Simplified Version of IPA? In IPA, the sounds of many symbols are so close that they are indistinguishable to me! For example, [bʊk], [ɓʊk], or [βʊk]. Even though they do have some minor differences, but all a listener like me hears is "book".
So is there any "Simplified IPA" where they contain all possible pronunciations but yet omit all those phonetically indistinguishable symbols?

If you're notating a language that uses [β] or [ɓ] but does not distinguish it from [b], that is, if there are no words such that changing one of these consonants to the other changes the meaning of the word (perhaps because [β] occurs only between vowels and [b] elsewhere), then for most purposes you write them all as /b/; so that is a “simplified IPA”.  This is called broad transcription, written with slashes to distinguish it from narrow transcription using brackets.  A famous example: English /p/ includes both [p] and [pʰ], which are distinguished in many languages including Zulu, Hindustani, Mandarin.
No language makes phonemic distinctions between all pairs of phones represented by distinct symbols in IPA; but every symbol exists because some language contrasts it with others.

This is a question well suited for a non-linguist. I have wondered about exactly this for the past few years and have come up with a system which is almost finished. I think the way to look at it is there are about 24 clearly different consonant sounds, and 12 different vowel sounds (including the English "r" as a vowel which I think is better). All the other consonant and vowel sounds are variations on these base 36 sounds.
If you are not an experienced native speaker or linguist in a particular language, and you were to be able to pronounce the 36 base sounds, you could get by as a beginner. Then as you learn how to get more refined and produce the variations of the sounds, you can move out of the beginner stage into the native stage.
What are these 36 sounds? I have started to map them out here. Letters without diacritics are the base sounds. Still working on how to present this so take with a grain of salt.

But here is a map of some of the initial values mapped to IPA.
ø,e̤,e~
ɔ,ṳ,u~
r,o̤,o~
i,i,i
e,e,e
a,a,a
ɒ,a,a
o,o,o
u,u,u
ɪ,ị,I
ɛ,ẹ,E
æ,ạ,A
ə,ụ,U
ʊ,ọ,O
ɯ,ọ,O
ɤ,ọ,O
y,i̤,Y
ɨ,i̤,Y
m,m,m
ɱ,ṃ,M
ɲ,ny,ny
n,n,n
ɳ,ṇ,N
ŋ,q,q
ɴ,q,q
ɠ,g̀,g?
ʛ,g̀,g?
ɡ,g,g
ɢ,g,g
ʔ,','
ʢ,","
dʼ,d̖,d!
ɗ,d̗,d?
ǂ,d̬,d*
d,d,d
ɖ,ḍ,D
ʙ,bb,bb
ɓ,b̗,b?
bʼ,b̖,b!
b,b,b
pʼ,ṕ,p!
ʘ,p̂,p*
p,p,p
tʼ,t̖,t!
tˤ,t̤,t~
ǀ,t̬,t*
t,t,t
ʈ,ṭ,T
kʼ,k̖,k!
ǃ,k̬,k*
k,k,k
c,k,k
q,ḳ,K
ħ,h̤,h~
ɦ,h̤,h~
ʜ,ḥḥ,HH
χ,ḥḥ,HH
h,h,h
x,ḥ,H
ʐ,j,j
ʒ,j,j
ʑ,j,j
ɮ,ȷ̈,J
sˤ,ṣ,S
s,s,s
ç,s̤,s~
f,f,f
ɸ,f̣,F
v,v,v
β,ṿ,V
ʋ,v,v
z,z,z
θ,c,c
ɬ,c̤,c~
ð,c̣,C
?,ḷ,L
ǁ,l̬,l*
l,l,l
lˤ,l̤,l~
ʀ,r̤r̤,RR
r,ŕŕ,rr
ʁ,r̤,r~
ɰ,r̤,r~
ɣ,r̤,r~
ɾ,r,r
ɽ,ṛ,R
ɕ,x̤,x~
ʃ,x,x
ʂ,x̣,X
w,w,w
ɥ,yw,yw
j,y,y
ʝ,y,y
ʑ,zy,zy

In the second column are what I call the OVO script, a latin script with minimal diacritics to get it across. OVO meaning "One Voice Orthography". The letter forms you see in the image above are a more expansive set of characters (36 shapes) to account for all the base sounds without diacritics. Again, it's in the final stages so not 100% exact, but if you click the "find word" links for various languages, there is an initial attempt at collecting some words in Arabic, Tibetan, Hindi, and others using this lettering system, which I am calling Hanakana.
So in short, yes, I believe there is a simpler way to deal with the IPA system, that will get you to pronounce any language with at least a beginner level of skill. Then adding diacritics (dots and arcs) to Hanakana, you can capture almost all of the IPA sounds. By almost all, I mean capturing most of the variations without getting into an exact replica of IPA. Because even IPA isn't 100% accurate, it is a set of approximations of the vocal chords and shapes of the mouth and air moving through these crevices as you've probably seen. So with this system here, you can do everything you would need to to speak languages from humans on earth, with current human anatomy.
To account for aspiration, add an "h" equivalent after the character, like normal. To account for nasal vowels, add a dot below, etc.


