Outline
Written on 11/28/2015. Translated on 12/2/2015.
Conlinguistics consists of Synchronic Conlinguistics and Diachronic Conlinguistics.
Synchronic conlangs studies about conlangs under the slogan; “make, use, evaluate” / Diachronic Conlinguistics studies about the history of conlangs, Conlinguistics and conlangers.
Synchronic linguistics consists of Making Conlinguistics, Using Conlinguistics, and Evaluating Conlinguistics.
Making Conlinguistics studies about creating conlangs.
It consists of Encounter Theory, Motive Theory, Purpose Theory, Environment Theory, Phenomenon Theory, Sound Theory, Character Theory, Vocabulary Theory, World Theory (morphology), Syntax Theory, Culture Theory, Climate Theory, History Theory, Usage Theory, Structure Theory, Expression Theory, Corpus Theory, and Method Theory.
Encounter Theory studies about how people meet conlangs or the community of conlangers. Some people might realize “Could I make a language by myself?!” Some people might begin to make conlangs by influence from other people.
Motive Theory studies about conlangers’ motive to create conlangs, e.g. Zamenhof of Esperanto thought people might be able to abolish discrimination to some extent without language barrier. He had a humanitarian motive.
Purpose Theory studies about what conlangers want to do by creating languages.
Al Bhed language of “Final Fantasy X” was created to deepen the world view. In this game, there is Al Bhed tribe in the world, Spira. They have their own language. It’s Al Bhed language. Thanks to the language, the users can feel how the world is large. Square Soft made the language to express the diversity of Spira’s culture.
Environment Theory studies about tools with which conlangers make conlangs. Conlangs were made with paper and pen by 20C. In 21C, conlangers make conlangs with PC, the Net, and applications. People can make conlangs without paper and pen. All they can use are their mouth and ears. It’s the most primitive way of creating conlangs. In human-powered digital era, conlangers still use their body to type the keyboard. So some people might think “conlangers, at least, need their body to create conlangs”, but in AI era, AI might create ones by themselves.
Phenomenon Theory studies about things which happen when conlangers are creating conlangs, e.g. conlangs are likely to change drastically by revision if conlangers make them with a long time.
Sound Theory consists of phonetics and phonology.
Linguistics studies phones and phonemes used in a language by analyzing the language. In conlinguistics, conlangers pick phones and phonemes for their conlangs, except for REL.
When conlangers pick phones and phonemes i.e. sounds, they’re likely to pick them in tendencies and laws under their conlangs’ classification.
E.g. NAT always use the phone [a] and have the phoneme /a/. If NAT has 3 vowels, they can’t be /e/, /o/, /ə/. Why?
Character Theory studies about various characters which conlangs have.
It’s surprising that there’re not a few conlangs which have only characters. In Japanese mangas, there’re alien languages alien languages which aliens use. They are likely to be in a fantasy story. Most manga creators which make conlangs just want to express the alienness of the characters, so they mostly don’t make grammar and vocabulary.
E.g. Yu Yabuuchi showed sentences written in her conlang at p.75 of “Naisho no tsubomi” vol.2.
In this manga, the sentences were written by Closet from Balcony planet. Tsubomi, the heroine called the conlang “Uchu go (Space language)”. The readers don’t know how to read the sentences. The author probably don’t neither, because she didn’t create the conlang elaborately. The animation of “Naisho no tsubomi” vol.1 was on the air. If vol.2 was animated, too, the author and the company which make animes would think about how to read the sentences.
Mangas are soundless, so there’re conlangs which only have characters. The way of reading the conlangs is finally defined when the mangas are made into animes like Namek language from “Dragon ball”.
Watching how conlangs are grown, their characters are likely to change gradually from ones of Balcony language and Namek language and so on to ones of North Semitic alphabets, especially Latin alphabet. Arka was such a conlang, too. Why does the phenomenon happen?
