Alternatives to independent verbs for encoding desiderative meaning English uses an independent verb to encode desiderative meaning, namely want. It normally takes an infinitival complement, although I can take a direct object as well if the subject of the infinitival clause is not the same as want's subject.
I want to swim tomorrow.

and
I want you to swim tomorrow.

However, there are some limits to its flexibility in English. It cannot take a dependent clause headed by that.
*I want that I find a yellow pencil soon.

Some languages use a verb similar to want in English, and others use dedicated verb morphology to encode the same meaning. I can't think of any natural languages that use a strategy for encoding the meaning of want (Y) to X that isn't one of those two.
What are some alternative constructions for expressing desiderative meaning, particularly those unattested in natural languages?

Quite a few languages have desiderative as an affix within the verbal system (whether it is analysed as an affix or a full mood being irrelevant here). Japanese and Sanskrit do, for example. It is fairly common (as one would expect) for agglutinating or polysynthetic languages to have one such as Quechua, Finno-Ugric or Turkic languages. It is by no mean universal for these languages: while Hungarian has such a suffix Finnish (and I believe Estonian) lacks it.
Desiderative construction otherwise tend (again not unexpectedly) to be mediated via an auxiliary verb (in Nahuatl, that verb is one of a couple that can be directly integrated into other verbs).
Note that desiderative applies (typically) only to the subject. That is, a form like "I want X to Y" is not a desiderative per se. More accurately, in most language with derivational desiderative affixes, these affixes do not have a "separate" argument structure the way an auxiliary verb an have, so they cannot insert an additional argument. Indeed in Nahuatl, that is exactly what you'll see:

Ticchīhuaznequi (You want to do it)
Ticnequi nicchīhuaz (You want me to do it)

I have not found an easy way to search for information about the three-argument version ("I want X to Y") cross-linguistically, but I'd wager it tends to be formed with some form of Optative or Subjunctive structure.


Is there a toki pona hieroglyphics font? For the toki pona language there is a writing system where each word is replaced by a single logogram or hieroglyph. There is also a web-based converter which allows you to enter a text in toki pona and converts it into a single PNG rendering in said hieroglyphs.

However, I was wondering if there was a way to directly produce texts in hieroglyphs, either as a font, or as a set of individual image files (ie one per word/hieroglyph), which could be used to render texts on webpages etc.

toki!

a, mi jo e sitelen tawa toki pona. nimi ona li linja pona. sina ken anpa e ona kepeken nimi tawa ni.

Hi! Yes, I have a script for toki pona. Its name is linja pona. You can download it by using this link.


How common is it for the creator of a conlang to be fluent in that conlang? This was one of my example questions but I now am actually interested in the answer.  I am an amateur conlanger; I have one pretty complete language and a couple in the process.  But I can't construct a sentence in any of my languages without referencing the lexicon and grammar.  How common is it for the creator of a conlang to be fluent in that conlang? (especially for languages that are not meant to be spoken like all of Tolkien's, where there is not a very significant fluent community).

From personal experience (active member in a large server of avid conlangers) very few people ever learn to speak their own conlangs. Language learning is a very time-intensive progress and there is not much gained from learning a language no one else speaks. The occasional exception tends to be found in group projects, in which sometimes at least to a part “creating by using” is used as a technique, which naturally leads to at least rudimentary command of the language. Some languages have also been developed exclusively by using them, such as Viossa, but this is an exception.

You may also be interested in this talk at LCC6, held by Jim Hopkins in his conlang (with an interpreter, of course).  Summary of the talk:

  In this presentation Jim Hopkins, creator of Itlani, will share his tips and techniques for recording, learning, and living the Language of your Soul. He will discuss the need for finding and ensuring stability in your language’s vocabulary and structure to facilitate easier learning, and how to immerse yourself in your language for mental and emotional engagement, even though you aren’t living full time among native speakers. The presentation will be done entirely in the Itlani language, with interpretation into English by Tony Harris.


Language with contextual-free vocabulary Every language (I know of) needs a context or a mark of reference for understanding a lot of the expressed message.

I'm refering about concepts like I, you, this, there, tomorrow...

I'd bet there is no organic language that doesn't use such contextual words. Still, though, I wondered:

Is there any constructed language that has no word context-dependant?
If there is: How does it manage to express common messages?
If there isn't: Would it be possible to have such language?

Firstly, I have thought about this too before. Actually, only one word is needed for all of I, you, this, there, tomorrow, etc. You can analyse these as I, (the person I am referring to), (the thing I am referring to at/by/on ME), (the place I am referring to not at/by/on ME), (the day which is one day later than the day I am in). This goes for most words like those.

Not that I know of. But let's create one for demonstration purposes: Loj-ban mi. It is Lojban, but there's a ban on the word mi (and vi, and ti, and other words incorporating mi as said above).

It would be able to express concepts like 'Bananas grow on trees', as this doesn't depend on the concept I. However, saying stuff like My name is Santa Claus., It's going well. and What are we doing tomorrow? would be impossible.
We could replace it with other concepts, for example, 'the speaker/writer'. But this is ambiguous, take this sentence: I don't know who said that, but the speaker is in big trouble when I find out!. (And, pulling it off correctly, it nevertheless depends on context). Names can be used, so the answer is actually yes. 'Tomorrow' would have to be expressed as a date, 'this' would have to be 'The plate on the table in the house of Joe Example, etc.

Yes, as we proved above with Loj-ban mi, it is possible. Would it be learnable? Probably. But not usable in practice.


Are there languages with five conjugations? If not, how would one construct one? Most languages I am familiar with have six different person/number combinations for verbs:

Singular

1st (I)
2nd (you)
3rd (he/she/it)

*Plural

1st (we)
2nd (you (all))
3rd (they)

Obviously, verb conjugation is more complicated than just these combinations (other features include tenses, aspects, mood (eg imperative), and gerunds), but for now, just focus on person/number. Is there some way to collapse these six combinations into five? On a related note, are there any natural languages with five conjugations?

Also, I need exactly five conjugations. Are there normal languages with only five conjugations? If there aren't, what would be the most realistic way to implement this?

If you have two features (number/person), it seems tricky to have five options (or any other odd number for that matter). However, there is an easy way: simply collapse singular and plural for one of the persons.

There is actually a real example in English (and several other languages): the pluralis majestatis ("Royal We"). Simply discard the first person singular and use the first person plural instead.

We are not sure what other languages use this, but we have definitely heard it in English and German. It would not be surprising to us if it occurred in other languages as well.

Sounds a bit odd, but would be an easy option.


Is there a language that meets these criteria? I feel less and less comfortable with the incoherence of natural languages, so I'm looking for a constructed language that suits me.

semantically close words must share a common affix (not like biology and mathematics in English which are sciences but do not have the same suffix),
vocabulary must be finite and relatively small (a few hundred or thousand words would be fine) with no synonyms,
grammar must be fully regular.

I think it should be toki pona. Reasons:

semantically close words must share a common affix (not like biology and mathematics in English which are sciences but do not have the same suffix)

In toki pona, every science has a compound noun word beginning from sona. Biology is sona jan and Mathematics is sona nanpa. (Physics is sona lon and Linguistics is sona toki.)
This is due to the fact that toki pona has a limited vocabulary; so, to form words like "physics", it simply says the phrase "science of existence" or sona lon.

vocabulary must be finite and relatively small (a few hundred or thousand words would be fine) with no synonyms

The vocabulary is just 123 words. Almost all of these are polysemantic, there's nothing like synonyms.

grammar must be fully regular

Grammar is not fully regular, but that's only because of the fact that toki pona has a few words. However, there are not that many exceptions, as in any language like English or Spanish. I have studied 12 lessons of the official book and till then, the only irregularity is the fact that li doesn't follow mi and sina.
In all, the language satisfying (1) and (2) and partly (3) to its fullest is toki pona.
Another close competitor is Esperanto. It totally satisfies (2) and (3) and partly (1). (Some semantically similar words don't seem to have common affixes in them.)
So, in all, if you are looking for such a language, go definitely for toki pona or Esperanto.
PS. Even I felt the same (unable to successfully learn natural languages due to the several irregularities) and thus myself decided to go for toki pona first (because I already know a lot about it) and then Esperanto.


Teaching children constructed languages Are there any modern accounts (either of personal experiences of individuals on this forum, or in general) of an individual creating their own language and teaching it to their child(ren)/family?

One guy taught his daughter Volapuk.

There is a contemporary case of someone teaching their kids their personal conlang, she used to be active on one of Facebook's conlang groups.

The revived languages, Cornish, Hebrew, Sanskrit, have similar dynamics to conlangs. Having government support in the form of schools and day care works wonders for the project being successful.

Getting a child to speak your languages takes time (20+ hours a week) of exposure, and it really helps to have a community of peers who also speak that language, or a child's decision to keep using their parents language will be personal and idiosyncratic. I get this impression from people I've met who tried speaking Arabic or Icelandic to their kids in the US where they got plenty of exposure to their parents, but no particular supporting community of peers.


Can features in the physical environment meaningfully affect the development of a local language's phonology? Imagine that I'm creating phonemic inventories for multiple conlangs, each of which is spoken by a people settled within (or roaming about) a very different physical environment from the others. Assuming that these different civilizations developed their languages completely apart from one another and haven't simply drifted apart from one original root language, is there any consensus that certain phonemes work better or worse in different environments?

For instance, do certain phonemes perform better or worse:

over choppy waters being sailed by a seafaring people?
through a jungle or heavily wooded area populated by a tree-dwelling people?
in a mountainous area frequently traversed by various groups settling near or even on the mountains?
carrying over a vast inland plain or a placid lake?
cutting through the ambient noise of a swamp or jungle (or even a city)?

These are just examples. I'm not specifically asking about any of those scenarios. I just want to make sure that any language I create would be as plausible as possible, down to the very last detail I can think of. Any reliable resources on the subject would be great, but as a complete novice, I haven't been entirely sure what to search for and have come up short on my attempts so far.

