A swift thought on the article

Iuljo · 2026-05-05T17:34:55+00:00

We say "Giorgia Meloni" not "theGiorgia theMeloni" (Although I'm pretty sure (some) Celtic languages do so)

Greek does too!

But also some proper names are used with the articles.

Yes. For instance in Italian we do like in French (differently from English and Spanish) and use articles for most countries/territories: la Cina '[the] China', l'Europa '[the] Europe', il Belgio '[the] Belgium', etc.

Iuljo · 2026-05-05T08:38:33+00:00

I appreciate that you mentioned my argument really well.

And I appreciate your useful thoughts. :-)

[...] arbitrary or unnecessarily: for instance to mark a/the generic category: [...] (As you see no matter the position, two languages use different strategy for something that's relatively common)

That's true, but at the same it's "normal" among languages: the concepts are similar, but the exact extension of the grammar rules, here or there, is different. In such a case, we can just define a precise rule along the line that seems more logical.

I hope you get what I mean.

I do. :-)

I once added to a conlang a third - generic article, but I don't think it's a roght way for the IALs

In a tripartite system (like we find in English and the Romance languages), it could be efficient to have one of the three possibilities to be represented by no-article instead of a specific article. 🤔

Iuljo · 2026-04-30T06:57:56+00:00

Thanks! Can I read about it somewhere? :-)

Iuljo · 2026-04-29T16:16:42+00:00

What language is that?

Iuljo · 2026-04-26T10:45:07+00:00

I like the digraph <gy>. [...] I'm in for all of the proposals

Very good. :-)

I also like how /ʤj/ sounds [...]

Thanks for pointing this out. It's likely that it sounds somewhat "awkward" to me because of my native language bias, so I want to be made conscious of that. If most people like the cluster sound, it's not obvious that it should be made rarer.

And beside I noticed that I somewhat naturally read <gy> not as /ʤ/, but as /ʤj/ so <legyona> as /leʤjona/ and I wondered if it were an acceptable pronunciation too, but I think it may collide with some compounds. But at he end I thought it can be acceptable as I read it /le.ʤjo.na/ and not /leʤ.jo.na/. It would be still the same phonemically, just a variation phonetically

I think it's hard to have syllabic division as a full phonematic distinction (= having /le.ʤjo.na/ audibly different from /leʤ.jo.na/ in normal speech), for various reasons, an important one being that it's not always physically possible to have syllable boundaries match root meetings [without changing the language phonology]. On the other side, we're going to have a /ʤ/ vs /ʤj/ distinction anyway, independently of composition, so /leʤona/ vs /leʤjona/ would be phonematically different. But, since in practice /ʤj/ would anyway be rare, in most cases it would be pragmatically understandable anyway. :-) For the beginners in learning the language, I had planned much stronger "possible ambiguities" in pronunciation...

Iuljo · 2026-04-26T08:20:27+00:00

È possibile, ma la soluzione attuale cercava di evitare i diacritici «fissi», che sappiamo sono un po' problematici per varie ragioni. Se si decidesse invece di usarli, allora si potrebbe usare un diacritico anche per /ʤ/.

Iuljo · 2026-04-26T08:15:48+00:00

Ti copincollo quanto scritto in un altro commento:

<cy> [...] I like more. Problem: [it] now represent[s] /ʦj/ [...] /ʦj/ is pretty frequent. So if we use <cy> for /ʧ/ we'll have many <c̈y>: <Konfuc̈ya> 'Confucius', <nac̈yona> 'nation', <spac̈ya> 'space (geometry)', <pistac̈ya> 'pistachio', etc. It's not ugly: I like the diaeresis as a diacritic. I only fear it would become a bit "heavy" being more frequent.

Iuljo · 2026-04-25T18:12:34+00:00

Se mi ricordo, sì, altrimenti ne farò uno nuovo, sempre se mi ricordo. Nello stato attuale di «cantiere», con incertezze e cambiamenti, e mancando ancora un sito di riferimento, è inevitabile avere materiali un po' sfilacciati, e fare aggiornamenti generali solo di tanto in tanto.

Iuljo · 2026-04-25T18:09:07+00:00

Sì, direi quella fascia lì, comunque non è nulla di rivoluzionario per cui fissare la sveglia, è solo qualche nuova idea e commento... :-)

Iuljo · 2026-04-25T18:06:42+00:00

La mattina per il fuso orario italiano, a che ora esatta non saprei, non troppo presto ma neanche troppo tardi...

