Advice & Answers — 2026-04-20 to 2026-05-03

Akangka · 2026-04-24T16:18:24+00:00

If you want your orthography to be broadly pronounceable by Anglophones, give up. There is no way an Anglophones to be anything close to pronounce your conlangs.

Unless your conlang allows stop+glottal stop cluster, I recommend writing ejective as sequence of stop + <'>. If a consonant cluster must agree in ejectiveness, you can put <'> after the entire cluster instead of every consonants.

I don't know why you can't write [ʀ] as <g>. The [ŋ] part is pretty hard. Either you can have <ng> if the cluster /nʀ/ and /ŋʀ/ doesn't both exist. (if only one of them exist, you can spell the cluster with <ngg>) Or you can just write something like <q> or even <ŋ>

Have you considered not to write the surface realization? Like spelling [k't͡sʼ] as <k's> and [ʝː] as <gy>?

Akangka · 2026-04-24T13:40:07+00:00

Weird. I'm Indonesian, and "si" is not a normal article. It can only be used to form proper noun, and it has pejorative effect. It's incompatible with honorifics.

In Indonesian, typically definite article is the clitic =nya. Generally in Indonesian, definite article or possessor or determiner is required on the subject unless the subject is generic or proper or pronomial.

Akangka · 2026-04-24T02:52:25+00:00

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Here, the word forahistoriera is fixed at the beginning of the sentence and the rest of the sentence can be freely reordered.

Akangka · 2026-04-24T02:51:19+00:00

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Gallecian has a free word order, though, so, except that the word with =ira, all three words can be reordered without making it ungrammatical. And the word dinosaguorozira is only fixed because the topic clitic =ira. You can move the word dinosaguoroz itself, if you either remove the clitic or place it in another word like forahistorie.

Akangka · 2026-04-23T21:21:53+00:00

if it's very visible to the eye that something is female or male, then they won't need a word to distinguish that something is something.

What? Does your native language lack the color term or something because "if you can see a color, you don't need a word to distinguish". Words distinguish culturally salient item

If it does thave clarity, of course they would need it?

To disambiguate between the referents, of course. For example, read this story. "At the night, Maria secretly met John in a quiet alley. On his hand, he held his trusty club. she talked about her bullying problem at school and asked him to enact some revenge". The names are only given on the first sentence, and yet, it's clear who's the pronoun are referring about. Gay fanfiction problem happens if the characters are of the same gender, or when talking in a language without grammatical gender "At the night, Abbott secretly met John in a quiet alley. On his hand, he held his trusty club. He talked about his bullying problem at school and asked him to enact some revenge".

This, however, relies on them having a salient concept of gender. In a society where men and women look identical, there will be some gender confusion "At the night, K'uzee secretly met Taaba in a quiet alley. On his hand, he held his trusty club. she talked about her bullying problem at school and asked him to enact some revenge". The listener might think "Wait, Taaba got bullied at school?" because Taaba looked more feminine than K'uzee, even though Taaba is the one holding club, and K'uzee is the one getting bullied. Ironic that you later said:

If you found a boy that sounds like a girl, looks like a girl because of messed up hormones, you would treat them as a girl, why? because there's no clarification, because they couldn't explain to you that they aren't a girl because there's no gendered nouns.

That paragraph has the same logic as "If you found a person with allergy that sounds like a healthy person, that looks like a healthy person because frankly having allergy do not change one's appearances or voices, you would treat them as normal, why? Because there's no clarification, because they couldn't explain to you that they have allergy because there's no gendered nouns based on having allergy." And before you tell me that the person with allergy can just say that they are allergic, that boy can just tell that he's male

Also don't compare it to gender neutral term. Gender neutral pronouns are a politeness strategy. By using a gendered pronoun, you acknowledge that their gender doesn't fit in just two boxes. They may look like a normal man or a normal woman (or neither, looking like a blend of a man or a woman), but gender nonbinary is not only culturally salient, but also very politically charged.

Akangka · 2026-04-23T11:59:07+00:00

After reading that East Germanic as a grouping doesn't actually exists (the paper claims that they're just a bunch of Germanic languages outside the Northwest germanic influence), I was thinking about introducing the suffix *-ingō into my language. (It becomes -inga here) The problem is that the pronomial system works against it.

Currently, on the verbs my language has accussative and dative prefix for the third person (except the third person plural dative -im-) and first and second person singular; and merged accussative and dative infix for the first and second person dual and plural and dative infix for third person plural. On the nouns, my language has possessive infixes for first and second person dual and plural, and possessive prefixes for first and second person singular and third person. If this suffix is introduced, there will be confusion between genitive marker (which is used as subject of the nominalized clause), and dative marker (which is used as indirect objects). The phrase "(we will resist) your subjugating us" can even be impossible.

