Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language 's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.
120-710: Wenja is a constructed fictional language in the video game Far Cry Primal , developed by Ubisoft . It is spoken by the Wenja, a fictional nomadic people in the game's world set in the valley of Oros in Central Europe . Two similar dialects, spoken by the Udam and the Izila tribes, are also present in the game. The language was developed for the game by a team of linguists led by the Indo-Europeanist Andrew Byrd. The use of
240-400: A hobby , or in connection to worldbuilding . The expression planned language is sometimes used to indicate international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some prefer it to the adjective artificial , as this term may be perceived as pejorative. Outside Esperanto culture , the term language planning means the prescriptions given to
360-432: A work of fiction . A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial , planned or invented language , or (in some cases) a fictional language . Planned languages (or engineered languages / engelangs ) are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning . There are many possible reasons to create
480-576: A "natural language" ( Natursprache ) of the senses. Musical languages from the Renaissance were often tied up with mysticism , magic and alchemy , sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds . A non-mystic musical language was Solresol . The 17th century saw the rise of projects for "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, such as: These early taxonomic conlangs produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Leibniz had
600-435: A "proto-Proto-Indo-European". To imagine an earlier version of the language, one that may have been spoken about 7,000 years before PIE existed, the team used their knowledge of the earlier stages of PIE. They looked at features of PIE that appear to be archaic and assumed them to be the normal features for Wenja. The language being based mostly on reconstructed PIE roots, the team drew inspiration particularly from Hittite ,
720-509: A community of conlangers with its own customs, such as translation challenges and translation relays , and its own terminology. Sarah Higley reports from results of her surveys that the demographics of the Conlang list are primarily men from North America and western Europe, with a smaller number from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, with an age range from thirteen to over sixty;
840-444: A constructed language is that if it was constructed to be a natural language for use by fictional foreigners or aliens, as with Dothraki and High Valyrian in the Game of Thrones series, which was adapted from the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, the language should be easily pronounced by actors, and should fit with and incorporate any fragments of the language already invented by
960-501: A constructed language is the telescope rule, which claims that it takes less time to first learn a simple constructed language and then a natural language, than to learn only a natural language. Thus, if someone wants to learn English, some suggest learning Basic English first. Constructed languages like Esperanto and Interlingua are in fact often simpler due to the typical lack of irregular verbs and other grammatical quirks. Some studies have found that learning Esperanto helps in learning
1080-429: A constructed language, such as to ease human communication (see international auxiliary language and code ); to give fiction or an associated constructed setting an added layer of realism; for experimentation in the fields of linguistics , cognitive science , and machine learning ; for artistic creation ; for fantasy role-playing games ; and for language games . Some people may also make constructed languages as
1200-584: A first language ". A member of the Klingon Language Institute , d'Armond Speers , attempted to raise his son as a native (bilingual with English) Klingon speaker. As soon as a constructed language has a community of fluent speakers, especially if it has numerous native speakers, it begins to evolve and hence loses its constructed status. For example, Modern Hebrew and its pronunciation norms were developed from existing traditions of Hebrew , such as Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew following
1320-422: A form contracted from dansugwawi ("shaggy cow", based on Hittite dassus and PIE * gʷṓws ). Others were derived from modern roots, such as mamaf (" mammoth "), derived directly from its English equivalent. Finally, yet others were developed from plausible evolution. For example, PIE lack a reconstructed term for "yes", so the team imagined an expression that may develop to have that meaning and came up with "it
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#17330862142071440-519: A full grammar. In total, 40,000 words of dialogue, mostly in Wenja, were developed for the game. During the early development stages for Far Cry Primal , the Ubisoft team struggled to create a script that sounded convincing in the game's prehistoric setting. They found that all attempts in English sounded "trite or just plain wrong, either too much like modern man or too much like science fiction." In search for
1560-422: A general Sephardic pronunciation, rather than engineered from scratch, and has undergone considerable changes since the state of Israel was founded in 1948 (Hetzron 1990:693). However, linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that Modern Hebrew, which he terms "Israeli", is a Semito-European hybrid based not only on Hebrew but also on Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists. Zuckermann therefore endorses
1680-538: A general suspicion that word accent must be the explanation, and that the accent in question must have been different from that of Modern English. Where the accent used to be and what the rules, if any, are for its relocation in Modern English cannot be recovered by internal reconstruction. In fact, even the givens are uncertain: it is not possible to tell even whether tonic syllables were lengthened or atonic syllables were shortened (actually, both were involved). Part of
1800-683: A historical split, the conditions involved are usually immune to recovery by internal reconstruction. For example, the alternation of voiced and voiceless fricatives in Germanic languages , as described in Verner's law , cannot be explained only by examining the Germanic forms themselves. Despite that general characteristic of secondary split, internal reconstruction can occasionally work. A primary split is, in principle, recoverable by internal reconstruction whenever it results in alternations, but later changes can make