What kind of design and history do conlangs’ character have? Character Theory studies about them.
Vocabulary Theory studies about vocabulary of conlangs. Every conlang has its way of cutting the world. Conlangers cut the world and take concepts out of it and give a name to them.
Unlike natural languages, conlangs are created in a shorter period; from a few years to a few centuries. Conlangs made in 21C don’t have a word for “octant” (as a measuring instrument), “slide rule”, “sonosheet”, “MiniDisc” with a high probability. Why?
How do conlangers make the vocabulary of their conlangs large? Are there any tendencies or laws about vocabulary of conlangs generally? Vocabulary Theory studies about such things.
Word Theory exists next to Syntax Theory. Some Indian languages are polysynthetic. In these languages, morphology which analyzes the inside structure of words is important while isolating language like Chinese study mainly about mainly about syntax more than morphology.
There’re more agglutinative conlangs than inflectional conlangs, so in conlanging, syntax is usually more important than morphology. Why? Is it related to the fact that there’re not many inflectional languages in pidgins and creoles?
In digital era, conlangers began to make conlangs with PC. Does it influence conlanging? Don’t conlangers usually make conlangs taking easy-to-consult-dictionary into consideration? Word Theory and Syntax Theory of Conlinguistics study about things peculiar to conlangs on morphology and syntax.
Culture influences languages.
Japanese and Korean give precedence to the elder people there use different language drastically. Japanese and Korean distinguish elder brother from younger brother by word level. People in USA also look up to the elder, but they don’t think the elderness is so important (compared to Japanese and Korean) that English don’t distinguish elder brother from younger brother by word level. Like this, culture influences languages.
That means culture influences conlangs, too. Mother culture of the creators and users might influence conlangs. Some creators might make a culture for their conlangs. Esperanto is the former and Arka is the latter. For ART, unique conculture might supply elaborateness of the world view. For AUX, culture might be a nuisance which should be bleached. Culture Theory studies the relationship between conlangs and culture plus phenomena raised by the relationship.
Climate Theory is the same to Culture Theory. Japanese live on rice. So they distinguish ine (rice) from kome (rice) by word level unlike the English word rice. English distinguishes cattle by their sex (I mean, cow or ox) because people in England lived as a stock farmer for a long time.
In languages in climate with much snow, people distinguish many kinds of snow by word level, but languages where it doesn’t snow at all might lack of words that mean snow except loanwords.
Like these, climate influence languages like culture. Conlinguistics studies about relationship between conlangs and climate.
History Theory studies about history of conlangs and places where conlangs are used.
Conlangs have culture and climate. They can be a priori or a posteriori. Culture and climate have history. Conlangs are put into the history, influenced by the history.
Arka is used in a conworld Kaldia as an IMG. In this conworld, Arka is a conlang made in Ordin era. Over 300y later from Ordin, satellites were made in Velei era. A new word meaning satellite was made with growth of science. Like this, Arka is influenced by history. An Arka word salyu meant only altar, but later it also meant place where people can get a cell phone signal well. Like this, meaning of words can change in history. Diachronic Conlinguistics studies about real history on conlangs while imaginary history is studied in Making Conlinguistics. History Theory studies about relationship between conlangs and history of conworld where the conlangs are used.
Usage Theory studies about usage of words of conlangs. Conlangs which have a monolingual dictionary explain usage of words by definition itself to some extent. But many conlangs have only bilingual dictionary. E.g. conlang and the creator’s mother tongue. Or conlang and English. An Arka word sex is lip in English and kuchibiru in Japanese. But lip has a different range to kuchibiru. So if I write only translation for sex in Japanese and English, it doesn’t mean I defined the usage of sex. I have to define the range of sex.
Usage Theory studies about many things like “Do usages of conlangs have tendencies and laws in common?”
Collocation Theory studies about how words are put together. Umbrella is put together with open in English, ouvrir in French but sasu in Japanese (sasu doesn’t mean open. Open is hiraku in Japanese).
