Creating the World's Worst Language

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  • Опубліковано 4 тра 2024
  • Click the link try.lingoda.com/KKlein_Sprint and use my code KKLEIN20 for €20 or $25 off your Lingoda Sprint registration! || I try to test the theoretical limit for how bad a language can get while also making extremely nerdy jokes rolled into a video. Enjoy ig :D
    An entry for: • Who Can Make The Most ... from @AgmaSchwa
    Thanks to my patrons!!
    www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
    00:00 - Introductory Remarks
    03:37 - Destroying the Lexicon
    05:03 - Deixis (and how to use it for evil)
    07:43 - Orthography
    09:12 - A Joke
    09:53 - Sample Text
    11:17 - Credits
    Written and edited by K Klein
    Additional writing and editing by @Annatomyy
    Art by kvd102
    Music by K Klein.

КОМЕНТАРІ • 830

  • @kklein
    @kklein  8 місяців тому +172

    Click the link try.lingoda.com/KKlein_Sprint and use my code KKLEIN20 for €20 or $25 off your Lingoda Sprint registration!

    • @Elisadoesstuff
      @Elisadoesstuff 8 місяців тому +9

      You did not forget to put this after uploading the video

    • @kklein
      @kklein  8 місяців тому +12

      @@Elisadoesstuff nope, absolutely not. i remembered immediately. as always.

    • @stefanofeblesverastegui8869
      @stefanofeblesverastegui8869 8 місяців тому

      Create the World's best Language now : )

    • @mumtazniazi9877
      @mumtazniazi9877 8 місяців тому +1

      Duolingo: *This means WAR*

    • @carkawalakhatulistiwa
      @carkawalakhatulistiwa 8 місяців тому

      ​@@stefanofeblesverastegui8869Indonesia language is the best nation language (real language not artificial or imitation) in the world

  • @water594
    @water594 8 місяців тому +3891

    Time to unironically learn and make a community around this.

    • @emmet3219
      @emmet3219 8 місяців тому +69

      there is already y

    • @kakahass8845
      @kakahass8845 8 місяців тому +421

      Unfortunately people will intentionally or not evolve the language to make it clearer.

    • @globalincident694
      @globalincident694 8 місяців тому +29

      @@emmet3219 where?

    • @enarmonika5557
      @enarmonika5557 8 місяців тому +134

      As a wise man once said, you could make a religion out of this

    • @anonymizationoverload9831
      @anonymizationoverload9831 8 місяців тому +50

      @@enarmonika5557 No, don't-

  • @MCjossic
    @MCjossic 8 місяців тому +3019

    I feel like the one sentence at a time thing could lead to stories being structured as dialogues, requiring at least two storytellers.

    • @austinrimel1150
      @austinrimel1150 8 місяців тому +312

      That's actually really smart.

    • @GodsOfGaming
      @GodsOfGaming 8 місяців тому +737

      no no no you can't make this language good and use its limiting structures as a catalyst for linguistically derived cultural features you cant

    • @nanamacapagal8342
      @nanamacapagal8342 8 місяців тому +474

      ​@@austinrimel1150 DAMMIT humans are good at communicating

    • @itisALWAYSR.A.
      @itisALWAYSR.A. 8 місяців тому +129

      So it's a cant spoken among improv troupes when they're having a rap battle?

    • @klop4228
      @klop4228 8 місяців тому +129

      So the next question: are both storytellers different characters, or is one just asking "what happens next?" and commenting on the story?
      ...or both are different styles of story, each with a long history and their own tropes?

  • @Laachen
    @Laachen 8 місяців тому +2270

    you've literally just created Japanese and then got rid of all the things holding the language together.

    • @Somebodyherefornow
      @Somebodyherefornow 8 місяців тому +458

      japanese but ONLY CHINESE CHARACTERS while weighting
      NO PRONOUNS

    • @Laachen
      @Laachen 8 місяців тому +276

      @@Somebodyherefornow And the Kunyomi and Onyomi were randomized across all characters

    • @dawntreader1247
      @dawntreader1247 8 місяців тому +276

      japanese 2: electric boogaloo

    • @HDR_AMParadox
      @HDR_AMParadox 8 місяців тому +121

      Ah yes, where each word can be pronounced differently which that same pronunciation which can have the same character of a different word and meaning in context.

    • @saltedmutton7269
      @saltedmutton7269 8 місяців тому +182

      the only thing missing is having 5 different politeness levels for mala

  • @usernamenotfound80
    @usernamenotfound80 8 місяців тому +1227

    Since word order is arbitrary, you can just order all of the words alphabetically.

    • @PeterBarnes2
      @PeterBarnes2 8 місяців тому +122

      And when you speak, you're doing so in one sentence, thus you could order _all_ of the words alphabetically, as there are no distinct clauses!
      Anof emfta fe fi fi fi fi fi fi iep iep impus inj jampus kepatak kfitf kfitf kfitf kfitfip kfitfip makata mala mfjo mfjo mju mju mnsuans no no no no no pakat pakat pefi peftk peftk pemol peraki soe soe soememj soememj sunut tama tama tama.
      I just had a thought. Isn't language much easier to understand when, in order to parse words, you have to retain lots of superfluous information which is only given implicitly? This is distinct from using superfluous information in an agreement system, where the information is both duplicated where it's relevant _and_ given explicitly.
      We should impose a grammatical constraint that you remove duplicates of words, but only when they have the same meaning!
      Anof emfta fe fi iep impus inj jampus kepatak kfitf kfitfip makata mala mfjo mfjo mju mnsuans no no no pakat pakat pefi peftk peftk pemol peraki soe soememj sunut tama tama tama.
      (Note on 3 'no,' while both 'we' and 'us' seem to be different forms of the same pronoun, the translations as given are different. While this would presumably be for clarification in English translation, conservatively I'm leaving them as distinct, and thus duplicate. The other 'no' is 'that,' mala.)

