symbol in the IPA that represents this sound, even though it seems to me fairly plausible for a language of this type.

The closest I have found is the symbol for a velopharyngeal fricative [ʩ] in extensions to the IPA.  However this still is clearly distinct from the sound I am describing.  Additionally, it appears to only occur as a speech defect and never as a proper consonant in a language.

What is the best way to transcribe this specific sound using the IPA?  Is there an allotted symbol that I just could not find?  What would be the best way to go about phonetically transcribing the sound if there is no exact symbol in the IPA?  Is there a better approximation than [ʩ]?  Additionally, what about the unvoiced counterpart?

I apologize for any mistakes in my use of the IPA, I am still learning.

What I think you meant to ask is to create a stop consonant by stopping air flowing through the nasal cavity while the mouth is open, then releasing it only through the nose while the mouth is closed.

The problem is that having no airstream block in the mouth can mean one of two things: producing an oral vowel, such as /a/, or making no sound at all. There isn't a plosive-like sound for stopping air flowing through the nose, as there is with the mouth (in multiple places). The way you can test this is by producing a sound like /aãaãaãa/, in which you are repeatedly stopping the nasal airflow, and yet the vowel sound remains continuous because there is no stop of air in the mouth. So a stop created solely by blocking the nasal passage is impossible.

The example you give for this sound is [ĩɲ't̚?ⁿn̩], where the [?] is supposed to represent the unknown sound. This has a [t̚] with the diacritic for no release after the consonant, and a nasal release [ⁿ] after it. However, there can't possibly be anything between [t̚] and [ⁿ]. The [t̚] means that when the consonant ends, you are still blocking both oral and nasal airflow, and the [ⁿ] means that you are releasing nasal airflow while keeping oral airflow closed. There is no articulation possible in between these: if there were an oral release, the diacritic on [t̚] would have no meaning, and there could no longer be a nasal release [ⁿ] after it. The only possibility is to add another consonant, or extend the [t] as a long consonant [tː], which continues to block all airflow.

Going through your definition, nasal release seems to fit (another possibility that fits just as well is a pre-stopped nasal, if the nasal consonant is supposed to be more prominent than the stop):

  This stop is formed by stopping air from flowing into the nasal cavity with the velum

Stopping airflow is a property of a stop consonant. A stop consonant stops the airflow in the mouth as well as the airflow in the nasal cavity. (Stopping only the airflow in the nasal cavity is impossible here, as explained above.)

  while the mouth is in position to form the following consonant

Simultaneous articulation is possible, but it depends on what the following consonant is. If the following consonant is in the same place of articulation, that means there's no change.

  and then releasing it into the nasal cavity.

Releasing the stop only in the nasal cavity means producing a nasal sound. Nasal release (and nasals in general) would continue to block the airflow in the mouth, but allow it to pass through the nose.


How to read One Ring inscription? The following inscription appears on the One Ring in The Fellowship of the Ring book:

Which in Black Speech can be written down as:

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

However, the inscription is using different letters. I've checked Tengwar, but I can't find any of the words (e.g. ash, nazg, etc.).
How should the inscription be read exactly, in other words, how it's transformed from the above fiery letters into latin letters?

You are likely having a hard time reading these tengwar because of three big problems:

the style itself is such that the tengwar are slanted and written
calligraphically
the mode used to write them is unusual and not common for Elvish languages
there are no spaces between words!

The page linked should provide assistance; the issue is that the tengwar and tehtar behave (like in several modes) as in an abugida: the vowels are diacritics to the "host" consonants, and a null consonant is used for vowel-initial words (even when the words aren't separated by spaces).


Creating Fictional Slavic Place Names I have a very simple question regarding a small problem I cannot find a single satisfying answer to. I am trying to create a country with a prominent Slavic culture. In my story, an alien world has been colonized by the nations of Earth. Respectively, each name their lands and territories how they see fit and in their own language. As for this country, it was colonized by the Slavic nations and is rightly given a Slavic sounding name. In fact, the entire continent it exists on shares the same name.

Now, my problem rests in the fact that I'm American and know little Russian except simple greetings. I want to create a genuine sounding Slavic name for the land but do not know where to start. Honestly, I do not understand the Slavic tongues' structures and vocabularies. I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this question so I'll be blunt. Simply, I want to know how to create a genuine sounding Slavic place name. Particularly, I want a name that describes the land itself (just as Belarus means "White Russia") or named after an important figure (just like how the U.S. state Pennsylvania is named after William Penn).