1920-425: A jumble of sounds, really — began to feel tangible, natural, a living language". The game only translates part of the dialogues and interactions, which encourages players to learn at least some keywords in order to understand what is happening and to know what actions they should take to continue playing. Wenja is both the name given to the language in the game's documentation, and the name of its main dialect. Each of
2040-494: A linguist who created multiple well-known constructed languages including the Valyrian languages and Dothraki , advocated a similar opinion, saying that "Theoretically, anyone can publish anything using any language I created, and, in my opinion, neither I nor anyone else should be able to do anything about it." However, Peterson also expressed concern that the respective rights-holders—regardless of whether or not their ownership of
2160-498: A natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even a "natural language" may be artificial in some respects, meaning some of its words have been crafted by conscious decision. Prescriptive grammars , which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit , are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naïve natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction. The term glossopoeia
2280-537: A non-constructed language later (see propaedeutic value of Esperanto). Codes for constructed languages include the ISO 639-2 " art " for conlangs; however, some constructed languages have their own ISO 639 language codes (e.g. " eo " and " epo " for Esperanto , " jbo " for Lojban , " ia " and " ina " for Interlingua , " tlh " for Klingon , " io " and " ido " for Ido , " lfn " for Lingua Franca Nova , and " tok " for Toki Pona ). One constraint on
2400-409: A particular language family) are a posteriori by definition. While most auxiliary languages are a posteriori due to their intended function as a medium of communication, many artistic languages are fully a posteriori in design—many for the purposes of alternate history . In distinguishing whether the language is a priori or a posteriori , the prevalence and distribution of respectable traits
2520-499: A posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French . During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) were proposed, so that Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects. The first of these that made any international impact
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#17330862142072640-406: A pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers. Robot Interaction Language (2010) is a spoken language that is optimized for communication between machines and humans. The major goals of ROILA are that it should be easily learnable by
2760-433: A prehistoric language instead of English was intended to create a more immersive in-game experience. Proto-Indo-European , which is theorised to have been spoken around 4000 BCE, was deemed too modern for a game set around 10000 BCE. Therefore, Ubisoft sought to project the language back in time, creating what Byrd called a "proto-Proto-Indo-European". This language was further divided into two dialects, Wenja and Udam, while
2880-453: A prehistoric sound-law can be discovered that replaced the inherited accentual system with an automatic initial-syllable accent, which itself was replaced by the attested accentual system. As it happens, Celtic languages also have an automatic word-initial accent that is subject, like the Germanic languages , to certain exceptions, mainly certain pretonic prefixes. Celtic, Germanic and Italic languages share some other features as well, and it
3000-476: A priori language based on such a classification of concepts. Under the entry Charactère , D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the Encyclopédie , projects for a priori languages moved more and more to the lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until
3120-510: A priori when considering some linguistic factors, and at the same time a posteriori when considering other factors. An a priori language is any constructed language with some features which are not based on existing languages. Instead these features are invented or elaborated to work differently or to allude to different purposes. Some a priori languages are designed to be international auxiliary languages that remove what could be considered an unfair learning advantage for native speakers of
3240-456: A priori . An a posteriori language (from Latin a posteriori , "from the latter"), according to French linguist Louis Couturat , is any constructed language whose elements are borrowed from or based on existing languages. The term can also be extended to controlled versions of natural languages, and is most commonly used to refer to vocabulary despite other features. Likewise, zonal auxiliary languages (auxiliary languages for speakers of
3360-399: A script in primitive English and another in Wenja, and found that English did not fit the period. As a result, they decided to further develop the Wenja language. Initially, Wenja was just a simplified version of PIE , but this was also deemed too modern for the game. The linguists were then tasked to project the language even further back in time, resulting in what Andrew Byrd referred to as
3480-448: A series of changes to PIE roots: Wenja has a three vowel system shown below: Unlike in PIE , there is no difference in vowel length in Wenja. This was a decision taken by the development team to make the pronunciation easier for monolingual English speakers. Three of the vowels of PIE, * e , * a , and * o were merged to Wenja a . This is because the alternance of * e and * o , or ablaut ,
3600-614: A set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language. A legend recorded in the seventh-century Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces claims that Fénius Farsaid visited Shinar after the confusion of tongues , and he and his scholars studied the various languages for ten years, taking the best features of each to create in Bérla tóbaide ("the selected language"), which he named Goídelc —the Irish language. This appears to be
3720-494: A significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association published its Interlingua–English Dictionary and an accompanying grammar . The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo , which mixes elements of English and Spanish. Loglan (1955) and its descendants constitute
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3840-410: A similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically, as a side-effect developing binary calculus . These projects were not only occupied with reducing or modelling grammar, but also with the arrangement of all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies, an idea that with