There has also been evidence that suggests that ejectives tend to occur more frequently in areas of higher elevation, perhaps due to their being easier to produce in these regions:

  We present evidence that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form. We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high. [...] we offer two plausible motivations for [this correlation's] existence. We suggest that ejective sounds might be facilitated at higher elevations due to the associated decrease in ambient air pressure, which reduces the physiological effort required for the compression of air in the pharyngeal cavity–a unique articulatory component of ejective sounds. In addition, we hypothesize that ejective sounds may help to mitigate rates of water vapor loss through exhaled air. [...] Our results reveal the direct influence of a geographic factor on the basic sound inventories of human languages.

(emphasis mine)


Is there a middle-written language? Real languages

I am aware of several types of writing systems.

The first one would be left to right and a prime example is English and also most of other languages, no matter if they use letters or other symbols.

Another type would be right to left, which can be seen in Hebrew writing:

As you can see, the text in the image selected by me for illustration, a digital user interface of a Hebrew keyboard, is right bound.

In the above image you can see Japanese text, which is traditionally read from top to bottom in either horizontal direction, in which I mean that both existed, not that you can read one text both from right to left and left to right after going top to bottom.

Constructed languages

Now I am wondering whether there is a constructed language that reads from the middle. I am pretty sure that there is no traditional language that does this, hence I am attending here.

Let me just create a concept here for you to understand. In such a language above rows would have the same meaning. In that case it is read horizontally, but from the middle, so that it does not matter if something appears on the left or right side.

Another example:

You might be able to understand what I mean by saying "middle-written", i.e. you always start in the middle.

Conclusion

I think that a language like this should be really interesting and maybe useful, thus I am curious whether or not a constructed language written quite like this exists.

The best possible approach to a writing system "from the middle" is probably a text spiralling outwards.

One famous artefact, the Phaistos Disk, shows a spiral layout of the text, but is is unknown whether it should be read inwards (most scholars prefer this) or outwards and the writing system is still undeciphered.

Your graphical samples suggest a symmetric progression of symbols to the right and left—I think this is unrealistic because lazyness and economy of writing will soon lead to the abandonment of one of the symmetric halves, leaving either right-to-left or -left-to-right writing.


How can I format a dictionary that mixes vertical and horizontal scripts? My conlang Atili is written in a vertical script. I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how to write out words in the Atili script within my dictionary. This is important because Atili spelling is not predictable, and the normal Romanization that I use for Atili is phonetic and thus does not convey how a word is meant to be spelled in the Atili script. Right now, I'm using a secondary Romanization as a proxy for the native script that does convey the spelling of words in the conscript, which leads to dictionary entries like the following:

azih   ÄZYIH n. (A) hand; (B) the first letter of the Atili alphabet, which represents the consonant /∅/

I would rather just write the Atili word in the native script, but I'm not sure how to sensibly mix the horizontal Latin alphabet with the vertical Atili script. I'm not looking for technical details about implementing such a thing, just how to lay out the entries on the page.

If you have a situation where the entry in the conscript is taller than the textual material discussing it, you’ll have to accept ‘wasted’ white space filling out the rectangle. Really, the only sensible way to do this if your textual material is in English is to have your conscript entry run down on the left edge of the rectangle, and fill in the English on the right.
If you have an alternative horizontal orthography (even if it uses the same characters, like happens in Chinese and Japanese), I would recommend using that for the dictionary/lexicon.


Greek-based altlangs The Wikipedia article on Artistic languages says in its current version

  What if Greek civilization had gone on to thrive without a Roman Empire, leaving Greek and not Latin to develop several modern descendants?

But in the ongoing text no Greek based altlangs are mentioned.

What are examples of Greek based altlangs?

TAKE is Το Ἄνευ Κλίσι Ἑλληνική / Greek Without Inflexions. According to Ray Brown, "Graeca sine flexione" ... (considers) what Greek might be like if stripped of its inflexions in the manner similar to Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione... It should be pointed out that although Giuseppe Peano produced 'Latino sine flexione' as an international auxiliary language, I am NOT making a similar proposal for ΤΑΚΕ!
Outidic is a kind of IAL for the learned, statesmen & merchants alike.

These are both by Ray Brown of Conlang-L.
Èskova Linga
Engadinese is a Greek-Romansch graftlang.
Atlo Greek appears now to be entirely lost.
Rhaetian

There may be others...


Are there nasalized nasal consonants? As in, [ñ] or [ñ̃]. It seems to me you can make a nasal sound more nasal, maybe by stressing your nose muscles or something in that sense. Does this exist?

EDIT:
Apologies, I was thinking about Nareal consonants, which do apparently exist. (see answer by me below, the other answers are also good.)

Nasal consonants are not nasal because you use any "nose muscles", but because the nasal passage is open and air is passing through it as well as the mouth. To my knowledge, the nasal passage does not have different degrees of being open or closed, so there wouldn't be any way to make a nasal consonant more nasal.

However, there are definitely some sounds that are less nasal than standard nasal stops. Prenasalized and poststopped consonants, where a nasal followed by a non-nasal stop is treated as a single consonant, exist and are phonemic in some languages. There are also denasal phones, in which the nasal passage is open and used as a resonant cavity but air does not flow out the nose (think of how someone sounds when they have a stuffy nose). While denasals are not phonemic in any natlang to my knowledge, they are sometimes allophonic or phonetically present in a language that is losing its nasals.


How do tones disappear from a language? There have been many good writeups on Tonogenesis, i.e. how language acquire tones. But never have I seen such a writeup on the opposite phenomenon, which one might call Tonoexodus. Obviously, one way for tone to get lost is to simply have tones merge until there’s only one left. However, doing that without any thought to a highly tonal language would be rather disastrous. If any Chinese language suddenly lost all its tones this would likely make communication rather challenging. This makes me think that perhaps, there is more to tonoexodus than just a disappearance of tone. So my question is:

Are there any phenomena which go hand in hand with the loss of tone, analogous to how the acquisition of tone goes hand in hand with the loss of consonants or phonations?

I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I think it may be because that while tonogenesis is a "special" process, in that it produces a whole new dimension to the phonology (as opposed to something more "trivial" like clusters becoming new single segment phonemes), whereas tonoexodus seems to not be much different from other processes of loss in segmental contrasts. Yes, a sudden collapse of the tone system in a Chinese language, or any other language with a high functional load on tonal contrasts would be rather challenging to deal with, but so would any sudden collapse of significant scope, whereas a slow collapse, where contrasts are lost slowly, one after one, in some environments before others gives plenty of time to resolve any disasterous mass ambiguity with innovations.

I have tried looking around for examples of tone loss, and this seems to be the pattern I have been able to find. The Oto-Manguean languages with fewer tonal contrast that the reconstructed protolanguages seem to simply come from mergers of tones, either consistently or only in some environments (e.g. unstressed syllables) though the data is not quite clear[1].

Classical Chinese had 8 tonal categories divisible into yin and yang registers occuring respectively after voiced and unvoiced consonants, and into four different categories, ping, shang, qu and ru(checked syllables). While some modern lects such as Songjiang maintain all of these as seperate categories (Songjiang also retains contrastive onset voicing), others collapse the system in various ways. Beijing Mandarin collapses the yin/yang distinction of the shang and qu tones and merges ru into the other tones, while the relatively nearby Tianjin Mandarin keeps yin shang seperate, while merging yang shang with other tones. Along similar lines the different Chinese lects have radically different distinction-dimininshing sandhi processes, from the well-known relatively limited 214 > 35 / _214 rule of Beijing Mandarin to the complete loss of surface realisation of all but one dominant lexical tone in Northern Wu variants such as Shanghainese. Again, there does not seem to be any phonological compensatory measures associated with any of these losses of contrasts.[2]

Tonoexodus that isn't a simple collapse seems to be hard to find, though the Danish glottal suprasegmental feature stød likely originates in a pitch accent system (note that some dialects have pitch-accent and some collapse the distinction entirely), and it seems reasonable to expect that other collapses of a two-way tone system to a phonation system could be found. As for other things, the largely autosegmental nature of tone means that it doesn't leave much room for other segmental changes, however there seem to be a few cases of such influences, primarily on consonant voicing discussed in sections 2.6 and 2.7 of Yip's Tone[3] and references therein, though she notes that it has been argued by Thurgood that all such alternations are a product of phonation types (which may then coincidentally be associated with tone) influencing voicing rather than tone itself.

In conclusion it seems that the most likely process of tonoexodus is simply a slow gradual loss of contrasts in an increasing number of environments, with the associated lexical replacement/innovation that comes with language change, and a tone system evolving into something else rather than just being lost entirely is likely to become a phonation system, possibly with a minor influence on consonant voicing as well.


How would having a logographic writing system work in a conlang? Creating a logographic writing system for a language can quickly become overwhelming; having a different symbol/image for each word can quickly become overwhelming; it’s why Sequoyah switched to a syllabary instead of a logogram. The more words there are in a language the more symbols there have to be.

However, there are historically successful uses of logograms - for instance, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese (when it first started). I’m not aware of any modern natural language that actually uses a logographic system as its primary writing system, though.

How would a conlang use a logographic writing system after the language grew to any extant? Would it be possible to create a conlang that actually uses a sustainable logographic system?

The problem with pure logographies is that languages tend to have a significant amount of morphemes, be these bound or free, that mark relatively abstract concepts, such as posession, the roles of NPs, etc., and some abstract words are rather hard to draw symbols for. As such, a purely logographic system cannot really deal with natural languages to their full extent, and therefore pick up "impurities", not just out of convenience, but out of necessity, since without them they are generally at best mnemonic aids and not a full (or almost full) representation of the spoken language. If you want a pure logographic system to be realistically viable for your conlang, going the oligomorphemic route, like Toki Pona, is probably the most reasonable, as the low number of morphemes reduces the strain of learning a large number of symbols, as well as the issue of coming up with new ones for new or rarely written-about concepts, since morphemes are a closed class, and the necessarily relatively general meaning of these morphemes means that it would likely be relatively straightforward to represent the majority of them with mostly intuitive iconography.