Unfortunately, the English Wikipedia does not have an article on Slavic toponymy yet, the best attempt I am able to find is Bulgarian placename etymology giving at least some hints. You can find interesting Slavic roots to play with in the article on Slavic given names.

Additionally, there are some Slavic based conlangs out there, you can honour one of them by employing it in your fictional world, to drop just names Slovio, Interslavic, see also Pan-Slavic language for an overview.


How do you call a "stillborn language"? And by "stillborn", I mean a dead language that never really lived to begin with: a modernized version of an archaic language frozen in time, or an all-out archaic language (with archaic grammar and vocabulary), but with modernized pronunciations (and all the vowel shifts and consonant shifts applied). Like Classical Latin, which was probably never spoken in daily life (in contrast with Vulgar Latin).

Or just simply a language that is based off an actual natural language, but highly stylized and artificial, having had diglossia with its parent-language since the start, never having been an actual spoken language at any point in history.

You're describing a couple different and not totally related things with different terminology used for each:

Classical Latin is an example of a literary language, a language used not really in speech but used to communicate through writing.
Modern Standard Arabic, one of those artificial languages based off of a natural one but not really being a spoken language. It's very frequently affected by diglossia, and not really used in natural settings. It's usually referred to as simply a standardized lanuage, and also qualifies as a literary language.
Hebrew as spoken in daily life in Israel would qualify as the first type you described, a modernized version of an old language that was resurrected after death. It would be referred to as a revived language.


By what criteria can we say that a conlang has a functional speech community? On another question I commented that I doubted that if Lojban had a functional speech community that its purity would last very long.

By what criteria can we say that a conlang has a functional speech community?

Here are some ideas, which when taken together would give a good idea whether a language has a strong functional speech community.

If a conlang has thousands of fluent first language (L1) speakers, that would be clear evidence, but even Esperanto, the most spoken conlang, has only up to 1000 Esperanto speaking families. Ideally those L1 speakers are able to meet and speak with each other regularly.
Even if the speakers are second language speakers, if there are so many speakers that distinct dialects have formed (without that being part of the design from the beginning) then that evidence of language change is evidence itself of healthy speech communities.
If there is friction between speakers of the language and the language's academy or regulators then that shows the language is starting to take on a life of its own. If the language regulators have ever had to make concessions to the speakers, then that shows the speech community is healthy.


Is there an existing constructed language that once was dead? That means, are there any such conlangs that exist today but were once declared as dead or not in use by any community?

Since conlangs by their very nature don't start out with any speakers, and in most cases the author is not immediately a skilled user of the language, conlangs tend start out dead, and so under this definition almost any conlang with a speaker community would technically once have been dead.

However, going by "dying" as having a community, then losing it, reliable data is somewhat hard to find, as a small remainder of a community (which could be as little as two individuals' private postal correspondence) can be very hard to locate especially in pre-internet days, though it seems that Idiom Neutral, published in 1902, once had largely fallen out of use, but has recieved a recent revival by enthusiasts in a couple of internet usergroups and blogs.


Did a majority of followers of Ido indeed switch over to Occidental? The Wikipedia article on Occidental/Interlingue says (in this version):

  According to the Occidental magazine Cosmoglotta in 1928, a majority of Ido adherents took up Occidental in place of Ido.

Obviously, Cosmosglotta isn't an unbiased publication venue. Is there any independent evidence that this switching of language actually took place?

I'm as pro-Occidental as they come (it's the only auxiliary language that I support) but I came across that article in 1928 during my typing up the archives of Cosmoglotta and that article is nothing more than Ric Berger wishful thinking. He unfortunately spent just as much time attacking Ido as he did supporting Occidental, and kept on proclaiming it to be moribund and ready to collapse for some 20 years.

Here's the article in question that he wrote in 1928 on the Ido conference from which he concluded that Ido was on its last legs:

http://cosmoglotta.pbworks.com/w/page/132587775/Cosmoglotta%20A%20053%20%28oct%201928%29 (Title: Raport del Occidental-Observator Ric. Berger al Association «Cosmoglotta», Wien.)

