"The following is the longest piece of text in IS that I could find alongside an English translation" *makes slightly more distressed noises for 30 seconds*
toaritok It’s designed to be naturalistic, you probably wouldn’t understand what that word means because you’re not a true intellectual linguist like me. I bet you can’t even speak kay(f)bop(t) fluently, fucking pleb.
Read your note about reading every word like something crawled inside you, scratched out your innards, and then died. Definitely sounds naturalistic, keep up the good work.
I just have to say I love how literal you read text. I had to go back a couple times when you said "lenght" literally as written and then laughed so hard my sides hurt. Please never stop being this literal with reading the text of others.
In my case my blood increases 1K in temperature. "No, you're getting it wrong! We are not trying to pretend not to be something we are! No one claimed what you refuted."
Why do people assume everyone thinks in sentences and language? Toddlers can think "There's a causal link between hitting the shiny red button on my toy and hearing a sound" without knowing any of those words. Cats can learn to look both ways before crossing a street because they have figured out cars drive there. They don't know the words, but they think. So it can be with adults. Most people learn to think in words, but not all.
@@arcticflower7223 I feel like this way of viewing things is very monolingual, or at least very monocultural. Being able to parse meaning from something in one language without being able to immediately declare the meaning in another language evidences that there's a middle stage between thinking and expressing something through language. If this intermediary stage didnt exist, then it would be impossible to encounter the situation where you understand but can't translate. To someone without this experience, it may appear that they think in words.
I find this a very interesting topic. As far as I can tell from trying to monitor my own thoughts, most of the time I don't think in words. When reading text I also don't read it in a voice in my head unless it is conversational, like messages, comments, etc. The best way I can describe my usual thoughts is as "connected concepts", sometimes represented visually in my mind, but often times with no representation. An interesting, though inconvenient, consequence is that I never am satisfied when trying to express my thoughts in words. I tend to talk in circles, trying to find fitting words, but rarely do. When I do think in words, it always is conversational, always a simulated dialogue, either between me and an abstract "person" with differing opinions or with a sort of second self.
I for instance dont think with word, i just think it when like right now i'm writting with it. And that is a pain in the ass cuz multiple time i'm think about something that is impossible to describe verbally, and mid way trying to say what i've thought, i forget about it.
I think that /ɜ/ is very clearly supposed to be /ʒ/, considering it's written very similarly to /s/, /ʃ/ and /ʑ/ in the writing system you showed. Aside from that, this is a very weird conlang, but I kind of like it?
@@OrangeC7 It certainly has a "New Age"y feel to it. I kind of want to delve deeper into the philosophy behind it, even if it's just nonsensical ramblings
0:51 "It's not for communication, but for the expression of emotional experiences" basically just means "It's not for communication, but it is for communication"
Random but I love Davis’ way of thinking. It mirrors my own extremely well and I think it’s extremely exciting from a philosophical pov to have someone point out how language affects thoughts which affect the self and our reality
every time someone tries to claim that humans naturally think in sentences i die a little. A lot of people think in words, but these words rarely form full sentences without conscious intent. Most of the time they're just sort of floating around in our language-association space until we decide to speak. And for a lot of people, the default is like... pictures, or... vague feelings of a personal space being somehow bent or pressured one way or another.
This is also not entirely accurate. Feelings, yes, pictures, no. Turns out, there's a surprisingly large group of people that are simply incapable of visualising in their minds. I believe it's a skill you learn, like learning to think with words. Thinking with pure feeling and instinct seems to be the natural default.
Also, how would you apply this viewpoint to children born into sign language, or the extremely rare case of a child who didn't learn any language? Clearly they are "thinking" in some way, but not in the traditional syntax of spoken language. The fact that this is even possible shows that the human default is not thinking in sentences, but in some more abstract way
i think that "thinking in sentences" is wrong, but the idea that the language we use biases how we think is well founded, which is what the cited article was about (in relation to English's bias to viewing subjects being seperate from objects). Although I cant find any examples of this illusion being a uniquely English-speaking phenomena, works been done elsewhere (Buroditsky's famous paper comes to mind, obviously)
I think in full sentences, and I always have. It even takes me about as long to think a sentence as it would to say it. Is that weird? I thought everybody did. :(
honestly the "subject-object duality" idea actually resonates with me a lot but i can see why it's a weird and confusing way of seeing things for a lot of people. imo it seems like more of a spiritual thing, rather than a philosophy of how one treats the world on a daily basis.
I've got an even better description: vöt(c)gil(c)san(t)ap(t)vlir(t)sing(b)es(p)u(t)vom(b)con(c)lang(c)cri(c)tic(c)vlim(p)kay(f)dan(f)zhna(f)point(f)vlim(p)ga(f)sna(f)ga(f)
This IS an old video, and the language is still pretty underdeveloped. However, I do think that some of the odd things about IS phonology and orthography can be explained. In the "Creating the Is Language" video, at 29 seconds in, he types a character in his IS font that doesn't appear on the chart, probably the actual click letter. And the fact that /ɜ/ is grouped with other fricatives and he consistently pronounces it as /ʃ~ʒ/suggests that it is probably supposed to be /ʒ/ not /ɜ/, and he mixed up the two IPA letters that look like a 3.