Is the concept of “spatial aspect” attested in any natural language? As described here, Aspect refers to the grammatical marking of the relation between topic and eventuality time, that is, it marking in what way the time an action actually occurs relates to the time currently being talked about. So in the sentence “Before returning home, he had gone shopping”, the topic time would be the moment of arriving home, and the eventuality time the time of going shopping, and the English past perfect marks that the latter happened before the former.

A logical extension of this system then would be to not only mark for differences in topic and eventuality time, but also topic and eventuality space. In the above sentence, the topic space (or location) would be the home, while the location of the shopping would be the eventuality space. The sentence might then mark for the fact that the shopping center is far away from the home, as opposed to (for example), inside the home. Further distinctions could be made with regards to motion: shopping is fairly stationary, but in “To get home, he had to drive on the highway”, there is clear motion towards the topic space and this too might be marked.

So I am curious, does anything along these lines exist in natural languages? The closest thing I was able to find were cis- and translocative markers in some languages, but the examples don’t really make it clear that this is used in a mandatory inflectional manner the same way temporal aspect is in many language.

I don't know of any languages where spatial marking is thoroughly compulsory in the same way aspect often is, however I do know of some potentially interesting cases of spatial marking. A lot of Papuan languages have grammaticalised systems for showing directionality and location. They are usually described as being relative to the speaker, but in at least some cases I have found them described as being relative to either the speaker or the village, or some other not wholly speaker-focussed system. The Nimboran languages in particular have highly complex systems e.g. Wilden(1976) describes Kemtuk as having the following system: https://i.imgur.com/cYKT8xS.png, but says that it is optional.  Anceaux (1965) describes 16 different spatial categories in Nimboran proper, but in a rather unhelpful manner. He notes that the unmarked position category, when the speaker is involved has a specific meaning of "near the speaker", but that it is also always used when the speakers position is indefinite or irrelevant, such as in stories or general statements. In at least some languages I have looked at, these markers were compulsory with motion verbs.

A somewhat different system involving location relative to other events is described by Huisman (1973) who reports that Angaataha has a class of medial verbs which are inflected for whether they occur in the same place or in a different place as the following conjunct.

As far as I can tell, none of this completely satisfies your request, but it shows that at least some things are definitely attested, and distinguish other, or more fine categories than what you've found yourself.

By definition, aspect is defined in relation to the action's temporality. As such, no there is no language, natural or otherwise with "spatial aspect".

However, countless languages do incorporate spatiality in verbs, whether that be in morphology or, less commonly, in the verbal paradigm. Germanic languages particles come to mind, but Nuučaan̓uł has affixes meaning, among others "at the ear", "at the side of a vessel" and "on the beach" (Advanced Language Construction, 179-180). Quechua does have (as I understand it) a mandatory directional -mu for verbs of movement. If absent, it explicitly excludes movement toward the speaker.

For sure nothing prevents you from making spatiality the main category affecting verbal forms.


"Turing-completeness" in conlangs Programming languages & programs are often said to be Turing complete when it's possible to simulate any Turing machine with it.

I'm now designing a constructed language for my game and I want everything to be possible to say in it. How can I know if the language is "Turing complete", that  is possible to say/describe everything using it? What would be the requirements for it? What words does the language need to have to be able to speak in it?

For now, everything I thought about:

It's possible to describe the past, the present and the future (ex. "I bought a car", "I'm buying a car", "I will buy a car")
It's possible to describe something (words?) (ex. "The cat is red")
It's possible to describe nearby area/terrain (ex. "There is a tree")
It's possible to describe plans (ex. "I want to buy a car")
Any more ideas?

The best parallel for Turing completeness in human languages is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The NSM proposes that there is a limited set of basic semantic concepts which all human languages have, and which are not reducible to other concepts. They call these "semantic primes", because you combine them to get all other meanings, and because they can't be broken down. The list of primes, currently numbering 65, is a work in progress as new primes are proposed and evaluated, but after over 45 years of work on the theory the list has proven to be very reliable and new primes are only rarely proposed.

