How to develop a detailed, realistic a posteriori conlang? Background

To begin, I’ve been conlanging ‘properly’ for around two to two and a half years now and have been into it for far, far longer. However, I have yet to create a conlang that is truly in-depth, detailed, and realistic. I soon want to begin that process. I am confident in my knowledge of linguistics and have at least a basic knowledge of most areas and a more in-depth knowledge of others (none the less, I am still an amateur of linguistics, of course).

The current situation

At the moment, I am in the very early stages of planning – I’ve yet to decide on the final concept which I am going to develop. My ideas currently on the shortlist are:

A Celtic language spoken on a (fictional) island nation off the north-western coast of Ireland with North-Germanic influence due to interactions and mixing with the Norse people throughout history.
A Turkic language spoken in a (fictional) nation in the Southern Caucasus with influence from Georgen, especially on the phonology and vocabulary side.
A Uralic language spoken in Eastern Finland and the Karelia/Murmansk regions with Slavic influence.

Of these ideas, I am currently most drawn towards the first bullet-point, however, choosing the scenario of the conlang is not the crux of the issue. That is the issue of creating an in-depth and realistic, believable a posteriori conlang. I want to create a language that has detailed and believable phonology and grammar.

My questions to you

What is your advice on creating a good a posteriori conlang in general?
How do I effectively develop a conlang with as much detail and depth as possible?

Thank you very much for any help or guidance.

So, you are going to create an altlang (a naturalistic language living in an alternate history of the the world). First, define your starting point (easiest for the first scenario: Old Irish or proto-Goidelic is a suitable starting point for this one). Look at the real world descendants from that starting points (Middle Irish and Modern Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelish) and what changes happened to them. You can create variation by retaining some archaic features, applying changes from different descendants, or applying changes in different temporal order to create a new artificial Goidelic language. You may also throw in some original changes not occurring in the known Goidelic languages. Keep a timeline of those changes—the changes will apply to loan words as well!

Than decide on the influence of the other language: Are there only borrowings of words, shall it influence syntax (e.g., the order of noun and genitive or noun and adjective, shall the basic word order change?), are there new phonemes added to the phonology?

Decide, when the influence happens, does it happen only once, are there several waves of influence. Note that the other language changes over time, too. Your conlang may preserve archaic words from the donor language that have fallen out of use or have undergone sound shifts there.

Put everything together and enjoy the result!


Has anybody come up with a "Japanized" version of toki pona? I saw a post on twitter about creating a "Japanized" version of toki pona. Has anyone done that? toki pona certainly seems to be influenced at least a little bit by Japanese anyway (word structure/particles). The poster suggested starting by substituting the vocabulary with the equivalent Japanese words, which would be a little difficult, because tp words can vary quite a bit in meaning so it's difficult to fit them into one word/kanji. Kanji are usually chosen with simplicity in mind first, over having the exact equivalent meaning. 'lon' for example can mean at/in/on, but also means true/real/alive. 在 is the standard kanji used. 'tawa' can be go/move (could be 行?), but also means for (as in 'for me/you'). Officially 去 is used. The word 'toki' could be 話 (hana, speak) or 語 (go, language) depending on the context, but generally 言(gen?) is used.(言良-good statement/quote 話良-good speech, & 語良-good language, would all normally just be written as 言良). Has anybody created a list of toki pona words with the equivalent Japanese words? I use the seperate kanji as well as unofficial words like te...to for surrounding quotes

There's a list of Chinese symbols that can be used for toki pona words on the official toki pona website. I know I saw something on Reddit about a week or two ago that said that there was somebody trying to create a mapping system for kanji for toki pona, but he hasn't uploaded a finalised version from what I've seen.


How common are reflexive pronouns in natlangs? I'm working on the pronoun system of one of my conlangs, and I can't find any resource that can tell me how commonly reflexive pronouns occur in natural languages.

Is a reflexive something I need to add to be naturalistic? And if it isn't is there a specific reason/way a lack of reflexive pronouns occurs?

Generally speaking, you need a reflexive pronoun of some type if not having one causes ambiguity in who did what to whom. Assume English had no reflexives. "I tossed the ball to I" and "You tossed the ball to you" (assuming singular "you") are quite understandable as one person tossing the ball to themselves, thus no reflexive needed. "She tossed the ball to he", acceptable. But suppose you had "She tossed the ball to she", and it's been previously established there is more than one woman present. Did person A throw the ball to Person B, or did she toss the ball up in the air and caught it herself? There's no way to tell. An example like that is why German only has a distinctive reflexive in third person; first and second person don't have that same ambiguity.
You can get rid of the reflexive entirely if your verb system, to use one possibility, allows a given verb to indicate if it takes a direct or indirect object, or if it does not. Let's say that English verbs used the affix a- to indicate the verb is ditransitive (it has both a direct and indirect object) and no affix to indicate purely transitive (it only has a direct object).

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She a-threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.

Under a system like that, English wouldn't need a reflexive pronoun because the verb would make it clear whether the subject was performing the action on themselves, or using themselves as the indirect object, or whether something else was the recipient of the action. One could argue the affix a- is similar to the single Icelandic reflexive pronoun that's used for everything.
In Inuktitut, verbs that are are equivalent to English intransitive verbs use one suffix attached to them to indicate the subject:

pisuk to walk
pisuktunga I am walking
pisuktutit You (singular) are walking
pisuktuq He/She/It is walking

Specific verbs, equivalent to transitive verbs, use a different set of suffixes that indicate both subject and object:

qukiq to shoot something
qukiqtagit I shoot you
qukiqtara I shoot him/her/it
qukiqtarma You shoot me
qukiqtait You shoot him/her/it
qukiqtaanga He/she/it shoot me
qukiqtaatit He/she/it shoot you
qukiqtanga He/she/it shoot that other he/she/it

Here's where the reflexives come in: if you don't use the second set of suffixes, but instead use the first set, then the verb becomes a reflexive: the subject did something to themselves.

qukiqtunga I shoot myself
qukiqtutit You shoot yourself
qukiqtuq He/She/It shoot themself

Attaching the suffix that goes on intransitive verbs onto a transitive verb turns that verb into a reflexive.
So, if your verb conjugation allows that sort of thing, then you can get away with not using reflexive pronouns. The verb indicates it.
On the other hand, if your verb doesn't allow you to do that, then you need reflexives in order to remove the ambiguity when you get into situations where it's not clear who is doing what to whom.
Another way: go back to that first English example I used. Suppose English had multiple third person singular pronouns, such that you didn't just have "she", but "she-1", "she-2", and perhaps more. Then what does the example look like?

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-2." - Mary threw the ball to Susan.
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She-1 threw the ball to she-1." - Mary threw the ball up in the air and caught it herself.

No ambiguity. The context makes it clear that Mary is she-1 (Mary had the ball, she-1 threw the ball, therefore Mary is she-1, so Susan is she-2).
A third option is context. You might have a language where you do need to gather more information in order to determine what's going on.

"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan threw it back." - Mary obviously threw the ball to Susan.
"Mary and Susan were on the field. Mary had the ball. She threw the ball to she. Susan then asked for the ball." - Mary apparently didn't throw the ball to Susan, since Susan asked for it after it had been thrown and caught.

So, three possible ways to get away without reflexive pronouns. So it's not a matter of how common or uncommon it is, but does the grammar of the language allow you to get away without them, or is it necessary because there's no other way of providing the same information?


What are some examples of mathematical conlangs? What are some examples of mathematical conlangs?
I'm curious as to if there are any full existing conlangs that allow you to do arithmetic or mathematical manipulations from a conlang perspective.
The closest that I've found for this is this set of short clips on YouTube, Inventing a Number System. But I'm curious as to if there might be more examples, especially examples that have a mathematical grammar of some sort.
(Note: I do apologize if this post is a bit fuzzy, as the idea is still kind of fuzzy in my mind. This is also my first post to this forum. I can revise the post if needed.)
Thanks.

There's a language based on stack-based programming languages (like Forth) that eliminates syntactic ambiguity called Fith. The name is a deliberate pun on Forth.

FrathWiki
2019 Smiley award page
Fith grammar (archived)

Basically, when parsing the language you have a stack of objects that you have to keep track of, as well as some global state like the default number that can be explicitly changed.
The idea of layering a human language on top of a Forth-like grammar is flexible enough that you could extend Fith or make radically different design decisions without losing some of its nice properties.


How Standard Average European is Esperanto? Esperanto is by design based on European languages, so every similarity to European languages is in fact intended.

But I want to know how Standard Average European (SAE criteria listed by @Sparksbet) Esperanto is. One of the hallmarks of SAE, the have-perfect, is absent from Esperanto, and some criteria are formulated in a way that I feel not able to evaluate them. Has someone undertaken this already, or can do it on-the-fly?

See also this combination of features in Esperanto that is not matched by SAE languages but by central Semitic languages and Welsh.

Tl;dr: Esperanto possesses about 8/12 SAE features

Let's go through these features one by one. This is going to be pretty long, sorry for that. For reference, I'm using the famous Haspelmath paper as reference for which features define the SAE sprachbund, as I did in my earlier post.

1. Definite and indefinite articles - ✗

Esperanto defies SAE norms out the gate here, as it only has a definite article.

  libro - "a book"
  la libro - "the book"

This is actually quite bizarre, as those SAE languages that do not fit this criterion (such as Slavic languages, which heavily influenced Esperanto) have no articles at all. However, some neighboring non-SAE languages do have only a definite article, so this isn't too bizarre cross-linguistically.