When learning natural languages, people have to remember not only words but also the combinations of words. It’s hard for the learners. How do conlangers devise a way to remember the collocations of their conlangs?
Like this, Collocation Theory studies about things on collocation of conlangs.
When Japanese learn English at school, they remember 5 sentence patterns (SV, SVC, SVO, SVOO, and SVOC). Conlinguistics calls these a structure.
Phrases like “in order to” “so that S can” “see to it that” are also counted as a structure.
“You play soccer” is SVO and “What do you play?” is made of SVO structure. But it’s counted as another structure in conlinguistics because the structure of the sentence is too different from the original sentence.
Natural languages have so many structures that they are hard for learners to remember. The less structures, the easier to learn natural languages. Then, do conlangers who know it would cut off structures of their conlangs? It’s up to the conlangs’ classification. E.g. some NATs won’t cut off the number of structures intentionally.
Structure Theory studies about the relationship between conlangs and structures.
The literal translation of “The wind broke the window” is “kaze ga mado wo watta” in Japanese. It’s not wrong but all Japanese think “kaze de mado ga wareta” is more natural. Its literal translation is “The window broke because of the wind”.
Languages can express the same thing in many ways, but it’s up to the languages that which way of expression is favored.
Expression Theory studies about the relationship between conlangs and the ways of expression.
When you write sample sentences, your conlang gets more corpus. Corpus Theory analyzes the corpus. Corpus Theory also studies about mental corpus of users, especially natives. When studying about corpus, I must explain about genshi (atom), and bunshi (molecule).
Method Theory studies how to make conlangs.
Using Conlinguistics studies about using conlangs. It consists of Learning Theory, Practicing Theory, Spreading Theory, Keeping Theory, and Breaking Theory.
Learning Theory studies about things when people learn conlangs.
AUX usually doesn’t have complex inflections unlike Latin so that it’s easy for the learners to learn the AUX though NAT and ENG can be an exception.
Still, generally speaking, conlangs are usually less complex than natural languages so that learners can learn the conlangs easily. What is there over the background relating to the efficiency of learning? What kinds of factors besides efficiency are there in conlanging?
Practicing Theory studies about reading, writing, listening, speaking conlangs. Most conlangs lack of orthography so that users can read words aloud. As they are written. Is it just conlangers’ consideration for learners to use the conlangs easily? If so, ordinary people using natural languages lack of consideration for the users?
All conlangs except –SER and some ENG won’t give a long name to basic concepts like “eye”, but why?
Some conlangers design their conlangs to be easy-to-learn and easy-to-use. E.g. established Arka could make opposite words just by changing their vowel regularly like fan (woman) and fin (man). Mal- is a prefix of Esperanto. It can make opposite words like fermi (to close) – malfermi (to open). The former system died in 2008 while the latter one is still alive now. But some Esperantists use unique words for the opposite words instead of using mal-. I mean, some users have abolished “conlangers’ consideration” perfectly or imperfectly. Why did the phenomenon happen?
Some users abolish conlangers’ design, but why?
Spreading Theory studies about spreading conlangs, i.e. increase creators and users of conlangs, increase people who have heard of the conlangs’ name. Esperanto is so famous that many people have heard of it even if they don’t know the word “conlang”.
Spreading Theory consists of Promotion Theory and Advertising Theory.
Promotion Theory studies about processes in which conlangs are spread, e.g. how did a conlang which Polish eye doctor made reach a country in the Far East? Are there any general tendencies or laws in spreading conlangs?
Advertising Theory studies about sways to spreading conlangs, e.g. Zamenhof advertised Esperanto by publishing books. Some Esperantists lodge foreign Esperantists. It’s a kind of hospitality and the hospitality is also a way of advertising.
Conlangers in the digital era can make various contents by themselves. Arka has various contents; novel, illustration, manga, video, movie game and so on. They worked as advertisement, increased users and creators.
