in Tivinkiji it is lisata Qiki la lisata qumununi sin qumununi 3:00 qakati maki pakasa min qiki. I stayed up last night till 3:00 making my own language. Literally: I no sleep past night before 3:00 action create language of me. (I really did)
@@TheRojo387 thorn does make sense for the voiceless dental fricative but eth representing the voiced dental fricative makes absolutely no sense. /δ/ would be much better suited for representing that sound
I'm confused about people disliking being forced to learn cursive. The first thing I learned to write in was cursive. It's the way I write the most when writing personal notes or texts longer than 2 simple sentences, since it is a very fast manner of doing so. Since people often have trouble reading my handwriting I sometimes have to imitate print (at around 2,5 seconds per letter).
@@festerdam4548 I mean I liked it when we were learning it, but I find it takes me longer to write legible notes with cursive, and I don't do it well in the first place. I also find it harder to read if it's not very clear
@@creativewanderer9577 Since it's much less likely to have to raise the writing utensil, it should increase the speed. I'm not speaking about marriage invitation cursive (fancy), but rather cursive that's used day-to-day for note taking or longer texts (practical). My handwriting is pretty bad, though, so for short and important messages, print is very useful ("Have fever. Don't wait for me.") Edit: Didn't read the legible part. Yeah if you are aiming for legibility, print is your friend, but I don't use it for long texts because I take so much longer to write with it.
@@festerdam4548 I imagine some dissatisfaction is from legibility. People can already have terrible handwriting in normal script, and with cursive's almost nonexistent use in formally typed and printed media, most people are naturally not nearly familiar with cursive script as both a writing, but greatly a reading script, as they are with standard Roman letters. From a young age kids are exposed almost completely to standard script, and I imagine most are fine using what they would favor something they see more often and is completely standardized in every other form of media to be exposed to.
As a weaver I’m super taken with the decorative kēlen writing system. Lovely. It’s so easy to work into a pattern-you could weave a name or title (or even endearments for courting/wedding gifts-imagine!) into garments. This absolutely sets my mind alight.
feel like in modern society we dont really have that kind of thing anymore. sure we have calligraphy but barely anyone uses it anymore other than making satisfying youtube videos
Since my name is Kaylan (pronounced like in the video) and I gotta say sentences out of context made me laugh my ass off xD "When I first heard the concept of "Kaylan", I was immediately skeptical" lmao Glad YT recommended your channel to me in general anywho!!
I think it could be possible to have a lang COMPLETELY without verbs, by for example specifying the state of something before and after a verb happens. Instead, of "they give me the thing" its something like "their thing -> my thing". If you are thinking that the "->" is a verb, what if all sentences are assumed to be linked in this way through just punctuation (so it becomes "their thing. my thing", and if they aren't, then a prefix is added to the first word of the next sentence? Can a period really be a verb? I don't think so. Also, I disagree that you said hangman is completely unrelated to anything else on the channel. Hangman is the most commonly played language related game!
Yeah, you're right, I think you could create completely verbless language just by stating the object's state before and after and having everything else be implied. It's technically verbless. I wonder, though, if there are verbs that can't be worked around like this. Let's see . . . I think it's possible with most common verbs. 'Say' works ("words in my mouth-->words in their ears" or something like that), 'walk' could be '"I here" (the 'am' can be implied like in Russian)-->"I there"'. But what about verbs like 'think'? "No thoughts in head"-->"thoughts in head"? (And again, you can say that something exists without using a verb. Instead of doing it the English way and saying 'There IS a whatever', You just say, 'There whatever'.) There are probably verbs that can only be communicated using verbs, instead of this before-after-state system, although I guess languages evolve and are devious enough that you could probably find a clever way to communicate even those verbs without verbs.
zero copula: Она дома "She at home", does not have a verb. Your language can be an SO language, there's simply no V. "A time ago, their thing, my thing" = they gave me their thing to me a while ago. "I book" could imply reading because that's what you do with books, but then the tricky part is how you would specify that you made that book. "I book-creation" would just make the noun "creation" into a verb, like how English use "book" as a noun and a verb. Technically then "I book" does mean "I'm reading" since "book" here is a verb. I'm really curious if you can make it without verbs.
More to verbs than only action. Also tense, mood, all that. Adverbs useful: yesterday no knowledge of this conlag by me . Today knowledge of this conlang by me. Too much redundancy though. At least success in verbless communication of my ideas.
This is definitely my experience bias talking, but that relational relabeling of verbs reminds me a _lot_ of how some programming languages work. Declaration, assignment, ownership, and change are roughly a set of fundamental "actions" that can happen in higher level languages, everything else is a noun constructed by composing other nouns and relations. I wonder if that's part of why it's so hard for us to learn to work with computers. Most of us are used to languages with lots of verbs, so we emulate that by thinking in imperatives, when in fact it may be better to think in relations...
Same, looking at the relations reminded me a lot of asm with how simple each individual word is but they can be combined to make higher level concepts that end up making practically limitless possibilities
Have you tried Factor, in which everything can be thought of as a verb? Or Joy, or Forth, Cat, Kitten, concatenative languages in general. Even numbers can be seen as a verb that puts itself on the stack.
@@frechjo I actually wrote a forth-like lisp for fun my freshman year of college. Recursion didn't work because it was dynamically scoped (or I just did the scoping wrong?). It's a neat idea, but I think 'all verb' languages are even harder to work with than 'all noun' languages, and that's reflected in popularity.
Perhaps this language would be easier for programmers to learn? It seems very logic-based; if you know about coding, the relational system might seem to make more sense than the average person would find.
There was a writer called Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote a story about a guy that found in a mysterious encyclopedia which told about two different peoples who spoke one a language without verbs, while the other spoke a language without adjectives. He tries in quite some detail to express the intuition of those languages. I remember once I was talking with a friend about making a language without adjectives or verbs. We got excited and started eliminating other things too. In the end we had wiped every structure and left only colors, hahaha.