2. Relative clauses with relative pronouns - ✓

Haspelmath characterizes this way of forming relative clauses, unique to SAE languages, by the following criteria:

The relative clause is post-nominal
There is an inflecting relative pronoun
This pronoun introduces the relative clause
The relative pronoun functions as a resumptive, signalling the head's role in the relative clause.

Esperanto relative clauses fit all of these criteria.

  Tiu blua balono, kion mi estis tenanta, knalis
  "That blue balloon, which I was holding, popped."

Here, the relative clause kion mi estis tenanta follows the nominal head balono. It is introduced by an inflecting relative pronoun kion, which is inflected for the accusative case to mark the balloon's role in the clause (that it is the object of estas tenanta. Pretty much prototypical SAE here.

3. 'Have'-perfect - ✗

Many European languages used a form of "to have" plus a passive participle to mark what we can loosely call the perfect. The languages that possess this construction have grammaticalized it to different degrees, but according to Haspelmath, "what is important here is that they all must have had basically the same meaning when they were first created."

Esperanto does not have a 'have'-perfect. Instead, Esperanto emulates Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in using "to be" + an active participle -- a form Haspelmath explicitly contrasts with the 'have'-perfect in his article.

  Mi estas vidinta la viron.

mi est-as vid-i-nta          la  vir-on
I  be-PRS see-PERF-ACT.PTCP  the man-ACC

  "I have seen the man."

Unsurprising given Zamenhof's language background, but not SAE.

4. Nominative experiencers - ✓

With "verbs of sensation, emotion, cognition, and perception," there are two main strategies for expressing the experiencer -- either the experiencer is treated like an agent and marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "I like it"), or it is treated like a patient or goal and the stimulus is marked as a nominative subject (e.g., "It pleases me", "It is pleasing to me"). English pretty much exclusively uses nominative experiencers, but this isn't strictly binary across languages -- many languages, including quite a few SAE languages, will have some verbs that do the former and some that do the latter. However, most SAE languages have a very strong tendency to prefer nominative experiencers.

Esperanto primarily uses nominative experiencers.

  Mi vidis fantomon. - "I saw a ghost."
  Mi timas la mallumon. - "I fear the darkness."
  Mi flaras florojn. - "I smell flowers."

Esperanto does possess at least one verb that bucks the trend, plaĉi.

  Ĉokolado plaĉas al mi
  "I like chocolate" (lit., "Chocolate is pleasing to me.")

However, even this construction is gradually becoming less used over time as speakers favor the nominative experiencer verb ŝati instead.

  Mi ŝatas ĉokoladon.
  "I like chocolate."

Therefore, I think it's safe to say that Esperanto is pretty SAE in this regard.

5. Participial passive - ✓

To quote Haspelmath: "Standard Average European languages typically have a canonical passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb ("be", "become", or the like). In this passive the original direct object becomes the subject and the original subject may be omitted, but it may also be expressed as an adverbial agent phrase."

Esperanto passives behave pretty much exactly in this way. Unsurprising, since none of the language families from which it draws its inspiration differ from the SAE trend here either.

  La knabo estas batita (de sia fratino).

la  knab-o  est-as bat-i-ta           de si-a      frat-in-o
the boy-NOM be-PRS hit-PERF-PASS.PTCP of REFL-POSS brother-FEM-NOM

  "The boy is hit (by his sister)."

Granted, these passive participle constructions in Esperanto can often be avoided using anticausitive morphology or free word order in contexts where this type of passive construction would be unavoidable in, say, English. But this construction exists and is certainly frequently used enough to be considered a nicely SAE feature of Esperanto.

6. Anticausative prominence - ?

Esperanto possesses both a causative affix -ig and an anticausative affix -iĝ, both of which are used very frequently.

fand-i           fand-iĝ-i          brul-i             brul-ig-i
melt-INF         melt-ANTIC-INF     burn-INF           burn-CAUS-INF
"to melt (tr.)"  "to melt (intr.)"  "to burn (intr.)"  "to burn (tr.)"

To say for certain that Esperanto has a preference for one over the other, some proper analysis of the language's vocabulary and usage would have to be done. In my limited experience, I'd say that they're about equally common in Esperanto, but it's really not possible to say without a lot more research into Esperanto verbs and their usage.

7. Dative external possessors - ✓

As @jknappen has pointed out, Esperanto does allow for dative external possessors

  Mi lavas al mi la manoj.
  "I wash my hands." (literally, "I wash to me the hands")

I can't personally speak for how common they are, but the only requirement for this criterion is that they exist.

8. Negative pronouns and lack of verbal negation - ✓

This is another easy one, as this SAE feature is explicitly spelled out in the basic 16 rules of Esperanto:

  When another NEGATIVE word is present, the word NE [English no, not] is omitted.

  Mi ne  venis     Neniu  venis
  I  not come      No.one comes

9. Particles in comparative constructions - ✓

There are quite a few ways of marking comparatives, but particle comparatives like the English "than" are pretty overwhelmingly SAE. Esperanto uses a particle comparative, as its ol is pretty much identical in function to English "that".

10. Relative-based equative constructions - ✓

Esperanto's equative construction tiel ... kiel is actually more transparently based on relative clauses than the English construction, as it uses synchronic relative correlatives -- and even the English "as ... as" construction is considered relative-based by Haspelmath. Another transparently SAE feature.

11. Subject person affixes as strict agreement markers - ✗

It's far more common, cross-linguistically, for languages with person-marking to be pro-drop. However, several SAE languages (including French, German, and English) inflect the verb to agree with the person/number of the subject without allowing the subject to be dropped.

While Esperanto is not pro-drop, to my knowledge, Esperanto does not inflect verbs to agree with the person or number of the subject, and so it avoids this SAE feature.

12. Intensifier-reflexive differentiation - ✓

European languages verb frequently distinguish between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns, but using one form for both appears to be more common worldwide. English actually averts this, as it uses its reflexive in this intensifier function (e.g., "He did it himself").

Esperanto's intensifier particle, mem, is distinct from its reflexive pronoun si.

  Li batis sin.
  "He hit himself."

  Li mem batis ĝin.
  "He hit it himself."

Thus, Esperanto is SAE in this regard.


Is num-det-n-adj-rel a reasonable order for a noun phrase? In English, noun phrases are det-num-adj-n-rel (e.g. "The five orange balls that John saw"). In Spanish, noun phrases are (mostly) det-num-n-adj-rel (e.g. "Las cinco pelotas naranjas las que Juan vió," lit. "The five balls orange that John saw"). Is num-det-n-adj-rel a reasonable order (e.g. "Five these balls orange that John saw").

My determiners are prefixes on the noun, so I can't put numbers between determiners and nouns. Do I have to put numbers after the noun in this case to be naturalistic? My language is primarily head-initial (SVO default word order, adverbs come after verbs, etc.)

Reasonable: sure!

We do this in English, fronting the number for emphasis or for poetry. There's no reason why you couldn't do this as a matter of ordinary in your language.

Five the orange balls that Johnny saw  flew through air and bounced to jackadaw.


With the death of CSUR, has there been any new Unicode proposal for con-scripts? The CSUR (ConScript Unicode Registry) is — or, rather, with its last update in 2008, was — a project "to coordinate the assignment of blocks out of the Unicode Private Use Area (E000-F8FF and 000F0000-0010FFFF) to constructed/artificial scripts, including scripts for constructed/artificial languages." As its authors do not seem to be involved with it anymore and the page suffering neglect, I can assume the project has stalled or died. Has anyone come up with a similar project since?

There exists the UCSUR (Under-ConScript Unicode Registry) which was created as a sort of temporary holding place for proposals to avoid conflicts until the CSUR is once again active.


What is the difference between an Isolating and an Analytic language? These two terms appear to be used nearly interchangeably to refer to languages with little morphology. However at the same time I sometimes see them contrasted with each other, but cannot identify a pattern.

Isolating languages do not use inflectional morphology, i.e., using affixes or other manipulations of roots to create words--all words are seperate, and none contain multiple morphemes.  Vietnamese is an isolating language.

Here's an example: the word snowman.  It has two morphemes: snow- and -man, and therefore has a morpheme-to-word ratio of 2:1.  Or take Spanish corremos, we run, which has three corr-, -e-, and -mos, for the word, present tense, and person/number.  (Please correct me if I am wrong--I don't know Spanish), so its ratio is 3:1.
In an isolating language, this ratio approaches 1:1--words stand alone and cannot be separated (hence "isolating.")  So, these concepts--"snowman" and "we are running"--would take multiple words to express, as each one would contain only a single morpheme.  Isolating languages have no inflectional morphology and no derivational morphology.

However, analytical languages are a broader category; they have a low morpheme-to-word ratio as well, but--and here's the big but--they can have a derivational morphology.  This means that while "we are running" would still be multiple single-morpheme words like in an isolating language, the word "snowman" could be a two-morpheme word.

Thus, isolating languages are actually a subset of analytic languages.  Analytic languages cover languages with no inflectional morphology and a low morpheme-to-word ratio, while isolating languages have all that and no derivational morphology.


How much Dwarvish did Tolkien actually devise? The Dwarvish language in Tolkien's legendarium is famous for being virtually unknown to non-Dwarves. Apart from a few phrases, like Gimli's battle-cry "Baruk Khazad! Khazad ai-menu!" (from memory; please forgive the lack of diacritics), almost nothing of their language is known to other Middle-Earth dwellers.