3960-409: A solution, the team stumbled upon recordings of Proto-Indo-European by Andrew Byrd for Archaeology and ultimately decided to hire him and his wife Brenna Byrd to lead a team of linguists that would recreate a language suitable for the game. The full team was composed by Andrew Miles Byrd, Brenna Reinhart Byrd, Jessica DeLisi, Chiara Bozzone and Ryan Paul Sandell. The team then conducted a test using
4080-449: A source language that would otherwise exist for a posteriori languages. Others, known as philosophical or taxonomic languages , try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophy or to make it easier to recognize new vocabulary. Finally, many artistic languages , created for either personal use or for use in a fictional medium, employ consciously constructed grammars and vocabularies, and are best understood as
4200-427: A third spend years on developing the same language. Internal reconstruction The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of cognates , under the assumption that they descend from a single proto-language , but internal reconstruction compares variant forms within a single language under the assumption that they descend from a single, regular form. For example, they could take
4320-535: Is Balaibalan , invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise , lost in the confusion of tongues . The first Christian project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri 's De vulgari eloquentia , where he searches for the ideal Italian vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull 's Ars Magna
4440-1284: Is a misuse of terms to say that we have natural language; languages exist through arbitrary institutions and the conventions of peoples. Voices, as the dialecticians say, don't signify naturally, but capriciously. " Furthermore, fictional or experimental languages can be considered naturalistic if they model real world languages. For example, if a naturalistic conlang is derived a posteriori from another language (real or constructed), it should imitate natural processes of phonological , lexical , and grammatical change. In contrast with languages such as Interlingua, naturalistic fictional languages are not usually intended for easy learning or communication. Thus, naturalistic fictional languages tend to be more difficult and complex. While Interlingua has simpler grammar, syntax, and orthography than its source languages (though more complex and irregular than Esperanto or its descendants), naturalistic fictional languages typically mimic behaviors of natural languages like irregular verbs and nouns, and complicated phonological processes. In terms of purpose, most constructed languages can broadly be divided into: The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear. A constructed language could easily fall into more than one of
4560-559: Is a simplification of Latin from which the inflections have been removed. As with Interlingua, some prefer to describe its development as "planning" rather than "constructing". Some speakers of Esperanto and Esperantidos also avoid the term "artificial language" because they deny that there is anything "unnatural" about the use of their language in human communication. By contrast, some philosophers have argued that all human languages are conventional or artificial. François Rabelais 's fictional giant Pantagruel, for instance, said: " It
4680-427: Is actually possible to reconstruct the history of the English vowel system with great accuracy but not by internal reconstruction. In short, during the atonic shortening, the tonic accent was two syllables after the affected vowel and was later retracted to its current position. However, words like division and vicious (compare vice ) have lost a syllable in the first place, which would be an insuperable obstacle to
4800-570: Is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic languages . Conlang speakers are rare. For example, the Hungarian census of 2011 found 8,397 speakers of Esperanto , and the census of 2001 found 10 of Romanid , two each of Interlingua and Ido and one each of Idiom Neutral and Mundolinco . The Russian census of 2010 found that in Russia there were about 992 speakers of Esperanto (the 120th most common) and nine of
4920-471: Is applied can remove significant evidence of the earlier state of the language and thus reduce the accuracy of the reconstructed proto-language . When undertaking a comparative study of an underanalyzed language family, one should understand its systems of alternations, if any, before one tackles the greater complexities of analyzing entire linguistic structures. For example, Type A forms of verbs in Samoan (as in
Wenja language - Misplaced Pages Continue
5040-464: Is contentious. In a 2015 lawsuit, CBS and Paramount Pictures challenged a fan film project called Axanar, stating the project infringed upon their intellectual property, which included the Klingon language , among other creative elements. During the controversy, Marc Okrand, the language's original designer expressed doubt as to whether Paramount's claims of ownership were valid. David J. Peterson ,
5160-536: Is correct". The corresponding phrase in reconstructed PIE, * h₃reǵtóm h₁ésti , was then subjected to the sound languages and possible syllable clipping imagined for the proto-language, and ended up as shrash in the Wenja dialect and tómhe in Izila. Once the language was ready, it was taught to the actors. During this phase, some war cries and chants were developed. Actors and linguists would speak to each other in Wenja in their spare time. According to Brenna Byrd, "[this was] when this hypothetical ancient language — just
5280-411: Is essentially the same language as PIE, this article deals mainly with the other dialects: Wenja and Udam. There are 22 consonant phonemes in the Wenja and Izila dialects. In the following IPA chart, each sound in Wenja is given with its spelling in brackets. The letters ⟨c⟩ , ⟨q⟩ and ⟨v⟩ do not appear in Wenja, although ⟨c⟩ appears in
5400-422: Is largely based on the standard academic version of Proto-Indo-European , with "some simplifications to make it a little easier to say and in grammar and pronunciation". The intonational pattern of Izila is also different, more "sing-songy" than Wenja. When the characters meet the Izila, they do not completely understand them, but some communication can get through since most of the vocabulary is related. Since Izila