People who don't know Lojban: "whoa, lojban says it doesnt have verbs!" People who know Lojban: "wtf are you smoking, the entire language is built around verbs"
@Joe Esperanto has some constructed dialects or derived languages. Ido is definitively in Esperanto's family, as well as that simplified/teaching version for Asians which I can't recall it's name. There are also some fictional dialects used in literature. So yes, Esperanto is already a family of languages. About dialects arising naturally among native speakers, I don't think there's much of it (unless you count as a dialect the variations that could exist inside a family or a very reduced group). There's not much of a geographical isolation, most Esperantists try to follow the grammar and vocabulary standards, and there's some aversion to the formation of dialects among the community. There are a few aspects you could consider "dialectal", like common mistakes by influence of the speakers native language, or adherence to reform proposals (like iĉismo, ĝiismo or riismo), but they're minor imo.
This actually raised a really interesting thought for me, which I have 0 time to follow up. Would it be possible to have a truly "verbless" language by implying the verb by sentence structure alone, and thus violate this linguistic constant? If you consider what the verbs/relationals in Kelen do, you could combine them into a single relational, and then ellipt it entirely and use suffixes to imply it. For example, let's say you had three suffixes, "oo" referring to the initial object, "oa" to the new object, and "as" referring to the subject/causer. To say "a painter painted the house red", you'd say "houseoo red-houseoa painteras". To say I am tall, you could say "tall-Ioa" and to say I've become tall (grown), you'd say "Ioo tall-Ioa". Then to give (se) would translate similarly. "Ali gave Bob a present" would become "Ali's-presentoo Bob'spresentoa Alias" (though I imagine the Alias would be ellipted due to being implied, much as Korean often ellipts it's subjects) . To say "Bob took Ali's present", you could use "Ali's-presentoo Bob's-presentoa Bobas". Finally, other information could be imparted by adverbs at the end of the sentence. While the other parts of the sentence could be in any order, so long as adjective came before noun, this would always have to be at the end. For example, to say "Bob angrily *stole* Ali's present", you'd use "Ali's-presentoo Bob's-presentoa Bobas illegally angrily" I'd imagine that time wouldn't be implied by tense, but by explicit reference (e.g. yesterday, last-hour, etc.), much like Kiribati. Place could probably be similar (e.g. at-home, at-school), though the "at" particle would likely be ellipted in informal speech. Finally, I'd imagine that the formality of speech would imply whether you kept the suffixes on nouns ("oo", "oa", "as"), and even if you required the nouns at all if it's implied by previous speech. For example "I eat an apple. I eat a banana." would be "appleoo eaten-appleoa Ias. Bananaoo eaten-bananaoa Ias" in formal speech, and "eaten-apple Ias. Eaten-banana." In informal speech. What do you think? Feel free to steal the idea and run with it, just lmk what you come up with!
"To cause to become" as a replacement for lots of verbs is something I wish English had. Imagine how sophisticated this would sound! Instead of "the fan cools the room," or "the dog eats his food," equivalents would be "the fan causes the temperature to go down," or "the food causes the dog to be sustained" Edit: "TO GIVE WORDS???" OH MY GOD THIS CONLANG IS AMAZING
It may be simpler to write, but I’m my experience sitelen sitelen is very simple to read. I like to think about it as a similar writing idea to Japanese. I know that in some ways it is very different from Japanese, but just like Japanese it has a character system that represents words; glyphs in sitelen sitelen and kanji in Japanese. Also just like Japanese, it also has a syllabary, which I like to think is similar to Hiragana/Katakana. In sitelen sitelen, the syllabary is used for names. This comparison can only go so far through. sitelen sitelen has around 120 complex glyphs, and Japanese has thousands of characters. Japanese also has two syllabaries to use in different circumstances while sitelen sitelen only has one for names. Honestly though I need to learn some of the laced script, as I’m biased towards sitelen sitelen as that is what I know. And it might be fun.
I like the script but it bothers me that it breaks the fundamental rule of interlace (in Celtic and La Tène art anyway) in that the strands aren't all continuous.
@@jakenadalachgile1836 I think that's actually a clever way to help differentiate background from writing - The stuff that isn't continuous is easier to set aside on your mind, to a degree, to help you focus on the important stuff. It would be nicer if the system was designed to have everything interlace, still, I do agree - But there are advantages.
Songs in Kelen must be really interesting to write and perform considering how important length is to the meaning of words. I've never in my life been interested in language but for some reason your videos are hooking me.
There is a way to make Kēlen [or any language] more "verbless": 1) Dispense with the copula altogether. Several real-world languages already do that. 2) For the other meaning of the verb, "to be", you can use an adjective like, "identical" or "similar." 3) To replace the construction, "There is …," one could use an adverb, such as, "here." Or an adjective like, "real," or, "present." Or the noun for "the present" or for "today." Or for that matter, it could use all of these, each in a different context that doesn't seem consistent to non-native speakers, but totally makes sense in the world-view of the culture of the language's speakers. 4) The verb, "to have": Easy. Use the genetive case. Again, maybe add in adjectives/adverbs as required by context. 5) Tenses: Again, easy. Just use the appropriate time-word. Or encode tense in direction and use the appropriate direction [e.g. "forward" for the past-tense; or "east" for the past-tense]. 6) A few particles indicating how nouns are connected together, instead of using verbs to make that connection. For example: 6a) A particle that means, "the next two nouns are conceptually connected." What that connection is depends on context. 6b) A particle used on 2 or more phrases, preceding each phrase, which has the meaning, "these phrases have a relationship." We have a similar construction to this in English: "either … or …" and “neither … nor … " 6c) A particle that is put in between items that are part of a sequence. Think of it as the spoken-equivalent of a comma. Again: These particles must not be a mere replacement for a bunch of verbs. A specific combination of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are the replacement for each verb. The particles would just increase the way you can make combinations.
@@jenovahhelson5941 I … don't think so. That would still be a kind of verb. What I was postulating was using a combination of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and grammar to replace verbs entirely. It would result in a rather alien way of thinking. The converse - using verbs as nouns, adjectives, and/or adverbs - actually happens regularly in human language.
Yey an episode about a language that actually doesn’t have verbs (kinda), unlike lojban which just calls it brivla and thinks that’s enough to trick people into thinking that it doesn’t have verbs.
