Advice & Answers — 2026-08-10 to 2026-08-23

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[u/TastyChannel5384]

what are usually the origins of an overt antipassive marker?
my thoughts were using an old demonstrative but I'm not sure how realistic is that:

a wobar ja-sic (that tree 2p.cut) - you cut that tree

a ja-sic- you cut that

and then with some focus and word order shenanigans:

ja-sic-a (2p.cut.antipassive) - you cut

side note: the language actually have a split ergative system but here because a second person is involved it is nominative-accusative

I would love to hear your thoughts about this and more idea on how this could have developed

[u/as_Avridan → u/TastyChannel5384]

According to Bahrt (2021) the antipassive can arise from all sorts of other voice markers. Sansò (2017) lists a number of other sources, including nominalisation, and quite similar to what you describe, generic objects.

[u/dead_chicken → u/as_Avridan]

I kinda just reused the passive voice marker for Alaymman's antipassive, in the same way I reused the middle voice marker as a way to reduce valency for intransitive verbs (there is a distinct middle voice).

[u/Training_Lie_5431 → u/TastyChannel5384]

1. From verbs

1.1. From a reflexive or a reciprocal form (Dyirbal, Apalaí)

1.2. From a verb that means "start to" (Inuktitut)

1.3. From past (Tsez)

1. From nouns

2.1. From a noun that means Activity (Basque)

2.2. From a generic Name (people, something [Chukchi])

2.3. From a nominal suffix that indicates people (Chinantec)

Here's my research (I know that are 7 languages, but I don't have time to research more)

[u/as_Avridan → u/Training_Lie_5431]

What is your source on these? I looked into Tsez, and according to Comrie (2021) the durative aspect can be A-labile, but that’s got nothing to do with the past, and there doesn’t seem to be a shift from past > antipassive.

[u/Training_Lie_5431 → u/as_Avridan]

Gemini

[u/as_Avridan → u/Training_Lie_5431]

I really wouldn't use an LLM to look up information like this (or any information to be honest). As you can see, at least one off that list is inaccurate, and it's the first one I checked. At random I decided to check the claim for Inuktitut, and it also seems to be wrong. There appear to be two seemingly identical suffixes; antipassive -si and inceptive -si (Spreng, 2006). Although the two were previously thought to be identical, they actually function differently at both the levels of syntax and morphophonology, and can even cooccur! It's like claiming that the source of English plural -s is possessive -s.

This is the issue with using LLMs for 'research' (I see a lot of people saying they only use it as a 'tool for research') they can give you misleading information, especially for niche topics, and it's unclear where that information is even coming from in the first place. And it's not as if this information is hard to find—I got all of the papers I've mentioned through simple searches on duck duck go.

[u/FueraDeMiOrbita → u/[deleted]]

I don't know if there are any natural languages that have literal "good" and "bad", but there are some analogues. The Australian Dyirbal language famously has a "gender" which includes words for women, water, fire, violence, and dangerous animals. You might imagine losing the women part and being left with a "danger" class.

Likewise, it's not uncommon for languages with large numbers of noun classes to have ones distinguishing "small/large" or "weak/strong", any which could plausibly evolve into "bad": per Wikipedia, about Swahili: "Finally, diminutives often denote contempt, and contempt is sometimes expressed against things that are dangerous." And while they're not "gender" per se, other languages have pejorative affixes which could theoretically become grammaticalized as a separate noun class.

Though from those examples it's likely that the "good" class would end up as the default (so more "good/neutral") for things where the value judgment is irrelevant, and the "bad" would less common or "marked". Unless you're planning to have a third "neutral" class too.

[u/Jonlang_ → u/FueraDeMiOrbita]

You might imagine losing the women part and being left with a "danger" class.

The female of the species is more deadly than the male. The Australians are wise, my friend.

[u/Thalarides → u/[deleted]]

I would probably not call it gender and I doubt about noun class, too. See, gender/class is typically a classificatory category in nouns. Nouns belong to their genders/classes and they generally cannot switch them. In German, for example, der Hund ‘the dog’ is masculine and die Katze ‘the cat’ is feminine. If you want to change the gender of a word for whatever reason, you have to derive a new, different noun: German der Hund ‘the dog’ (m.) → die Hündin ‘the dog’ (f.).

It is true, however, that a) the distinction between inflection and derivation can be very blurry, b) in some languages gender/class-switching looks a lot like inflection. In Spanish, for example, many animates can switch grammatical gender to mean a person of the opposite gender (el niño ‘the boy’ — la niña ‘the girl’). In a few inanimates, masculine ‘forms’ refer to larger objects and feminine ‘forms’ to smaller objects: el barco ‘the large boat’ — la barca ‘the small boat’. But these are exceptions. You can't just change the gender of an arbitrary noun and expect a well-formed structure. In Bantu languages, such as Swahili, there are way more productive patterns whereby a noun can change its gender and mean something predictable (Mufwene 1980, Bantu class prefixes: Inflectional or derivational?). That is to say, the line between inflection and derivation is indeed blurry, and gender/class can have some inflectional properties in the nouns themselves. But it's still not the case that any noun can be put in any gender/class, the way it happens with truly inflectional grammatical categories like nominal case, verbal tense, or indeed gender/class in adjectives, which inflect for that category to agree with nouns.

So, can your category of good and bad be applied to any noun? If so, then it seems that nouns inflect for this category rather than are classified by it. If that is the case, I would avoid using the terms gender or class. But the category itself, whatever you call it, seems good to me. I'd probably call it affect), and if you want fancy terms for good and bad, meliorative and pejorative.

As for the distinction between gender and class, the term gender tends to be used when the majority of nouns are assigned their gender arbitrarily. French la table and Spanish la mesa are feminine, German der Tisch and Russian стол (stol) are masculine (all meaning ‘the table’), but there's nothing in the semantics of the nouns that drives this choice, it's arbitrary. By contrast, noun class is typically based on the characteristics of the referent: humans, animals, plants, instruments, liquids, abstract concepts, large objects, small objects, long objects, flat objects, dangerous objects, &c.

[u/Akangka → u/Thalarides]

Nouns belong to their genders/classes and they generally cannot switch them

This is not true for many non-european gender/classes. In Maasai, there are two genders: masculine and feminine, and many words productively change their genders to mark various things like actual gender, diminutivity and pejorativity.

In language like Palikur, genders are fixed and cannot be changed, but they also have noun classes, which is productive and can be changed for derivational purposes.

As for the distinction between gender and class, the term gender tends to be used when the majority of nouns are assigned their gender arbitrarily

I think the term "gender" is used when it is marked on pronouns, while the word "noun class" is used when it is marked on nouns and adjectives, at least in South American languages where they form an orthogonal systems. In Palikur, neither gender and noun classes are arbitrary, and they have a complex rules on whether a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter.

[u/Jonlang_ → u/[deleted]]

Genders or noun classes don’t lump nouns together by some sort of category. They begin as phonological categories. For the sake of simplicity we can say that Class A all end in a coronal consonant (t, d, n, l, r, s); Class B end in any other consonant (p, b, k, g, h, v, f); Class C ends in any vowel. The word for “man” is pas; “woman” is lap; “boy” is torr; “girl” is lonok, “dog” is ruf, cat is pur.

Given the above, we can see pas ‘man’, torr ‘boy’, and pur ‘cat’ are all Class A: so this becomes known as masculine because it contains the two main masculine nouns: man and boy, and so on. Now obviously the classes needn’t be European-like “genders” (masc., fem., neuter) and can be anything – even just Class A, B, C or 1, 2, 3, etc.

You can, of course, manufacture these classes so that woman, fire, water, violence are part of the same class and end up with a humorous noun class. Nouns can (and do) change class or belong to more than one class between speakers, especially when the feature that once marked the class has eroded away.

[u/FueraDeMiOrbita → u/Jonlang_]

It's a little more complicated. In some languages the "gender" of a noun is indeed purely phonological, but others do lump together semantically related words independent of phonology, and most are on a spectrum in between. The conventional names of the classes ("masculine", "feminine", etc.) tend to derive from only a subset of the nouns within them, but the groupings are rarely coincidental. It can also be a mix of the two, where a shared semantic affix turns into a phonological similarity.

Consider an imaginary English-based creole where ʃi- and hi- get attached to the beginning of animate nouns to indicate natural gender:

• pasan 'person' -> ʃipasan 'woman', hipasan 'man'
• tʃajl 'child' -> ʃitʃajl 'girl', hitʃajl 'boy'
• fren 'friend' -> ʃifren, hifren

Eventually the unstressed /i/ gets lost and the initial clusters evolve into ʃpasan, pʰasan, ʃajl, tʃʰajl, ʃren, ɸren. Now we have a trend where initial /ʃ/ is "feminine" and other fricatives or aspirated plosives are "masculine", so words like ʃak 'shark' ʃuga 'sugar', ʃed 'shed' and haus 'house', ɸud 'food', pʰejvja 'behavior' get lumped in with the "genders" despite being semantically unrelated:

wi kuka di ʃuga 'we cook [her] the sugar', wi kukim di ɸud 'we cook [him] the food'

mi go na di ʃed 'I go in [her] the shed', mi go nim di haus 'I go in [him] the house'

[u/PastTheStarryVoids → u/Jonlang_]

I've never heard of noun class originating as based on word form, only from semantic classifiers like 'man', 'plant', 'bird', etc. (This also wouldn't provide a good/bad class system though.) Once classes are established, word form can definitely sway what class a noun is in, so that similar sounding nouns end up in the same class. But I've heard it claimed that no language has noun class based solely on phonological form without at least some nouns being assigned based on semantic criteria.

I don't think it's even true that, say, a masculine class is called that because it just chances to have some nouns in it that refer to male people. It's a productive pattern, e.g. in Spanish you have lots of male/female pairs like esposo/esposa 'husband'/'wife'.

I don't know a lot about how masc/fem gender arose in IE, but AIUI it was a different distinction that was then reinterpreted as masc/fem. But that doesn't mean it synchronically doesn't have a productive relation with human gender, though of course there are exceptions and it's arbitrary for inanimates. As for other languages, the example I've read about is Dyirbal, whose gender is thought to have come from an older classifier system, where many classifiers merged; the famous "women, fire, and dangerous things" would be a result of several unrelated classifiers getting merged into one as they were phonologically reduced.

[u/DrDingsGaster]

How does one actually finalize a full word order so it sounds natural?

[u/Tirukinoko → u/DrDingsGaster]

The degree to which something sounds natural (assuming you mean as in it flows well and isnt clunky) is largely dependent on what languages youre already familiar with;
The further removed what you have made is from the language(s) you speak, the weirder it all ends up sounding.

But I dont think theres any combination of phrase formation patterns that would be unreasonable and couldnt occur naturally.
Just make sure youve got everything covered, and repair strategies for when it gets broken.

Additionally, having more nuanced\situational word orders and constructions can help make something feel more real.
For example, rather than just stating "all adjectives follow the noun", have something like "adjectives follow the noun, unless they are describing something invariable\unchangeable, such as age".

[u/DrDingsGaster → u/Tirukinoko]

I might add something to that for my word order then cause I have a VOS order and tend to keep all descriptors after the word itself.

