The Weird History of Invented Languages | Otherwords
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- Опубліковано 28 лип 2024
- Can you really invent a language? These people sure tried! But does anyone actually speak them?
Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and fınds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fıelds of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective on what it means to be human.
Host: Erica Brozovsky, Ph.D.
Creator/Director: Andrew Matthews & Katie Graham
Writer: Andrew Matthews
Producer: Katie Graham
Editor/Animation: Andrew Matthews
Executive Producer: Amanda Fox
Fact Checker: Yvonne McGreevy
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell
Stock Images from Shutterstock
Music from APM Music
Otherwords is produced by Spotzen for PBS.
© 2023 PBS. All rights reserved.
Tolkien called constructing languages his "secret vice." I think he'd be amazed by all the conlangs in popular media today.
I wonder if it actually helped him get better at his actual job as a linguist. If nothing else it's a form of practice, right?
And I imagine he'd be impressed by how far-reaching his conlangs have become! - Dr. B
*Tolkien sees Ithkuil and spontaneously combusts on the spot
@@pbsstoried Impressed or frightened and disappointed. He never expected to complete Elvish or any conlangs during his life, let one have someone else learn them.
Tolkien is a mystifying person linguistically - it was determined within his lifetime that his paternal origin was Baltic-Prussian. He never invested time into Baltic languages it seems let alone prūsiskan which would have been his mother tongue in a decolonised context.
But he had no shortage in imagination to come up with artificial languages - almost as though he tried to plug a hole in his own identity (he also referred himself to being "kind of like a hobbit" etc)
We know from Tolkien's letters that he had a very flawed perception of his family's past though he certainly tried to learn as much as possible.
To me it seems his own bias was severely distorting his own ancestral research at the time. Many of the things he thought he knew were later partially or fully debunked by historians (though obviously Tolkien's ancestral assumptions were usually in good faith). He was correct in that his family was originally from "Eastern Prussia" where his family was comprised of intermarriage between natives and colonists.
Many in the Baltic languages community think that Tolkien's perhaps "disregard" for Baltic languages destroyed a unique opportunity to market these languages to a wider international audience - specifically revival efforts of prūsiskan which we know to be the ancestral language of Tolkien's paternal family.
As for his descendants they have done a much better job imo. While not as language savvy they have been much more honest with their past and built up a semi extensive network of Tolkiens and variations of the name globally.
Nowadays I don't think there is a single Tolkien of mature age the doesn't know their Baltic-Prussian paternal ancestry.
Finally - Tolkien did sort of "relinquish his past" in that he thought because of his diverse background he would rather be the person he becomes rather than be dictated by who he is supposed to be ancestry wise. Though that was also based in the context of him assuming he had majority German ancestry (he definitely had some but perhaps not majority) - which understandably became inconvenient as WWI broke out.
I'm a conlanger and this is probably the most accurate video ever made about our hobby by a UA-cam channel that isn't dedicated to conlanging. Congrats!
Much obliged! And glad to shed some light onto your hobby for those new to conlangs. - Dr. B
Are you the Harvard quizbowl guy?
I remember as a kid, looking up "Esperanto" in an dictionary. My mind was blown that it was described as (IIRC) a "man-made language", which got me wondering where everyone thought that the other older languages had come from!
They were made naturally, like it evolved & not like a person had such idea
Similar to saying a "NATURAL" life & an "ARTIFICIAL"life
"Words are the shadows in Plato's cave"
Absolutely love it. I'm using that quote forever.
Hopefully not exclusively cuz I wanna use it too & it'd be weird if you said nothing else. 😁
*"might be", is the quote. The uncertainty is important. But the metaphor is good.
@@paulholleger8538 true, you're right
Comparing anything to Plato's cave allegory is cliche
@@dirkdiggler. i mean, it's probably the most Influencial philosopher of history, so it's not hard to find stuff that talks with him
If you apply for a job at the UN, there is a drop down menu where you can select your language skills, and you can choose klingon
😂😂😂
Another fun conlang is toki pona which was invented in the early 2000s and attempted to make the simplest and easy to learn universal language out there
lon mute a!