What kinds of advertisement do conlangers have to spread their conlangs?
Keeping Theory studies about things such as keep using conlangs to avoid their death, revive conlangs which have been dead.
What if Murasakishikibu had made a conlang and the conlang was found today? She would’ve explained her conlang in Japanese. But Japanese today can’t read Japanese 1000y before. So conlinguists had to translate the old Japanese into the present-day Japanese to revive the conlang.
Keeping Theory consists of Maintaining Theory and Modifying Theory.
Maintaining Theory studies things such as keep using conlangs, revive dead conlangs, protect conlangs from rash revisions and differentiations.
Arka has been living since 1991.Except for a few radical revisions. Arka has been kept steadily.
But languages change. Conlangs also change. Especially conlangs change faster and more drastic than natural languages. Arka adopted the users’ opinions and experience instead of adopting the authors’ armchair theories, so it was revised some times, but thanks to the empiricists, Arka could survive for a long time.
Conlangs have to change according to paradigm shifts. Modifying Theory studies about such things.
Breaking Theory studies about the death of conlangs.
Conlinguistics studies about birth of conlangs in Making Conlinguistics, life of conlangs in Keeping Theory, and death of conlangs in Breaking Theory.
Breaking Theory consists of Renovation Theory and Destruction Theory.
Daily lasting slight changes of conlangs are studied in Modifying Theory, meanwhile breaking and remaking which we can’t call “modification” anymore such as the revision of Established Arka into New Arka are studied in Renovation Theory.
When conlangers are making conlangs, their conlangs change drastically sometimes. The changes are not modification anymore but renovation with collapse of the old system.
Destruction Theory deals with the conlangs’ deaths directly.
How do conlangs die? Most conlangs die of “be forgot” like some men “die alone”.
What happens after conlangs die? Like Yehuda revived Hebrew as the present-day Hebrew, conlangs could come back.
Some natural languages like Ancient Greek and Latin could influence the languages in the present days. They are a dead language, but their genes are still alive in the languages today like English and French. Is there any conlang like Latin?
Evaluating Conlinguistics studies about evaluating conlangs. It consists of Classifying Theory, Examining Theory, Analyzing Theory, Assessing Theory, Individual Theory, and Society Theory.
Classifying Theory studies about the classification of conlangs.
Traditionally, conlangs are classified into 3 classes; international auxiliary languages, artistic languages, and engineered languages. Conlangers couldn’t classify conlangs in detail, so Japanese conlangers gave tags on classification to conlangs in 2015.
At that time, I gave a feature to conlangs like semantic features to classify them.
What kinds of conlangs are there? It was studied in Classifying Theory.
Examining Theory checks whether there is inconsistency in conlangs and conworlds.
Approval for existence of Pegasus in REL makes inconsistency, while approval for it in conlangs except REL doesn’t always make inconsistency.
Pegasus doesn’t exist. In short, Pegasus is a horse with wings, can fly and run. But it can’t lift its heavy body with those wings. Then what if its body and legs were so light that they can fly? Then it can’t run. So Pegasus can’t exist physically. Approval for existence of Pegasus in REL makes inconsistency.
But approval for it in IMG and so on doesn’t always make inconsistency. In fantasy worlds, Pegasus can exist and it doesn’t make any inconsistency.
But it doesn’t mean fantasy, IMG and so on don’t make inconsistency at all, e.g. if you say red symbolizes fire and say blue symbolizes fire later, of course you’ve made an inconsistency. Of course, conlangers won’t make such a simple error, but they sometimes make inconsistencies in writing articles because it takes a long time to create conlangs and conworlds.
Conlangers will avoid inconsistency if they don’t make conlangs where inconsistency is favored.
Analyzing Theory judges whether the system of conlangs obeys linguistic theories.
E.g. for linguistics, if a language has words for black and red, the language must have a word for white.