Can Kēlen truly be considered verb-free? It has been claimed that the conlang Kēlen, winner of the 2009 Smiley award, is supposed to challenge Greenberg's universal of always having a noun-verb distinction by eliminating verbs. In light of the fact that Kēlen has a special word-class called relationals, which are four predicating words that take noun phrase arguments, is it not more factual to analyse the relationals of Kēlen as a very limited and closed class of verbs? They do seem to fulfill the same function words called "verbs" do in other languages, and are necessary for predication — another domain typically reserved for verbs (even if we assume zero-copula).

Using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a good baseline of what a human language can communicate, there are several core verbs:

Mental predicates: THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
Speech: SAY
Actions, events, movement: DO, HAPPEN, MOVE
Location, existence, specification: BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)

LA is clearly polysemous for THERE IS, BE (SOMEWHERE), BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING), and probably also marks PART in reverse.

NI probably covers DO and MOVE.

SE is even higher level, expressing the verb of give, as well as primes like FEEL and SAY.

So the claim that Kēlen does not have verbs is patently false.

There are in fact natural languages with even more restricted verb inventories than Kēlen, such as Jingulu, which has been analysed as only have verbs for go, come, and do. (I haven't seen an NSM style analysis of Jingulu, I wonder how they would see the verbs like THINK etc being expressed in Jingulu?)


Are there conlangs which compel their users to speak with honesty? George Orwell's novel 1984 introduced us to
Newspeak,
a language devised by authorities to be entirely misleading.

Languages that attempt to guide knowledge have been termed Orwellian
and, more technically, relativistic or Sapir-Whorf.

Any examples of languages that are opposite of Newspeak,
compelled to be genuine?

I don't think that languages, whether natural or constructed, have this power.

The fact is that there are numerous ways to be deceptive. You can straight out lie, you can speak as if there is uncertainty when really there is not, you can be deceptive through what you don't say, and you can be deceptive by saying true facts that are not actually strictly relevant, something called "paltering".

Like most linguists now, I think that the weak Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that our language influences our thoughts and decisions, is surely true, but I am sceptical about the strong version, that language completely determines and limits our thought categories. Either way, I don't think it's really relevant to the aspect of human psychology which makes deception possible. Lying through omission or distraction is possible because our minds can generate multiple possible statements to make to others, each disclosing a different level of truth, but none of us are compelled to speak every thought that enters our minds.

Perhaps someone has invented an alien species with an alien psychology and an alien language to speak, and maybe in their universe their language does compel them to speak honestly. But what would it mean to prove such a thing, and how could anyone else present an argument to refute their claims? So for humans I say the answer is no, and for fictional creatures it's not a useful question for us to ask.


What is the meaning of this Toki Pona sentence? I found a sentence written in order to prove that Toki Pona is a complete language. As far as I know it is a foolish nominal sentence.

What is the English translation?

  pona sona pi (wawa pi ma Lipija) poka toki lawa mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Atilanisi.

I finally got an answer from the author. The sentence meant:

pona sona pi (wawa pi ma Lipija) poka toki lawa mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Atilanisi.
The influence of Libyan power on the election of Atlantis' vice president.

The closest translation was "The strength of Libya beside many commands of vice president of Atlantis" by jastako.
Here's a word-for-word translation for what I understand.

pona sona was in fact pana sona: influence (idea sending)
wawa pi ma Lipija: Libyan power
poka: on, about
toki lawa mute: elections
jan lawa nanpa tu: vice president
ma Atilanisi: Atlantis

Suggestions
Feel free to explain how you would have translated that phrase into toki pona.
John Clifford's (Facebook)

kama pi wawa pi ma Lipija pi wile pi jan mute pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Alansi.

Mine

pana nasin pi wawa pi ma Lipija tawa wile kulupu pi jan lawa nanpa tu pi ma Alansi.


Are there any good programs out there to help when constructing languages? Are there any tools out there to keep track of which works you have already defined, managing your lexicon easily, and storing conjugations and the like?

Barring that, what are some good strategies to keep everything organized in text files?

Polyglot is a piece of software made specifically for the organisation, and management of conlangs as a whole. I haven't used it personally (preferring pen and paper to a large extent), but I've heard a fair few positive things about it.

Conworkshop includes a bunch of different tools for storing and organising things, but I've personally not found it particularly useful, and I have heard from people who have looked at the backend that you do not want to look at the backend, though I think they are doing a rewrite.

SIL Fieldworks is a vocabulary management program, and while developed for natlang lexicographers, it's also useful for conlangs. It's a rather powerful tool, but it has a significant learning curve to it. SIL also publishes other potentially useful free software such as Toolbox: https://software.sil.org/products/

Lexique Pro is a piece of software for making and editing presentable dictionaries. I haven't used it but it apparently offers compatibility with Fieldworks.

In addition to these, a regular spreadsheet program and a text editor can be quite useful, and there is a sea of both web and downloadable word generators (e.g. Gen, Awkwords, Lexifer) and sound change appliers (e.g. SCA2, GSCA), and for writing publishable materials, LaTeX, combined with a variety of packages for extra functionality such as Lingmacros and TikZ can produce fantastic results.


What has the impact of Star Trek: Discovery been on the development of Klingon? Has Klingon changed significantly since it has started being used for Star Trek: Discovery? Has the vocabulary grown significantly? Has there been novel grammar revealed? To what extent is the language still developing under Marc Okrand's guidance to meet the demands of the script, and how much leeway does Robyn "Qov" Stewart have in coming up with Klingon translations for the script?

The language still has Okrand's guidance, and he trusts Robyn to do it correctly.
From IndieWire:

Before Stewart initially took the “Discovery” job, she did check in with Okrand himself to make sure he approved. “He said, ‘You know what? I’m really glad you’re doing this for two reasons: One is so I don’t have to do it.’ Because just for a movie, it’s a lot of work, and the series goes on,” Stewart said.
But Okrand then added that he knew “the language is in good hands.” Said Stewart, “It was a huge ego boost for me — his confidence that I’ll do it correctly."

And even though Robyn Steward has Okrand's approval, every change has to get his stamp of approval before officially being added to the language.
TrekMovie tells us:

As was noted in the video, Okrand isn’t working on Star Trek: Discovery, as the translating for the show is being handled by Klingon expert Robyn Stewart. However, Okrand is still the only person who can introduce new words into the Klingon language, which is maintained by the Klingon Language Institute. As he does at each annual conference of the KLI (called the qep’a’), Okrand introduced a number of new Klingon words in the summer of 2017. You can see the full list at KLI.org (words noted as “qep’a’ 24” were announced this year).

So to address each question:

Has Klingon changed significantly since it has started being used for Star Trek: Discovery?

Nope - the people working on it are hardcore Klingon speakers, doing their utmost to keep everything accurate.

Has the vocabulary grown significantly?

Yes, it's grown - you can see exactly which words were added recently in the above link.

Has there been novel grammar revealed?

As far as I am aware, and from what Google turns up, no. The grammar is still the same as it was - just words are being added.

To what extent is the language still developing under Marc Okrand's guidance to meet the demands of the script, and how much leeway does Robyn "Qov" Stewart have in coming up with Klingon translations for the script?

As mentioned in the above quote from TrekMovie, Okrand still has control over the language - while Steward has some wiggle room like any other translation to any other language, she has to work with the language, only adding words when absolutely necessary.


How to say right and left in Toki Pona? As we know, Toki Pona is a quite minimal language and it sometimes not easy to come up with a word we use everyday in English. The problem is that I cannot think of a non-culture-specific and easily understandable way of saying right and left.

How to say right (and left) in Toki Pona as those words are not a part of the official dictionary?

I agree with thrig that you would need to create something to handle this case. toki pona doesn't normally differentiate between specific sides, and this is one of those cases - there are no ways to describe "left" and "right" natively.

However, I'm not sure thrig's examples necessarily do the job the way it needs to be done - poka wawa could work, but it implies something about strength, when that's not often what people mean by dominant and non-dominant side. And meli/mije are not used to describe strength in this way.

Instead, I would suggest using:

poka lawa: your leading side.
poka kama: your following side.

No matter what, though, if you use this you're going to have to indicate that you're setting it up as such in advance. You can still do this in toki pona itself: mi toki e ni: poka wan li poka lawa. poka tu li poka kama. This sets up that you're saying one side is your poka lawa and the other side is your poka kama.


How do Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole? In the book and TV series The Expanse inhabitants of the asteroid belt (Belters) speak a language called Belter Creole, a conlang designed by Nick Farmer which is intended to be the result of creolisation between most of the Earth's languages, including English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Romance languages, Hindi, Slavic, and Bantu. Although the dominant language of the series is English, Belters frequent mix in Belter Creole words, an example of code-switching.

I would like to know in which social situations Belters code-switch English and Belter Creole, or in order words, in which registers. (A register is "a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting" (Wikipedia).) Do Belters code-switch productively in all registers, or only in non-formal registers?

Nick has talked about how there is no “slang” per se in Belter. Languages like French are spoken both on the street and in high society, so there are multiple registers. It’s an introductory language for many people.

Slang is often used to exclude; if you’re not “one of us” but you still
Speak the language, you still are on the outside because you can’t quite follow what’s being said.

A language like Quechua in South America (according to Nick) doesn’t develop slang because speaking it is already a marker for being low-status socially (vs Spanish speakers). Speaking Quechua already excludes those on the other end of the linguistic divide.

Belter is similar. Nobody but Belters speak it (maybe some inner intelligence officers do, the way UK troops would learn Irish during the troubles. Speaking Belter is a mark of low social status.

Nick has said that he would imagine belters “fluidly speaking belt Lish. One can code shift on the fly between the two languages quite easily. If there amongst a bunch a rock hopper’s, they’ll probably all speak pure LB. When they’re on the docks, when there are more inners around, probably shift more towards English.