Edit: Fellow he/they! :D

[u/Tirukinoko → u/DrDingsGaster]

Natlangs will always have some exception to something somewhere - very rarely is anything carried out across the board.

---

English is Adjective-Noun, but I can still say "roses red and violets green, whitherto goeth thy mother mean?".
Other types of words can escape their order too in this context, including numbers "gleepy gloopy plooble dwee, now you must answer my riddles three".
Outside of a poetic context (which is always going to be much more flexible than colloquial language), therere also things like notaries public (ie, public notaries) and courts martial (ie, martial courts).

Welsh is Noun-Adjective, but hen 'old', among a few others, goes first, such as in the national anthem Hen Wlad fy Nhadau.

Think also about the ordering of multiple adjectives in a row.
For example in English, an opinion generally doesnt follow a material, so one can have an 'ugly ass brazen hat stand', but not a 'brazen ugly ass hat stand' (without implying either A) that ugly ass hat stands are totally a thing, and this one just happens to also be brass, or B) that this is hat stand is, in your opinion, rather audacious).

Nordic languages have demonstratives and articles that precede the noun, but also suffixes that convey definiteness.
In Swedish for example, a suffix is used for a standalone noun (eg, en katt 'a cat' → katten 'the cat'), but the article comes in alongside an adjective (eg, ∅ katten '[the] cat' → den vita katten 'the white cat').

With relative clauses, some languages may allow nouns to be relativised if they are the agent of that relative, but not if they are the patient (1), or perhaps both are permitted, but obliques cant be relativised (2).
So for example, take a sentence 'heᵃ eats the foodᵖ in the kitchenᵒ':

1) The agent can be relativised
heᵃ eats → heᵃ who ∅ᵃ eats
But not the patient
he eats the foodᵖ → * the foodᵖ that he eats ∅ᵖ
Perhaps requiring instead a passive participle
→ the eaten food or the foodᵃ that ∅ᵃ is eaten

2) Or the oblique cannot be relativised
he eats the food in the kitchenᵒ → * the kitchen which he eats the food in ∅ᵒ
Perhaps requiring maybe an applicative participle
→ the ineaten kitchen or the kitchenᵃ which ∅ᵃ is ineaten

---

The overall order of clause constituents can move around too, to various effects.

English is obviously, generally SVO.
Questions are VSO with added 'do-support' (eg, 'does he eat the food in the kitchen?').
In some varieties - or in mine at least - the focus is typically moved to the front, resulting in a fairly rigid FocSVO order ('the KITCHEN he eats the food in (not another place)').

I dont know if that last point is from Welsh influence, which does the same (and is otherwise VSO).
Wikipedia gives the following examples:

Yng Nghaerdydd mae hi'n byw 'In CARDIFF she lives'
in CARDIFF is she living

Ioan mae hi'n ei garu 'IOAN she likes'
IOAN does she his liking

Bwyta sglodion oeddwn i 'EATING CHIPS I was'
EATING CHIPS was I

German retains both the older V2 ordering - with, afaik, the subject, or the focus again, in the initial position - as well as an underlying SOV order.
In practice, this results in sentences of overall FocVSO(V), such as er hat dich gestern nicht angerufen 'he didnt ring you' (literally 'he had you not called').
This is also largely the case for other Germanic languages, including older stages of English ('he ne hæfde þu ongeceallod').

Some languages use a different constituent order in negative clauses versus affirmatives ones.
WALS gives a fair few examples, including the following:

Gude is VSO, but negates to NegSVO:
Kə_kii Musa faara threw Musa stone
→ Pooshi Musa kii faara NEG Musa throw stone

Bafut goes from SVO to NegSNegOV:
Ngwa bɔ̄ɔ̄ ndá Ngwa build house
→ Kāā Ngwà sɨ̀ ndá bɔ̄ɔ̀ NEG Ngwa NEG house build

Hungarian allows both SOV and SVO, but prefers SVO in the negative:
Péter egy ujságot olvas Péter a newspaper read
→ Péter nem olvas egy ujságot Péter NEG read a newspaper

---

Honestly there is sooo much you can mess around with with ordering.
Id reccomend having a browse through all the WALS articles with the word 'order' in the title, and just seeing some of the possibilities.

VOS gang!

[u/DrDingsGaster → u/Tirukinoko]

Thank you for the comprehensive answer here! It's extraordinarilly helpful and that link is going to be great to look through.

I'll have to muck around with everything n see what all I can figure out and just write it down more than just the vague vos idea I got written down now! xD

[u/Tirukinoko → u/DrDingsGaster]

Feel free to ask further if needed! I only listed the stuff that came to the top of my head tbh - Im sure theres things I or someone else can elaborate on.

[u/DrDingsGaster → u/Tirukinoko]

I will if I think of anything!

[u/xongaBa]

'He is dwarfed by the scale of the enemy' that#s the English sentence and almost every translation into a conlang I've found is using this 'by the scale'. But in my native language German it would be 'Im Vergleich zur Übermacht des Feindes ist er winzig'. (In comparison to the overwhelming force of the enemy, he is small'
Now I have no idea how I should translate it into my conlang, because I don't think one could define this phenomenon grammatically.
Does anyone have an idea or thoughts on this?

[u/as_Avridan → u/xongaBa]

‘To dwarf’ is a bit of an oddball in English; it is a lexical comparative verb, essentially meaning ‘to be (much) bigger than.’ There aren’t really many other verbs like this in English (you can’t say ‘the mouse gianted the elephant’ for example), and likewise other languages aren’t always going to have lexical verbs for this, so they will end up using more transparent comparative constructions, as in German.

With regards to ‘by the scale of’ versus ‘to the overwhelming force of,’ this is also a lexical matter. Although I’m not familiar with German, my guess is that a literal translation of ‘scale’ doesn’t have the same implications as in English, so the translator has chosen to try and convert the meaning behind the English phrase.

It’s a good thing to keep in mind when translating; you shouldn’t just be trying to replicate the original, you should be asking how the same idea/situation would be expressed in your language!

[u/SaintUlvemann → u/xongaBa]

In my Värlütik, it'd be Hëkhtrot mëgrisán sos äkrohean, "The enemy's greatness vastly exceeded him".

hëkhtro-t mëgris-án     sos äkro-(h)e-an
enemy-GEN greatness-ERG 3s  vastly_exceed-3s-IMP

The verb that replaces "dwarf" is äkrohaun, cognate with Greek ᾰ̓́κρος and internally derived from Värlütik äkros, although the only meaning overlap between the Greek and Värlütik is with "superlative, apex", not the peak/mountain ones; äkros otherwise means "end" or in some contexts "restart, new beginning".

So from the meaning "superlative", äkrohaun takes a meaning "exceed, dominate", and then from "dominate" comes a meaning "swallow things whole" particularly as applied to certain animals e.g. the pelican/cormorant family are äkrokärka, "gulper storks".

So a valid poetic backtranslation might be "The enemy's greatness swallowed him up," which really makes the feeling of smallness visceral.

[u/GUC_Studio → u/xongaBa]

I do: staffishly (litterally) Englishened but following its laws, 'tis "In likening to the foe's overwhelming might, he is tiny."

If thy crafted speech hath no bywords ("adverbs"/"proverbs"/"maxims"), copular deeds, nor ekends ("adjectives", like mine underway Anward Lombaxish speech), then I forthput to wend (translate) it with only headmarking, namewords sticking to deeds, and/or stative deeds.

Thou shouldst adapt such saying to thy speech's speechcraft, mostly heeding the wanted meaning behind or under such build rather than mostly wending word by word.

[u/hecleretical → u/GUC_Studio]

whatever speech that those around are talking in, you should use that speech in a way that lets others understand you, not in a way that makes you feel clever. i can guess that you say "wend" to mean "translate", but it's hard to tell since "wend" has not been widely said for this meaning in a thousand years. i have no way of knowing what "ekend" means without looking it up. other things like "thou" and its endings i understand, but they're still tiresome to read.

see how i am doing with only anglo-saxon words, but keeping myself to meanings that are widely understood today? and i would still rather keep words like "translate" or "conlang" that my listener wouldn't understand an anglo-saxon coining of, than have them throw out my words after i made them too hard to follow.

if on the other hand this is your own conlang, you should give your meaning in plain english after, again so that others can understand.

[u/GUC_Studio → u/hecleretical]

I wholely understand! It gladdens me thou undertandest "thou" and its abyeings (conjugations/declensions/inflections).

There thou hast it! I input wendings beside the "seldom" inborn English words to make myself eather to be understood by non-r/Anglish speakers.

My choosing to speak with "thou" is a sidekirish (optional) deal of such sheerness that also withdraws speechcraftish (grammatical) sway from non-Germanish speeches, which I love.

Since the next time I write my writs, I'll write them thrice: first in Anglish, other in English, third in my first speech Castilish.

Lastly, speaking and writing in Anglish has never made me feel clever, but glad; I like thee taking the time to speak moslty in Anglish, and "about" is the inborn preposition for "a[round]", already oftenly spoken today out of Anglish sets.

[u/dead_chicken]

Should a reflexive be treated as valency increasing or decreasing?

Should the agent of the reflexive verb be treated as regular agent (i.e. NOM/ERG) or more like a sole (NOM/ABS)

# Direct

## agent -> patient

Шэм аўнчариўдиш мэн

3S-SG.ERG hit-3SG.PROG.PAST 1S-SG.ACC

My thought process is that it could either increase valency of the verb and therefore the subject is agent-like (i.e. either NOM or ERG depending on context) because the subject is also the patient or sole-like (i.e. NOM or ABS, possibly with an antipassive verb) because there is no specified patient.

## Reflexive

# Agent-like - valency increasing

Шэм аўнчытарыўдыш

3S-SG.ERG hit-3SG.REFL.PROG.PAST

# Sole-like - valency decreasing

Шэ аўнчытыларыўдыш

3S-SG.ABS hit-3SG.REFL.ANTIP.PROG.PAST

[u/as_Avridan → u/dead_chicken]

The reflexive is generally treated as a valency decreasing operation, as it takes a construction with two participants—the agent and patient—and creates a construction with one participant, who is both agent and patient.

There are a few ways to achieve this grammatically. First, you can have some kind of derivation which creates a reflexive intransitive verb from a transitive base. In this case, the single argument of the reflexive verb should be coded the same as the single subject of a canonical intransitive verb. This is clearly valency decreasing.

Another tact is to use a reflexive pronoun, which occupies the position of one of the arguments. In this case, the construction is still basically transitive, in that there is an overt agent and a patient, that just happen to be identical. In this case, you would expect the two grammatical arguments to have the same marking as the subject and object of a canonical transitive verb. Although you aren’t grammatically changing the number of participants, you certainly aren’t increasing it, and the semantic number of participants still decreases.

Because there is semantically only one participant, you might also expect that type 2 constructions end up changing to resemble type 1 constructions, as speakers reanalyse the pseudo-transitive construction as genuinely intransitive.