Now that I've watched this video a couple of times I think I finally get what he meant by "subject/object duality", and I don't think it has anything ~specifically~ to do with the English language at all but rather language in general. I think it's kind of like IS is treating subjects and objects identically, as if they're both subjects, and using the "horizontal" "dimension" of the verb to define what the action of the sentence actually is. Since reversing the verb will reverse its meaning and reverse the roles of the subject and object, treating the two "angles" of the verb as if they're the same word makes us consider every sentence as being in active and passive voice simultaneously? Like, if I were to say "I ate the apple", someone trying to ignore "subject/object duality" might rephrase that as "an eating happened, and I and the apple were involved, oh and it was me who did the eating", making the separation between subject and object the part of the sentence that gets the least focus. I don't know if I'm interpreting this right, and it has way more to do with philosophy than linguistics (just like everything else here) but at least now I think I get what Stuart was going for.
In my understanding, which I think is similar to yours, it can be thought of like this: To use your example ('a person eats an apple') with subject/object duality, the verb 'eat' requires one thing to act/perform (a person, the subject) and one thing to be acted/performed upon (an apple, the object). Instead, with subject/object singularity, 'eat' is a process that affects two things when it occurs, both of them being neither subjects nor objects, but equal components that are modified by the event. The person is nourished and energised while the apple is broken up and dissolved. Which one did the action and which one had the action done to it? Perhaps neither! We think of the person as the subject because it caused the event of eating, involving the person and the apple, to take place by deciding to act, while the apple had no say. But if the apple wasn't present, the eating, involving the person and the apple, wouldn't have happened, so maybe the apple equally caused the eating to take place!
@@OmikronGT that is a much better phrasing of what I was trying to say. Thanks! I had a hard time putting that idea into words (which maybe is the point)
@@ruwisc_ Great, I'm glad it made sense, though I had to spend a while thinking about it and then a while trying to word it. It's an interesting concept for a conlang.
'the apple and i participated in the action of consumption. i performed the eating and the apple performed the feeding, the apple was consumed and i was fed' sorta deal??? kinda cool way to think about it
I never heard of "Is", but you seemed to do a very good job of summarizing it. A strange and interesting specimen! I enjoyed your presentation of this oddity.
My admittedly half-assed impression is that even if it has the trappings and traits of a conlang, IS is meant to be read as a heavily philosophical piece of performance art rather than a proper conlang.
4:26 Given where he mentions ɜ in his chart -- between s and ʃ, I'd guess that he did actually mean ʒ. This would also alleviate that problem you mention of three central vowels sounding somewhat similar. And his letters for these three sounds are similar, and, as you also point out, his letters are somewhat featural.
11:08 When I think about Descartes quote "I think, therefore I am", in my native language the translation was. "I think, therefore I exist". I always thought it was about how the only thing we have confidence that exists is ourselves, and everything else might as well be a product of our mind (or, at least, how our mind perceive the world around).
It very specifically is about the fact that the only real certainty is your existence, because you think. There is at least one thing that exists, you itself, because otherwise you wouldn't feel. This is the only thing you are certain. The rest could be made by a conspiracy, an evil genie, or, just like you said, an illusion of your own mind.
I don't agree with non-dual philosophy, but I absolutely love the idea of creating a conlang to explore it. The idea of "altitude" reminded me a lot of Western non-dual philosophies like Spiral Dynamics or Ken Wilber's 4-Quadrant Integral Model. The idea of an art lang also reminded me of the short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges. I don't know a lot about linguistics, but I would say the concepts in this video are in my wheelhouse.
This is my favorite one you've done yet. IS seems halfbaked and your pointers to the creator are awesome. A little positivity to break up the negatives
This language reminds me quite a lot of conversations I've had with people who have done a lot of psychedelic drugs and talk about a loss of a sense of self or a feeling of interconnectedness between themselves and all things. Those people have expressed the idea that there is no real physical world, that everything we see and experience is constructed in our minds, and that there is no truth. Honestly I've found those conversations more or less incomprehensible, and I feel the same way about this conlang
Just watched part of the linked video of his, and yeah, I would be shocked if he didn't do a lot of drugs. He said that he was visited by an eight foot tall praying mantis entity, whatever that means
Yeah, this strikes me as a "I did a bunch of acid, and I can't express the feelings I have when I'm tripping, so I made up a language to express those feelings" kind of language
I know I'm a little late to the party, but I didn't see anyone mention this in the comments: a lot of the concepts behind the IS language seem to have been borrowed from the philosopher (mystic?) Ken Wilber. The "altitudes" for example are taken from Wilber's so-called "altitudes of consciousness".
You know what? It sounds like you need to swallow your tongue to pronounce something like "jzh" or "hzj" And listening to the spoken sample, I was completely right
Let's be honest, we're all here for the auxlangs. I wish there were more conlang review youtubers. There's just too many out there for one person alone to review them all
I also disagree with your idea that we are all here for the auxlangs. I like the auxlang videos, but the artlang videos have been even better to me. Auxlangs have inherent restrictions on what they can do and still be good, whereas artlangs can do just about anything and be justifiable. In just about every auxlang video there are similar complaints (uncommon phonemes that users would have to learn, Euro-centric grammar and vocabulary, etc.), whereas both the good and bad parts of the artlangs are pretty interesting and unique since they have a broader range of purposes.