    • @gavasiarobinssson5108
      @gavasiarobinssson5108 8 місяців тому +11

      Poetry?

    • @PeterBarnes2
      @PeterBarnes2 8 місяців тому +33

      @@gavasiarobinssson5108 I suppose alphabetical order makes alliteration interesting in certain ways, and it would really alter the way rhyming and meter are handled, particular considering the 1-sentence rule. I suppose you could do dialogue poetry, but overall I think the poetry ends up being more cursed than interesting in this language.

    • @klop4228
      @klop4228 8 місяців тому +25

      But what does "alphabetically" mean? Are we ordering the alphabet by number of fingers, number and placement of lines on the side, or how many sides the polygon has? Or some unholy combination of these? And where do the symbols at the end go?

    • @PeterBarnes2
      @PeterBarnes2 8 місяців тому +17

      @@klop4228 Oh! I forgot about the abjad for the language. In that case, we'll absolutely need to do none of those things you just said, because those would be logical.
      It would probably make sense to optimize the alphabet to be written as ambiguously as possible, looking for all the ambiguous sets of pairs of characters, and forming as many of those pairs as possible in order.
      I just had a cursed thought. What if we say the abjad goes in an order, but without a first character? Like, you can say for sure that one goes after the next, but if you'd write all of them, once, in order, it's equally valid to start on any character. It'd be like a circle! When doing this, we should impose a rule that you can't literally write the abjad in a circle, and also that you should put a copy of the first character at the end, for clarification.

  • @LinusBoman
    @LinusBoman 8 місяців тому +2187

    As a Swede, with this video title, not bringing Danish up even once? Your self control astounds me.

    • @Ra1d_danois
      @Ra1d_danois 8 місяців тому +163

      As a Dane, I had the very same thougth

    • @meowtherainbowx4163
      @meowtherainbowx4163 8 місяців тому +29

      Oh, hey, it's another UA-cam guy!

    • @ananas_anna
      @ananas_anna 8 місяців тому +54

      Rødgrød med fløde

    • @Anonymoose66G
      @Anonymoose66G 8 місяців тому +8

      @@Ra1d_danois Danish=the worst European Germanic language 😂.

    • @Ra1d_danois
      @Ra1d_danois 8 місяців тому +17

      @@Anonymoose66G Nonsense, you know it's dutch!

  • @twotothehalf3725
    @twotothehalf3725 8 місяців тому +518

    "Penafi" can be translated from Malay to mean "denier" ("nafi" means to deny or refute; "pe-" is a prefix meaning the doer of attached verb), which is fitting for a language that actively denies communication.

    • @BinglesP
      @BinglesP 8 місяців тому +14

      That's honestly really interesting how well that coincidence(if it is) lines up. Thank you for sharing!

    • @anggakaruniawan
      @anggakaruniawan 8 місяців тому +3

      Eh, di bahasa Melayu ada kata "nafi"? Di bahasa Indonesia tidak ada😂

    • @twotothehalf3725
      @twotothehalf3725 8 місяців тому +7

      @@anggakaruniawan Eh, ya ka tak ada? Dalam KBBI ada disenarai kata "nafi". Agaknya tak selalu diguna kot dalam percakapan sehari-hari - dalam bahasa Melayu pun jarang dipakai.

    • @catabakies69
      @catabakies69 8 місяців тому +3

      ​@@anggakaruniawaningat lagu "Sahabat Jadi Cinta"?
      "Tak bisa hatiku menafikan cinta
      Karena cinta tersirat bukan tersurat
      Meski bibirku terus berkata tidak
      Mataku terus pancarkan sinarnya"

  • @Lee-us3ol
    @Lee-us3ol 8 місяців тому +543

    If you're feeling unsure about your own conlang; don't worry! It could always be worse

    • @livedandletdie
      @livedandletdie 7 місяців тому +7

      If you want to make it worse, just add in r-colored nasal creaky vowels. Or turn regular consonants into cursed glides.

    • @Designed1
      @Designed1 Місяць тому

      > poliespo

  • @KingsleyIII
    @KingsleyIII 8 місяців тому +927

    What I'm getting from this is that a language is bad at being a language when it has boatloads of ambiguity at every possible level.

    • @michaelweiske702
      @michaelweiske702 8 місяців тому +55

      Correct!

    • @the5002ndpanda
      @the5002ndpanda 8 місяців тому +177

      I mean, the main purpose of language is to convey information. If a language cannot effectively do so, it's fair to call it a bad language.

    • @foxglovesbouquet2905
      @foxglovesbouquet2905 8 місяців тому +28

      Eli: Works for awful programming languages as well 😅

    • @gavasiarobinssson5108
      @gavasiarobinssson5108 8 місяців тому +1

      Cantonese

    • @novilunium5339
      @novilunium5339 8 місяців тому +15

      English

  • @cicada.and.pomegranate
    @cicada.and.pomegranate 8 місяців тому +748

    You can make phonology bad by having all of the phonemes be similar to each other and hard for small children to pronounce, making it so children cannot be meaningfully understood.

    • @nixel1324
      @nixel1324 8 місяців тому +49

      You might not need bad phonology for that, depending on the child.

    • @rateeightx
      @rateeightx 8 місяців тому +126

      Yeah, find the sounds children often make first, Like 'm' or 'p', And just have them absent from the language, And then instead have really rare contrasts, like say having minimal pairs between /x/, /χ/, and /h/, and maybe /ħ/ too for good measure. Something like that wouldn't necessarily make the sound harder to _speak,_ if people grew up around those sounds they'd likely be able to produce them easily, But it would make it harder to _understand,_ as it can be really hard to tell those sounds apart, especially in a loud or crowded environment.