Yeah, I was about to say, no mention of my boi toki pona?
Another cool "conlang" is Viossa! It's not really a conlang, but like a "forced" pidgin, using words and concepts across several real languages (but avoiding english) and started as a lingustics experiment with people just pointing and saying what they think that the word should be.
@@alicecold Yeah I've heard of this! I've seen an interview on youtube and thought it was really cool, it was quite a spontaneous project and there are dialects of the language because people have personal preferences but it seems they still understand each other
One of the biggest notes on Toki Pona is that its linguistic library contained just around 100 words at its creation. Another 100-ish has been added since, but naturally, one only really needs to learn those first 100 to be really fluent in it.
Saying that language nerds don't get language nerdier than conlang nerds is entirely accurate. I have learned so much about linguistics from conlang UA-camrs it's ridiculous.
While the way we view language is certainly no small part of what makes conlangs interesting, I find it more interesting how it gives the ability to play and experiment with language. We can create them and explore linguistics as an art form and a science at the same time, which is just a fascinating concept.
It’s fascinating to me because I am definitely a person who learns best by taking things apart, putting them back together, and doing it myself. When conlang people talk about language, it makes sense to me because that’s what they’re doing - dismantling, reassembling, creating, and explaining the processes while they do it. LOVE conlangs so much.
Just want to say that I love Otherwords, it might easily be on my top 3 favorite youtube shows.
Glad I’m not the only one excited for new episodes!!
Hard same. really enjoy this show.
Same! It’s one of the most informative and entertaining UA-cam channels.
Right! It's so fascinating to learn about language and all it's beautiful differences and variations.
me toooo!!! this might be the only show i’d be watching in this channel 😭😭
When she says "we've only scratched the surface", she's definitely understating it. There's a whole universe you can get lost in. Literally, there are books written on the subject, books written with conlangs in them, books written IN conlangs... it can get nuts.
There's even joke languages, like kay(f)bop(t), which has phonemic hats! If you think that sounds like nonsense, you're right! lol.
I'm glad she covered the major subsets of conlangs though: artlang, auxlang, and engineered (though some would still call that aux.). Though I did think she was going to give a brief mention of Ithkuil when she mentioned engineered conlangs, I think keeping it to loglan/lojban was the right call.
For those looking to learn an artlang, the languages in LotR are probably the most fleshed out. For those looking to learn an auxlang, Esperanto will get you a lot of mileage, and Toki Pona will be easiest to pick up.
For artlangs (particularly naturalistic artlangs) David Peterson's showcases in his talks and Biblaridion's videos here on youtube are so great and informative. A TON of really good youtubers have dedicated their channel to conlanging and honestly there are so many that have high-quality content that I'm impressed. As an Italian, I must say the community is quite monolingual (in the sense that the content itself is in English, be sure these nerds speak more than one language!), but if you know English, the conlanging world is at your mercy.
i unironically want to learn kay(f)bop(t) if only for the tower-of-babel-story-slash-rickroll
But can you say, "My hovercraft is full of eels"?
toki pona is not never attempted to be an auxlang. it's a philosophical artlang, meaning it was designed to be an artistic form of expression based on the philosophical ideas of minimalism.
@@yuvalne In my opinion it's in the same category as lojban, a language based on philosopical principles (in lojban's being perfectly logical an unambigous, in toki pona's minimalism)
The illustration of the friendly neighbor Klingon is the clear winner of this episode.
Yes, I love the Hawaiian shirt!
Well... You haven't experienced real neighbourly friendliness until you've witnessed it in its original Klingon form.
specially in an episode missing the giddy shakespeare
That and this episode's cursed (or blessed?) thumbnail. xD
Loved it 😂
Funny enough, in Dutch "zamen" means "together, and "hof" can mean either "court", "courtyard" or "garden". So in Dutch at least Zamenhof sort of means "court of togetherness", which fits his ambitions. I wonder if the (presumably) Yiddish roots of the surname have a similar meaning.
It is spelled as "Samen" though, but the Germans have "Zusammen" so maybe that is how the Z fits in
@@MissMoontree en in tezamen is het wel met een z
@@CouldBeMathijs Which is easier in your opinion, German or Dutch? Does Dutch have genders for inanimate objects like German?