I've never heard of Is, but I had some fun giving a good think into it (I love philosophy), so here's my take on some of the concepts you had trouble with: S/O Duality: from what I gathered on Wolfe's websites, this is a straight-up philosophy thing and not actually a linguistic thing, at least when Wolfe is talking about it. He's only using language as an example to explain a broader concept of non-dualistic Absolute Idealism. It can also be applied religiously, such as in Hinduism, Brahmanism, and Christianity. I personally think that part of the confusion and what limits Absolute Idealism is that we have to use language to express and share our thoughts, so we get bungled down but having to use words like "subject" and "object" which have similar but differently connotated ideas in other fields i.e. linguistics and philosophy. If we could just telepathically beam ideas into each other's minds, it would be less confusing. Absolute Idealism didn't really take hold in America like it did in Europe, as we prefer Analytic Philosophy. Check out Wikipedia's articles for more. Vertical Dimension: As someone with anxiety, I can definitely see how emotional both transcends and includes physical. Think of it this way: your body doesn't innately have emotions, but you need a body (brain, face, etc.) to feel and express emotions. (There is some debate about how the body and emotions interact in psychology, but that's another thing.) Also with that rainbow graph with the arrows at around 12:30, this completely reminds me of tarot cards. In tarot, when you interpret the meanings of each card, whether the card is upside-down or not is important. Upside-down cards (called reversed) tend to have a meaning that relates to its normal meaning but diminished or in a negative way. For example, the Empress card can mean motherly instincts and compassion, but the Empress reversed means being smothering or abusive. Additionally, I actually really liked your pronunciation in the spoken sample. It sounds like you're talking backwards. I wonder what it'd sound like if you reversed that audio.
Does Stuart Davis truly exist? Or is he a collection of random thoughts about Conlangs that didn't make sense and were abandoned? A better language that could fully explore philosophical depths would have no vocal expression, as that would limit complete understand between two individuals. It would require use of the term "thought transference".
What we think he's trying to get at with the subject-object duality is that, because the negated form of a thing is the thing spelled backwards, whether a word is describing a thing or the not thing is, in IS, a matter of perspective. If you change how you look at the words and/or sentences, you change your view of it to mean the things outside of this. This allows the language to presuppose a unity between the thing and the things outside of it in a really interesting way and force you to consider your perspective on writing in it for considering meaning rather than presupposing a singular, objective perspective.
Am I the only person who was amazed that Stewart Davis made a conlang I'd never heard of, and then thought, "Oh, not THE Stewart Davis"? I have to give this new Stewart Davis credit trying to be an artist with the same name as such a giant in cubism.
I have one idea about ɪ1 and ɪ2. ɪ2 written with letter similar to ə it could mean that this sounds are alike, and ɪ2 means similar sound to Ukrainian "и" marked (at least on Wikipedia) as /ɪ/ and named close central vowel, this is actually how jan Misali named ə in this video. And pronunciation "ɜ" like /ʒ/ seams reasonable because it is written similar to other sibilants.
I'm stoked for Sindarin. Never read the books or watched the movies but I know about tolkeins affinity for languages so I'm excited. Both Sindarin and Quenya
(9:40) Fully agree on your point. Lojban would have its own words for the grammatical features it has, but you still use the English names when describing it in English. It's like if you learn about Swedish, where we have this crazy part of speech called "substantiv" ... but, you would still just call it "noun" in English.
I agree that calling it weird names when speaking about it in english seems kinda silly, but it seems plausible to me that the “doesn’t emphasize the distinction between the idea of a subject and an object,” idea could make sense? Like, “predicate with 2 arguments” seems like a decent way to formulate things. I don’t know much about lojban though.
Have you ever seen that classic UA-cam skit, _this is how we trip?_ "Everyone can fly, you know that, right?" "This book right here is the Language. Everyone must speak it." This whole thing seems like a real life version of that!
depending on how you're counting, Sesotho only has one (1) click : the alveolar. But some people count aspirated and nasalised clicks separately, in which case Sesotho has three, orthographically "q, qh, nq"
The first thing I thought when you mentioned Subject-object duality was that it might be a philosophical feature rather than a linguistic one. People who have had experiences of enlightenment often mention that the distincion between "me" and "not me" fades. Maybe that's what the creator meant here?
I don't think he left the bilabial click letter unchanged because he thought it looked good enough, I think IS contains a bilabial click because the associated IPA letter looks nice.
This video has inspired me to make a personal philosophical language I've rediscovered that my least favorite part of conlanging is generating vocabulary Maybe I'll crowdsource words from my closest friends
I think what would be fun if you covered the weirdest real life languages (whatever your definition of weird is) cheers from the worlds most uninformed w fan
Given the similarity of shape and clustering together of the four sounds /s/, /ʃ/, /ɜ/, and /ʑ/, it seems clear and certain that the third one should be /ʒ/, not the vowel /ɜ/, despite the symbol given in the video.
I'm guessing the opposite of subject/object duality would be realizing that everything we experience could be rendered as a thought in our mind, and since the subject is everything "I" think of or am, all objects must therefore also be part of the subject.(???)
