Does Esperanto have any words that mean more than one thing? Looking at the "about Esperanto" page, I see this line:

  While he realized that a common language would not end the cultural barrier, it would enable ordinary people, not politicians, to have cross national conversations. To this end, he created Esperanto, a language that would be easy for most people to learn, due to it's logical, regular design.

Speaking from experience, one of the difficult parts of learning a new language is keeping different meanings straight for words that have different meaning. It's a little hard to bear at times how many words mean many things.

Does Esperanto, with it's "logical, regular design", have any homographs?

One also has to bear in mind polysemy: a word that might correspond to one concept in English might translate to two different words in Spanish or German. A classic example is “corner”, which can be translated to Spanish as either rincón or esquina, depending on whether one is talking about an “inside” or “outside” corner. I went to check how Esperanto deals with that particular word and found that eo angulo refers not only to both kinds of corners, but additionally also means “angle”.

So yes, Esperanto clearly has polysemies.


what kinds of vocal sounds echo less? Please bear with me as I elaborate.
I'm looking to create a language for humanoids that live in a set of cave systems and tunnels. While their language may have been 'born' on the surface, they have moved under the ground ages ago. The Ecosystem under the ground is very hostile, and so they had to adapt their language to carry less when spoken.
For this purpose, I'm trying to find out which of the known vocal sounds would be more prevalent in such a language.
(I am a true novice in the field, mind you, so I'm, reading several language construction guides to help in this endeavor)
So, what I'm asking, essentially, is which of the vocal sounds (labial, dental, palatal etc etc) would echo more, and which would echo less. I've searched in vain for an answer, and I don't have a convenient cave to test that in.
Thank you!

It would probably be a question of volume and frequency pattern. Loud sounds would travel further (and thus have more potential for echo). I would like to stress that I too have no cave to try this out, so there is a certain speculative aspect to this answer.

So, avoid vowels (obviously), and voiced sounds (prefer /p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/ over /b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /z/).

However, such a language would be pretty hard to use, so you'd need to compromise. Assuming low frequency sounds have less energy, the vowels /u/ and /o/ might be suitable, and perhaps the schwa.

Plosives (/p/, /b/, /t/) feature a burst as the air is released, which might also not work well, so you're probably better off using fricatives.

That leaves you with voiceless fricatives: /f/, /th/, /s/, /S/, /h/. Though voiced, nasals might also be suitable, as the mouth is closed during the articulation and thus it is possible to pronounce them without releasing too much acoustic energy.


Alternate direction systems for spatial reference What are some alternative direction systems besides egocentric direction systems (left, right, &c)?
Some natural languages use {north, south, east, west} like Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal (Maya) (source for Tzeltal). The situation in Tzeltal is probably more complex, since there's references to an uphill/downhill distinction too, but I'm having trouble locating a free resource for it.
Ithkuil uses the position of the sunrise and sunset. It does not appear to use the current position of the sun.

Okay. How about instead of an egocentric direction system, employing a listener-centric or "you"-centric system? We do this in natural language when we say "On your left" or "At your 3:00". Probably such a system would be developed among speakers from a highly empathetic and listener-oriented culture, where the individual's reference is considered secondary to the listener's.


Should I use “double o” in Toki Pona? In Toki Pona, the small word o has several meanings.

In the official book Toki Pona: The Language of Good, it says

  The particle o has three uses: (1) after a noun phrase to show who is being called or addressed, (2) before a verb to express a command or request, (3) after the subject (and replacing li) to express a wish or desire.

The question is whether a sentence like ”my friend, come here” (using jan pona mi 'my friend', kama 'come', ni 'here') should be jan pona mi o, o kama ni or jan pona mi o kama ni. Or perhaps those phrases are both acceptable? In that case, are they used interchangeably, or are there different use cases or styles?

It seems there are Toki Pona speakers with different opinions on this. Who are they, and what are their arguments?

The book by jan Pije and jan Lope says:

We've learned how to address people and how to make commands; now let's put these two concepts together. Suppose you want to address someone and tell them to do something. Notice how one of the o's got dropped, as did the comma.
jan San o, ... - John, ...
... o tawa tomo sina! - ... go to your house!
jan San o tawa tomo sina! - John, go to your house!


Is there an open-source set of topics and vocabulary for making a language tutorial? Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and grammar by topic. Instead of stealing from Berlitz or Duolingo, I'd like to steal from people who give me permission to do so.

An example of what I have in mind, I'd like a set of topics and vocabulary like the following:

Lesson 1: Greetings

Hello
How are you?
Fine.
Thank you.
Goodbye.

Lesson 2: Classroom objects

pencil
notebook
textbook
paper

Lesson 3: Simple sentences

I
You
a
have
I have a pencil.
You have a textbook.

Of course, given a standard template, I'm willing to adjust according to the needs of my grammar, but a starting point could help a lot.

The Fundamento de Esperanto was published in 1905, so as far as I know it's in the public domain everywhere. It's one of the foundational documents of Esperanto, containing a short grammar description, a dictionary of thousands of words, and crucially a book of exercises (called the ekzercaro).
The ekzercaro fits what you're asking for. It is divided into sections, and every section after section 4 contains sample sentences and new vocabulary items. For example, this is one of the sentences in section 5:

Leono estas besto.

And these are the English definitions of the terms introduced in that sentence.

leono lion
esti be
as ending of the present tense in verbs
besto beast

Some of the designs of this course may or may not be suitable for your needs. For one thing, the ekzerzaro does not aim to have a very complete vocabulary because it is assumed that you will check the dictionary for other words you used. That means that the exercises do not teach you the word for "cat" even though they teach the word for lion very quickly.
Some sections are paragraphs to read. My favorite thing about this exercise book is that it contains a short story about a fairy interspersed throughout it. Section 27 is a discussion of Esperanto grammar written in Esperanto, which will probably have to be completely rewritten for your language.
You'll have to make adaptations depending on your language and culture. If you use these exercises to teach contemporary American English, you'll have to adapt to the ways the world has changed in the last century. For example, early on, there is is a sentence about hitting a student, and I am thankful that that is not a typical part of my country's culture anymore.


Is there a constructed language in existence that has graduated to "natural" status? That is, are there any such languages in use today that are in use for day to day activities, or are formally recognized, etc?

For varying definitions of "conlang", yes:

The very most obvious example is Esperanto with a well-documented native speaker community. It has received limited official recognition, the most interesting of which currently seems to be PR of China's El Popola Ĉinio magazine and China Radio International in Esperanto. There are many more.
A less obvious example would be Classical Sanskrit, which was, arguably, constructed by Pāṇini, and is a Scheduled Language of India with some fifty thousand people speaking it in 1991; it is furthermore an official language of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and reportedly the language of the majority in a village called Mathoor. It is used across all levels of education across India.
A more controversial example would be Modern Hebrew, one of the few successfully revived language in modern times. The page on Wikipedia gives a solid overview of the situation, and is fairly unbiased. Of the three mentioned here, Hebrew is arguably the most successful "graduated" language — if you consider it a conlang to begin with.


How could a syllabary be adapted for a language with a complex syllable structure? By definition, a syllabary has separate glyphs for each possible syllable (and usually unrelated or at least not systematically related ones for similar syllables, unlike alphasyllabaries). This obviously clashes in practicality with having complex syllable structure, leading to a large amount of possible syllables and therefore a large amount of symbols. How can this conflict be dealt with?