@@Anonymoose66G I thing German might be a little more difficult in some aspects, Dutch has a gender system, but the masculine and feminine have merged in almost al situations, so it's actually two genders, neuter and a common gender. Dutch also doesn't really have cases anymore in Standard Dutch and most dialects, even the genitive (English' 's and ', is barely used in daily conversation anymore). But I find Dutch spelling more confusing. Also keep in mind that this post is written from the perspective of a Flemish Dutch native speaker, who has had 1 hour of German class for the past 3 school years, I just have a grasp of the language and do not know it to anything more then A1.
I took one linguistics course in college, and the professor mentioned that she was one of the creators of Pakuni. This was the language spoken by Cha-Ka and his people on the show Land of the Lost. The show creators had hired a few people to create a whole language for their silly show. As I recall, the professor was pretty proud of it.
Well, yeah! They invented a whole language! That’s actually a pretty big deal.
Which _Land of the Lost_ was it?
@@r0bw00d The original TV series, from the '70s. I used to watch it as a kid.
@@JeffRobbins27 That was a great show! Which theme song gets stuck in your head: the original or Uncle Jack?
I'm oddly proud that I worked on a movie that actually used Esperanto as a written language...in the movie Blade: Trinity (yes, the lame vampire movie, to be "vague" about where the movie was taking place and give it a "European" flair (even though it was filmed in Vancouver and made many references to the FBI and other Americanisms), the film company decided to make many building signs legible in English and Esperanto. To really drive this home there is a scene where Ryan Reyolds' character "Hannibal King" is bedridden because of an injury and is watching the movie "The Incubus"...a movie famous for both starring William Shatner and being the first feature film in the Esperanto language.
1 of my personal favorite fictional languages is Trigedasleng (shortened to Trig) from The 100, which in the show was originally a combination of English & Latin but changed over a century to the language the various clans used throughout the series.
"English and Latin"
So, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Latin and Latin seasoned with a sprinkle of Norse?
Can I suggest you do a video about controlled natural languages?
Their use can be benign (enabling people to communicate in a simplified third language with minimal study, e.g. Basic English ) or terrifying (restricting a natural language to a prescribed set of words to make it impossible to express dissent, e.g. Newspeak).
It might make an interesting companion video to your conlang one.
There was also a push in the 90s to 00s to simplify an existing language with few native speakers and have that real language be the new global default. The idea was that this would sidestep the practice of the politically dominate country's language being the linga franca.
Icelandic is highly restricted to preserve it, as it is the closest to Old Norse you can find. If that will actually work remains to be seen.
I was going to say "haha, like French making up Official New French Words because they hated having English loanwords" but this is my first time hearing how strictly regulated Icelandic is, wow
@@pluspiping I recommend looking it up if you find it interesting. As a Swede, I've found some Icelandic people annoyingly claiming they have more Viking heritage, and are more authentic, than the whole of Scandinavia.
Despite the fact that the city Uppsala existed before people even lived on Iceland.
@@Ikajo They're not claiming to be more authentic than those who lived in Uppsala before Iceland was colonized, are they? They're only claiming to be "more authentic" than Scandinavia _today._
As a Conlanger myself, I was so psyched to see this video go up! Now I have a really good intro to link people to when they're confused & baffled by my hobby!
My favorite type of conlang are hypothetical conlangs (like what if the Romans never left Britain, and a British Romance language developed).
Another good book on Conlangs is "From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages" by Michael Adams. It almost reads like a doctoral thesis, which is to say kind of dry at some points, but it has a lot of good information on the nuances of Klingon, Sindarin, Newspeak, 1337 speak, and others. The book is about 12 years old, so some newer artlangs and things won't get touched on in there. Still a good primer.
It would be cool to do a video on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and talk about both it's supporters and skeptics. Many people hear about it and are tantalized by the implications, but I think carry it too far (e.g. in Arrival) without knowing it's history and actual claims. It might also be a good to close with modern linguists that are still working on testing it out (Daniel Everett comes to mind, if a bit of a controversial figure himself).