    • @simonnt
      @simonnt 8 місяців тому +40

      Me when /ə/ /ɜ/ distinction

    • @leandroulpio7473
      @leandroulpio7473 8 місяців тому +5

      @@rateeightx Tlingit people were fine with it for many centuries, for some reasons.

    • @LordSandwichII
      @LordSandwichII 8 місяців тому +6

      Every word has a cluster of three or four consonants that makes it near impossible for even adults to pronounce.

  • @c0rny1000
    @c0rny1000 8 місяців тому +2975

    Thats not a good language

    • @kklein
      @kklein  8 місяців тому +1111

      mean :(

    • @respys_meh
      @respys_meh 8 місяців тому +107

      well it could be worse

    • @zasharan2
      @zasharan2 8 місяців тому +144

      @@respys_meh no it couldnt, didnt you read the title?

    • @venosa7649
      @venosa7649 8 місяців тому

      💀@@zasharan2

    • @sdcb363
      @sdcb363 8 місяців тому

      ​@@zasharan20:40

  • @PedanticAntics
    @PedanticAntics 8 місяців тому +154

    1:52
    Ah yes, a term in the regional dialect of 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖈𝖗𝖆𝖋𝖙𝖊𝖘𝖊 for "My, what a delicious porkchop."

    • @jedimasterhighground334
      @jedimasterhighground334 8 місяців тому +13

      That literally made me laugh out loud!

    • @StuffandThings_
      @StuffandThings_ 8 місяців тому +9

      @@jedimasterhighground334 No joke same

    • @Arexsis
      @Arexsis 2 місяці тому +1

      That joke was so stupid I cackled like a hyenna

  • @kohrau
    @kohrau 8 місяців тому +442

    My initial thought was when I saw the CCC was just to submit the English language

    • @modmaker7617
      @modmaker7617 8 місяців тому +80

      English:
      Strengths
      CCCVCCC

    • @beady5831
      @beady5831 8 місяців тому +106

      Someone already did that with French for the first one. So English would be a cursed conlang heavily influenced by another cursed conlang. I couldn't see why this isn't the most cursed language that exists.

    • @usernamenotfound80
      @usernamenotfound80 8 місяців тому +11

      @@modmaker7617 Isn't "strengths" CCCVCCC?

    • @Lussra
      @Lussra 8 місяців тому +22

      @@usernamenotfound80 There is a hidden 'k' sound when you say the word. "Strengkths"

    • @modmaker7617
      @modmaker7617 8 місяців тому +4

      @@usernamenotfound80
      Right the G is silent.

  • @vedqiibyol
    @vedqiibyol 8 місяців тому +182

    I don't know why he chose to write the consonants. I would have only had the vowels. 5 symbols Well, 89 because who cares.

    • @kklein
      @kklein  8 місяців тому +61

      based idea

  • @jacksondetterbeck4983
    @jacksondetterbeck4983 8 місяців тому +198

    I feel the issue with this language is that it will very quickly gain grammar and specificity and whatnot by convention. "po", for example, if used in usage will very quickly gravitate towards always being taken to mean the thing that is being gestured at. I feel for a language to actually be the worst, it has to be at a local optima - where a single change to the can't make the language better. Only then can you make a stable worst language that truly stands the test of time.

    • @aiocafea
      @aiocafea 8 місяців тому +26

      yeah same i feel as if you need to find a low valley of efficiency on the highest mountain of linguistic effort
      and if there is a stream that your language can slide down into boring language territory, at least some plausible explanation as to why
      the need of hiding or codifying speech can make a lot of crazy changes to a language, or the medium of communication, or a people's system of organisation, etc
      but saying something could in theory be done but it's rude or it's just mot done doesn't work too well in my book

    • @anonymizationoverload9831
      @anonymizationoverload9831 8 місяців тому +35

      Damn it humans are good at communicating!

    • @LordSandwichII
      @LordSandwichII 8 місяців тому +17

      Or you could have a strong community of zealots dedicated to ensuring that no beneficial change is ever deemed acceptable. The only changes that are ever allowed, must be ones that make it worse. Then force most of the world to speak it this way forever, and teach it in schools, using the same standards all the time.
      ...wait, I think there is already a language like that...

    • @BinglesP
      @BinglesP 8 місяців тому +5

      So, basically, like an involuntary version of how people refused to adapt to the changes Mr. Esperanto made to Esperanto?

    • @usernametaken017
      @usernametaken017 Місяць тому +2

      ​@@LordSandwichIIomg it's every language with an institution that sets rules on how to speak it

  • @chocolateavian
    @chocolateavian 8 місяців тому +670

    Everytime K Klein uploads I immediately drop everything and watch it. Unfortunately I was holding a bowl of spaghetti when I saw the notification.

    • @iceylore7767
      @iceylore7767 8 місяців тому +25

      crying

    • @roseashkiiii4361
      @roseashkiiii4361 8 місяців тому +53

      ​@@iceylore7767 your nafi noooo

    • @ffreeze9924
      @ffreeze9924 8 місяців тому +5

      Oopsies! XDXDXD

    • @nileprimewastaken
      @nileprimewastaken 8 місяців тому +18

      @@roseashkiiii4361 why would they care about the thing that is completely opposite of just north-northeast of the thing on the opposite side of your body from where you are gesturing?

    • @ObamaBinLaden525
      @ObamaBinLaden525 8 місяців тому +1

      RIP Spaghetti

  • @thatoneguy9475
    @thatoneguy9475 8 місяців тому +169

    I love how you accidentally created japanese in the first part, especially with the 'context' thing

    • @MsZsc
      @MsZsc 8 місяців тому +3

      these comments don't make any sense. Japanese doesn't use roman letters nor that stop sign pictography.

