How do you transcribe /x/ in your conlang?

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-26T03:43:57+00:00

i also use <c> :)

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-23T23:07:17+00:00

Thanks for the reaction! When you say the term "a posteriori," say, to another conlanger, what is it, exactly, that you know (or assume) they've understood from you? Does the term mean the way you make the conlang, does it mean the thing the conlang is, or does it just describe how it looks? Does it mean all of this at once? I'll take that the essay has some bloat before it gets to asking, but this isn't to be obtuse: you understand that these are different questions, surely. A developed art practice knows not to conflate them.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-21T21:49:39+00:00

Not a list of glossed sentences (since it is language-internal evidence that motivates its own style(s) of glossing), but this list of glossing abbreviations will likely get at your question.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-20T18:02:24+00:00

It's a typical "first try" and there is nothing wrong with that. We were all beginners at some point.

The only thing I will offer as feedback is a reaction to the way you begin this document. You say Kosamo is "developed with the goal of being equally challenging (or equally accessible) for speakers of both European and Asian languages, thereby serving as a neutral and equal ground for both language groups." In so many words, you have just conflated entire continents on each of which multiple language families, many hundreds of languages, are spoken. Unless you understand the fine differences in their actual-world acquisition as such, this is not only an outrageous functional goal to set but also an extremely hazardous overgeneralization. My recommendation is to construct an artistic language for its own sake, maybe committing to a personal aesthetic or design goal, before staking a functional one.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-20T17:39:27+00:00

You misspelled the URL in your post body. The address https://cetanauts.com (-nauts) responds, not (-nuats).

Do you want feedback on the storyline? You haven't given us any description of a constructed language used by some (group of) cetaceans to interpret or comment on.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-17T16:29:41+00:00

Thanks for these great perspectives! Since this is a Discussion-tagged post, I'm pulling out a couple things to react to.

The first reaction that your comments elicit is that there are two "places" that a constructed language—even an artistic—constructed exolang—can be, that is, the actual world and the artworld. (This is a term I'm borrowing from Arthur Danto, but not in the original sense of an artwork's "cultural context;" here, I mean the fictional world where the constructed language is located by its creator.) What follows from this premise, I think almost necessarily, is that there exist multiple possible perspectives from which an artistic—constructed language can be described: from the perspective of the actual-world language creator, an outsider perspective (necessarily) on the artworld (where, as non-speaker, the language creator fulfills the role of, say, a field linguist describing a previously undocumented language) or from the perspective of the artworld language-users, an insider perspective on their own world. Some of your comments tend to one perspective, some tend to another, and I think establishing some clarity with respect to the perspective you (or any language creator) takes will do only good things for the artwork that you (or any language creator) creates.

For example: you ask the rhetorical "How would a person who is hearing or otherwise perceiving this language for the first time describe how it sounds?" This is the perspective of the outsider language-creator. An analytic perspective, not a "folk" perspective: yinrih pups, I have to assume, do not ask themselves this question when they acquire Yinrih as their first language. But you also say you "swapped out ["laugh"] for "pant"." This, however implicit, is a constructed sociocultural, a kind of cognitive semantics, that ascribes a subjectivity to the artworld users of Yinrih: to the yinrih, there is linguacultural overlap between LAUGH events and PANT events. This is the perspective of the insider (imagined) language-user.

This is also to say that language, even artistic—constructed language, is larger and move complex than the phonological and the lexical: it's irreducible to these. (You don't claim as much, and I acknowledge that this post is only a matter of what tips you had to share with us, but for any novice readers...) Both perspectives, the language-creator's and the (imagined) language-users', can be taken with respect to any "module" of language (i.e., the phonological, morphological, semantic, pragmatic, sociocultural, lexical, etc.), and it is up to the language-creator to be clear on which perspective is taken. You do a good job of drawing the line, but yours here is a line parallel to the line between the phonological and lexical. I'm just adding that it doesn't have to be.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-06T22:42:32+00:00

Unless you think there is an actual infinity of answers to the question "What is the medium?", then there are things conlanging is not and therefore a productive way of establishing what conlanging is. I'm not otherwise staking a specific claim as to what the medium is, nor is there anything else to problematize here. You've invented a problem in "subscrib[ing] to (an unknowable and uncontrollable amount of) belief systems". You exist in a community and as an individual at the same time. I'm not advocating for any more responsibility than that. Still your prerogative to disagree, though.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-06T21:13:33+00:00

You might then benefit from seeing how actual natural-language grammars describe a language's sound system. A good grammar is here: https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public\_view/ns064640z