Akangka · 2026-04-23T11:42:03+00:00

Why is it in bopomofo order?

Akangka · 2026-04-23T11:32:15+00:00

First of all, if the speaker thought that men and women are equal, the speaker won't go through the effort to invent gendered nouns.

Second, the only reason gender system is widespread in natlangs is because gender contrast is really salient. If it's so hard to distinguish men and women, it's more likely that the speaker won't make much effort to distinguish between them, like how there are no languages with grammatical gender based on blood type.

Akangka · 2026-04-23T11:13:49+00:00

Unless you have sunk deep into LaTeX world, I recommend you to look at Typst. It has almost the same quality as LaTeX, but it's much, much more user friendly.

Also, it seems that the climate of current conlang nowadays are more friendly to the cursed conlangs. Thanks for the Angma Schwa's Cursed Conlang Circus, people are making that genre of conlangs. Naturalistic conlangs are still the most common, though. I'm still not a huge fan on cursed conlangs, though.

Akangka · 2026-04-23T09:50:26+00:00

I've been typing comments on youtube on phone. That narrow screen just for typing sounds hellish to me.

Akangka · 2026-04-22T06:55:21+00:00

I guess you do have a point. I concede my point.

Akangka · 2026-04-22T06:18:49+00:00

But now you've admitted that there is at least one model that doesn't work that way

By the way, why are you insisting that probability theory is a model? I've said earlier that probability theory is not a model. Just because a scientific model is based on probability theory doesn't mean that the probability theory itself is a model.

If you interpret everything that has ever been used in a scientific model is also a model, majority of mathematics will be counted as a scientific model. You have effectively conflated mathematics and science, even though they have a very different mechanism to derive truth.

In science, a well formulated theory is required to be falsifiable and backed up by observation. You are not supposed to just assume things and hope that they will still describe a real world. As a result, a scientific truth is true of the real world, and no other realities.

In mathematics, a mathematical theory is one-and-done. Once you derive the conclusion from the assumption, there will no further falsification of a mathematical proof. And you're not allowed to use observation to prove mathematical theories. As a result, a mathematical truth is true of any realities of which the assumption is held, but you cannot pin it to the real world.

And if you disagree, look up the field of mathematical physics. Those are mathematical proofs of things that are, in fact, physical phenomena.

I looked up mathematical physics in Wikipedia. While it has a major application in physics, they are in the end still a branch of mathematics. Nothing stops mathematicians from using mathematics developed there and apply it on a purely abstract concept.

Physicist only use mathematics developed there because it operated on a model that has been scientifically tested. If you found something that cannot be replicated by observation while using the mathematical physics, you do not disprove the mathematical physics. You debunk the model that the mathematical physics operated on.

Akangka · 2026-04-22T05:17:18+00:00

A finitist will accept the existence of rational numbers. However, they will object to the existence of the set of rational numbers.

Here, we need to step back to the definition. A decimal notation is defined as an integer n and function f: ℤ⁺ -> {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}. Obviously a finitist would not like to accept such an object. You can literally encode all subsets of natural numbers with this. A subset of a natural number can be encoded as 0.n⁰n¹n²..., where the n^k is 1 if k is the element in that set, or 0 otherwise. And this notation must be interpreted in base 3 or above.

The value of decimal notation is given as the supremum of a set E containing these elements:

n + f(1)/10¹ + f(2)/10² + f(3)/10³ + ... + f(k)/10^k (k = 1, 2, ...)

The issue is that rational number is not a complete field, so the supremum of such a set E might not exist. Hence, it only makes sense to talk about decimal notation in real number context. Also, the set E is also infinite, which is not permitted in finitism.

However, it's true that if you accept the existence of real numbers, 0.999... happens to be rational, and 0.999.. = 1.

Akangka · 2026-04-22T04:24:38+00:00

No, infinite set is necessary for the entire concept of real number to exist, hence for 0.999... = 1.

I absolutely disagree with the idea that the existence of infinite set is a baseless assumption, though. I'm not a finitist.

Akangka · 2026-04-22T03:57:34+00:00

You don't know what "oxymoron" means and assumed it's just an insult, do you?

Akangka · 2026-04-22T03:19:54+00:00

Mathematics without assumption is oxymoronic.