I think the lojban designers would be the first to tell you that brivla are verbs. No one who is familiar with its grammar would ever claim otherwise. (However, many folks find that, when discussing lojban grammar, it is convenient and maximally communicative to use lojban words to describe lojban grammatical categories. Such usage should never be interpreted to mean that English academic words don't apply. Anyone who knows lojban knows that brivla are verbs. [Even though they also serve as nouns, which is unusual but certainly not groundbreaking.])
I mean, give, cause, be, and have, are commonly available meanings of syllables that compose into verbs in some real languages, so kelen really just defines those built verbs to not be verbs.
While i'm not sure if their "to be" can count as not-a-verb-in-disguise, "to have" definitely doesn't need to count as a verb, like in Irish. Instead it's a preposition, i.e. "[thing] is *at me*" vs "*I have* [thing]". You still need to be as a verb for tha particular example, but there's probably some way around that too.
I mean, they're link-verbs, which is a little different, and as mentioned below, some of them don't have to be verbs at all, so it's much closer to being verbless than you'd think.
wow that Ceremonial alphabet is awesome, i have not seen nothing simmilar, and recently i started with the desing of a conscript that looks like that interlace and it will be for a language with a huge amount of verbs
I think it's closer to being verbless than one might think; the relationals do the same *job* as verbs, and are translated as verbs when you translate the words into a Human language, but they don't really act like a verb. It conveys all actions by way of things in relation to other things, with no unique words for doing anything!
@MC King you mean /ʃ/. /sh/ isn't proper IPA. that's the consonant cluster in "aSSHole". if you can't access the esh, use /S/ or /š/, or just say "the sh-sound".
Kelen reminds me of Basque. It's just taken the lexical information out of the verbs, and then stripped them down to a closed set. The small closed set of verbs take person, tense, mood etc., while the lexical information is handled by nouns and word order. The "relationals" are just relabelled verbs.
anlāsi everyone, I love this episode, this conlang and specifically the artistic possibilities the braiding patterns have. Thank you for making this video. Also, greetings from the Netherlands
I actually really liked how the passage at the end sounded, which is great because that can't be said about the vast majority of conlangs reviewed on this channel lol
Actually me during the announcement * new video * Oh sounds cool * a video nobody asked for * OH MY GOD * on a topic nobody cares about * YES YES YES * my weirdest idea for a video essay since w * THIS WILL BE GREAT * jan Misali presents: hangman is a weird game * OH MY GOD THIS IS SO AMAZING I CAN'T WAIT (melts with joy)
So…. the reason the orthography looks like Devanagari is because it basically is. Nearly all the letters showed on screen seem to be mirrored, rotated, and occasionally slightly modified Devanagari letters 🤷♂️. Looks good, though!
Kelen sounds like a last name, and every time you say "kelen's this" or "kelen's that" my brain interprets it as someone named kelen doing these things
I’m doing an important school project on conlangs, have had an interest in them for a long time, and have even tried my hand at constructing my own. And yet, there are still so many things you can do with them that I find new and quite surprising! Kēlen’s ceremonial writing system and the relationals to substitute verbs were both really creative and unlike most conlangs I have any knowledge of. I think it’s part of the reason I like conlangs so much-it never ceases to amaze me how creative one can get with them, and language really is an expression of culture and identity, which means there are near-infinite options of what you can come up with. Really, the sky is the limit! I’m glad to have found this video; thanks for making such interesting content :))
I'm working on a new conlang. Do you think that this is too long of a pronoun list? pa - I pa’ne - we tuk - you tu’ne - you pl. tsam - he tsa’ne - he pl. atsal - she atsane - she pl. ku’tsa - person of unknown sex ku’tsane - group of people of unknown/mixed sex, i.e. “they” paklut - animal of unknown sex paklune - group of animals of unknown/mixed sex pak’tsam - male animal pak’tsane - group of male animals pak’atsal - female animal pak’atsane - group of female animals ukat - non-living noun, i.e. “it” ukane - group of non-living nouns NOTE: this fictional society lives in an African-plains-like environment and worships animals as deities or angel-like beings.
When I thought I had an original conlang idea and see this. F it the same what I’m building from the grammar to the script ahhaha. Lesson learn “You the original?-No”
i love that creating a language is somehow both so easy that a highschooler or middleschooler can do it but at the same time so hard that it can take decades for an adult to do it
its weird, i thought i found your channel for the first time just now, but scrolling through your videos, i realize ive watched quite a few of them already
I could write these relationals without verbs at all. But the verbs almost feel implied. Are prepositions verbs in disguise? is/exists: Here water change: Before water, now steam make: Before water and fire, now steam has: Water in my hands
The orthography is indeed aesthetically pleasing. I do wonder now if it's possible to go completely without verbs. It's incredible how far you can get with 4 words indicating the actions. Excellent presentation of an excellent conlang.
Did anyone else get sent here bc of hangman but now you've watched like 30 videos of stuff that's going straight over your head but that okay because Jan is great? Just me.
Hey man great video it's always nice watching a video on a conlang you're passionate about. I have a question tho, why did you stop including the number of the episode on the title? I miss that tbh
10:45 the Finnish language also doesn't have the verb "have" instead they use the adessive case suffixes -lla or -llä attached to the person/thing who does the "having" + copula + the thing being had (accusative) e.g. Minulla on koira = [lit.] At/on me is dog = I have a/the dog.
I'm so glad that another conlang uses knotting as a form of communication, even if it's just ceremonial. While I never got far enough to make an actual language with it, I had the idea for my gnomes writing via knotted rope, which could thus be read underground in the dark. This is the same conlang concept where I envisioned an extensive set of positional words, so that, for example, using words as simple as "front" or "beside," you could indicate "reach into the hole and feel the wall closest to you, to the left and a little up" -- thus allowing the gnomes to quickly locate objects and scurry back to the safety of their burrows ^_^
This "verbless" system kind of reminds me of the Basque verbal system. In Basque, the majority of verbs do not conjugate. Instead a verbal noun or participle is combined with an auxiliary verb (or "relationals" as this conlang calls them) that conjugates based on the subject, direct object, indirect object and TAM.