5520-436: Is likely to be a matter of inheritance from an earlier system, rather than the result of some native pattern overlaid by a borrowed one. (An example of such an overlay would be the non-alternating English privative prefix un- compared to the alternating privative prefix in borrowed Latinate forms, in-, im, ir-, il- .) One might guess that the difference between the two sets can be explained by two different native markers of
5640-399: Is neutralizing environments, which can be an obstacle to historically correct analysis. Consider the following forms from Spanish, spelled phonemically rather than orthographically: One pattern of inflection shows alternation between /o/ and /ue/ ; the other type has /o/ throughout. Since those lexical items are all basic, not technical, high-register or obvious borrowings, their behavior
5760-512: Is often the key. Grammatical speculation dates from Classical Antiquity ; for instance, it appears in Plato 's Cratylus in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice ... to the thing". Athenaeus tells the story of two figures: Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus : "He [Alexarchus] once wrote something ... to
5880-473: Is relatively uncommon in Wenja; the language generally uses conjunctions or parataxis . Nevertheless, it can employ the relative pronoun/adjective ya , which means “who, which, what” in relative sentences: Wantar hafchu fakwi daws: na ya alya pacharsh, pacha daws , "A hunter needs fast eyes, they must see what others do not see". Below follow some basic expressions in Wenja: The following sentence starts with
6000-452: Is sometimes cited; this claims that the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Thus, a "better" language should allow the speaker to think more clearly or intelligently or to encompass more points of view; this was the intention of Suzette Haden Elgin in creating Láadan , a feminist language embodied in her feminist science fiction series Native Tongue . Constructed languages have been included in standardized tests such as
6120-750: Is tempting to think that the word-initial accent system was an areal feature , but that would be more speculative than the inference of a prehistoric word-initial accent for Latin specifically. There is a very similar set of givens in English but with very different consequences for internal reconstruction. There is pervasive alternation between long and short vowels (the former now phonetically diphthongs): between / aɪ / and / ɪ / in words like divide, division; decide, decision ; between / oʊ / and / ɒ / in words like provoke, provocative; pose, positive ; between / aʊ / and / ʌ / in words like pronounce, pronunciation; renounce, renunciation; profound, profundity and many other examples. As in
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#17330862142076240-406: Is the same as the input. As it happens, the forms as given yield readily to real analysis and so there is no reason to look elsewhere. The first assumption is that in pairs like bolbér / buélbe , the root vowels were originally the same. There are two possibilities: either something happened to make an original */o/ turn into two different sounds in the third-person singular, or the distinction in
6360-413: Is true of almost all of the examples given ( cólligō, rédimō, īlicō (initial-syllable accent) are the only exceptions) and indeed for most examples of such alternations in the language. The reduction of contrast points in the vowel system (- a - and -o - fall together with - i - before a single consonant, with - e - before two consonants; long vowels replace diphthongs) must not have had anything to do with
6480-515: Is unstressed. However, the true history is quite different: there were no diphthongs in Proto-Romance. There was an *o (reflecting Latin ŭ and ō ) and an *ɔ (reflecting Latin ŏ ). In Spanish the two fell together in unstressed syllables, as in all other Romance languages, but *ɔ broke into the complex nucleus /ue/ in stressed syllables. Internal reconstruction accurately points to two different historical nuclei in unstressed /o/ but gets
6600-647: The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo , and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius , in Steganographia and Polygraphia , attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian ). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of
6720-534: The Enlightenment would ultimately lead to the Encyclopédie . Many of these 17th–18th centuries conlangs were pasigraphies , or purely written languages with no spoken form or a spoken form that would vary greatly according to the native language of the reader. Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally in a tree diagram, and consequently to construct an
6840-667: The Esperantido Ido . The terms "planned", "constructed", "invented", "fictional", and "artificial" are used differently in some traditions. For example, few speakers of Interlingua consider their language artificial, since they assert that it has no invented content: Interlingua's vocabulary is taken from a small set of natural languages, and its grammar is based closely on these source languages, even including some degree of irregularity; its proponents prefer to describe its vocabulary and grammar as standardized rather than artificial or constructed. Similarly, Latino sine flexione (LsF)
6960-708: The SAT , where they were used to test the applicant's ability to infer and apply grammatical rules. By the same token, a constructed language might also be used to restrict thought, as in George Orwell 's Newspeak , or to simplify thought, as in Toki Pona . However, linguists such as Steven Pinker argue that ideas exist independently of language. For example, in the book The Language Instinct , Pinker states that children spontaneously re-invent slang and even grammar with each generation. These linguists argue that attempts to control
7080-411: The comparative by adding -r to the adjective stem: Urus shanti, ma tigri shanti r , "Oros is close, but the tiger is closer". Most commonly the regular adjective is used after the postposition -bi: Martibi shwapa! , "Worse than death!". To indicate the superlative , Wenja normally uses reduplication: shan-shanti , "very close / the closest". Reduplication is productive in adjectives and verbs. In
7200-415: The digraph ⟨ch⟩ . The digraphs ⟨kw⟩ and ⟨gw⟩ represent / kw / and / gw / in Wenja, rather than / kʷ / and / gʷ / as reconstructed for PIE . The pronunciation of Wenja consonants has only a few peculiarities for an English-speaker: To recreate an earlier stage of PIE, and at the same time produce a language suitable for the game, the linguist team performed
7320-519: The pre- prefix, as in Pre-Old Japanese, like the use of proto- to indicate a language reconstructed by means of the comparative method, as in Proto-Indo-European . (However, the pre- prefix is sometimes used for an unattested prior stage of a language, without reference to internal reconstruction.) It is possible to apply internal reconstruction even to proto-languages reconstructed by