But what about us in the real world? Did Tolkien actually develop the language beyong those few phrases, in any of his wider notes on Middle-Earth and its languages? Or did he focus more on the Elvish languages, and create the in-universe conceit of Dwarvish secretiveness just so that he didn't have to develop yet another language?

As per this (cited by "An Analysis of Dwarvish" in Arda Philology 1: Proceedings of the First International Conference, with a very nice glossary of the language, which can be found here):

  Regarding Khuzdul, Tolkien stated that "this tongue has been sketched in some detail of structure, if with a very small vocabulary" (PM:300). It evidently came into being in the thirties.

Here PM refers to the Peoples of Middle Earth. The complete corpus of the language is described on the same site as being

  a few names, like Khazad-dûm and Zirak-zigil, the inscription on Balin's tomb, and a battle cry: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! "Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!"

A petty-dwarf, Mîm, is also named, in The Children of Hurin, though that is the only reference there. The names also include Chamber of Mazarbul [records].

(A complete glossary is given on the website; it is too long to copy here.) It also mentions Appendix D, E, and F in the Lord of the Rings (F primarily containing history, of course) and the Appendix in the Silmarillion also apparently contains a reference to Khuzdul:

  At least one Khuzdul word made its way into Sindarin: kheled "glass", that appears in Grey-elven as heledh (see the Silmarillion Appendix, entry khelek-)

This appears to be all we know of Khuzdul. In spite of this, extensive analysis has been made, with a not insignificant amount of it guesswork. See "An Analysis of Dwarvish" for one example (provides a theory of language structure).

Of course, Tolkien did state that it was "sketched", but the question is where it was - there's a chance it may be unpublished:

  Yes, there is some unpublished material concerning Khuzdul. However, it’s only a small amount, and as I recall, it consists mostly of phonological discussion, though inevitably there is in conjunction with this some discussion of the grammatical significance of various root modifications. But don’t expect anything like Etymologies or the "Early Qenya Grammar" for Khuzdul.


What are some options for alternative contrasts in demonstratives? Most languages contrast demonstrative in a "here/there/over there" distance system, with two to five grades (with some referring to the hearer's location too). I'm looking for a different concept for demonstrative contrast.

Does anyone have suggestions for me?

As the linked WALS chapter already mentions, a common distinction is to contrast near speaker/near listener/distal rather than a simple distance constrast.

One way to make such as system more "interesting" can be to add additional usages or shades of meaning to the different demonstratives, for example having one be a neutral term and the other one that is only used when specific focus on the distance is desired, or alternatively having a neutral demonstrative in addition to ones overtly marked for distance (the WALS chapter again already has examples of this, mentioning modern Hebrew and Lithuanian respectively). Korafe (TNG, Oro Province PNG) has a 3 demonstratives e, a, o in a speaker/listener/distal system which additionally serve the function of showing emontional evolvement of the speaker in utterance, with a "near listener" being the neutral default, e "near speaker" showing a great deal of involvement and o "distal" showing a desire of the speaker to distance and dissociate him/herself from the utterance1 pp.75-77.

Variables may be paradigmatically overlaid on top of a distance system, e.g. a visibility contrast as seen in Malagasy(Astronesian, Madagascar)2, or may supplement it, for example by having a 3-way proximal/distal/non-visible contrast. Other contrasts than visibility are possible, for example in Fore(TNG, Eastern Higlands Province PNG), which has a 5-way speaker/listener/proximal/medial/distal system, with proximal and distal further exhibiting a 3-way same level/above/below vertical relationship, for a total of 9 different demonstratives1.

Other than overlaying various such contrasts on a system there is also the possibility of instead having a large set of what may be called "positional stems", whith relatively specific semantics such as "up above", "on the beach" or "towards the Siberian mainland" which can then either be used as or derived into demonstratives. The various Yup'ik languages(Eskaleut, Bering Sea area) are an example of languages with a lot of these, and using various specialised and general nominal morphology allows forming demonstrative pronouns and adverbs with meanings such as "the ones up there" or "from the two entities upstairs/on the mountain", though I think there is a fair bit of variation in the actual meaning of the different stems between the different lects and langs. Section III.4 of this document covers them summarily as they are used in Gambell, St. Lawrence Island.

A somewhat similar in result but structureally different approach to this is exemplified by Nasioi(South Bougainville, Bougainville Province PNG), which rather than have a large inventory of deictic stems and a limited set of affixes instead has just one demonstrative stem a~e from which a large number of directional, as well as some nominalising and oblique affixes may derive different demonstratives such as a-un-toom-peto DEM-NOM-down.north-near.movement_toward"that down there, closer, ascending towards us from the north" or e-eʔ-dan-to DEM-INSTR-seaward-far "by going seaward far away (from us)"1.


How can I talk about weather without expletives? In English, it is necessary to use a syntactic expletive ("it") when talking about weather:

It   is     sun-ny.
EXPL COP.3S sun-ADJ

Pro-drop languages can easily avoid the explicit expletive by excluding it (Spanish):

Hac-e sol.
do-3S sun

But in this Spanish example, there's still an implicit expletive subject. How can I completely avoid using expletive subject when talking about the weather?

There are also language with impersonal verb conjugation, and of course, nothing prevents a verb from being used only in the impersonal. Nahuatl has an impersonal voice, but because it's only used with verbs that normally have animate subjects, its weather verbs function much like Spanish's, ironically enough.

In my own conlang Mfalen, weather verbs function as descriptors, so one says the equivalent of "X is raining" (i.e. It's raining on/in X) the same way one says "X is cold" or "X is windy" (or indeed, "X is red").


Are there any resources to learn Solresol available in English? I've been interested in learning Solresol, as the idea of it intrigues me. But I haven't been able to find anything in English to learn it from (the original works on the language are in French, which I don't know).

I checked out sidosi.org, and it shows a couple of links to an English translation of the original grammar of Solresol, but one redirects back to the sidosi.org homepage, and one leads to a message saying the site has been retired from service. Other resources are also linked, and also turn out to be missing.

So are there any resources (preferably online) to learn Solresol from English?

You can find many articles at SiDoSi (sidosi.org)'s resources page or at this tutorial on blogspot. Also, I'd recommend a translation of "The second major book about Solresol, written by the other major contributor to Solresol, Boleslas Gajewski," also at sidosi.org over here.

Note that SiDoSi (sidosi.org)'s resources page has an error that requires you to click the [+] and then the link that appears because the direct links don't work and redirect you. Else see the beta version, without broken links.


Are there differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show? Belter Creole is a conlang creole spoken in the novel series The Expanse by James S. A. Corey. When the novel was adapted into a TV series they got linguist Nick Farmer to develop the language.

Are there substantial differences between the Belter Creole of the books and the show? Or is what is in the books just less developed, and Farmer created a more complete but still fully compatible version for the show? Do the later novels, from after the show started to be produced, use Farmer's version or Corey's original version?

Yes they are totally different.
In the books
Maybe because Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck are not language experts, the Belter language in the books is very simple, and not really a con-lang. It does not exhibit a plausible grammar and etymological evolution. In short, it's just words from different languages pieced together.
You can find a good list of examples inside the fan wiki https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books), with also the real languages the Belter expression come
A couple examples that pop up often in the books:
Bist Bien: "Are you okay" from German bist and bien spanish
The usage of "dui" from Chinese to say "yes!" "correct!"
In the TV
In the series, maybe producers had a bigger budget and commissioned the creation of a real con-lang, even if it is seldom spoken.
The words you hear in the TV are not in the books, and instead sound very plausible from etymologycal analysis:
Beltalowda = from "belter", corrupted in "belta" and "lowda" people
And this is a good example, you see the consistensy in how the word component is used:
Inyalowda = from "inner" corrupted in "inya" and "lowda" again! = Inner people.
The spelling corrupt from Belter -> Belta and Inner -> Inya is plausible in a language evolution context in the future.
Another example:
Welwala = from "well-dweller", the person who live in a gravity well
And in the TV movie, Belter language is also speak in longer sentences with full grammar rules. When in books it's always just random foreign words in the same sentence, but mainly in English
I hope this help you solving your doubt. English is not my mother language, sorry if is not clear.


How many unique sounds does the average conlang have? At the moment I have 90 unique vowel/diphthong sounds that use tonal and length distinction in my conlang. In addition I've chosen 14 consonants, making my total of unique sounds 104.

I don't particularly want to drop any of them, but this seems a lot higher than the usual amount of unique sounds in a language. High enough to consider a more selective approach maybe.

I do want the language to have more vowel sounds than consonant, but how many unique vowel sounds does it have to have to be considered above average?

Depends what you want to do. If you want to be able to emulate all the words of real languages, add the whole IPA system. If you want nice melodic options, add in accordance with your preferred music system (Asian 5 tone, Western 7 tone, Modern 12 tone, each with steps and variations, and repeating form 20 Hz up to 20 000 Hz) and for each possible sound humans can produce - different voiced and voiceless sounds, whispered (ha) or normal (a), and so on. If you want to actually use it and keep it independent of other languages, I suggest keeping it simple - a movie language, for instance, is more effectful if you only choose in-character sounds.

Btw, you get a lot more sounds even in English and Italian if you include unusual words, regional dialects and so on - a large part of the IPA phonemes can be used in either language, though people often don't notice.