That our language in itself influencing our worldview is a very real thing. This is evident with many new-world slaves being restricted to illiteracy. It's also evident in invasion/colonization of a country. The dominant side impresses their language, as well as ideals, upon the natives.
This is a perfect subject for an Otherwords video, and the team did a terrific job of it. I really enjoy this series!
Agreed.
Ben Burtt, who created the computer tone voice for R2-D2, also created the conlang Huttese for Jabba The Hutt. He based Huttese on Quechua, an indigenous language family spoken by the Quechua peoples in the Andes and highlands of South America.
It's not a conlang. Huttese doesn't have a grammar- for the most part it's an English relex- and in Return of the Jedi it's mostly gibberish made to sound vaguely Quechua.
Yeah.... Huttese is somewhat famously an example of where people were lazy and just used gibberish instead of actually making a real conlang. The same utterance is used within a single scene to mean two entirely different sentences
@@leenaf8322 What you're talking about isn't actually Huttese, it's the language Boushh speaks
I am a big fan of Interlingua even though I've never studied it (which is the point).
It's a conlang that was designed to be understood by speakers of all Romance languages, using features they all share.
Spanish speakers think it sounds like Italian and vice versa. French speakers might gave a harder time if they're just listening, but should be able to understand everything if they read it.
It's even more Euro-centric than Esperanto, so I don't think it should be a universal language or anything. But it fascinates me that millions can understand a language without making any attempt to learn it.
Well "Euro-centric"... most romance language speakers today live outside Europe xD
Marc Okrand also created the Atlantean language for the Disney animated film, Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Definitely one of the most unique and underrated films ever.
I thought it was good too. I think its only weakness was that there wasn't enough story to fill its time.
Just wanna say this: thank you for this wonderful video, I myself am a conlanger who's currently working on two conlangs for a fantastic universe (still trying to figure out how it's gonna be), w/ some others coming soon. Can't wait to read "In the land of invented languages", this will surely be very useful for my quirky creations hehe
Cool, what's the story about?
@@bardw8792 at first I'm thinking of making some kind of low fantasy/alternative history mix of a story, based on my home country. Still blurry how to make it work but I'm very excited w/ what will come out of it!
A J. R. R. Tolkien in the making! - Dr. B
@@pbsstoried thx Dr. B! 🥰
what i love about conlanging is when i try to not think about linguistics but give the language a structure that's in and of itself works, then come back at it with a knowledge of linguistics and realise what features have emerged from the idea. and the most satisfying is when i design a feature that i only way later learn exists in a natural language, bc that's a bit like discovering something through experimental archaeology.
Fun Fact: Independent film maker, Christopher R. Mihm includes an Esperanto audio track on all his films.
That’s awesome!
This was such a fun video. No matter how you plan and engineer things, it will be overtaken by spontaneity.
One of my favorite explorations of conlags is in the classic science fiction novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller. Basically, after a nuclear holocaust English splits into multiple new languages similar to how Latin did after the fall of Rome. I’m going to try any avoid spoilers but several characters discuss the difficulties of translating English into their language. For example, they come up with multiple meanings of the words “fallout shelter”. 😉
I love that book. The discovery by Brother Francis was especially hilarious, but also evocative. Another conlang I found believable is Belter creole from The Expanse series, which necessitates hand gestures, since it is mostly spoken by people in space suits who can not see expressions.
If only there was a Babel fish to help us understand each other without knowing all of the languages.
As a longtime Esperantist and student of other planned languages let me tell you people, the auxlang rabbit hole goes far deeper than you'd ever dream. There was the split between the mainstream Esperantists and the Esperanto reformers which resulted in the separate language Ido, the numerous attempts at reviving a simplified Latin as an international language which has resulted in three entirely separate languages calling themselves Interlingua, Esperanto's constructed literary dialects like Gavaro and Arcaicam Esperantom, the birth, death, rebirth, and redeath of Volapük, the philosophical split between Finvenikismo and Raŭmismo, kaj tiel plu. Part of me does hold out hope for la fina venko, sed male al de aliaj finvenkistoj mi ne zorgas kiun lingvon venkos. Mi nur scias ke neniu el la naturaj lingvoj taŭgas kiel universala lingvo, kaj la anglan estas la plej maltaŭgan el ciujn eblojn.
