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My apologies, what I meant is that most of your languages are made for fantastic, fantasy worlds, as opposed to a fictional culture on Earth. If you're creating a language for a culture set on Earth, you'd probably incorporate features that tie it to a real language, am I correct?

I think you still may be misunderstanding what the key questions are and how they factor into language creation. There are two questions:

Is this language supposed to be descended from an existing language (or set of languages) on Earth?

Is this language spoken by creatures that are identical to humans in all the ways that play a crucial role in language use, comprehensijon, and transmission?

These are the only relevant questions. Notice I didn't say anything about where the languages are spoken. That bit is irrelevant. Language has its own geography and it's the only geography that matters when it comes to a posteriori language construction.

For example, looking at Dothraki, the answer to (1) is no, and the answer to (2) is yes. For that reason, Dothraki should be a language that looks entirely ordinary, in terms of how it stacks up with languages spoken currently on Earth, but its vocabulary and grammar shouldn't be directly related to any language on the planet. How could it be, if our planet doesn't exist in that universe? But since Dothraki are completely ordinary human beings their language should be a compeltely ordinary human language.

If you look at the aliens District 9, the answers to both (1) and (2) are no, despite the fact that the movie takes place in South Africa. And, in fact, you see some very interesting linguistic phenomena in that movie, where you have two species that understand but cannot use each other's languages. Its setting, though, doesn't mean that the alien language should be influenced by Afrikaans in any important way, though. It may have "borrowings", but even those would be strange (calques, most likely), since the aliens can't actually make human sounds—the same way the humans wouldn't have "borrowings" from the alien language.

On the other hand, if you look at Trigedasleng, the answers to both (1) and (2) are yes. But the suggestion you seem to be making is that I might kind of haphazardly "borrow" features from an existing language into a language that I'm nevertheless creating from scratch. That wouldn't make sense. Trigedasleng is simply an evolved form of American English with some specific constraints (some quite unrealistic, due to the scifi setting) placed on the evolution. I didn't "incorporate" features from American English: it IS American English, through and through, evolved in a way that makes sense for the setting.

There are certainly a posteriori conlangs where the creator approaches the creation of the language by saying, "I took the initial consonant mutation of Irish and combined it with the triconsonantal root system of Arabic and added the Turkish plural suffix (with vowel harmony) and added the accusative from Esperanto", and the like. This is one of the hallmarks of an amateur conlanger. Not even a creole language in the real world does this. Creole languages draw influences from many different languages, but the resulting system can't be divided up neatly into different linguistic sources. Furthermore, the result is a coherent system that doesn't look like any of the sources. Tok Pisin gets a lot of its vocabulary and grammar from English, but also gets vocabulary from German and other languages that were native to the region. When listening to the language, though, it's not like it sounds like English, then it suddenly sounds like German for a word, then it sounds like a Papuan language, then back to English: the whole thing sounds like Tok Pisin. It's a seamless, coherent system—just like any language, since all languages on Earth have borrowings and features from other languages.

Also, minor nitpick: "real" language doesn't make sense. We say natural language vs. constructed languages. Both are equally real, in that neither has any kind of material existence. A constructed language is a real language with a fake history.

Does this make sense?

Kinda spitballing a hypothesis here based off of an I once saw somewhere in the conlanging corner of the internet (I think it was on an episode of Conlangery talking about extremely regular philosophical languages? @gacorley might remember), but I've got an idea about lexical structure, because it seems to me like there's two opposing trends in Language when it comes to semantic fields.

On the one hand, from the perspective of acquisition and to some extent production it's nice to have words that are derivationally related to each other, both because it makes it possible to 'work out' the meaning of the word even in the absence of actual real-world context and because new words can easily be coined to fill lacunae in vocabulary. 'My father is a weaver; What does he do for a living? He weaves' kinda stuff.