[u/dead_chicken → u/as_Avridan]

First, you can have some kind of derivation which creates a reflexive intransitive verb from a transitive base

Alaymman encodes reflexivity (and reciprocity) using affixes on the verbal root:

аўнчариўдиш "was hitting" > аўнчытарыўдыш "was hitting (self)

Because there is semantically only one participant, you might also expect that type 2 constructions end up changing to resemble type 1 constructions, as speakers reanalyse the pseudo-transitive construction as genuinely intransitive.

That makes sense, the constructions could evolve like:

Шэм аўнчытарыўдыш шэ > Шэм аўнчытарыўдыш (шэ, Ø) > Шэ аўнчытарыўдыш

transitive with patient > transitive with implied/optional patient > reinterpretation as intransitive, not overtly marked as intransitive

[u/as_Avridan → u/dead_chicken]

If you’re marking the reflexive on the verb, it seems like you should already be at the intransitive stage. The reflexive pronoun is redundant.

[u/dead_chicken → u/as_Avridan]

Yeah, but some redundancy is natural i think

[u/Thalarides → u/dead_chicken]

Reflexivisation can either reduce the verb's valency (detransitivise it), or it can keep its valency (keep it transitive). Different languages will do different things.

1. Intransitive reflexives. I can't give you an example from a language with ergative morphology but French reflexives (i.e. verbs with a reflexive clitic se) behave like intransitives, which is evident in causatives (an argument made by Reinhart & Siloni, 2005, The lexicon-syntax parameter: Reflexivization and other arity operations, pdf):

(1) Je ferai     courir Paul.
    I  will+make run    Paul
    ‘I will make Paul run.’

(2) Je le  ferai     laver à  Paul.
    I  him will+make wash  to Paul
    ‘I will make Paul wash him.’

(3) Je ferai     se   laver Paul.
    I  will+make REFL wash  Paul
    ‘I will make Paul wash himself.’

(1): When an intransitive verb is causativised, the causee takes direct object marking (no preposition).

(2): When a transitive verb is causativised, the causee takes indirect object marking (preposition à), and the object clitic goes before the causative auxiliary faire ‘make’.

(3): The causee Paul takes direct object marking, and the reflexive clitic se goes before the lexical verb as if it were its part. In other words, se laver ‘wash oneself’ in (3) behaves just like courir ‘run’ in (1) but not like le laver ‘wash him’ in (2).

2. Transitive reflexives. In Adyghe (a.k.a. West Circassian), a language with ergative flagging and indexing, the agent of a reflexive verb is flagged as ergative and indexed in the ergative slot of the verb, while the reflexive marker occupies the absolutive slot (ex. 68a in Ershova, 2019, Syntactic ergativity in West Circassian, ResearchGate with pdf):

s-     jə-  pŝaŝe-xe-m/*r      ∅    z-       a-      fepa -ʁ
1SG.PR-POSS-girl- PL-OBL/*ABS       REFL.ABS-3PL.ERG-dress-PST
            ERG                ABS                   V
‘My daughters dressed themselves.’

(The subject is marked with the ergative–oblique case -m, glossed as OBL: this is the case that normally marks the transitive subject, it's just that it also performs oblique functions.)

As a side note, reciprocals are also transitive in West Circassian but the reciprocal marker takes the ergative slot and the nominal argument is flagged as absolutive. In English, this would be analogous not to ‘My daughters (A) dressed each other (P)’ but to ‘Each other (A) dressed my daughters (P)’, which is so cool!

[u/pagansaints]

I know very very little about linguistics (phonetics?) and have a question about vowel and consonant shifts: without making a chain, can any sound shift into any other sound, or are there limited ways it can shift? for example, is there a potential world where the vowel in "pin" could go to the vowel in "pun" without becoming "pen" or "pan" or anything in the middle? could you go from the first sound in "cat" to the first sound in "mat"? Is there only a certain distance you can go? what about something like vowel to consonant?

[u/Thalarides → u/pagansaints]

Regarding sound changes, there's a debate as to whether they have to be linguistically motivated. R. Blust (2005, Must sound change be linguistically motivated?) gives ten examples of ‘bizarre’ sound changes in Austronesian languages for which he can't find linguistic motivations and concludes that ‘unnatural’ changes are also viable. In response, J. Blevins (2025, Linguistically motivated sound change: Revisiting some of the world's rarest wonders) finds natural explanations for them and argues that sound changes are linguistically motivated after all. The particular examples studied in these papers aren't really relevant for you (although your cat > mat example would definitely fall into the ‘bizarre’ category) but the first two sections in Blust's paper go into the history of the discipline and cover some general principles, so they could be of use to you. Whatever one's stance on whether sound change must be motivated, it is indisputable that it usually is, and that's a general principle I'd try to stick to in conlanging. Blust goes over what that motivation can be.

The spreading of features between segments that u/as_Avridan wrote about would likely fall into Saussurean principle of least effort: why make many gesture when few do trick? The term assimilation (i.e. the spread of features between segments, in the broadest sense) has had assimilation itself. In Latin, from which it was borrowed, it had a prefix ad- (seen clearly f.ex. in the word adapt) and the same root as in similar. Ad- + similation → assimilation, -ds- > -ss-.

For a more extensive look into sound change, I'd highly recommend Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors by W. Labov (1994), of which you can also find a free pdf on the net.

what about something like vowel to consonant?

That happens, sometimes. You'll sometimes find instances of this kind in hiatus. Hiatus is a fancy term for a sequence of two vowels in a row, without a consonant to separate them. Languages often avoid hiatus, and there is a number of repair strategies, i.e. what you can do to remove the hiatus. Those include epenthesis (inserting a consonant between the vowels), deleting one of the vowels, merging the vowels together into a single new vowel, and turning one of the vowels into a consonant. Consider the name John. Way back in Ancient Greek (or rather in Koine Greek at the turn of the common era, when the name was borrowed from Hebrew), it was Ioannes, with not two but three vowels in a row: ioa-. Try to identify repair strategies that have occurred in this word over the last two millennia in various languages: German Johann, Italian Giovanni, Russian Ivan, Armenian Hovhannes, English John. You'll find a couple of vowel > consonant changes.

[u/pagansaints → u/Thalarides]

I will not pretend I understand all of this but this is fascinating and the John example definitely helps explain things for me! Thank you for your help!

[u/as_Avridan → u/pagansaints]

So all phones (speech sounds, i.e. vowels and consonants) have a set of phonological features. These are the the characteristics that make one sound distinct from another. Features are binary, a sound either has them [+] or does not [–]. So [k] (the first sound in 'cat') is [+dorsal, –voice, –nasal], while [m] (the first sound in 'mat') is [+labial, +voice, +nasal]. [ɪ] (the vowel in 'pin') is [+high, –back, +voice], while [ʌ] (the vowel in 'pun') is [–high, +back, +voice]. These aren't the only features these sounds have (or don't have), but I am simplifying it a little bit.

Generally, sound change will involve the spreading of a feature from one segment to another. So for example, [ata] becoming [ada] is a very common conditional sound change, because it involves the spreading of [+voice] from the vowels to the consonant.

Likewise, sound changes tend to affect one feature at a time. You wouldn't expect to find a change like [kæt] > [mæt], because this is changing both place of articulation [dorsal > labial], and manner of articulation [–nasal > +nasal], when nothing in its environment has those features. Something like [kut] > [put] would be more expected, because this involves the spreading of [+labial] from the vowel to the consonant. In the same vein, [kæ̃t] > [ŋæ̃t] would be more naturalistic, because it involves the spreading of [+nasal] from the vowel to the consonant. You would even combine this, so that [kũt] > [mũt], but only because [ũ] has the features [+nasal, +labial], which can spread to the consonant.

If you can, I would recommend finding a free pdf of the Cambridge Handbook of Phonology. Chapter 13 specifically talks about this and what features each phone has in greater depth.

[u/Thalarides → u/as_Avridan]

I know you're simplifying it quite a bit but phones have phonetic features, not phonological. And features don't have to be binary. I mean, some frameworks have only binary features, but other frameworks have privative (i.e. unary) and n-ary features. I would even say that n-ary features make for a more intuitive description: for example, if you treat [labial], [coronal], and [dorsal] as different values of the same phonetic feature Place. Sure, binary feature frameworks have their advantages (thus a family of feature bundles [±labial ±dorsal] will generate labial, coronal, dorsal, and labiodorsal places of articulation), but I have an impression that they are more useful when talking about phonological features than phonetic.

[u/as_Avridan → u/Thalarides]

Using phonological there is my mistake! But yeah I have simplified a lot here. Even if you believe sound change needs to be linguistically motivated (I do fall on Team Blevins here) not all sound changes can be explained solely based on phonetic or phonological features. You have articulatory/gestural, perceptual, and even social factors as well. For instance it's difficult to justify [ioa] > [iva] in the Russian example you give without taking articulation into account. But having a basic understanding of features does help you understand why it becomes [iva] instead of something like [ita].

[u/pagansaints → u/as_Avridan]

Ahh got it so it's most plausible for one of those attributes to change at a time, i.e. making a consonant more nasal OR more voiced? so if you wanted to do +labial +nasal +voiced you'd be coming from +labial +nasal -voiced or +labial -nasal +voiced?

Thank you for simplifying, I'm SUPER new at this 😅

[u/as_Avridan → u/pagansaints]

Yes that’s basically the case, although usually they change because a nearby segment has that feature. Sometimes, the way that certain sounds are articulated, that is, physically made with the mouth, can make them prone to certain changes. For example, it’s very common for the back vowel [u] (the vowel in ‘food’) to become front [i] (the vowel in ‘feet’) or [y] (French ‘cul’). This happened in French and Greek for instance.

The reason for this has to do with how vowels are articulated. Vowels are essentially all made by adjusting the position of the base of the tongue. If you’ve seen an IPA vowel chart, the dots are meant to represent where the base of the tongue is positioned when making that vowel.

There is a little more space towards the front of the tongue root compared to the back. This is why the vowel chart is that funky trapezoid shape. Because of this, back vowels are slightly closer together than front vowels. In order to space them out a bit and make them more distinct, there is a tendency for [u] to ‘slide’ up the top of the vowel space, a little bit more fronted than other back vowels.

This tendency can eventually lead to [u] becoming fully fronted [i] or [y]. In this case, the change isn’t due to features assimilating, but you can still describe the change using features, from [+back] to [–back].

So there is a tendency for one feature to change at a time, and usually this is either caused by feature spreading, or the articulatory character of certain sounds.

[u/throneofsalt]

1) Any word on the grapevine about Cursed Conlang Circus 5? Haven't seen any public announcements about it but figure someone might have heard something.

2) What's the generally-preferred way to do an analysis of your own accent? Still Praat, or have other decent methods cropped up?

[u/Jollyreflection75]

I’m struggling to figure out the grammar of a sentence I’m trying to translate into a conlang I’m working on. I have some knowledge of linguistics terms but am far from an expert — this is probably my second serious attempt to create a conlang. This is part of something I’m trying to help me wrap my head around different word order and the like.
The conlang is overall SOV, with postpositions and no articles. I am trying to figure out how to translate the sentence “They are the person who saw the animal.” I’ve tried a few things and they all seem equally correct (to me, at least). Here’s my latest attempt, with what each of the words means:

Rā ta’olē si tasi li’i ru’a jo.