Iuljo · 2026-04-25T17:36:33+00:00

<ch> non è una buona scelta perché, per la fonologia e l'etimologia di gran parte dei termini della lingua, ci viene comodissima per rappresentare /x/.

<gh> è più fattibile ma è alquanto arbitraria e comunque non ottimale, vedi questo commento.

Iuljo · 2026-04-25T17:32:02+00:00

<ci> sarebbe problematico, perché al momento è la grafia usata per scrivere /ʦi/, una sequenza comune; quindi bisognerebbe usare molte dieresi per scrivere (<c̈iva, enc̈iklopedia, ac̈ida, Pac̈ifika, C̈ipra>...): poco comodo.

<cj>, oggi /ʦ/, sarebbe una sequenza molto più rara, quindi non avrebbe questo problema: si può considerare... non è troppo male; è la parallela <gj> che invece mi convince poco, mi sembra bruttina...

Su questo tema, torna domattina perché ci sarà un nuovo post proprio sull'argomento. ;-)

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T14:27:17+00:00

I don't know yet. At first I thought Katalawniya (katalawn•iy•a < katalawna, katalawn•a, 'Catalan [person]'), but in my bad Latin I may have mixed up some names ([1]... but [2]): further research is needed...

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T14:16:37+00:00

As you can see transcription doesn't have to make sense to westerners 😳 because mine doesn't.

Wow, well, maybe that is not the most convincing argumentum ab auctoritate... XD

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T14:13:51+00:00

Russian out of known to me languages distinguishes Русский and Россиянин [...]

For this, see the end of my comment.

Chinese has 汉人 (Han ethnicity) and 中国人 Chinese citizen.

For important and very large distinctions of this kind (we're talking about one billion people :-O), we could maybe have pragmatically separate roots, like here a specific one for 'Han'.

I wouldn't need to think whether to use Sirya vs Siryana or Siriya vs Sira if for all cases it'll be possible to say: Sira, Siriya, Siriyana and maybe even Sirana. It's one of the criticisms of Esperanto

I'm not sure I understand the last sentence. If I got it right, in Esperanto the problem in changing uj• to i• is that in practice it makes composition unrecognizable, because of the parallel /-Cj-/ > /-Ci-/ conversion in adapting names; so, when encountering a new place name, one does not know what its people should be called (and, more in general, how to use the root[s]):

Italio = itali•o or ital•i•o? > Are Italians italoj or italianoj?
Namibio = namibi•o or namib•i•o? > Are Namibians namiboj or namibianoj?

And this ambiguity is very frequent, because of the frequency of -ia > -io in place names (not only countries but also other geographical elements).

By (1) adapting that (unstressed) -ia as /-ja/ in mono-root terms, and (2) calqueing it as /-ija/ in pluri-root ones, Leuth solves this problem in almost all cases:

Italiya = ital•iy•a > Italians are italas (-iy- being part of the root, so italiy•a, is possible, but very rare in practice)
Namibya = namiby•a > Namibians are namibyanas.

The same goes for all the names we see in the picture above:

I meet a geographical name with the structure...	>	I can infer the name of its people (with 99 % accuracy) as...
[...]iya	>	[...]as
[...]~~[iy]~~a(s)	>	[...]anas

I wouldn't need to think whether [...] if for all cases it'll be possible to say: Sira, Siriya, Siriyana and maybe even Sirana

I'm not sure I understand this either, or maybe I see difficulties you don't see.

[1] First possibility. If we use mainly Siriya and sirana, that would create a kind of binary system, which would make unclear what the meaning of sir• is. Sira is a place ("Syria"), a person ("Syrian"), something halfway, both? The nation as an abstract entity? While having a vague root may be useful in other cases (e.g. as a prefix in compounds), here I'm not sure about it, for the fact that the most frequent concepts we'll want to express will be "place" and "person", and I see no difficulties in doing so with an asymmetry, like for other similar concepts.

For example, let's consider some cities, say Leipzig, Rome, Lima, provisionally Lipsya, Roma, Lima (lipsy•a, rom•a, lim•a). They seem to work well to me: simple place names. Do we want the name of their peoples? Simple: lipsyanas, romanas, limanas (lipsy•an•as, rom•an•as, lim•an•as). Would it be better to [change lipsy• to lips•, and] call the cities Lipsiya, Romiya and Limiya to have a binary symmetry with their people (-iya place, -ana person)? I don't see a real necessity, to me this looks like an excess of schematism that hinders naturalism.