I think this is a very interesting language but calling it verbless is an exaggeration. The relationals can be analyzed, I'd even say should be analyzed, as words, or even affixes, that convert nouns and adjectives into verbs. Nothing especially unusual about that. That's in fact pretty standard in conlangs, although having several ways to do it is a great idea and eliminates a lot of ambiguity.
1:29 the behavior of ‘s’ here is oddly similar to the Korean ㅅ, which was originally pronunced as ‘s’ in all occasions but was later reduced to ‘t’ in end of words.
Can you cover D'ni? As an added bonus, they have their own numeral system. It's a base 25, where the numbers up to 25 are base 5. Thought you might like that. I haven't conlanged in a very very long time. Love the series!
![NOSFERATU - Official Trailer [HD] - Only In Theaters December 25](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nulvWqYUM8k/mqdefault.jpg)
Dude wtf I've never heard of a conlang and no experience in language but I'm enjoying this video
Sat's World Studios why not
@Sat's World Studios dude it’s not even the _freaking_ word
@Sat's World Studios *fucking
@@jameeztherandomguy5418 ʘoʘ
Thats how everybody ends up staying... stay here with us... with us... with us... with us... STAY
Whenever Misali does the vowel inventory I imagine him walking slowly across a bed of hot coals.
I absolutely hate it
@Joel Haggis LOL
iihhh
uuhh
eeeEeEh
oOoOoh
AAAAAAAAAAA
@@IdaeChop The 5 vowel system
a:
When it's 2:30am but your conlang doesn't have a word for "sleep" yet
/kʷ i.´θin/ night
/ba.'kʷi.da.ny/ any mean of transport
In L'takut it would "Shnurpuk"
Tèkl'r tèishnurpat
=
You should sleep
in Tivinkiji it is lisata
Qiki la lisata qumununi sin qumununi 3:00 qakati maki pakasa min qiki.
I stayed up last night till 3:00 making my own language.
Literally: I no sleep past night before 3:00 action create language of me.
(I really did)
Liriu, a'nezh! (Sleep, dammit!)
Finally... Je peux dors...
“This caused SECONDS of confusion “ - me, about everything, always
@Alexnader Hamiltun we are still have SECONDS of confusion
@@IcedTheLocalClown dang must be a lotta seconds
Thorn actually makes more sense than theta for the "th" sound in "thin" and "thong".
@@TheRojo387 afaict, θ vs δ is more unambiguous than þ vs ð.
@@TheRojo387 thorn does make sense for the voiceless dental fricative but eth representing the voiced dental fricative makes absolutely no sense. /δ/ would be much better suited for representing that sound
wow a conlang you actually liked? impressive. I could hear the enthusiasm in your voice
It's like when Gordon Ramsay actually praises someone...
It's a rare occurrence. I know of only two he actually likes , Toki Pona being the other one....
Na'vi be like:
Viossa be like:
Sindarin be like:
Dothraki be like:
Yeah it's uncommon but not *rare* ya know
@@palatasikuntheyoutubecomme2046 I never said it was rare. what are you talking about?
@@celticconlanger6401 You fool, you forgot kay(f)bop(t), the most superior of all conlangs.
*See's thumbnail on feed.*
Why is this one written entirely in pretzels?
ahah
My favourite language is *Pretzel.* Come to think of it, that sounds like an Aztec branch-off.
@AHYAN BIN Hey, do you hear that sound?
@@Lumegrin the sound of the joke flying over their head?
@@Nibiri3304 yeah like “wooosh.” what an idiotic sound.
imagine learning the ceremonial system in a school setting, like the way the us treats cursive writing.
Omg
I'm confused about people disliking being forced to learn cursive. The first thing I learned to write in was cursive. It's the way I write the most when writing personal notes or texts longer than 2 simple sentences, since it is a very fast manner of doing so. Since people often have trouble reading my handwriting I sometimes have to imitate print (at around 2,5 seconds per letter).
@@festerdam4548 I mean I liked it when we were learning it, but I find it takes me longer to write legible notes with cursive, and I don't do it well in the first place. I also find it harder to read if it's not very clear
@@creativewanderer9577 Since it's much less likely to have to raise the writing utensil, it should increase the speed. I'm not speaking about marriage invitation cursive (fancy), but rather cursive that's used day-to-day for note taking or longer texts (practical). My handwriting is pretty bad, though, so for short and important messages, print is very useful ("Have fever. Don't wait for me.")
Edit: Didn't read the legible part. Yeah if you are aiming for legibility, print is your friend, but I don't use it for long texts because I take so much longer to write with it.
@@festerdam4548 I imagine some dissatisfaction is from legibility. People can already have terrible handwriting in normal script, and with cursive's almost nonexistent use in formally typed and printed media, most people are naturally not nearly familiar with cursive script as both a writing, but greatly a reading script, as they are with standard Roman letters. From a young age kids are exposed almost completely to standard script, and I imagine most are fine using what they would favor something they see more often and is completely standardized in every other form of media to be exposed to.
Since nineteen.
Eighty.
Hot.
Damn.
Ashakari Singh literally my thought 😳😳
I mean, I’ve been working on my first conlang for about 14-16yrs and I thought *that* was a long time 🤯
I literally started working on a conlang and left the project on hold after a little less than a month
@@dandanthedandan7558 i barely get a week most of the time
Holy moley. I never expected an Indian here.
my oldest still-worked on language is from late 2017 but I’ve been conlanging since like 2015-16
As a weaver I’m super taken with the decorative kēlen writing system. Lovely. It’s so easy to work into a pattern-you could weave a name or title (or even endearments for courting/wedding gifts-imagine!) into garments. This absolutely sets my mind alight.
It's like Egyptian. Everyone wrote in hieratic, but everyone remembers hieroglyphics, which were just used for ceremonial use.
never knew that. makes a lot of sense. thanks
@@ts4gv yes demotic was the common written form later
Or you know... calligraphy, a thing a lot of natural languages have.
Certainly a unique calligraphy but still that at it's core
Funnily enough we were going over ancient Egypt today in class and in my head I thought of this conlang
feel like in modern society we dont really have that kind of thing anymore. sure we have calligraphy but barely anyone uses it anymore other than making satisfying youtube videos
Since my name is Kaylan (pronounced like in the video) and I gotta say sentences out of context made me laugh my ass off xD
"When I first heard the concept of "Kaylan", I was immediately skeptical" lmao
Glad YT recommended your channel to me in general anywho!!