But on the other hand, from the perspective of perception you don't really want words that sound similar to each other, particularly in the same semantic field, because when you're talking about those topics, well, if everything sounds similar (especially in a noisy environment where you might not be able to hear entirely clearly) then you're going to start to get confused very quickly. 'Judges judge what judgements are just' sort of thing (see also 'oligosynthesis'), as well as of course 'Acronym and Abbreviation Overload' type phenomena (after all, there's only 26 possible syllables in an acronym...).

I think the fact that languages will vary between favouring one over the other does likely have impacts on learnability. The effect is not going to be major in comparison to other things, but there's unlikely to be nothing there.

For instance, obviously for a speaker of a language that makes a lot of use of derivation (Russian, say), English must be made harder to learn by the number of separate roots needed (like we have entirely different roots for the meat of domestic animals for pity's sake!).

But at the same time, for me, a native speaker of English, part of the irritation of learning Russian is that nobody is there teaching you the derivational morphology that enables you to make a guess at the approximate meaning of расследование from identifying the root (след 'trail') and building up from there (verbaliser -ова-, prepositional prefix рас- and adjectivaliser/abstract nominaliser -ние; the end result means 'investigation'), nor am I really that used to making use of that because in English you so often can't.

I'll note that this is kind of similar to a proposal made in Trudgill's Sociolinguistic Typology (2011), where he points out that small sound systems like Hawai'ian can be found in isolated languages precisely because all the words start to sound the same and context (i.e. shared background information between participants, more available in smaller societies) is more necessary to disambiguate what's being said. I think what I'm proposing is kinda orthogonal to this, because both extremes are kinda difficult, and there's several kinds of factor which can influence a language's tendency in either direction (English for instance has its several layers of historically more prestigious foreign vocabulary from having spent time as the language of an underclass, while 'pidgin-adjacent' creoles are of course forced to 'make do' with limited lexical resources they have, thus giving rise to stuff like Tok Pisin gras bilong fes 'beard'), but perhaps that's something for me to write about somewhere else.

What I'm Doing On My Blog

I'm planning on doing a couple of things with my blog.

Language Journals

Dance Progress

Life Notes

Info Dumps

Cooking Knowledge

Language Journals

I am currently learning Korean and Chinese. I am also re-learning Japanese, Tok Pisin, and Spanish after not using them for a while. On here I'm going to be writing journal entries in each language, posting my vocabulary and grammar notes, and anything else related to my language learning. If you speak any of these languages please interact and correct me if I use something wrong or if there's a better way to say something. I'm open to feedback and would love to have a conversation and make new language friends :).

Dance Progress

My goal for the rest of the year is to learn at least the chorus of a song per day. I have a list of songs I want to learn. I have numbered them and will be using a random number generator to choose which dance to learn that day. I will be posting the list and an entry about each dance I learn (possibly with a video of me doing the dance ;))

Life Notes

This is where I will be posting bullet journal style entries, lessons I've learnt, and photos from my day. Basically like a digital bullet journal. Maybe with drawings.

Info Dumps

Anything I've hyperfocused on I've decided to put my research on here instead of google drive. This can be anything from random topics I research, to whatever series of things I've rabbit holed to draw, to things I've crocheted or designed. Just a digital diary of my hobbies and hyperfixations.

Cooking Knowledge

Cooking is a big thing in my family. My dad has read tons of recipes and cooking books and has committed the information to memory, now he doesn't really uses recipes (only uses them as a base idea of flavours and ingredients if he's unfamiliar) and measures with the spirit of the ancestors. This is the way I've been taught to cook since I was little. Now that I'm an adult and am cooking a lot more I am testing out my skills and figuring things out for myself and creating my own brain cooking book. To help me keep track of everything I'm going to be writing down my recipes, my notes on different dishes and ingredients. My mum can't eat too much garlic and onion, I can't eat shellfish, tomato, and eggplant so I also have to figure out how to make things to suit that. I'll also be writing any techniques I've learnt.