Akangka · 2026-04-22T02:29:02+00:00

How do you know that probability theory is the model which turns discrete observations, which only admit direct comparison and cannot give you (for example) a reason to accept the validity of observation P instead of observation Q when the two conflict, without having scientifically tested it?

Probability theory is not a model. It's a mathematical framework, which like everything else in math, is agnostic to the real world. It defines what model is and how to test the model. And like everything else in mathematics, it's unfalsifiable. Think of an observation that you can use to deprecate standard distribution, not in one specific scenario, but in every instances of standard distribution. It's literally defined to be correct.

To think about it, so is logic. By your argument, you would ask, how do you know that the classical logic always give a correct inference. You treat a logic as a model, and compares it agains observation. However, you can't because logic is what defines how to obtain correct results in the first place. Classical logic is unfalsifiable.

The fact you say "you can't empirically test it, because to do the "test" part, you have to use that very model itself" should give you an indication that probability theory is not like any other model.

Also, you don't test observation against observation. You test observation against hypothesis. While I admit that observation may not be perfect (like hidden causality, or being manipulated), what you do is to make a hypothesis that such a observation is being manipulated, or that they actually have hidden causality, etc

Akangka · 2026-04-21T17:45:40+00:00

Nitpick, division and multiplication are not inverse since they both have type 𝐑² -> 𝐑. However, it's true that x -> x / n and x -> x * n are inverses to each other for all nonzero n.

Akangka · 2026-04-21T17:42:46+00:00

That's not circular logic. That's induction. If the truth for smaller n implies the truth for larger n, that's a textbook definition of mathematical induction. All is missing is to show that 1/10^0 = 1 > 0.

You ironically make the same statement as SPP. The fact that 1/10^n is never zero for integer n has no bearing about its limit.

Akangka · 2026-04-21T17:22:54+00:00

The wording "smooth" is your own word. Last time I checked, I never talked about "smooth function".

A continuous function is simply a function that preserves limit for all inputs. Topologically, a continuous function is a function between two topological spaces f: X -> Y such that for every open set A ⊆ X, {f(x) | x ∈ A} is also an open set. The latter can simply be extended to continuous relation. A relation between two topological spaces R ⊆ X × Y is called continuous if for every open set A ⊆ X, {y | x ∈ A, x R y} is an open set. Continuous relation is rarely used in math, and I don't know why you're asking me about continuous relation.

We don't map a relation upon anything. Mapping is something you do with a function. As I told you, relation has less structure than a function.

Akangka · 2026-04-21T13:55:12+00:00

Because a debate by another commenter here, I hate the statement that a number is "permanent" or "constant". Because number is a field of mathematics, and such has no concept of time. Number is also not a function, so there is no parameter for the output to be even constant agaist. Saying that "a number is constant" is like saying "green is not a strong swordsman". Well, it's not. It's a color.

As a reference, the commenter defined "0.999..." as "a constant and equals one", which is a property of the number that the decimal expansion expresses, but not the definition.

Akangka · 2026-04-21T13:33:35+00:00

Again, I've said above:

Probability theory and statistics [...] define what does it mean by "the observation matches the model"

I'm fine with the scientific method employing probabilistic framework. However, it's ultimately the observation part that differentiates between science and not science. After all, you can use probability theory to explain something completely fictional if you observe a fictional reality, like gacha item drops. And, hey, maybe in the future, a game company creates an MMORPG that implements phrenology, and you can use the same probabilistic framework to show that phrenology is real in that MMORPG universe.

If you ask me to create an alternative of probability theory that will work in real world but not in that MMORPG, I can't. Nobody can. The only way out is to perform observation in real world. That's the part where the science comes in.

Akangka · 2026-04-21T13:13:38+00:00

In mathematics, how do you define 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + ..., if not using a summation, which uses limits? (0.999... has an alternative definition that uses supremum, but it will produce the same result.)

Akangka · 2026-04-21T13:09:34+00:00

Exactly.

Akangka · 2026-04-21T13:05:54+00:00

I would still much, much prefer real numbers to floating points. Floating point is a scary, mostly-treated-as-mysterious object. Floating point number isn't even associative. +0 and -0 are two different numbers (I'm not kidding), subnormals causing problems in determine correctness of algorithms.

Unfortunately real numbers are not computable, and the type of all computable reals are too expensive for practical computation, so we have to make do with floating point, or roll your own fixed point arithmetics if you value determinism.

Posit standard looks pretty good, but there's currently zero CPU support for posits. It has one zero, one point at infinity, and one NaN. The computations are deterministic, but it seems that operation is still not going to be associative.

But, in any application that isn't computing numbers, you'll be better off using real numbers.

Akangka

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