My name is sylvia, imagine how i felt
Wow, a language Critic actually likes! This was actually a really neat language, a cool video, and probably my favorite so far. Keep up the good work!
He prefers Jan Misali
He also liked lingua franca nova
And then we go right back to Romance IALs
I'm assuming jan Misali likes most of the languages and just sounds critical cos that's the point of the videos lol
you forget about Toki Pona. He loved that conlang.
I think it could be possible to have a lang COMPLETELY without verbs, by for example specifying the state of something before and after a verb happens. Instead, of "they give me the thing" its something like "their thing -> my thing". If you are thinking that the "->" is a verb, what if all sentences are assumed to be linked in this way through just punctuation (so it becomes "their thing. my thing", and if they aren't, then a prefix is added to the first word of the next sentence? Can a period really be a verb? I don't think so.
Also, I disagree that you said hangman is completely unrelated to anything else on the channel. Hangman is the most commonly played language related game!
Yeah, you're right, I think you could create completely verbless language just by stating the object's state before and after and having everything else be implied. It's technically verbless.
I wonder, though, if there are verbs that can't be worked around like this. Let's see . . . I think it's possible with most common verbs. 'Say' works ("words in my mouth-->words in their ears" or something like that), 'walk' could be '"I here" (the 'am' can be implied like in Russian)-->"I there"'. But what about verbs like 'think'? "No thoughts in head"-->"thoughts in head"? (And again, you can say that something exists without using a verb. Instead of doing it the English way and saying 'There IS a whatever', You just say, 'There whatever'.) There are probably verbs that can only be communicated using verbs, instead of this before-after-state system, although I guess languages evolve and are devious enough that you could probably find a clever way to communicate even those verbs without verbs.
Are you that swedish man on the toki pona server? If so then toki!
zero copula: Она дома "She at home", does not have a verb. Your language can be an SO language, there's simply no V. "A time ago, their thing, my thing" = they gave me their thing to me a while ago. "I book" could imply reading because that's what you do with books, but then the tricky part is how you would specify that you made that book. "I book-creation" would just make the noun "creation" into a verb, like how English use "book" as a noun and a verb. Technically then "I book" does mean "I'm reading" since "book" here is a verb. I'm really curious if you can make it without verbs.
@@Liggliluff 11 books by me. 12 books by me.
More to verbs than only action. Also tense, mood, all that. Adverbs useful: yesterday no knowledge of this conlag by me . Today knowledge of this conlang by me. Too much redundancy though. At least success in verbless communication of my ideas.
This is definitely my experience bias talking, but that relational relabeling of verbs reminds me a _lot_ of how some programming languages work. Declaration, assignment, ownership, and change are roughly a set of fundamental "actions" that can happen in higher level languages, everything else is a noun constructed by composing other nouns and relations. I wonder if that's part of why it's so hard for us to learn to work with computers. Most of us are used to languages with lots of verbs, so we emulate that by thinking in imperatives, when in fact it may be better to think in relations...
Same, looking at the relations reminded me a lot of asm with how simple each individual word is but they can be combined to make higher level concepts that end up making practically limitless possibilities
Have you tried Factor, in which everything can be thought of as a verb? Or Joy, or Forth, Cat, Kitten, concatenative languages in general. Even numbers can be seen as a verb that puts itself on the stack.
We should all just speak in something like Prolog. Just state enough relations, and let the verbs and sentences come as a logical consequence. ;)
@@frechjo I actually wrote a forth-like lisp for fun my freshman year of college. Recursion didn't work because it was dynamically scoped (or I just did the scoping wrong?). It's a neat idea, but I think 'all verb' languages are even harder to work with than 'all noun' languages, and that's reflected in popularity.
Perhaps this language would be easier for programmers to learn? It seems very logic-based; if you know about coding, the relational system might seem to make more sense than the average person would find.
There was a writer called Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote a story about a guy that found in a mysterious encyclopedia which told about two different peoples who spoke one a language without verbs, while the other spoke a language without adjectives. He tries in quite some detail to express the intuition of those languages.
I remember once I was talking with a friend about making a language without adjectives or verbs. We got excited and started eliminating other things too. In the end we had wiped every structure and left only colors, hahaha.
It would be funny to naturally find or hear a fictional language that had none adjectives nor verbs
Lojbanic Family: "We don't have verbs!"
Kelen: "You're all lying to me!"
People who don't know Lojban: "whoa, lojban says it doesnt have verbs!"
People who know Lojban: "wtf are you smoking, the entire language is built around verbs"
@@UnshavenStatue .u'i everything is a verbs therefore nothing is a verb
@Joe
Esperanto has some constructed dialects or derived languages. Ido is definitively in Esperanto's family, as well as that simplified/teaching version for Asians which I can't recall it's name. There are also some fictional dialects used in literature. So yes, Esperanto is already a family of languages.
About dialects arising naturally among native speakers, I don't think there's much of it (unless you count as a dialect the variations that could exist inside a family or a very reduced group).
There's not much of a geographical isolation, most Esperantists try to follow the grammar and vocabulary standards, and there's some aversion to the formation of dialects among the community.
There are a few aspects you could consider "dialectal", like common mistakes by influence of the speakers native language, or adherence to reform proposals (like iĉismo, ĝiismo or riismo), but they're minor imo.
Uh more like "Yall are giving me lies!"
hehe i'll make a language that has vrebens which are definetly not verbs
jan misali: * mentions toki pona *
Me: Guess I'll wait for Anthony McCarthy then.
You know he wants that bibliography
And thanks to him, now there actually are new radio shows released in toki pona every week
Wait there are? Where do I find these?
@@lunkel8108 Now up to 2 official books thanks to the dictionary :)
@@zionj104 Link please. I need this
This actually raised a really interesting thought for me, which I have 0 time to follow up. Would it be possible to have a truly "verbless" language by implying the verb by sentence structure alone, and thus violate this linguistic constant?
If you consider what the verbs/relationals in Kelen do, you could combine them into a single relational, and then ellipt it entirely and use suffixes to imply it.