Ooh, when I clicked on translate, it showed me the rest of your comment in English. Good job (this time), Auto-translate.
EDIT: Can you tell if it did it correctly?
Ido kaj du aliaj estas eĉ menciitaj en la filmeto 😉
@@resourceress7 I've simply read it en la lingvo internacia Esperanto.
"words might be shadows on Plato's wall" is a pretty amazing sentence. Thanks for the issue of its utterance!
I remember hearing a constructed language in the tv series The Expanse. One thing I did like is that it even affected their accent.
Belter Creole. The in-universe origins were that the people who came to live in the Astroid Belt, mining and trawling resources for Earth and Mars, were from many different nations on Earth and over time, forced to live in Space on extended contracts, had descendants that never really learned their ancestors' languages, instead developing a patóis language that incorporated them all.
You could actually hear hints of Swahili, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Japanese and more in some of the words, and Belter culture incorporates a lot from the Earth cultures that birthed their ancestors including tattoos similar to what you see in Polynesian cultures
Check out the interview Ars Technica did Nick Farmer. He's the person who developed Belter for The Expanse.
Having recently watched The Expanse for the first time, I am fascinated by the Lang Belta. It is actually believable, that such a language could evolve from a hodge-podge of different earth languages. You can even understand the odd word or part of sentence just from inferring from other real world languages. The most interesting aspect is, that most words have their origin in more than one language, making it a true amalgamation. For example the word "kopeng" for friend is an mix of the french word "copain" for friend and the mandarin word "péngyu" for friend. I would really like to play a campaign in the Expanse RPG, just to have a reason to learn and use that language (and maybe even expand on it).
@@rd3299 I'm only sad it didn't make an appearance in this great video!
Fun Fact: The song "The storm" by TheFatRat is sung completely in Na'vi and it's incredible
yes! The pronunciation is kinda wack sometimes but its a great song and what got me into learning na'vi
“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”
Constructed languages are fascinating; I've taken stabs at one myself (failed). RE-constructed languages, like PIE are cool too. Frankly, I just mostly wish I had the capacity to pick up every language, grammar & forgotten word, ever!
... Oh, and kudos to the makeup. You made for an awesome Klingon.
I'm really hoping for videos about Korean, one about the language as a whole and one video specifically about invented writing system 한글 (Hangul)
I second your suggestion. In the meantime, the NativLang channel has a good video about Hangul. It's part of a series on writing systems.
I've just recently discovered your content. You have an amazing, charismatic way of talking and describing this content. Not everyone is equally skilled at language and being an engaging speaker.
Thank you
This channel is great. Keep it up
The sentence "English is the Lingua Franca" is one of my favorites. You could make an entire video analyzing just that sentence.
I knew a guy who used to invent languages for his own stories he wrote as a kid. His method was to take an existing language but apply the grammatical and conjugation rules of another existing language. For example, for one of his languages, he would apply latin conjugation and grammatical rules for English sentences."He is eating a red apple" would be "He eatendo a apple red."
Nice! Sort of the linguistic version of the musical trick a friend of mine did in high school. He could play the Mickey Mouse theme song in all sorts of styles, like Bach, or Beethoven, or Jazz, or … similar idea of applying a different set of rules. :)
Shouldn't it be appleum redum, I mean, accusative case?
This languageus interestat meum!
toki pona is another great success
story that is worth mentioning here
"...the de facto lingua franca"
Nicely played. Love this channel and every episode.
In the comedy sci fi series, 'Red Dwarf', it's imagined that in the future Esperanto has taken off. All across the space ship, signage is shown in English and Esperanto!
I recently watched a documentary of Johnny Harris regarding the living in Greenland. So the natives have several words for ice based on location texture and use. They even have words for the spaces between floating ice as well as for the edge of the ice. If you drop me in the middle of that location, I will only see "white frozen water".
In Chinese, we have three separate words for _fry_ : pan fry (煎), stir fry (炒), and deep fry (炸).
