See my comment over at r/GlyphrStudio

Could you share examples of sentences in both english and your conlang to illustrate the inefficiency you're talking about

I've been conlanging for a bit but I've had this consistent concern of my language being less efficient than English? I've done a couple of languages before but every time, communicating ends up being more cumbersome to communicate the same amount of information

Before running with a category you just established, it's always a good idea to play with it a bit. What does efficiency mean? Is it quantifiable? How much of it does English have? How much do other natural languages have?

Anyway, be of good cheer. A good article was already made on this matter:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6984970/

But the abstract may be enough for those who just want a speedy conclusion:

Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.

Understanding this fully requires you to engage with the categories it establishes (ID, SR, IR), which are obviously not defined in the abstract. Nonetheless, what is true is that all languages, through the social activity of the speaker-base, trend towards a certain baseline of "efficiency."

This is called an a posteriori conlang. Some examples are Esperanto, Interlingua, Interslavic, Brithenig, Latino sine flexione, and Volapük. You might notice that a lot of these are zonal auxlangs, and that makes sense since auxlangs like to take grammar and vocabulary from real world languages. Brithenig is maybe the most similar to your project. It’s an alternate history British Romance language with Welsh sound changes applied.

You would probably have the most luck with conlangs attached to popular IPs like Sindarin, Quenya, Klingon, Dothraki, High Valyrian, etc. Or maybe other zonal auxlangs like Interlingua. I don’t think any other conlangs have the sort of reach that Esperanto or Toki Pona have.

The idea that ergativity arises from reanalysis of the passive is a little outdated, or at least controversial, and basically has its roots in the fact that the II ergative perfect has a similar morphological structure to the English/German passive. In actuality, the II ergative seems to have developed more from the insubordination of a resultative construction. Notably, Vedic Sanskrit had a morphological passive -ya, which is totally unrelated to the ergative.

All that being said, Roots of Ergativity in Africa (and Beyond) basically argues that ergativity can arise more or less from the reinterpretation of instruments to agents in scenarios where the actual agent is dropped.

My overall advice is to use any word processor for the reference grammar, and use a spreadsheet or a dedicated program like Lexique Pro for the lexicon.

I use MS Word for my reference grammars, and Lexique Pro for my lexicons. I used spreadsheets for my lexicons in the past, and still do for collaborative work where multiple people need to edit it. However, I find Lexique Pro superior, despite a few flaws.

Lexique Pro has some nice advantages: you can categorize words into categories of your making and an entry can have multiple categories; it's easy to cross-link other entries, such as the morphemes that go into a derivation, similar words, or antonyms; one entry can have multiple senses, parts of speech, examples, and notes, and it all formats more nicely than in a spreadsheet, and is easier to navigate though admittedly with less options for how to style/format it.

To me the biggest positive of Lexique Pro is how much easier it is to add examples to than a spreadsheet. Back when I was only using spreadsheets, it would be very rare for me to add an example, because it was difficult to do so and there was no dedicated space, so I never thought to. When I switched to LP, always having the field there in the template, that I would have to choose to fill in, deleted, or leave blank, encouraged me to think about examples more, and now many of my entries have examples, sometimes many of them.

I'm a big believer in the usefulness of writing example sentences, and wrote several paragraphs on it, which I'm now going to banish to a second comment because it's not directly relevant to your question.

Lexique Pro has some flaws: the formatting options are inflexible, so that you're limited to certain colors and it will always add a period after certain fields in certain display windows, even when I don't want a period there. It also makes it harder to share your lexicon with other conlangers if you need to do so for an event like a relay. You can export Lexique Pro to RTF, MS Word, or OpenOffice, but the formatting is quite ugly.

Some people use spreadsheets for their grammar documentation. I don't really understand this; it works okay when you're mostly making tables, but the overwhelming majority of my grammar docs, even for my more fusional and synthetic projects, is descriptions and examples. You certainly can put a paragraph into a spreadsheet, but it feels like the wrong tool for the job.