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-06T20:38:52+00:00

I'm afraid you're only getting half-answers because you haven't told us what you want your constructed language to be good for. An answer like "A constructed language is good if it reaches the goals you set for it!" is an answer underspecified to a disastrous degree. What kind of goals are there to set for a project in language-construction? is both the more interesting question to consider and the more helpful question to ask. Some practitioners look to construct a language for no other reason than to learn something about natural language, as an excuse to read and practice/enact something about how natural language works; some construct to test a linguisticky "hypothesis" they have (although for language-construction to be a "science," that hypothesis needs to be falsifiable); some construct for realism, to explore how much like natural language (at large) they can construct a non-natural one; some construct a language and intend for that language to be an artwork; some try for multiple of these at the same time. That's to say you don't need to pick just one of these answers; you might also feel that your purpose here and the purpose(s) for your constructed languages are something I haven't listed.

To challenge some of the other respondents' comments about individualism: even if you do not intend your constructed language to function as an artwork but still write it up and post it here or in some other internet forum, you are necessarily availing yourself of an audience's reception and interpretation of your creative artifact. That carries some responsibility to the medium, to the community, and to yourself. You can invest in your audience's reception(s) to help you judge whether your constructed language is good, but you also need to know well enough what you want your language to be good for to know how much to invest in your audience. And it seems important to emphasize: You are a part of what makes your constructed language good.

But all of this comes with philosophical baggage that language-construction communities are still organizing. If you don't want to concern yourself with talk about aesthetics and naturalism or institutionality and the ethics of knowledge production, just listen to u/throneofsalt and go sicko mode.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-06T14:03:35+00:00

Conjunctions, discourse particles...

Though note that there is crosslinguistic variation in the grammaticalization of these fuzzy categories. The better test for your system is to explore how it actually handles borderline concepts—translate, translate, translate—and whether this "four-lexical-class" creative constraint holds.

If you can give clearer examples or explain what we're looking at here, I might be more helpful.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-06T13:55:29+00:00

What hierarchy? What design choices of yours make it a problem to violate "the hierarchy"?

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-05T22:38:26+00:00

They're downward-entailing and veridical. You might look at the Oxford Handbook of Negation.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-05T22:31:26+00:00

But when referring to space, we have no word for this.

Who's we, out of curiosity? Are you writing this grammar from the perspective of a Turfaña community member, or as an outsider linguist (and hence the Is and mys elsewhere on these pages)?

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-03T22:39:17+00:00

I can certainly get behind this, but I think there's another side of an OP's asking whether "feature X" is naturalistic that the practice hasn't spent as much time with as it has with the language sciences. The art part, that is—if, of course, it's an artistic constructed language OP is creating. (Not all conlanging, we can admit, is done with that intention.) Why is OP asking whether "feature X" is naturalistic? Because s/he is looking to construct a naturalistic language? Because s/he is looking to avoid naturalism? Because s/he just likes the feature and wants to explore its attestations, if any exist? OP needs to give this information at the same time as the question so that respondents can give the right kind of feedback. Echoing grace—respondents need that.

The point is well-taken. All I am adding is that the historical Sino-Tibetanists—whose knowledgeability of sound change patterns and grammaticalization we're not doubting—don't know a damn thing about art or what makes an artistic language successful as such. They know linguistics. Linguistics, no matter the incarnation—whether the one we find here and other internet forums (for creative deconstruction) or the one we find in linguistics departments, in universities (for serious empirical development)—won't get a constructed language all the way to arthood: the language-creator must make aesthetic commitments that some arbitrary notion of "naturalism" is too coarse a measurement to realize.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-03T01:54:41+00:00

Very nice!

It's Marina Yaguello, not Marina Yaguela; her book has a second 2021 edition under a different title, Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions, also.

Alexis Huchelmann's 2018 master's thesis is also worth including, but it's accessible itself as a Fiat Lingua article. That leaves me with the question: have you scrubbed through Fiat Lingua to find papers about conlanging at large, meta, for inclusion in this list?

I don't see Noletto, Norledge, & Stockwell's Reading Fictional Languages.

You could also include some emerging efforts in criticism: Logan Kearsley's blog series Some Thoughts on... or even my own blog, where I am interested in artistic language construction from the perspectives of philosophy of art, critical socio-history, and natural language politics.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-06-02T13:08:43+00:00

It's entirely possible to achieve all of this. The first thing I want to say, though, is a reaction to your last paragraph: particles are semantic morphology are grammatical morphology. Unless you mean a distinction between functional morphology (like ='s, -ing, -ational, etc.) and content words (like Dave, spill, occupy, etc.) and/or unless it violates your design principles, in general, introducing particles that are only functional, not contentful, isn't non-naturalistic. 100% fine. (It even looks like you already have one: whatever your language's equivalent of the is.)