Here a few different English vowels (all mainstream):

Hut
Hat
Heroic
Hellenic
Hmmmh
Hit
Here
Hot
Hotel
Herd
Hoover

Alpha
And
Entity
About
e-in-Garden
India
Equal
Oven
Organ
Earth
Ultra

Iron
Out
Able
Oil
Over

Hi
How
Hey
Hoist
Holy

That's 32 distinct sounds. Some might be debatable, they are also dependent on dialect - "and" and "entity" start with the same sound for some, but I hear a difference - at least in some regions. The e in "Garden" isn't a sound at all according to some. And so on. The version on Wikipedia (English phonology) is slightly different. "Ha" is even in IPA written as two sounds, though it clearly is one sound (a whispered "a"), as you can see when stretching it, with or without adding a letter afterwards. I even ommitted a few vowels only the British/Australian/Canadian people use. According to Google, US English has 14-16 vowel phonemes, Australian English 20-21. And the whispered variety isn't even included.

If you multiply by three for tonal (add Up like we do in questions and Down like we do in some forms of emphasis or sounding defeated), you get 96. Asia also has a wavering tonal, but that can be emulated with two letters imo.

If you multiply by two for 2 different lengths, you get 192. If we ignore the h-sounds, we are still at 96.

So what you have is not that much.


Are there conlangs using constructed sounds? Usually, constructed languages of all kind (naturalistic or not) draw their sounds from existing natural languages.

Are there conlangs with constructed sounds, i.e., sounds that do not occur in natural languages (or are at least very rare in natural languages)?

Click consonants are rare in natlangs, but rather popular in conlangs, though despite this, given the existence of things like !Xóõ reality is stranger than most fiction in this specific regard. Language-game/conlang(?) turned actual spoken register Damin had several phonemes not seen in (other?) natural languages, such as an ingressive glotally interrupted unvoiced lateral fricative /ɬ↓ʔ/, an egressively released bilabial click /ʘ↑/ and stuttered bilabial trill /ʙ\ʙ/.

Searching for the various hypothetical combinations as well as ext-IPA sounds on google turns up a fair few instances of conlangs using sounds such as percussives, implosive fricatives, velopharyngeal and nareal fricatives, etc.

Outside of these humanly-possible, but non-attested outside of disordered speech phonemes, some languages made up for non-humans include sounds that are impossible for humans to make, such as this one spoken by a race of giants, including a special type of whistle-like sounds, or this one made for creatures with bird-like anatomy, differentiating between 4 different types of contraction of muscles in the throat overlaid with 5 different pitch contours.


Structure only conlang? Nouns? Are there examples of conlangs that are used by applying their structure such as grammar, sentence structure, intonation, means of combining words, etc… with other features of a given language or given member of a class of languages?

This has the disadvantage that for understanding one would have to know both the language in question, call this X, and the language it's adapting, call this Y.

For example and in particular I'm thinking that X could use the alphabet and all the single morpheme nouns and verbs of Y, but replace every other aspect of the language with its own.

A possible advantage could be in allowing the speaker more reachable access to an unfamiliar linguistic environment, be that a conlang or a natural language, where different modes of thought are the most natural.

It happens with sign languages - often there are two "versions" of a sign language, the first one (less official, natural) is generally used by the community and has its own grammar, the second one (more official, heavily constructed) parallels grammar (syntax) of the corresponding spoken language.

E.g.there is the natural Polish Sign Language, and a rather artificial constructed Signed Polish, following closely the syntax of spoken Polish, so somewhat the opposite of the question, a natural language imposing its grammar over the conlang. But it could be said that the signing system (obviously) imposes its own "phonology" over the spoken language.


Is Schleyer's first sketch of Volapük available as a reprint? Johann Martin Schleyer published the first sketch of Volapük in 1879 in a rather obscure catholic newsletter named Die Sionsharfe. This newsletter isn't easily accessible, as far as I know. Is this first sketch available as a reprint in some more accessible work?

To my big surprise the relevant issue of Sionsharfe is now digitised and freely available from Digitale Bibliothek München. The first sketch of Volapük at this moment still named only Weltsprache or Allsprache, the word Volapük itself can be found a few month later, occurs in Nr. 35, Vol. IV (1879) Beilage as a supplement.

What a fascinating document!

Following issues of Sionsharfe also contain shorter or longer fragments of Volapük, unfortunately the digisat ends with Nr 48 (1880), there are four more years missing.


Grammar concepts required for every conlang Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?

For example, is there a list of such concepts available?

Is there a method to make sure that a constructed language contains all the necessary grammar concepts, e.g. to make sure that a concept like genitive case or a construct state is present?

The primary issue here is trying to find out what is necessary for a language to function; not even 'Chomskyan tenets' like recursion (or broader concepts like classifiers and numbers) seem to be obligatory, and language in essence seems to boil down to a glorified predicate machine with parts tacked on by Broca's area — and so, the answer is, for now, no: we'd very much like to see a way of doing this, and it would be truly groundbreaking in linguistics, seeing as it's a major focus point for many researchers in many fields of philosophy, linguistics, psychology and neurology.


Do we know languages which think about subordinate conjunctions (like 'as,' 'even,' 'while') differently than English does? for my conlang, I am trying to think of how to do the subordinating conjunction 'as,' 'even,' 'while' (and related: 'even though,' etc.).
In the languages that I know well enough to use these words (English, Spanish, and Turkish), they are separate words. I wonder, do we know languages which use other constructions for 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' other than with a separate word linking two clauses?
Example:
We ate as we ran.
I have covered quite a lot of grammar so far with systems of agglutinating clitics and affixes, so I'm trying to get my mind around how 'as,' 'even,' 'while,' could be handled without separate words. I guess I could just have like a "simultaneity clitic" for 'while' like I have a "conditional clitic" for 'would'...?
This has been difficult for me to conceptualize quietly in my head, so I really appreciate input and discussion :)

In Inuit languages, there are no separate subordinating conjunctions. In Inuktitut, you identify the subordinate clause by an affix that indicates a conjunction.
For example, take the sentence "While Mary was eating, John was walking." In some Inuktitut dialects, you'd only indicate time tense for the superordinate phrase ("John was walking"), while the subordinate verb wouldn't have a tense marker, but instead use the conjunctive affix -tillu- (with the appropriate person marker)

Mary niri-tillugu John pisu-lauq-tuq (Mary eat-CONJ.3s John walk-Past-Part.3s)

It obviously gets a lot more complicated, but that gives one example of how to do it. If English had a similar setup, you might see something like this:

Mary eat John walked.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to relate them serially (Mary ate then John walked), you might see this sort of construction:

Mary ate John walked.

And you'd obviously reverse them for the other sequence, so "John walked Mary ate."
Obviously it would have to get more sophisticated, but you get the idea.


Does Lojban completely remove semantic ambiguity? As a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language (Wikipedia), does Lojban also completely eliminate semantic ambiguity? If not, what are some examples?

Let's take an element of Lojban's grammar, and see if it's semantically ambiguous.
In lojban, tanru are basically two predicates in adposition. The first one semantically modifies the second one; and that's all.

Example:

{lo zdani gerku cu barda}: The house dog is big.
{lo gerku zdani cu barda}: The kennel is big.

Where {zdani} (roughly) means "home", {gerku} means "dog", and {barda} means "big (the rest is grammatical witchcraft, don't bother).

In the first example, {zdani gerku} is syntactically a tanru, and {zdani} modifies {gerku}. However, the tanru is primarily about {gerku}.
In the second one, it's the reverse. {gerku zdani} is also syntactically a tanru, but {gerku} modifies {zdani}; and the overall tanru is about {zadni}, not {gerku}.

However, it isn't possible to make assumptions about the overall meaning of a tanru. Though it's syntactically not ambiguous, it is semantically ambiguous.
I've chosen the english “house dog” and “kennel”, but it was just my intent, and english translates this way. Officially, it's not possible to infer the meaning from a tanru.

You can even read yourself in the last official reference grammar that “All tanru are ambiguous semantically.”

For a surer version:

{lo gerku poi ta'e zvati lo zdani cu barda}: The dog that uses to live at the house is big
{lo zdani poi zukte ke'a lo nu stuzi lo gerku cu barda}: The house that is aimed so that dogs could live in is big.

EDIT: added an explanation on how it's ambiguous, and the surer examples.


How do lists of three or more items work in Klingon? Concerning compound subjects and such, I'm not exactly sure how lists of nouns work exactly, especially with three or more items. How would "bears and metal drums" be distinguished from "bears, metal, and drums"? Wouldn't both be mIl'oDmey baS 'Inmey je?

The Klingon Dictionary says that je follows two or more nouns, so I wouldn't think you use multiple, and I've only seen commas used in dependent clauses. Is there a way to clarify your meaning?

I think it depends on the context. If it is "I can see bears and metal drums", then you would have to repeat the subject and verb, effectively saying "I can see bears and I can see metal drums".

As per The Klingon Dictionary (6.2, Complex Sentences):

  When the subject of both the joined sentences is the same, the English translation may be reduced to a less choppy form, but Klingon does not allow this shortening.

If you are just talking about lists of items without having a complex sentence, then I would think this sentence from 5.3 (Conjunctions) applies (even though it is about the post-verbal meaning of je):

  As in English, the meaning of such sentences is ambiguous: [..] The exact meaning is determined by context.

If there are bears and metal drums, then presumably you're not talking about bears, metal, and drums. An oft-quoted example where there is an ambiguity in English is I am dedicating this work to my parents, the Queen of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Without a comma before and, the list could be mistaken for an apposition. Obviously, the context makes this interpretation highly unlikely!