Linear B is an interesting example for this:

This system was apparently designed for a non-Greek language, as it did not fit the sounds of Greek very well. In fact, it is likely that Linear A was used to write the pre-Greek language of Crete, and the incoming Greeks adopted this writing system for their own use, but without changing how the system fundamentally works. In doing so, they developed "spelling conventions" to represent sound patterns found in Greek but not in the syllabary.
First, there are many Greek sounds that are missing in Linear B signs, such as [g], [kh], [gw], [b], [ph], [th], and [l]. To solve this problem, signs for similar sounds are used instead: p-signs are used for [p], [b], and [ph]; k-signs are used for [k], [g], and [kh]; t-signs are used for [t] and [th]; q-signs are used for [kw] and [gw]; and r-signs are used for [r] and [l]. However, while this convention was likely easily understood by ancient Mycenaean scribes, it took modern scholars a lot of theoretical analysis and work, plus comparison with later Greek dialects and reconstructed Mycenaean words to rediscover how this system works

And more relevantly:

Another inadequacy stems from the fact that Linear B signs usually represent Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllables, but the syllabic structure of Greek allows initial consonant clusters, ending consonants, and dipthongs. In the case of a syllable with a initial consonant cluster, individual consonants in the cluster are written by a CV sign whose vowel matches the vowel of the syllable. Therefore, for example, the word tri is written as ti-ri, and khrusos as ku-ru-so. In the case of ending consonant, the situation becomes more complicated. Ending consonants such as [l], [m], [n], [r], and [s] are not usually written, whereas other consonants such as [k] and [p] are written in a way similar to initial consonants.

So one way to represent consonant clusters in a syllabary is to pick a "dummy vowel" that gets read over when the word is pronounced, as in Linear B, or Japanese katakana when writing foreign words.
The question doesn't mention just how complex the syllable structure is; if it's not too complex, you can also do what Japanese hiragana does with the ん character and have a single character that represents a syllable-ending consonant. Or something like what Brahmi does for vowels and nasals, adding strokes and dots to represent them. Maybe if kra, tra, and pra are common syllables in your language, you could have a stroke that represents an r between the consonant and vowel, and add it to the characters for ka, ta, and pa.


Are there any "unspeakable" languages? Sorry, my title is slightly misleading; what I'm after is more like a written language that doesn't have its roots in spoken language, and has no definitive translation into speech, but is none-the-less concise and clearly understandable. Tall order, I know - perhaps something similar would be cave-paintings: they seem to have a strong meaning that one could imagine was clear to people at the time, and which may convey a narrative of some sort; but the actual recital might have many variations. Or a more modern example: when you see a red circle around a drawing of a cigarette, with a red line across, you know it means that you are not allowed to smoke (so the meaning is clear and concise) - but the equivalent wording depends on the viewer, and could include phrases like "Don't smoke", "No smoking", or many others,

It seems achievable, at least, that one could construct such a language, which might even be universally understandable; but has it already been done in the form of a full language?

The answer is a definite Yes, there are.

The example that comes immediately to my mind is Bliss symbolics (also known as Semantography) by Charles Bliss from 1942–1949. As an additional bonus, it is still used and developped further, and may even be included into Unicode at some date.

EDIT: The term to look for is pasigraphy. There were lots of pasigraphies (Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen, gives the number 60) mainly in the 19th century, but the most successful ones were created in the 20th century. There were both philosophical pasigraphies (often using digits or abstract symbols) and naturalistic ones (starting from pictograms).


Use of string reversion in conlangs I came across the Esperantido Universal where reversion of stems (e.g., mega "big" ⁒ gema "small", -a is the adjective ending) is used to denote antonymy. Are there other conlangs using this unusual and un-naturalistic device?

Solresol actually reverses the syllable order of a word to denote an opposite meaning, though this occurrence is inconsistent through the creator's published dictionary. For example, fala means good, but lafa means bad, and falaredo means accessible, but dorelafa means inaccessible.


How to conjugate "fhtagn" in R'lyehian? The accepted translation of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu fhtagn" seems to be "Cthulhu dreams".

How would one conjugate "fhtagn" to get the word derivations "dream", "dreamer", "dreaming".

This answer had a helpful link for translations, but not much in the way of deriving conjugates.

Lovecraft probably didn't think about grammar, and we certainly don't have enough material to reconstruct one. Could also be like Sindarin, where Tolkien wrote much, but never released any specification of the language. Quote from the threat you linked: "To my knowledge, we only have the transcription in the Latin alphabet" (comment from Sparksbet).


Which features make a language easier to learn? Which features make a language easier to learn for children learning a constructed language as L1? Are children learning a language with these features able to learn the language faster than a natural, irregular language without some of these features?

Difficult question. I think regularity would speed up learning, as children during language learning overgeneralise (see experiments with English past tense endings). Thus instead of learning the correct exceptions at a later stage the corresponding feature would have been learned earlier.

There is a programme for teaching Esperanto as a first foreign language, as it can be used to increase second language awareness and is supposed to make learning a natural foreign language easier. You don't have to worry about exceptions, for one thing, so you can teach the concept without having to hedge your explanations by listing all the cases where it's different.

My personal view on 'difficulty' of different languages is that all languages are about equally difficult. Some languages are easier/simpler regarding some features (English inflectional morphology), but make up for that in others (vast number of near-synonyms with different distributional characteristics in English). Toki Pona is a very simple language (120 words, virtually no syntactic complexity), so you can learn it almost in a day, but it is very hard to express complicated narratives, and an equivalent text in a more complex language would be far more concise.

Learning Esperanto is reasonably easy, but then you look at how people actually use it in everyday interactions, and you find that it is more difficult than you imagined: there are a lot of the smaller particles that make it tricky to understand for a beginner. But the 'early' sentences composed when the language was still fairly new are a lot simpler. However, they were not suitable for encoding all the pragmatic and other information people need for an everyday language.

So, there are undoubtedly features that make it easier for children to learn a language as L1, but the question is "what for?" It's a bit like learning Lisp programming: understanding the syntax takes literally ten minutes, but that does not mean you can write useful programs in it after that. Languages are more than the sum of syntax and vocabulary, and if there was a language that was easier to learn and use than other languages, and had equal expressive power, then we would all be speaking it already.


Are there any small scale auxlangs that are actually used by a substantial amount of people? International Auxiliary Languages are very, very ambitious, and probably bound to fail on a large scale. However, it seems plausible to me that there might be some corners of the world where an auxlang might be used to facilitate communication between more localized groups, much like English is used in many parts of Europe (and really, the world) for this purpose. But does this actually occur anywhere?

The line between "conlang" and "supradialectal standard" can get incredibly fuzzy. You mention Rumantsch Grischun and Modern Hebrew yourself, something along similar lines, but much more successful in terms of number of speakers is Bahasa Indonesia. Any number of other supradialectal standards depending on how strict you are with drawing the line may fall under this category.

In addition to supradialectal standards, another thing that may or may not be considered a conlang is controlled languages, such as ASD STE-100 Simplified Technical English which see some use in various technical documents (but aren't really spoken).


Is Basic English a well-defined constructed language? Wikipedia says that Basic English is an English-based controlled language, an international auxiliary language, and an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English.

The problem is: there is a fixed number of 850 basic words for beginners, but there is no definite list. Some lists have 1500 words, others have 2000 words, but one can always draw more words from the English language. For instance: how would you talk about a cucumber, an oak tree or a rhinoceros without some silly circumlocution or using the real English word?

So, is Basic English a well-defined constructed language that can exists on its own?

The website describing Ogden's Basic English is here.
Wiktionary has the 850 word list here.

I would argue that Basic English is a (rather) well defined invented language.  Wikipedia lists it as a controlled natural language, which simply means that it is a natural language whose natural form and evolution have been suspended and its new form and evolution have been created by someone. In this case, Charles Ogden.

Classical Latin I have seen argued is a similar beast: a natural language that has some constructed or artificial tendencies, just not a single author.

The controlled language is, I would argue, the "fourth axial point of the Gnoli Triangle" --- the point where the art, science/engineering & practicality of invented languages become cotangent with the world of natural languages.