Belters have to speak English to deal with the UN/MCRN tax
Collectors. When they get boarded by Mickie Marines, you BETTER speak English. When they deal with the any government office, it’ll be in English.

In Haiti, the majority of the population are monolingual Kreyol speakers. But the language of Education and government forms is French. That leads to some fucked-up outcomes. I imagine Belter would be treated like Creole languages usually are; something broken & degenerate, not a real language.

The correspondence courses Naomi took were almost certainly in English. Nobody is translating engineering textbooks into a “degenerate” language like a Creole, and nobody is teaching this classs in LB. Hinikirii Brown’s tablet on Anderson Station was in English, although he father spoke to her mostly in LB.

Miller is a perfect example of code shifting. Watch his hands throughout the seasons; for a “welwala”, he is the most hand-gesturing Belter on Ceres. When interviewing Gia (who has just had a client murdered in her room), he interviews her in LB to set her at ease. But when talking to the Governor’s agent about the water thieves, he speaks perfect English.

Prax is an educated Belter. You don’t do botany classes in LB. and when he wakes up on the refugee ship, he first asks for Mei in English. When he realizes the crewman he’s speaking to is a Belter, Prax switches to LB. Prax spends so much time speaking English, shifting back into LB is something that takes a moment.

So yeah, my feeling is the code shift mainly comes from “am I speaking to a Belter, or an Inner?” The inner/Belter dichotomy is cooked into LB down to the level of pronouns the way social hierarchy is cooked into Japanese.

“Beltalowda” is the plural pronoun for “Belters” with the connotation of both “all Belters” as well as “us Belters” ( becaus again, almost nobody outside Belters speaks LB). “Inyalowda” is both “all inners” [No distinction between Earther or Martian], and “You inners”.


Are Interslavic and Neoslavonic the same conlang? I read that Interslavic and Neoslavonic merged into a single language.

All three projects collaborated closely with each other from that time, and in 2011 Medžuslovjanski („Interslavic”) was chosen as a common name. Fruits of this cooperation were, among other things, a common dictionary, a common news portal and a common wiki.

I wonder why there are two websites:

Interslavic – Medžuslovjansky – Меджусловјанскы,
interslavic language tutorial with the domain name "neoslavonic.org".

Is there any difference in the grammar? If so, which one is the most popular?

Depends on how you look at it; the Interslavic page does say (as you have noticed) that:

  All three projects collaborated closely with each other from that time, and in 2011 Medžuslovjanski („Interslavic”) was chosen as a common name. Fruits of this cooperation were, among other things, a common dictionary, a common news portal and a common wiki.

-- History of Interslavic

Thus, historically speaking, they are two different projects (plus a third one) that have coalesced into one, and are now one project with some internal variation. The websites are continuations of their individual parent projects, as each team retained its independence from the new fused project.


Are there human beatbox inspired conlangs? Human beatbox is an art form producing percussion sounds with the mouth only. It uses techniques and sounds that are rare or entirely absent in natural languages.

Are the constructed languages that take inspiration by human beatbox sounds?

I tried to find conlangs based on such sounds but could not find any. However, the closest human phonemes to such sounds are clicks and many conlangs use them. I don't know any well-known conlangs that use clicks, but HyPry and Gdili were two that I could find.

You could try making one yourself, but given that Beatbox sounds are fairly limited and sometimes hard to distinguish, I doubt you would be able to make an effective language from it without adding in typical consonants and vowels.


Is there a specific term for a substitution cipher language? A really simple but effective method to create an unintelligble language from a given language is applying a substitution cipher to the vocabulary. In order to be pronouncable, vowels should be substituted with vowels, and consonants with other consonant of comparable sonority.

It is of course a special case of a relexification, but is there a specific term for this?

"code" or "coded language". Probably mostly used in conjunction with sign languages, where the signs replace the (spoken) words (e.g. Signing Exact English as opposed to "natural" signed languages), but also for "encoded" spoken languages (either by relexification or phoneme substitution).


Valyrian - what living languages does it resemble the most? I'm interested in knowing what living languages Valyrian from Game of Thrones resembles the most in its grammar and/or vocabulary.

I've gathered here some very basic examples of what kind of similarities I would like to know of:

History/Culture

To the layman the history of the language group seems to resemble that or latin (and maybe arabic).

Vocabulary

If I have understood correctly the Valyrian vocabulary is formed so that it shouldn't sound like any living language so probably there's not much similarities there.

Grammar

It seems to contain many word inflections which would mean it bears more similarity to Latin than for example English, right?
It has four grammatical genders and here the Wikipedia article mentions some kind of similarity to Bantu languages?
Any other aspects of Valyrian containing significant similarities?

I'm aware that David J. Peterson, the creator of the language for the series didn't base Valyrian on any existing language. Yet it does seem to resemble in many aspects some languages much more (Latin, also Lithuanian comes to mind) than others (Chinese). It might not be a complete language but it has hundreds of words and what seems to be a well-thought-out grammar (see the Wikipedia article) so it should be possible to compare linguistic similarities.

It is probably impossible to say which language resembles Valyrian most, lacking a metric for similarity. But there are clearly identifyable influences of other languages, both constructed and natural.

Let's start with the catch phrase valar morghulis from GRRM: It just sounds like Tolkien's Elvish languages, with valar being a word from Quenya and morghul a word from Sindarin. Both Quenya and Sindarin have well-known influences from natural languages: Finnish for Quenya and Welsh for Sindarin.

Looking at High Valyrian, some Finnish feeling is still retained in the language: There is a distinction between long and short consonants as well as vowels, the case endings still have some Finnish feel (and a Latin feel, too, especially the vowel alternations), the phonotactics resemble Finnish. It is further away from Finnish than Quenya in its phonology contrasting voiced and voiceless stops and featuring the sound /q/. There is little Welsh in High Valyrian left, maybe the frequency of "the defining fantasy vowel" ae (Laura Wattenberg) can be traced to Welsh.

The 8-case system may be insprired by Languages like Russian or Sanskrit, with the commitative case being typologically rare, but occurring in Finnish again.

The four noun classes are a creative invention (but not far of, as natural language, especially Native American languages, are concerned) and I see no closer resemblence to Bantu languages (they have a lot of noun classes, but the noun classes are marked by overt prefixes that are also used as agreement markers).

The syntax with head-final relative clauses may be inspired by languages like Japanese.

P.S. While Peterson has stated some linguistic influences for the Dothraki language, I have not found a similar quote for Valyrian. So all the observations above are mine.


Methods to avoid similarity in lexicons When creating words I have often run into the problem that too many words sound similar even when I have allowed many different phonemes. Are there methods to avoid too much similarity between words, while making words similar enough to feel part on one language?

A modern approach to this problem is to generate the words automatically according to some formula describing allowed words. You can filter out words that are too close to already generated ones, but usually the randomness used by a computer program will be sufficient.

There are well-known examples of Conlangs with computer generated vocabulary. Loglan and Lojban used some vocabulary lists from natural languages as input for their vocabulary generating algorithm.


Can entire words be silent? Most people will be familiar with the idea that naturalistic spelling can be tricky. Some examples of natlangs with annoying spelling that come to mind are English ("ough" can be pronounced /ʌf/, /ɔf/, /ʌp/, /ow/, /u/, or /o/), French ("Qu'est-ce qu'il mangent ?" /kɛs kɪl mãʒ/), and Modern Greek (/i/ can be spelled "η", "ι", "ει", "υ", "οι", or "υι"). But how bad can it get? Are completely silent words (that is, written but unpronounced) words attested in any language? I'm aware that Irish mutations developed from completely lost particles, but I don't think these particles are still written as separate words.

Dropping words happen (the ne of negation notoriously drops pretty systematically in spoken French) and commonly a that, as Gregory points out. However, I believer a true "silent word" is a nonsensical concept.
For starters,  Silent letters are historical artifacts of a writing system. They are not a feature of the spoken language, so right there, a "silent word" cannot be something that happens in the spoken language unless the words in question are composed of phonemes or features that are merely difficult to hear from locutors of a different language. Still not silent in their native language. If a writer writes down a word, they typically do it with some sort of communicative intent (even if not consciously so).
Second, in the spoken language, something that isn't pronounced in one way or another literally doesn't exist by definition (we can argue about stuff like sandhi and the side effects of sound change, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion IMO).
So unless your language has a need to transcribe something that is literally not said (and we usually have punctuation and emoticons for that), then a "silent word" is, in my opinion, a self-contradicting concept.


Are there any successful conlangs using information density as a design goal? I'm interested in the idea of a conlang which could be used to create extremely information dense statements - such that, for example, a single word could be built up from morphemes to express a complete sentence. It would probably be a highly agglutinative language, similar to Eskimo-Aleut languages.
Are there successful* examples of conlangs which have been created with this principle in mind? I'm interested in seeing how other people might have applied this principle in creating another language.
*When I say successful: I'm aware of fictional examples like Speedtalk, where each phoneme is meaningful, and has incredibly complex and subtle distinctions. I don't consider that successful, because it's far too complex for anyone to reasonably learn. Japanese verbs can be informationally-dense in the way that I mean in terms of its inflectional morphology, e.g. the single word 行かせられたくなかった (ika-se-rare-ta-kuna-katta) can express the complete sentence "[I/he/she/they] didn't want to be made to go," using inflectional morphemes.

Answering this question is tricky. As you obtain higher and higher levels of information density, you have to sacrifice some naturalism or some simplicity in order to get there.
Marking the point where you've sacrificed too much naturalism or simplicity to be learnable is a judgment call.
Short answer:
Possibly guaspi, but it's obscure.

One famous example of this is Ithkuil. Parts of Ithkuil are reasonably naturalistic, such as its phonology, which is less complex than Ubykh or Chechen (which also has a large number of vowels). Other parts are not, such as the very fine-grained case distinctions or how meanings are organized into roots, which is more complex than the system of triliteral roots in Semitic languages that it is based on.
Is Ithkuil learnable? I really don't know. My guess is no but I don't have proof.