The NSM is a good guide therefore for judging whether a conlang is "complete" - whether it would be as capable for expressing human thought as any natural language. If a conlang has vocabulary items (they can be words, affixes, or phrases) for each of the semantic primes then I would judge it to be complete.

Think:

  What features does a language you understand fluently have. Does your language contain that?

For example:

In English, we get plurals: apple , apples.

Does your language contain a way to use plurals?

In English, we have exceptions to cover things that feel incomplete, or "out of place": James's but James'  We have leaves not leafs

Does your language contain exceptions to make your language feel "complete" and "tidy"?

it's up to you to think of other examples, but I think that these were some good guidelines to follow.


What tools exist for creating syntactically correct generated text in new languages? Another way to put this is, what tools exist to generate sentences in the same way that some conlanging tools generate phonotactically valid words.

I've heard people suggest using word generators to generate sentences. I'm open to the idea, but it seems that morphology and syntax aren't close enough and I'm not smart enough to put my finger on why. If there is a word generator that can do sentences, I'd be interested in looking at it.

Here is an example I laboriously wrote for Toki Pona.

Note: I'm well aware there are a bunch of tools for just generating a random sampling of a dictionary, but that doesn't create syntactically valid sentences.

It is difficult for a machine to passively understand a language (it takes tons of time with machine learning, and that's for Google). Actively, that's even more difficult, as many machine responses are pre-programmed and rarely actually generated (and in that case, mostly nonsensical, but the question isn't for sensical utterances). It will be extremely difficult and without appropriate backing impossible to make one that learns a new language.

That said, the one like the Toki Pona in your question could be made. But you'd have to program most of it yourself, and in languages like Toki Pona that's easy. Try generating artlangs which more like natlangs.

This doesn't mean it couldn't seem like one. You could:

Extract text (in English or some language) from books or such. You can find enough text online.
Translate it (i.e. Google translate) between many languages, obscuring the information. (optional)
Translate it from English—or better, i.e. Lojban, Esperanto, Toki Pona or raw predicate logic, as they are less complicated and easier to translate from—to your conlang.
Dispose of invalid sentences using some kind of lightweight parser. (optional)

I couldn't find any (good) generators, but you could have the first!

I've done stories and rhyming poems with my own JABBER.EXE, but it is 16 bit (windows XP or earlier).  Besides filling out a dictionary (which includes verb affordances and hyponym trees), you have to set 'parameters' for the language, and ConLangs do too much with those parameters.  There can be no general purpose ConLang generator unless it learns like a human.


How could a conlang enforce subjective idealism in a constructed world Subjective idealism is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism.

How could my to be constructed language be restricted to such view of reality?

My guess is that its semantic primes should consist of:

qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience such as  the redness of an evening sky, pain of a headache, the taste of wine, etc.
A pronoun like *I* to refer to one's self
Verbs such as *think*, *believe*, *know*
Adverbs such as: *now*, *before*, *after*

Objects (e.g. chair, table, etc.), other personal pronouns (you, he, etc.), matter and all the other things that do not really exist (in the view of subjective idealism) would be defined as paraphrases.

Edit: Note that this is not a question on subjective idealism in reality, but about subjective idealism in a constructed world. Therefore arguments against subjective idealism in reality are irrelevant.

You may be interested in E-Prime.

E-Prime is a version of English that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. This makes many objective statements like "Roses are red" impossible. Instead a person is required to use more subjective constructions like "Roses appear red to me".

I assume that the inhabitants of your constructed world are humans (or at least have comparable minds to humans).

The is a famous hypothesis in lingusitics, called Linguisitc Relativity or Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that claims (to different degrees) that the language shapes the mind and the world view. Experimental studies only show weak effects, if any. We can assume that humans are able to develop every thought in any language.

On the other hand, authors have used this to some effect in fiction writing—in a constructed fictional world you have the licence to do so and to ignore hard science.


Are constructed languages intellectual property? Do they ever stop being IP, once people use them? Are conlangs intellectual property? Can they be copyrighted?

The second question is a little more complicated. Does a certain level of public, common usage cause a conlang to become public domain, even when the language was created by a select group?

I know there has been some debate over the Klingon language regarding this, especially since there are a few people who were raised with Klingon as a secondary natural language. But I'm not certain about its legal status.

For the purposes of location, consider the US generally. If a state is needed, in California.