Basic English and its relatives might thus be seen as "conlang-natlang creoles". Where the creolisation process happens between two types of language rather than between two specific languages.

As for existing on its own, I think that is a rather different matter. If we were to replace the grammar with some kind of fundamental rule list and replace the English lexicon with unique, perhaps even levelled-Germanic words, we'd basically end up reinventing Esperanto.  Or Folksprak.  As such, yes, it could "exist on its own".

But Basic English is quite different among auxlangs, in that its essential function is that of a "bridge language".  It is designed to bring people who have no English at all across the gap and to a place where they can immerse themselves in the broader Anglophone world. Basic English is thus, in this key regard, self limiting in scope and usefulness.  It's great so long as the learner has extremely limited access to English speakers or English media.

As soon as that learner discovers the Internet or Anglophone aural culture (radio, television, movies) or English literature (broadly defined as anything written), they are going to discover the limitations imposed by Basic English. They'll have to leave it behind. In that sense, Basic English can't really have its own existence.

To build on your example: a Basic English speaker would simply have to step off the bridge and begin learning the "extended" lexicon of ordinary English!


good naturalistic system for Germanic language? I hope this isn't too redundant of a question...
I was hoping somebody could briefly summarize what general features languages descended from proto-Germanic tend to have?  I understand all the relevant terms, but I cannot work my way through grammar breakdowns because I have unmedicated ADHD, so it all blends together :(
I'm really stuck and I would REALLY appreciate if some kind person could lay out some key features of either Germanic languages in general or protogermanic specifically.. like a brief bullet point list?

A long time ago, I was involved in a project named Folkspraak to create a Germanic conlang. It was entertaining, but it did not went very far at that attempt.
Some grammatical hallmarks of Germanic languages are:

A very simple tense system, present and past only, all other tenses are periphrastic and later acquisitions
A past participle as third principal part of the verb
Weak verbs ("regular" verbs) and strong verbs (looking irregular, but in fact they are regular, too, falling into several classes of strong verbs)
Related pairs of strong and weak verbs like fall/fell where the weak verb is a causative of the strong one one (to make fall). More examples for this relation from German trinken (strong verb, "to drink")/tränken (weak verb, "to water (animals)"); springen (strong verb, "to jump, to leap")/sprengen (weak verb, "to explode; to water (lawn); to gallop"). A notorious one is erschrecken (strong verb; "to get frightened, to startle)/erschrecken (weak verb; "to startle so., to frighten")—notorious because the infinitive and some other form coincide and there is some confusion and a tendency to use sich erschrecken (weak verb) instead of the original strong verb in Modern colloquial German.
Modal verbs that are special (preterite-present)

For nouns there is less common ground for the Germanic languages, while German retained four cases and three genders for nouns, those features are partially or completely lost in some other Germanic languages. You can do whatever you want (strive for simplicity or keep a more complicated system at your wish). Same for adjectives.


Conlangs based on lesser known antique languages The canon of classical languages studied in Europe comprises Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (and maybe classical Aramaic). Inspired by this answer mentioning a conlang based on Hittite, my follow-up question is: Are there conlangs based on other languages of the antiquity, like Sumerian, Elamite, Akkadian, Hurrian, or Ancient Egyptian?

Eressilian (Hittite)
I wrote the answer you linked, which talks about Eressilian, a conlang based on the Hittite language, supplemented with loanwords from Arabic, ancient Greek and Persian. I talked there about the Greek influence (which is slight, from the information we have); the Hittite roots are of course much stronger. An example passage given by the creator shows Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Hittite and Eressilian:

Hittite
Hūmant+es antuhsa+es arawa+iya+ya annual+iya kraht(Persian)+a hoquq(Persian/Arabic) anda asanzi hassant+ke. Anda mem+iyan+a wajidan(Persian) asanzi har+ke+ya  ēsdu aniya+du adelphotés(Greek)+us katta hūmant+as anda.
Eressilian
Uvẽndesh ãndushesh irawedhadha ãnnuelidha krata ukuk ãnda eshẽnji eshshẽndke. Ãnda mẽvedheva wajidan eshẽnji erkedha ishchu enidhadhu elelpulush kata uvẽndesh ãnda.

I don't have a grasp on the pronunciation of either language, but after attempting to sound it out, the two are quite similar. For instance, the Hittite "antuhsa es" appears similar to the Eressilian "ãndushesh" - both meaning, I believe, "man" or "human".
Goa'uld (Egyptian) (sort of)
This is the "language" spoken by the Goa'uld race in Stargate. It's ostensibly based in ancient Egyptian, drawing from the language and hieroglyphs - appropriate, given that the Goa'uld supposedly ruled Earth as gods, sometimes appearing as the gods of the ancient Egyptians. I keep seeing references to a writing variation called Nakht, which I can't find much information on.
Some (though not much) of the writing uses the Meroitic system. To my (untrained) eye, there don't appear to be a huge amount of similarities (see Meroitic and Goa'uld), but some crossovers show through pretty easily, such as "l"s and "n"s. Those are probably the main Meroitic contributions.
All that said . . . Goa'uld vocabulary is basically made up, and so it's not really a conlang. No attempts were made to keep much linguistic continuity, and so it's not a constructed language as such. There are probably some similarities to ancient Egyptian, but likely not many. I include it here only because its use of some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs is notable; it appears that an alphabet for the language was indeed constructed.
Irǧeret (Egyptian and Akkadian, with Ugaritic, Arabic and Hebrew influences)
This one seems decently documented by its author. The vocabulary and phonology are derived from Egyptian, although there isn't much vocabulary listed. The organization of nouns - in number and gender - resembles Akkadian. It also contains the Akkadian declensions, with the addition of the dative. In short, the grammar and morphology appears Akkadian, while the vocabulary should be Egyptian. It's an interesting blend.
A note on Proto-Indo-European
A couple of languages have been derived from Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed common ancestor of Indo-European languages. It's only known indirectly. Therefore, many (though not all) conlangs that are based on it also use words from more recent Indo-European languages. Proto-Indo-European is certainly antique; whether it's "lesser-known" is perhaps another question entirely. That said, it's not a terribly common template, and so I'm listing some Proto-Indo-European languages here for the sake of interest.

Sambahsa:  Sambahsa, an international auxiliary language, appears to be heavily influenced by Proto-Indo-European, primarily through vocabulary. It modifies words from languages ranging from India to Spain, attempting to go back to the languages' common roots.
Atlantean (Proto-Indo-European): Like Sambahsa, Atlantean is Proto-Indo-European in origin, especially when it comes to vocabulary (grammatically, it is quite different). Notably, it was created by Marc Okrand, the man behind Klingon. According to the linked website, Okrand

took Proto-Indo-European roots and then compared them with language families at various points in time from around the world.  Where similarities between words existed, he altered the root or its semantic value to reflect that similarity.  By the combination of the PIE roots and by the adoption of new roots from these world languages, he created a vocabulary.

Given that these languages borrow vocabulary from many descendants of Proto-Indo-European, you could argue that they're not directly based in it. However, the intentional linguistic diversity within the family - and the attempts to base words on common similarities that are attributable to Proto-Indo-European - do seem to make these conlangs its descendants.


How to naturally evolve verbs into adverbs or dependent clauses? Currently I have a very simple proto-language which I'm trying to evolve. For example:

slishi  hu      ho    shofli  shofli pfufi   tushi
repair  person  tool  fish.V  fish.V succeed cause
Person repairs fish net to have abundant catch.

However, this seems to be confusing and unwieldy, so I'm assuming that native speakers would feel the same and would attempt:

To change tushi into something similar to 'so that' combining two sentences where one causes another.
To change pfufi into an adverb - successfully

Something like (for example):

slishi hu      ho    shofli tushu   shofli  nshi     pfufe         he
repair person  tool  fish.V so.that fish.V  AUX.FUT  successfully  3.PRO
Person repairs fish net so that he will have an aboundant catch

Note that tushi (to cause) has been changed into tushu (so that) to make a conjunction and pfufi (to succeed) into pfufe (successfully) to make an adverb.