An example of an informationally-dense written language is Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is not a conlang, but it was written centuries after it stopped being spoken and uses a heavily abbreviated style where nearly everything that's pragmatically inferable is dropped.
If you want to make an informationally dense conlang, Classical Chinese is a good starting point. It has pervasive zero marking (although you can optionally mark possessors and relative clauses with an overt marker) and the reconstructed roots are monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic.

One possible example of an intentionally information dense language is guaspi, a tonal derivative of lojban.
I don't know whether lojban is considered learnable or not and I don't know whether to consider guaspi successful or not, but efficiency is one of its stated goals.

Gua\spi is efficient. Words are short, and extensive defaults on
articles and modal cases eliminate the majority of structure words.

In my personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, a human can speak "informal" lojban riddled with logic errors and this should count as speaking lojban.

Closing remarks:
Looking at some of these examples reveals an important design decision that creators of an informationally-dense language face: whether to allow the speaker to drop things that are pragmatically inferable and how to account for that when evaluating how well their language achieves its goals.
For instance, suppose a language has very specific tenses that are marked on all verbs or person marking on all verbs. Tense information is frequently recoverable from context, as are pronominal arguments. If information is recoverable from context, does the language get any points for encoding it directly, however efficiently it may do so?


Syllabic restriction/word boundaries set by IPA? Or it is decided by language creator When creating syllables we basically require an onset, nucleus, and a coda. Now, usually, all language have an onset, and the coda is fairly optional. Before creating a phonetic system, we first decide the word order, and rules about what sounds are allowed in the onset, nucleus and coda positions.
My question is focused on the 2nd part. For example, in English, the sound [ŋ] isn’t allowed to begin a word, but it can begin a syllable; and in Dothraki, the consonants, <I couldn't find the symbol>, [q], and [w] can’t end a word.
So these restrictions, do they arrive because of some IPA rule? Or is it the developer that creates these rules?

The phonotactics of a language, what you have described, is the silent partner of phonology. The analogy I like to use is that a language's phonology is its periodic table (with individual phonemes as individual elements), while its phonotactics are the entire rest of its chemistry. Higher level stuff, like morphology, semantics, pragmatics, are things like biology, psychology, sociology.
Just like every language has its own phonology, every language has its own phonotactics.  There are languages that can put /ŋ/ in onset (for example, Vietnamese) or /h/ in coda (Arabic). There are languages that can't make /s/ clusters, or any clusters for that matter (Hawaiian).
The IPA is the "Grand Unified Periodic Table of Linguistics"; it's stated purpose is to label every sound used in a human language, and does not restrict their arrangement in anyway. There is no "Grand Unified Chemistry of Linguistics"; phonotactic laws are usually described in plain language, although there is a notation to succinctly describe allophonic variation (that is, how phonemes are realized as phones in different environments) and phonemic evolution (how a language's phonemes evolve over time).


How do Romance-based naturalistic conlangs deal with the different principal parts of a verb? The Latin verb has four principal parts (e.g., ducere, duco, duxi, ductum) that are sufficient and necessary to create all inflected forms and derived words from it. As far as I know, no naturalistic conlang attempts to preserve the French passé simple and related tempora in other Romance languages; so we can drop this one. Usually, the differences between infinitives and present tense forms are also levelled out by dropping most of the Romance verbal inflections.

This leaves us with two principal parts, one for the infinitive, present tense and past tense, and one for the past participle (or at least for derivations from the past participle, in case that the participle is somehow regularised).

I remember that Edgar de Wahl even went further in his design of Occidental-Interlingue using a device called de Wahl's rule (the description in the Wikipedia differs somewhat from my presentation) in deriving also the infinitive and the present tense stem from the past particple, so his word for "to lead" is ducter. He isn't 100% consequent, but this adds a lot of regularity to his design.

How do other Romance-based conlangs deal with the principal parts?

I answer first for two of my own invented languages, Kerno and Loucarian. Since the question is now broadened to invented IALs, I choose to add several additional sections: Interlingua, Sabir, Occidental, Romanal, Medial Europan and Lingua Franca Nova. Also, just so one can get a flavour of these languages, I append the Pater Noster in each.

Looking back at some of my old Romance languages, I don't think I paid much attention to the Latin principle parts as a system. As the languages evolve out of Latin and into their more modern selves, the systematic nature might fall apart or accrete new forms.

In Kerno, we can certainly see the survival of at least three principal parts for the regular verbs.

cantam, cantar, cantú (sing)
caru, carer, carú (love)
dormu, dormir, dormú (sleep)

It's not until we meet up with those good old irregular verbs that more principal parts seem to linger:

In the Grammar, there is actually a section that lists the principal parts of the irregular verbs (though for some unknown reason, I didn't call them such):

doc (or doy), dar, dedai, doú
istam, ystar, stetai, ystú
currem, currer, coscorrai (or cocorrai), cursú
llodu, lloder, llosès, llosú
ioc, ir, fu, eú
sentu, sentir, senti, sentú

So, four principal parts surviving.

a Phazeoir Nusteor que bias 'n y ceues;
foreth noef il tew nom;
gouenyes il tew camouils;
foreth fès la teva gouoluntáts
en lâ derra cuomo 'ny ceues;
danos-el osdia le nusteor panèn cuotidièn;
dimeti y nusteor dheuz
cuomo dimitemus ai nusteor dheutoeres;
et ne nus attrayer rhen al tentación,
mays eliveránus des val.

Loucarian takes its inspiration from Sabir and has a similarly reduced verbal conjugation.

amare, amando, amato
clevere, cleviendo, cleveto
ajire, ajiendo, ajito
pejeire, pejiendo, pejito
vidure, videndo, viduto

While not a principal part of the ancestral Reman language, modern Loucarian takes the present/infinitive, progressive/continual & past for its principal parts.

nemet sospeito pôdis IC cata maccareire; etti pejeto IC:
enamverver tim maccareire coudeiere ican:
jenì abba en samayam na
qedd al iccà nomon
sôppere al iccà noummen podeqc festinam
outtato wad al iccà alfas eim en al tir eim en al paradeisiam
cvercare tim adis nasser hotim al jenìm pountim cascoumênem
demetere tim al jenìn nobes eim nas demetere al jenìn namaderam
mire doucere nasser adis peirasmom
mire dê côire tim nasser ad injoudissiam.

Interlingua is an invented Romance IAL. From the I-a grammar article under Verbs, we can see exactly what has been done with Latin's principal parts.

All personal inflexion is stripped off, so there can be no "first principal part" as such. However, the Latin present stem remains largely intact, so the I-a present tense could continue to serve as first principal part.
The infinitive remains distinct.
The old Latin perfect stems have all been obliterated; the I-a past tense is formed upon the Latin imperfect (present stem), so there can be no "third principal part".
The Latin past participle remains in I-a.

One could say the principal parts of an Interlingua verb are:

parla, parlar, parlate
dice, dicer, dicíte
senti, sentir, séntite

Interlingua is not entirely regular as regards its verbal system. There are a few (unofficial) irregulars (thank Goodness!)

The principal parts of esser are:

es, esser, era, essite thus four principal parts.

Nostre Patre, qui es in le celos,
que tu nomine sia sanctificate;
que tu regno veni;
que tu voluntate sia facite
super le terra como etiam in le celo.
Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,
e pardona a nos nostre debitas
como nos pardona a nostre debitores,
e non duce nos in tentation,
sed libera nos del mal.

Sabir (also knows as Mediterranean Lingua Franca) was an actual, natural Romance IAL in use within the Mediterranean Sea basin from the middle ages onwards to about the mid 19th century or so.

It is well known for severe reduction & levelling of morphology in general. There are but two principal parts, both surviving from Latin:

parlar, parlato
fazer, fazeto
sabir, sabito

The present tense, imperative and infinitive are all wrapped within the immutable infinitive; the past and past participle are wrapped up within the old perfect participle.

There are a couple odd forms. For example, in the Pater Noster we find noi volir ki nomi di ti star saluti of which I (having no grammar of the language available) can only imagine to be a past participle of saluer. Why the -i termination and why not "salueto", I don't know. Obviously Sabir was not designed to level all irregularity. It evolved naturally and over a long period of time within a broad geographical region. Oddities are bound to survive / arise.

Padri di noi, ki star in syelo,
noi volir ki nomi di ti star saluti.
Noi volir ki il paisi di ti star kon noi,
i ki ti lasar ki tuto il populo fazer volo di ti
na tera, syemi syemi ki nel syelo.
Dar noi sempri pani di noi di kada jorno,
i skuzar per noi li kulpa di noi,
syemi syemi ki noi skuzar kwesto populo ki fazer kulpa a noi.
Non lasar noi tenir katibo pensyeri,
ma tradir per noi di malu.

Occidental is another invented Romance IAL. I really don't know much about it beyond a couple articles I've read online. Even so, we can easily pick out the remaining principal parts from a good sample text:

da, dar, dat
inducte, inducter, inductet
veni, venir, venit

As with Interlingua and Sabir, the morphology of person is eliminated, leaving only a present stem. Also, the perfect stem itself is eliminated. This leaves us three principal parts.

Patre nor, qui es in li cieles,
mey tui nómine esser sanctificat,
mey tui regnia venir,
mey tui vole esser fat,
qualmen in li cieles talmen anc sur li terre.
Da nos hodie nor pan omnidial,
e pardona nor débites,
qualmen anc noi pardona nor debitores.
E ne inducte nos in tentation,
ma libera nos de lu mal.

Romanal was another invented Romance IAL. I have again no reference grammar, but a perusal of a text shows some interesting morphology.

das, dar, dat

Forms like ne nos inducas and dimitta speak of the survival of Latin negative imperative and possibly imperative forms as well. Romanal is well worth the visit for the spiffy verbal conjugation alone!

