All Questions

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, ...

We can make a noun for the instrument of an action, by taking the verb for the action and adding an instrumental marker.[1] For instance, in English, we can add "-er",[2] like so: I cut the box ...

At the moment I have 90 unique vowel/diphthong sounds that use tonal and length distinction in my conlang. In addition I've chosen 14 consonants, making my total of unique sounds 104. I don't ...

I've got most of Mark Rosenfelder's books on conlanging except The Syntax Construction Kit (which I'm not sure I need). The conlang I'm currently working on is a 'holy musical magic language' called ...

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

I've created a race of nomadic robots, but am having trouble finding a culture to base their language off of. They're peripatetic nomads, meaning they travel around offering goods and services to any ...

Background I am planning a naturalistic Goidelic language which shall have quite an influence from Old Norse – probably at least 1/4 or 1/3 of the vocabulary to be of North Germanic origin, as well ...

I'm working on a language with nominal tense–aspect–mood (TAM), i.e. inflecting nouns instead of verbs. So, a sentence like "the woman sees the man", could be roughly translated to something like "the ...

Have there been any attempts to create a language based on Proto-Indo-European (PIE)? Of course PIE has had an effect on other languages, and through them ended up in many a posteriori conlangs as ...

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 ...

Background To begin, I’ve been conlanging ‘properly’ for around two to two and a half years now and have been into it for far, far longer. However, I have yet to create a conlang that is truly in-...

I know that Slovio is not very popular but if I write or speak in this language, will I be understood by Russian or Ukrainian as their website says? If someone has experience to share, it helps me to ...

In languages with conjugated verbs there is usually a similar structure across verbs that makes them easy to recognize even if you do not know the word. For example in German, all verbs after the ...

Most conlang examples I find in tutorials use a small set of vowels, but the one I'm working on has 13 and I'm having trouble finding the simplest transliteration to work with. Here are the IPA ...

I've read that the most commonly used verbs in a language are almost always irregular, and for the most part the irregular forms of verbs can be traced to an archaic form being preserved in the ...

Most auxiliary languages I know of, especially Esperanto, are primarily a posteriori—that is, their vocabulary or grammar are derived from other existing languages, and most are fairly Eurocentric. ...

Wikipedia says that Basic English is an English-based controlled language, an international auxiliary language, and an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a ...

Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material ...

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 ...

The Wikipedia article on Occidental/Interlingue says: According to the Occidental magazine Cosmoglotta in 1928, a majority of Ido adherents took up Occidental in place of Ido. Obviously, ...

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

And by "stillborn", I mean a dead language that never really lived to begin with: a modernized version of an archaic language frozen in time, or an all-out archaic language (with archaic grammar and ...

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

For readers who aren't familiar with the Theory of Relativity, here is a sketch of how the Special Theory of Relativity structures space and time: There is a point "here and now" where the observer ...

Dritok is a conlang by Dan Boozer without any voiced sounds. It is said to be based on chipmunk sounds. While this language even has a wikipedia article, I was not able to discover some more detailed ...

Here is the scenario: In or before the Classical Period, a king from some Greek city-state--it doesn't matter which--first brought all the other Greek city-states together to become one unified ...

I'd like to hear from anyone who has built a dialect continuum, in which innovations spreading from different centres affect overlapping subsets of the range (see wave theory). How do you model it? ...

In my new language, I use tones, such as those in Mandarin and Cantonese, to diversify my words. When I try to make a dictionary, I do not know how to describe these tones. I have tried using parts ...

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

The language I am creating is derived from East Norse and heavily influenced by Slavic. It has a quite complex grammatical structure - for example, it has not only taken over the two additional cases ...

The acronym ANADEW is quite popular among conlang enthusiats, but what does it mean? For an answer, I'd like to see not only an expansion of the acronym, but also some good usage examples.

The relatively high degree of mutual intercomprehensibility of the Slavic languages has fascinated a lot of people for a long time. It was also a motivation in the design of zonal constructed ...

Sorry, my title is slightly misleading; what I'm after is more like a written language that doesn't have its roots in spoken language, and has no definitive translation into speech, but is none-the-...

Other than making words easier to pronounce, is there any purpose to having the letters divided like this? Should they or a similar concept be added to a constructed language?

A little background before my question: I am an amateur in mid-development of a logographic writing system, not necessarily a whole language with phonetics. As I develop, I don't so much care about ...

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 ...

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 ...

Auxlangs are meant to be easily learnt/understood by the entire populace of the world, no matter their native language. So, they are constructed to be unambiguous and it's reference should have a one-...

I am well-aware of the fact that some people use Klingon in conversions at special conventions and events. Is there an estimate about the number of Klingon speakers and how many of them are there?

What are examples of grammatical cases that are not attested in natural languages, but occur in some conlang? To qualify here, the conlang should have at least some bit of flesh (e.g., a few ...

Of all the criticisms you see of Volapuk, one the most pervasive is that it can be difficult to parse some of the longer compound words. Which is pretty obvious. With all words being CVCVCVCV... and ...

There are well-known and notable differences in speed for natural languages: While a fast language like Spanish is spoken at a speed of about 6–7 syllables per second, a slow language like German, ...

As any linguist (and anyone who knows unrelated languages, probably), not all languages express things the same way. Worse yet, its not possible to express everything logically, so all languages are ...

In a previous question about making a language easy to learn as a second language I suggested that grammatical genders have very little usefulness. A couple of people, however, suggested that ...

The accepted translation of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu fhtagn" seems to be "Cthulhu dreams". How would one conjugate "fhtagn" to get the word derivations "dream", "dreamer", "dreaming". This answer had a ...

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

I want my language, Syn, to be as precise, efficient, unambiguous, and aesthetic as humanely possible. To do that, I think even the texture, dynamics, rhythm, and the likes should be accounted for. ...

ROILA (RObot Interaction LAnguage), a constructed language for communication between robots and between robots and humans, comes with a 5 vowel system. the vowels are written a e i o u but their sound ...

I'm constructing an auxlang/artlang (temporarily named Syn). The Syn is (being) designed to interface with any known human language, with a wildly uniform set of simplistic, unambiguous symbols. I ...

Looking for information on the International Auxiliary languages Interglossa and Glosa again, I stumbled over these sample texts in Glosa. I am astonished, how slavishly Glosa copies the English ...