However I'm not sure what a natural way of doing this would be. Most guides for conlangs suggest to apply phonological evolution rules universally, so I'm not sure if it is natural to diverge [-i] into [-ɨ/e] and then [-u/e] to derive an adverb/preposition/conjunction and suggest to evolve the adverbs from nouns or verbs, but they don't provide guides for creating a derivation systems (that I found).

If this helps, the language later/earlier evolves tenses by adding the pronouns - ignoring other changes that happened in between:

slishi-he  hu     ho   shofli  tushu   shofli nshi    pfufe         he
repair-1   person tool fish.V  so.that fish.V AUX.FUT successfully  3.PRO
Person repairs fish net so that he will have an aboundant catch

This is more a lengthy comment on your question than a real answer, but comment space is restricted ...

You are undertaking a very difficult task by setting a starting point and an end point and asking for natural development between the two. This is difficult even when it is known that such a natural development exists because the two languages are attested natural languages and not constructed.

We know sound laws really well, and also the process of grammaticalization is fairly well understood. The evolution of different basic word orders is still under research, we know that it has happened but how exactly it happened, is less clear.

It seems that your are needing some grammaticalisation to get from the verb pfufi to the adverb pfufe. Here's a suggestion: Add a particle ye meaning roughly "like" to your proto-language, and the phrase pfufi ye will fill the role of an adverb. It is easy to conceive, that pfufi ye evolves to pfufe by just dropping one syllable (syncope). To make tushu from tushi a particle like vu might be applicable, but I have some difficulties to define its original meaning.

I think that language change is easier to "grow" than to "plot", i.e., it is easier to just apply changes to a proto-language and watch where they lead to than to interpolate between two stages of a language.

Of course you can invoke language contact to achieve a particular change in your language evolution, as kind of last resort to save the plot. Just don't overuse this.


How to choose a writing system for a conlang? When one creates a conlang, it notionally has its own writing system (although in many cases actually working out the writing system is ignored, and everything is simply done in transliteration). If one is going to actually work out the writing system, how should one decide/evaluate whether to create ideograms, an abugida, an abjad, a syllabary, or an alphabet?

The answer mostly depends on your grammar and phonotactics:

Alphabets

Examples: Latin, Ogham, Mongolian. Alphabets are a pretty reasonable writing system for most spoken languages. I think there's a good reason why the majority of languages with standard written forms use some sort of alphabet. That said, they seem to take a long time to develop, so alphabets are unlikely for concultures that recently discovered writing.

Abjads

Examples: Arabic, Hebrew, Tifinagh. Abjads are good for languages with few vowels and very few minimal pairs distinguished by vowels. It's especially good in languages with triconsonental roots or other forms that undergo dramatic vowel shift as part of regular grammatical processes to improve coherence across grammatical forms.

Abugidas

Examples: Devanagari, Ge'ez (Ethiopic), Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. Abugdias are pretty good for languages with relatively simple syllable structure (ideally not more complex than (C)CV(C)). Based on the real world, it seems that they're best suited for languages with a high number of tones or phonations.

Syllabaries

Examples: Hiragana*, Vai, Cherokee. Syllabaries are really only appropriate in languages with relatively simple phonology, ideally not more than (C)V (or adopt a pseudo-syllabary like the kana with separate symbols for coda consonants). Otherwise the number of characters grows exponentially, or will not do a very good job representing all segments of the language, though this is not necessarily a dealbreaker (cf. Cherokee).

* Hiragana is not a true Syllabary because each kana actually represents a mora, not a syllable.

Logographies

Examples: Chinese, Cuneiform, Mayan. Logographs are best suited to isolating and analytic languages. The earliest writing systems seem to be logographies though, so cultures that only recently discovered writing are most likely to have logographies.


Saying "hello" in khuzdul Khuzdul, Tolkien's mysterious dwarvish language, is limited in vocabulary (we don't know most of the words) and I can't find hello anywhere. Some notes:

According to this, "good" is "gamut" and "day" is "manan", so "gamut manan" might sort of convey what I'm looking for. (On the other hand, I have no idea if the grammar here is correct.)
This lists neither "gamut" nor "manan" as valid words in Khuzdul, so a reliable dictionary also seems to be somewhat in demand.
This gives "huglgla" as hello. Again, this is listed in neither of the above links.

So, how would you say hello in Khuzdul? Are either of the above three sources reliable? The middle link seems to be closest to Tolkien's actual works, and seems to be cited decently frequently, but perhaps work has been done since that was published.

Well, from what we can glean out of the given texts, I'd be looking for something more like "at your service" rather than "good day".

I know the movies aren't canon, but Jackson depicts the Dwarves as not really comprehending Bilbo when tries to "good morning" them. And Gandalf's retort is classic. That greeting might be a cultural artifact of the Shire.

I wouldn't place too much faith in the lists you link to. They're fan art, which is fine as far as it goes. Especially the third one: that's just horrible garbled English. I mean really: Baruk Khazâd! next to Haw aru tauu? - - - I should think it would be difficult to make a worse reconstruction of Khuzdul.


Is Loglan still alive? Loglan is a predecessor of the Lojban language. Is it still supported and actively used/developed, or is it a dead language?

Yes.
Loglan is continuously being developed and modified, as the website shows. There are new reports about changes to the language (and proposals to do so). The CEO of the Loglan Institute, Randall Holmes, has written periodic reports on the language; the one from 2015 shows that several speakers have proposed changes, including the addition of new words (see Appendix 9). For the most part, excluding specific major developments like the Great Morphological Revolution of 1989, the structure has stayed the same, but grammar and vocabulary continue to grow and evolve.
In terms of the total number of speakers, we have little to no data. My impression is that since the split, Lojban has become more popular than Loglan. The Lojban community is largely Internet-based, and perhaps 20-200 people use it in some non-negligible capacity. Loglan's userbase is probably smaller than that, although I don't know how small. It's clearly non-zero, but not by much - perhaps 10 or 20 people.
Now, the question of whether Loglan is dead or alive rests in part on how you define a "dead language". I don't think anybody has ever learned Loglan or Lojban as a native language; you could therefore argue that it was never alive in the first place. So I suppose the best answer to your questions is that yes, Loglan is still being used and changed, but it's not "alive" in the sense of most languages.
The Loglan Institute considers Loglan to be alive because of the constant grammar/vocabulary changes; they define a dead language as one that isn't evolving. Based on that definition, Loglan is indeed alive.


What are some reasons that constructed languages would want to have ambiguity? As far as I know, most constructed languages have no syntactically or semantically ambiguous grammatical constructions. However, would there be any reasons that a constructed language might include certain potentially ambiguous constructions, and if not, why do many (or maybe most) natural languages have so much ambiguity, and why would that not be resolved in natural languages?

If naturalness (being like a natural language) is a design goal, then a conlang can embrace ambiguity with no shame.
Efficiency. Most ambiguous sentences are understood well enough in the context they are uttered in, clarified either by prior knowledge, non-linguistic communication (body language, pointing, etc), or through follow up questions from the listener. When most ambiguity is not actually a problem, it doesn't need to be explicitly countered. To require a language to be completely and always unambiguous would require much more specific and cumbersome sentences, violating the cooperative principle.
Wordplay. Puns, double entendres, and garden path sentences are unlikely to be possible or productive without substantial ambiguity.


Conlang where the initial consonants of words have meaning? A lot of languages, both natural and constructed, mark things like part of speech, gender/noun class, tense, and what not with suffixes. But what about prefixes?

I think that would make more sense for a head-first language. But the issue with just adding vowels to the beginning of all words makes things look repetitive, and also adds an additional syllable.