The klingon language in the titlecard looks like it spells out sneed
Sneed, feeder of seed
It says {pIqaD} ("Klingon writing system").
A friend of mine once spelled out {chaq qaS} "It could happen" in pIqaD characters. Another person looking at it said it looked like "yes sex".
No mention of the Bill Shatner starring All-Esperanto movie, Incubus?
I just watched part of that the other day!
Lol @me for thinking ConLang meant a Language only spoken at Conventions 😂❤
That is pretty much what it means, since that's likely the oly place you will find another speaker.
@@kyleellis1825 hmmmm, you may have a point there!
Not going to lie, I'm kind of disappointed Erica isn't dressed up as a Klingon, like in the thumbnail. oO
I would have liked a reference to two other examples despite neither actually being an entire language. The first is Orwell's Newspeak in 1984. The other being a kind of shorthand that is emojis. Newspeak is interesting because it envisions what an engineered language could be used for, and emojis because of their ability to facilitate communication without the use of words at all. Interesting stuff.
As a Star Wars fan, I (naturally) always loved Huttese although it's not very fleshed out at all, only a a hundred words or so. But I always like the sound and the concept of being the language of the Outer Rim.
Koo-joo, gwan-kee. Cha ha ha ha ha...
That's not how you say "lojban", it's LOZH-bahn. Kudos for including it!! Neat episode
Ive always liked the idea of something like Lojban being a common second language for diplomacy and records wherever ambiguity can be detrimental. Cant force any such thing of course, but I do wonder how many misunderstandings could have been avoided? how many conflicts? and how much knowledge has been lost in these ambiguities?
Fanakalo is one used in South African mines. They even send them to 'school' when they come to work in the mines to learn the language. One needs it when you consider there are 11 official languages and many migrants from neighbouring countries come to work there too.
"words might be Plato's shadows on the cave wall" sounds like a sentence every conlanger needs to translate to their conlang at some point
Loved this video! Constructed language has always been a mystery to me, so it's great to learn more
It's funny how this video comes out just as I've been thinking about conlangs. I've been considering a unique approach: delving into numerous dictionaries and compiling words with similar meanings. For instance, take the word 'pineapple,' which is pronounced as 'ananas' in almost all languages except English. By creating words that resonate with as many languages as possible, we could potentially develop a universal language that incorporates familiar vocabulary.
Another word I think about is that in most languages “beer” is very similar, but in Spain and Portugal it is cerveza/cerveja.
that has been done so many times already. check out Esperanto and Lojban
you might think it's just like that, but the problem is that it creates biases. for example, english, being the most commonly spoken language, would be favoured over other languages. english is an indo-european language, like german, french, spanish, hindi/urdu, russian, polish, latvian, armenian, and dutch, but languages like hungarian and chinese and japanese and georgian and indonesian are not. since indo european languages make up the most commonly spoken languages, this results in a eurocentric vocabulary that many people cannot understand. it's not an easy problem to solve.
there are some words which are easy though, like cha/te (tea) and ma[ma] (mother)
This is legit one of my fave series on UA-cam. Every video teaches me things.
The best description I ever heard for Klingon was, "... [people] over there barking at each other." 🤣
“'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. '”
conlangs really are such a fascinating subject, and it always makes me think about the way people talk about lost or languages we are losing too because its like learning an invented language is fun and in theory can be helpful as is the case for the attempts at universal languages but also would it also be more ethical/practical to encourage the use and learning of languages with a dwindling number of speakers. also the evolution of languages too like the reason lots of conlangs dont expand in their use is because they cant really evolve bc theyre limited by the structure or the creator not creating all the words necessary for anyone wanting to be fluent to build on. like there is a klingon version of hamlet but the number of words is still like less than 2000 words, and its a cyclical problem bc lacking speakers means lacking people to expand the language and lacking language to build upon means lack of speakers.
i do appreciate media that make conlangs tho bc its easy to just justify the use of english or even a mix of english and other languages, but creating a new language does a lot for worldbuilding.
I love how you explain what the story of the Tower of Babel is but assume your audience is familiar with Plato's Theory of Forms.