Just remember that language is rarely unambiguous and independent of context; any attempts to avoid this make it very unwieldy. Which is why legal language is typically so hard to read.


Is there any evidence that learning a zonal Slavic conlang can help conversing with native speakers of Slavic languages The relatively high degree of mutual intercomprehensibility of the Slavic languages has fascinated a lot of people for a long time. It was also a motivation in the design of zonal constructed languages based on Slavic languages (e.g., Slovio and Interslavic).

Are there studies or experiments showing that learning a zonal Slavic-based conlang enables communication with native speakers of Slavic languages at least to some degree?

Yes, they show. Slovio is not a zonal conlang, it is supposed to be a kind of Slavic Esperanto. It took place 20 years ago, but nowadays noone wants to use it.

Nevertheless, Interslavic is comprehensible for all Slavic people. Speaker of Interslavic went abroad to different Slavic countries and expressed their idea using Interslavic instead of native languages or English. And it worked. People understand the meaning, though the language can sound strange or event funny to them. And if it does, Interslavic is a viable project and succeeds in its challenge.


What's a good starting place to work on vocab? Obviously, generating a lexicon is very time-consuming, and there's so much that needs to be done, I often find myself suffering with analysis paralysis, because I just can't decide where to begin.

Word frequency lists don't help all that much, because there's an inverse relationship between how useful a word is and how common it is. The most commonly used word in English is 'the', for instance. If you just made words for the 100 most commonly used words, you wouldn't really be able to make that many sentences, which would make it difficult to work on the grammar.

I've seen some people use the Swadesh list, but I fail to see how that is useful in any way since the list was arbitarily chosen rather than thought through. And besides, it would require you make words for things that are highly unlikely to ever be mentioned, such as a word for 'louse'.

The Conlanger's Lexicon suggests you work by categories, so that that way you can at least form complete sentences, even if this does limit you to writing about one topic. Of course, there's still the problem of which list to begin with. He just lists the categories in the book alphabetically.

Are there other methods to use? And yes, I know about word-generating programs, but those spit out stuff that's much lower quality than stuff generated by hand. And besides, my conlang will have a highly productive word-derivation system, so I don't need that many roots (when I'm writing down lists of words, often times I just write what I want the compound word to literally translate as, though I rarely go back to fill it in because I never get to the words that would comprise the compound).

I've mostly been looking at frequency lists and the Conlanger's Lexipedia, but I would like to know if there was a better way.

If you're new to conlanging and want to start an entire language from scratch:  I would recommend reading The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder.  It's a fun read and is very helpful to a new conlanger, and helps you know what to create for your purposes, how to do this, and gives you a good understanding of basic linguistics.

For creating vocabularies from scratch:  A common practice is to begin with a list of roots and expand outwards, usually using some kind of derivational morphology.  The words you're going to want to begin with, besides words that come up in your grammar, which I think should be close to done by the time you start building a lexicon, are the basic concepts.  Things like man, tree, water, eat, do, green.  One famous example of such a list is the Swadesh list.  The way I made my vocab for my first language, Simean, was by coming up with roots for the concepts on this list and using morphological rules to expand that list.

Another alternative, though one I don't personally use, is to simply translate things and make up the necessary words as you go along.  Even so, I'd start with the Swadesh list to get a good grounding in terms of what your language feels, looks, and sounds like.


How to describe a purely symbolic writing system? Before I jump headlong into constructing a language, I'd like to do some research and see what others have done before me and learn from their experiences/mistakes.  The keywords I'm currently using are sub-optimal, so I need help tightening them up.

The "communication method" I am thinking of:

is purely for reading and writing
has no need to be spoken and is thus not based upon letters/phonemes
uses symbols to represent concepts
each symbol/concept corresponds to something like an English word or sentence (e.g. 'a cat', 'the sound made by flying bees', 'the feeling that results from being beaten by a lesser foe', 'move quickly', 'why?')
symbols are arranged relative to each other (in 2D space) to communicate more complex concepts and provide context
symbols are highly domain-specific and exclusive — mining, carpentry, fishing, etc. would have exclusive symbols that only have meaning in their contexts
is not meant to be signed, hummed, whistled, grunted, tapped or transmitted in any other way except for being printed on, and read from, a two-dimensional surface
is not based on any existing language
would permit deaf people, and people with no common language, to collaborate on very specific tasks

Wikipedia defines pasigraphy as 'a writing system where each written symbol represents a concept (rather than a word or sound or series of sounds in a spoken language)' but also defines a writing system as "any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication".  That seems a bit contradictory and confusing.

What are some good/accurate keywords that describe this 'thing' I am trying to develop?

I think you're overthinking this a little. While what you're considering is unusual, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't just be a written language in a logographic script.

is purely for reading and writing
has no need to be spoken and is thus not based upon letters/phonemes
is not meant to be signed, hummed, whistled, grunted, tapped or transmitted in any other way except for being printed on, and read from, a two-dimensional surface

It has no need to be, sure. But if humans or human-like beings are there they would most likely develop an oral way of "reading" it eventually.

uses symbols to represent concepts
each symbol/concept corresponds to something like an English word or sentence (e.g. 'a cat', 'the sound made by flying bees', 'the feeling that results from being beaten by a lesser foe', 'move quickly', 'why?')
symbols are highly domain-specific and exclusive — mining, carpentry, fishing, etc. would have exclusive symbols that only have meaning in their contexts

Sounds like a logographic writing system. Now it's not clear if the symbols for phrases are made up of component symbols for the things they represent or are unique singular symbols. Building symbols from other symbols would make sense, otherwise the number of symbols would grow exponentially.

symbols are arranged relative to each other (in 2D space) to communicate more complex concepts and provide context

This is on the surface the biggest difference between your proposal and human languages, which for both spoken and written language are linear.
However consider that some branches of linguistics believe that all language is representable by binary trees alone. If your language has a syntax (and if it doesn't it really couldn't be considered language) then we'd expect that it would be possible to develop a tree-based representation of it, perhaps using multiple levels of deep structure below the surface. And a non-binary tree could be converted to a binary tree.
I just spent some time looking at 2D languages, both conlangs and programming languages, and all the ones I found consisted of linear paths to follow or a tree structure. Conlangger Sai has explained their ideas for a non-linear fully 2D writing system, but they don't give an example of such a writing system. But they do say that their version of non-linearity is distinguished from linear design systems only by inelegance or convolution. I'd take this to mean that actually it is serialisable (and therefore could in theory be spoken) if not by humans then by some being of great intelligence. The essay is worth reading anyway if this topic continues to interest you.

In fact, I believe I can say that it is not possible, short of crippled or very simple specialty cases, to directly convert a linear writing to a non-linear one without either loosing a lot of meaning (NLàL), being extremely inelegant by virtue of failing to take advantage of better design (LàNL), or becoming functionally incomprehensible (e.g. the list format in which an Nth-degree array is stored in the C programming language).
So, what is non-linearity?
At its core, NL has to do with how concepts are arranged, both on physical paper and in their more abstract form. A NL system is a multigraph; its components are, or can be, extremely interconnected. There is no single traversal method, though there may be some conventional ones. There may not be a ‘traversal’ method at all, as such;


A Hypothetical Mediterranean Language Inspired by Both Greek and Latin Here is the scenario:

In or before the Classical Period, a king from some Greek city-state--it doesn't matter which--first brought all the other Greek city-states together to become one unified nation.  Either he or his heir then declared that the whole of the Mediterranean belong to the Greeks.  First phase of the grand plan was to conquer the Mediterranean was to absorb the lands of their closest neighbors, the Roman Republic.  The Republic, weak from the Conflict of the Orders, embraced their Greek conquerors with minimal resistance.  In absorbing Greek and Roman lands together, Greek and Roman culture merged into one, and that includes language.

The inspiration behind this scenario is that both Greek and Roman cultures have such inspirations on modern Western culture that it's hard to decipher where Greek ended and Roman began.  But what if both cultures were merged into one new one?  If you mix Greek with Latin, what should I look out for in regards to grammar?

I ask this because many people are not convinced that Glosa, an auxlang already inspired by both Greek and Latin, won't be the natural answer to this question.

The situation you describe, in which Classical Greece invades the Roman Republic, has two probable outcomes. (This is assuming a single language "merged into one" excludes the possibility of both languages coexisting. However, a language can also exert influence on another without supplanting it.)

If the Romans adopted (or were forced to adopt) their conquerors' language, which is what happened in other nations after Alexander the Great's conquests later in history, then the spoken language would become Greek. The influence of the Latin language in such a case would exist as a substrate, which could introduce Latin loan words and grammatical structures into Roman Greek.
If the Romans didn't choose (or weren't forced) to adopt Greek as their language and continued to speak Latin, then Latin would remain the spoken language, but would have Greek influence on vocabulary and grammar, as a superstrate or adstrate. As it is, Latin already has Greek influence on its vocabulary, with learned words like philosophia; but in the case of a Greek conquest, it would probably gain more mundane words as well.

A comparable case in history with regard to English could be the Norman invasion of England. Anglo-Norman and English were spoken alongside each other. Eventually, English was the only language spoken of the two in England, but not without considerable influence from Anglo-Norman. Looking at this case might give an idea of how a language could change followed by the invasion of another one.