An alternative would be to have the initial consonant instead be a prefix. Though this would mean that every root in the language would have to start with a vowel (unless the language was very liberal with initial consonant clusters).

I don't know of any language that does this. Its common for languages to have the rhyme of a word mean something, but I've never heard of the onset of the word meaning anything.

And yes, I'm aware of the 'consonant mutations' of the Celtic languages, but those are triggered by agreement. They can't indicate anything on their own, as far as I know.

I'm not saying that all conlangs have to be like natlangs, but in my experience, there's some things that languages do where there's a very good practical reason why they do them. If you come up with something that no natlang does, there may be a good reason for that. Humans for example seem to favor placing the subject of the sentence at the beginning. If you say try to place the verb first, you end up with a lot of weird problems. Of course, there are verb-initial languages, but they're rare and tend to feature very exotic grammars (Tagalog comes to mind).

Many languages mark things like those you mention at the beginning of a word. Noun class in Swahili and the other Bantu languages comes to mind. It doesn't require all roots to begin with a vowel; the prefixes also include vowels (as in Kiswahili).

Russian has prepositions (not prefixes) such as в, which are pronounced as part of the onset of the following word (and it does sometimes cause initial consonant clusters), in addition to case. There's no reason why a conlang couldn't have the same as a prefix for gender, case or tense.

You might also want to look at the WALS chapters Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology, Position of Case Affixes, and Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes for lists of languages that have these features as prefixes.


How could my to be constructed language reflect a culture of carefulness? For a role-playing setting, I want to construct an elven language. The society of these elves strongly values being careful, thinking things through, taking one’s time and preventing mistakes. This is not a recent development but has been that way for centuries.

I feel that the language should somehow reflect their culture of being careful and preventing mistakes — somewhat like the Japanese language mirrors the importance of showing respect to the other party with a wide range of respectful address suffixes, respectful grammatical features and a respectful vocabulary.

In what way could I implement my elves’ carefulness and mistake-preventing ideal in their language?

As requested in the comments, here is some further elaboration of what I have in mind.
In cultures, certain behaviour is considered acceptable, certain behaviour is considered well-mannered and other behaviour is considered rude. For example, in Germany coming straight to the point is considered the normal, accepted behaviour while giving white lies is frowned upon to different degrees leading to Germans outright stating what they observe even in other languages in what is elsewhere considered an unfriendly manner.

On the other hand in China, not being able to provide an answer to a question is considered rude so accepted behaviour instead is to provide an answer even if one has no idea if it is true or not. (That is the impression I got from interaction with previous Chinese colleagues.)

In the culture of my elven society, it would be perfectly acceptable and even considered well-mannered to let a deadline pass or let somebody wait in order to perfection a good or a service. On the other hand, providing someone with a flawed product or a not fully thought-through piece of advice would considered disrespectful because one should have taken the time to ensure the error within does not exist. (Such behaviour would be entirely unacceptable in Germany where it is expected for the finished product to arrive five minutes before the deadline.)

A number of common — to them — proverbs would underline this expectation. Maybe something along the lines of ‘the time you lose from a bad result outweighs the gain from finishing quickly’ or ‘even the king will gladly wait for his crown’ etc.

I hope I have made the general idea more clear.

My idea on that would be very close to what you suggested yourself: introducing suffixes / prefixes which would indicate the uncertainty of the word.  For instance, let's suppose that your word for "strong" is hariq, your word for "I sit down" is brumo and your word for "house" is niptug, and the word for "in" or "inside" would be bomp.*

Now I would invent some prefixes, such as ar- meaning "with great certainty," no prefix meaning something along the lines of "a certain degree of certitude, but not absolute certainty," (such as, it is supposed that; it is presumed that) and fun, meaning, "a large amount of uncertainty" (such as "we think" or "it appears possible that")**

Now let us suppose that I want to say that I that I sit down in the house, with an extreme certainty that it was a house that I was sitting in, but the fact that I was sitting or that I am actually inside is assumed to be true, though it could be theoretically disproved.  I would say,

arniptug bomp brumo

In this fictive language,

funhariq niptug arbomp brumo

would mean, "I sit down in a place definitely inside a house which appears to be strong."

Note that these suffixes / prefixes could theoretically be added to any part of speech, or made different for nouns, verbs, adjectives, interjections, etc.

You could also possibly devise a way to make the order of the words show a carefulness about exactly how accurate what is being said is.

* Words invented totally randomly.
** Again, randomly selected; more or less prefixes could be used,
 with different definitions.  This is just an example.


How much of Tolkien's "black language" exists? What samples or knowledge do we have of the black speech created by Tolkien? Having read a decent amount of the legendarium (Silmarillion, LotR, Hobbit, Children of Hurin, and some of the Lost Tales) the only occurrence I am aware of is the inscription on the one ring.

Am reading through LotR now, and have just finished H, Lost Tales, R, FG, etc. so the memories are still pretty fresh.

The Ring verse is the longest bit of Black Speech, followed by Grishnákh's bit of invective towards Ugluk. Other than that, there's only a couple individual words (like snaga, slave and ghash, fire) to be found.

Tolkien himself wrote as much in a letter (No. 144) to a reader of page-proofs (presumably of LotR): ...[Black Speech] only occurs in the Ring inscription, and a sentence uttered by the Orcs of Barad-Dur and in the word Nazgúl.

A related query on the Black Speech.


What notation do constructed sign languages use? What notation do constructed sign languages use?
Many well-known big sign languages (such as ASL) have their own form of notation, but that notation is very specific and may not be able to express a sign in other sign languages. For example, ASL school is

OpenB@Palm-PalmDown-OpenB@CenterChesthigh-PalmUp Contact Contact

but some constructed sign language X might require signals that don't appear in ASL, like 'touch your elbow with the thumb of your non-dominant hand'. The notation could be extended but would be complicating it. Language X thus requires its own system for its own signs or an 'international' one in analogy with the International Phonetic Alphabet.

What are the notations commonly used by constructed sign languages?
Which sign languages use them?

There are very few constructed sign languages. On the subreddit, we sometimes get questions about whether anyone has made any, which usually don’t get many replies. This one here has some examples given, and also links a website which has basically the answer to your actual question:

SLIPA is an attempt by David Peterson to fill the lack of sign language transcription systems. However, due to it being ASCII-compliant, it ends up rather unweildy and I’ve never seen it employed in actuality. Nevertheless, the website provides important information that could be useful for you to derive your own system tailored to your language, and to use as a reference for comparing your own notation to.


Where should I start planning my grammar? I'm about creating my first conlang grammar, I know a few general characteristics yet I don't truly know where or how I should start to outline it. I only have messy pieces of informations about. From your experience, what could you advise me?

It would probably be a good way to start with the features you want to express through grammar. Many features can be expressed in different ways, lexically, through morphology, or through syntax. For example, 'subject' could be done through a particle, an affix, or through the position in the sentence.
You first come up with the list of features, and then you look at the inventory of forms in the grammar. Do you want a complex morphology? English, for example, marks very few features through morphology (plural for nouns, 3rd person singular for verbs, tenses, …) and a lot through word order or by adding auxiliaries.
The inventory will define the shape of your language; you can also start with that and then assign features to it. But be clear what kind of features you want to be able to express – not every possible distinction needs to be expressed in language. Do you want to mark the gender of the subject in the verb? Perfectly possible, but probably not very useful, unless your language is for a very gender-segregated society.
Obviously, the more features you want to express, the more complex your grammar will be. As an extreme example, toki pona pretty much only uses word order and a few particles to distinguish between subject/verb/object, and ignores number or gender markers. In Esperanto most work is done by the morphology, which encodes the role in the sentence, gender of nouns, number, and even a range of semantic relationships (eg "room where you do a particular action").


