It's hilarious how literally the entire conlang sphere of youtube knows eachother. Also I kind of hate you for briefly making me think you got Nativlang in on this.
It seems to be that way with the "chronic illness vlog" section as well. A vlogger in Minnesota with X illness knows one on the East Coast with Y illness and vice versa. I think it even crosses international borders.
It's amazing how Tolkien was, and continues to be, way ahead of the game as far as conlanging and worldbuilding goes. He was doing everything worldbuilders today try to do. The Hobbits even had a lunisolar calendar based off of the Germanic calendar, long before Xidnaf or anyone else had some rant on calendar systems in worldbuilding. Tolkien also remains ahead of the game in his naming, and how his aesthetics play on English sound-associations, and linguistic history (as opposed to the more utilitarian romanisations many conlanger use). Take this excerpt about the river Baranduin: The name Baranduin was Sindarin for "golden-brown river", from baran and duin.[3] The Hobbits of the Shire originally gave it the punning name Branda-nîn, meaning "border water" in original Hobbitish Westron. This was later punned again as Bralda-hîm meaning "heady ale" (referring to the colour of its water), which Tolkien renders into English as Brandywine.[4] The word Brandywine both resembles the original Elvish name Baranduin, and provides the Hobbitish meaning adequately. The word brandywine was actually the archaic English word for brandy as imported from the Dutch brandewijn. David Salo noted that it represents a possible Old English *baernedwin, meaning "burned wine", which would resemble quite closely the original Elvish Baranduin,[5] making Hobbitish Brandywine a legitimate corruption of S. Baranduin.
I think it's a combination of his academic background, fantastical imagination, and a great deal of work (dedicating a large portion of his life) that goes in to making it all so special!
The actual order of his creative process: 1. I'm gonna call this river Brandywine because hobbits are all british-y and cute. 2. Oh but now I'm writing a serious epic with elvish names for everything. What if the aforementioned Brandywine was the 'Baranduin' all along! 3. Uhh but the hobbits don't have the english words brandy and wine because english is from our world. Shit, better invent a chain of Hobbitish Westron puns to get us to something that roughly translates to the english. It's clever, but clongers are literally inventing the vocab as they go so it's not difficult to come up with this stuff per se.
Though people may at first disagree, the irish system of adding letters instead of replacing them offers a HUGE advantage to learners: If you read a word, you immediately know where to look it up in the dictionary!
Hákon D yeah, some brazilian portugueae dialects have that phoneme, and this pronunciation is far from voiceless, is just a affricate, but it isnt easy also, so it's ok.
I really enjoyed this video. I was really excited to see you get to this language! I don't think I agree with you that vocabulary is the least interesting aspect of evaluating a conlang, though. I find it interesting to see if the creator exhibited awareness of how the semantic space of words and usage differ between languages. I can see how that could be dull for a lot of people, but for the kind of people who like reading etymologies of words in natural languages and enjoy seeing how languages differ in this regard, that's a fun aspect of conlanging, too.