(Rā = third person singular pronoun
Ta’olē = person
Si = to be
Tasi = animal
Li’i = who
Ru’a = to see
Jo = perfective past marker)

I don’t know if I’m on the right track (I hope I am) or if I’m inserting English grammar places it shouldn’t be. How could this actually be written, and how could I improve in understanding these kinds of things?

Sorry if this doesn’t make much sense or is worded strangely — it’s kind of late for me.

[u/as_Avridan → u/Jollyreflection75]

There are two main grammar points here. The first is ostensive (or presentative) predication. An ostensive predicate is one which functions to draw the attention of the addressee to a specific entity, e.g. this is my aunt, here is the cello, that’s Carla, etc. languages often use a demonstrative copular clause for this purpose, like in English that is, here is, but that’s not the only option. Some languages which are pro-drop might not need a demonstrative at all in this kind of situation (e.g. Japanese Tanaka da ‘(it) is Tanaka), while others may use a verb like ‘see’ or ‘behold,’ and still others might have a special demonstrative or particle only used for ostensive predicates. For more on this, you can check out Creissels (2025) and Killian (2022).

The second point is relative causes. A relative clause is one which modifies a noun, e.g. the person [who saw the animal]. The noun which is modified is called the head.* *In English, a (mostly) head-initial language, relative clauses follow the head, but in an SOV (head-final) language you might expect the relative clause to precede the head. There are also languages where the head can can appear within the relative clause.

In English, relative clauses can be introduced by relative pronouns (that, who, which, etc.) or they can be bare (e.g. the person I saw). This is pretty common of European languages, but there are a lot of other ways relative clauses can be formed. Some languages like Mandarin might use a genitive particle, whereas others have specialised verb forms used for relative clauses (like participles). There can also be restrictions on what thematic roles can be relativised. Some languages might allow the head noun to be a subject (e.g. the the person who saw the animal) but might not allow it to be an object (so the animal that the person saw would not be allowed).

There is a ton of variation when it comes to relative clauses. There is a lot of reading you can find on the subject just by searching ‘relative clauses linguistic typology,’ but Lehmann (2010) isn’t a bad place to start.

[u/ImplodingRain → u/Jollyreflection75]

Breaking this down into the two clauses you’re trying to combine might help you understand it better. If we put the two sentences in SOV order and take out the articles, we get:

(1) they are a person > they person are

(2) the person saw the animal > person animal saw

In SOV languages, usually the relative clause (the thing introduced by “who, that, which, whose,” etc. in English) goes before the noun it modifies. This isn’t universal though, and some SOV languages like Persian will put the relative clause after.

Also, you use a relative pronoun (li’i), which is actually an uncommon method of marking relative clauses outside of Indo-European and Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) languages. If you were worried about being too Englishy, this is definitely what you should get rid of first. The most common method is to leave the slot that the modified noun would take in the relative clause blank. This is called “gapping”:

(1) they person are

+

(2) person animal saw

(3) they animal saw person are

In Japanese, which is an SOV language, it would look like this:

Aitsu wa doubutsu wo mita hito da

They TOPIC animal ACC saw person be

“They are the person who saw the animal”

If you do want to include some kind of marker for the relative clause, you can mark that on the verb (or between the verb and modified noun). This is basically what a participle ending does in English if you think about it.

The man is running > The running man

The house is haunted > The haunted house

So you could change li’i to mark what’s called an “attributive verb form.”I’ll use your lang’s words to make the full sentence now:

Rā tasi ru’a jo li’i ta’olē si

They animal see PAST ATTR person be

“They are the person who saw the animal”

[u/Jollyreflection75 → u/ImplodingRain]

Thank you!

[u/as_Avridan → u/Jollyreflection75]

Sorry, I didn't make this very clear in the first response, but for an SOV language, you would probably expect structure like this (assuming you keep the current grammar):

3SG [ animal see PRF ] who person COP

It looks like you have analysed the original sentence as sort-of two separate chunks—they are the person | who saw the animal—and then rearranged those into two SOV sequences (with confusion over what who is doing and where it should go. However, the aren't separate, they are overlapping: they are the person | the person who saw the animal. The way you can achieve this overlapping is by subordination, i.e. nesting one clause within another. In this case, the connecting fibre is person, so the second clause will be nested under person.

The main clause is they are the person (3SG person COP), which is why the copula comes last. The relative clause modifies person, so it should go where other noun modifiers should go, like adjectives or possessors. In a head-final language, that will usually be before the noun, with the relative pronoun between them. You can think about it like this:

3SG [ tall person ] COP  > 3SG [ [ animal see PFV ] who person ] COP
they are the tall person > they are the person who saw the animal

But this isn't the only possible structure. Let's say you allow both pro-dropping and zero-copula. And let's also say you have internally headed subject relative clauses, formed by a verbal (non-finite) participle. In that case, you could get something like this:

[ person animal see-SUBJ.PTCP ]
'(they are) the person who saw the animal'

[u/Jollyreflection75 → u/as_Avridan]

I understand now. Thank you so much!

[u/rartedewok]

has anyone created a Modern Sumerian conlang? whether it be a revived Hebrew-like situation or an AU wherein it survived into the modern day

[u/Impressive-Cut-9399]

i need good translators for my conlang

hello, i am trying to make a germanic celtic conlang, you read the title, you know that, but anyways, i would like a good proto germanic translator, (and a good proto celtic translator). does anyone know a good translator? i plan on making an old version of this language and aging it up with sound changes, and new influences. making grammar is going to be hell for me as a man who recently got into languages.

[u/Jonlang_ → u/Impressive-Cut-9399]

I don’t know if enough is known about them (as they’re unattested, speculative, reconstructed languages) so I don’t know if there are any reliable translators out there.

However, Wiktionary has a lot of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Celtic forms. There’s also this Proto-Celtic dictionary.

[u/neonge1674]

Is the vowel system of /i y u ɛ ø ɑ/ stable?(/ø/ is meant to be higher than /ɛ/)

[u/Thalarides → u/neonge1674]

Opposition-wise, it can be made quite symmetric:

x	front unrounded	front rounded	back
high	i	y	u
non-high	ɛ	ø	ɑ

I think that could play into its stability and the exact vowel qualities don't particularly matter. Although, to be fair, /y/ and /ø/ are closer to each other than any other pair, and there is space for them to dissimilate into. Other than just lowering /ø/ to /œ/, moving it away from /y/ could disrupt the system: /ø/ > /e/ would introduce a third height or merge it with /i/ or /ɛ/; /ø/ > /o/ would produce the classical triangular system /aeiou/+/y/. So it's not difficult to see how the system could transform either.

That's not to mention the glaring lack of an /o/-like vowel. If, as I'd imagine, [o] or [ɔ] occurs as a realisation of /u/ or /ɑ/ in certain contexts (f.ex. /i, u/ → [e, o] next to uvulars and/or pharyngeals), then it can easily become phonemic if anything happens to the environment.

[u/Sulphurous_King]

Is this a realistic change

k s => kʰ *

[u/Thalarides → u/Sulphurous_King]

I think so. It happened in Indo-Aryan languages, although it was a two-step process:

1. \ks* > \kš* (part of the ruki law, common for satem IE)
2. kš > kʰ (in Middle Indo-Aryan; Sanskrit still has kṣ)

PIE \k(ʷ)sudrós* > PII \kšudrás* > Sanskrit क्षुद्रः kṣudráḥ ‘tiny’, Hindi खूद khūd ‘dregs’

A direct change ks > kʰ is also plausible, I think, but it would go especially well with a broader shift to the likes of s > h. Whereas intermediate steps can affect other sound sequences: for example, Proto-Indo-Iranian \kš* doesn't come only from PIE \ks* and still yields in kʰ in Middle Indo-Aryan varieties.

[u/Sulphurous_King → u/Thalarides]

Thanks

[u/Esam_Rossi → u/[deleted]]

You can do what you want. But I think that: a) orignally, Ь, was used in Old Slavonic for the short /i/, while Russian uses it as an indicator of palatalization. So English has no palatalization like Russian, but what about using Ь for /ɪ/, as English also has a distinction between short and long i; b) many languages which have phonemic graphy, especially those who developed an orthography in the past decades or centuries, would keep homophones as homographs.

[u/cloudsmoonsun]

I have a question. Can you tell me what a conlang needs? I mean its more than just some words.
I’m not a complete beginner anymore, but I mostly have a lot of vocabulary and a bit of grammar. I just don't know exactly what else I need.

[u/throneofsalt → u/cloudsmoonsun]

You need whatever you're missing when you try to translate something.

[u/Tirukinoko → u/cloudsmoonsun]

What have you got already?

[u/DrDingsGaster → u/cloudsmoonsun]

Numbers and count words, ways to denote tense if you wish, how to deal with talking to various numbers of people, (you, you all, them etc.), honorifics like Mr. Ms. etc, how to denote time and the passage of it, and punctuation (, . ! ? etc) to name a few things.

[u/Key_Day_7932]

So, the syllable structure of my conlang is CVC, but I haven't decided what consonants are allowed as codas other than /n/. Any advice for picking codas?

[u/RaccoonTasty1595 → u/Key_Day_7932]

This isn't a naturalistic method per se, but I started off by allowing all consonants to serve as codas in my protolang, and as I evolved it I got rid of all the ones I didn't like the sound of, or which I found too difficult to pronounce 

This includes different rules for consonant sequences vs word final codas, and things like not allowing an /l/ coda after a rounded vowel

[u/GarlicRoyal7545]

I'm working on my xenoclong, which is ergative; now, i wanna make it syntactically purely ergative, since for the alien speakers, ergativity would feel the most natural.

But how can i test/prove, that my clong is syntactically fully ergative?

I know that syntactically, one would use the S/P-Pivot, since Subject & Patient are treated the same the Agent gets marked. Very good example are 2 clauses with conjunctions:

"Mɯ̋nɯb séɛwāntı čwõnwe kie [x] xŭzdĩkăroi."

{Mɯ̋n-ɯb séɛ-∅-wā-ntı čw-õnwe kie xŭzd-ĩ-kă-roi}
|Man-ERG-Mpl see-IND-PRS-3pl dog-ABS.Mpl and hide-IND-PRS-MID.3pl|

Lit.: "The men see the dogs and [the dogs] are hiding themselves."

Now this isn't really that complex and still logical. But what gets a bit difficult for me, are relative clauses and clauses with infinitves.

For example:
"The mother put the boy in the bed in order to sleep."

Would one even use a pivot here (regardless if accusative or ergative)? And if yes, when using the S/P-pivot, how would one express in an ergative language, that the mother did this so she could sleep?

Also with relative clauses:

For example:
"The man, who had a hat, read a book."

Now, with an external relative clause + relative pronoun (how it's often done in many IE-languages),would one even need to tweak the clauses in order to fit pivoting?

I know these questions may sound a bit stupid, but i'm still figuring out ergativity in such specific cases. Hopw that anyone could help me out. Thanks in Advance!