So the answer is no. However, it's also true that the majority of the Occidentalists at that time were once Idists, from Berger to Gär to Ramstedt to Pigal to de Guesnet and all the rest. There was definitely a large influx from Ido to Occidental, and Occidental as far as I can tell was the most active auxiliary language after Esperanto by the late 30s and into the 1940s. Matejka and Berger had a lot of back-and-forth in the 1920s to early 1930s until Matejka decided to move over to Occidental, which he stayed with until his death in the late 1990s. He's probably the most prominent example of a major Idist who went full in on Occidental. But Berger hadn't taken into account the other source for new Idists, namely new users who weren't satisfied with Esperanto but still liked the overall concept (i.e. the people that thought that Zamenhof almost got it right).

Anyhow, I removed that sentence from Wikipedia last year when going through the Cosmoglotta archives because it certainly isn't backed up by anything besides Berger's wishes.


What are the defining traits of a Euro-centric conlang? I know that a Euro-centric conlang is a conlang based mostly on Indo-European grammar, or more generally a conlang that is written from a worldview (conscious or not) that the "normal" language is Indo-European, but what are the traits of a Euro-centric conlang? What are the things that are a dead giveaway that the language is Euro-centric?

It could be a grammatical curiosity specific to Indo-European, or maybe something like a conlang being based around one non-Indo-European language feature as a kind of "gimmick" (although these are just unfounded speculation, seeing as I don't know the answer).

The term "Standard Average European" (SAE) pretty much covers it, and has been around since the 1930s. Haspelmath listed a number of typical "Euroversals" in a portion of the 2001 book Language Typology and Language Universals. These are listed in a more readable-to-laymen way in the wikipedia article on the subject. Haspelmath included as true Europeanisms (that is, features that are part of the SAE Sprachbund) only features that fit the following requirements:

Most of the "core" European languages possess it.
Nearby languages (Celtic, Turkic, etc.) lack it.
Eastern Indo-European languages (Armenian, Iranian, Indic languages, etc.) lack it -- this prevents us from merely calling it a feature of the Indo-European language family as a whole.
It is not found in the majority of the world's languages.

The Europeanisms identified by Haspelmath that fit this criteria include:

Definite and indefinite articles
Post-nominal relative clauses with resumptive relative pronouns
The (transitive) perfect formed with "have" plus a past participle
Experiencers coded as nominative subjects
Passive formed with a participle plus "to be"
A preference for anticausatives over causatives.
Dative external possession
Negation with negative pronouns and positive verb forms (e.g., "Nobody comes" instead of "Nobody won't come.")
Particle comparatives
Relative-clause based equative constructions (e.g., "tan Z como X", "so Z wie X", "as Z as X")
Subject person marking used strictly for agreement (i.e., the verb is inflected for the person/number of the subject but the subject cannot be dropped)
Different forms for reflexives vs. intensifiers

He also identified several other features that were common among this Sprachbund but were not as well-documented as the above, such as the verb fronting of polar interrogatives (i.e., turning "I have done it" into "Have I done it?" to make a yes/no question), an inflectional marker for the comparative, and several others -- these are also included in the linked articles.


An Elvish word for squirrel Is there an Elvish word for squirrel?

According to my latest information from Helmut W. Pesch, Das große Elbisch-Buch, Bastei-Lübbe 2009, there is no such word.

My best try is the Quenya word nornoyaulë (literally "oak cat", from norno "oak" and yaulë "cat", formed after a German dialectal word).

peccuvo
peccuvo (Quenya): Squirrel, lit. "nut-hider" [pec 'nut' + kuvo 'hider']
(source: Parma Eldalamberon #22 2015).


Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works? Is there any constructed language that eliminated all fallacies related to how language works, that made extinct all fallacies that could be made extinct by creating a language from scratch to avoid them?

Some example of those fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Verbal_fallacies

Looking at the list of fallacies you quote, I would say this is not possible — most of them have got nothing to do with the language itself, but with the way it is used. It's a bit like making a kitchen knife that you cannot use to hurt someone with.

The Fallacy of Composition is related to reasoning. I cannot think of any way that a language can make that impossible. As long as you have expressive power in the language to express anything, you can express incorrect reasoning as well. The same goes for False Attribution, which is about how you use language, not anything in the language itself.

Loki's Wager refers to the absence of clear definitions or boundaries. The world is not clear-cut, so language cannot be like that either. Defining where the head starts and the neck ends is unrelated to language. Unless you want to accompany each word in that language with a book that defines exactly what it means.

Even the Fallacy of Accent is a problem, unless you take stress patterns out of the language, which then is a lot less usable, as stress is a good way of expressing nuances of meaning.