Smerg the Dargon its interesting cause he usually pronounces english TH as T/D so i thought that was the case, but then he pronounces other instances of th right
17:17 i didn't even realize this part literally says "the thing 'here's tree' is from" i only realized that after watching the 2014 christmas specials last night
Interestingly, there is actually some debate as to whether or not Chinese functions as a language family or as a series of dialects. Many Chinese people see what linguists call the Sinitic Branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Gan, Hui, Jin, Hokkien, Min, and Wu) as dialects of Chinese, similar to the difference between Australian English, Cork English, and Bostonian English. However, the Sinitic languages tend to have little mutual intelligibility. While the aforementioned English speakers may have a hard time understanding each other, they could probably converse somewhat well: this is usually not true of someone from Shanghai who speaks Wu and someone from Jiangsu who speaks Mandarin. This is further complicated by the fact that all of these languages have their own dialects, reducing conversational ability even more. Additionally, Chinese language family speakers typically use a standardized form of written communication, called Standard Chinese, which is similar to how Standard Arabic functions in the Arabic-speaking world, where thousands of local dialects exist. Because of this, Chinese is sometimes referred to as a family of closely related spoken languages, but only a select few written languages (for written Cantonese, written Shanghainese Wu, and written Hokkien are also commonly used). To add in political conflict, several areas of the globe that speak Cantonese are Hong Kong and Macau, who both claim independence from mainland China and whom the Chinese government does not officially recognize as independent. A person from Hong Kong may justly feel sore about their language being referred to as "Chinese". The same is true of Hokkien, primarily spoken in Taiwan. All in all, it's a complicated issue, but one that interests me a lot :)
Can you please make an episode on Ämärangnä, also known as Adytite, from the SCP Foundation? It's a natlang that, in universe, broke off from Proto-Uralic as Old Adytite, which was the official language of the Kalmaktama Empire (Lit. "Deathless") and currently serves as a secret religious language for the Sarkic Cults. The SCP wiki has a full article on it so it should be pretty easy to make. Love your channel!
On April fool's day you should do an episode on German as if you don't know it's a real language and criticising it for copying English and Latin and having too complicated word order
Or on English... I mean, this whole language is basically a bunch of words stolen from other, *real* languages and just sort of mashed together haphazardly
I remember playing LOTRO back in the day and I noticed that the monsters had these cool plural names like "craban" became "crebain" in the plural and so on.
Tengwar are beautiful, but I also like what Mark Rosenfelder wrote in The Language Construction Kit: “[k]eep the letters looking distinct. The best alphabets spread out over the conceptual graphic space, so that letters can’t be confused for one another. Tolkien [Tengwar] is a bad example here: the elves must have been tormented by dyslexia.”
"My next video is the most effort I've ever put into anything in my entire RUclips career. I'd hate for you to miss it." Time to start making predictions and theories about what it could be!
When you talked about reading the sindarin dictionary and feeling like there are missing words remind me of the old nahuatl dictionary my great grandpa inherited to me, where many a words are spelled wrong and some words feel like they're missing. It's like a foreign person wrote a dictionary about it, and I feel like that makes sindarin at least a bit more interesting
This will likely be my favourite episode ute, Iabsolutely LOVE lord of the rings and I especially like how there is so much background that isn’t shown in the books!
>saw this premiere like 12 hours ago >was hyped >decided not to click bc it was too soon, thinking others would do the same >90 likes and 45 comments >O H
The Tengwar (elvish script) at 0:06 don't seem to spell but rather something like (?). Can somebody clarify what that means? Is it an alternative name for the language?
Switch your brackets around, though. The slashes are used for broad transcriptions into the IPA, and the angle brackets are used for orthographical representations. Thus, the sound /f/ is represented by the spelling ⟨ff⟩ in Welsh.
6:42 To me it sounds like a *slightly* more open and slightly further back ü, which represents that sound in my native german, so yeah, you're doing a good job with that.
@@AvalonisHere Yeah so am I. Artifexian is talking about how a word with the sound /v/ would be spelt if it were Welsh, in which case it would be spelt with an Edit: in fact the Welsh word for "woman" with the soft mutation is spelt "fenyw" and pronounced with a /v/
@@Sprecherfuchs You are not understanding the point of the comment. "Note the different orthographic strategies. Irish adds letters, Welsh replaces letters, so if Irish were written like Welsh-" Irish does actually have a v in loanwords, so this is exactly 100% how Irish would write it if it had the replacement method Welsh has. Hopefully you get it now. "Written like Welsh" doesn't mean "written with the exact same orthography," it very clearly on context means "written with the same lenition orthography".
you should definitely check out Hymmnos, from the Ar Tonelico series. It’s got a lot of flaws, but some REALLY unique concepts, especially in its grammar (it’s primarily meant as a “magic” language, or a purely ritualistic language used to cast magic by “interfacing” with a giant AI that controls the universe*, but it can also be used in speech, albeit probably not very easy to do so) *okay this is a hyper simplification of the lore, but honestly it would take hours to explain it all, thankfully not a lot of the content of the language itself hinges on knowing the lore beyond what’s available in the wiki.