For example, let's say you had three suffixes, "oo" referring to the initial object, "oa" to the new object, and "as" referring to the subject/causer. To say "a painter painted the house red", you'd say "houseoo red-houseoa painteras". To say I am tall, you could say "tall-Ioa" and to say I've become tall (grown), you'd say "Ioo tall-Ioa".
Then to give (se) would translate similarly. "Ali gave Bob a present" would become "Ali's-presentoo Bob'spresentoa Alias" (though I imagine the Alias would be ellipted due to being implied, much as Korean often ellipts it's subjects) . To say "Bob took Ali's present", you could use "Ali's-presentoo Bob's-presentoa Bobas".
Finally, other information could be imparted by adverbs at the end of the sentence. While the other parts of the sentence could be in any order, so long as adjective came before noun, this would always have to be at the end. For example, to say "Bob angrily *stole* Ali's present", you'd use "Ali's-presentoo Bob's-presentoa Bobas illegally angrily"
I'd imagine that time wouldn't be implied by tense, but by explicit reference (e.g. yesterday, last-hour, etc.), much like Kiribati. Place could probably be similar (e.g. at-home, at-school), though the "at" particle would likely be ellipted in informal speech.
Finally, I'd imagine that the formality of speech would imply whether you kept the suffixes on nouns ("oo", "oa", "as"), and even if you required the nouns at all if it's implied by previous speech. For example "I eat an apple. I eat a banana." would be "appleoo eaten-appleoa Ias. Bananaoo eaten-bananaoa Ias" in formal speech, and "eaten-apple Ias. Eaten-banana." In informal speech.
What do you think? Feel free to steal the idea and run with it, just lmk what you come up with!
tfw you mispronounce /ʃ/ as /s/
Oh, sick, a midnight snack.
And _wow,_ that ceremonial script is *mad cool.*
Why must you do this to me quarantine has already destroyed my sleep schedule enough
I’ve never found an artlang that wasn’t attached to a work of fiction that I actually really wanted to learn, until now. I love this actually
"To cause to become" as a replacement for lots of verbs is something I wish English had. Imagine how sophisticated this would sound! Instead of "the fan cools the room," or "the dog eats his food," equivalents would be "the fan causes the temperature to go down," or "the food causes the dog to be sustained"
Edit: "TO GIVE WORDS???" OH MY GOD THIS CONLANG IS AMAZING
kts
gdz
@@glowstonelovepad9294
xpf
γbv
The ceremonial alphabet vaguely remind me of Geometric Kufic Arabic.
Wow that calligraphy looks amazing! this is like taking it and adding more celtic knots to the mix
April 2020
World: ends
Jan Misali: So... hangman is actually a pretty weird game
hotel: trivago
It's 2022 and i comfirm were already dead
Do you like the laced writing system more than sitelen sitelen? sitelen sitelen li pona lukin mute a.
the laced writing system looks more simple than sitelen sitelen
It may be simpler to write, but I’m my experience sitelen sitelen is very simple to read. I like to think about it as a similar writing idea to Japanese. I know that in some ways it is very different from Japanese, but just like Japanese it has a character system that represents words; glyphs in sitelen sitelen and kanji in Japanese. Also just like Japanese, it also has a syllabary, which I like to think is similar to Hiragana/Katakana. In sitelen sitelen, the syllabary is used for names. This comparison can only go so far through. sitelen sitelen has around 120 complex glyphs, and Japanese has thousands of characters. Japanese also has two syllabaries to use in different circumstances while sitelen sitelen only has one for names.
Honestly though I need to learn some of the laced script, as I’m biased towards sitelen sitelen as that is what I know. And it might be fun.
I like the script but it bothers me that it breaks the fundamental rule of interlace (in Celtic and La Tène art anyway) in that the strands aren't all continuous.
@@jakenadalachgile1836 I think that's actually a clever way to help differentiate background from writing - The stuff that isn't continuous is easier to set aside on your mind, to a degree, to help you focus on the important stuff. It would be nicer if the system was designed to have everything interlace, still, I do agree - But there are advantages.
@@Woodledude the words themselves arent continuous either - look at the thumbnail for this video
anyone else want conlang critic to review their language but is afraid of being torn to shreds?
Have you watched the last episode (Poliespo)? I'm sure your cloŋ is better than that!
9:43
se.x.y z
se.x.y z ke x mo y
se.x.y z to x mo y
se.x.y z ien "w"
se.x.y z
se x
Damn this language is dirty 👀
se.x y; x experiences y
@@ukraniankgb9131 eperiences*
and when talking about giving and taking, no less. ooh la-laaa
@@cameronhaney4892 *pireinces
urunu
urunade
urunū
urunú
Songs in Kelen must be really interesting to write and perform considering how important length is to the meaning of words. I've never in my life been interested in language but for some reason your videos are hooking me.
Hangman: *executing* in April
There is a way to make Kēlen [or any language] more "verbless":
1) Dispense with the copula altogether. Several real-world languages already do that.
2) For the other meaning of the verb, "to be", you can use an adjective like, "identical" or "similar."
3) To replace the construction, "There is …," one could use an adverb, such as, "here." Or an adjective like, "real," or, "present." Or the noun for "the present" or for "today." Or for that matter, it could use all of these, each in a different context that doesn't seem consistent to non-native speakers, but totally makes sense in the world-view of the culture of the language's speakers.
4) The verb, "to have": Easy. Use the genetive case. Again, maybe add in adjectives/adverbs as required by context.
5) Tenses: Again, easy. Just use the appropriate time-word. Or encode tense in direction and use the appropriate direction [e.g. "forward" for the past-tense; or "east" for the past-tense].
6) A few particles indicating how nouns are connected together, instead of using verbs to make that connection. For example:
6a) A particle that means, "the next two nouns are conceptually connected."
What that connection is depends on context.
6b) A particle used on 2 or more phrases, preceding each phrase, which has the meaning, "these phrases have a relationship."
We have a similar construction to this in English: "either … or …" and “neither … nor … "
6c) A particle that is put in between items that are part of a sequence. Think of it as the spoken-equivalent of a comma.
Again: These particles must not be a mere replacement for a bunch of verbs. A specific combination of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are the replacement for each verb. The particles would just increase the way you can make combinations.