I remember watching some documentary in which the Nile River was explored from starting point(s) to finish, i.e., the delta at Alexandria. The documentary showcased African tribes that were living near the river's starting highlands. These tribes were relatively underdeveloped, maintaining a more or less primitive lifestyle, unchanged by external world history. What I found fascinating about the tribe is that they spoke a language that sounded nearly identical to the language spoken by Ewoks from the "Star Wars" universe. Since I know that George Lucas often derived his fictional languages from real world languages, I had to assume that these African tribes' language had to be the inspiration for the Ewok language.
ah the art-lang, having 5 different words for different specifications of the same thing, yet not being able to say things like 'door'
One of your best episodes yet.
Thank you!
welcome back to conlang critic, the show where i get things wrong about your favourite conlang!
mi olin e ona a!
Wonderful work, as always Dr B. 👍
I love this channel so much. Thank you Dr. E!
I spent a while trying to learn Esperanto, but due to a lack of others around me speaking it I kind of just stopped. I do want to pick it back up again.
Tried it on Duolingo - it felt natural, but got more confusing the more lessons I did, since it borrowed from so many languages.
I felt like I was code-switching every other word.
@@eddierayvanlynch6133 Honestly my brain just goes full Italian when I speak it, hand gestures and all. The problem I have is my Esperanto and Spanish from highschool sometimes trip over each other due to being similar.
I get such joy from a new Otherwords. Thank you!
I’ve been creating conlangs for years. I enjoy mixing different what ifs into my languages.
0:56 It's fun because actually all three cases she mentions can be applied to Basque 😂 So she could have just said something like this:
"Will it be agglutinative... like Basque?
Will it have a subject + object + verb structure... like Basque?
Or will it have ergative-absolutive allignment... like Basque?"
i met a bulgarian lady, who was a globe trotting expert and advocate for esperanto. during the iron curtain, she still did seminars worl wide. i spent a lovely afternoon in her home drinking tea with her
Neat!
Yay, this was a great video to start the day on. Thanks Otherwords team ❤
I LOVE this series
That tactical use of Papyrus is some yummy shade
I'll never forget the phrase in The 5th Element: "Akta Gamat" (I have no idea how to spell this), meaning, "Not without my permission."
Captain Kirk knew about conlangs before he ever met a Klingon. Shatner starred in the movie "Incubus" in 1966, filmed entirely in Esperanto.
Really? That’s a neat factoid!
@@DawnDavidson The entire film _Incubus_ can be viewed on UA-cam.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 Marvellous episode!
a camp counselor of mine when I was a kid was a Japanese guy who had been raised on Esperanto. he taught us a few words, but obviously it didn't stick.
Fun bit of trivia. William Shatner starred in the film “Incubus” (1966), which was entirely in Esperanto.
Edit: I see may others have pointed this out. 😀
Esperanto in that film is terrible. It seems that only „Angoroj” (1964) and „Gerda Malaperis” (2006) are actual Esperanto films. Although there is no point in watching them for plot.
Pet peeve: Japanese is not SOV ( subject object verb) it is just V ( Verb last). In both formal and colloquial Japanese both the subject and object can, and often are omitted and the order can be switched as long as the verb is last. Basically, Japanese does not have a word order based grammar, subject, object, and topic are determined by particles, not word order.
And colloquially, many speakers often postpose subjects/objects after the predicate in the same clause, so Japanese being a strictly verb-final language isn't necessarily the case... Take a look at this: www.bu.edu/bucld/files/2011/05/31-NOMURA.pdf
I love that there are people commenting here that know things like this. Linguistics geeks FTW!
Anyone whose been to a Star Trek convention knows there number of conversational Klingon speakers is greater than what can fit in a bus.
Informative and entertaining. Thanks Dr Brozovsky.
Though it was never fleshed out, the Martian language from Heinlein's "Stranger In A Strange Land" was described to unlock a person's true physical and mental potential if it could be learned to the point of thinking in the tongue.
Grok that?
I just love this show!!! I don't teach anymore, but I can't help but think how I would use them to teach my ESL students!
You didn't mention my favorite conlang, which is Ithkuil, it's kind of like a cool version of logban. If anyone is wanting to up they're nerd level to 11 that's the conlang for you.