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#17330862142077440-429: The 1970s through the 1990s, such as Glossopoeic Quarterly , Taboo Jadoo , and The Journal of Planned Languages . The Conlang Mailing List was founded in 1991, and later split off an AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages. In the early to mid-1990s a few conlang-related zines were published as email or websites, such as Vortpunoj and Model Languages . The Conlang mailing list has developed
7560-467: The 20th century. A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs was possibly the first fiction of that century to feature a constructed language. J. R. R. Tolkien developed families of related fictional languages and discussed artistic languages publicly, giving a lecture entitled " A Secret Vice " in 1931 at a congress. (Orwell's Newspeak is considered a satire of an international auxiliary language rather than an artistic language proper.) By
7680-410: The Izila tribe speak a different dialect that resembles PIE more closely. Far Cry Primal' s dialects are one of the few appearances of PIE and a PIE-based constructed language in a mass-consumed medium, and it was also the first time a video game featured a constructed prehistoric language. As of June 2017, Wenja and Izila comprised about 2400 words (roughly 1200 each), with both dialects having
7800-472: The Latin example, the tonic accent of Modern English is often on the syllable showing the vowel alternation. In Latin, an explicit hypothesis could be framed on the location of word-accent in prehistoric Latin that would account for both the vowel alternations and the attested system of accent. Indeed, such a hypothesis is hard to avoid. By contrast, the alternations in English point to no specific hypothesis but only
7920-521: The Rings ( Elvish ), Stargate SG-1 , Atlantis: The Lost Empire , Ar Tonelico ( Hymmnos ), Game of Thrones ( Dothraki language and Valyrian languages ), The Expanse , Avatar , Dune , and the Myst series of computer adventure games. The matter of whether or not a constructed language can be owned or protected by intellectual property laws, or if it would even be possible to enforce those laws,
8040-584: The above categories. A logical language created for aesthetic reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language; one created with philosophical motives could include being used as an auxiliary language. There are no rules, either inherent in the process of language construction or externally imposed, that would limit a constructed language to fitting only one of the above categories. A constructed language can have native speakers if young children learn it from parents who speak it fluently. According to Ethnologue , there are "200–2000 who speak Esperanto as
8160-527: The affix /ɪd/ after word-final apical stops then belonged to a later stratum in the evolution of the language. The same suffix was involved in both types but with a total reversal of "strategy." Other exercises of internal reconstruction would point to the conclusion that the original affix of the dental preterites was /Vd/ (V being a vowel of uncertain phonetics). A direct inspection of Old English would certainly reveal several different stem-vowels involved. In modern formations, stems that end in /t d/ preserve
8280-554: The beasts"). Typologically , Wenja has a pragmatic word order that by default is subject–object–verb (SOV). The copula , hasa (from PIE * h₁es- "to be") is typically omitted the ( Da chamsa , "Da is ready") except in formal contexts. Wenja nouns and pronouns can be either active or inactive. Active nominals are agents of transitive or intransitive verbs, while inactive nominals are subjects of nominal predication, subjects of inactive intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs. While active nominals trigger endings on
8400-511: The beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become common for science fiction and fantasy works set in other worlds to feature constructed languages, or more commonly, an extremely limited but defined vocabulary which suggests the existence of a complete language, or whatever portions of the language are needed for the story. Constructed languages are a regular part of the genre, appearing in Star Wars , Star Trek , The Lord of
8520-429: The book's author, and preferably also fit with any personal names of fictional speakers of the language. An a priori (from Latin a priori , "from the former") constructed language is one whose features (including vocabulary, grammar, etc.) are not based on an existing language, and an a posteriori language is the opposite. This categorization, however, is not absolute, as many constructed languages may be called
8640-515: The comparative method is unavailable. Internal reconstruction can also draw limited inferences from peculiarities of distribution. Even before comparative investigations had sorted out the true history of Indo-Iranian phonology, some scholars had wondered if the extraordinary frequency of the phoneme /a/ in Sanskrit (20% of all phonemes together, an astonishing total) might point to some historical fusion of two or more vowels. (In fact, it represents
8760-412: The comparative method. For example, performing internal reconstruction on Proto-Mayan would yield Pre-Proto-Mayan. In some cases, it is also desirable to use internal reconstruction to uncover an earlier form of various languages and then submit those pre- languages to the comparative method. Care must be taken, however, because internal reconstruction performed on languages before the comparative method
8880-473: The conditioning irrecoverable. English has two patterns for forming the past tense in roots ending in apical stops: /t d/ . Although Modern English has very little affixal morphology, its number includes a marker of the preterite , other than verbs with vowel changes of the find/found sort, and almost all verbs that end in /t d/ take /ɪd/ as the marker of the preterite, as seen in Type I. Comparing between
9000-450: The details wrong. When applying internal reconstruction to related languages prior to applying the comparative method, one must check that the analysis does not remove the shared innovations that characterize subgroups. An example is consonant gradation in Finnish , Estonian , and Sami . A pre-gradation phonology can be derived for each of the three groups by internal reconstruction, but it