Converbs?
@@jenovahhelson5941 I … don't think so. That would still be a kind of verb.
What I was postulating was using a combination of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and grammar to replace verbs entirely.
It would result in a rather alien way of thinking.
The converse - using verbs as nouns, adjectives, and/or adverbs - actually happens regularly in human language.
in so early the captions haven't shown up yet
Yey an episode about a language that actually doesn’t have verbs (kinda), unlike lojban which just calls it brivla and thinks that’s enough to trick people into thinking that it doesn’t have verbs.
I think the lojban designers would be the first to tell you that brivla are verbs. No one who is familiar with its grammar would ever claim otherwise.
(However, many folks find that, when discussing lojban grammar, it is convenient and maximally communicative to use lojban words to describe lojban grammatical categories. Such usage should never be interpreted to mean that English academic words don't apply. Anyone who knows lojban knows that brivla are verbs. [Even though they also serve as nouns, which is unusual but certainly not groundbreaking.])
I mean, give, cause, be, and have, are commonly available meanings of syllables that compose into verbs in some real languages, so kelen really just defines those built verbs to not be verbs.
It does have a verb. It's just that verb constitutes a closed and tiny wordclass, which is not that strange for a natlang.
Was having lessons on Zoom. Sees new video. Mutes Zoom and clicks video.
same
MOOD
What's zoom?
@@dandanthedandan7558 group call app
Eminem: Im the fastest rapper in the world.
Jan Misali: hold my proto-uralo-altaic
Kelen: this is language without verbs
Jan Misali: This can't be a good thing
Kelen: Shows its heavily researched details.
So Kēlen does have verbs, but only 4 verbs. I think it should be appreciated for what it is, not for what it isn't.
Liggliluff 4 likes for every verb in Kēlen.
While i'm not sure if their "to be" can count as not-a-verb-in-disguise, "to have" definitely doesn't need to count as a verb, like in Irish. Instead it's a preposition, i.e. "[thing] is *at me*" vs "*I have* [thing]". You still need to be as a verb for tha particular example, but there's probably some way around that too.
I mean, they're link-verbs, which is a little different, and as mentioned below, some of them don't have to be verbs at all, so it's much closer to being verbless than you'd think.
Came for the Hangman, stayed for the conlangs. I'm currently in the middle of a conlang rabbit hole and I'm not sure how to feel about that
wow that Ceremonial alphabet is awesome, i have not seen nothing simmilar, and recently i started with the desing of a conscript that looks like that interlace and it will be for a language with a huge amount of verbs
I think it's closer to being verbless than one might think; the relationals do the same *job* as verbs, and are translated as verbs when you translate the words into a Human language, but they don't really act like a verb. It conveys all actions by way of things in relation to other things, with no unique words for doing anything!
Excuse me, but you kind of pronounced x like s😅
@MC King but he pronounced it like /s/
yeah. oops
@@HBMmaster Did you switch around some of the sound files by accident?
@@HBMmaster i see in 12:30 what is that song is this
@MC King you mean /ʃ/. /sh/ isn't proper IPA. that's the consonant cluster in "aSSHole". if you can't access the esh, use /S/ or /š/, or just say "the sh-sound".
Videos nobody asked for, on topics nobody cares about, completely unrelated with anything else on the channel are my favorite kind of youtube content
Imagine a knot theory paper written in ceremonial interlace alphabet.
Nuts.
Kelen reminds me of Basque. It's just taken the lexical information out of the verbs, and then stripped them down to a closed set. The small closed set of verbs take person, tense, mood etc., while the lexical information is handled by nouns and word order. The "relationals" are just relabelled verbs.
anlāsi everyone,
I love this episode, this conlang and specifically the artistic possibilities the braiding patterns have.
Thank you for making this video.
Also, greetings from the Netherlands
Wow this is like the first conlang you’ve reviewed that was actually good
The way you say devanagari hurt me.
Copper Hools saaaaaame
The way he says Sotomayor hurt me. :3
Why is that? It’s a perfectly decent Englishy version of the Sanskrit pronunciation, which is what it’s romanized from.
I love how it sounds!!
I'd describe it as a ponteduro (hard eatable ball of caramel popcorn): Sweet and hard, but it melts a bit in your mouth
That actually sounds like some sort of Elvish language... I love it!
"on a topic nobody cares about", he wrongly believed
Oh my god! A conlang critic episode! I am currently not hating life!
And if you really like the consonants why did you butcher them so bad?
I actually really liked how the passage at the end sounded, which is great because that can't be said about the vast majority of conlangs reviewed on this channel lol
*12:30** hear the song*
Actually me during the announcement
* new video *
Oh sounds cool
* a video nobody asked for *
OH MY GOD
* on a topic nobody cares about *
YES YES YES
* my weirdest idea for a video essay since w *
THIS WILL BE GREAT
* jan Misali presents: hangman is a weird game *
OH MY GOD THIS IS SO AMAZING I CAN'T WAIT (melts with joy)
I never thought the day would come, I am undeserving of this position...
*I have become the 69th like of a conlang critic video*
I'm proud of you, go get a cookie and go to bed
@@gamerx07gaming28 Thank you, kind sir. I will do so. goodnight to you!
L E G E N D A R Y
I was number 690
@@lextatertotsfromhell7673 I'm proud of you, go get a cookie and eat some lunch.
When I first watched this video, I thought he was saying Sonia Sotomayor (the Supreme Court justice) made a conlang. That would be cool, though.
Why do you pronounce /ʃ/ like /s/? It's sh.
Cool conlang though, and very in-depth video.
oops
I'm 'Knot' going to say- *ARGH!* I DID IT AGAIN!
10:11 - Seems like "pa" could be called the "possessive relational" if you wanted a cool name for it.
Please make a video about Simlish.
It has the unique property, that it is not meant to be understood.
Huh, this language is actually really cool
I just got an upload notification for this video, dispote it being from 3 years ago
Me at 12:30 AM: notices new conlang critic before I’m about to go to bed. Me: “Well, I guess I have to watch it now”
So…. the reason the orthography looks like Devanagari is because it basically is. Nearly all the letters showed on screen seem to be mirrored, rotated, and occasionally slightly modified Devanagari letters 🤷♂️. Looks good, though!