If a conlang aims to express the inexpressible, then it fully succeeds if it contains any type of concept that can be comprehended only by use of the conlang. If this type of concept is only made relatively more accessible via the conlang, then it gets at least partial credit. If it achieves this aim only by remixing existing linguistic concepts, that should still be perfectly fine.
Maybe "IS" is "I, S(tuart)". Would make sense if it's a personal language. The fact that the name of the language contains a sibilant that isn't in the language and that the sibilant in question isn't the same one from "Stuart" throw this idea into confusion, but if Stuart is an English speaker (which he is) then this confusion may be an illusion.
_"An object measured an object and showed that objects in reality are not like what I thought objects should be like, therefore objects are not real."_ Bruh.
this video was very educational, but I don't quite understand why youtube recommended me a video about linguistics when the most academic videos I watch are about mathematics and physics, yet it was quite interesting
how can i send you a conlang to review (not necessarily make a video on though you could if you wanted to) ? I have have my degree in linguistics and created a conlang for my final in my morpho-syntax class. its (in my opinion) a very unique language syntactically. though the vocab is all inspired from Germanic language. I have all the information on the language neatly laid out in a word dock along side parsing in an excel spreadsheet. im pretty proud of the language and would love to get it out there somehow
I wonder how popular the name "Is" is for the languages, because I have 2 languages (and even the language family) called Is, too. Actually they are "Ayaho as Is" and "Ya sa Isj" (the consonantless 80 voweled madness).
maybe the two "I"s is why the language is called "Is"
@Pedro Zalazar My question about is is, is is is? Is is is, is it not?
@@pentelegomenon1175 is just is
Is is is, or is is not is?
Vincent T nah, Is IS is.
it all depends on what is is
"Now let's look at the vowels"
*makes mildly distressed noises for 30 seconds*
"The following is the longest piece of text in IS that I could find alongside an English translation"
*makes slightly more distressed noises for 30 seconds*
why
Next review my conlang called French, I created it to be a mix of Romance and Celtic languages, I hope you like it!
What about all that German?
I thought you were working on English, the Germanic based language with all sorts of influence.
toaritok
It’s designed to be naturalistic, you probably wouldn’t understand what that word means because you’re not a true intellectual linguist like me. I bet you can’t even speak kay(f)bop(t) fluently, fucking pleb.
Read your note about reading every word like something crawled inside you, scratched out your innards, and then died. Definitely sounds naturalistic, keep up the good work.
@toaritok Have you ever seen the Tsez conlang? It has way too many cases.
I just have to say I love how literal you read text. I had to go back a couple times when you said "lenght" literally as written and then laughed so hard my sides hurt. Please never stop being this literal with reading the text of others.
same with on line !!
that specific part is the most played for 2 reasons lol
The "wheelhouse" bit was hysterical
That one bit where you roast lojban. I cry every time.
In my case my blood increases 1K in temperature. "No, you're getting it wrong! We are not trying to pretend not to be something we are! No one claimed what you refuted."
god, I was not prepared for the backwards "in my wheelhouse" and even less prepared for how quickly you got over it
*Twin Peaks flashbacks*
Why do people assume everyone thinks in sentences and language?
Toddlers can think "There's a causal link between hitting the shiny red button on my toy and hearing a sound" without knowing any of those words. Cats can learn to look both ways before crossing a street because they have figured out cars drive there. They don't know the words, but they think.
So it can be with adults. Most people learn to think in words, but not all.
I'm sure I did. Thought comes in distinguishable units and sentences are this realized linguuistically.
@@arcticflower7223 I feel like this way of viewing things is very monolingual, or at least very monocultural. Being able to parse meaning from something in one language without being able to immediately declare the meaning in another language evidences that there's a middle stage between thinking and expressing something through language. If this intermediary stage didnt exist, then it would be impossible to encounter the situation where you understand but can't translate. To someone without this experience, it may appear that they think in words.
I find this a very interesting topic.
As far as I can tell from trying to monitor my own thoughts, most of the time I don't think in words. When reading text I also don't read it in a voice in my head unless it is conversational, like messages, comments, etc.
The best way I can describe my usual thoughts is as "connected concepts", sometimes represented visually in my mind, but often times with no representation.
An interesting, though inconvenient, consequence is that I never am satisfied when trying to express my thoughts in words. I tend to talk in circles, trying to find fitting words, but rarely do.
When I do think in words, it always is conversational, always a simulated dialogue, either between me and an abstract "person" with differing opinions or with a sort of second self.
I feel like most people kind of forget how to do that once they learn languages, so I wonder if one could relearn how to do it by some method...
I for instance dont think with word, i just think it when like right now i'm writting with it. And that is a pain in the ass cuz multiple time i'm think about something that is impossible to describe verbally, and mid way trying to say what i've thought, i forget about it.
You better do OA when Artifexian is done / close to done
agrweee
I thought Oa was just a demonstration language for his videos?
@@seanthesheep but it's complete, with it's vocab, grammar... almost everything
@@TNTErick Does it actually have a lexicon?
@@TheMasaoL idk
conlangs need more swear words
Isn't there Dothraki
everyone can make some in any language. But you need to make the swear word fit in the lang's culture
Toki pona has “pakala”
In general, yeah - but for this one I am not sure if that would fit
I consider Toki Pona a language WITH no curses, but one where you CAN curse.