Official resource on simlish language I know that Simlish language is not fully created. It is just a list of words and sentences.
Where can I find the full list (official source)?

P.S I wanna create this language as fully created conlang.

According to the Font of All Knowledge, Simlish

  worked best as a "language" made up of gibberish words that could not
  be translated, so that the dialogue's meanings would be left open to
  the imagination of the player.

and that William Wright, the Sims creator, intended it to be that way.

Here's a good Youtubeumentary on the topic. The voice actors, the audio director, they aver that it's gibberish. Meaning or emotion without form: while some words and phrases may have acquired "meanings", it doesn't seem like they've actually acquired "translations".

For example, if an English speaker says sulsul means "hello" while a French speaker says it means "bon jour", that doesn't mean hello = good day. All three are greetings, and I think that's rather Wright's point: sulsul has acquired universal meaning without actually acquiring a specific translation.


Finding inspiration for letter forms? I believe I've mentioned before on here how I struggle to come up with forms for letters.

I've tried to solve this by looking at other systems. Despite the diversity in our world, I've found it surprisingly hard to find a multitude of systems to draw from.

The problem is: writing systems have different factors that can influence their design. Syllabraries tend to have more complex characters than alphabets, because they don't have to write as many of them to spell out a word. And besides, they need a wider diversity of symbols anyway. Logographic systems are no different. Also the medium makes a huge difference. The aesthetic of one script may not be too practical to replicate using a medium it wasn't intended for.

I've found this all divides up writing systems into multiple different categories based on design. This means that if you stick with a certain medium and type of writing system, you won't have much to go off of. Like, if you look at alphabets, all that really seems to be out there is Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Korean. And if you look at cursive scripts, you only really have two options: English cursive, and Arabic, which is technically an abjad. And of course if you want a logographic system, the only living logographic system (aka, the only one to see use in a world where literacy was normal writing was part of every day life) is Chinese. Beyond that, all you have to look at are long extinct logographic systems that were all made to be carved into stone. Or cuneiform, which used some rather odd tools and medium to write. How many systems do you know of that were written in clay, and were always stamped rather than drawn?

I can't come up with forms that really look overly different from the few alphabets currently in use. Worse yet, most of them are closely related to each other! It seems like every symbol possible has already been used in a writing system somewhere.

The only thing that has really helped me is I've noticed that most lower-case Latin letters are built from a limited number of shapes: a circle, loop, short line, long line, long line with a loop, and a dot. Sadly, I can't really come up with any practical letter forms that don't use these shapes. They're pretty simple and basic.

After all, there is a limited number of shapes that one can draw with reasonable effort. You can measure the effort for writing a character in a writing system by the number of strokes needed. For alphabets, there should be no more than 5 strokes, for a syllabary maybe 7 or 8.

But there are more shapes available than you may think: For a relatively recent (in terms of writing systems) invention, you can look at the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics having a distinct look from other writing systems.

The different Indic writing systems are also a good source of inspiration: While sharing a common set of characters and common principles, the letter shapes are always different in the various Indic and Indic inspired (like Thai or Khmer) scripts.

And it is still possible to invent a new and distinct writing system from scratch: Tolkien's Tengwar shows clear external influences (from Indic scripts and from Francis Lodwick's Universal Alphabet) but is clearly distinguished from both sources of inspiration.


Was Tolkien aware of the Voynich manuscript? Looking at the Tengwar script designed by Tolkien I feel a certain similarity to the unknown script of the Voynich manuscript: Many characters look very similar to others of the same script, and there is a restricted set of penstrokes used in the characters. Repetition of strokes is used to derive other characters.

So I am wondering whether the Tengwar script could be influenced by the script of the Voynich manuscript. Was Tolkien aware of the Voynich manuscript? Or, to the opposite, was Tengwar already designed before the Voynich manuscript was rediscovered and publically known?

Or, to the opposite, was Tengwar already designed before the Voynich manuscript was rediscovered and publically known?

The manuscript was rediscovered in 1912. Tolkien, according to Wikipedia, started developing Elvish in 1910 or 1911... before the Voynich manuscript was rediscovered.

There is at least one claim that he was aware of it, though, although it would have to be after he had already started developing the languages.

This is a transcript of a message sent to the Voynich mailing list, sent November 13, 2002:

  Hello
  I have "lurked" on this list for a while and finally have a comment to offer, albeit a very insignificant one.

  I wonder if the fact that Prof. JRR Tolkien apparently had an interest in (or at least knowledge of) the Voynich Ms has been discussed or indeed is of any interest at all?

  The thing is, a nagging feeling that I had once seen the VMs many years ago - long before my recent interest was sparked by that piece in The New Scientist - is resolved. I now recall it - and though the persons concerned having died long since makes my little anecdote mere hearsay and in no way veridical, I thought I'd forward it. An old friend, a retired military man with an amateur interest in codes and cyphers, once showed me a couple of not entirely distinct b&w copies of pages from a curious coded manuscript, which I now realise were a couple of folios of the VMs. I was not especially interested in them at the time, I think, but the reason that the incident made an impression was that he said that they had been given to him by Prof JRR Tolkien. At that time I had just discovered and was very much 'into' Tolkien so I was most envious of my friend's knowing him and pressed for details of the great man, though in the end I never achieved my longed-for personal introduction. So I now wonder if there might be any reference anywhere in the mass of Tolkien papers to our VMs, and is this of any possible slight significance? After all, JRRT knew a great deal about languages and artificial scripts of course and if he was interested enough to make and pass on copies to a friend, he might have devoted some time to the VMs himself. And the Voynichese script does have a Tolkien-ish look to it or vice versa: could it have influenced him?

(this was found through a link from CipherMysteries.com)

However, since his development started before the Voynich manuscript was discovered, I'd say that it's... kinda unlikely that he was inspired by it.


State-based analogue to distributive case I am developing conlang that has grammatical cases system for nominals that for each spatial case there is state-based case.

In Finnic languages grammatical cases that denote states occur, examples in Finnish:

Essive (ESS) with the ending -na/-nä denotes being in state, corresponds to the combination 'as X' in English. lapsi - 'child', lapsena - 'as child / being a child'
dialectal Exessive (EXESS) with the ending -nta/-ntä denotes a departure from state, corresponding to English 'from being X...'. lapsi - 'child', lapsenta - 'from being child'
Translative (TRANSL) with the ending -ksi denotes a transition into state, corresponds to English 'to (becoming) X'. aikuinen - 'adult', aikuiseksi - 'to adult'. lapsenta aikuiseksi = '[maturing] from child to adult'.

There is clear spatial analogy:

Locative ↔ Essive
Ablative ↔ Exessive
Allative ↔ Translative

You can construct state-based analogues to other spatial cases. For example, for the Prolative case ('through X') we can make Essive-Prolative, which would mean 'passing through a state of being X / through way of being X"

There is a Hungarian grammatical case called Distributive (DISTR) with the ending -nként, which is equivalent to 'per X'. For example, hét - 'week', hetenként - 'weekly, once per week'. It has a clear spatial-temporal nature.

I am trying to come up with a state based analogue for this case. Let's call it 'Essive-distributive', but I am stuck with the expansion of the analogy. What exactly can 'per being in state' mean? Can anyone suggest a meaning and usage for such a case?

Interesting concept for a case. In my interpretation this kind of an abstract distributive case would apply in sentences like this one (a probably very clumsy reformulation of a famous first sentence in literature)

Every unhappy family is different in their unhappiness.

I looked up the really case-rich conlang Ithkuil and did not find a precedent for this kind of case. Feel free to name it by any name you like. When you don't have an own idea, I suggest respective case for that one.


What does xorlo do, and is it an official part of the Lojban language? I've noticed that many speakers of Lojban use xorlo, which is a modification branching off the base language, but finding explicit information about it is difficult. What does it do?

I also know people are generally using it by consensus, but is xorlo an official part of the language? What happens to the original text, The Complete Lojban Language?

xorlo is an official part of the Lojban Language. The Complete Lojban Language does not contain information about xorlo, and is no longer guaranteed to be entirely accurate. The Committee for Developing Lojban (BPFK) voted 11-0 to include xorlo in the official record as a part of the Lojban language. The proposal is not finalized until the BPFK declares their work finished, but it is extremely unlikely to change, as it has become an integral part of how the language works conversationally.

In essence, xorlo changes the meaning of two particle articles in lojban: lo, and le.

lo as an article used to indicate that you were talking about a set of objects which are truthfully what you claim they are. Nothing about them indicates that they would be anything else. For example, "lo jgena" meant "some things that are, to our best perceptions, knots."

Now, it doesn't say anything about perceptions, or the truthiness of what it is. It just means "any or some." It becomes the most generic article you can use in lojban, in place of anything else, because it is vague. "lo jgena" now means "any/some knot(s)," without qualification or ulterior statement about veracity.

le as an article used to mean "some things I have in mind, which I am describing." For example, "le jgena" meant that you had some knots in your head. The change to le is very minor in this context, and its pure meaning hasn't actually changed. The only difference is that it now exists only to be used when you have specific images of something in mind. Now, if I tell you "le jgena," you know I mean something more specific.


Is the Klingon alphabet inspired by Tibetan alphabet? Is the Klingon alphabet inspired by Tibetan alphabet?

Because they look similar..