The verb system is weirdly reminescent of Basque imo
Kelen sounds like a last name, and every time you say "kelen's this" or "kelen's that" my brain interprets it as someone named kelen doing these things
It's my first name so this video was hilarious for me 😂
@@anfa2789 Yeah I'm sure that was weird
I’m doing an important school project on conlangs, have had an interest in them for a long time, and have even tried my hand at constructing my own. And yet, there are still so many things you can do with them that I find new and quite surprising! Kēlen’s ceremonial writing system and the relationals to substitute verbs were both really creative and unlike most conlangs I have any knowledge of. I think it’s part of the reason I like conlangs so much-it never ceases to amaze me how creative one can get with them, and language really is an expression of culture and identity, which means there are near-infinite options of what you can come up with. Really, the sky is the limit! I’m glad to have found this video; thanks for making such interesting content :))
make a video of biblaridion's conlangs aka. Oqolaawak, Nekachti, Edun, and Ilothwii.
I'm working on a new conlang. Do you think that this is too long of a pronoun list?
pa - I
pa’ne - we
tuk - you
tu’ne - you pl.
tsam - he
tsa’ne - he pl.
atsal - she
atsane - she pl.
ku’tsa - person of unknown sex
ku’tsane - group of people of unknown/mixed sex, i.e. “they”
paklut - animal of unknown sex
paklune - group of animals of unknown/mixed sex
pak’tsam - male animal
pak’tsane - group of male animals
pak’atsal - female animal
pak’atsane - group of female animals
ukat - non-living noun, i.e. “it”
ukane - group of non-living nouns
NOTE: this fictional society lives in an African-plains-like environment and worships animals as deities or angel-like beings.
Conlang critic episodes behave like "good cop bad cop". First you hit us with that poliespo and then you present to us kēlen.
a! toki Kelen li pona mute tawa mi! pona!
I'm not sure if enough of Newspeak exists to really make a proper Conlang Critic episode on it, but I'd love to see that regardless.
2+2=5
My name is Caylen and this video is ...somewhat uncomfortable to watch
After so long, after so long...
It's finally here. It's finally here!
Thank you, jan misali.
When I thought I had an original conlang idea and see this. F it the same what I’m building from the grammar to the script ahhaha. Lesson learn “You the original?-No”
i love that creating a language is somehow both so easy that a highschooler or middleschooler can do it but at the same time so hard that it can take decades for an adult to do it
Damn, the ceremonial writing system is truly beautiful.
its weird, i thought i found your channel for the first time just now, but scrolling through your videos, i realize ive watched quite a few of them already
I could write these relationals without verbs at all. But the verbs almost feel implied. Are prepositions verbs in disguise?
is/exists: Here water
change: Before water, now steam
make: Before water and fire, now steam
has: Water in my hands
Im making a conlang which has 30 separate consonants ._. (but a normal 5 vowel system + ɤ (ǒ)
The orthography is indeed aesthetically pleasing. I do wonder now if it's possible to go completely without verbs. It's incredible how far you can get with 4 words indicating the actions. Excellent presentation of an excellent conlang.
I think everyone deserves to hear an autistic man talk excitedly about something you love, even if it’s on RUclips
3:48 fricatives together would be so cool though.
It would literally sound like a lightsaber!
Did anyone else get sent here bc of hangman but now you've watched like 30 videos of stuff that's going straight over your head but that okay because Jan is great?
Just me.
The relationals also make me think the word “can” or “able” can be integrated into a verb conjugation, adjective, or the noun itself
i have no idea why this was recommended to me but i enjoyed it so. good job
The fact that I have no idea what he's talking about but I'm still watching this at 1:30am says something about myself that I'm not ready to analyze
Hey man great video it's always nice watching a video on a conlang you're passionate about. I have a question tho, why did you stop including the number of the episode on the title? I miss that tbh
What is this? What is he talking about? What does this mean? Where am I? Why am I in the linguistic side of youtube and how did I fall in here?
Wtf this conlang is pronounced exactly like my name and it's freaking me out
very excited for the hangman video essay
i am extremely excited for the hangman video
10:45 the Finnish language also doesn't have the verb "have"
instead they use the adessive case suffixes -lla or -llä attached to the person/thing who does the "having" + copula + the thing being had (accusative)
e.g. Minulla on koira = [lit.] At/on me is dog = I have a/the dog.
I'm so glad that another conlang uses knotting as a form of communication, even if it's just ceremonial.
While I never got far enough to make an actual language with it, I had the idea for my gnomes writing via knotted rope, which could thus be read underground in the dark. This is the same conlang concept where I envisioned an extensive set of positional words, so that, for example, using words as simple as "front" or "beside," you could indicate "reach into the hole and feel the wall closest to you, to the left and a little up" -- thus allowing the gnomes to quickly locate objects and scurry back to the safety of their burrows ^_^
i’m currently working on creating a conlang based on Chess and ideas like: the five classical elements, yin yang, etc.
fun
This "verbless" system kind of reminds me of the Basque verbal system. In Basque, the majority of verbs do not conjugate. Instead a verbal noun or participle is combined with an auxiliary verb (or "relationals" as this conlang calls them) that conjugates based on the subject, direct object, indirect object and TAM.
I think this is a very interesting language but calling it verbless is an exaggeration. The relationals can be analyzed, I'd even say should be analyzed, as words, or even affixes, that convert nouns and adjectives into verbs. Nothing especially unusual about that. That's in fact pretty standard in conlangs, although having several ways to do it is a great idea and eliminates a lot of ambiguity.
1:29 the behavior of ‘s’ here is oddly similar to the Korean ㅅ, which was originally pronunced as ‘s’ in all occasions but was later reduced to ‘t’ in end of words.
Can you cover D'ni? As an added bonus, they have their own numeral system. It's a base 25, where the numbers up to 25 are base 5. Thought you might like that.
I haven't conlanged in a very very long time. Love the series!
I have no fucking idea what is going on in these videos yet I watch them every time
*speedruns the conlang critic series to make sure my own conlang isnt doing something Horribly Wrong*