That's my plan for this blog. Obviously there will be some random stuff but I'll try to fit it into one of these categories. Thank You for reading. I love messages and suggestions about new things to try so feel free to message me :)

Have a great day! <33333

the passcode thing is cool as shit. if youre still infodumping what is your FAVORITE thing about a language. or languages in general. talk for a long time about some nerd shit is what i'm saying

You want a long infodump of nerd shit?? HERE IT COMES

My absolute favorite area of study in linguistics is pidgin and creole languages and, in particular, this really weird theory around them being the secret to discovering the “root code of language.” To start, you need to know what a pidgins and creoles are and what the difference is:

The word “pidgin” is based on a transcription of how Chinese merchants pronounced the English word “business.” And that’s a pretty apt description! A pidgin is a sort of broken mashup of two or more languages that occurs when speakers of different languages, who don’t speak one another’s languages with much fluency, have to interact and figure out how to communicate with one another. Historically, this often happened during trade and commerce interactions.

Imagine you’re a French merchant arriving in Haiti and trying to sell gun powder to a local who speaks no French whatsoever and you don’t even know what language this dude speaks. And you’re pointing at your wares and shouting “Poudre pour les armes!!” which to him probably sounds like “Pood pore lay zahhm” and the local kinda squints at you and says “Poud zam?” and mimes shooting a gun. You’re sick of shouting and you think he gets what you’re saying, so you’re just like “Oui, sure, poud zam,” and now gunpowder is “poud zam.”

Generally, one language provides most of the vocabulary for a pidgin, whichever is most widely spoken or is spoken by those with the most prestige or power. That’s called 'lexification.' So, for instance, Haitian creole is 'French lexified.' The vocabulary will be colored by local accents, though, and depend on what sounds everyone knows how to make (if half the people don’t know how to trill their ‘R’s, that sound will be left out of a Spanish-based pidgin).

When it comes to grammar, though, pidgins are distinctly lacking. Communicating grammar by pointing and shouting just doesn’t work that well, and you can mostly get by without a lot of grammatical nuance in those contexts. “Me give gunpowder. You give one-two-three bag gold.” BOOM, commerce accomplished.

You really only need more comprehensive structures once the pidgin enters the private/personal sphere, and THIS is where creoles come in. A pidgin becomes a creole the moment it becomes someone’s mother tongue. The second a kid is raised speaking pidgin as a first language, it’s considered a creole. And the reason we make that distinction is where things get very interesting.

Unlike pidgins, creoles are grammatically complete. But it’s not like anyone sits down and says, "Okay, kids are learning this now, we have to figure out the grammar rules.” It’s actually the opposite. Children naturally fill in the grammatical gaps of a pidgin. Studies that compared adult pidgin speakers with their creole-speaking children found that the children had formed grammatical constructions... pretty much out of nowhere. They do it naturally. Instinctively.

Now, this makes sense if you’ve ever spoken with a child who is still learning their first language. Have you ever heard a kid say ‘mouses' instead of 'mice'? It’s because they’ve learned the grammar rule for how we pluralize things in English and simply over-applied it. Kids will take the barest hints and grains of grammar in a pidgin and apply them over an entire language. And if there’s nothing to go off of? They make it out of nothing.

One really fascinating thing about creoles is that a lot of them share similar features - even when they were made in very different places, based on very different languages. Since a lot of modern creoles were created during the colonial period, one theory was that those features come from common ‘substratum’ languages (languages that didn’t lexify the pidgin) that were spoken by the African slaves transported around the world. While this may have contributed to some language similarities, attempts to trace back the linguistic origins of the populations that created the original pidgins has generally disproved this theory. Another WILD theory was that all creoles were originally based on Portuguese. Don’t ask me how this makes sense. It doesn’t. But there were whole ass professional academics spewing that shit.

A more contemporary - and exciting! - theory is that these common features come from a “root code of language” buried in the human brain. Basically, that children can and will learn whatever grammatical constructions exist in the language they’re taught, but when there’s nothing for them to go off of, there is a very old basic language instinct that reverts them to our oldest, most basic grammar forms. One example is reduplication or the repeating of all or part of a word. Instead of using a suffix for pluralization (mouses), you just say the word twice (mouse-mouse). Instead of saying ‘really tall,’ you say ‘tall-tall.’ This does exist in some other languages but is particularly common in creoles.