Considering this question is a rehash of another question on SX, I'm inclined to say it's chance resemblance — and not a very high one at that. It is very highly plausible that it was designed by a non-linguist at Paramount (if I understand correctly) at a time when there was no easy way of finding out about Tibetan even with the budding Internet of 1992 when the aforelinked article was published in the HolQeD journal of the KLI. The article specifically says:

  More recently we’ve been treated to a different alphabet, (often incorrectly attributed to Michael
  Okuda, scenic designer for Star Trek: The Next Generation™), one which corresponds to the phonemes of
  Klingon as described by Okrand in The Klingon Dicitionary. While the characters themselves are easily identifiable from background displays on Star Trek: The Next Generation™ (assuming one has access to video
  equipment and a reasonably large television screen), there has never been an “official” release describing
  the particular relationship between individual glyphs and specific sounds. As Okuda has indicated (HolQeD
  1:1, 11) all Klingon background displays are composed for appearance, not communication. And yet, an
  unofficial letter to a Klingon fan group from an unnamed source at Paramount resulted in the following
  alphabet: [...]


What is the word “li” in Toki pona, grammatically? In Toki pona, words are never inflected, and many words can act as a noun, verb or adjective in different contexts. The word "li" usually separates the subject from a predicate, and “e” goes before the object (in SVO order). With soweli (animal), moku (eat, food) and kili (fruit), one can say:

  soweli li moku e kili

The animal eats the fruit.

This is the usage listed in the dictionary section of the official book, Toki Pona: the Language of Good:

  li. PARTICLE (between any subject except mi alone or sina alone and its verb; also to introduce a new verb for the same subject)

But there is another usage, as seen in phrase:

  soweli li ijo

Animals are things (ijo means thing).

It seems that this usage increases the ambiguity, because

  soweli li moku

can mean both ”The animal is eating” (with moku as an intransitive verb), or ”animals are food”.

What role does the li actually have in this phrase?

Li in these examples could be described as a copula - this is the name for a word whose function is to link a subject and predicate.


Is there a specific term for a constructed writing system purportedly used for a conlang but actually for a natlang? Many constructed writing systems are purportedly used to write conlangs, but in reality are actually used to write English or another natlang.

For example, omniglot.com says that Kryptonian is "a transliteration alphabet containing symbols for each of the letters of the English alphabet. ... They just used this alphabet to write things in English in the comics."

Matoran has been called "similar to the English alphabet, being a simple substitution cipher".

And in Star Wars, Aurebesh is essentially the same, a different way of writing English, although technically it's actually "Galactic Basic". Apparently another script was also used to write Galatic Basic, called Outer Rim Basic, although there's very little information about it.

I'd consider these example to be a different kind of thing compared to something like the dancing men script from Sherlock Holmes as they're ostensibly constructed writing systems for other languages, whereas the dancing men script is explicitly another way of writing English.

In the conlang community, is there a specific term for this type of constructed writing system? Or should we just refer to them as "transliterations" or "substitutions"?

Please note that I am specifically asking if there is a term which excludes these categories:

new orthographies for natlangs (ex. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics or Deseret for English)
a new writing system actually used to write a conlang (ex. Tengwar for Quenya)

I don't think there's already a word for this exact subset of scripts.

However, I think such a term would be a useful one -- we certainly have to refer to these sorts of scripts in the conlanging community -- and I think there are a number of options here.

1. Circumlocution

We could refer to these sorts of scripts in paraphrastic ways, like how you have in your question. "Transliteration alphabet" and "substitution cipher" both work for this purpose. However, I don't think this is a particularly attractive option, as these are long and rather unwieldy. Shortenings of these phrases end up being pretty ambiguous, as well. "Transliteration" in particular is usually used to describe completely separate things entirely, so using it in isolation to refer to these scripts would be confusing at best, and "substitution" is too vague.

2. Neologism

Since these sorts of scripts are really the neographic equivalent of relexes, we could also coin a new term like "relex" to refer to these scripts. Just spitballing, here are a few examples of the sorts of coinages that could work:

transbet (from "transliteration alphabet")
subscript (from "substitution script" -- though this word does obviously already have another meaning so that might not be desirable)
rescript (from analogy with "relex")
keychain script (because these sorts of scripts are easily used to sell keychains with people's names on them 'in another language')

There are any number of ways that such a term could be derived beyond these, but I feel that in order to have a term that describes this subset of scripts, some sort of new coinage is necessary.


Is Glosa more than just a relex of English? Looking for information on the International Auxiliary languages Interglossa and Glosa again, I stumbled over these sample texts in Glosa. I am astonished, how slavishly Glosa copies the English syntax: While some elements of a noun phrase or a verb phrase may be slightly reordered, translation unit after translation unit are completely parallel in the English and Glosa texts, even for rather complicated English sentences. And the English preference for past participles also carries over to Glosa in a one-to-one fashion.

Has Glosa any syntax of its own (independent from English)? Are there any Glosa idioms setting it apart from a relex of English?

While Glosa definitely does seem to take a lot of influence from English, it's grammar isn't quite so indistinguishable from English's as to be an obvious relex.

It avoids classic relex mistakes like including do-support, and while its tense-aspect system doesn't do anything too wild for English speakers, it uses a variety of particles rather than English's auxiliary-based periphrastic tenses. It's also noteworthy that it lacks plurals, a decidedly un-English-like feature. Both these features were likely inspired by Mandarin Chinese.

Glosa also has an article that is unspecified for definiteness, using u(n) for both "the" and "a(n)", which is a departure from its major influences -- English, which has distinct definite and indefinite articles; Mandarin Chinese, which doesn't have any such articles; and Esperanto, which possesses one explicitly definite article. However, this article's syntactic behavior does not seem notably different from the English or Esperanto articles, so it's not thinking too far outside the box there.

You could definitely argue that Glosa's departures from English are pretty small, and that it's thus still quite relex-y in spirit. It's certainly closer to normal English grammatically than Interglossa, which is reportedly based on Simple English. So it really depends exactly how far you think a conlang must depart from English grammatically to "count" as not being a relex.


Why learn constructed languages? I understand why create conlangs - they are sometimes needed for world of a book or game.

But... why learn them?

If most people in the world know normal languages and speak them, we can communicate with them using existing languages. There is no problem with talking with someone without knowing his language, because nowadays a lot of people in the world speak English, which is kind of an international language.

I couldn't find a real reason why. We don't talk with characters inside books or movies. We do eventually talk with in-game characters, but they rather speak a normal language, not a conlang. If they don't do so, then we can still understand what they want to say, because games often add some kind of translation, if creators of the game want the player to understand the message.

Is learning constructed languages ever necessary? What are the possible reasons of learning a conlang?

EDIT: I don't think this is opinion based. I'm not asking "why do you learn conlangs?" I'm asking for the most common reasons why people learn conlangs, not for opinion.

An unordered set of potential reasons:

Showing off. I know something cool that you don’t. For some, that is the reason to learn Latin but for others that may be the reason to attempt to learn e.g. a language from the Lord of the Rings. It can easily have a vast impression on fans of the franchise.
Cosplay. This is especially true for languages appearing in games/movies/etc. For many cosplayers, the prime goal when cosplaying a character is to mimic them as perfectly as possible. Of course, if you’re mimicking e.g. Eragon after he has learnt the ancient language, you want to at least be able to produce meaningful sentences (unless you’re explicitly aiming for mishaps like the one in the underground city — but arguably that requires even more knowledge). If you’re cosplaying Arya, that is even more true.
Creating a franchise that uses a conlang. If you want to make extensive use of your conlang while writing a series of books like A Song of Ice and Fire, getting it right at later stages is much easier if you have some basic understanding early.
Just because they can. For some people, picking up a language is extremely easy so they may just want to do it for intellectual stimulation.


Would these features be naturalistic in this scenario? Background

I am planning a naturalistic Goidelic language which shall have quite an influence from Old Norse – probably at least 1/4 or 1/3 of the vocabulary to be of North Germanic origin, as well as a mostly undecided, but lesser influence on the phonology and grammar. Despite the North Germanic influence, I would still like to retain a ‘broad-slender’ vowel system, lenition, eclipsis, and (possibly) prothesis.

Also, although I intend for the Old Norse influence to be less focused on grammar, I came up with the idea of, instead of deriving from the Old Irish definite article in and having it work similarly to the other Goidelic languages, I could derive from the Old Norse clitic article -inn and instead use this style of clitic article.

Questions

Would the retention of broad-slender vowels and consonant mutations be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?
Would the replacement of the Goidelic definite article with an Old Norse-style clitic definite article be possible and at least somewhat naturalistic in this scenario?

As an extension to this question – would it be realistic to retain the different Old Norse articles for the different genders (-inn for masculine nom., -in for feminine nom., and -it for neuter nom.) as well as the different cases (for example, -innar for feminine genitive singular) or to just keep one or two articles (such as to just derive from -inn for all the definite articles in my language), regardless of the gender or case?

Thank you in advance.

Yes, the whole thing looks naturalistic.

ad 1) When you assimilate the Old Norse words to a Goidelic phonetic system, lenitions and broad/slender distinctions come in very naturally. It will be more difficult when you insist on some Old Norse sounds sticking out of the Goidelic system; they can form exceptions to the lenition rules or evolve specific lenitions of their own.

ad 2) Retaining the Old Norse suffixed article is definitely an option, and simplifying it to only one form (independent of gender, case, and number) looks most natuaral to me, but keeping the inflected forms is also covered by your artistic license as a conlang author. Or you may inflect the definite forms according to Goidelic inflectional rules.