Syntactic ambiguity is about the only one which could be avoided through careful language design. But most 'usable' languages have some of that as well, especially if they are reasonably complex.

Most of these verbal fallacies are to do with the way you use language and express meanings, which you could do in any language. Syntactic ambiguities crop up more often than you would think, but unless you are a linguist, you won't even notice most of them, as it is usually very clear which meaning is the appropriate one in the context.

So, my answer is no, because it is not even possible to do that.


Has anybody created an Arabic inspired shorthand for english? I'm thinking of a system where all fricatives look similar to each other, all plosives look similar, etc; the same base shape could be used for similar sounds using the dots placed above/below letters (see I'jām) to distinguish between voiced/unvoiced. For example ز and ژ could both be fricatives but one voiced & one unvoiced with the number of i'jām dots indicating voiced & unvoiced. As an example 1 dot (خ) could be unvoiced, & 2 dots (ت) could be voiced , 3 dots (ش/چ) could be digraphs(?) like sh/ch/th etc;. Their placement above or below could even mean something (پ/ث)? vowels could be diacritics like how Arabic harakat are used. I'm not really talking about adapting Arabic itself to write english. Plenty of those have been done, some good, some bad. I'm talking about a script inspired by Arabic, but that is really suited to write English because it is designed for English. Dots & vowels could even be omitted to further speed up writing if the dots/vowels could easily be inferred from context as in (Rasm). To use an example that can be typed: 'تُن' could be 'dot', but without diacritics could be 'date' depending on context & with i'jām reversed it could be represent 't-d'. 'O' wouldn't have to be  ُ  (damma), I'm just using that as an example. I like the look of connected letters but disconnected could be used too. It could be designed to be written in either direction by rotating certain letters to face in the direction of writing as was done with Egyptian hieroglyphs. It would be easier to learn because similar sounds would look similar which is rarely the case in Arabic. Has anybody created something like this or could it be created? The table is here

Do these count?
Anglo-Arabic

Anglo-Arabic, created by Pangus Ho, is a fully phonetic writing system that can be used to write English. It borrows the shape of Arabic letters so that it looks like Arabic at a glance, however few of the letters have the same sound as they do in Arabic. For example the letter "nūn", which is used to symbolize the sound /n/ in Arabic, is pronounced /t/ in Anglo-Arabic. The main objective is to make similar consonants have similar letter shapes. Consonants, long vowels, and diphthongs are represented by letters, while short vowels are represented by diacritics.

Angrezi (انگریزی)

Angrezi is a method of writing English using the Arabic script devised by Adnaan Mahmood. It is designed so that each sound of English is represented by one letter, and to be a standardised way for transcribing English in the Arabic script. Adnaan also thought that if the large population of English speaking Muslims want to write English in the Arabic script they could do so by using this version of the alphabet which includes vowels for easy reading and comprehension.

The name of the alphabet comes from the Urdu name for English, انگریزی (angrezi).


How typologically unusual is using postpositions in an otherwise head-initial language? My conlang is predominately head-initial (SVO, n-adj, mostly suffixing), but has postpositions because I'd though that the noun was the head of an adpositional phrase. Wikipedia, however, says that the adposition is the head.

So how unlikely is a language with postpositions that is otherwise head-initial?

Such languages are uncommon but not unattested. However, they are more common than prepositional SOV languages and are present in a number of unrelated families around the world.

This WALS map shows us that in general, the order of object and verb and adposition and noun phrase is very highly correlated. In the map, postpositional VO languages are the group with the third highest number of total languages, but they are less than a tenth as common as the most frequent types.

 Postposition / OV    472
 Preposition  / VO    454
 Postposition / VO     41

There are some parts of the world such as West Africa where there are many SVO languages with postpositions. There seems to be a cluster of them around Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. I think the languages in question are proven or suspected to be Niger-Congo languages. The westernmost group of these languages has both VO and OV languages as well as some intermediate types like SOVX languages and postpositional VO languages.

Another example of a postpositional VO language is Finnish. I think Proto-Uralic is generally reconstructed as having verb-final word order. However, many of the modern groups of Uralic languages have SVO word order.

There are a few cases of languages with verb-initial word orders with postpositions. One such example is Yagua. Yagua is an interesting case because the verbs are very highly inflected, but the nouns are not.