    • @brightblackhole2442
      @brightblackhole2442 7 місяців тому +36

      ⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@MsZsc nobody said or implied that japanese uses the latin alphabet (although it is typed using a romanization scheme which uses it). don't cherrypick examples that aren't relevant, just to prove people wrong

  • @thewoodlandcryptid
    @thewoodlandcryptid 8 місяців тому +92

    the language spoken out loud sounds like someone talking backwards. it's honestly fascinating

  • @LinguaPhiliax
    @LinguaPhiliax 8 місяців тому +218

    All words being deictic is a terrible idea that I absolutely love!

  • @tcowtiahanto8815
    @tcowtiahanto8815 8 місяців тому +323

    i will never comprehend how linguist youtubers know or at least know about eachother
    like it makes sense but like also ?!?!

    • @tuluppampam
      @tuluppampam 8 місяців тому +99

      There are few creators and anyone interested in linguistics or conlanging will basically find all of them

    • @LinguaPhiliax
      @LinguaPhiliax 8 місяців тому +64

      We are very lonely.

    • @AgmaSchwa
      @AgmaSchwa 8 місяців тому +74

      We're all in a group chat together, haha

    • @mildlymarvelous
      @mildlymarvelous 8 місяців тому +32

      I mean, they’re experts in communication!

    • @grivitastb
      @grivitastb 7 місяців тому +2

      ​@@mildlymarvelousoh my god you're a comedic genius

  • @rojnx9
    @rojnx9 8 місяців тому +58

    Make sure that you face away from someone when you are speaking as to not be rude, this means they can't lip read and all the sounds come out quieter and blurrier and facial expressions can't be read which means less context and pointing and gestures are even harder!!

  • @cameronburger9368
    @cameronburger9368 8 місяців тому +65

    I think this language would produce the most profound poetry, if only anyone could understand it.

  • @Elisadoesstuff
    @Elisadoesstuff 8 місяців тому +160

    Can't believe K Klein would copy Moldovanto and change it to be totally different. Unbelievable!

  • @gaberdo84
    @gaberdo84 8 місяців тому +120

    I do wonder how languages like this would evolve if they where somehow spoken IRL

    • @tahunuva4254
      @tahunuva4254 8 місяців тому +34

      Someone needs to make a bunch of AI simulate this over thousands of years in a week.

    • @gaberdo84
      @gaberdo84 8 місяців тому +20

      @@tahunuva4254 I wonder what it will do to Ithkuil

    • @user-uc8zh5me5u
      @user-uc8zh5me5u 8 місяців тому +6

      I wonder how would evolve the humanity speaking ithkuil

    • @xolagix
      @xolagix 8 місяців тому +9

      you are speaking english i think that's enough of an explanation

  • @nanamacapagal8342
    @nanamacapagal8342 8 місяців тому +18

    Why do I feel like speakers of this language would:
    A) push for language reform and maybe use a little distinction in their phonemes
    B) simplify the orthography into something more useful and readable, like maybe shift the lines somewhere else to make it more readable or change the shapes a little to make them more writable
    C) get around the "one sentence rule" by having a listener interject with "mhm" or "yeah" every sentence until it becomes customary and respectful to do so
    DAMMIT humans are good at communicating

    • @gcewing
      @gcewing 8 місяців тому +5

      Problem is, "This language is terrible, we should change it" can also mean "This language is fine, we should leave it how it is", making it difficult for language reform advocates to argue their case.

    • @nanamacapagal8342
      @nanamacapagal8342 8 місяців тому

      @@gcewing the biggest problem is that yes means no, no means yes, and left is right is up is north-west-south.

  • @Skyisgoingbacktopluto
    @Skyisgoingbacktopluto 8 місяців тому +39

    Well, now I wanna see someone dub the whole Bee Movie in this language one scene at a time.

  • @lananghayomingbumi2782
    @lananghayomingbumi2782 8 місяців тому +34

    Has anyone noticed in the translation, the first four word could also mean 'girl just want to have fun'? is this a coincidence?

  • @nucleus_zalikell
    @nucleus_zalikell 8 місяців тому +57

    Sometimes, the absolute worst can be seen as an art form.

  • @rarebeeph1783
    @rarebeeph1783 8 місяців тому +30

    my solution for the gesturing problem would be to make the language mixed between verbal and signed. if you're busy using your hands to sign words, you can't use them to point. make sure the signs involve all your limbs so you don't get smart asses pointing with their legs.

  • @drdca8263
    @drdca8263 8 місяців тому +34

    Hm, what if we tried to design a language so as, not to just be bad, but, compromising on that goal a little bit, in order to try to make it *stably bad*, I.e. not just trying to make it as bad as possible at the particular snapshot we describe, but rather, try to make it so that as the language evolved over time with people trying to communicate, designing it so that it would take longer for these changes to make it not-so-bad.
    Like, the worse some particular feature it, typically, the more quickly, I think, it would tend to change for the better...
    But suppose we designed it to be good enough that a culture could plausibly speak this language, encounter some irl natural language, and yet still prefer to use (a modified form of) their native language, and want to preserve some form of their language...
    but, would likely want to make some reforms to their language.
    How can we design the language so as to stymie these reforms?
    How can we make it so that trying to fix one thing, will generally end up making another part worse?
    In order for this, the language needs to have some genuine structure to it, just one that is bad.
    Here’s an idea:
    Use the “many words can mean both one thing, and the opposite of that thing” idea, but, in order to discourage the language from evolving to make the sounds for the two versions different, instead, make the language already have a means of distinguishing between them... but put it substantially later in the sentence (perhaps put all such markers at the end?)
    Now, this seems to invite a change to the language where people simply move the sense-indicator to the word whose sense needs to be disambiguated. That’s a problem. We can’t have that.
    To pre-empt that, therefore, we should make sure that saying any of these natural ways to try to fix it, are already things that the language assigns different meaning. Importantly, these meanings should be such that they could potentially be used in the same context, but unlikely to be what was meant.
    I do think the “many/none” ambiguity is a good fit.
    Could say maybe that “man [noun] [verb] [object] nom” means “no [noun] [verb] [object]” while “man [noun] [verb] [object] yom” means “many [noun] verb object”
    While “man nom [noun] [verb] [object] ” means “a non-negligible amount of noun verb object” and “man yom [noun] [verb] [object] nom” means that the speaker doesn’t know whether any noun verbs subject.
    Etc.