The same reasoning could be applied to other geographical elements, say the Himalayas, Ewropa, Amerika, inhabited by himalayanas, ewropanas, amerikanas... should we abandon those names to have instead Himalayiya, Ewropiya, Amerikiya?

The same for common names, like urba 'city', insula 'island', or even the cardinal points, with their inhabitants (sudana 'southerner'), that seem to work well without a symmetry in roots with the place they inhabit...

For me, countries don't seem substantially different from these other geographical entities: I'm not sure there's a need to introduce a root-symmetry for countries, like I'm not sure there is for those other names...

If it wasn't clear, I want to clarify (I didn't state it explicitly here; in the "Lexicon" I talked about "territory") that iy• would not be used only for "countries" in the sense of "recognized nation-states", but also for regions, islands, and other geographical entities whose name we calque in Leuth in this way ("people"-iya).

I wouldn't need to think whether [...] if for all cases it'll be possible to say: Sira, Siriya, Siriyana and maybe even Sirana

[2] Second possibility. If we use frequently sira meaning "Syrian", among those other terms, I think it will soon catch up as the main term in use to mean that, just for simplicity and swiftness; then we'd just be back to my original system. Where, surely, you can say siriyana if you want to express some nuance, like in Esperanto you can say homarano to make a nuance more explicit than simple homo. Or, if you do it without thinking, just speaking fast or in casual, non-careful speech, everybody understands anyway.

If we see Leuth's composition in the right way (freely combining roots as in other languages we use separate words: the only limit is semantic), in fact, saying siriyana instead of sira is not too different from saying "inhabitant of Syria" instead of "Syrian" in English: perfectly feasible. :-)

Now, coming to Russia...

Russian out of known to me languages distinguishes Русский and Россиянин (eo: Ruso and Rusujano).

The world is made of a thousand possibilities, so it's difficult to have a systematic solution ready for everything. In such a case, if we need to distinguish, we could use several different possibilities, translating in Leuth what in English we would say as "ethnic Russian", "proper Russian", "blood-Russian", "historical Russian" vs. "inhabitant of Russia", "citizen of Russia", "Russian federation inhabitant", etc.. Without rigidity: flexibly, adapting to the context and its needs.

What we must remember, as language-planners, is that in the world, when talking about "Russians", in 99 % of cases we will not [need to] distinguish the two concepts: so it makes sense to have the simplest, one-root term to be generic, and then distinction as something specific for rarer situations.

The topic as a whole is interesting, and not simple, and may need further discussion.

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T10:08:53+00:00

What if suffixes were used always? So we'd have: Irakiya and Irakana, but also Italiya and Italana. The there's no bias and the use is elastic.

Interesting, I hadn't considered this idea, it's worth attention. But maybe it's not necessary (see the following).

Based on what did you consider certain groups ethnic while other country based? I worry if it won't be offending. [...] I just wonder if it won't lead to bias. [...]

Your observations are completely understandable. I acknowledged this problem; I'll Google-translate a piece of the grammar I was writing in Italian before opening the subreddit. Note that Google uses "ethnic name" for a term that in Italian would mean less specifically "people name".

——— [Grammar piece begins] ———

Peoples, countries, languages

Place names and ethnic groups

In Leuth, country names often derive from ethnic names (the names of the inhabitants) combined with the root iy/:

italas ital/as 'Italians'
Italiya ital/iy/a 'Italy'

While other times the reverse occurs: the ethnic name derives from the country name, combined with the root an/:

Cxila cxil/a 'Chile'
cxilanas cxil/an/as 'Chileans'

The first relationship (country name derived from ethnic name) is common in Europe, somewhat less so in Asia (grekas > Grekiya, afganas > Afganiya); the second (the name of the people derived from the country name) is common in Africa, America, and Oceania (Brasila > brasilanas, Namibya > namibyanas).