Patro nostri,
qui est en cieles,
sanctificat estas nomine tui,
advenias regne tui,
fias volite tui,
sicut en ciele, et en terre.
Il pane nostri quotidiani das ad nos hodie,
et dimittas nostri debites,
sicut et nus dimitta debitantos nostri,
et ne nos inducas in tentatione,
sed liberas nos ex male.

Medial Europan was another invented Romance IAL.

It would seem, from the given text, that all distinctions of conjugation have been reduced to but one. We can see that the present tense and infinitive are distinct.

pintit, pintir

Un englo, un franco ed un deuto havit le taske pintir kamele. Le englo voyajit ad Afrike for studiir le kamele in tisui doimie. Le franco gidit al zoologi jarden, ed le deuto pintit on kamelo ex le profunde de sui psyke.

Lingua Franca Nova was also inspired by Sabir. Its verbal system is the most reduced respecting the old Latin principal parts. That is to say, there are no principal parts, the bare verb stem being used for all tenses, in conjunction with temporal particles.

leva
come
boli

Nosa Padre ci es en la sielo,
Ta ce tua nom es santida.
Ta ce tua rena veni.
Ta ce tua vole aveni
sur la tera como en la sielo.
Dona oji nosa pan dial a nos,
e pardona nosa detas,
como nos pardona nosa detores,
e no condui nos a tenta,
ma libri nos de malia.

NB: I deliberately left out Esperanto / Ido because, while their vocabulary is largely paneuropean, its grammar is not Romance. (I've read several sources that claim it is closer to Slavic grammatically.) Also, I leave out Novial for the same reason, only its grammar is much closer to that of English.


Is there a structured toki pona dictionary/thesaurus? I'm currently working on an NLP project using toki pona, analysing and generating sentences. I was wondering if there was a structured dictionary available for it, or whether people have attempted to create one.

Let me explain what I mean by "structured dictionary":

There are only 120-odd words in toki pona. The word jan refers to a person. Compounds are used to be more specific, ie jan pona is "friend", jan utala is "fighter", jan alasa is "hunter", etc. This is reminiscent of expressing the meaning of nouns through semantic primitives, a bit like Wilks (1975). So the set of words described by jan would be {"person", "friend", "fighter", "hunter", ...}. There are subsets which are more specific, so jan utala is {"fighter", "soldier", "mercenary", ...}. jan utala pi ma would be {"soldier", "private", "general", ...}

You can envisage it as a tree structure, where the leaves are the word meanings, and the roots (as there would be multiple trees: one for each 'top' primitive) encompasses all of them. As you wander down the tree, the path is an ever longer chain of toki pona words, and the set of meanings covered by those words becomes smaller and smaller.

Another example would be ilo, "tool". ilo toki is a tool for communication: {"telephone", "telegraph", "vhf radio", "loud hailer", ...}; ilo toki uta suli (tool talk mouth big) could be a loud hailer. Another sub-tree would capture wireless communication devices, perhaps ilo toki pi kon.

I know this somewhat goes against the toki pona philosophy of being a simple and small language, but it seems to me to more or less accidentally provide a useful set of semantic primitives that can be used to describe word meanings in general. So before I embark on creating such a structure, has anyone already attempted something similar? Surely there must be dictionaries of mulit-word toki pona expressions? I haven't been able to find a good one yet.

Wilks, Y (1975) An Intelligent Analyzer and Understander of English, Communications of the ACM 18(5):264-274

Proving a negative is always difficult, but as far as I can tell there is no obvious candidate for what you're looking for and if you made one yourself it would presumably fill an empty niche in the Toki Pona universe. At least I haven't found any sites written in English yet that seem to fit the bill.

The closest thing I can find to what you are looking for is a Toki Pona corpus search tool, which seems like it would be useful for tracking down examples of usage and might help you find compounds containing a particular word that have already been coined.

Also, I have yet to find two simpler things that would be good stepping stones for a hierarchically organized Toki Pona dictionary.

A non-minimal dictionary
Toki Pona-English parallel texts

All of the Toki Pona dictionaries I have found so far define just the basic vocabulary and do not provide entries for any multi-morpheme lexemes, even famous ones like jan utala.

Many of the dictionaries out there are more or less copies of the official dictionary, such as this one. Other dictionaries like this Wiktionary appendix do not provide definitions for whole Toki Pona expressions at a time.

Toki Pona-English parallel texts would help distinguish lexeme boundaries within complex phrases, since the presence or absence of pi is not a completely reliable cue as to whether a "real lexeme boundary" was intended.


Is there a word for "skull" in Klingon? Exactly what it says on the can - I'm looking for a word in tlhingan-Hol (Klingon) for "skull".

Fallback: In case there isn't a canon word, I'm defaulting to using "head bone" as a replacement. I know from TKD that nach is "head" and Hom is "bone". Is this combination nach Hom correct? e.g. is jaghpu'ma' nach HomDu' a reasonable translation for "our enemies' skulls"?

Indeed, there doesn't seem to be any canon word for "skull" in Klingon, so a compound should be fine.

Note, however, that some compounds are constructed without separation between their parts (see for example Wiktionary's list of Klingon compound words) with no apparent rule as to why, so "skull" could conceivably be nachHom.

BUT, since -Hom is also the diminutive suffix, nachHom would primarily mean "little skull", making nach Hom is the less ambiguous translation.


Can Root Words Be Derived From Other Root Words If I said "I" was "Zha" would it be plausible to say "you" is "Zho" and from there naturally begin forming grammatical gender, or would that be too early in the language to add complexities? Also, could the word "we" not be a root word but instead be derived from "I" (Zha->Zhasa)?

Sure. And like always, real languages got there first.

In Quechua, for instance, fist person singular ("I/me") is Ñuqa. 1st person plural inclusive (we, all of us) is Ñuqanchik, and exclusive (us, but not you) is Ñuqayku.

Second person singular is Qam, plural Qamkuna. Third person singular is Pay, third person plural Paykuna. -kuna is simply the Quechuan plural suffix. "House" is wasi, "houses" wasikuna.

"You, the person I'm talking to" Qam, "You, the people I'm talking to" Qamkuna.

It's quite common in many languages that "I" and "you" are distinct; after all, I'm usually the most most important person in the universe, and you just live there. Third person pronouns seem to often be derived from pointing words: "that thing over there" becomes "that person over there".


How to make good analogy in one's constructed language? What steps can be taken to reproduce analogy in a constructed language? Which parts of grammar are more likely to evolve with analogy, and why? Are there rules for what analogy does to which words, or rules that show where analogy may take place?

Let's look at a made-up example. Assume that we want to apply a sound change from /g/ to /d͡ʒ/ before /e/ and /i/ in Esperanto. Then, the conjugation of the Esperanto verb pagi "to pay" suddenly becomes irregular:

paĝi, pagas, paĝis, pagos, pagus (The infinitive and the past tense have a different consonant (ĝ) than the rest).

Analogy will force one consonant for all forms but we cannot predict which one. In this respect, analogy is quite irregular, and we can end up either with the original Esperanto paradigm, or with all forms shifted to the new consonant (paĝi, paĝas, paĝis, paĝos, paĝus).

Analogy affects usually inflected or agglutinative word forms, such as verbs and nouns, but it can also be applied to derivational morphology.

Another type of analogy tries to level out differences between conjugations or declensions. Assume, your language features two different conjugations. Than borrowing an ending (or prefix, or vowel change) from one conjugation to the other is also an analogy.


How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there? I've seen several variations of Tolkien's Elvish around, with different names, such as Sindarin and Q(u)enya.

How many dialects of Tolkien's Elvish are there, and how do they differ from one another?

In this article, it is mentioned:

Primitive Quendian (language of the Elves in Cuiviénen)
Avarin
Various Avarin languages (some later merged with Nandorin)
Common Eldarin (the early language of all the Eldar)
Quenya (the language of the Ñoldor and the Vanyar)
Quendya (also Vanyarin Quenya) (daily tongue of the Vanyar: closest to archaic Quenya)
Ñoldorin Quenya (also Exilic Quenya) (the "Elven Latin" of Middle-earth)
Common Telerin (the early language of all the Lindar)
Telerin (the language of the Teleri who reached the Undying Lands)
Nandorin (languages of the Nandor — some were influenced by Avarin)
Original language of Greenwood the Great
Original language of Lórinand
Sindarin (language of the Sindar)
Doriathrin (dialect of Doriath)
Falathrin (dialect of the Falas and Nargothrond)
North Sindarin (dialects of Dorthonion and Hithlum)

So a good many dialects exist. However, we cannot exactly count how many there are, because it mentions "various" and we don't know whether there is a hierarchy of languages that have branched off somewhere else.  However, we can confirm there are at least 17 dialects of the Elvish.


How does the Wede:i language reflect their cultural focus on government? We can see that the Wede:i have a focus on the state in their culture:

  The central fact of existence has always been the state, always essential. The southern religions had always preached support for the state, the importance of the collective good, and the social lubrication necessary to a populous and busy state: manners and decorum; respect for superiors; fair and just treatment for inferiors.

Can we see this in their language? i.e., are there more government-related words than in other languages?

I don't think you can generally assume a strong correlation between the vocabulary of a language and culture of the kind you are asking about. Just like the "50 Eskimo words for snow" is a myth, it would also apply to other languages...

Not knowing the language in question I would think that there is a cultural influence, but not as obvious as having more words in a given topic area. I would expect a fine-grained system of honorifics, expressed in, for example, different verbal affixes depending on whether you speak to someone who is superior to you or not. So you express respect by using a different form of the verb, but not a different lexical item.

The same would apply to other areas of discourse. Politeness markers, modality (should, could, would,...) all play a role in social interaction, but do not necessarily manifest themselves directly in the vocabulary.


International Auxiliary Language created by a Japanese person I remember some facts about an international auxiliary language (IAL) created by a Japanese person, but unfortunately I both forgot the name of the inventor and the name of the IAL. Can someone help me out?