9120-423: The early 20th century (e.g. Ro ), but most recent engineered languages have had more modest goals; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus (e.g. Lincos and programming languages ), others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity (e.g., Loglan and Lojban ) or maximizing conciseness (e.g., Ithkuil ). Already in the Encyclopédie attention began to focus on
9240-513: The example below) are the citation forms, which are in dictionaries and word lists, but in making historical comparisons with other Austronesian languages, one should not use Samoan citation forms that have missing parts. (An analysis of the verb sets would alert the researcher to the certainty that many other words in Samoan have lost a final consonant.) In other words, internal reconstruction gives access to an earlier stage, at least in some details, of
9360-499: The final outcome of five different Proto-Indo-European syllabics whose syllabic states of /m/ and /n/ can be discerned by the application of internal reconstruction.) However, in such cases, internal analysis is better at raising questions than at answering them. The extraordinary frequency of /a/ in Sanskrit hints at some sort of historical event but does not and cannot lead to any specific theory. One issue in internal reconstruction
9480-462: The first mention of the concept of a constructed language in literature. The earliest non-natural languages were considered less "constructed" than "super-natural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota , recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen , is an example, and apparently the first entirely artificial language. It is a form of private mystical cant (see also Enochian ). An important example from Middle-Eastern culture
9600-442: The first vowel if this is a ( shnár-hadan , "cannibal"; shwádisha , "to pull") and on the second if this is i or u ( sunstáshman , "regime"; fumáygan , "piss-man"; izíla , "Izila"; hisúbar , "quiver"). Izila, on the other hand, as an intentionally different intonational pattern, less predictable and more "sing-songy". The linguistic team used this to differentiate the two dialects to sound like entirely different languages to
9720-425: The form of allomorphs of the same morpheme . The basic premise of internal reconstruction is that a meaning-bearing element that alternates between two or more similar forms in different environments was probably once a single form into which alternation has been introduced by the usual mechanisms of sound change and analogy . Language forms that are reconstructed by internal reconstruction are denoted with
9840-675: The former, it intensifies the meaning and produces the superlative. In the later, it forms the iterative aspect. The reduplicant always has two morae in Wenja, hence pal-palhu ("very many") or daba-dabu ("very few") (not pa-palhu or da-dabu ). There are five main suffixes that can be attached to verb stems to create new nouns in Wenja: There are three sets of personal pronouns in Wenja. Stressed pronouns are used for nominal / adjectival predicates, intransitive subjects and direct objects. Unstressed pronouns are attached to verbs or particles in other cases. Possessive pronouns are attached to
9960-843: The human user, and optimized for efficient recognition by computer speech recognition algorithms. Artists may use language as a source of creativity in art, poetry, or calligraphy, or as a metaphor to address themes as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalized world. Some people prefer however to take pleasure in constructing, crafting a language by a conscious decision for reasons of literary enjoyment or aesthetic reasons without any claim of usefulness. Such artistic languages begin to appear in Early Modern literature (in Pantagruel , and in Utopian contexts), but they only seem to gain notability as serious projects beginning in
10080-468: The infinitive forms: /ué/ becomes /o/ . One might notice further, upon looking at other Spanish forms, that the nucleus /ue/ is found only in stressed syllables even other than in verb forms. That analysis gains plausibility from the observation that the neutralizing environment is unstressed, but the nuclei are different in stressed syllables. That fits with vowel contrasts often being preserved differently in stressed and unstressed environments and that
10200-407: The languages being compared, which can be valuable since the more time has passed, the more changes have been accumulated in the structure of a living language. Thus, the earliest known attestations of languages should be used with the comparative method. Internal reconstruction, when it is not a sort of preliminary to the application of the comparative method, is most useful if the analytic power of
10320-410: The legal consensus on ownership of languages remains uncertain. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre claims ownership of Palawa kani , an attempted composite reconstruction of up to a dozen extinct Tasmanian indigenous languages, and has asked Misplaced Pages to remove its page on the project. However, there is no current legal backing for the claim. Various papers on constructed languages were published from
10440-456: The location of the accent in attested Latin. The accentual system of Latin is well-known, partly from statements by Roman grammarians and partly from agreements among the Romance languages on the location of tonic accent: the tonic accent in Latin fell three syllables before the end of any word with three or more syllables unless the second-last syllable (called the penult in classical linguistics)
10560-505: The nouns they modify. New words can be formed through prefixing , suffixing , and compounding . Wenja nouns and adjectives are not marked for number or gender , but they can be inflected by six clitic postpositions, which are only attached to the main noun they modify. This feature is based on the fact that cases tend to come from actual words, so it was assumed that at an earlier stage those words would behave like clitics. The six postpositions used in Wenja are: Some adjectives form
10680-697: The number of women participating has increased over time. More recently founded online communities include the Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB; since 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board. Discussion on these forums includes presentation of members' conlangs and feedback from other members, discussion of natural languages, whether particular conlang features have natural language precedents, and how interesting features of natural languages can be repurposed for conlangs, posting of interesting short texts as translation challenges, and meta-discussion about