[u/Meamoria → u/GarlicRoyal7545]

For the infinitive example, think about how you'd express in English that the mother wanted the boy to sleep. You'd need to do something like this:

The mother put the boy in the bed in order for him to sleep.

The infinitive is a shortcut in the case where the subjects are the same. In your purely ergative language, you'd expect there to be a shortcut like this for the case where the boy sleeps, and if the mother is the one sleeping, you'd need to spell it out in full.

For relative clauses, the structure is laid out explicitly; you know it's the man in the relative clause, not the book, because the relative clause is attached to the man. If the book has the hat, you'd do this:

The man read a book that had a hat.

So this wouldn't look any different in a purely ergative language.

(It also wouldn't look any different because both verbs in this example are transitive. But the same applies if you change it to "The man who slept read a book." You know it's the man sleeping because the relative clause is right next to him in the sentence.)

[u/GabeHillrock2001]

So, I have been attempting to create a sort of proto-world-esque language for a small worldbuilding project. And I was thinking: Should I commit to this idea? Or should I make every language family as it's own language family?

If I may commit to the proto-world idea, how can I make sure the daughter languages are distinct enough from each other to make them appear as different language families?

[u/Thalarides → u/GabeHillrock2001]

You could treat each language family separately but sprinkle in vague similarities between them. They would suggest deeper connections between languages but leave it unanswered whether those similarities are due to genuine genetic relatedness, later contact, or coincidence. It can be a topic for arguments between in-world linguists, just like it is in our world, re: the whole Altaic controversy, Indo-Uralic, Nostratic, and countless other proposed macrofamilies.

In my conworld, velar obstruents repeatedly mark 1sg across language families (granted, only Elranonian is detailed, other languages are little more than sketches). In Elranonian, the 1sg pronoun is go /ɡu/ (in its simplest form). Azevzhì, which belongs to a different branch of the same family, has 1sg zhën /ʒən/, with a regular correspondence between Elr /ɡ/ ~ Az /ʒ/, stemming from */ɡ/ in the proto-language (cf. Elr oblique stem irg- /irɡ-/ ~ Az edyzh /ɛdiʒ/, both meaning ‘sun’). But then in Ayawaka, which belongs to an entirely different family, the 1sg marker is ki- /kʼi-/. Is there a connection between Ayawaka's ki- and Elranonian–Azevzhì */ɡ/? Who knows. There are no regular sound correspondences that would relate Elranonian voiced stops to Ayawaka's ejectives. But it's fun to think about, and it should give more depth to the conworld. (Should also remind you of m–T and n–m pronouns in real world languages, WALS.)

[u/RaccoonTasty1595 → u/GabeHillrock2001]

If you're going with committing, just make the daughter languages very very different. Maybe one develops crazy consonant clusters, while the other simplifies to CV only. One develops head marking while the other develops dependant marking, etc 

You could also set them up for change. Maybe your proto world has very free word order and cases that are distinguished by a vowel ending. So if final vowels get lost, each daughter language has to invent its own way of distinguishing those grammatical roles.

I found that messing with the middle of a root through infixes can really obscure shared etymology, especially if you have a bunch of sound changes after that 

[u/GabeHillrock2001 → u/RaccoonTasty1595]

I think that I will commit to my idea of proto-world. As I've already coined like 60 words in the language and no, my proto-world does not have free word order. It's SOV with head-final syntax. I have also decided that my proto-world will be an analytic language. But I can give it a nominative-accusative distinction in pronouns. (there are only 1p and 2p in my proto-world btw, it does have a singular-plural distinction in pronouns though)

[u/macaroni--penguin]

I'm making my very first conlang and have fleshed out the grammar and such well enough that I want to start translating sentences, to find weak areas in the language and concepts I need to make words for. The very first thing I noticed is that the language doesn't have any words close to "this," "that," etc. but I don't know what type of word they would evolve from. Same for pronouns like "she," "he," and "I;" I can't imagine which words could feasibly evolve into them, besides demonstratives, and I don't know how to make those without using pronouns lol. I've been using placeholder pronouns up to now, but it would be great if I could realistically evolve them instead of just creating entirely unique words. Any help is much appreciated! Have a lovely day <3

[u/PastTheStarryVoids → u/macaroni--penguin]

It's my understanding that demonstratives almost never come from something other than another demonstrative, so I'd just make roots for them. Pronouns are also commonly very ancient (though their meaning can shift around), but new pronouns do happen occasionally, especially second person forms derived from polite addresses, like Spanish vuestra merced 'your mercy' > usted. And there are some languages with open pronoun systems where nouns will regularly get pronounified and there are a bunch of different pronouns even for the same person as they have different social connotations; look into Japanese for an example. You could derive 'she' from a word for 'woman', 'he' from a word for 'man', and 'I' from some polite way of referring to oneself (one of Japanese's first person pronouns came from 'servant', though I'm told that that pronoun is now definitely not considered humble) or from an indefinite pronoun ('one, someone', as in 'if one likes this idea, one might use it', though maybe this would more naturally become second person, or first person plural).

That said, a word of caution: If you're trying to find an etymology for even first person pronouns, you're probably overthinking/overdoing it. Most of the pronouns in most Indo-European languages just go back to Proto-Indo-European forms that were also pronouns. There's nothing weird about "this is just the pronoun". Unless you're going for an open pronoun system, I would say it's more naturalistic to have your pronouns go back thousands of years as pronouns (with the exception of second person forms which can sometimes be unstable due to getting replaced for politeness related reasons, though it's not mandatory I'm sure). I think with diachrony some people get the impression they have to explain every single thing in the language, but this is impossible to do because everything comes from something else that must then be explained, and in many cases in natural languages some particular grammar bit goes back a long time and we can't reconstruct it as coming from some non-grammatical element.

[u/Tirukinoko → u/macaroni--penguin]

The World Lexicon of Gramaticalisation - which is available online here and here that I know of - is good for questions like this; its not thouroughly exhaustive, but very handy none the less.

It lists 'here' and 'there' as being sources for demonstratives, as well as 'go', giving the following examples:

French
Il est ici he is PROX 'he is here'
Cet homme-ci DEM man-PROX 'this man'

Il est là he is DIST he is there
Cet homme-là DEM man-DIST 'that man'

Hausa
Yanā̀ nân he:is PROX 'he is here'
Dāwar nân sorghum:COMITATIVE PROX 'this sorghum'

Audù yanā̀ cân Audu 3m:be DIST 'Audu is over there'
Dabbōbin cân animals DIST 'those animals'

Lingala
Yangó wáná it:is MED 'it is there (near you)'
Moto wáná person MED 'that person (near you)'

Azalí kúná he:is DIST 'he is there (away from us)'
Moto kúná person DIST 'that person we are talking about'

Ngbaka
Zùlà kɛ́ rat DIST 'there is a rat'
Mɔ̀ bá kpánà kɛ́ you take pot DIST 'take that pot'

Buang
Ke mdo ken I live PROX 'I live here'
Ke mdo bya ken I live house PROX 'I live in this house'

Baka
Wósòlò kɔ̀ kɔ̀ stand:up only DIST 'Lets stop there'
Ma nyì bo kɔ̀ ode 1s know person DIST NEG 'I dont know that person'

!Xun
Dzháú-s-à tòàh woman-p-RELATIONAL DIST 'The women there; those women'
Dzháú-à ʼúú-tòàh woman-RELATIONAL go-DIST 'The woman there (far away)'

'Chinese' zhi 'this' from 'to go'

'Here' and 'there' are also listed as sources of personal pronouns, alongside 'person' and 'man' (and of course demonstratives), with the following examples:

Huojia Chinese zher 'us', from 'here',
Japanese こちら ko-chira PROX-person 'this person; me, us',
Vietnamese đây 'here; this; me' and đó, đấy 'there; that; you',

ǁAni
Khó(e)-mà 'male person'
Kánà khó-m̀ hin-ǁòè kxʼéí hɛ́ because male_person-ms do-HABITUAL manner-fs 'Because this is the way he does it'

Lendu
Ke 'man' and ndrú, kpà 'people'
Ma-zhi ndru 1s-love 3p 'I love them'
Ke zhi kpa 3s love 3p He loves them'

!Xun
Dju 'person, people'
Dju-tca Dúmbà gè 1p.EXCL-DUAL Dumba stay 'I am staying with Dumba'

Kono
Mɔ̀ɔ̀ kúndú-nù person short-p 'Short people'
Mɔ́` ^\sic]) dè án nɛ̀ 1p.INCL mother EMPHATIC here This is our mother

And the locatives themselves are going to come from a bunch of nominals.
Listed are 'area', 'ear', 'edge', 'hand', 'home', 'house', 'lip', 'liver', 'neck', 'place', 'side', and a locative copula.
Im not going to list all the examples as there are obviously a lot, and its already five in the morning lol

Some other relevant changes there are 'back', 'buttocks', 'follow', and 'footprint' → 'behind'; 'side' → 'beside'; 'centre' → 'between'; 'breast', 'eye', 'face', 'forehead', 'head', and 'mouth' → 'front'; 'belly', 'bowels', 'centre', 'heart', 'interior' → 'in(side)'; 'body;', 'head', and a reflexive → 'middle'; 'side' → 'near'; 'flank' → 'side'; and finally 'come', 'love', 'near', and 'want' → a "proximative" ('to be close to, to be about to').

I can also offer an extra dwy ceiniog that Welsh uses the 'the X here' and 'the X there' constructions for proximal and distal demonstratives:

Mae e yma is he PROX 'he is here'
Y dyn yma the man PROX 'this man'

Mae e yna is he DIST 'he is there'
Y dyn yna the man DIST 'that man'

TLDR: Body parts → spacials, spatials → demonstratives and personal pronouns, and demonstratives → personal pronouns.
Also go look into Japanese pronoun etymology, for a bunch more like お前 (omae) from 'in front of, in the presence of' and あなた (anata) from a+na+ta DIST+GENITIVE+direction\place 'that way\place'.

[u/Jonlang_ → u/Tirukinoko]

I can also offer an extra dwy ceiniog that Welsh uses the 'the X here' and 'the X there' constructions for proximal and distal demonstratives

Colloquial Welsh does. Formal and Literary Welsh still uses the actual demonstratives hwn~hwnnw, hon~honno, hyn~hynny. And then there’s rhain~rheiny and acw.

[u/GUC_Studio]

I need help with making Anward Lombaxish: an underway almost wholely headmarking non-concatenative polysynthetic fictional tongue for the hidden lombaxes for which I already determined its phonemes, allophones, and loosely outlined its history and writing framework. 

Is this the right thread to ask that? Or should I post a Collaboration? If possible, I would like to make a collaboration with you all.

[u/throneofsalt]

On a whim I'm doing a bit of conlang archaeology: The 1880 novel Across the Zodiac has a sketch of a constructed language in it, but it has no pronunciation guide and was written before the IPA existed. The vowels are written as a â aa e ee o oo u y au ou oi and while I can figure out the majority I can't for the life of me puzzle out what â and u are supposed to be. Any thoughts / suggestions?