Creoles are often seen as “simple” or “incomplete” languages. While they are simpler in some ways, native speakers are still able to convey complex ideas, which makes them more complicated in others. For instance, creoles tend to have a smaller vocabulary. However, to make up for this, they tend to be highly metaphorical in their constructions. In Tok Pisin, the creole of Papua New Guinea, most fibrous materials are called 'gras' (as in ‘grass’ - it’s English-lexified). But to distinguish between them, you have ‘gras bilong het’ (hair), ‘gras bilong sipsip’ (wool), ‘gras bilong solwara’ (seaweed).

Grammatically, creoles tend to have fewer verb tenses and tend not to have case markers. But it would be a mistake to say that all creole grammar is simple. To use Tok Pisin as an example again, that language has way more pronoun distinctions than most languages. Instead of just “we,” it has words for “you and me,” “me and another person [not you],” “me and two other people [not you],” “me and the two of you,” “me and all y’all,” and “me and all of them.” They have different forms of ‘you’ depending on if you’re talking about one, two, three, or more than three people - same with ‘he/she/them’! (And their pronouns are nongendered.)

Grammatical simplicity doesn’t equate to a lesser language, in any case. And it can tell us a lot about how languages develop over time. Creoles have fewer irregular constructions than older languages, which makes sense - irregular constructions are often vestiges of old words or grammar that no longer exist. A lot of grammatical complexity is just the result of things being added to a language or changing over time. If creoles are using a “new” root code sort of grammar, it makes sense that it wouldn’t be as “complex” - they haven’t had time to fuck it up yet!

So these are some of the many, many reasons I love creoles. I hope you enjoyed this infodump <3

Ask me about linguistics!

My MC's world has a medieval-type setting, but magic allowed them to advance faster with space travel. So they're fully aware of and in contact with six nearby solar systems that are populated. My question is: would it make sense to have people from all these different planets communicate with each other via a Universal Sign Language? (For the record, there's also deaf characters in my story that use their own regional sign languages, which are different than the interplanetary sign language)

Feral: I think it totally makes sense. For trade to occur between groups that speak different languages, some kind of common language has to be established for communication. Often in our history, that’s been a language imposed by dominant or colonial powers, but a pidgin or a blended language could easily develop. Sign languages are particularly fantastic for this as they can be used equally among hearing and d/Deaf people as well as in a variety of environments. One thing to keep in mind is that for a USL to work, the various peoples across the six solar systems will need to have enough anatomical similarities that the audience can reasonably expect them to be able to make the same signs. As you know, there are many sign languages in the real world, and they have accents and dialects within them (video), so it’s reasonable to assume that any USL would have the same. Noting that accents develop from different alien species having a variation on specific signs from what is considered the “standard” way of doing it can help with verisimilitude as well as allow for a slightly wider variety of alien anatomy, but still keep in mind that if a large portion of your population couldn’t possibly sign in the standard dialect, it’s unlikely that said dialect would have organically developed or been accepted without force.

Utuabzu: It is certainly plausible, particularly if one or several species lack the ability to use spoken language for anatomical reasons. Throughout history one of the first things that happens when two groups first come into contact is the development of a contact language. This is usually a very basic code with a few words initially established by gesture, almost all nouns or verbs, and little to no grammar. Over time, with prolonged contact this evolves into a pidgin, characterised by a simplified grammar and a limited vocabulary, but still more versatility than a contact language. If, later on, you have a significant number of children learning the pidgin as a first language, they will elaborate its grammar as they use it and create or borrow vocabulary to fill in gaps until you have a full, natural language, called a creole. (NB: while there are several languages called “Pidgin” or some variation thereof, they are almost all now classed as creoles. Pidgin and creole are here just the technical terms used by linguists and should not be taken as any sort of value judgement.)