10800-448: The obvious inference is that in prehistory, the tonic accent must have been an accent that was always on the first syllable of a word. Such an accentual system is very common in the world's languages ( Czech , Latvian , Finnish , Hungarian , and, with certain complications, High German and Old English ) but was definitely not the accentual system of Proto-Indo-European . Therefore, on the basis of internal reconstruction within Latin,
10920-513: The oldest attested Indo-European language. As a result, Wenja lacks grammatical gender and is also pre- ablaut , as those features were imagined to have come about at a later stage. The vocabulary was also inspired by the imagined contemporaneous culture, reflecting the material and religious culture of the period. A small number of words necessary for the game could not be reconstructed from PIE and had to be invented. Some of these words were constructed via compound words , such as dang (" yak "),
11040-535: The particle nu and uses the imperfective with a future meaning: Nu ˈnu now mash-wantar maʃˈwantar our.hunter pur-ha ˈpurha fire. INS shitawgarsh. ʃiˈtawgarʃ frighten. 3PL Nu mash-wantar pur-ha shitawgarsh. Constructed language A constructed language (shortened to conlang ) is a language whose phonology , grammar , orthography , and vocabulary , instead of having developed naturally , are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for
11160-460: The peoples in Far Cry Primal speak a slightly different language, and they derive their names from their respective dialect. Thus the Wenja derive their name from the Wenja verb wana , "to hunt"; the Udam from the Udam expression U damnash , "let's conquer"; and the Izila from the Izila phrase his-hílax , "the masters". The Wenja and Udam dialects represent an older form of the language, which
11280-447: The philosophy of conlanging, conlangers' purposes, and whether conlanging is an art or a hobby. Another 2001 survey by Patrick Jarrett showed an average age of 30.65, with the average time since starting to invent languages 11.83 years. A more recent thread on the ZBB showed that many conlangers spend a relatively small amount of time on any one conlang, moving from one project to another; about
11400-450: The players, emphasising that two different peoples speak them. The phonology , grammar , vocabulary , and semantics of Wenja are based on Proto-Indo-European and its daughter languages, notably Greek , Sanskrit , Hittite , Latin and the Germanic languages . Typologically , Wenja has both prepositions and postpositions , and its default pragmatic word order is subject–object–verb (SOV). Adjectives in Wenja are placed before
11520-461: The preterites of to sned and to absquatulate would most likely be snedded and absquatulated . That evidence shows that the absence of a "dental preterite" marker on roots ending in apical stops in Type II reflects a more original state of affairs. In the early history of the language, the "dental preterite" marker was in a sense absorbed into the root-final consonant when it was /t/ or /d/ , and
11640-459: The problem is that English has alternations between diphthongs and monophthongs (between Middle English long and short vowels, respectively) from at least six different sources, the oldest (such as in write, written ) dating back to Proto-Indo-European. However, even if it were possible to sort out the corpus of affected words, sound changes after the relocation of tonic accent have eliminated the necessary conditions for framing accurate sound laws. It
11760-502: The proto-language (all unmarked vowels in these examples are short), but some, involving only short vowels, clearly arose within Latin: faciō "do", participle factus , but perficiō, perfectus "complete, accomplish"; amīcus "friend" but inimīcus "unfriendly, hostile"; legō "gather", but colligō "bind, tie together", participle collectus ; emō "take; buy", but redimō "buy back", participle redemptus ; locus "place" but īlicō "on
11880-527: The public authorities in Casandreia ... As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it." While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages ( Latin , Greek , and Sanskrit ), they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary to Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed
12000-463: The range of human thought through the reform of language would fail, as concepts like "freedom" will reappear in new words if the old words vanish. Proponents claim a particular language makes it easier to express and understand concepts in one area, and more difficult in others. An example can be taken from the way various programming languages make it easier to write certain kinds of programs and harder to write others. Another reason cited for using
12120-488: The rights is legitimate—would be likely to sue individuals who publish material in said languages, especially if the author might profit from said material. Furthermore, comprehensive learning material for such constructed languages as High Valyrian and Klingon has been published and made freely accessible on the language-learning platform Duolingo —but those courses are licensed by the respective copyright holders. Because only a few such disputes have occurred thus far,
12240-442: The simplex forms become - i - before a single consonant and - e - before two consonants; the diphthongs - ae - and - au - of initial syllables alternate respectively with medial - ī - and - ū -. As happened here, reduction in contrast in a vowel system is very commonly associated with position in atonic (unaccented) syllables, but Latin's tonic accent of reficiō and refectus is on the same syllable as simplex faciō, factus , which
12360-491: The spot" (< * stloc-/*instloc- ); capiō "take, seize", participle captus but percipiō "lay hold of", perceptus ; arma "weapon" but inermis "unarmed"; causa "lawsuit, quarrel" but incūsō "accuse, blame"; claudō "shut", inclūdō "shut in"; caedō "fell, cut", but concīdō "cut to pieces"; and damnō "find guilty" but condemnō "sentence" (verb). To oversimplify, vowels in initial syllables never alternate in this way, but in non-initial syllables short vowels of
12480-405: The third-person singular, but a basic principle of linguistic analysis is that one cannot and should not try to analyze data that one does not have. Also, positing such a history violates the principle of parsimony ( Occam's Razor ) by unnecessarily adding a complication to the analysis whose chief result is to restate the observed data as a sort of historical fact. That is, the result of the analysis
12600-422: The third-singular is original and the vowels of the infinitives are in what is called a neutralizing environment (if an original contrast is lost because two or more elements "fall together", or coalesce into one). There is no way of predicting when /o/ breaks to /ué/ and when it remains /ó/ in the third-person singular. On the other hand, starting with /ó/ and /ué/ , one can write an unambiguous rule for