    • @PurpleShift42
      @PurpleShift42 8 місяців тому +2

      This sounds next level cursed and I love it

  • @isomeme
    @isomeme 8 місяців тому +55

    This is epic. Thank you for sharing it!
    When I was in college, I fell in with an extremely weird and wonderful group of friends who shared an imagined world that we did a kind of mixed role-playing and world-building in. This included several related conlangs. My favorite was Clinical Frelng, a linguistics experiment that escaped from the laboratory and memetically infected the population of an entire planet. The one feature of this language I remember was its orthography. All words were three "letters" long. The first letter indicated all the vowels in the word, the second all the consonants, and the third what order they occurred in. So e.g. "kudi" (meaning "person") would be spelled as the equivalent of "(iu) (dk) (c2 v2 c1 v1)". There were tens of thousands of glyphs for that last character.
    Ah, bright college days. 🙂

    • @o.steinman3855
      @o.steinman3855 8 місяців тому +7

      that orthography is exquisitely awful

    • @--ISABELLA--
      @--ISABELLA-- 8 місяців тому +6

      That reminds me of when i made a sign language with my friends in elementary school, but it involved both hands and feet, like stomping and clapping meant “go!”. I gotta admit, having friends was kinda fun sometimes.

  • @TheGrinningViking
    @TheGrinningViking 8 місяців тому +16

    The worst possible orthography would be one that shared as many words per character as possible, no spaces, line breaks, or punctuation; and relied entirely on context for you to determine which word each character was standing for.

    • @PurpleShift42
      @PurpleShift42 8 місяців тому +1

      I reckon I could make that worse: writing it in boustrophedon (i.e. alternating directions of written lines, like how an ox plows a field) but only every second piece of material written (so that one side of the paper is written normally, but the other side is boustrophedon)

  • @andrewcherry3058
    @andrewcherry3058 8 місяців тому +33

    Now time to raise a kid speaking only this around them and see what happens

    • @mars5train601
      @mars5train601 8 місяців тому +17

      You must not be granted children

    • @WodkaEclair
      @WodkaEclair 8 місяців тому +4

      ​@@mars5train601I see it is opposite day where you live

  • @vitormelomedeiros
    @vitormelomedeiros 8 місяців тому +50

    9:13 as someone who took a year of linguistics in college, this bit KILLED me, I was literally laughing out loud

  • @KN-oc7cu
    @KN-oc7cu 8 місяців тому +4

    I love that the intro to the be movie is "girls just wanna have fun"

  • @robert9016
    @robert9016 8 місяців тому +17

    When you go on the news to talk about this, they should put “Bad Language Maker” under your name on that textbar thing

  • @Oler-yx7xj
    @Oler-yx7xj 8 місяців тому +22

    I like how starts to become increasingly newspeakful

  • @AgmaSchwa
    @AgmaSchwa 8 місяців тому +10

    Truly cursed, welcome to the Circus

  • @mightybatillo
    @mightybatillo 8 місяців тому +8

    This reminded me of the short story "The weird language from Kampung Sebula" that talks about a very complex and silly language, for example an empty bed has a different word than when someone is on it. Also, the same word could change depending on if you were speaking to a child, an adult or an old person.

  • @happyelephant5384
    @happyelephant5384 8 місяців тому +5

    Imagine lawyers in the world with this language:
    - the law says it is prohibited to eat horses in car.
    - NOOOO! the law says it is obligatory to feed not horses which serve as cars!

  • @LingoLizard
    @LingoLizard 8 місяців тому +18

    :3 cat is my favorite Penafi glyph

    • @tuluppampam
      @tuluppampam 8 місяців тому

      Isn't it of all? (This makes perfect sense, although it might take a while)

  • @uncanaleaparte
    @uncanaleaparte 8 місяців тому +25

    What if emphasis could only be through double negation? No adverbs such as "very", or "so", or "incredibly" exist. So to say "They are very beautiful" you would have to say "They are a person who are not not beautiful" or maybe "... Beautilessless" and to say "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmorizingly beautiful" You would have to say "They are a person who are not not not not not not beautiful"

    • @justforplaylists
      @justforplaylists 8 місяців тому

      Like litotes?