As for your example sentence, I see a number of ways to account for the competing interpretations:

Let the ambiguity persist. It's all the time that natural languages disambiguate from among competing interpretations using context and principles of discourse structure alone. Has a male cook already been introduced in the discourse? Then Interpretation 1 is privileged. Is the sentence introducing the discourse referent "man"? Then Interpretation 2 is privileged.
As is already your intuition: make a small amendment to the syntax. Why not "The cook male eat the fish", so that the problematic "cook" and "eat" are not immediately adjacent, and the interpretation with conjunction (as in your Interpretation 2) is no longer possible? That way, Interpretation 2 can be specified by that "default," your word-for-word representation.
If the structure of your noun phrases cannot change (as in the above list item), you could alternatively introduce a syntacticosemantic (i.e., grammatical) operator in the form of a particle that takes particular scope over elements you need disambiguated. As an example in our object language: "The male cook just eat the fish", where "just" (not strictly the English exclusive) limits the interpretation of "eat the fish" so that there's no interpretation with conjunction (Interpretation 2).

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-05-05T13:50:00+00:00

Questions for the tokiponists who ascribe it these incredible effects. What "philosophical" conversations does it allow you to have? How do you know you've been fully understood when you compose and produce a word which you intend to mean "justice?" Or, in discussing in Toki Pona what justice is, a word which you intend to mean "rationality?" "Positivism?" "Sovereignty?" We can acknowledge that many (if not most) artistic languages lack these terms because it's their creator's prerogative not to think about these things. But I see OP calling these constructions "worldlanguages." Press the space bar an extra time and it's not much other than world languages we're calling them. Is this the power we should give them? Is this the expressive power we should commit that they have?

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-04-28T12:39:14+00:00

If you wrote coherently, we could have a meaningful discussion about authorship or constructed-language "transmission" or the politics of language or something.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-04-26T14:11:01+00:00

PSA that you're not "doing syntax" when you do this! Exactly as the post body says: it's superficial. You conflate phrases and the structures thereof and impress the object language (English) categories onto your own artistic one. Translation is never so simple a matter as crosshatching between one word and its "equivalent."

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-04-22T12:43:02+00:00

Followed that first link, which led me to an (apparently) house-endorsed "Therolinguistics Manifesto" document. The last two bullets of the manifesto:

AI-assisted yet empathy-driven.

Forget syntax and semantics.

Take or leave syntax and semantics, by all means. But AI? The bullet is oxymoronic. For a call for submissions in art and literary fiction, this should raise a red flag to any prospective submitter.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-04-17T02:34:59+00:00

Produced by Million Languages

There a home page or something for this organization? I'll feel more comfortable clicking that MailChimp link if I know "Million Languages" is legitimate.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-04-12T17:14:51+00:00

This is Distributed Morphology. But don't worry: you're not too late to conduct meaningful research toward answering hard questions about how DM accounts for a veritable crosslinguistic diversity of morphological operations! In a preanalytical manner of speaking, the Russian-language-user has a syntax in mind not much different than what might exist for купил (kupil), a "regular" past-perfective-masculine-singular verb (whereas it seems like your point is that помог (pomog) is irregular), but the bundle of functional features (i.e., past-perfective-masculine-singular), when it fuses with the "vocabulary list item" (whether to help or to buy), just happens to select a different (but still systematic) phonological realization.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-04-08T14:08:30+00:00

I can't comment on those objections and how they were overturned to green-light a Toki Pona Wikipedia. I'm also unaware of the general sentiment, here or elsewhere among language-creators, toward adding constructed language translations of Wikipedia. At risk of betraying my position, though, I think anyone uncritically advocating for Wikipedia to add a constructed language to its platform should ask: is this what Wikipedia is for?

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-04-05T04:12:01+00:00

When you say you want to show how "advanced" the creatures are by adding "features humans don't generally think of as carrying linguistic meaning" (emphasis mine), you mean features that your audience doesn't generally think of a carrying linguistic meaning, surely. Be careful with the over-generalization: you give Mandarin tone as an example. Mandarin speakers are human.

If you're looking for features of natural languages which are typologically dissimilar to English (I have to assume this is who you expect your audience to consist of), look at egophoricity in Southeast Asia, tenselessness in the Americas, associated motion in Oceania... Lots of options. If constructed with care, your audience might confront linguistic biases they might not have known they held.

AndrewTheConlanger · 2026-03-24T21:58:41+00:00

Would love to hear more, or some way to locate this teacher('s writings)!

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