12720-636: The translation of the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli". Esperanto as a living spoken language has evolved significantly from the prescriptive blueprint published in 1887, so that modern editions of the Fundamenta Krestomatio , a 1903 collection of early texts in the language, require many footnotes on the syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto. Proponents of constructed languages often have many reasons for using them. The famous but disputed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
12840-408: The usual relationship is that there are more contrasts in stressed syllables than in unstressed ones since previously-distinctive vowels fell together in unstressed environments. The idea that original */ue/ might fall together with original */o/ is unproblematic and so internally, a complex nucleus * ue can be reconstructed that remains distinct when it is stressed and coalesces with * o when it
12960-420: The verb daha , "to do" ( shnar mara hada daham , "I made the man eat an apple"). The imperative mood is in its most basic just the verb stem. However, it is often preceded by the particle u : u shlawdra gwash ("walk free"). The negative imperative is always preceded by the particle may : may dram! ("don't run!"). The infinitive is also made up of the bare verbal stem: gwar gwan dawsam ("I need to kill
13080-465: The verb stem. There are no discrete tenses in Wenja. All aspects can express any tense, although the completive is commonly used as a past: Wenja does not have a discrete passive voice , but prefers to leave out an underlying agent ( num hu-gwan , "(it) killed me / I was killed"). However, a passive may be formed by indicating the demoted agent with the instrumental postposition -ha . Compare num hu-gwanta ("you killed me") and num tiha hu-gwan ("I
13200-414: The verb, inactive nominals trigger endings on a sentence initial particle. A significant distinction is made in Wenja between animate and inanimate nouns, as only animate subjects trigger verbal endings: Sentences in Wenja commonly start with a sentence-initial particle. These particles can both indicate grammatical properties and serve as conjunctions . The ten main sentence starters are: Subordination
13320-567: The verbs of Type I and Type II, those in Type II are all basic vocabulary (This is a claim about Type II verbs and not about basic verbs since there are basic verbs in Type I also). However, no denominative verbs (those formed from nouns like to gut, to braid, to hoard, to bed, to court, to head, to hand ) are in Type II. There are no verbs of Latin or French origin; all stems like depict, enact, denote, elude, preclude, convict are Type I. Furthermore, all new forms are inflected as Type I and so all native speakers of English would presumably agree that
13440-480: The vowel of the preterite marker. As oddly as it might seem, the loss of the stem vowel had taken place already whenever the root ended in an apical stop before the first written evidence. Latin has many examples of "word families" showing vowel alternations. Some of them are examples of Indo-European ablaut : pendō "weigh", pondus "a weight"; dōnum "gift", datum "a given", caedō "cut" perf. ce-cid- , dīcō "speak", participle dictus , that is, inherited from
13560-433: The word they describe and can also combine with postpositions. Wenja verbs feature three aspects ( imperfective , completive, iterative ), two moods ( indicative , imperative ) and two voices ( active , passive ). Verbs have also an infinitive form, and can be made reflexive by means of a reflexive suffix . The causative is indicated either morphologically or periphrastically. Endings do not necessarily attach to
13680-459: Was Volapük , proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer ; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid-1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto , proposed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof , and its descendants . Interlingua , the most recent auxlang to gain
13800-405: Was "heavy" (contained a diphthong or a long vowel or was followed by two or more consonants). Then, that syllable had the tonic accent: perfíciō, perféctus, rédimō, condémnō, inérmis . If there is any connection, between word-accent and vowel-weakening, the accent in question cannot be that of Classical Latin. Since the vowels of initial syllables do not show that weakening (to oversimplify a bit),
13920-560: Was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance , Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical context, resulting in cryptographic applications. Renaissance interest in Ancient Egypt , notably the discovery of
14040-573: Was actually an innovation in the Finnic branch of Uralic , rather than the individual languages. Indeed, it was one of the innovations defining that branch. That fact would be missed if the comparanda of the Uralic family included as primary data the "degraded" states of Finnish, Estonian, and Sami. Not all synchronic alternation is amenable to internal reconstruction. Even if a secondary split (see phonological change ) often results in alternations that signal
14160-610: Was considered a later development in PIE. Thus Wenja can be considered phonetically "pre-ablaut". With regard to prosody , Wenja features a trochaic rhythm , in which generally with every other syllable is stressed. This makes the intonation predictable and give the language an intentional "caveman" rhythm. This creates a rhythmic feel to the language, with 2- and 4-syllable words being always perfect trochees: dácham , "ten"; kúshla , "back"; mága , "can"; shàwikwála , "shepherd"; shìyugwáyfa , "eternal life"; etc. 3-syllable words are stressed on
14280-443: Was created systematically by internal reconstruction based on the most irregular features of PIE, which are usually vestiges of older forms. The Wenja and the Udam basically speak two close dialects of the same language, which are mutually intelligible to a great extent. The differences are subtle and appear mainly in pronunciation and intonation. The Udam are "very brassy" and their dialect sounds "very deliberate". The Izila dialect
14400-437: Was killed by you"). Verbs can be made reflexive by adding the reflexive suffix -ra . As with the passive, reflexive verbs do not need to be inflected for person: numra kayda ("I hit myself"), nara Udam hada ("an Udam does not eat himself"). The causative can be indicated in two ways: morphologically adding the suffix -ay(a) to a verb ( mu shnar mara haday , "the man made me eat an apple") or periphrastically by means of
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