    • @Primalmoon
      @Primalmoon 8 місяців тому +2

      Not sure if you intended it, but if you make it so that you have to use the same mechanism to emphasize negatives, it would become very risky to emphasize anything (and thus be even worse). Fail to hear a single one of the negations and you'll get the completely wrong meaning.
      "They are a person who are not not not not not not beautiful" = "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmerizingly beautiful"
      "They are a person who are not not not not not not not beautiful" = "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmerizingly ugly"

    • @uncanaleaparte
      @uncanaleaparte 8 місяців тому

      @@justforplaylists A bit, but with the opposite effect. Where litotes make the sentence weaker, my bad rule is all about emphasis

    • @uncanaleaparte
      @uncanaleaparte 8 місяців тому

      @@Primalmoon I did not think about the implications for the listener, and you're right: it is even more dysfunctional than I thought

  • @burekusakagami5653
    @burekusakagami5653 8 місяців тому +34

    I mean, about the gestures, you addressed the idea of deictic gestures, but what about their iconicity? I suppose one could have to gesture for something completely different than what they are attempting to represent, but how would you deal with it? I love the idea tho, it’s absolutely infuriating 😂

  • @daishoryujin95
    @daishoryujin95 8 місяців тому +5

    I think this language could easily become the center of a game where people try to have a conversation and afterwards see how close they got to understanding each other

  • @U.Inferno
    @U.Inferno 8 місяців тому +7

    I think with the orthography you could have done something like the programming language Malbolge which all tokens dont just do one thing in isolation but have a side effect elsewhere in the writing. Like let's say ¤ is a letter in my language. It means the syllable *pta'*, but what it also means is 10 letters from the end of the sentence, increment the letter used 3 times down the alphabet (to use English as an example: if its the letter H it becomes K) and then invert its voicing. However, when it modifies that letter, there's a side effect attached to that which must be interpreted. This makes reading and writing a tangled web of modifiers that must be planned to write and untangled when reading

  • @ultradude5410
    @ultradude5410 8 місяців тому +3

    My internet is fiddly and at 5:55 my video froze
    “But what if people just point?” (Still frame, where a spoken pause could be reasonable)
    It took me a solid 5 seconds to realize the video froze lol

  • @joaopedroauriemo
    @joaopedroauriemo 8 місяців тому +6

    A language that requires you to have other people to talk to; this IS the hardest language to learn

  • @duckyplayz2272
    @duckyplayz2272 8 місяців тому +6

    i once had a conlang idea of the entire language being /a/ and the different meaning of words are signified by the tone youre speaking, so as the person i am i set 400Hz as “good” and 401Hz as “death” and 402Hz as “tasty” amazing language am i right

    • @brinleyhamer729
      @brinleyhamer729 4 місяці тому

      400.1 means “I am a wanted criminal”

    • @danielbishop1863
      @danielbishop1863 2 місяці тому

      So, like Solresol, except that instead of seven musical notes to distinguish, you have a few thousand frequencies to distinguish. Good luck communicating if you don't have perfect pitch.

  • @pedror598
    @pedror598 8 місяців тому +9

    My guy is trying to create the worst language while totally ignoring that french already exists

  • @Alkavi_Ch
    @Alkavi_Ch 6 місяців тому +7

    I love the fact that every word is metaphorical. "He speaks Penafi = He speaks lots of words" could literally just mean that "He wont shut up". Given the language, I'd say that's a rational response.

    • @NewLightning1
      @NewLightning1 6 місяців тому +2

      It can also mean "He's very quiet"

    • @daishoryujin95
      @daishoryujin95 5 місяців тому

      @@NewLightning1or “he eats a lot of fish soup” which could mean that he constantly fails at things

  • @GoldenSandslash15
    @GoldenSandslash15 7 місяців тому +3

    If you’re trying to make a bad language, then the worse your language is, the better it did at accomplishing its goals, so you actually made a good language in the end. If you want a bad language, you need to try to make a good language and fail.

  • @MegaMGstudios
    @MegaMGstudios 7 місяців тому +1

    This is how it feels to learn any new language

  • @IloveRumania
    @IloveRumania 8 місяців тому +3

    Person: Why can't anyone understand me?
    Meanwhile, their speech:

  • @Cathowl
    @Cathowl 8 місяців тому +4

    Wow when you read out the story it sounded like the verbal equivalent of an audio glitch.

  • @Eckred
    @Eckred 8 місяців тому +2

    This Language is perfect for the famous 'Bees can't fly, but do it anyway' statement, because it's so wrong that it can be improved by simply making it unintelligible.

  • @boomboy8104
    @boomboy8104 8 місяців тому +2

    You know this has probably been done before, but I just had the best idea.
    What if you made ur own English accent by taking a bunch of English Phonemes and replacing them with similar ones.
    Maybe make all ds and ts fricatives or changing where accents are placed (plus you could show off your furigana script idea eh?)
    Just a thought!

  • @tomtoms8480
    @tomtoms8480 8 місяців тому

    This is fantastic, I especially love that any sound has a chance of being silent. I imagine it's like video game rng lol

  • @lordedmundblackadder9321
    @lordedmundblackadder9321 8 місяців тому +5

    Having had to take four years of high school French, I can say that in terms of worst language, yours is a close second.

    • @TheAlison1456
      @TheAlison1456 8 місяців тому +1

      blame the teaching not the langing

  • @TeleviseGuy
    @TeleviseGuy 8 місяців тому +5

    Ah yes, my favorite creator, agneshwise. At least, that's his name according to the subtitles.
    This feels a lot like Japanese or Chinese with the whole context-based meaning thing.

  • @barodrinksbeer7484
    @barodrinksbeer7484 8 місяців тому +1

    When I was in High School I did an after school event where we were tasked with making a language that could be taught to the teacher but not deciphered by anyone else. Everyone made languages which were either based on code words/latin/signs. But me and my wife decided to invent a language which is local to a specific areas season, relating to shadow distance from the person, and footstep/movements around a person. To establish communication you must first drag your foot in the specific initiation for that person. Then determine the time of day by using your shadow, if you are indoors you need to remember the time of day before entering to align your shadow. Depending on the season someone may align their shadow with yours/may align your shadow with theirs/disconnect shadows/hierarchy their shadow. Then after that you can start movements around that person, depending upon the season they may also have to move with you, to affirm that they are understanding you. Letters have generally very simple movements which unless you had combined letters “th, ss, ha, ll, etc…” you would only move in a approximate degree away from someone. We also had full or more loose movements that related to specific words, which was actually really hard to notice, so we had to make a signifier where we pivot to let the other person know that this is a full word. Our language also allowed for two people to directly communicate at the same time without interrupting the other, allowing for a much better sharing of information then traditional means.
    We ended up winning the task, even tho we told people about seasons being important to our movements, no one realized that we were lining up our shadows when simulating conversation and different seasons.
    P.S if you couldn’t infer we were dance partners since like 2 years old, I do not think anyone who has not been practicing dance all their life could do what we did.