I really enjoyed this one. Though the language is messy, I loved how different the purpose of it is from most of the langs I've heard about
I think that /ɜ/ is very clearly supposed to be /ʒ/, considering it's written very similarly to /s/, /ʃ/ and /ʑ/ in the writing system you showed. Aside from that, this is a very weird conlang, but I kind of like it?
+
It's definitely kinda idealistic, but that's kinda the point? So I really don't dislike it all that much either.
^ Is that the right word
@@OrangeC7 It certainly has a "New Age"y feel to it. I kind of want to delve deeper into the philosophy behind it, even if it's just nonsensical ramblings
る
seeing him interpret it as not that was so lazy
this video is good and all but "Jzh" gives me nightmares
jsczh
same
I might be setting myself up to be slaughtered here, but I love the "jzh" trigraph.
Jzheez, no need to be mean.
I read it "> gives me nightmares"...
Days since Sapir-Whorf: 0
It's true.
@@pentelegomenon1175 if you don't know stuff you can't think about that stuff but it has nothing to do with the language you speak
IS is not meant to be comprehensible, IS just IS.
But then is it a language or an exercise in madness?
IS just AM
Livia Lautenschlager IS is IS
"IS just works"
-Sodd Howard
Maybe the language should be called SUX.
0:51 "It's not for communication, but for the expression of emotional experiences" basically just means "It's not for communication, but it is for communication"
I think he means everyday communication
He most likely meant poetry and stuff like that
Random but I love Davis’ way of thinking. It mirrors my own extremely well and I think it’s extremely exciting from a philosophical pov to have someone point out how language affects thoughts which affect the self and our reality
every time someone tries to claim that humans naturally think in sentences i die a little. A lot of people think in words, but these words rarely form full sentences without conscious intent. Most of the time they're just sort of floating around in our language-association space until we decide to speak. And for a lot of people, the default is like... pictures, or... vague feelings of a personal space being somehow bent or pressured one way or another.
This is also not entirely accurate. Feelings, yes, pictures, no. Turns out, there's a surprisingly large group of people that are simply incapable of visualising in their minds. I believe it's a skill you learn, like learning to think with words. Thinking with pure feeling and instinct seems to be the natural default.
Also, how would you apply this viewpoint to children born into sign language, or the extremely rare case of a child who didn't learn any language? Clearly they are "thinking" in some way, but not in the traditional syntax of spoken language. The fact that this is even possible shows that the human default is not thinking in sentences, but in some more abstract way
i think that "thinking in sentences" is wrong, but the idea that the language we use biases how we think is well founded, which is what the cited article was about (in relation to English's bias to viewing subjects being seperate from objects).
Although I cant find any examples of this illusion being a uniquely English-speaking phenomena, works been done elsewhere (Buroditsky's famous paper comes to mind, obviously)
I think in sentences... lol
I think in full sentences, and I always have. It even takes me about as long to think a sentence as it would to say it. Is that weird? I thought everybody did. :(
honestly the "subject-object duality" idea actually resonates with me a lot but i can see why it's a weird and confusing way of seeing things for a lot of people. imo it seems like more of a spiritual thing, rather than a philosophy of how one treats the world on a daily basis.
Yah! You recovered your tone! You acknowledged us!
I'm happy 😁
8:24 VötGwd is a perfect description of Vötgil.
lmao goteem
@@elemenopi9239 can I get a translation?
“Gwd” means good, while “VötGwd” means not good.
This is the nichest joke I've ever gotten
I've got an even better description: vöt(c)gil(c)san(t)ap(t)vlir(t)sing(b)es(p)u(t)vom(b)con(c)lang(c)cri(c)tic(c)vlim(p)kay(f)dan(f)zhna(f)point(f)vlim(p)ga(f)sna(f)ga(f)
This video: There is not much information known about the IS language
but like in 15 minutes
15
IS
@@fuitbythefoot “15:51” oh my god
13:08 ever wanted to hear a drunk Russian speak Mandarin Chinese?
sounds like a backward language
as a russian this is actually a perfect description of what that sounds like
and only speak in the kind of thing you would see before a Denis Villeneuve Dune movie
(i tried)
熬坡 牛手 誒 愛盧耶兒
熬坡 牛手 誒 愛了米
熬坡 牛手 誒 愛所躲
嘔挨衣裡跌 挨路寨了尿嗎
俺尿馬誰 恩又 誒餓度馬術
安雅咪惹 愛秀 餓督小 欸的死
This IS an old video, and the language is still pretty underdeveloped. However, I do think that some of the odd things about IS phonology and orthography can be explained.
In the "Creating the Is Language" video, at 29 seconds in, he types a character in his IS font that doesn't appear on the chart, probably the actual click letter. And the fact that /ɜ/ is grouped with other fricatives and he consistently pronounces it as /ʃ~ʒ/suggests that it is probably supposed to be /ʒ/ not /ɜ/, and he mixed up the two IPA letters that look like a 3.