The short answer is that there are no mechanisms in place by which one could credibly copyright, patent or otherwise secure ones language. Works you create about the language (such as a grammar document or a poem) of course fall under the same copyright laws as any other works of their kind and as such generally belong to you, but your language as of now is just as copyrightable as English.

For a long answer, I recommend watching this talk by Sai (founder of the LCS) about exactly this topic.

I would say yes.  If for example you own the copyright to a dictionary and a grammar guide for words that you made up, then people can only use those words within the "fair use" guidelines of copyright law.  So they could write an original poem using your language without your permission, but would need to provide citations to your copyrighted works.  But no one would be able to read or understand the poem unless they also had access to the copyrighted works, which would quickly stifle any use of the language.  If you want as many people as possible to learn and speak your language, then the fastest way to disseminate the language would be by releasing all materials into the public domain so that they are freely accessible to everyone.


Do any conlangs have verbs that change form depending on the object? Are there any examples of constructed languages that have verbs with different forms depending on the object of the verb?

Yes.

I am not familiar with any “well-known” conlangs, but a quick search reveals that Klingon verbs inflect for both subject and object. This is a phenomenon called polypersonal agreement and it is very common in natural languages, and so it is only expected that it would also crop up in several conlangs. Among them, for example also my own, for which I just yesterday put up a puzzle that involves decoding the verbal system here.

I cannot currently think of any examples of a language which inflects for only the object, but it’s a rather low-hanging fruit and I cannot imagine that it has never been done before.

I believe your question conflates two related, but crucially distinct concepts, patients (a thematic relation and semantic concept) and objects (a verbal argument and syntactic concept).

By conventional syntactic definition, if only one argument is being agreed with, that argument is the subject. In that sense, it's by definition impossible for a verb to agree only with an object.

However, the patient of a verb does not have to be its object! In ergative languages, it's generally acceptable to analyze that the syntactic subject of a transitive verb is its patient.

In summary: it makes no sense to say that a verb agrees only with its object, because it would causes that object, by definition, to be the subject, merely reversing the agency alignment of the verb (cf. English I like X vs. Spanish me gusta X).


From known languages, what are the expected features of a Generation Ship Language? Pandorum is a generation ship movie. Generation ships are a fairly big sub-genre of sci-fi where people live for many generations in a ship while travelling to a distant star.

The movie Pandorum did not use a conlang at all, despite the ships residents devolving into a tribe of "primitive" natives. What sort of features would we expect to find after 1000 years of travel in space, using real world island languages as a guide?

The idea that language would not change over 1000 years of travel in space is absolutely ludicrous. 1000 years ago was before Middle English existed. Massive amounts of language change can occur over such a long period of time. Even very conservative languages change significantly over such a long period of time. No language will remain unchanged after 1000 years. Based on natlangs, it's more likely than not that the language will not be mutually intelligible with its predecessor after 1000 years.

How exactly the language changes depends a lot on the details of the situation -- how multicultural is the ship? What is the lingua franca of the ship? How are other languages viewed relative to the lingua franca? If there is enough of a divide in where different languages are used (such as if everything for official purposes is in English but a great number of native, say, Spanish speakers speak Spanish with their families at home), you may end up with diglossia arising. If there are significant numbers of multilingual people on these ships, you can bet there will be a lot of borrowing from minority languages into the dominant language, at least in less formal contexts. As in real life, there may be stigma against using such borrowings.

Honestly, language change in this situation won't likely differ that much from language change anywhere else. A conlanger has a lot of freedom in how they want to deal with the diachronics in this situation. The only real difference is that you don't have any chance of outsiders suddenly arriving and bringing with them waves of loanwords. ...Well, at least, you probably don't.