  • @CookieFonster
    @CookieFonster 8 місяців тому +10

    I can hear a Swedish accent when you pronounce this conlang, it's quite amusing.

    • @Empyror
      @Empyror 5 місяців тому

      i was looking for this comment

  • @TallyHallEnthusiast
    @TallyHallEnthusiast 8 місяців тому +5

    Somehow I don’t understand a single thing he says and still watch all 11 minutes and 49 seconds

  • @yonatanbeer3475
    @yonatanbeer3475 8 місяців тому +2

    Love this idea, funny concept.

  • @Ilikestarwars1245
    @Ilikestarwars1245 8 місяців тому +1

    This whole language is horrifying!! I love it! You earned a subscription!!!

  • @linguleum
    @linguleum 7 місяців тому

    Great stuff!

  • @blumoogle2901
    @blumoogle2901 8 місяців тому +1

    The way I would make a language bad is to encode a lot of cultural taboos, have a very limited selection of verbs (less than 20) and very few adverbs or adverbial phrases. Then enforce inconsistency and ambiguity. What you get is a very low data throughput language which creates a structural roadblock to effectively communicating ideas. Perfect.

  • @WadelDee
    @WadelDee 7 місяців тому +1

    I once had the idea of making a worst possible language. Some of my ideas were in your video but there were also some ideas that are not in your video: My first idea was to give the language like 14 different levels of formality so that it is almost impossible to say anything without accidentally offending someone. My second idea was: You know how every verb you say indicates a time by its tense and every pronoun indicates a gender because they're mandatory to include, even when they're irrelevant to what you want to communicate? Well, I had the idea of requiring the speaker to include their own gender, the gender of the interlocutor, their own age, the age of the interlocutor, the time, the place, the level of certainty, how all of this makes you feel, any many other things IN EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE. Get any of those things wrong and your sentence will be considered an inappropriate insult. Even insulting someone in this language is super difficult because if you do it wrong then your insult will be considered inappropriate and unjustified. Thirdly, hestitating is considered offensive, stuttering is considered offensive, and not answering to a question is also considered offensive. Fourthly, pejoratives are far more common than neutral words and if you know a neutral alternative to a pejorative, chances are a native speaker won't know them so you gotta describe the concept instead. If you ever try to talk to a native speaker in this language you'll almost certainly end up in an argument. Even their native speakers have problems with it: Children are generally seen as rude and disrespectful because they haven't figured out the complex formality system yet and many children get into arguments or even get disowned for accidentally insulting someone.

  • @oldamar9994
    @oldamar9994 7 місяців тому

    Thank you for this video, and honestly thank Agma Schwa and everyone else who participates in Cursed Conglang Circus. I remember that I used to be super into Conlanging when I was a young teen, and now I think that at least for a little bit, I might have a hyperfixation on Conlangs again. I will now be obsessed with this crime against humanity that is a language.

  • @steamfang5371
    @steamfang5371 8 місяців тому

    Obsessed with this, net 0 knowledge sort of language (but also this helped a lot as someone making a fantasy language). 10/10 video. subbed

  • @aaronmarks9366
    @aaronmarks9366 6 місяців тому +1

    I had an idea like this back in high school to make a really fucked up conlang that was next to impossible to learn or use, except I just grabbed the idea of conjugations/declensions and turned the dj soundboard dials up to maximum on every category: the language would have like 185 genders, 122 noun cases, unique inflection for every number category up to 1,000 (i.e., singular, dual, trial, quadral, etc.), and verbs would have unique tenses for the last 18 days and the next 45 days in addition to X number of weeks, months, and years in the past/future, plus the 1,000-number inflection, plus 65 verbal moods and 93 verbal aspects. But the worst part would be that there would be no consistent paradigms anywhere, every single noun and verb would have a unique declension/conjugation paradigm, *and*, there would be a ton of unpredictable identities and irregularities between different inflections for the same noun/verb. I think I wrote out like 1/100th of one word's inflections before I got bored of the project.

  • @gwenrees7594
    @gwenrees7594 8 місяців тому

    This is awesome, thank you

  • @user-rm2qj2jh4l
    @user-rm2qj2jh4l 8 місяців тому

    This is wonderful! haha :D So interesting to play with language like that

  • @BeamerGaming33
    @BeamerGaming33 8 місяців тому +1

    Somehow this sounds like an actual language and not someone having a stroke

  • @BinglesP
    @BinglesP 8 місяців тому +1

    10:09 "All laws of aviation which we know give us information that no way exists which bee should can fly which has reason that wing of bee too small for purpose which make bee's fat small body off-ground despite which bee of course fly which has reason that bee not care about thing which human think."
    Yeah, that's basically how my inner-thoughts tend to play out in a nutshell

  • @elitettelbach4247
    @elitettelbach4247 8 місяців тому

    Okay but why is this legitimately compelling?!
    It takes a deep understanding of rules and structures in order to break them so wholly and absolutely like this.

