... on Conlangs

Q

Linguists: Could you tell the difference between a real language you don't speak and a conlang (constructed language), by listening to/reading it without being told whether or not it's a real language?

Two answers

and mine not there, since I am only an amateur linguist, and since the question was arguably about probing a well known positoion of mine, expressed yesterday latest time, conlangs are real languages, and God would be the perfect conlanger, therefore absolutely able to impose new linguistic settings on everyone He wanted to, and therefore no obstacle to his using this power at Babel.

However, comments of mine are involved under the two answers.

I

Enrique Ellem

I have spoken Esperanto in 25 countries with people from more than 100 countries

Answered 15h ago

Esperanto is a “real” language that started as a conlang. 131 years of use converted it into a language used every day in most countries of the world. If you don’t know Esperanto and you hear it, you will think the same that you think when you hear any language that you don’t know. It you try to hear it very well, maybe you will recognize a few words, but still you will be unable to tell what it is.

Maddock Emerson

15h ago

I was thinking more about entirely fictitious languages like Klingon, Elvish, etc.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Just now

They are NOT entirely fictitious, they are however primarily meant for a fictitious setting (in the case of certain Elvish languages, the fictitious setting is rather meant for Quenya, Sindarin, Telerin, or their precursors like Qenya and Noldorin).

They are conlangs of the artlang type as esperanto is a conlang of the auxlang type.

But they are both conlangs.

II

Answer requested

by Maddock Emerson

Jens Stengaard Larsen

perpetual student of linguistics

Answered 8h ago

The number of scripts is much lower than the number of spoken languages, so it’s not very difficult to recognize an historically attested kind of writing from a newly invented one if you’re into that kind of thing.

Determining what kind of language is written or heard, however, is tricky if you don’t happen to know it (or some related language). Language doesn’t exist outside of our heads, so the same string of sounds or characters can be natural when one person utters it, but artificial when somebody else does. It’s wholly artificial if a singer has no clue what he’s singing while being able to mimic the accent perfectly; it’s wholly natural only if you’re speaking your native dialect in a state of great excitement. Writing always is at least 50% artificial. We all have perfect knowledge about what could potentially count as natural language structures, but it’s hidden deep in our subconscious and is very tricky to access for examination— and when we reach puberty, the ability to use it subconsciously on new forms of speech has already significantly declined.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

3m ago

“an historically attested kind of writing”

Like orthography of Middle English, Old French etc?

What if the languages were shown in pairs, one a recently alphabetised native language and the other a conlang in similar orthographic convention?

“We all have perfect knowledge about what could potentially count as natural language structures,”

And so has a good conlanger.

“Writing always is at least 50% artificial.”

I don’t know what you mean by artificial. It’s an acquired synaesthesia between grapheme and phoneme. Any given spoken language is an acquired art, involving near synaesthesia (also acquired) between sound and meaning.

Jens Stengaard Larsen

1 upvote from Hans-Georg Lundahl

5h ago

> What if the languages were shown in pairs, one a recently
> alphabetised native language and the other a conlang in
> similar orthographic convention?

If the conlang is constructed along the lines of specific preexisting languages, then it would be easy for a specialtist of those languages to spot what features are unlikely to occur in those dialects that he or she might not be familiar with. But if you present a linguist with two phonologically transscribed texts in languages that he doesn’t recognize a word of, where one is a natlang and the other a conlang, then all bets are off — especially if that linguist isn’t handed a translation.

>> “We all have perfect knowledge about what could potentially count
>> as natural language structures,”

> And so has a good conlanger.

A bad one has too.

>> “Writing always is at least 50% artificial.”

> I don’t know what you mean by artificial. It’s an acquired
> synaesthesia between grapheme and phoneme.

Interesting way to look at it. But experienced readers most of the time read whole words at once (and probably sometimes whole phrases).

> Any given spoken language is an acquired art, involving near
> synaesthesia (also acquired) between sound and meaning.

You cannot acquire a new language without building on an older one. Our perfect knowledge about what could potentially count as natural language structures is innate, and that’s what we build our first language(s) on. If a conlang contains structures that cannot count as natural, its speakers will not be able to spontaneously remember those features when they need them and will have to make something up on the fly. Once a speech community is up and running, it will replace such features while hardly noticing it, unless there are so many that the speakers have to start from scratch. It’s not so different from having an accent, except that an accent comes from the constraints of a specific previously acquired linguistic habit rather than the constraints of all linguistic habits.

Answered twice

α and β

α

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Just now

“If a conlang contains structures that cannot count as natural, its speakers will not be able to spontaneously remember those features when they need them and will have to make something up on the fly.”

Can the structures of Sumerian count as natural?

I’d consider it is harder to learn Sumerian or Greenlandic, due to structure, than to learn Finnish.

But structurally, Quenya has notable similarities to Finnish, so, learning Quenya should be easier than learning Sumerian or Greenlandic.

Do you believe Sumerian is a conlang?

Jens Stengaard Larsen

Original Author · Mar 7

It’s not about easiness of learning, but the possibility for a child to adapt the internal, inborn language (the abstract I-language) to the spoken sounds he or she hears in the external environment (the E-language). E-languages are never natural or unnatural by themselves, but only in relation to a given person.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Just now

Isn’t “the abstract I-language” a philosophical construct by Chomsky?

β

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Just now

“You cannot acquire a new language without building on an older one.”

Or more than one older ones.