I use google sheets for storing my language. It's very intuitive and easy to use. Also makes grammar tables very easy to make. For the dictionary I also use a separate tab on google sheets. I have a column for the word, the IPA, definition, part of speech and other things that may be important. Also sort the words in alphabetical order and you can search a word by using Ctrl+F.

Romance object indices usually come from clitic pronouns, which are generally definite. Having no clitic for an indefinite object is thus pretty reasonable.

However, so far as I am aware, all Romance languages use articles, so getting rid of them is, from a typological perspective, very odd. There will also be plenty of situations where the verb won’t index a given noun’s definiteness, so articles are still quite useful. And on top of that, languages frequently encode redundant information, such as gender and personal agreement.

Is recommend taking a look at two papers by Guillaume Jacques and Anton Antonov: Direct/inverse systems and The directionality of analogical change in direct/inverse systems.

The first one has a section on how direct-inverse systems can arise, while the second describes how they can further grammaticalise.

How would you go about with making a grammar system that allows infinitely stackable morphemes? Like, morphemes that can be applied onto each other, in an infinitely recurring chain

The "grammar system" is actually an abstraction of real linguistic habits that your imaginary speakers engage in. Since nobody talks forever and people have to both remember what they said and allow the interlocutor to speak, there are limits on how long an utterance will be on average within a community. Speeches and writing don't even make up to 10% of what language is made for, and writers and speech-givers emulate already existing linguistic habits (but sentences in books and poems and the like are usually longer than those in casual speech; these mediums free the words from some of their limits).

So, being an abstraction meant to describe these linguistic habits, if your grammar describes a structure as being infinitely extendable, it also needs to have a way to account for the real limits that are imposed on this extensibility by the speakers. Sometimes this will be a weird statement about how it's technically grammatical but not allowed "in practice," but this is a philosophically clumsy statement since theories are meant to explain and understand and inform practice, all this means is that your theory is bad. Moreover, there are problems with appealing to grammaticality, which is not just the shadowy unreasoned reflection of the mental parsing table in our head (a la Chomsky) but our attempts to rationalize our speech habit patterns. Sometimes the reasons for the unproductivity of a given structure in a language are not reducible to binding rules (or at least have nothing to do with them). For instance, you might understand that "under-re-mis-clicking" means "clicking something wrongly to an insufficient extent" but you'd look at me like I'm weird. But nothing there is "bad" grammatically speaking. What is happening is simply that the average English speaker's habits do not generate this often enough. The theories are ways to describe this in a way that has descriptive (and thus predictive) power. If we notice that most English speakers will only add one extensional prefix to a word we might say this is the limit. We might then say that "under-mis-represent," which is extremely parse-able since both "represent" and "misrepresent" are common and the connection is understood, is not "under[mis[represent]]" but "under[misrepresent]." But this is just to consolidate our theory while making sure it still makes sense of the world. Languages vary on what this limit is so most languages that do not have binding restrictions and allow a good amount of extensional prefixes can be described as having infinitely stackable constructions. But you have to understand what this actually means. Also, this is a snapshot of a language at a particular stage in history and it is very possible that in fifty years some dialects of English will start being analyzable as predominantly prefix-stacking "out of nowhere." All that is required is a spike in the productivity of just a few to the detriment of other strategies.

It seems everyone does what they find most comfortable. I started with MS Excel and now use Google Sheets, both are not the best, but they work, specially for simpler projects

If you're talking about designing a custom script, then like any other artistic endeavor, that's hard to answer. If you're interested in trying it, try it. Doodle shapes, come up with variants, fiddle around until you have something. If you like the process (even if you don't like the result) and/or want to do better at it, you might want to keep doing it. If you decide it's not for you, that's fine too. Conlangers don't have to be neographers as well.

Ask yourself these questions: - Would it bring me joy to do? (Even if there is no direct benefit) - What is the conlangs goals?

It is alot of work, but if it brings you joy then yeah worth it! But (i’m using my own conlang case as an example) my goal with the language was to create an easily learnsble / usable language. And on top of having obviously vocabulary it would create just unnessecary difficulty to have a script. Since on top of having to read the actual words and be able translate and learn it, i’d have to learn the script too.