  • @Isabela-ub1fx
    @Isabela-ub1fx 8 місяців тому +1

    I am a native spanish speaker who follows a spanish language youtuber and she is also being sponsored by lingoda. I found that funny

  • @ValkyRiver
    @ValkyRiver 8 місяців тому +3

    You should submit this to Agma Schwa’s cursed conlang circus

  • @edwinhuang9244
    @edwinhuang9244 8 місяців тому +1

    I just thought of something.
    All the ambiguity between the defintion of each words could be resolved if this language evolves to become a tonal language.
    Now I doubt it will evolve to become a tonal language because no one will actually speak this language for reasons other than "why not?", but it could become an informal rule among people who speaks this.
    An unofficial official rule.

  • @janhavlis
    @janhavlis 8 місяців тому +3

    creating the world's worst language as a synchronic creation seems to be fun, thnx for sharing, but i propose even more fun - let it have a diachrony. mwa ha ha. i bet, quite some of the features you devised for penafi are "cognitively linguistically impossible", simply they could not appear nor survive in a practically used language. just a hypothesis. oh, my, that would be a perfect task for my seminar 😈 experimental linguopoesis, go!

  • @3clipse449
    @3clipse449 8 місяців тому

    Hey, if you haven’t already, you should make a conlag 101 or a breakdown of what you need to make a conlag, I’ve tried to get into it but learning how the phonetic alphabet works has been rough

  • @belooko
    @belooko 8 місяців тому +3

    bro fi crafted mfjo new “sinitic-papanuguenya" languag”
    me gusta

  • @pi_xi
    @pi_xi 2 місяці тому +1

    I once had the idea of a language whose dictionary shifts which each word, so each word's meaning depends on the previous word. That would make it very difficult.

  • @svetlanasath7792
    @svetlanasath7792 8 місяців тому +2

    The "Penafi" controversial meaning didn't send me to a coma just because in Russian we have "A kettle wouldn't take so long to cool down" and "A kettle takes so long to cool down" and those phrases are absolutely equal

  • @gwalla
    @gwalla 8 місяців тому +1

    > Tries to create a language that hinders communication
    > Invents puns

  • @razumnygerstein2448
    @razumnygerstein2448 7 місяців тому +2

    “I have two solutions to this”
    Me: chop off their arms
    “The first is to chop everyone’s arms off”
    Lmao xD great (terrible?) minds think alike

  • @nightflame389
    @nightflame389 8 місяців тому +1

    The easiest way to do this is to do what Aladeen did in The Dictator
    Doctor: Do you want the Aladeen news or the Aladeen news?
    Patient: The Aladeen news.
    Doctor: You are HIV-Aladeen
    Patient: _shock to despair to joy to confusion_

  • @davbah
    @davbah 7 місяців тому +2

    So the first sentence is «Girls just want to have fun»

  • @MeepleCat
    @MeepleCat 7 місяців тому

    I actually think that the addition of characters like the checkered one make the language easier to decipher, as it can give you information about the characters to its left and right.

  • @lorefox201
    @lorefox201 8 місяців тому +2

    the issue is that there's unironically lots of languages that do this thing in which one word can mean thing or anti-thing or oranges according to context (ancient Hebrew comes to mind) and people spoke with it fine.

    • @kklein
      @kklein  8 місяців тому +3

      sure, but every word doesn't work like that, which allows for an actual context to exist

    • @lorefox201
      @lorefox201 Місяць тому

      ​@@kklein that's true

  • @kedrak90
    @kedrak90 7 місяців тому +1

    This would be either the best or the worst language for puns.

  • @jondw
    @jondw 7 місяців тому +1

    if you wanted to go all out, you could have solved the gesturing problem by incorporating a body language aspect to the language thus requiring the hands not be available to gesture at the object

  • @BroadwayRonMexico
    @BroadwayRonMexico 6 місяців тому +1

    Your breakdown of the morphemes of "Penafi" reminds me of "kuusi palaa" in Finnish, which can mean multiple things, including "six pieces", "your moon returns", and "the spruce is on fire"

  • @mothycofee
    @mothycofee 6 місяців тому +1

    i made a conlang that has loads of vowel sounds but only 5 symbols,also it has rules which it often breaks
    it has bits of german french greek and latin words

  • @Dinnyeify
    @Dinnyeify 7 місяців тому

    fun game idea! one person constructs a sentence in this language. the other attempts to decode what they wanted to say

  • @forbiddenera
    @forbiddenera 8 місяців тому +1

    I swear I was recommended this because I recently rewarched the most cursed programming language 😂

  • @wolfvampire817
    @wolfvampire817 7 місяців тому

    This video made me cry

  • @Jacob-yg7lz
    @Jacob-yg7lz 8 місяців тому

    People will just assume the most useful version of the word is the one being used, i.e. the one you're gesturing at. It's like how in the sentence "where'd you get a horse", "a horse" explicitly denotes a non-specific horse, yet connotes a specific relevant horse that the person got.

  • @Jacob-yg7lz
    @Jacob-yg7lz 8 місяців тому

    I came up with a worse orthography when trying to make a writing system that forced you to rhyme:
    All symbols are on a line. The direction that the line is going determines the vowel sound (though if you really wanted to be evil you could get rid of vowel sounds and make this for consonants instead). The line can only turn in 90 degree increments, and cannot cross over itself. This is crippling because
    1. There can only be 4 vowel sounds communicated
    2. The word choice is dictated by topology and calligraphy
    3. There is no good place to start on a page where you can guarantee you can fit everything an not leave a lot of blank space
    4. It is impossible to tell which way is up without additional context and thus what sounds you should be reading

  • @maybenextweek418
    @maybenextweek418 8 місяців тому +1

    you just created toki pona, great job.

  • @user-fp1hw1yr7x
    @user-fp1hw1yr7x 7 місяців тому

    I feel like within a couple months of actual use, intent would be consolidated and expanded for utility and written text would be adjusted, possibly with dots between characters