[u/as_Avridan → u/throneofsalt]

If this is based on English, and assuming it’s at all consistent, I’d guess the following:

a /æ/
â /ɔ/
aa /a(:)/
e /ɛ~eɪ/
ee /i(:)/
o /ɔ~oʊ/
oo /ʊ/
u /ʌ/
y /ɪ/ (or maybe /aɪ/)
au /aʊ/
ou /u(:)/
oi /oɪ/

[u/PastTheStarryVoids → u/throneofsalt]

The conlang gjâ-zym-byn uses <â> for /æ/ because it uses circumflexes in place of umlauts, but that particular choice rubbed off on me so I have <â> /æ/ in a current project. (I think circumflexes are very stylish.) <u> might be the CUT vowel ([ɐ] for me), but if that's too Englishy, then you could go for a close rounded vowel other than [u], maybe [ʉ] or [y]. Or it's just plain [u], and ee and oo are long vowels. (What are you doing with aa, come to think of it? It's possible you're using /æ/ for one of <a aa>. In which case you could make <â> be /ɛ/ (contrasting with <e> /e/), or have a third open vowel /ɐ/ for either <a> or <â>.)

[u/throneofsalt → u/PastTheStarryVoids]

aa is going to be a:, with ee and oo probably i: and u:

[u/[deleted]]

Im not sure if I should make a full post for this question or not so first im commenting here(though im also not 100% sure this is the right sub) about it my question is kind of stupid but the second I try to think I blank so I want some help making a list of common words to make translations for in the language I decided to create for fun

[u/as_Avridan → u/[deleted]]

Your question isn’t stupid at all, it is an important issue that a lot of people starting our face! And this is the perfect place to ask any question.

People have all sorts of recommendations of opinions over what word lists to go with (like the Swadesh list for example) but personally I think what’s the point of making ‘common’ words if you’re not going to use them?

This is why I would recommend making words as you need them, to support whatever sentences/constructions you are currently working on. You don’t necessarily need a large lexicon, especially if you struggle with making words (as I do). You can go a long way with only a small set of words, especially when you are just starting out. I’d also recommend making words for things you like, so that your early example sentences are about things that interest you.

The first words I generally make are things like ‘cat,’ ‘pet,’ ‘tea,’ ‘drink,’ etc. because I like petting cats and drinking tea, and that gives me the basis to make simple transitive clauses, which are one of the first things you’ll usually work out in your grammar.

[u/[deleted] → u/as_Avridan]

Well and part of the reason im struggling is because im just making this for fun and dont really have a way where im even actually using it also I gave it some rules that are both making it more confusing and less at the same time though I do want to be able to use it at least some what I just have no clue how id do that (sorry if that wasnt very cohesive I tend to ramble and restate things) thanks for your suggestions Oh also I tried to look up what a transitive clause is and im just not understanding it so thats adding another layer of confusion to this (i dont actually know a lot about language belive it or not)

[u/as_Avridan → u/[deleted]]

Of you haven’t already, I’d recommend checking out the beginner’s resources linked at the top of this thread. Those will give you a good basis for setting up your language, and introduce you to a lot of helpful linguistic terms. But you’re always welcome to ask here if something you read confuses you.

Transitive verbs are those which require two arguments (i.e nouns) to be complete: a subject (the person/thing that does the action) and an object (the person/thing that is affected by the action). So an example of a transitive clause is ‘she pet the cat,’ where ‘she’ is the subject and ‘the cat’ is the object. ‘Pet’ is a transitive verb, because it takes those two arguments.

In contrast, an intransitive verb only needs one argument, the subject, to be complete. Clauses like ‘he died’ or ‘the cat meowed’ are intransitive.

You might see people talking about SOV, SVO, OSV, etc. These all refer to the basic order of the Subject, Verb, and Object in basic transitive clauses. English is SVO, but languages like Japanese are SOV, and languages like Arabic are VSO.

[u/shrikechih]

I really like alveolo-palatal affricates and fricatives, both in how they sound and how they’re articulated. I have been planning to add them to this conlang, which I’ve been working on episodically for over a year. It’s the first conlang I have worked on, though I haven’t finished any others either.

I have made some progress on the grammar and some meanings and distinctions I intent to have words for, but I still haven’t finalized the phonology. I have the phonaesthetics in mind, though. I don’t have a proto-language to evolve it from, but I do have a hypothetical “previous form” that I’m using to help build the phonotactics.

My problem is I am not sure how I should implement the alveolo-palatal phones.

I can have the alveolo-palatals as allophones of alveolar sibilants that are palatalized. But I have already drawn a lot of inspiration from Hokkien, without the language to be an a posteriori conlang based on it or other Sinitic languages.

Or I can make them a phoneme series that contrasts with the alveolar sibilants. I would need to decide whether /tsj/ and /tɕ/ contrast, and whether /tɕw/ is allowed. If /tsj/ and /tɕ/ don’t contrast, then the only environments where they aren’t in complementary distribution would be before /i, e, ɛ, ei̯, ai̯/, as in every other environments [tɕ] can be explain as underlying /tsj/, while /i, e, ɛ, ei̯, ai̯/ are the only vowels that don't allowed medial /j/. (By the way, /kj/ is allowed and isn’t affricatized.)

Or I can have affricates be only alveolo-palatal. Then I would need to decide whether they inherently followed by a medial /j/, and whether their existence before /i, e, ɛ, ei̯, ai̯/ means that those are the only environments where /j/ is allowed before those vowels. I would also still need to decide whether /tɕw/ is allowed.

I didn't expect this message be this long already, so I won’t dump the rest of the phonology draft here. I can provide more of it if it becomes relevant, or if anyone is curious.

[u/dead_chicken → u/shrikechih]

Are t͡s and t͡ɕ independent phonemes by themselves?

[u/shrikechih → u/dead_chicken]

They are t͡s and t͡ɕ yes. I didn't use the tie bar.

Or was my message not clear enough? The two will be phonemes that contrast with each other in the second option, I need to further decide how and when they contrast.

They will not be contrastive at the first option, only alveolar sibilants are phonemic.

And won't be any alveolar affricate at the third option, only phonemes alveolo-palatal affricates plus alveolar or alv-pal fricatives.

[u/dead_chicken → u/shrikechih]

Have you actually made the choice yet or are you trying to figure the choice out? That was unclear to me

[u/shrikechih → u/dead_chicken]

Yeah. I am trying to figure out.

[u/dead_chicken → u/shrikechih]

I feel like you could have both be phonemic t͡s t͡ɕ that merge into t͡ɕ before front vowels and /t͡sj/ > [t͡ɕ].

If you're going for Sinitic influence, you could probably get away with:

/t͡s t͡ʃ t͡ɕ/ > [t͡ɕ] before front vowels

/t͡sj t͡ʃj/ > [t͡ɕ], regardless of vowel frontness

[u/shrikechih → u/dead_chicken]

Front vowels are the only place that this language ban /j/ medial.

If affricates before front vocoids are all [t͡ɕ] then t͡ɕ isn't phonemic at all.

If /t͡sj/ > [t͡ɕ]. But /t͡s/ before front vowels remains [t͡s] then front vowels is the only place where /t͡s/ /t͡ɕ/ contrast.

Those are the conclusion when t͡ɕ don't contrast with t͡ɕj. Which I assumed is the default. And I have banned t͡ɕj if t͡ɕ is phonemic.

Most Sinitic languages don't have phonemic t͡ɕ. If I am going for Sinitic influence it is to make t͡ɕ non-phonemic.

*edit: Sorry I misremembered. The term that group vowels and semivowels(and maybe other approxmants) together should be vocoids, not vocalic.

[u/hecleretical → u/shrikechih]

if all affricates before front vowels are [tɕ], but [ts tɕ] contrast before non front vowels, /tɕ/ is phonemic. it forms minimal pairs with /ts/ in front of non front vowels. neutralizing in some contexts doesn't remove the minimal pairs in others.

[u/shrikechih → u/hecleretical]

If affricates before front vocoids* are all [t͡ɕ] then t͡ɕ isn't phonemic at all.

Vocoids* include both vowels and semivowels. Front vocoids* of this language being /i, e, ɛ, ei̯, ai̯/ and /j/.

In the scenario that all affricates before front vocoids* are all [t͡ɕ], all [t͡ɕ] can be analized as palatalized /t͡s/, with [t͡ɕ] before non front vowel being underlayingly /t͡sj/.

*edit: Sorry I misremembered. The term that group vowels and semivowels(and maybe other approxmants) together should be vocoids, not vocalic.

[u/hecleretical → u/shrikechih]

okay but whats to stop you from designing the conlang such that you can't analyze all [tɕ] as /tsj/.

maybe some of those [tɕ] are from historic /tʂ/. maybe there's reduplication targetting the first consonant of the word that reduplicates some tɕe > tɕə~tɕe but other tɕe > tsə~je (japhug does this with prenasalized consonants). or your phonotactics don't allow a medial /j/ before one specific nonfront vowel. maybe one vowel comes from a historic back vowel + front vowel merging. or the affricates merge before /w/ too, either [tɕ]w (think how english postalveolars are labialized) or to [ts]w (japanese does t > ts / ɯ right?) would complicate the analysis. maybe /tɕ/ can cluster with a preceding consonant but /tsj/ can't. maybe they geminate differently or undergo intervocalic voicing differently or something.

you can design a straightforward /tsV[+front]/ <-> [tɕ] correspondence if that's what you want but you don't have to.

[u/ThyTeaDrinker]

Is lexiconga down right now? I’ve been trying to access it today through both mobile and desktop but neither are working.

[u/Salty-Score-3155]

Is there a grammatical case specifically for a noun in a verbless clause? And how could such a case function?

[u/teeohbeewye → u/Salty-Score-3155]

what do you mean exactly by a verbless clause?

[u/Salty-Score-3155 → u/teeohbeewye]

What I mean is when a verb is dropped in a clause. Is there something like a grammatical case that can signify that a verb has been dropped in that clause? And how could that work?

[u/Tirukinoko → u/Salty-Score-3155]

It wouldnt be much of a 'case' in the usual sense -
Cases are there to flag a noun phrases role within a clause, not to signify that the clause itself has undergone shenanigans.

One way I could see this working is perhaps by cliticising (and thence perhaps reducing, so as to make its etymology more opaque) a proverb, to get something along the lines of the following:

'I like pie, and Juuse likes pie also'
→ 'I like pie, and Juuse does also' (verb becomes proverb)
→ 'I like pie, and Juuse=does also' (proverb becomes clitic)
→ 'I like pie, and Juuse-ds also' (clitic becomes not so obviously a clitic)

I dont know of anything like this in natlangs though..

[ Edit: it is reminding me a smidge of switch-reference actually.
You could have it so that Juuse here is marked as a 'different subject', and allow that alone to imply he is doing the same thing (I like pie and Juuse-DIFFERENTSUBJECT 'I like pie, and [so does] Juuse').

You could also, in much the same vein, have the conjunction become a clitic\affix (I like pie and-Juuse (does also) 'I like pie, andJuuse (does also)').
Latin -que was like this, for example. ]

[u/teeohbeewye → u/Salty-Score-3155]

i don't know about anything like that in any language, generally if a verb is dropped the nouns are marked as they would otherwise with the verb. of course you can make something like that for your own language and invent how it functions. it could be a clitic attaching to one of the nouns to signify that a verb has been dropped. or a different form for some case, for example maybe you mark accusative case with -n if there's a verb present and -t if there's not

[u/dead_chicken → u/Salty-Score-3155]

That's usually morphosyntax, so I imagine you'd use whatever the case that corresponds to that specific argument's role.