Do the ADVENT in XCOM 2 speak a real language? In the game XCOM 2 ADVENT soldiers shout observations and commands to each other. Their words are not understandable, but context makes clear to the player what they're thinking.

Did the creators of XCOM 2 design a full conlang for ADVENT?

In this article the dev team of XCOM 2 explain that they didn't have the time or resources to invent a full conlang, but instead made up gibberish that got across the sort of 'feeling' they wanted. In order to sound "darker and more ominous," they were deliberate in their choice of sounds for this gibberish, basing it on so-called "guttural languages" such as German and Dutch, and then they designed filters to make the voice actors sound more robotic.

  Steve helped shape the final sound by experimenting with the gibberish pronunciations that we came up with. In order to convey meaning to the player, we had to rely solely on the tone and delivery of the lines, with things like ‘Halt!’ Or ‘Enemy Spotted!’ coming across with more intensity than say a standard ‘I’m moving’ line. In the process I also tried to establish vocal patterns in each subset of lines to create some cohesion between the otherwise meaningless words the actors were reading.

A feat on the part of the sound designers and voice actors, to be sure, but not a proper conlang. Nothing stopping XCOM fans from expanding it into a full conlang, though!


What legal aspects should one consider when creating a constructed language? Constructed languages, like everything, is an intellectual property, and most countries worldwide do care about protecting the rights of the owners.

If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?

My common sense suggests me that something is obvious here:

entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;
lots of things are public domain, e.g. SVO/OVS clause order or the Latin alphabet;

…but I'm totally lost about the case if some aspect(s) of existing works can be incidentally copied or deliberately borrowed.

Where should I start here?

If I'm about to create a new conlang, should I consider any existing patents?

No. It is conceivable that conlangs might be patentable under US law, but none so far have been.

  entirely copying someone else's writing system would certainly constitute a copyright infringement;

Probably not. Again, it might infringe a patent, but there are very few patents on writing systems. Copying a specific font or typeface would constitute copyright infringement, but not copying the writing system in abstract.

  Where should I start here?

I'd start by reviewing Sai's talk at LCC 6 on the legal status of conlangs, and the accompanying slides and legal memo.

You might also review the Language Creation Society's involvement in the Axanar case regarding whether or not Paramount "owns" Klingon.


What language uses the most amount of phonemes? I'm constructing an auxlang/artlang (temporarily named Syn).

The Syn is (being) designed to interface with any known human language, with a wildly uniform set of simplistic, unambiguous symbols.

I have almost finished the phonetic alphabet component and have been trying to transliterate several languages into this while translating some that I know now on the side. However, since I'm not a native speaker of any of the transliterations and google translate is becoming not much of a help, I can't pinpoint the exact phonetic equivalent of some words. Now I'm running out of practice scripts from different spoken languages to accurately transliterate. Hence, I think I'm gonna need another language similar to what I'm making.

Are there any languages, written or spoken, natural or constructed, that occupy majority of the entire phonetic alphabet, with as little diacritics, as few ambiguous strokes, and as strict 1-to-1 symbol-phoneme as possible?

You're gonna have a hard time with "majority of the entire IPA". Non-pulmonic consonants are rare, and some consonants are hard to contrast (e.g. /β/ vs. /v/), while vowels are often highly allophonic. Natural languages tend to have fewer IPA places and distinction via aspiration, labialization, etc.

My best answer to your question would be Ithkuil (constructed, almost unspeakable language). It has 58 phonemes, with unusually many vowels (13). This allows it to have mostly single phonemes for morphemes. Ithkuil's Roman transliteration is a bit strange, as some phonemes use diacritics and others have digraphs, but it also has its own script (morpho-phonemic with alphabetic characters).


What are language concepts that could be considered to be based on human anatomy? I'm in the early stages of creating an alien language for a personal writing project. I'm trying to avoid the aliens' language having properties that human languages do that are somehow linked to our anatomy. One of the most obvious examples of such a feature is a numerical system with base ten due to the number of digits.

What are language concepts that are linked to our anatomy in comparable ways that I should find alternatives for when creating a language for aliens who are not humanoid? Any references for links between our anatomy and such language concepts or features are much appreciated.

Some obvious ones:

Phonetics, be it of spoken or signed language, is obviously constrained by the body of humans - both in the channels (aural, visual) employed and also in how they are employed.

Metaphors often make use of body parts. Spatial prepositions and adverbs are often derived from relevant body parts: front from face, forehead, nose, chest; back from back or butt; up from head… you get the picture. Basically every organ has been referred to as being the cause of emotions etc as well in metaphors.

Words for directions in particular are also somewhat based on human anatomy. We have lateral symmetry (left-right) but an alien could likely have some form of radial symmetry in their bodies, which would make the concepts of leftness and rightness very weird to them. Aquatic beings would also likely have a different concept of directions altogether, probably based more on the orientation of their own bodies than relative to the ground.

Those are the things that come to mind. However, much more importantly, the inner workings of language as a whole would likely be different from a human’s. There are some things in human language that you really wouldn’t assume to be necessary. Just to make two examples:

It seems pretty clear that humans take the raw audio input, break it into segments (phones) then further abstract those phones into phonemes, which are then in turn used to build more complex words. One could just as well imagine skipping the segmentation step and going directly from audio to meaning. There appears to be evidence however that some songbirds also employ what could be considered phonemes in their songs, so perhaps it is to be expected.

Another thing is in syntax: human language does not appear to allow circular dependencies, that is word¹ A modifying word B, which in turn modifies word A again. From my fairly limited understanding of syntax, human sentences can be structured in a tree structure. It seems plausible that an alien language might have more or less freedom, perhaps allowing cyclic graphs in their syntax… or in the other direction, only linear dependence. An example of an alien conlang playing around with this is Europan, which I personally consider one of the most interesting conlangs I’ve ever encountered.

¹or clause


How can I name my days of the week? In my conworld, months are divided into twelve-day weeks. That seems a bit too long (since I recall that people complained that the ten-day weeks of the French Republican calendar were too long), so I've divided my week into two halves, so I don't want the names for the days to have numbers, in order to avoid silliness like "first firstday" or "second thirdday." I know that English days of the week are named after Norse gods, but since my months are named after gods, I want to avoid that, too.

What are other attested etymologies for names of days of the week, in either traditional calendars or the modern Gregorian one?

While in English (and German) the days are named after (North-)Germanic gods or the sun and the moon, the months are also name after gods (and emperors), albeit from a different set (Roman), with some numerical ones thrown in (September/October/November/December); so there is no need to be consistent.

In Irish it's similar: some names have been taken from Latin, others have been added in with cultural/religious significance.

I was just looking at another language which is from a different family (Hawai'ian), but I guess they no longer have the weekdays they had before they had contact with Western powers: their days are literally "Night-one" (Po'akahi) to "Night-six" (Po'aono), plus Sunday being "Pray Day" (La pule). The month names are just localised versions of the English ones ("Ianuali", "Pepeluali", etc). Indonesian weekday names also seem to be derived from the names of (arabic) numerals.

You could choose anything where you've got a set: celebrities/rulers, planets, plants, animals, whatever. I don't think anyone would look at it and think it weird to have a "fox-day", or an "oak-day". Add a regular prefix or suffix to the word that means something like "day", and it should look alright.

And if you have two half-weeks, why not have an animal half followed by a tree-half?


Are there any constructed languages designed for legal agreements / country constitutions? A few weeks back i've watched a talk of Stephen Wolfram. I think was this video. Plus this article is also relevant.

The idea discussed was: how to build a language for formalizing every day discourse.

A language that can be understood and acted upon by both humans and computers. With the advancements in AI, crypto-currencyes, decentralization etc.. i feel this problem has become more then just the philosophical curiosity that Leibniz had.

What is our general status on this issue?