Features that I can remember:

Created by a Japanese around the turn of 19th to the 20th century
Based on European languages (mostly latinate vocabulary)
Having a schematic and simplified inflection
When the author became aware of Esperanto he dumped his own IAL project and became one of the first Japanese Esperantists

I want to know the name of the author and (if available) the name of the language. Additional information is always welcome!

Assuming that the OP misremembered a few facts, the language may be Babm, invented by the Japanese philosopher Rikichi [Fuishiki] Okamoto (1885–1963) and first published in 1962. It uses the Latin script as a syllabary (which is not the same thing as using a latinate vocabulary) and has "some degree of analytic inflection".


Brahmic conscript with European style The scripts of South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent), e.g. Devanagari, and Southeast Asia, e.g. Thai, are almost all derived from the Brahmic script. They show gradual visual relationships and most of them are structurally similar. They are syllabaries with non-default vowels being denoted by diacritics and consonant clusters often forming complex ligatures.

Is there any constructed variant of this family of scripts that intentionally uses shapes found in the major European scripts (Roman, Cyrillic and Greek)? Preferably, it would be based upon the stems and loops of lowercase Roman letters. I think it’s impossible to achieve in a readable way, but maybe there is even a mimicry or "faux Latin" font for one of the existing scripts (e.g. Burmese or Malayalam) that would qualify.

PS: I have attached some roman letters in red to similar looking glyphs in the picture below. The imagined conscript would have a consistent set of letters and diacritics that looked much like roman ones.

Next project: Pama-Nyungan inspired vocabulary, but using English words


Are Esperanto's part of speech endings actually beneficial? I was wondering if they really serve any practical advantage.

For one, what they mean depends on what the innate part of speech of the root is, which isn't marked except through the part of speech endings. For instance, attaching the verbal suffix -i to an adjective gives a different meaning than attaching it to a noun.

Further more, Lingua Franca Nova has a rather novel method of marking mart of speech: its own derivational morphology. Unlike Esperanto's affixes, LFN's affixes often transform a specific part of speech into another (or sometimes just leaves it the same). In this say, suffixes that derive nouns are automatically mark the noun for part of speech without the need of an additional affix that serves no other purpose.

But of course, I'm not exactly fluent in the language myself, so I'd like an opinion from people who do actually know and use this language. Are the part of speech endings really useful or are they just a convoluted way to derive new words?

For those unfamiliar with Esperanto POS suffixes,

-o noun
-i verb (infinitive)
-a adjective
-e adverb

For example:

sano - health
sani - to be healthy
sana - healthy
sane - healthily

Since Esperanto has free word order, having POS markers allows the differentiation between the following phrases:

ĝoje knabino ludas - a girl plays happily
ĝoja knabino ludas - a happy girl plays

Esperanto and LFN have a very similar affix system, however unlike LFN, Esperanto root words have no innate part of speech, so there is no way of "adding" a verbal suffix to a noun or an adjective. Rather, you would be changing the nominal/adjectival suffix to the verbal one and forming the verb based on the root word. Knowing the POS of any given word makes understanding unfamiliar words a lot easier, which is very advantageous for an auxiliary language.

With that being said, in EO poetry, nouns often drop their -o ending for aesthetic reasons.

  Berlino sen vi estas urb' (urbo) sen harmoni' (harmonio)
  Estas trista, trista, amasloĝej' (amasloĝejo)

Between EO and LFN's, there is no "better" affix system. They are just two different ways of doing the same thing.


Which character is best to use for a schwa? Ь or Ъ? Cyrillic for English - (Сарилик фоьр Иңглиш) is an adapted Cyrillic orthography to write English using ь as schwa, so 'sofa' would be written 'соьфь'. Does ь make sense as a schwa or is ъ better? The way I understand it ъ basically forces a pause. Is there really any use for ь or is there something I'm not understanding about how they are used? Is there a character that would make sense to use at the beginning of a word?

If you're going to use one of <ъ> or <ь> to represent /ə/, it's probably better to use <ъ>. This letter is currently used to write /ɤ/ in modern Bulgarian, whereas <ь>, as far as I'm aware, is only used to write actual vowels in dead Slavic languages. Moreover, because <ь> historically represented a short front vowel, it is used in modern languages like Russian to indicate palatalisation, something that does not accompany /ə/, whereas, e.g. in both modern (and more widely in pre-reform) Russian, <ъ> marks not a vowel but the absence of palatalisation.


Examples of the combination of 2 independent symbolic scripts I am looking for examples real or con, of two foreign symbolic scripts being made into a hybrid language/script.

In my case I wish to see about making a hybrid 15th century Aztec-Chinese Hybrid language. (I know its not realistic)

I was thinking that the influence of a Chinese Empire in exile in the Americas would influence Aztec to take on the simplification of their character to be more based on simple strokes like chinese.

I.e. Chinese began as pictographs that evolved into today's simple stroke based script, Would Aztecs combine Chinese symbols with their own, adapt theirs to be more chinese?

I doubt the influence of Aztecs would inspire Chinese to have more complicated and colorized pictographs

The obvious comparison to make here is to Japanese, as it's a real-life hybrid script and is currently the only non-Chinese language to use them. However, it's important to consider that Japanese did not have an existing writing system when Chinese characters were brought over, and for quite a while the Japanese elites wrote strictly in Classical/Literary Chinese, even after the evolution of hiragana (which were more often used by women).

Given that you have actual Chinese people in this exiled empire you describe, they will almost certainly be writing in Literary Chinese but speaking some form of vernacular (the specifics of which will depend upon where in China they've come from), so it's possible that Chinese characters will be repurposed to write Nahuatl, particularly if the Chinese become the dominant group in the area. Or it's possible that the opposite will happen, particularly if the Aztecs are the dominant group, and the Chinese will begin to write their language (be it Literary Chinese or their spoken vernacular) using the Aztec script.

The idea of the Chinese script influencing the Aztec script but the opposite not being likely seems to be based on some misplaced ideas about simpler characters being inherently better and more likely to catch on -- which script becomes dominant is more likely to be influenced by the sociopolitics of this situation rather than any inherent qualities of the script. Also be sure to keep in mind that different scripts are better for different writing materials -- will the Chinese be able to continue to produce the kinds of paper, ink, and brushes they're used to in the Americas? These are the sorts of things you need to research, ponder, and decide for yourself.


Are there any constructed languages designed with a constructed script, both aiming to be international and auxiliary? Hangul is a beautiful constructed script, used to write the natural languages of Korean, Jeju, Hokkien, and Cia-Cia, perhaps others.  The shape of the letters mimic the shape of the mouth, and a letter for a voiceless consonant is directly related to the letter for its voiced counterpart.  Personally, I think it's brilliant and should be adopted worldwide, perhaps with some additions to consider sounds that do not exist in Korean (by far the most dominant language using it).

One idea of constructed international auxiliary languages is that those languages should have a simple and logical grammar to be easy to learn.  But it appears most of those languages are still written with the Latin alphabet, which doesn't have much or any connection between the look of a letter and its pronunciation — this still needs to be learned by heart.  A learner cannot derive the pronunciation of a previously unknown letter from its shape.

Have there been any designs of constructed languages, aiming to be international auxiliary languages (thus not counting fictional alien/fantasy languages), which from the start had a dedicated constructed script designed to be as simple as possible, yet universally applicable?

I found one language called Bliss Symbolics that is

It is an International Auxiliary Language
It has its own character set, not based on Latin characters or any other character set.

I also found another IAL that doesn't use latin characters called Temenia that uses Greek characters instead of Latin.  While this language doesn't apply exactly to your question, you seem to be interested in NON-Latin based character IAL's.


Does Dovahzul have the same grammar rules as English, or are they different? I have recently been reading this page about the Dragon Language, and I was curious about whether if it and the English language share grammer rules. They seem to have similar bases (organized alphabets with words that derive from it), but I am unsure since Dovahzul seems to be primitive.

There are a lot of rules that are exactly the same.  For instance, Dovahzul has the exact same parts of speech:

Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
Articles
Conjunctions
Interjections
Prepositions

However, there are some rules that are different: for instance, in the Dragon Language, some words can be used either as an adjective, noun, verb, or adverb, such as the word Nahlot, which means officially "Silenced," but whose meaning can be expanded to mean "silent," "silently," or "silence."

So yes, it shares some rules with English, but no, its rules are not the same.  If you had any specific questions about specific rules, you'd have to ask those in separate questions.


Are there any rules of thumb for number of "steps" between two points in a language's natural development? Let's suppose that you want to create Conlang B. You want this conlang to be derived from Conlang A. Let's also suppose that you have some arbitrary period of time in between A and B. Are there any rules of thumb for how many steps—how many major grammar/vocabulary alterations, etc.—would generally manifest between A and B as a general guideline? Is it entirely up to the conlanger's prerogative, or can patterns from natural languages be found?

It’s relatively hard to say. First, some general numbers:

Over 1000 years, Old High German split into the various southern German dialects, including Swiss German and Standard German. While differences are very noticable, many developments were parallel and speakers usually don’t take long to get accustomed to the differences. A similar time depth can be claimed for English vs Scots. Old High German itself is not readily intelligible to the modern speaker, but many words are recognizable.

2000 years ago, we had Latin and Proto-Germanic, the ancestors of the Romance and Germanic branches of Indo-European. While the modern languages all show clear similarities in most regards of the language, they are as a general rule not mutually intelligible and speakers need to invest a lot of time to learn another of those languages - but still much less than with an unrelated language. Proto-Germanic and Latin are both quite different than the modern languages, showing vast differences in morphology and syntax, as well as having undergone many sound changes since. Nevertheless, with some knowledge on etymology, words can readily be recognized for what they are in a written text.