Depends on you. If you are asking this here, answer is most likely then yes if you want to.

What's the measure of worth here?

It really depends on what your goals for the language are. If it is meant to be part of our real world, then it can go either way depending on the conlang's history. You can adapt an existing writing system, make a new writing system, or say that your speakers are not literate in their language. If it is meant to be part of a fictional world, then it may make more sense to come up with a new script. I will disagree with the other reply that you've gotten on it being automatically better for your language to have its own writing system. There is no reason you can't make a writing system specifically for your conlang and have it be highly defective for those purposes. That is the case for plenty of real world languages.

I'll just spitball some examples from Japanese to hopefully give you some inspiration. For reference, the andative and venitive are transparently formed from the verbs 行く iku 'to go' and 来る kuru 'to come' attached to the perfective converb form of another verb. Disclaimer: I am not a native Japanese speaker, but I'll try to structure my examples like real sentences I've heard from natives.

(1) Both the andative and venitive can describe literal movement away from/toward the deictic center

(1a) あいつもう出て行ってしまったわ

Aitsu mou dete itte shimat-ta wa

3SG already exit-CNVB go-CNVB [involuntary action]-PST DECL

"He's already gone and left"

(1b) 子供が家に走って入ってきた

Kodomo-ga ie-ni hashit-te hait-te ki-ta

child-NOM house-DAT run-CNVB enter-CNVB come-PST

"The child came running into the house"

(2) The venitive can imply a 1st person object (i.e. that the action is directed toward the speaker)

(2a) 声かけてくるな

Koe kake-te kuru na

voice reach.out-CNVB come PROH

"Don't talk to me"

(2b) 名前を３回呼んだら、お化けが襲ってくる

Namae-wo san kai yon-dara, obake-ga osot-te kuru

name-ACC 3 times call-HYPO, ghost-NOM attack-CNVB come

"If you call its name 3 times, the ghost will come attack us"

(3) The venitive can express an immediate future intention (not necessarily with the intent of returning after performing the action, though that is often the case)

(3a) 飲み物取ってくるわ

Nomimono tot-te kuru wa

drink take-CNVB come DECL

"I'm gonna grab a drink rq"

(3b) 先生にから許可を得てくるわ

Sensei-kara kyoka-wo e-te kuru wa

well, teacher-ABL receive-CNVB come DECL

"I'm gonna get permission from the teacher"

(4) The venitive can express the inchoative aspect along with an adverb and the auxiliary verb なる naru 'to become' in its perfective converb form. Maybe this isn't actually the venitive, but it's morphologically identical.

(4a) 最近めっちゃ寒くなってきたね

Saikin meccha samu-ku nat-te ki-ta

recently very cold-ADV become-CNVB come-PST right

"It's gotten really cold recently, hasn't it"

(4b) 頭がおかしくなってきた

Atama-ga okashi-ku nat-te ki-ta

head-NOM crazy-ADV become-CNVB come-PST

"I'm going crazy / I'm starting to lose my mind"

(5) The andative can express that an action will continue into the future.

(5a) 日本語力がだんだん上がっていく

Nihongo-ryoku-ga dandan agat-te iku

Japanese-power-NOM gradually rise-CNVB go

"Your Japanese level will gradually keep getting better"

(5b) これからも頑張っていきたいと思います

Kore-kara mo ganbat-te iki-tai to omoi-masu

this-ABL also work.hard-CNVB go-DESIR SUB think-POL

"I'd like to keep working hard from this point on as well"

Considering the structure of the WLG, I’d also look at come and go for further inspiration.

I’d recommend Introduction: Associated Motion as a grammatical category in linguistic typology as a good starting point for looking more into associated motion, and how it can possible develop non-deictic functions.

I think you’ve got the deictic nature of the andative and venitive a little wrong. You can say ‘I’m going to the bathroom’ even if you’re stood at the bathroom door, and you can say ‘I’m coming home on Tuesday’ even if home is on the other side of the world, so the proximal/distal distinction doesn’t really hold.