What are some successful / failed attempts of building languages specially designed for handling legal matters ? Are there any?

So far I have not been able to find any language of this nature - maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

It strikes me that, while this is not precisely what you're asking, Law French I think it might be argued fits the bill.

While French, of course, was the everyday language of the upper class in England from the mid-11th to the late 14th century, and was therefore naturally the language of the Law, it can hardly be called a "constructed language". But after this time, it might be said that, divorced of all real connexion with French or Anglo-French culture, Law French came to be something like an invented language based on natural French. It was certainly a group project (lawyers and judges, all others need not apply).

Later examples are both humorous and instructive:

Richardson Chief Justice de Common Banc al assises de Salisbury in Summer 1631 fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony, que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice, que narrowly mist, et pur ceo immediately fuit indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner et son dexter manus ampute et fix al gibbet, sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court.  -- Sir George Treby

ahem

Perhaps Law French might best be called a deconstructed language?

About all that's left in modern times are a few set phrases, mostly in Parliament:

La reyne (or le roy) remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult -- (The Queen/King thanks her/his good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so)
La reyne (or le roy) le veult -- (The Queen/King wills it)
La reyne (or le roy) s'avisera -- (The Queen/King will advise)
Soit fait comme il est désiré -- (Let it be done as it is desired)

Even in the USA, we still hear oyez, oyez, oyez when court comes to order.

Some interesting notes on Law French, especially pertinent to the question:

"The effort of reporting English speech in French was not merely an expression of affection for the past, for in the long run it probably saved a lawyer more time and trouble than was taken to learn it. ... The formalised French phrases used in the year books gave him a shorthand ready made and adapted for legal purposes."

"To the linguist, Law French is a corrupt dialect by definition. Anglo-French was in steady decline after 1300. ... (That English lawyers could seriously complain that French, spoken in France, had deteriorated considerably as compared to its use in England) is in itself a clear demonstration that by the middle of the fifteenth century there was a marked difference between the French of English lawyers and the French of France."

A Frenchman living in England during Elizabeth I's reign noted of Law French "...now it seemeth that almost there is no language more far from the true French, then the French of our lawes: There being almost no word, which either by intermingling, or adding, or diminishing, or changing of a letter into another, they have not altered and corrupted."

"The lawyers also took what seemed to be a perverse delight in pronouncing Law French as if it were English: indeed, 'their pronunciation differeth so much from ours (French) as it is impossible for a Frenchman to understand them'.

"Few of those who used French paid the slightest attention to grammar or vocabulary."

All taken from J.H. Baker's Manual of Law French


What are the aspects of Esperanto? By design (looking at the 16 rules of Esperanto) there is no verbal aspect in the Esperanto grammar. However, one can see an incohative aspect in the prefix ek- (e.g., mi ekridas "I burst out laughing").

More controversial is the question of a perfective/imperfective aspect (see this question and its differing answers) or a continuative aspect. Those aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English (despite tenses named *present perfect or present continous).

What are the verbal aspects in Esperanto and how are they expressed?

Whoever told you Esperanto lacks verbal aspect was lying to you. Yes, aspect isn't mentioned in the 16 Rules. However, this clearly doesn't mean Esperanto completely lacks aspect -- the 16 Rules are not intended to be a linguistically rigorous analysis of Esperanto, but merely a set of easy rules to teach laymen. Zamenhof definitely designed Esperanto containing some aspectual markers, especially given the amount of influence he took from Slavic languages; what is unclear is exactly how much aspectual information he intended to be encoded in certain markers.

Based on your description of Esperanto's complex tenses and your claim that "these aspects do not even occur in a pure form in English", you seem to be under the impression that to truly be present in a language, an aspect must be marked by a single morpheme rather than through syntactic constructions like the verb + participle constructions in English and Esperanto "complex tenses." However, that isn't how that works. The English present/past continuous constructions do mark progressive/continuous aspect. The English present/past perfect constructions do mark the perfect, though "perfect" is a bit more of a complex mix of tense and aspect than it is pure aspect. The fact that certain syntactic constructions are used here rather than a single affix does not make the aspectual marking here any less "pure".

There actually has historically been some debate over how Esperanto participles mark aspect when used in complex tenses. Zamenhof himself saw Esperanto participles as marking a mixture of tense and aspect, and this resulted in a divide among Esperantists regarding whether to translate, say "The house was built long ago" with estis konstruata (because the participle happens at the same time as the main verb) or with estis konstruita (as the building is accomplished and focused on describing its result). The latter group largely won out with an un-official notice from the Academy in 1965, which gave the following positions:

  The Esperanto tense system consists of but three tenses: the present, the past, and the future.
  All other time relationships (such as the pluperfect, future perfect, etc. of many other languages) are expressed by adverbs, conjunctions, or simply by context.
  The six participles, used either with nouns or with the verb esti, show aspect, not tense. They show, in other words, in what phase of the action the subject finds himself with respect to the object: whether beginning and unfinished (-ant, -at), finished and fulfilled (-int, -it), or not yet begun but intended or awaited (-ont, -ot).
  Accordingly the forms with -ata focus upon the duration or repetition of the act, and the forms with -ita focus upon the result of the act. The forms with -ita can also show priority in time in the event that there is separate evidence of that in the sentence, such as a word like jam = “already.”

(Quoted from Being Colloquial in Esperanto's Appendix on Participles, which goes into more detail about the conflict here.)

While this treatment of Esperanto participles are markers exclusively of aspect is technically not an official order from the Academy, it has generally been treated as such my most Esperantists, and this is largely how Esperantists use participles -- the -anta/-ata participles marking the continuous/progressive, the -inta/-ita participles marking the resultative, and the -onta/-ota participles marking the prospective. This is consistent with how they're used outside of the complex tenses as well. Based on this, one would have to willfully ignore a lot of Esperanto usage and convention to claim its participles don't mark aspect.

In addition to the obvious aspect marking on the participles, it should also be noted a few other affixes mark what could be considered aspect. You've mentioned ek- as a marker of inchoative aspect yourself (it could also be said to mark the momentane). -iĝ- could also be said to have some inchoative flavor to it (though it's a bit more obscured among its other functions, consider that eksidi and sidiĝi are near-synonymous), and -ad- similarly can mark something like continuative or iterative aspect.


Is there any research on the efficacy of intentionally designed linguistic relativity in conlangs? Toki Pona is a language designed to shape the thought process of users. So is Loglan: According to Wikipedia, "Loglan was originally conceived as a means to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought."

Has any research been done on how well these languages (and others with similar aims) achieved their goals?

To gauge how well these languages have achieved their goals, we really need to quantify what exactly achieving those goals would entail, and what steps along that path we would consider progress. What constitutes success for Toki Pona or Loglan? A world of people thinking differently? A small group of speakers who have improved the way they think substantially based on learning the language? Without knowing that, we cannot say whether these languages have achieved their goals.

Additionally, when looking for research into linguistic relativity, the place to look would be linguistic research, and we're unlikely to see much research into Toki Pona's or Loglan's influence on the minds of their speakers. Why? Well, strong Sapir-Whorf is pretty much a settled question in linguistics -- the vast majority of the field agrees it's not the case -- and weak Sapir-Whorf is more likely to be tested on natlangs for many reasons, not least of which is the number of potential subjects. Even the most popular conlangs have much smaller speaker communities compared to most natlangs, and so even if conlangs and natlangs were equal in all other ways when it came to this research (and from a linguist's perspective, they really aren't), it would be far harder to gather subjects and conduct research for the conlangs.


What are the reasons behind ROILA's phonology? ROILA (RObot Interaction LAnguage), a constructed language for communication between robots and between robots and humans, comes with a 5 vowel system. the vowels are written a e i o u but their sound are not according to cardinal vowels (which one would expect from natural languages) but:

a   æ   AE  fast
e   ɛ   EH  red
i   ɪ   IH  big
o   ɔ   AO  frost
u   ʌ   AH  but

(Columns are: spelling, IPA, ARPABET, example word)

What are the reasons behind that choice?