One thing that can occur is that a pre-existing common language, sometimes a pidgin or creole, can spread and overtake contact languages instead of allowing them to develop into pidgins. A good example of this is Bislama in Vanuatu or Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, where an initially limited pidgin extended to cover peoples speaking languages unrelated to the initial speakers’, and often with little to no direct contact with them. In both cases this occurred in large part because a powerful body (in this case government) chose to use that creole as its common language.

So, in short, yes, it’s totally plausible. You may especially want to look at this real-world example of a signed creole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Indian_Sign_Language

Toki Pona Overview pt. 1 (Words)

**sources: Wikipedia and tokipona.net**

Toki Pona is a minimal conlang.

The Vocabulary (essentially these are all the words in the language)

-words may be used as nouns, adjectives, verbs, or adverbs, therefore the meaning given in the picture is HIGHLY flexible

-writing systems: latin script (eg. “telo”), sitelen pona (i.e. hieroglyphic representation like the two waves above “telo”), sitelen sitelen (i.e. syllable based hieroglyphics), Tengwar script, and even Kanji 

-there is also a sign language format!

-FUN FACT: many of the words are derived from English, Finnish, Tok Pisin, Georgian, Dutch, Acadian French, Esperanto, Croatian, Chinese, and a few other languages

~ Alphabet & Pronunciation ~

9 consonants: p, t, k, s, m, n, l, j, w

5 vowels: a, e, i, o, u

-the letter sounds are very similar to English except “j” has a “y” sound (which is similar to Esperanto and German)

-vowel sounds do not change: father, met, peel, more, and food respectively represent the sounds of a, e, i, o, and u

-the first syllable of a word is always stressed

-most words have 2 syllables (70%), though some are 1 syllable (~20%) or 3 syllables (10%)

~ Pronouns/Possessive Adjectives ~

-mi: I, we, me, us, my, our

-sina: you, yours

-ona: any 3rd person identifier 

~ Nouns ~

-no NUMBER is expressed. singular and plural verbs appear the same

-lots of noun phrases/compound words must be used (eg. jan + utala = person + fight = warrior/soldier; telo + kili = liquid + fruit = juice)

-no proper nouns exist so they are expressed by noun + distinct adjective (eg. to refer to me [my name is Leeza], you would say jan Leeza [jan= person]. Note: you can also "tokiponize" a name)

~ Modifiers ~

the order is important from comprehension!

- noun + modifier 1 + modifier 2 is read as (noun + modifier 1) + modifier 2

that is.... jan pona lukin (person + good + look at) is read as ‘a friend who is looking,’ not ‘a good-looking person’

- noun + “pi” + modifier 1 + modifier 2 + modifier 3.....etc

this structure allows you to group as many modifiers as you need. “Pi” means of. Eg. jan pi pona lukin = a good-looking person

- demonstratives (ni), numbers, and possessive adjectives follow other modifiers 

~ Numbers ~

nanpa: number

wan: 1

tu: 2

luka: 5

mute: 20

ali/ale: 100

-there are two numerical systems which will be explained in a future post! They are probably the biggest drawback to the language because they're not very efficient/distinct though.

Got curious as to why no one’d tried to reconstruct Proto-North Bougainville given that it contains Rotokas and went looking for cognates (i.e. roped a few people into filling in a spreadsheet) and it looks to me like the answer is that Rotokas is an isolate.

Didn’t try to filter out loans because there are too many candidates for source languages (although I caught a few from Austronesian or Tok Pisin), and a really high rate of lexical replacement would be plausible in the region! But at the same time, a really high rate of lexical replacement would be a plausible explanation for the cognate-looking things between Rotokas and North Bougainville.

There are patterns of sporadic consonant variation that look like loanword adaptation -- t~r, p~b, h~k etc. -- that occur even in items you’d expect to be basic vocabulary! (Rotokas oira ~ Konua oita ‘man’; cf. atari ~ atari ‘fish’)

And the three obvious loans that turned up were basket (multilingual wordlist with the same form in multiple columns), know, and speak... which you’d expect to be resistant to borrowing!