I am making a language called Wudov. It has a bit of tense, but it has a weird system where if you say it like your asking a question, it means that the sentence is a question, for example, Yun set panuo means “You moved it” but Yun set panuo? Means did you move it. It also works for excitement, and other emotions.
The most famous Star Trek conlang is Klingon, but there are other ones too! There are great resources online for Vulcan and Romulan in particular.
As a conlanger (if not in practice (yet) but in spirit), conlanging is very fun, if painful in the way only art can be XD. This was a very fun video!!
This was fascinating! Have you ever discussed the "Darmok" episode of ST:TNG? In one of my computer science classes we discussed this in relation to compression and information theory. Is all language (except for the conlans you explained) really just indexing a shared knowledge?
There definitely exists a mapping between vocabulary and conceptual space. That's what makes jargon interesting, linguistically. But language isn't *just* that mapping: it is entirely possible to express things that we do not know with language. This is probably transitive: i.e., we express what we don't know in terms of what we do, and thereby expand what we do know. Similarly, knowledge isn't entirely bounded by language. There's plenty that we know but cannot express. Some things, like the limits of logic, like the Liar's Paradox or axiomatic statements, break language and make it nonsensical, but we can nevertheless understand it. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem doesn't entirely apply to language as a whole, but it certainly indicates that language will never be complete.
Would have loved to see Toki Pona mentioned, which takes such a contrary approach to the loglang while still having the assumptions of Whorf in mind. Though of course I do understand, there is just soooooooo much to talk about languages and you cannot talk about everything.
There's an ironic phenomenon in software engineering. A developer gets fed up with the 100 different imperfect programming languages and thinks "I will design a perfect new language to replace them all!" Some time later, a new developer comes along and looks at the 101 different imperfect programming languages and thinks...
I knew there were constructed languages, but I had no idea there were so many! Another great video!
The count very much depends on what standard you use to say it's one. If I make up a word, does that count as a new language? What if I make up enough words to form a sentence, but I don't specify a sound inventory? What if I specify a sound inventory and give phonotactic rules, but don't bother actually spelling out any words? What if I explain how to speak a language, but provide no writing system? Languages are incredibly complex beasts and there are an extremely large number of constructed ones if you relax the rules for what counts as one. I'd bet the count of 500 depends, for example, on the language being *published* and *accepted* by some community of speakers.
This video touches on the reason I want to learn the Chinese words for numbers--they are so predictable and structured that they actually make it easier to understand maths well enough to learn them quickly.
Well, there's the normal form: 零、一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、十、百、千
and the financial form: 零、壹、貳、參、肆、伍、陸、柒、捌、玖、拾、佰、仟
Don't forget the joke language kay(f)bop(t), where what hat you are wearing dictates parts of the language... one of the hats being a Pangolin.
and "zig-a-zig 'ah" is what you call your significant other.
My favorite Conlangs are Al-Bhed, Hymnos, Elven(Lord of The Rings) and Esperanto. I can't really speak them, but I've heard them a few times and they sound good enough.
It would be interesting to see Otherwords building on the ideas of language & color, & the way that research has affected our understanding of linguistic determinism/relativism.
a friend of mine has gone to a few Esperanto world congresses! i speak a but not as well as she does.
One book that I find fascinating is "Toki Pona: The Language of Good" by Sonja Lang. in it, the author not only introduces a minimalist language called Toki Pona and teaches you how to speak it, but also gives fascinating insight into the thoughts and rules that go into making a conlang. I highly recommend reading through at least the first half of the book, even if you have no intention to actually learn the language
This is just a fun thing to know that people are actively making languages. It is amazing what people have made.
5:50 this remind me, there was a talk on how we (Türkiye) need to replace the words we got from foreign languages with words of our own language and the best they came up with "otobüs (bus)" was "çok oturgaçlı götürgeç (a vehicle to transport that has multiple seats)"
fun fact: i saw a sarcastic tweet as a reply that said "o zaman alarma da sövdürgeçli uyandırgaç desinler (then they should say an object that makes you swear/cuss as it wakes one up instead of alarm)"
Man, I love this channel. I always end up watching it when I'm high.