Instead, the venitive refers to motion towards a deictic centre, while the andative refers to motion away from a deictic centre. In this light, a ‘mesial’ category makes much less sense. But the paper I linked does go into other kinds of associated motion.

I usually see ‘dialectical’ used in the sense of Hegelian/Marxist dialectics.

I have only ever seen dialectal and dialectic (minus the -al), with the former being the more common, personally..

Also, changing how words are said doesnt immediately make them incomprehensible.

Case in point, much song & poetry uses unstandard contractions to preserve metre, and pronunciations to preserve rhymes.
For some seasonal examples:

To preserve the trochaic metre in 'Hark, the Herald Angels Sing': / × / × / × / / × / × / × / With th'angelic hosts proclaim, Christ is born in Bethlehem. ^\doesnt make the definite article unintelligible))

To preserve the iambicish metre in 'O Little Town of Bethlehem': × / × \ × / × \ × / × / × / How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is gi(v)'n. ^\doesnt make 'given' unintelligible))

And to preserve a rhyme (albeit humourously) in 'Does Santa Claus (Visit Zombie Pig-Men Kids in the Nether in Minecraft at Christmas Time)?':

We'll make a portal out of obsidian, sadness will be forbidian;
We'll bring that gold to them children, for the gold house we will really be buildren.
^\doesnt make 'forbid[den]' or 'build[ing]' unintelligible))

[ Edit: That is to say, speakers of a language are intuitively familiar with it; a little poetic tweakage, while on paper may seem to blur the word completely, in practice is nothing. ]

Nope, as evidenced by the fact that Māori songs exist. Japanese also has long vowels and a pretty big music industry.

Music is pretty much a universal human experience; there’s no language that cannot be sung.

No, the long vowels are simply held for longer, and the melody is adjusted or written precisely to fit this.

Absolutely.

Perfective presents often act as ‘perfect’ tenses, describing events which happened in the past but have present relevance, or whose resultant state continues to hold into the present. Take the English perfect, which combines a present tense auxiliary have with a perfective participle. They can also act as ‘near past’ tenses, describing events that occur within the same time unit (e.g. today, this week) as the present. The English perfect also has this quality, you can’t say I have eaten an egg yesterday, but you can say I have eaten an egg today.

Chichewa comes to mind; it has multiple TAME markers that primarily have a present-tense reading, like

• A “present simple” tense mainly used with performative utterances or to describe imminent actions (as in «Ndínyamula katúndu, musavutíke» “I’ll carry the bags, fret not”), as well as in directions like you’d see in a recipe book or a stage/film script or a math problem (as in «Télala átuluka m’sitólo» “The tailor exits the shop”)
• A “present habitual” tense that’s used much like in English
• A “present continuous sense” that’s used much like English’s present progressive be …-ing/-ant (note that stative verbs like “know”, “want”, “think”, “see”, “believe” or “remember” can take this TAM in Chichewa when they can’t in English)
• A “present frequentative” that adds the sense of “often”, “always” or “ad nauseam”; this tense often implies that the speaker/writer finds the sitch annoying or melodramatic
• A “present persistent” that adds the sense of “still” or “ongoing”
• A “present perfect” used somewhat like English’s have …-ed

You may also be interested in Navajo “modes”.

MSCLK is a microsoft official software for making a custom keyboard layout. If you want to use a custom font. This is a very good tutorial on r/neography on how to make a font with fontforge for your conlang. (yes it's free) That should be able to make vertical scripts.

In English, the choice between the head-final Saxon genitive and the head-initial of-genitive is partly based on the animacy of the possessor (or the possessor's animacy?):

• the brother's leg often sounds more natural than the leg of the brother
• the leg of the table often sounds more natural than the table's leg

There are other factors at play and it's more of a stylistic than grammatical choice, since both constructions are grammatical, but it's something.

[Edit: of the possessor, not the possessum. I hurried to post the comment and only confused myself. The animacy of the head does not seem to play a role, I don't think.]

Nothing about these morphemes will tell you what any of the other morphemes will be or look like. That's entirely up to you.