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Ah yes I meant in writing. Or text based conversation where you can't hear the accent. I was thinking about Singaporean English or Singlish, you know. You mentioned misused words and or oddly formal structure, but this is where I got confused, how do you know that the words they use are misused, I mean, there's a possibility that that word's commonly used in their vocabulary, while it's odd/uncommon in yours, right? I don't have any idea in this because my language is only spoken in my country.

I don’t think a word is misused if it’s part of a regional vocabulary, or a creole language. 

Like if someone refers to the storage part at the back of a car as a “trunk” then chances are they’re American. If they call it a “boot” then they might be from the UK or Australia. Neither usage is wrong though. 

When I talk about misusing words, I’m talking about having the wrong word there entirely. Like “cloths” for “clothes” or “price” for “prize”. I mean, these could also be typos, but when a bunch crop up in a fic it’s very likely that the writer’s first language isn’t English. 

If I read something that’s in Singlish or Tok Pisin I’m not going to mistake it for badly-constructed English. Creole languages are their own entity. That’s a little like saying that English is just badly-constructed German with some French thrown in. Maybe once upon a time, but it’s definitely it’s own thing now! 

A Year in Language, Day 261: Tok Pisin Tok Pisin is a creole language of Papua New Guinea (PNG). It is spoken by some 5+ million people, all but 1-200,000 do so as a second language. It is a relative, in the convoluted ways of creole languages, to Bislama of Vanuatu. The name "Tok Pisin" is literally "Talk pidgin", and is often referred to as "Pidgin" by Anglophones on the island. In spite of that Tok Pisin is not a pidgin, a grammatically lax system of crosslinguistic communication, but a fully fledged fusion language aka. a creole. Tok Pisin developed around the turn of the 20th century. Like Bislama its development was largely a product of the European practice of abducting and enslaving peoples from different island cultures and moving them to wherever labor was needed. Tok Pisin is English derived in spite of the fact that its origin was in the German controlled colonies of PNG, largely because it was brought as a pidgin by people previously enslaved by Anglophones. Tok Pisin is currently the most widespread lingua france of PNG, which has some 850 native tongues. The previous bridge language of the aggressively diverse island was Hiri Motu, which still claims a few thousand speakers. It is an official language of the nation (alongside Hiri Motu and English) though its standardization is lacking, and vocabulary can differ quite a bit from region to region, though this is a normal state of affairs for PNG. While its vocabulary is almost entirely English derived the simplified phonetics and intonation, more similar to native languages, means that an English speaker is unlikely to be able to understand Tok Pisin without significant aid. Some distinct features of the language are as follows: Transitivity in verbs, unmarked and fluid in English, is marked by the suffix "-im" derived from English "him". There are only two prepositions: "bilong" (belong) and "long" (along). "Bilong" primarily denotes possession, though it can also do other forms of benefaction (like the "for" in English "I did it for you") and "long" is an all purpose locative, serving the functions of English "on", "at", "towards", "next to" etc. Many adjectives take the ending "-pela" which comes from English "fellow".

The Wonders of Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin is a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. It is the official language and the most widely used language in that country. ‘Tok’ is derived from the English word talk and ‘Pisin’ is derived from the word pidgin. Tok Pisin is also sometimes called New Guinea Pidgin. Along with English and Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin is one of the three official languages of Papua New Guinea. While English is the main language in the education system, some schools use Tok Pisin in the first three years of elementary education to promote early literacy.

Tok Pisin is also known as a "mixed" language. This means that it consists of the characteristics of different languages. It obtained most of its vocabulary from the English language. For example, the word “vot” is from Tok Pisin but the word in the English language is “vote” or “election”.                                             

Other examples are:

Tok Pisin: "hevi"; English: "heavy" (adj) and "weight" (n)

Tok Pisin: “pis”; English: “fish”   

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