I use a 13-based number system to my fictional elves. It fits nicely in the other aspects of the language like the number of tones, and an odd-based number system represents very well their chaotic nature. in an even-based number system, the final digit dictates the even-or-odd-ness of the number in a simple ordered way, numbers ending in 2 are always even and numbers ending in 3 are always odd, but in an odd-based number system, the even-or-odd-ness shifts from "trezen" to "trezen", so 2 is even, 12 is odd, 22 is even, 32 is odd, etc.
Artifexian saying he's a little jealous that Tolkein was more inspired by Welsh than Irish made my day 'cause it's almost always the other way around xD
There's one tiny piece of evidence for an elvish language inspired by Old Irish. There's a list of different tribes' words for ‘elves’, and given the cognate nature of things, it really looks (to my eyes) like one is supposed to look like the Gaelic-ish counterpart to Sindarin. Specifically Old Irish, which would make sense given that Tolkien was a philologist.
8:05 imo the difference between abugidas and abjads are the necessity of vowel marking, it's part of abugidas, while in abjads it's optional.. abugidas don't necessarily need to contain an inherent vowel..
In Welsh, the digraph "dd" (in "meddal") is the voiced dental non-sibilant fricative, ð, the same sound as the "th" in English words like thou, they and this (but not three, thorough and think). The voiced alveolar stop "d" which you used is represented by the letter "d". In the Welsh alphabet "dd" is a letter in its own right, as are ch, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh and th.
Your front rounded vowel is fine, it's just a little dark, like you're pushing your tongue against the roof of your mouth or straining the back of your throat :) Great vid! Always fun!
i love this series! was wondering if you'd ever take a look at the ancient language from eragon/the inheritance cycle? apparently it's also based on celtic languages and i thought it was really cool when i read the series 👀
Old Norse in part, plus whatever words Christopher Paolini thought sounded cool. It's not a great language, but it is important to me personally on account of being the language that made me decide to research and begin constructing my own languages.
Just a couple things I want to point out: First, a good descriptive approach to Sindarin and a decent compilation of words and roots can be found in David Salo's 'A Gateway to Sindarin' (books.google.com/books/about/A_Gateway_to_Sindarin.html?id=4dsSn0QAmi0C&source=kp_book_description). Second, most spoken Sindarin lines in the LotR movies were necessarily in a fan-made version of Sindarin, called Neo-Sindarin, that filled in many of the conversational gaps and missing words (more can be read about that here: tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Neo-Elvish and even published in a book here: books.google.com/books?id=FXInDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_similarbooks). Thanks for the great video, looking forward to future conlang reviews!
The distinguishing factor of an abjad isn't that they don't have an inherent vowel but that marking the vowels is entirely optional, if a way to mark them exists at all. Tengwar isn't an abjad but an alphasyllabary, which under some definitions is just a type of abugida.
In terms of the languages that most often get given these labels, the difference between abjads and abugidas is that abugidas like Devanagari, Ge'ez, and Cree (if you count that) are always specific about the vowel (barring historical spelling issues), whereas abjads frequently just don't bother to mark vowels at all. (Althogh Arabic and Hebrew do write long vowels with full letters, unlike early phoenician, the diacritics for writing all vowels are generally only used learners materials and religeous texts.)