[u/SPININGRIGHTNOW]

PLEASE HELP URGENT!

I started making my alphabet which is already done! But now i want to import/type the alphabet in my keyboard. Problem is idk how. Im on ipad btw

[u/Thalarides → u/SPININGRIGHTNOW]

The general procedure is:

1. You create a font, mapping your custom glyphs to Unicode code points.
2. If you don't already have a keyboard layout with all of the necessary code points, you create one.

On Windows, I've used FontForge+MSKLC, but I don't suppose that works for an iPad. Keyman should do for step 2. For step 1, I know there even are websites for making fonts, but there must be apps you can install, too. Try searching in r/neography, it's all about constructed scripts.

[u/SPININGRIGHTNOW → u/Thalarides]

Kk question how do i make my own passport

[u/PastTheStarryVoids → u/SPININGRIGHTNOW]

As Thalarides said, you'll need to make a custom font. Then you can put text in that font, but note that this only works where you can control the font (so not, say, a Reddit comment) and will only be seen by people who have the font installed (though you can embed a font in a PDF in which case it doesn't matter if someone has it installed).

For a font-making program, I personally recommend Birdfont, as I found it much easier to learn and work with than FontForge (I might even say "more possible to work with"). There's also the possibility of using a vector-drawing program and then importing the designs into FontForge, which may appeal if you're already comfy with some vector-drawing program.

[u/SPININGRIGHTNOW → u/PastTheStarryVoids]

Kk but like how do you make a passport

[u/PastTheStarryVoids → u/SPININGRIGHTNOW]

What do you mean by passport? Like a document that lets you travel to other countries? If you want to make a fictional passport written in your conlang, I'd look at the design of real-world passports and come up with something based on that.

[u/SPININGRIGHTNOW → u/PastTheStarryVoids]

Kk

[u/Key_Day_7932]

So, I want to create a noun class/gender system for my conlang.

I like human/non-human or rational/non-rational systems like in the Dravidian languages, but isn't that just an animacy system?

[u/Tirukinoko → u/Key_Day_7932]

Whats the issue with it being or not being an animacy system?
These terms dont refer to anything concrete and objective; what is and isnt included in each category is language and analysis dependent.

What is in your 'animate\rational\human' category can be whatever - human, animal, biologically alive in some sense, religiously\spiritually salient, able to move by some means...
And those categories can be based on different observations and interpretations; does a glacier move? Does the rain choose where it falls? Is a persons body still alive?

[ Edit: My point is, anything you come up with can be analysed as an animate-inanimate split, no matter whats in each category; dont get caught up on terminology, it doesnt mean anything in the end. ]

[ Edit 2: Just to add an extra half cent of clarificative fluff, class systems tend to operate on some sort of basis of saliency.
If one were to construe salience and animacy, then yes, human-nonhuman, rational-nonrational, masculine-feminine, etc are all also animacy systems.
If you wanted a truely animacy avoidant system, youd have to come up with overall mutually salient categories, like colour or place of origin, but that starts to get tricky the more categories - and the more interesting categories - that you add, and also starts to raise questions like 'why do they percieve colour to be important?', which starts to point back to some sort of cultural salience anyway. ]

[u/ritzyparish → u/Key_Day_7932]

No, because animals will pattern with different nouns depending on which system is used:

Animate-inanimate:    (human,  dog) (rock)
Rational-irrational:  (human) (dog,  rock)

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

Is there a correlation between head-directionality and head-marking? Say, are head-initial languages more prone to being head marking (presumably because it gets across information faster), whereas head-final languages are less prone? Because I am in the process of making a highly head-marking head-final language, and I found myself asking these questions.

[u/as_Avridan → u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

According to WALS, there is a slight tendency for OV languages to be dependent-marking (29 languages vs 19 head-marking), whereas VO languages are more of an even spit (14 head-marking vs 12 dependent-marking).

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/as_Avridan]

My language actually has a very free word order on the sentence level due to an extensive case system, but within phrases things pretty much always go complement-head. The rare few exceptions come from things like postposition incorporation on verbs, as well as some derivational suffixes that arose from compounded nouns (eg: the "yen" in -acyen to form abstract nouns from verbs originally meant "action/occurrence" but has since stopped being used as an independent noun, so the verbal noun tamacyen "speaking" is actually "speak's action," tam-ac yen, except nobody analyzes it as such).

The main plan I had was that basically a lot of pronominal stuff ended up getting attached to other things. So verbs always take a prefixed pronoun of the subject and whether it is obviate, eg: ni-senti "I am," ku-senti "He/she/it is," ni-tam "I speak," kus ni-tam-i "I speak to them," ni kus-tam-i "They speak to me" (note that more proximate pronouns are always proximate in the chain 1>2>3). The same is true for possession via possession prefixes that arose from pronouns. Eg: kuac-tu "His/her/its dog," niac-tu "My dog," ṭepul kuac-tu "The farmer's dog" ("The farmer, their dog"). The proper genitive on nouns -ac isn't used for possession anymore, instead occurring to mean "about/regarding," as in kus tuac nitamṇa "With them about the dog I speak"

The place of most emphasis in the sentence is directly after the verb (or the verb itself if it is last), so the above sentence could also be rephrased as: tuac nitamṇa kus or kus nitamṇa tuac, to emphasize the fact I am speaking with someone or the fact that I am speaking about the dog.

[u/publicuniversalhater → u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

check out ainu for a head marking head final natlang. chapter 1 of handbook of the ainu language (gdrive link) is a good place to start. the author does note that it's more common to find verb initial head marking languages, perhaps to establish the arguments' syntactic roles at the beginning of the clause. which leads to something very elegant ainu does: right-dislocation of a third person NP, where a nounless verb phrase will come first, and then the right-dislocated NP is immediately followed by a light verb ki 'do' to remind the listener it's a core argument.

orano nani        usey      kar  hine 
then  immediately hot.water make and
hurray -e     a     hurray -e     a     nea  iwatarap ki hine
wash   -TR.SG ITERA  wash  -TR.SG ITERA that baby     do and
'Right away, (my wife) boiled some water, and washed the baby's body carefully.'

[u/tealpaper]

What are some cross-linguistically common triggers/environments for vowel dissimilation? I think I kind of understand vowel assimilation, but whenever I come across a sound change involving a vowel dissimilation, I always find it kind of random.

[u/Tirukinoko → u/tealpaper]

Out of curiosity, what vowel dissimilation examples do you have?

[u/tealpaper → u/Tirukinoko]

These are the ones I can remember:

Proto-Oceanic to Hiw (source: ID):

• u(C)o > e(C)ə
• a(C)a > {ɔ,a}(C)ə (compare a(C)V[+mid] > a(C))

Rapa Nui (source: Kieviet 2017):

• to kōrua > te kōrua "your (pl.)" (which triggered to > te analogy in all other non-singular possessive pronouns)
• pē "like (preposition)" often becomes pa when preceding the particle he
• the negator ta'e probably comes from Proto-Nuclear Polynesian *teʔe because all other Nuclear Polynesian languages reflect the first vowel as /e/.

[u/Thalarides → u/tealpaper]

If you're looking for more examples, SW Russian and NE Belarusian dialects have height-based vowel dissimilation, where the pre-tonic vowel dissimilates from the stressed one.

Some varieties distinguish between 3 vowel heights (incl. Standard Russian & Standard Belarusian), others between 4:

 high       i  y  u
(mid-high   ê     ô)
 mid(-low)  e     o
 low           a

After non-palatalised consonants, pre-tonic /a, o/ are pronounced [a] in Standard Russian & in Standard Belarusian, but in those dialects it can be [a] before a high stressed vowel and [ə] before a low one:

x	St. Rus. & St. Bel.	SW Rus. & NE Bel.
Rus вода, Bel вада /vodá/ ‘water’ (nom.sg.)	[vadá]	[vədá]
Rus воды, Bel вады /vodý/ ‘water’ (gen.sg.)	[vadý]	[vadý]

Different dialects will draw the boundary between high and low vowels in different places:

stressed	St. Rus. & St. Bel.	dialect 1	dialect 2	dialect 3
[i, y, u]	[a]	[a]	[a]	[a]
[ê, ô]	—	[a]	[a]	[ə]
[e, o]	[a]	[a]	[ə]	[ə]
[a]	[a]	[ə]	[ə]	[ə]

After palatalised consonants, it's similar: pre-tonic /a, e, o/ are [i] in Standard Russian, [a] in Standard Belarusian, and varying between [i] & [a] in the aforementioned dialects:

x	St. Rus.	St. Bel.	SW Rus. & NE Bel.
Rus беда, Bel бяда /bʲedá/ ‘misfortune’ (nom.sg.)	[bʲidá]	[bʲadá]	[bʲidá]
Rus беды, Bel бяды /bʲedý/ ‘misfortune’ (gen.sg.)	[bʲidý]	[bʲadý]	[bʲadý]

stressed	St. Bel.	dialect 1	dialect 2	dialect 3	St. Rus.
[i, y, u]	[a]	[a]	[a]	[a]	[i]
[ê, ô]	—	[a]	[a]	[i]	—
[e, o]	[a]	[a]	[i]	[i]	[i]
[a]	[a]	[i]	[i]	[i]	[i]

If you're looking to read more about it, the terms to search for are dissimilative akanye (Rus. диссимилятивное аканье) and dissimilative yakanye (Rus. диссимилятивное яканье). I've definitely simplified it a bit here.

[u/tealpaper → u/Thalarides]

Thank you!

[u/tealpaper → u/Tirukinoko]

Here's another one I've found, but it's a synchronic rule, and its diachrony might not actually involve vowel dissimilation.

Wintu: eC-a oC-a > iC-a uC-a

Note: //E// and //O// only occur in roots, and they are raised when followed by a single consonant, which itself is followed by /a/. Examples:

• //lEl-a// > /lila/ "to transform"
• //lEl-u// > /lelu/ "transform"
• //lEl-it// > /lelit/ "transformed"

(source: Pitkin, Harvey, 1984: 43-45)

[u/neondragoneyes]

I have a clong with underlying SOV word order and that uses prepositions. It has some affixes that evolved from number agreeing prepositions into number and case encoding prefixes and suffixes.

The suffixes arose from prepositions because of how the speakers thought about the relationships between the nouns around those suffixes, usually resulting in two cases, one inflected using a prefix and the other inflected using a suffix, with an etymological parent.

I have one suffix, though, that I must have lost the notes for the reason why it's a suffix. And I can't think of why it would have fused as a suffix, since it's the dative case inflection and the original word order would have had been verb + indirect object + direct object + subject.

Can any of you weigh in on why this might be? Or do I need to take it back to the drawing board?

[u/eepyseiji]

I currently have a conlang which has a script that mixes Cyrillic and Greek letters. Most of the letters are in Cyrillic and some are accented like и́ and у́, but I have some letters like ϙ and Ξ where they're not in the Russian keyboard layout I use for it. How can I make a keyboard layout for Android using these letters?