So I have a problem, I always seem to make unaturalistic grammar! Whenever I make grammarical particles or endings or suffixs they end up becoming so unatural. I try to make my conlangs sound naturalistic but it seems like I just make all the grammatical markers sound too alike or too unrelated.

What is an unrealistic grammar? What is realism? From my own interaction with the community and my immersion within the fandom I know that conlangers are generally shitty philosophers but the first thing you should do is define your terms^[1]. A common bad outcome that occurs when you don't do this is when you realize that by "unrealistic" you meant "non-PIE." This is a big whoopsie that consistently happens with beginners who speak imperial languages, who are scolded by initiated conlangers that are making even more subtle and pernicious assumptions as well.

The typical definition I have seen by conlangers (and by all adherents of the underlying philosophy of the UG project) is a purely positivist one. A realistic grammatical structure (here engulfing phonology, morphology, syntax, etc.) is one that is "well-attested." Those who are trying to be careful will say that anything that is attested is realistic, though the combinations in which these attestations occur also has an impact, such that feature A is realistic only if it is paired with feature B. This may be interpreted by the witty acolyte as meaning that feature A, as a historic rule, co-occurs with feature B; that is, there is something about that syntactic feature that attaches to the other. But this is probably an overextension on their end. Many linguistic theories exist but afaik none of them are unconstrained by the historical patterns of the here and now, reducible to apolitical linguistic evolution (this is actually an anti-goal, though certain conlangers act as though it isn't). Getting a broader and more direct view of the matter is the task of science. But many conlangers really mean it in the most vulgar positivist sense until they are challenged.

The advent of world imperialism has seen a rapid wave of language families being wiped out and thrown into the void. This tendency is actually an exacerbation of what has happened during any expansion event. Presumably, Western Europe was filled to the brim with language families that were not PIE, common among which are Sumerian and Elamite. Celtic languages filled Europe at some point and would have represented a hypothetical line of inheritance not necessarily constrained by the now. The Bantu expansion probably eroded numerous language families in its wake. Moreover, any language developments that occur now already exist in a general world system where developments are likely to be tugs from here and there, like the tendency towards "simplification" in numerous present indigenous languages. It very well may be that the advent of the state is responsible for simplification; Bedouin Arabic dialects are usually the most irregular and even the evolution of its plural system is from compounded irregularities upon irregularities. Comparatively, Hebrew and Akkadian are very tame. But we have no politically neutral simplification events anymore, if any such thing ever existed.

The point is that I'm not sure what the point is. What do you want, exactly? If you want your language to feel "spoken", then that's impossible except by self-delusion, and this is very fickle. Your language is not real and, excepting truly bad attempts at making conlangs, it will only feel real by emulation. This is like listening to music and asking if it's good in the abstract. Your musical ear is socially contingent, transhuman euphony likely doesn't exist except in very elementary patterns and tendencies in the trajectory of historic musical development. The typical advise to simulate linguistic evolutionary changes is good but it's now distracting from the initial discourse on "realism." I still find myself thinking that Okuna is unrealistic but I know what I am actually referring to now and I've hopefully gained some humility.

[1] Not to say that taking this step will save you from this fate, mind you. This is fundamentally a result of ideology. But forcing yourself to articulate yourself is how you can subject your ideas to critique, instead of leaving them in a half-formed state where you can easily pretend that they are not what they are.

It sounds like you already have a sense of how you can get your affixes to look more naturalistic, which is diachronic evolution. However, evolution is hard, and you don't need to actually evolve your conlang to implement some simple sandhi rules. For example, look at the English plural marker -//z//, which has three allomorphs: -[s], -[z], and -[ɨz]. Think about what environments each allomorph shows up in:

(1) -[s] appears after most voiceless sounds (/f θ p t k/ etc.)

(2) -[z] appears after most voiced sounds (/v ð b d g/, vowels and diphthongs, etc.)

(3) -[ɨz] appears after sibilants (/s z ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/)

(1) and (2) show assimilation, where the underlying //z// of the suffix gets devoiced after a voiceless sound. (3) gets an epenthetic [ɨ] inserted to break up the final sibilant cluster, which English doesn't allow phonotactically.