I'm so early the video isn't even prossesed yet
Now that I've watched this video a couple of times I think I finally get what he meant by "subject/object duality", and I don't think it has anything ~specifically~ to do with the English language at all but rather language in general. I think it's kind of like IS is treating subjects and objects identically, as if they're both subjects, and using the "horizontal" "dimension" of the verb to define what the action of the sentence actually is. Since reversing the verb will reverse its meaning and reverse the roles of the subject and object, treating the two "angles" of the verb as if they're the same word makes us consider every sentence as being in active and passive voice simultaneously?
Like, if I were to say "I ate the apple", someone trying to ignore "subject/object duality" might rephrase that as "an eating happened, and I and the apple were involved, oh and it was me who did the eating", making the separation between subject and object the part of the sentence that gets the least focus.
I don't know if I'm interpreting this right, and it has way more to do with philosophy than linguistics (just like everything else here) but at least now I think I get what Stuart was going for.
In my understanding, which I think is similar to yours, it can be thought of like this:
To use your example ('a person eats an apple') with subject/object duality, the verb 'eat' requires one thing to act/perform (a person, the subject) and one thing to be acted/performed upon (an apple, the object).
Instead, with subject/object singularity, 'eat' is a process that affects two things when it occurs, both of them being neither subjects nor objects, but equal components that are modified by the event. The person is nourished and energised while the apple is broken up and dissolved. Which one did the action and which one had the action done to it? Perhaps neither!
We think of the person as the subject because it caused the event of eating, involving the person and the apple, to take place by deciding to act, while the apple had no say. But if the apple wasn't present, the eating, involving the person and the apple, wouldn't have happened, so maybe the apple equally caused the eating to take place!
@@OmikronGT that is a much better phrasing of what I was trying to say. Thanks! I had a hard time putting that idea into words (which maybe is the point)
@@ruwisc_ Great, I'm glad it made sense, though I had to spend a while thinking about it and then a while trying to word it. It's an interesting concept for a conlang.
@@OmikronGT this actually makes a bit of sense
'the apple and i participated in the action of consumption. i performed the eating and the apple performed the feeding, the apple was consumed and i was fed' sorta deal??? kinda cool way to think about it
I never heard of "Is", but you seemed to do a very good job of summarizing it. A strange and interesting specimen! I enjoyed your presentation of this oddity.
An auxlang is a tool, an artlang is a story, an engelang is a demonstration
_a personal language is a philosophy_
My admittedly half-assed impression is that even if it has the trappings and traits of a conlang, IS is meant to be read as a heavily philosophical piece of performance art rather than a proper conlang.
*L E N G H T*
C O C C
Lengt
The amount of inspiration I got for my own personal language is overwhelming. I love this.
Also that outro sounded so anime lol
4:26 Given where he mentions ɜ in his chart -- between s and ʃ, I'd guess that he did actually mean ʒ. This would also alleviate that problem you mention of three central vowels sounding somewhat similar. And his letters for these three sounds are similar, and, as you also point out, his letters are somewhat featural.
That song at the ending is a masterpiece.
11:08
When I think about Descartes quote "I think, therefore I am", in my native language the translation was. "I think, therefore I exist".
I always thought it was about how the only thing we have confidence that exists is ourselves, and everything else might as well be a product of our mind (or, at least, how our mind perceive the world around).
It very specifically is about the fact that the only real certainty is your existence, because you think. There is at least one thing that exists, you itself, because otherwise you wouldn't feel. This is the only thing you are certain. The rest could be made by a conspiracy, an evil genie, or, just like you said, an illusion of your own mind.
I don't agree with non-dual philosophy, but I absolutely love the idea of creating a conlang to explore it. The idea of "altitude" reminded me a lot of Western non-dual philosophies like Spiral Dynamics or Ken Wilber's 4-Quadrant Integral Model.
The idea of an art lang also reminded me of the short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges.
I don't know a lot about linguistics, but I would say the concepts in this video are in my wheelhouse.
Me: Wow I'm tired I can't wait to go to sleep...
Conlang critic: uploads video
Me: Sleep will need to wait
yep
This is my favorite one you've done yet. IS seems halfbaked and your pointers to the creator are awesome. A little positivity to break up the negatives
How to make 12 minutes of documentation into 15 minutes of video? Easy! Just talk about how much documentation was missing.
This language reminds me quite a lot of conversations I've had with people who have done a lot of psychedelic drugs and talk about a loss of a sense of self or a feeling of interconnectedness between themselves and all things. Those people have expressed the idea that there is no real physical world, that everything we see and experience is constructed in our minds, and that there is no truth. Honestly I've found those conversations more or less incomprehensible, and I feel the same way about this conlang
Just watched part of the linked video of his, and yeah, I would be shocked if he didn't do a lot of drugs. He said that he was visited by an eight foot tall praying mantis entity, whatever that means
Stuart Davis predicted Disco Elysium
2:55 When 12 year old me walked over over my lego-strewn carpet at 2 am.
CONLANG CRITIC posted a language video!
HOW RARE!
i give this one a "philosophy 101 hippie woo-woo"/10
Yeah, this strikes me as a "I did a bunch of acid, and I can't express the feelings I have when I'm tripping, so I made up a language to express those feelings" kind of language
duuuude/10
@@kevinwells9751 That's actually a good idea.
Man not guna lie but if I ever had a language reviewed on this Chanel than I’d say I’ve done very well.