Short Answer
The language used on a generation ship would change very little over the course of the journey despite its 1,000 year duration.
Long Answer
Contrary to widespread conventional wisdom, language drift is very modest over long periods of time in the absence of specific environmental or language contact experiences the cause a language to change over time.
One of the best historical comparisons is the Icelandic language. It is almost unique in experiencing very little language contact or mass migration for a very long period of time. (In contrast, for example, Old English arose from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a linguistically Celtic and Latin speaking island, and Middle English arose as the main modification in the wake of England's conquest by a French speaking Normal elite and England was extremely involved in contacting other civilizations globally as part of its diplomatic, trade and cultural interactions with Europe and as a result of its global empire.)
Iceland was an uninhabited island (hence not subject to any substrate influences unlike many other colonists) settled in the historic era by colonists who spoke a single shared language fairly close to "Old Norse" (the proto-language of the Germanic languages), who had a total population similar to that of a generation ship.
Somewhat more subtly, Iceland's colonists were looking for economic opportunities, rather than constituting a cultural minority fleeing persecution in their homeland the way, for example, that the Puritan colonists of New England were, so they were not motivated at the outset to intentionally set out to put linguistic and cultural distance between themselves and the speakers of their original mother tongue the way that early Americans deliberately attempted to distinguish themselves linguistically from England to assert a distinct cultural identity. The Iceland situation of a group of people not committed ideologically to putting cultural distance between themselves and their ancestor population would likely also be true of the people on a generation ship.
The descendants of the original colonists of Iceland remained in constant communication with each other ever after, just as generation ship residents would, although this did break up from a single community into about a dozen or so chiefdoms that were substantially autonomous from each other and had distinct identities although they did retain a very thin form of island-wide weak government. So, tribal divisions, per se, do not distinguish a generation ship from Iceland.
And, Iceland received almost no significant waves of migration prior to the recent past, so it has never had a large community of outside language learners to influence its linguistic development (just as would be the case in a generation ship).
While Iceland wasn't as isolated from other people as generation ship would be, for a period of time roughly equal to the length of a generation ship journey prior to the introduction of telecommunications, Iceland was very isolated from the rest of the world, and the vast majority of what little contact it did have with the rest of the world from visiting ships was with people who spoke the closest linguistic relative of their language in the world. So, it did not have any languages from which to borrow words, and it was not subject to any areal effects from neighboring languages in a significant way (apart from Danish rule whose effect is noted below).
Icelandic is by far the most linguistically static of the Germanic languages, with the only significant change being a change in pronunciation that arose during a several century period of Danish rule, a country that speaks a closely related by different language derived from Old Norse. A generation ship would not experience this outside influence and would not need to develop a new written language as Iceland did.
As Wikipedia explains (at the link above):

The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD.
Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved
orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland
from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise
the historical works and the eddaic poems.
The language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old
Norse. The Dano-Norwegian, then later Danish rule of Iceland from 1536
to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic (in contrary
to the Norwegian language), which remained in daily use among the
general population. Though more archaic than the other living Germanic
languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th
to the 16th century, especially in vowels (in particular, á, æ, au,
and y/ý).
The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard
established in the 19th century, primarily by the Danish linguist
Rasmus Rask. It is based strongly on an orthography laid out in the
early 12th century by a mysterious document referred to as The First
Grammatical Treatise by an anonymous author, who has later been
referred to as the First Grammarian. The later Rasmus Rask standard
was a re-creation of the old treatise, with some changes to fit
concurrent Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of k rather
than c. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used
much in later centuries. Rask's standard constituted a major change in
practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use of é instead of
je and the removal of z from the Icelandic alphabet in 1973.
Apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not
changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts
were written on vellum. Modern speakers can understand the
original sagas and Eddas which were written about eight hundred years
ago. The sagas are usually read with updated modern spelling and
footnotes but otherwise intact (as with modern English readers of
Shakespeare). With some effort, many Icelanders can also understand
the original manuscripts.

Also, usually new vocabulary is developed in response to new topics of conversation. Since the environment would change less and there would be fewer new things on a generation ship than in Iceland over the same time period (in part, due to a generation ship's lack of trade with the outside world that Iceland had) one would expect there to be less innovation in vocabulary on a generation ship than there was in Iceland. Still, as noted by @Hyperneutrino one might expect words that residents of a generation ship have no reason to use to be lost early on from popular speech (although presumably written sources would still preserve the old words for those so inclined, as a generation ship's residents would not be illiterate and written languages stabilize spelling and prevent old words from dying completely), and there would be a few new words developed over time.
Another clue with which I have first hand experience, which corroborates the example of Iceland, is the development of motherland languages in immigrant communities. For example, the dialect of Korean spoken in Korean immigrant communities in the U.S. that formed shortly after the Korean War is much more similar to the dialect spoken at the time of migration than the dialect of Korean currently spoken in South Korea, notwithstanding the fact that there have been many visits to South Korea and there has been access to modern Korean television and music in that time period in the U.S. Small, relatively isolated communities are simply much less linguistically innovative than large communities that are strongly connected to neighboring communities that speak different languages.
In summary then, it is likely that the language of a generation ship would be extremely static over a period of approximately 1,000 years, because generally speaking it would be in conditions very similar to those of Iceland which historically has had an extremely static language over a similar time period under similar conditions. And, several of the factors that are know to have led to the modest changes between Old Icelandic and Modern Iceland over that time period would be absent on a generation ship.