As for the semi-duodecimal system, the way I see it is that it's very (VERY) much like Germanic languages… and like… English has kinda lost its word for a "gross" (even though "gross" still exists, it's not really used anymore) but older Germanic tongues did have it. I personally mostly know it from deriving a conlang of mine off Proto-Germanic but I wouldn't be surprised if Tolkien took from Old English's "hundred" versus "hund" and "ān" to "twelf" (knowing that eleven and twelve are actually *ainaz+*lif and *twa+*lif aka one+left and two+left (note that lif and left don't actually share the same root, funnily enough), so… they're not full on new numbers proper, but it's the same in a bunch of other languages; see: all derivations of latin ūndecim and duodecim that most often don't show their roots anymore (onze/once/jonco/indesch - doce/dotze/douze/dudesch/dóghi and of course English "dozen"). But yeah, imo this whole thing was just Tolkien fanboying a bit more about Old English. idk
The interesting bit is that, while perhaps it is somewhat coincidence, English may come close to a true "dual-base" language with no new coinages: if you use "dozen", "gross", and "great gross" (1728 or 1000[12]) you can name, in English, numbers in base-12 about as naturally as in base-10, at least up to BBBB[12] or 20,735: "eleven great gross, eleven gross, eleven dozen and eleven".
yes, but in an abugida a specific vowel is indicated by not writing a diacritic, and in an abjad not writing a vowel diacritic means that there isn't a vowel (or it's just ambiguous what the vowel is)
Furthermore, the vowel tehtar were not always written. A word like "calma" was routinely written with just in the tengwar, as there were no other words which could cause confusion with that word. And my understanding is that other words also got that treatment. As such, I think that describing it as a mostly-but-not-entirely-vocalized abjad is fine.
@@Sovairu only the a-tehta was sometimes not written. As "a" is by far the most common vowel, it's absence is more noteworthy than it's presence. Quenya with no vowels at all would however be unreadable. Also, leaving out vowels only works because you're still indicating the presence of a final vowel by writing the carrier. Quenya quite frequently uses vowel alone to distinguish words. For example: ringa (damp, chilly) and ranga (pace). It isn't actually that no word could be confused for calma, there is also a word "celma" meaning "channel". Tengwar though, can be used for multiple languages. If you had a language that didn't use vowels alone to distinguish words as frequently as Quenya does: then it could certainly function as a true abjad, or as a true abugida.
@@sophiejones7727 I never once said that it was a never-vocalized abjad, did I? However, Arabic uses only vowels to distinguish large sets of words, and yet, its vowel diacritics are almost never used, except for foreign words and names, and for learning material. I am confident that knowledge of Quenya and context within a sentence would usually be enough to figure out what word is written, even with few tehtar being represented. Are you using adjectivally? Then it must be "ringa." Are you using nominally? Then it must be "ranga." So, no, it would not make Quenya "unreadable." Also, there is no real reason to use a vowel carrier in Quenya unless the word starts with a vowel, or there are multiple vowels next to each other, so vowel carriers really shouldn't be coming at the end of a Quenya word. And as for being used for "calma," Tolkien himself said that that was the natural reading for such a rendering: "In Quenya in which a was very frequent, its vowel sign was often omitted altogether. Thus for calma ‘lamp’ clm could be written. This would naturally be read as calma, since cl was not in Quenya a possible initial combination, and m never occurred finally. A possible reading was calama, but no such word existed." This quotation is from his Appendix E in the Lord of the Rings. The main point, though, is that the tengwar, even in universe, are not so vocalized as they might seem.
Here to discuss is Josh from Native lang. Hello! Thanks for being on the show!... He's not actually here. I mean, could you imagine? Not sure if I'm more sad that Josh wasn't here or proud that Jan low-key implied that Josh is a legend by joking about him coming to his show. 'Cause Josh is a legend. "Could you imagine?"