The process of creating the phonology is described at length in Omar Mubin's PhD thesis "ROILA: RObot Interaction LAnguage" (available from the publications page). It seems to have happened in three stages.

He determined which phonemes are most common in a number of natural and artificial languages (pp. 17-19). The most common vowels were /i, u, o, a, e/ (in IPA).
The final set of phonemes he chose included the vowels a, e, i, o and u. He doesn't indicate that the vowels were given in IPA, and indeed he later gives them the IPA values /ae (sic), ɛ, ɪ, ɑ, ʌ/ (pp. 22-23).
AA /ɑ/ was later altered to AO /ɔ/ in order to avoid confusion with AE /æ/ (p. 35-36).

The only explanation I can give for the incongruity between stage 1 and stage 2 is that he (mistakenly?) put the five vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ into his orthography, but changed their phonetic values to the English orthographic "short" vowels, which are /æ, ɛ, ɪ, ɑ, ʌ/ in American English.

The fact that he had to avoid confusion between /æ/ and /ɑ/ (in step 3), but doesn't consider any confusion between /æ/ and /ɛ/ or between /ɔ/ and /ʌ/ seems very English-centric, but which would be very strange from the perspective of Dutch, which doesn't distinguish either pair of phonemes (considering the fact he was doing his research in Holland).

Unsurprisingly, "American English speakers significantly outperformed other speakers in our setup" (p. 34). They also mention problems with Dutch accents and different regional English accents (p. 86 of this document).


Can you construct garden path sentences in Lojban? A garden path sentence is a sentence whose beginning suggests one parsing which is invalidated as the whole sentence is read and then re-parsed. Some examples in English (from fun-with-words.com):

Fat people eat accumulates.
When Fred eats food gets thrown.
The girl told the story cried.

It is claimed that Lojban is a syntactically unambiguous language. Does that mean that garden path sentences cannot be constructed in Lojban?

Lojban's official formal grammar is written in YACC, which is a LALR(1) parser generator. Since this means that the parser only ever "looks ahead" a maximum distance of one token while parsing, garden path sentences are impossible in the traditional sense.

This just means that the parse tree can't be drastically transformed during the sentence—it doesn't mean that the meaning of sentences can't be changed signficantly later on within them. The first example that comes to mind is the song NA KU from Djemynai's ZA'O, which contains the chorus "pu ku zvati fa do .ije ca ku zvati fa do... na ku." This glosses roughly as follows:

pu-ku zvati   fa-do
PST   present 2sg.NOM
You were here.

.i-je ca-ku zvati   fa-do   na-ku
and   PRES  present 2sg.NOM NEG
Now you are not here.

Note that the use of ku allows the negation particle to be moved to the very end of the sentence. This does not affect the parse, so it's not a traditional garden path sentence, but it still allows the creation of a surprising effect, which is similar in some senses.


Will I be able to read texts written in all Romance languages simply by learning Interlingua? Interlingua's official site claims that speakers of all Romance languages will immediately understand the language on paper when first exposed to it. Is this true? Can I really understand Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and French simply by learning a conlang?
If it is true, then why isn't it more popular?

On their site it says:

Millions understand Interlingua "at first sight". Speakers of Romance languages especially understand Interlingua immediately and almost effortlessly. Ideal for traveling!

So it's the other way round: if you speak a Romance language, Interlingua will make sense to you because it contains many elements (eg vocabulary) from these languages. This does not, however, mean that you can necessarily understand any Romance language after learning Interlingua, though I assume there will be some benefit going both ways.


What tools exist for creating syntactically correct generated text in new languages? Another way to put this is, what tools exist to generate sentences in the same way that some conlanging tools generate phonotactically valid words.

I've heard people suggest using word generators to generate sentences. I'm open to the idea, but it seems that morphology and syntax aren't close enough and I'm not smart enough to put my finger on why. If there is a word generator that can do sentences, I'd be interested in looking at it.

Here is an example I laboriously wrote for Toki Pona.

Note: I'm well aware there are a bunch of tools for just generating a random sampling of a dictionary, but that doesn't create syntactically valid sentences.

It is difficult for a machine to passively understand a language (it takes tons of time with machine learning, and that's for Google). Actively, that's even more difficult, as many machine responses are pre-programmed and rarely actually generated (and in that case, mostly nonsensical, but the question isn't for sensical utterances). It will be extremely difficult and without appropriate backing impossible to make one that learns a new language.

That said, the one like the Toki Pona in your question could be made. But you'd have to program most of it yourself, and in languages like Toki Pona that's easy. Try generating artlangs which more like natlangs.

This doesn't mean it couldn't seem like one. You could:

Extract text (in English or some language) from books or such. You can find enough text online.
Translate it (i.e. Google translate) between many languages, obscuring the information. (optional)
Translate it from English—or better, i.e. Lojban, Esperanto, Toki Pona or raw predicate logic, as they are less complicated and easier to translate from—to your conlang.
Dispose of invalid sentences using some kind of lightweight parser. (optional)

I couldn't find any (good) generators, but you could have the first!


How to classify the language of "Uncleftish Beholding"? The essay Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Andersen is written in a special kind of English without borrowings from Latin, French, and Greek. The gaps in the lexicon are filled with German style compounds (in fact, a lot of them, like waterstuff "hydrogen" or sourstuff "oxygen" are real calques from Dutch or German).

Is this piece of art written in a conlang? Or is it just a funny form the natlang English?

I wouldn’t personally call Anglish (that is, English without non-Germanic (or sometimes even non-Anglosaxon) vocabulary) a conlang. Taken at face value, it replaces English vocabulary 1:1 with coined words, which is basically the definition of a relex. Whether you want to consider relexes a subset of conlangs or an entirely different category (perhaps a subset of ciphers and codes) altogether is subjective.

As a note, Anglish can also just be stylistic in nature — favouring germanic word stems over loaned ones where possible, but in the context of the essay you posted this is clearly not the case.


Are suffixes in Ido agglutinative? I was thinking what is the correct way to say "Little princess" in Ido.

(EN) Little princess - Little (indicates the "size") Princess (descendant of some royal crown and that descendant is female).

(ES) Princesita - Princes (root), -it- (suffix for "litte"), -a (indicates female gender).

We should translate as in english like "Mikra princino"? or in the Spanish way like "Princetino"?

If Ido suffixes are agglutinative, is there a particular order? "-et" suffix for little "-in" for female... we could get "Princineto".

After a research, I finally found this example which explains this.

  si quieres decir una perra (adulta) pequeña, el orden adecuado es entonces perra+pequeña = hundineto. El orden contrario es poco natural y hace dudar al que oye la palabra hundetino = perrito hembra

So the valid ones for Little princess are:
1. Mikra princino = "Little" + "female descendant of some royal crown"
2. Princineto = A female descendant of some royal crown who is little.

"Princetino" would be like:
A little descendant of some royal crown who is female.


What are the benefits of inventing irregular verbs in one’s conlang? Many natlangs have irregular verbs that do not follow the same patterns as the majority of verbs, often as a product of old verb patterns that are no longer used. Some of the benefits of not having irregular verbs are an easier to learn and interpret conlang, but are there benefits, such as giving a sense that the language has changed over time?

Irregular verbs are naturalistic.

For this reason, even an international auxiliary language, namely IALA Interlingua, has irregular verbs to match its Romance source languages (that are famous for their wealth of irregular verbs mostly directly inherited from Latin)

Irregularities add flavour to your conlang.

They make the conlang as a whole more interesting and create some esthetic effect. It also shows that the conlang designer has spent some more time to make Eir creation not too schematic.