How much of Slovio is based on Esperanto? According to Wikipedia,

  Slovio (from the Slavic word "slovo") is a constructed language begun in 1999 by Mark Hučko. Hučko claims that the language should be relatively easy for non-Slavs to learn as well, as an alternative to languages such as Esperanto which are based more on Latin...
  [...]
  Slovio has a relatively simple grammar based on a mix of Esperanto grammar with Slavic elements. Just like in natural Slavic languages, new words can be formed with a variety of suffixes and prefixes.

I'm not familiar with Slovio or Esperanto at all. How much is Slovio based on Esperanto? Does it just take some parts of the grammar, or does it go to a further extant than that?

In terms of the vocabulary, not much is based on Esperanto.

From the Slovio website:

  Esperanto? While Esperanto is a simple language its main problem is the fact that it is made up of too many unrelated languages and thus, if you speak Esperanto, no-one will understand you only other Esperantists. On the other hand Slovio, since it is made up of only closely related Slavic languages, can be put to an immediate use. Using Slovio, you will be understood by some 400 million people, most of whom have never ever heard of Slovio, but who will understand you.

So, it looks like the only inspiration Slovio has taken from Esperanto is the grammar.


What are some strategies for setting verbs apart from other words without knowing it's a verb In languages with conjugated verbs there is usually a similar structure across verbs that makes them easy to recognize even if you do not know the word. For example in German, all verbs after the pronoun 'Sie' end with 'en' which makes them easy to recognize. This is compounded by the fact that verbs are in second position, making the verb in a sentence very easy to pick out.

In my language verbs are not conjugated, nor do they have tense. The way the language is structured, there can be multiple verbs per sentence, and it would make the language easier to parse if verbs could be picked out easily. I also worry that similar sounding nouns will become easy to confuse with verbs as I grow my dictionary, which would be nice to avoid completely.

I considered making all verbs have a particular ending, but this quickly gets repetitive and breaks up sentence flow since the sound will be made several times in one sentence.

What strategies can I adopt to make the verbs recognizable as verbs even if the reader/listener does not already know the specific verb being used?

In Lojban, cmevla (proper nouns, like .alis.) are the only words ending in a consonant. Depending on how big your vowel inventory is, you could make all verbs end in a vowel and everything else end in a consonant. That way, they are easy to pick out and still provide much variety.

To generalize that, you could just take the last sound of a verb from any distinct group of sounds, like nasals, fricatives or labiliased consonants ("labialiseds"?). One could also use that to make word correspondences, e.g. nominalization changing the verb's final sound to the corresponding nasal.

You also mentioned position in the sentence. Having the verb in a specific position (first, last, second, etc.) is a good way to distinguish them, but depending on your language, dependent clauses could get difficult.
Of course, coupling position in sentence with a specific ending sound provides a nice way to recognize sentence borders. There, one could again use the ending sound kind to modify the verb to signify a dependent clause.


Usage of different plural systems in the same language Let's assume a language once had an extensive plural system, indicating singular/dual/paucal/plural distinctions on nouns, pronouns, verbs, et cetera. Over time, as has happened in real languages, this was simplified to a simpler singular/plural system except in personal pronouns, which retained the original distinctions. In other words, the language would distinguish only between "woman" (one woman) and "women" (more than one woman), but when you used a pronoun, you'd have "she" (one woman), "she2" (two women"), "she+" (a few women), and "she++" (many women).
Your conversations would thus look like the following:

"That woman came out of the store. She is carrying a bag."
"Those women came out of the store. She2 are carrying bags." (Two women came out)
"Those women came out of the store. She+ are carrying bags." (More than two women came out)
"Those women came out of the store. She++ are carrying bags." (Many women came out)

A similar situation situation would occur with all personal pronouns.
So, the question: while this sort of thing is obviously possible, since I just described it, is this a feature which has been documented in a natural language? I'm not just restricting it the way I've done, but the general situation where the grammar of the language has simplified down the grammatical number, perhaps even to not having a singular/plural distinction at all, except for retaining a more elaborate grammatical number system in one single common grammatical element.

A similar system to the one you describe is attested in Fijian. Fijian has a single-dual-paucal-plural distinction in its pronouns only. However, almost every sentence must contain a subject pronoun. I'm not sure about the status of imperatives in Fijian. Fijian also has VOS word order, where S is a lexical subject.