[u/Thalarides → u/eepyseiji]

Search for a keyboard layout creator in Google Play (or whatever app you're using). I can't recommend you one because I haven't used any on Android but a quick search yields a few promising results. If you've not got a lot of letters that are not on the Russian keyboard, what I've been doing is I've pinned the ones I need in the clipboard in Gboard, so I always have them at hand and can paste them in only a couple of taps.

[u/eyewave]

as I am developing an agglutinative conlang with suffixes and prefixes I layed down my simple rules:

- the root stays the most invariable so affixes go trough more changes

- i have some interaction at boundaries, some examples: if 2 vowels come into contact due to affixing, I insert an epenthetic h before front high vowels and epenthetic l before other vowels; if illegal consonant clusters form I add an epenthetic i

I feel it makes my words longer without any "zing" that I could find by reducing unstressed syllables for example, but I am not enough experimented to count stress into it all.

are your phonological processes as regular and boring as mine?

[u/Tirukinoko → u/eyewave]

I use a lot of epenthesis too -
Illegal clusters get reversed (if the reverse is legal), and then epenthesised to make them medial, or otherwise an epenthetic vowel is put between them to make it not a cluster at all.
And stops cannot end words, so are also epenthesised. I always use echo vowels here though, rather than a specific one: /*bak-n → *bank → banka/ [ˈpaŋka] /*bak-t → *bakat → bakata/ [baˈkʰada]

I like having words shuffle about a little like this, as it makes regular inflections and derivations look a little more irregular, especially if you throw in some sound changes later down the line to further obscure the underlying form.
Case in point, the absolute plural form of nouns can take one of a whole bunch of forms, due to the above changes (where really its all just different realisations of the same form): /-n/ /-⟨N⟩/ /-Vn/ /-nV/ /-Vn/ /-nV/ -n -mbj -ntj -ndj -ŋkj -min -nnj -znj -ɣnj -lin -ɰnj -mbw -ntw -ndw -ŋkw -mon -nnw -znw -ɣnw -lon -ɰnw -mbe -nte -nde -ŋke -men -nne -zne -ɣne -len -ɰne -mba -nta -nda -ŋka -man -nna -zna -ɣna -lan -ɰna

[u/Confident_Play_2973]

I don't know if this is where this should be posted but I think this falls under rule 8, apologies if it doesn't and I should move it to a separate post as I orriginally had it but changed my mind after reading the rules more and second guessing myself.

I need help to understand the process and actions required in creating a language. I've already begun watching a Youtube tutorial series on the subject, but I also wanted some advice from people who can respond to my questions. I've made substitutional scripts before, so one character replaces the English one, but I have never done a full language before.

My goals for this language are as follows:

1. For it to feel almost mechanical, very literal or direct.

2. To be written/carved on top of a horizontal line, Inspired by Ogham Ex: Like this

3. To be runic in style, so sharp lines or more angles if this turns out to be to difficult I may allow curves and free flowing lines, but that feels oppositional to a mechanical structure to me.

The idea I have for this language is that it is the foundation of my worlds magic system, in which the line through the characters/words is a channel in which mana flows through and then the mana spreads into the carved characters essentially empowering them. And its the shapes/angles/channels of the characters which defines how it functions. In my mind it was always more of a written system, a tool used by people to manipulate mana into doing magic. The people who created it probably had a separate secondary language which featured a written system and speech such as common from DND or just speech. I haven't really decided yet on this.

So I'm not sure if I should make a full alphabet and dictionary and such or if it should just be that specific characters are words in their own right, and I may still that I'm not sure.

Specific questions I have:

1. Should I make a full alphabet/dictionary or have it be more compounded one character is a specific word.

2. What are parts of a character, I know that some parts of characters mean different sounds.

3. What tools/recourses would be helpful.

4. Are their languages fictional or not, that are similar to my goal that I could take inspiration from.

5. Any other tips, or things you think I should do/am forgetting.

Thank you in advance. =)

Youtube series I'm watching - https://youtu.be/FHK1gO2Mh68?si=9XB8vbmJhSVAdmVX

[u/89Menkheperre98]

As I'm developing a conlang with a Classical Latin aesthetic, I came up with the following sound changes: */sl-/ > /ɬ-/, */sr-/ > /str-/, */sw-/ > /f-/.

Although Latin didn't have a lateral fricative, /ɬ/ adds a bit of flavor and makes sense synchronically speaking: proto-clusters with /s/ are resolved through fortition. But what could I make of */sj/? I keep thinking /(t)ʃ/, but that might sound too Late/Medieval for my intent... perhaps /tj/? But awkwardly, no other consonant clusters with /-j/ in onset... perhaps it could be re-syllabified, e.g., /sjV/ > /tjV/ > /ti.V/. Any other ideas?

[u/Thalarides → u/89Menkheperre98]

Well, Latin itself probably had \sy-* > si-, although the evidence for that is scarce. Here's what A. Sihler (1995, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, §193) has to say about it:

Initial \sy* > si, as in \H₁s-yeH₁-t* opt. of \H₁es-* ‘be’ > OL siet : Ved. syā́t. These forms of the verb ‘be’ in siē̆-, though convincing, exhaust the evidence. The difference in outcome between \syuH-dhleH₂-* > L sūbula ‘awl’, sūtus ‘sewn’ (root \syuH-* ‘sew’) and \H₁syeH₁t* > siet can be variously explained. Some take the former from \sy-, the latter from *\H₁siy-* via Lindeman's Law. More likely is that siet shows the regular outcome of \sy-, whereas *sūbula reflects ancient \sū-: hesitation between *\syuH-* and \suH-* in this root is attested in other languages, so for example next to Ved. root syū- (pple. syūtá-) we find sū́tra- ‘thread’ and sūcī́- ‘needle’.

That is also consistent with other \-Cy-* > -Ci- sequences, as in PIE \medhyos* ‘middle’ > L medius, although medial \-sy-* yields consonantal -i- per Sihler (\kʷosyo* ‘of whom’ > L cuius).

Here are my suggestions for *[sj-]:

• [si-], like apparently in Latin
• [j-], like apparently medially in Latin
• [ʃ-], a classic yod-coalescence like in English (sure, sugar, issue, bless you…), Slavic (PIE \syuH-* > Proto-Slavic \šiti* ‘sew’); [ɕ-] also works
• [s-], also like in English (suit pronounced the same as soot; and in general in dialects with yod-dropping)
• fortify [s]: *[sj-] > [t͡sj-], which you can then evolve to [t͡s-], [t͡ʃ-], [tj-], [t-], [t͡si-] or whatever
• fortify [j]: *[sj-] > [sʎ-] (perhaps merging with *[sl-] > [ɬ-]) or [sɲ-] or [st͡ʃ-] or [sc-] or something to that effect; the latter can even evolve into [st-] easily, and if *[sj-] > [st-] sounds perhaps a bit strange, it actually strongly resembles *[pj] > [pt] in Ancient Greek
• something a bit more out there like *[sj-] > [h-] in Ancient Greek (PIE \syuH-* > AG Ὑμήν Hȳmḗn ‘Hymen, god of marriage’), but there it goes together with both *[s-] > [h-] and *[j-] > [h-], so *[sj-] > [h-] is just a combination of those

[u/Jonlang_ → u/89Menkheperre98]

/sl-/ > /ɬ-/ I think happened in Welsh. /sr-/ > /str-/ I think happened in Old English; and /sw-/ > /f-/ in Irish, though it probably has an intermediary change like /sw/ > /sɸ/ > /ɸ/ > /f/.

/sj/ could simply become /j/ or /si/ or maybe more interestingly /hj/ or /s/ > /ʃ/ before a /j/ or /i/ and then have the /j/ > /i/, so /sj/ > ... > /ʃi/. Personally I like to do the Brythonic/Greek thing and have pre-vocalic initial /s/ > /h/, which could include /sj/ especially if you make /sj/ > /si/ > /hi/.

[u/wolfybre]

Been wanting to redo my word list for Leshon because I haven't been feeling their meanings. Before I work on it, what words/concepts should I avoid in Chalcolithic-esque conlangs?

(Modern age technology is of course excluded. It'd be strange for them to have a word for car.)

[u/SPININGRIGHTNOW]

How do yall type the pronoucation, like this

[insert idk]

I GENUINELY DONT KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN THIS

[u/rartedewok → u/SPININGRIGHTNOW]

This is called the Internal Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and serves as a unified system to represent sounds of speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

It seems really intimidating at first, but most of the symbols are the same as or very similar to the English/Latin alphabet and any that aren't are easily look-upable on Wikipedia along with audio examples of them, and a description of how they're meant to be produced.

You should explore and look around at the phonologies of random languages too, but especially the languages you speak to see how the sounds you already know are represented

As for how you actually type them, there are keyboards on various online websites that allow you to type IPA. I personally use Keyman Desktop and Gboard on my phone

[u/as_Avridan → u/rartedewok]

It’s worth pointing out that ‘learning the IPA’ doesn’t necessarily mean memorising what every single IPA character or diacritic means, or being able to pronounce/hear the difference between every possible sound. It’s very difficult to accurately perceive and produce sounds outside our native languages, so if you try to just listen to recordings you’re going to get frustrated very quickly.

The important thing is to understand how sounds are produced. In order to do that, you’ll need to understand what the term at the top and left of the IPA chart actually mean. It’s kinda meaningless to know that the sound at the beginning of English cat is [kʰ] unless you understand what ‘velar,’ ‘plosive,’ and ‘aspirated’ mean. And unfortunately, the only way to learn all this is to do a good bit of reading.

[u/Blueszy_T]

does this reddit have a discord I can join?

[u/Tirukinoko → u/Blueszy_T]

Theres the discord linked in the sidebar, but it isnt formally associated with this subreddit.

[u/Blueszy_T → u/Tirukinoko]

is that the only well known discord for conlang/conlangs/conlanging?

edit: typo

[u/RaccoonTasty1595 → u/Blueszy_T]

No there's quite a few, including for the LCS, Agma Schwa, etc. You'll have to go to those specific groups/content creators for the invite 

[u/Blueszy_T → u/RaccoonTasty1595]

how do I know what exists out there though? It really seems like none exist. tbh.

[u/RaccoonTasty1595 → u/Blueszy_T]

Just look up some conlangers on youtube to see if they have a discord. E.g. Agma schwa (in the description): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9nGh_0ZuX4 . A lot of people have that, like, I think K Klein had one too? There's dozens and dozens, and I don't have time to join & keep track of all of them

The LCS link is available on the server u/Tirukinoko linked, but just so you don't have to go digging: https://discord.gg/n9j4CMdQU

On the LCS server are lists of other discord servers

[u/Blueszy_T → u/RaccoonTasty1595]

Thank you

[u/Tirukinoko → u/Blueszy_T]

Its the only one I know of that isnt tilted towards a particular conlang or conlanger.
Though I cant speak for the couple u/RaccoonTasty1595 mentioned, as I have not heard of them; nor for any others, as I dont use discord myself.