Them purposefully pronounced mistakes. Noice
lost my shit at the absolutely _golden_ editing on "lenght" at 12:05
Front ronded vowel
I know I'm a little late to the party, but I didn't see anyone mention this in the comments: a lot of the concepts behind the IS language seem to have been borrowed from the philosopher (mystic?) Ken Wilber. The "altitudes" for example are taken from Wilber's so-called "altitudes of consciousness".
One day you have to create your own conlang and review it
12:05 caught me completely off-guard
your "mwah" at 6:37 gives me serotonin
You know what?
It sounds like you need to swallow your tongue to pronounce something like "jzh" or "hzj"
And listening to the spoken sample, I was completely right
Let's be honest, we're all here for the auxlangs. I wish there were more conlang review youtubers. There's just too many out there for one person alone to review them all
Wait, wha… I’m here for linguistics, not just the auxlangs. Why do you have an idea like this?..
Eh?? I prefer the artlangs and natlangs and the linguistics
I also disagree with your idea that we are all here for the auxlangs. I like the auxlang videos, but the artlang videos have been even better to me. Auxlangs have inherent restrictions on what they can do and still be good, whereas artlangs can do just about anything and be justifiable. In just about every auxlang video there are similar complaints (uncommon phonemes that users would have to learn, Euro-centric grammar and vocabulary, etc.), whereas both the good and bad parts of the artlangs are pretty interesting and unique since they have a broader range of purposes.
@@melitopiia4730 he doesn't cover natlangs?
@@teacul It's more like occasional mentions of natlangs sprinkled throughout the videos tbh
I've never heard of Is, but I had some fun giving a good think into it (I love philosophy), so here's my take on some of the concepts you had trouble with:
S/O Duality: from what I gathered on Wolfe's websites, this is a straight-up philosophy thing and not actually a linguistic thing, at least when Wolfe is talking about it. He's only using language as an example to explain a broader concept of non-dualistic Absolute Idealism. It can also be applied religiously, such as in Hinduism, Brahmanism, and Christianity. I personally think that part of the confusion and what limits Absolute Idealism is that we have to use language to express and share our thoughts, so we get bungled down but having to use words like "subject" and "object" which have similar but differently connotated ideas in other fields i.e. linguistics and philosophy. If we could just telepathically beam ideas into each other's minds, it would be less confusing. Absolute Idealism didn't really take hold in America like it did in Europe, as we prefer Analytic Philosophy. Check out Wikipedia's articles for more.
Vertical Dimension: As someone with anxiety, I can definitely see how emotional both transcends and includes physical. Think of it this way: your body doesn't innately have emotions, but you need a body (brain, face, etc.) to feel and express emotions. (There is some debate about how the body and emotions interact in psychology, but that's another thing.)
Also with that rainbow graph with the arrows at around 12:30, this completely reminds me of tarot cards. In tarot, when you interpret the meanings of each card, whether the card is upside-down or not is important. Upside-down cards (called reversed) tend to have a meaning that relates to its normal meaning but diminished or in a negative way. For example, the Empress card can mean motherly instincts and compassion, but the Empress reversed means being smothering or abusive.
Additionally, I actually really liked your pronunciation in the spoken sample. It sounds like you're talking backwards. I wonder what it'd sound like if you reversed that audio.
Does Stuart Davis truly exist? Or is he a collection of random thoughts about Conlangs that didn't make sense and were abandoned? A better language that could fully explore philosophical depths would have no vocal expression, as that would limit complete understand between two individuals. It would require use of the term "thought transference".
I misread the title as “This IS language”, as if some conlanger was really desperately trying to prove what they had created was a language.
What we think he's trying to get at with the subject-object duality is that, because the negated form of a thing is the thing spelled backwards, whether a word is describing a thing or the not thing is, in IS, a matter of perspective. If you change how you look at the words and/or sentences, you change your view of it to mean the things outside of this. This allows the language to presuppose a unity between the thing and the things outside of it in a really interesting way and force you to consider your perspective on writing in it for considering meaning rather than presupposing a singular, objective perspective.
I love these videos!! Keep up the good work!
Am I the only person who was amazed that Stewart Davis made a conlang I'd never heard of, and then thought, "Oh, not THE Stewart Davis"? I have to give this new Stewart Davis credit trying to be an artist with the same name as such a giant in cubism.
"lenght of a fully erect penis" made me burst out laughing, great editing on that part.
I have one idea about ɪ1 and ɪ2. ɪ2 written with letter similar to ə it could mean that this sounds are alike, and ɪ2 means similar sound to Ukrainian "и" marked (at least on Wikipedia) as /ɪ/ and named close central vowel, this is actually how jan Misali named ə in this video.
And pronunciation "ɜ" like /ʒ/ seams reasonable because it is written similar to other sibilants.
I'm stoked for Sindarin. Never read the books or watched the movies but I know about tolkeins affinity for languages so I'm excited. Both Sindarin and Quenya
That digression on wheelhouses was fantastic.
11:35
Dude. You're gonna summon a freaking demon
12:05
Oh my fuck I had to go back and listen to this 3 times I'm crying yiur comedic timing is so good fuck
im here before it was processed :)
helo
Processed? You mean, like a preview? How does processing a video work?