Independent nouns themselves are not marked for number and the articles that introduce them are also not marked for number.

era la'o [a gone]
3PL go   DET child
The children are going

In other examples, a gone is glossed as the child. From this we can infer that the subject pronoun (or part of the verb phrase, depending on how you analyze it), is usually the only place in the clause where number is overtly marked. Pronouns can surface in other positions as well, and pronominal number contrasts are not neutralized when the pronoun isn't the subject.

As an interesting wrinkle, pronouns have a separate form that's used when they are the head of a noun phrase, including a subject noun phrase.

era sa  la'o [o   ira]
3PL ASP go   ART  3PL
"They are going"

But, pronouns can occur after the verb without being introduced by an article or a preposition if they are objects.

  o   aa   biu-ti  ira
2SG PAST leave-TR  3PL
"You left them"

More generally, it is somewhat common for pronouns or a subset of the pronouns to have a different number system than independent nouns. Proto-Germanic is reconstructed with dual number in first and second person pronouns and their corresponding verbal forms, but without the dual in the third person or in nouns.


What are reasons to construct an auxlang, artlang, altlang, etc? What are reasons to construct a language? Why do people construct languages? For example, auxlangs are created for global (or regional) 'compatibility'. Why do people construct artlangs, altlangs, englangs, auxlangs and philangs?

I cannot speak for any other language creator, but I have done so as part of "worldbuilding" - for an alien world to have alien languages adds verisimilitude, and even if the language isn't actually heavily used, knowing how the language works and having a partial vocabulary lets me insert words from that language where there is no exact translation in English, or where the English would be a long circumlocution. As an example, one language I worked up has a word that means, literally, "a change in lighting that reveals new detail", but whose use has been extended to the metaphorical equivalent - and in one discussion in the associated story, after one character explained something to another, the second thanked the first - "That was a very useful kurìshdàm; thank you."


Is any of the Wakandan writing in Black Panther used for something other than English? For the film Black Panther production designer Hannah Beachler created a Wakandan writing system partially based on real African writing systems. Well that's what this and other news articles say, but if you look at how it's used, for example in the film's intertitles, it's clearly only a transliteration alphabet of English:

You can see here how the letters are 1-1 mappings of the very non-phonemic English spellings.

Now in the film, when the characters aren't speaking English, they are actually speaking Xhosa. (I'm not sure if in-universe that they are meant to be speaking Xhosa, or if Xhosa is just used to represent what would be a distinct Wakandan language in-universe, possibly related to Xhosa.)

Is any of the Wakandan writing in the film used to write Xhosa? Or any other African language, or even an actual conlang?

It's important to note that there were two Wakandan scripts used in the set design of Black Panther -- one is the transliteration alphabet seen here, while the other is a se of symbols based on Nsibidi that is more logographic in nature. They were used on different parts of the set, with the more logographic script occurring in a lot of the more traditional contexts and the alphabet occurring more widely throughout the set.

The Omniglot page for the script includes text written in both English and Xhosa using the script, but the Xhosa text seems transliterated from the romanized orthography for Xhosa. That said, since the author described the alphabetic script as a "more evolved" version of the logography, it's possible that it was deliberately designed to be similar to the Latin transliteration of Xhosa? Granted, that doesn't seem particularly in-character for the Wakanda depicted in the film, but who knows. Perhaps we'll learn more about the script in the inevitable sequel.

I think we can say that the alphabetic script is not only used to transliterate English as it is in the title cards. Consider this image from the article, which features portions of some Wakandan signs:

The glyphs on the rightward sign are difficult to make out and may be part of the logographic script, but those on the leftward sign read "DJO" in the Wakandan script -- as neither DJO nor OJD are allowable clusters in English, it seems unlikely that this is a portion of an English word transliterated into the alphabet.

However, it definitely is used to transliterate English even outside of the title cards. Let's look at the text on the throne in this poster:

The text on the lefthand side of his throne clearly reads "WISDOM" and the righthand text reads "LOYALTY" -- obviously an English transliteration. This is particularly egregious given that this is the king's throne, which arguably shouldn't feature the modern Wakandan script at all, much less Wakandan being used for English. However, it is admittedly a poster, so it's not really properly in the movie -- I cannot find a screenshot of the base of the throne from the actual film, so I can't say whether the text is the same there.

The alphabetic script is frequently used in the set design of the lab, but the only screenshots I can find of it are either too blurry to make out or just feature simply the glyphs overlapping each other for aesthetic in a screensaver-esque fashion.