If a conlang has black and red but doesn’t have white, the conlang is regarded as NOT linguistic.
Assessing Theory evaluates things such as whether conlangs are good subjectively, whether conlangers like the conlangs, e.g. an extensive vocabulary and many articles on conlangs improve the conlangs’ elaborateness. And not a few conlangers often highly appreciate conlangs with much elaborateness subjectively because they know how hard their work on conlangs was. Arka was the kind.
What points do conlangers appreciate about conlangs? Are there any factors which many conlangers favor? Assessing Theory studies about such things.
Individual Theory studies about conlangers. What kind of people are conlangers? Is there anything in common among conlangers? It studies about such things.
E.g. half of human beings are women, but quite many conlangers are men. Why?
According to the neuroscience, women are often better at using languages than men. If so, many conlangers should be a woman. However, actually, most conlangers are a man.
This is just experience, but conlangers tend to have sisters than brothers. In the latter half of 00s, I realized the fact, asked Japanese conlangers again if they have sisters.
Obviously many Japanese conlangers at that time had sisters than brothers. I don’t have any sisters. I was minority in conlangers. It means having sisters is one of the factors which might turn people into a conlanger, but why?
Individual Theory also examines the relationship between conlangers and mental illness.
Most people don’t become a conlanger. No one except native speakers of conlangs and programmers need conlangs. Conlangs don’t earn only 1 cent. Still, conlangers make conlangs. Why?
Individual Theory evaluates, analyzes, and studies about conlangers themselves.
Society Theory studies about conlanging worlds. Conlanging is a minor activity, but conlangers make small societies with the Net and so on. These societies are the conlanging world.
As of 2015, there are conlanging worlds in the English, Japanese, Korean spheres and so on. Conlangers in each sphere don’t often communicate with each other and there’re still some conlanging worlds because of the language barrier.
What kind of things are the societies which conlangers make? Can the societies influence conlangs? Actually, they can. E.g. there is a conlang named Nagili. It is a conlang used in Kaldia. Originally, I made the framework, but May Ayukawa, a Japanese conlanger succeeded the conlang in 2014. I left it to him. I met him in 2012 in the Japanese conlanging world. Through our communication, Nagili was left to him. If the conlanging world hadn’t existed, Nagili would have only the framework.
Diachronic Conlinguistics consists of General History of conlang, Individual History of conlang, History of Conlinguistics, and Change Theory.
General History of conlang studies about the around 900 years of history from Hildegard of Binden in 12C to the present. I wrote about it and uploaded the manuscript to my website in 2006. In 2011, the manuscript was published as Jinkogengo-shi Gaisetsu (人工言語史概説） in my book, Conlinguistics and Arka.
Individual Theory of conlang studies about individual history of conlangs like Esperanto and Arka.
It also studies about not only conlangs themselves but also conlangs’ influence to others’ conlangs. E.g. Volapük was made in the same era to Esperanto and they were rivals. In Esperanto, “It’s all Greek to me” is “It’s like Volapük“. Here we can see histories of conlangs are entangled.
History of Conlinguistics studies about the history of conlinguistics.
It was in 90s when I first used the word conlinguistics and it was 2011 when the name of my official web site included the word conlinguistics.
My history of conlinguistics started in 1991 with making Arka, but there might be somebody who had studied conlinguistics before me. At least, I am the oldest conlinguists in the Japanese and the Korean spheres, but I’m not familiar with the English sphere.
Change Theory studies about how conlangs change. E.g. in 90s, the basic word order of Arka was SOV, but later (still 90s), a revision made it SVO.
By the way, linguistics teaches us that the basic word order of pidgins and creoles tends to change from SOV and so on to SVO. Is this phenomenon related to the changes of conlangs? Living conlangs change because they are a language. Are there any tendencies or laws in the ways of changes of conlangs? Change Theory studies about such things.
Method Theory studies about how to make conlangs.