How can I avoid "relexing" punctuation? I'm trying to design a conscript for my conlang Atili and would like to create punctuation in order to deliminate sentences and transcribe limited prosody. However, I don't just want to create new symbols for the full stop, comma, colon, semicolon, etc. I am especially cautious of non-terminating punctuation and how it can be used differently from in English.
I'm aware of distinctions like the Oxford comma and Spanish inverted punctuation, so I know that punctuation is not universal. How do other languages use punctuation differently from English?

In fact, each language has its own punctuation rules that have to be learned. German is very different in its punctuation rules from English (relative sentences always require a comma, dependent clauses are separated from the main clause by a comma, but no "Oxford comma" and no comma after sentence-initial adverbials. Studying the rules of punctuation for some non-English languages should give you an idea of how things can be regulated differently.
I also learned that Russian and Kyrgyz and probably other languages have more ellispis-type multiple punctuations like !.. and ?.. and even !?. and ?!..
And than there are creative extensions to punctuation like the interrobang ‽, its inverted counterpart gnaborretni ⸘ and lots of proposals for an Irony mark.


Do toki pona speakers, in practice, permit compounding more than three words? In toki pona, compounding multiple words together is possible. For example:

  tomo: room/box/structure/home
  telo: water/fluid
  tomo telo: bathroom

It also allows compounding three words together:

  tomo pi telo nasa: a bar
  kiwen mun laso: blue moon rocks

This is where the official grammar stops, and the official stance is that larger statements are ungrammatical. However, I am wondering if it is common in practice for people to compound more than three words.

Suppose I wanted to say “the broken yellow dome hut.” The official grammar would have me say something in a full sentence:

  tomo sike pakala li jelo.

However, despite the rules of grammar, do people ever say:

  tomo sike pakala jelo.

Or include other compounds of many words with pi?

(Note: I am not asking whether this is grammatical according to official rules. I am asking whether colloquial toki pona permits this.)

In general, we don't want to make descriptions so long and complicated as to be difficult to follow. That is more important than exact word count, in my experience (as an admin of the "toki pona taso" group on Facebook). For example, if someone mentioned a "poki kala suli pi telo ala", I wouldn't find that at all strange as a description of an empty aquarium. However, if someone spoke of an "ilo sona lili pakala laso", I'd probably have to read it a few times to figure out what they're talking about (in this case I'm thinking of a dysfunctional blue laptop). So compounds with "pi" tend to have a bit more leeway because that groups the words together somewhat, making it easier to decipher. But shorter, simpler descriptions are generally preferred, and in practice this usually does turn out to be three words or less.


How to distinguish [i] from [iː] in Cyrillic Renglish/Рэнглиш (not mine)
is an adaptation of Cyrillic for English. Most of the sounds seem ok, but how would you normally differentiate [i] in bit from the [iː] in beet using Cyrillic or would they both just use 'И'?
The sample text they give is:
Ал Хйюмън бееингз ар борн фри энд еекўъл ин Дигнити энд Райтз. Ђей ар ендауед ўић Реезън энд Каншънс энд шюдд якт тъўордс ўун ънуђер ин ей Спирит ъв Бруђергхюд.
In the Latin alphabet that is:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal declaration of human rights)
I know some characters are very differenṭ from their normal sounds, like я for 'æ' instead of 'ja' & ц for dʒ instead of 'ts' (стяк ексчэнц would be 'stack exchange'.) I use џ instead of ц for dʒ. I thought about using ы for [i] and и for
I previously posted this in the Linguistics community but was told this was a better fit.

If ы is otherwise unused, it seems like the best fit here to me. It certainly seems at least as close a match as some others you've accepted (e.g. ц for dʒ)


Are there any sites you can use to develop an online course for your own conlang? Creating a conlang is usually only half (or less than half!) of the necessary effort: someone has to be able to learn it, unless you want to keep it as your own private secret code.

I use Duolingo to learn various languages, and it does of course have an Esperanto course on it, as well as Klingon and High Valyrian. However, it is unlikely that it will feature many more Conlangs, especially not one that you will develop yourself.

Now, it is of course not feasible to re-implement all of Duolingo's features, but I was just wondering if there are any apps/websites that you can use to develop an on-line course for your own conlang (it has to be fully automated, with no human teaching involved).

Is there something along the lines of Duolingo available where you can create your own courses?

Apparently folks can do this with Memrise, as evidenced by the Sajem Tan lessons.

There's been talk that I found on Duolingo forums, but if they're at all serious, they probably won't allow "dabbling". You'd need a serious effort to make and maintain enough lessons for people to actually learn a language.


Why is the Lord's Prayer so common as a translation? I'm an amateur conlanger, but I've seen multiple instances of people using the Lord's Prayer as a test or a way of showing off a translation of their conlang.  I've even done it a couple times myself.

Why is this such a common practice among conlangers?

It is a long standing tradition to use the Lord's prayer as a sample text for illustrating natural languages, for instance, the mid-16th century Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster contains the Lord's prayer in Finnish as an illustration of the Finnish language.

It has the advantage of being available in many languages, including otherwise ill-documented or dead languages.

Its disadvantages are the religious bias and the fact, that some very marked constructions tend to occur in this text (in German, there is a relative clause in the second person singular ..., der Du bist im Himmel, ... a really rare beast).


Is Irrealis and Evidentials Compatible? I and other people are making a collaborative conlang. It features mood/evidentiality contrast. There are 4 moods:

Indicative
Imperative
Optative
Conditional

There are also 6 evidentials:

Direct
Hearsay
Egophoric
Gnomic
Inferential
Dubitative

The problem is we disagreed whether Imperative/Optative/Conditional (i.e. Irrealis moods) are compatible with evidentials. I feel they are incompatible, but the other conlangers think they are.

The most prototypical evidentials are a class of verbal affixes. They are not commonly tenses or moods of their own (though they can be). As such, they are not structurally incompatible with the irrealis/conditional, and ultimately it really depends on what exactly that mood is being used for by a language.
In Quechua, counterfactuals (If I had hooves, I'd be a horse) use the irrealis marker -man, but cannot (as I understand it anyway) take evidentials, but a statement of probability (She may be at school), which also uses the same marker, definitely can.
Irrealis statements about future events or hypotheticals, on the other, can also reasonably be said to be semantically unsuitable to use evidentials: in I will try to feed her some soup, the "feed her some soup" subclause is not really a statement you can really describe the source of the information (unless you have a dedicated evidential for that case, but natural languages don't). Nonetheless, WALS notes that some languages do:

Because evidentials are used to describe the speaker’s involvement with events, they tend to occur in realis contexts, especially in past tense situations. Nevertheless, evidentials do occur in what can be described as irrealis situations. Example (9) from Barasano (Eastern Tucanoan; Colombia; Jones and Jones 1991: 116) shows an interrogative evidential, and (10), from Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Daghestanian; Georgia; Holisky and Gagua 1994: 180) shows an evidential with a future event.


What is the oldest known constructed language? Historically speaking, what is the oldest known constructed language that we are able to determine with historical evidence?

The oldest language whose creator set out to actually invent a language (as opposed to Pāṇini, who wanted to create a classical standard out of an already  extant language) was probably Lingua Ignota. The formerly brilliant Langmaker website had an article on it (now accessible through the Wayback Machine). It was made in the twelfth century, predating another early conlang, Balaibalan, which was made somewhen between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.


What makes lojban such a "logical" language? The title says it all. While I have not studied it, I have repeatedly heard that lojban is an especially "logical" language, one that could even be a way to speak a "natural" language to the computer that it can understand.

What feature of lojban (or features) makes this so? Is it just that humans haven't gotten to it yet?

Lojban was designed with a few key features in mind, which are ultimately why it claims the title of "logical" language.

First it's good to know that a logical language actually means something pretty specific. It's usually built on predicate logic, and a desire to express any logically-expressible statement unambiguously. No two statements are allowed to mean the same thing, and no statement is allowed to mean two things.

In this sense, Lojban fulfills the literal criteria for what counts as a logical language. There's also the colloquial sense, though - the way people think about it, when someone says "logical language."

It is designed to be a regular language. This gives it a few key properties that make it easier for computers to process (though it's still an immensely complicated task to implement). Most of these properties are mathematical, and you can read them on the Wikipedia page. However, what it means in an intuitive way is that no word or word phrase's meaning changes based on words it's not adjacent to. That's a nice property when you're a computer and have a hard time maintaining a sense of context.

Lojban also has no irregular forms or rule exceptions whatsoever. All words are constructed based on specific properties that are clearly delineated, using roots that are unique and are intended to mesh with each other as-is.

This means that any construction which can be built in a logical form can be written completely and uniquely in Lojban. There are no ambiguities between forms. Note, though, that this is commonly confused with "the language has no ambiguity." It's possible to be ambiguous in Lojban, but only intentionally, and that ambiguity is unique to the way you wrote it.

It also allows for systematic, structured learning and use. New words fit into the existing grammar and structure without any other prompting, once you know what they mean and how they're used. No additional grammatical structures are needed to use any words, once you know them.


How is ANADEW pronounced? How is the acronym ANADEW pronounced among conlang enthusiasts. I have seen it only in print so far and I want to know whether the letters are spelled out or whether it is pronounced as if it were an English word.

As a native speaker of American English from the middle of the North American continent, I have always pronounced it as /ˈænədu/, like Xanadu (the movie), but with out the leading /z/. Visit https://tophonetics.com for a close approximation (capitalization ignored, British and American options generate the same audio).