About 4000-6000 years ago, we have PIE. At this point, the language is no longer immediately recognizable as being related to a modern European language. The grammar is very different - just as an example, PIE verbs inflect for three persons and three numbers, but not directly for tense or aspect, which are instead marked with various more-or-less productive derivational affixes. The phonology would also look very out of place in modern day Europe. And for most roots, even if they didn’t change much phonologically, there was probably a semantic shift somewhere between PIE and English. The average English speaker will understand exactly zero words in a passage in Serbian or Punjabi.

But there’s another side to this as well. General tendencies are fine, but what about individual languages? If you compare Italian and French to Latin, then it’s plainly obvious that French has changed more, at least with regards to phonology and morphology. Similarly, comparing English to Icelandic, the latter is clearly more conservative (though no where near as much as some people might make you believe). To me, French and English look like they are 500+ years further in the future than their contemporary siblings — in reality of course they just underwent some more drastical sound changes that in turn messed with their morphology, which in turn forced changes to the syntax. People try to ascribe those changes to various factors, usually external ones such as a large number of foreign learners, but most of this is not grounded in actual science and just speculation.

As such, no definitive answer can be given. I find the time depths I gave above to be good rules of thumb, but single languages may deviate from those quite a bit. To achieve such results, it’s important to apply changes not only to the phonology, but to all parts of the language — especially the lexicon.


What is the key to realistic inventories Shy of simply recreating or stitching together natural languages' phonological inventories, what is the solution for making a naturalistic conlangs' inventory naturalistic?

You should think of phonology  in terms of distinction. You have to distinguish certain consonants and vowels from others, and you have to figure out the best way to do that.

A realistic inventory has spread out places of articulation, often symmetrical. It's much easier to make a distinction between spread-out consonants that between consonants that are articulated similarly. That's why this is a really common inventory:

             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close
Mid-Close
Mid          e             o
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open           a

And this is unheard of:

             Front Central Back
Close        i             u
Near-Close   ɪ             ʊ
Mid-Close          ɘ
Mid
Mid-Open
Near-Open
Mid-Open

You should always make sure a language makes distinctions that are spread apart, e.g. /p t k/, rather than distinguishing three types of t-sounds /t̼ t ʈ/ without also having a distinction from /p k/ (unless for some reason you're making a language to be spoken by aliens without lips, for instance). There's also no reason to have only three consonants /p d kʰ/; you should either have only one set (such as /p t k/), or have a set for each of them (i.e. /p pʰ b, t tʰ d, k kʰ g/).

Every rule has its exceptions, but this is true of most natural languages, and you should use this as a starting point.

(Some more details can be found in my answer on Linguistics, from which I copied some of the examples)


Has anyone tried learning and speaking Kesh? The book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K Le Guin is an anthropological account of the Kesh, a people that "might be going to have lived" in future California. It includes short stories, songs, poems, recipes and sacred texts of the fictional people; but relevant to the question is the section at the end of the book which contains the script, numerals, and punctuation of the language, as well as an extensive glossary. I don't think there are any details on grammar written there, but there are example sentences in different places in the book. So, my question is, is there anyone that has tried to learn this language or studied it much? And, if so, what is it like?

I have the novel, but haven't yet read it, so can't say that I've tried learning Kesh.
I used to (and may still) have the cassette tapes that came with some work about the Kesh. As I recall, it was recordings very much as you describe for the texts: songs and lore of various kinds. As I recall it was a pretty sounding language.  I think this is it.
I think it's therefore safe to say sòmeone has tried to learn it! Well enough to record it, anyway!


In what ways are well-known a priori conlangs inadvertently eurocentric? It’s well-known that among inexperienced conlangers¹, many times their conlangs turn out to be way more European than intended, often showing features found only rarely outside of European languages, because the creator is not aware there was even an option.

What I’m curious now is whether among the “big names” such as Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki etc. there are any such accidental Europeanisms? We can disregard Tolkien’s works as he was actively taking inspiration from various European languages (such as Welsh or Finnish²). Obviously auxlangs meant to suit primarily Europe can also be excluded, and whatever Esperanto is meant to be I’m well aware of the situation there, so you can exclude that from answers as well.

¹ Who are native speakers of an European language, i.e. statistically probably English.

² While not Indo-European, Finnish does share many features with other European languages.

While it's true that languages like Na'vi and Klingon (can't speak for Dothraki) do contain quite a few explicitly non-SAE (Standard Average European) features, it's worth noting that both Paul Frommer and Marc Okrand have stated that they were deliberately using less common and lesser-known features in their respective conlangs to make them sound more alien. Since avoiding features that would be considered common or familiar to their audiences (typically comprised of speakers of English and other SAE languages) was a goal during their language creation. I'd argue that deliberately avoiding all SAE features to make your language sound "strange" and "alien" is a sort of eurocentrism (though perhaps a less obvious sort than unthinkingly including all SAE features) in that your language ends up very influenced by European languages and their features.


How can I add irregularities to a morphological paradigm? So, I'm trying to make something with a naturalistic feel, even though the current phonetic system distinguishes about 38 phonemes... Let's say I'll tackle this later.
I have issues with grammar... I want to use Proto-Kartvelian as a root source but make a language that has Indo-European grammatical structure. So... When I tried making noun declensions I generally end up making something that turns into agglutinitive suffixes... E.g. if we have a masculine noun ending in -o, I simply use consonants after the -o to express cases, then change the -o to -a for plural and repeat. E.g. -o/ -og/ -ot/ -om/ -ol vs -a/ -ag/ -at/ -am/ -al...
 It is too regular. How do I change certain things so that it looks less artificial, but still maintain some logic... I need advice.

One possibility: perhaps your "-a- for plural" derives from an ancient word for "many" that was of a different declension, having different endings, so you could posit:

S  -o / -og / -ot / -om / -ol
vs
P  -a / -az / -asis / -amis / -ay

Another possibility: the historical importation of a foreign declension pattern into words of certain classes, which practice later infects native words of other classes either in whole or in part.

Consider the Latin words that have Greek declension and extrapolate from there.

A third possibility: the later "regularisation" of ancient defective words actually introduces an irregularity. For example, your modern word for "mob" might be an ancient plural form of "person", so you could posit:

S -a / -ag / -at / -am / -al
vs
P -a / -az / -asis / -amis / -ay


What are the common features of "Elvish" conlangs? I want to create a fantasy world with Elves speaking their own language. In order to avoid unwanted associations with works of other authors, the Elves should speak a newly invented language. What features make a conlang sound "Elvish" in a fantasy setting, delineating it from languages of other races (like humans, dwarves, or orcs)?

My picture of Elves is heavily influenced by the works of Tolkien. The Elves are tall and strong humanoids with very long live-span living in the forests of my fantasy world. They are fond of arts and crafts and of poetry, but also engage in fights and wars when necessary.

Elves like these are a common race in genre fiction by many authors, and they also occur in genre based games (e.g., Dungeons and Dragons). They often have typical Elvish names, and some authors also invented some bits of Elvish languages for them. So I assume there are some common features for Elvish languages. What are they?

One way to look at "elvish" features is to compare how different elvish languages look, and to take inspiration from that.

A look at the phonologies of a few elvish languages:

Quenya
(phonology from here)

         Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d            k g
Fricative  f v     s     (ç)      x     h
Trill                r
Semivowel (ʍ) w             j
Liquid               l

      Front Central Back
Close  i(ː)         u(ː)
C-Mid  eː           o:
O-Mid  ɛ            ɔ
Open         a(ː)

Sindarin
(phonology from here)

         Labial  Dental Alveolar Lateral Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasal        m       n                              ŋ
Stop       p b     t d                            k g
Fricative  f v     θ ð   s       ɬ                      χ      h
Trill               r
Approximant                          l       j    ʍ w

        Front Central Back
Close   i y             u
Near-C  ɪ               ʊ
O-Mid   ɛ               ɔ
Open          a

Some common denominators in Tolkien's Elvish: They all have distinction between voiced and unvoiced stops and (labial) fricatives, both have the somewhat /ʍ/ as a phoneme or allophone as well as /ŋ/, /x~χ/ and /h/. With vowels, they each have four vowel heights but nothing much in common beyond that. Allowed syllables seem to be (CC)V(CC) in Quenya (many more details at Wikipedia) and (C)V(C) in Sindarin, though I don't see that explicitly.

Pathfinder Elf Names
(names from here)

  Male Names: Caladrel, Heldalel, Lanliss, Meirdrarel, Seldlon, Talathel, Variel, Zordlon.

  Female Names: Amrunelara, Dardlara, Faunra, Jathal, Merisiel, Oparal, Soumral, Tessara, Yalandlara.

My interpretation of the names hints at some of these features: Only two nasals, voicing distinction, five vowels.

Allowed syllables: Apparently (C)V(CC) or (C)V(LC) where L is a liquid (l or r) or nasal

Dungeons & Dragons Elf Names
(names from 3.5 edition Player's Handbook p. 16)

  Male Names: Aramil, Aust, Enialis, Heian, Himo, Ivellios, Laucian, Quarion, Soveliss, Thamior, Tharivol

  Female Names: Anastrianna, Antinua, Drusilia, Felosial, Ielenia, Lia, Mialee, Qilathe, Silaqui, Vadanja, Valanthe, Xanaphia

  Family Names: Amastacia, Amakiir, Galanodel, Holimion, Liadon, Meliamne, Naïlo, Siannodel, Ilphukiir, Xiloscient

Here we seem to have gemination at the end of words, vowel length, maybe uvular stop; th and ph are probably fricatives and not aspirated, judging by the presence of v and absence of f. Syllables seem to be (C)V(CC).

Using the very questionable methodology of taking the least common denominators of all of them would give us something like:

          Labial   Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal        m       n
Stop       p b     t d                      k g
Fricative  f v     θ       s z                    h
Trill                        r
Approximant                  l       j       w

        Front Central Back
Close   i               u
Mid     e               o
Open          a

If you want an elvish language to be easily recognizable as elvish, you might be able to copy some of these features. I'm not sure, though, that there is any feature that might be universally understood as elf-like.