All Questions

I'm trying to translate this sentence: "May we drink from the empty skulls of our enemies" to tlhIngan-Hol / Klingon, this will be used as a toast at a friends' wedding (of all things). While my ...

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 ...

Lojban was created to be syntactically unambiguous. I wonder though if there are natural languages that have the same property, or at least come much closer to having it than English does? Has ...

Since it's impossible to read numbers in other bases, I was thinking about some universal affix based solution. Could some linguist help me find better words or point me to a rich resource? Some ...

I was thinking what is the correct way to say "Little princess" in Ido. (EN) Little princess - Little (indicates the "size") Princess (descendant of some royal crown and that descendant is female). (...

I'm working on the pronoun system of one of my conlangs, and I can't find any resource that can tell me how commonly reflexive pronouns occur in natural languages. Is a reflexive something I need to ...

I am familiar with zonal languages that attempt to smooth out and simplify the differences between languages within a family, such as Slovio for the Slavic languages and Folkspraak for the Germanic ...

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

In my world, I have a race of humanoids who speak a language called Gé̃kt, which is derived from various Eastern Iranian languages such as Khotanese, Ossetian, Yaghnobi and Bactrian with a dash of ...

I'm writing a book about humans finding alien writing off-planet, which is why I want to know how—without referencing known human languages like the Rosetta Stone does—it may be deciphered. Does it ...

Say for instance I want to say something like, "I'm looking for bears and the lost sheep." I would think that would be to use the genitive case, making something like: mIl'oDmey chIlpu'ghach ...

Concerning compound subjects and such, I'm not exactly sure how lists of nouns work exactly, especially with three or more items. How would "bears and metal drums" be distinguished from "bears, metal, ...

Currently I have a very simple proto-language which I'm trying to evolve. For example: slishi hu ho shofli shofli pfufi tushi repair person tool fish.V fish.V succeed cause Person ...

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 ...

I'm getting started with creating a language and I run into trouble when I started using rules I devised for protolanguage (e.g. only open syllables). However I run into trouble when I tried to apply ...

I need to sort these phonemes properly before I get into clusters and making syllables, but I'm not sure I did it right.

I wonder how is it possible to construct a language based on the existing languages. There are Indo-European, Altaic, Semitic, and a small portion of Dravidian and Caucasic languages in my country, ...

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 ...

A conlang I am working on contains the nasal syllabic consonants [m̩] and [n̩] fairly frequently. It seems like it would be a natural step for the language to develop what I would call a voiced ...

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 ...

Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea stories contain vocabulary and utterances from three invented languages. The first step to fleshing these out into fully developed conlangs would be to list all the ...

Please bear with me as I elaborate. I'm looking to create a language for humanoids that live in a set of cave systems and tunnels. While their language may have been 'born' on the surface, they have ...

I have a very simple question regarding a small problem I cannot find a single satisfying answer to. I am trying to create a country with a prominent Slavic culture. In my story, an alien world has ...

In Dovahzul, you can show possession by using se, do, ro, or dro. However, the pronouns already have possessive versions of themselves (e.g. You goes to Your). Would something like hisedok/hi do dok ...

Latino sine flexione is a variant of Latin created by Peano in 1903. As far as I know it was used in scientific literature but since forgotten. I found this site and a few discussions on Duolingo but ...

Before I jump headlong into constructing a language, I'd like to do some research and see what others have done before me and learn from their experiences/mistakes. The keywords I'm currently using ...

I apologize for how this question may be perceived. I am casually learning linguistics with no curriculum. I can understand that this question may have many possible answers, but I am not quite sure ...

Note: For the purposes of this question, please do not assume that the Tongues of Ice and Fire Wiki is correct1 unless it references somewhere else. The High Valyrian [grammatical] number page of the ...

Are there examples of conlangs that are used by applying their structure such as grammar, sentence structure, intonation, means of combining words, etc… with other features of a given language or ...

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?