The weak preterite suffix -//d// shows a similar distribution, with similar allomorphs -[t] after a voiceless consonant (pack > pack[t]), -[d] after a voiced consonant or vowel (pay > pai[d]), and -[ɨd] after an alveolar stop (want > want[ɨd]).

Other languages have very similar processes, usually involving assimilation, dissimilation, or epenthesis in some way. As an example, let's look at the past tense suffix in Japanese, which has the underlying form -//ta//. This form used to attach to the gerund form of the verb, which was either the bare stem for vowel-final stems, or stem + i for consonant-final stems.

Verb Stem Type	Old Form Example	Modern Form Example
-V	tabe-ta	tabeta
-ri, fi, -ti	nari-ta, omofi-ta, moti-ta	natta, omotta, motta
-ki	kaki-ta	kaita
-gi	oyogi-ta	oyoida
-ni, -mi, -bi	shini-ta, kami-ta, ukabi-ta	shinda, kanda, ukanda

So what can we say about the allomorphs of the past tense in the modern language? What patterns emerge, and why? Well, first of all, we see that the gerund suffix disappeared in all forms. This left behind consonant clusters in all the verbs that ended in a consonant. Japanese doesn't allow consonant clusters (except nasal + consonant or geminates), so these clusters had to be simplified to fit those constraints:

(1) /r f t/ assimilate to the /t/ of the suffix, geminating it

(2) /k g/ palatalize to /i/, sidestepping the issue of a cluster entirely

(3) /n m b/ become a nasal /n/

(4) if the final consonant was voiced, it voices the /t/ of the suffix into /d/ (except /r/ for some reason)

The gerund forms survived intact, so now you have interesting alternations like:

nari - natta, omoi (< omofi) - omotta, mochi (< moti) - motta

kaki - kaita, oyogi - oyoida

shini - shinda, kami - kanda, ukabi - ukanda

These changes in the verb were happening at the same time as similar changes in other parts of speech, such as in certain nominal compounds or the inflection of verbal adjectives, which helped spread a similar "aesthetic" across all parts of the language.

For example, the non-past suffix for verbal adjectives used to be -ki, but just as with the verbs that ended in -ki, like kaki, it was simplified to -/i/. This is why you see many words like kuroi, amai, samui, oishii, etc. and why their adverbial and past tense forms still have a /k/ that seems to appear from nowhere: kuro-i
(< kuro-ki) - kuro-ku - kuro-katta. Compare this to kaki - kaita or naki - naita. The palatalization only occurred before an /i/, so it didn't affect those other forms.

Obviously, Japanese as a natural language underwent actual diachronic evolution. But I don't think it's impossible for a conlanger to simulate just the few changes that would be necessary to create this kind of allomorphy, even without applying actual sound changes. Hopefully this gave you some inspiration for how you could spice up your own affixes.

If there's a particular kind of writing system you want to use, it could influence how you design your phonology or even grammar. For instance, if you want to have a glyph for each possible syllable (making the writing system a syllabary), then your phonotactic rules shouldn't allow thousands of possible syllables. (Unless you want to make a ton of symbols. The biggest syllabary I know of is Yi, which Wikipedia says has a bit over eight hundred basic glyphs....)

(There are ways to reduce the glyph count if you have too many syllables, though, e.g. you could add letters that represent single consonants so you can break down a syllable like nan into a glyph for na plus a glyph for -n. So there's definitely flexibility and ways to make a writing system work even if it's not a perfect fit otherwise.)

However, if you don't have a particular kind of writing system in mind, then you should probably start with the phonology and grammar, and worry about the writing system later. You can work with a romanization in the meantime.

Or perhaps you don't want to make a custom writing system, or you'll try and decide it's not interesting to you. That's okay too.

Focus on making the language first; that'll make figuring out what you need your writing system to do much easier later on

Off the cuff: * Mohawk (an Iroquoian language) * the Salish languages * Khmer (an Austroasiatic lang) * Moroccan Arabic (Darija) * I’m pretty sure Old Chinese, but you’d have to check that

And no doubt many more!

What differences in grammar do you want?