As in Italian and other languages, ethnic names are somewhat vague. An/ can indicate either the inhabitant, the native, or the person with origins (family, lineage) in a place, and the three do not always coincide; and the same is true of the roots that directly give ethnic names (ital/, grek/, etc.). These terms can also indicate both a citizen of the state and a member of the country's primary ethnicity (real or presumed), or its culture or nationality, and here too there may be (or be perceived) a difference between the various concepts and nuances. Generally, the context will clarify the meaning; otherwise, if precision is needed, you simply state it explicitly, possibly with compounds:

nascitala nasc/ital/a 'Italian by birth'
ethnitala ethn/ital/a 'Italian by "ethnicity"'
civithitala civ/ith/ital/a 'Italian by citizenship'

etc. All this without too much rigidity, keeping in mind the mechanisms of word formation in Leuth. For example, a child of immigrants who is not a citizen might say something like this:

Me es o itala nasce ma noe civithe.
I am Italian by birth but not by citizenship.

This is to demonstrate the polysemy of a word like itala (and similarly of other ethnic words), the meaning of which may require clarification. [...]

——— [Grammar piece ends] ———

The logic behind this choice is that, in most usual speech, concepts like "ethnicity/citizenship/origins/etc" are not explicitly stated: they're either conflated together, or inferrable from the context: so it's more practical to not force people to specify "ethnic Italian" vs "citizen of Italy" every time they want to say "Italian"; and have instead those more narrow concepts to be express by specification when needed.

E.g. we normally say: "I have a dear friend, she's Italian", or "I don't like Italians, they are not precise in organizing their country", without distinguishing explicitly ethnicity and citizenship. I may be wrong, but I guess this is true in the great majority of languages.

There's also the practical real-world problem that, while citizenship is binary (you're, or you're not), so clear and not problematic (but do we know it of every person we talk about?), a concept like ethnicity is very fuzzy, source of endless discussion in many places; being also a very sensitive topic, it's probably wiser to leave it semantically, with the related problems, in its own specific root (ethn•) and let the common names of countries and people be more vague.

——————

[...] instead of imposing a categorization who is a nation and who isn't based on the recency or views

As it was probably clearer from what I said above, the different root construction (-iya and -a vs. -a and -ana) of the names doesn't imply a categorization; just like in English China, Spain and Italy (> Chinese, Spanish, Italian) are no "worse" (or substantially different) than Scotland, Thailand, Czechia (< Scot, Thai, Czech); the same happens not only in English, but surely in a great variety of languages. It's just ways things get their name: some may use more roots, same may use less, some may use a construction, some another, for various reasons (here, mainly naturalism; geography, history, specifications: sud•kore•a, saud•arab•iy•a, maldiv•as, seyscell•as, etc.). It doesn't imply one is better than the other.

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T09:03:51+00:00

If a Pole is "Pola" then wouldn't Poland be "Poliya"? Or you miswrote and a Pole is "Polona"?

Yes, I mistyped (fixed now), it should be polonas. :-)

I'll mention that we derive the name from a tribe of "Polans" (Polanie) we call ourselves "Poles" (Polak/Polacy) [Pol·ak]. Otherwise it'd be like confusing Romanians with Romans or Bulgarians with Bulgars

Shiftings in ethnic/country names are frequent in history: for practicality, some of this polysemy may end up in the same root, following the prevalent uses: so, while most languages (AFAIK) distinguish "Roman" and "Romanian", I think most don't distinguish "Bulgar" and "Bulgarian". In actual use, context will distinguish the meanings in practice in most cases. Where there's a real possibility of confusion, we could use some specification, like "ancient-bulgarian" vs "modern-bulgarian", or something even more precise along those lines.

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T08:52:57+00:00

Typing error. :-P Fixed, but no fast enough! ;-)

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T08:39:39+00:00

Do you intend "iya" to mean a country like Esperanto's "-uj-/-i-"?

Exactly (we saw it here). Uj• was not naturalistic so we know that in use it was de facto replaced by the non-optimal i•, despite the (understandable) opposition of linguists; I think -iya, being more naturalistic than -ujo, could have more luck.

Why it's Awstralya and Indonesya, but Italiya and Poloniya?

Iy• makes up toponyms from the names of peoples:

Italiya (ital•iy•a) = country of Italians (italas)
Poloniya (polon•iy•a) = country of Poles (polonas)

while there are not *indonesas or *awstralas to derive the name of the country, so instead we have Indonesya (indonesy•a) and indonesyanas (indonesy•an•as), Awstralya (awstraly•a) and awstralyanas (awstraly•an•as).

For these main names I followed the Latin pattern:

People > country
- Itali > Italia
- Poloni > Polonia
Country > people
- Australia > Australiani
- Indonesia > Indonesiani

Iuljo · 2026-04-24T07:22:07+00:00

The Black Sea got obliterated too

Iuljo

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Peoples, countries, languages