@@sictoabu9611 like when a video is first uploaded it takes a bit of time to be processed
(9:40) Fully agree on your point. Lojban would have its own words for the grammatical features it has, but you still use the English names when describing it in English. It's like if you learn about Swedish, where we have this crazy part of speech called "substantiv" ... but, you would still just call it "noun" in English.
I agree that calling it weird names when speaking about it in english seems kinda silly, but it seems plausible to me that the “doesn’t emphasize the distinction between the idea of a subject and an object,” idea could make sense?
Like, “predicate with 2 arguments” seems like a decent way to formulate things.
I don’t know much about lojban though.
Looking at the chat I believe this /ɜ/ was indeed supposed to be /ʒ/. It stays between /s/ and /ʃ/ and is written with an almost identical letter.
Have you ever seen that classic UA-cam skit, _this is how we trip?_
"Everyone can fly, you know that, right?"
"This book right here is the Language. Everyone must speak it."
This whole thing seems like a real life version of that!
Can we get an episode on Fremen? It's a surprisingly well documented language when you look at how little time it's actually spoken in the Dune Saga.
The wheelhouse bit is unironically my favorite thing you’ve ever said
depending on how you're counting, Sesotho only has one (1) click : the alveolar. But some people count aspirated and nasalised clicks separately, in which case Sesotho has three, orthographically "q, qh, nq"
Just binged the other episodes
The first thing I thought when you mentioned Subject-object duality was that it might be a philosophical feature rather than a linguistic one. People who have had experiences of enlightenment often mention that the distincion between "me" and "not me" fades. Maybe that's what the creator meant here?
And then I watched the rest of the video...
2:40
I can't believe I missed that "the his language" bit in all the previous times I watched this video. 😂
Eyyy it’s back!
9:38 Ha! Nice call out on Lojban.
I don't think he left the bilabial click letter unchanged because he thought it looked good enough, I think IS contains a bilabial click because the associated IPA letter looks nice.
This video has inspired me to make a personal philosophical language
I've rediscovered that my least favorite part of conlanging is generating vocabulary
Maybe I'll crowdsource words from my closest friends
I think what would be fun if you covered the weirdest real life languages (whatever your definition of weird is) cheers from the worlds most uninformed w fan
You should do an episode on Toaq once you've finished up this season. That would be really cool!
Well, this is certainly the funniest episode of Conlang Critic so far.
Given the similarity of shape and clustering together of the four sounds /s/, /ʃ/, /ɜ/, and /ʑ/, it seems clear and certain that the third one should be /ʒ/, not the vowel /ɜ/, despite the symbol given in the video.
I actually really enjoyed this episode a lot
Okay, so it's not a conlang for the Islamic State.
That's what I was worried about. This is much better.
Is IS ISIS? ISIS is IS
@@masicbemester no, is IS is is is
@@mckydamonsta oh ok
i love the way you chose to just pronounce his spelling errors as written
I'm guessing the opposite of subject/object duality would be realizing that everything we experience could be rendered as a thought in our mind, and since the subject is everything "I" think of or am, all objects must therefore also be part of the subject.(???)
Im glas this man is having a good time with Is because oo sis idek whats happening
lenght
If a conlang aims to express the inexpressible, then it fully succeeds if it contains any type of concept that can be comprehended only by use of the conlang. If this type of concept is only made relatively more accessible via the conlang, then it gets at least partial credit. If it achieves this aim only by remixing existing linguistic concepts, that should still be perfectly fine.
All this philosophy stuff, it's basically the just Daoism's "the Way"
It would be interesting to converse with you on the nature of duality and dichotomy.
I would love to see you analyse and review natural languages like this.
you should do a follow up when is has been made more
12:04 I had to replay that several times that's fucking hilarious
Maybe "IS" is "I, S(tuart)". Would make sense if it's a personal language. The fact that the name of the language contains a sibilant that isn't in the language and that the sibilant in question isn't the same one from "Stuart" throw this idea into confusion, but if Stuart is an English speaker (which he is) then this confusion may be an illusion.
xD can i comment before it even processes?
_"An object measured an object and showed that objects in reality are not like what I thought objects should be like, therefore objects are not real."_
Bruh.
11:36 wasn’t expecting that
12:06 wasn’t expecting that as well
@@viracocha6093 length of the *F U L L Y E R E C T P E N I S*
this video was very educational, but I don't quite understand why youtube recommended me a video about linguistics when the most academic videos I watch are about mathematics and physics, yet it was quite interesting
how can i send you a conlang to review (not necessarily make a video on though you could if you wanted to) ? I have have my degree in linguistics and created a conlang for my final in my morpho-syntax class. its (in my opinion) a very unique language syntactically. though the vocab is all inspired from Germanic language. I have all the information on the language neatly laid out in a word dock along side parsing in an excel spreadsheet. im pretty proud of the language and would love to get it out there somehow
I wonder how popular the name "Is" is for the languages, because I have 2 languages (and even the language family) called Is, too. Actually they are "Ayaho as Is" and "Ya sa Isj" (the consonantless 80 voweled madness).
Please do a video on biblaridion’s oqolaawak or nekachti!!!
Speaking IS sounds like you’re having a stroke