Question for jan: what's the smallest number of phonemes you've ever seen in a conlang? (Or natural language but im guessing they don't tend to be phonologically small)
It’s hard to say that the celtic inspiration is bad, since canonically it is supposed to be an ancient ancestor of modern, real-world languages like welsh.
echant, eregion, teithant, and thiw all look and sound like Welsh! Celebrimbor looks like Middle Welsh. The -ant is a 3rd person plural past ending in literary Welsh* and it appears to be the same in the example! (* dros ryddid collasaaaaaaant eu gwaaaaaaaaed)
Now we just need Quenya. Also been falling in love with Mando'a lately, so what if you reviewed that? If you do, Wookieepedia and Mandoa.org are invaluable resources.
thanks, Edgar!
ok
Lenition occurs in Scottish gealic
Conlang Critic, do you use PowerPoint to make your videos?
google slides
How do you handle COPPA? You might be demonetized or fined if you don't mark your content correctly.
I'd love to see an April fool's video reviewing English as if it were a con lang.
@@kaziro But how about for real though?
@@pentelegomenon1175 ruclips.net/video/dQw4w9WgXcQ/видео.html
And the script is written in Esperanto
@@ingwerschorle_ I really hope thats what the video will sound like
Yes
As a Welshie, hearing Artifexian speak Welsh in an Irish accent was interesting.
Ngl I laughed a tad at "treiglad medal" 😂
I didn't know Welsh had a uvular R
@@archeofutura_4606 It doesn't. Edgar can't pronounce a rolled r, unfortunately.
XMV Ziron i thought that was strange when I heard it.... lol imagine not being able to roll one’s Rs 😆
@@archeofutura_4606 ruclips.net/video/3378FlHK4v0/видео.html
It's hilarious how literally the entire conlang sphere of youtube knows eachother. Also I kind of hate you for briefly making me think you got Nativlang in on this.
I mean, there's like 30k people throughout the whole world who are _really_ interested in conlanging, so.... yeah 😂
It seems to be that way with the "chronic illness vlog" section as well. A vlogger in Minnesota with X illness knows one on the East Coast with Y illness and vice versa. I think it even crosses international borders.
Have we had David Peterson on yet?
@@couchbug same for all cellular automata studiers. Im able to get in touch with just about anyone simply because we’re all friends of friends
Surely that's true for all spheres of youtube
I just love the "the book" is written as "i barf" when romanized.
CastMeAway I barf
books🤮
It's amazing how Tolkien was, and continues to be, way ahead of the game as far as conlanging and worldbuilding goes. He was doing everything worldbuilders today try to do. The Hobbits even had a lunisolar calendar based off of the Germanic calendar, long before Xidnaf or anyone else had some rant on calendar systems in worldbuilding. Tolkien also remains ahead of the game in his naming, and how his aesthetics play on English sound-associations, and linguistic history (as opposed to the more utilitarian romanisations many conlanger use). Take this excerpt about the river Baranduin:
The name Baranduin was Sindarin for "golden-brown river", from baran and duin.[3]
The Hobbits of the Shire originally gave it the punning name Branda-nîn, meaning "border water" in original Hobbitish Westron. This was later punned again as Bralda-hîm meaning "heady ale" (referring to the colour of its water), which Tolkien renders into English as Brandywine.[4]
The word Brandywine both resembles the original Elvish name Baranduin, and provides the Hobbitish meaning adequately.
The word brandywine was actually the archaic English word for brandy as imported from the Dutch brandewijn. David Salo noted that it represents a possible Old English *baernedwin, meaning "burned wine", which would resemble quite closely the original Elvish Baranduin,[5] making Hobbitish Brandywine a legitimate corruption of S. Baranduin.
He truly was a gifted person!
I'm yet to read a world that convinces me of it's reality as much as Eä does!
I think it's a combination of his academic background, fantastical imagination, and a great deal of work (dedicating a large portion of his life) that goes in to making it all so special!
Hobbit calendar please tell my re
I've not heard xidnaf in 2 and a half years yikes
The actual order of his creative process:
1. I'm gonna call this river Brandywine because hobbits are all british-y and cute.
2. Oh but now I'm writing a serious epic with elvish names for everything. What if the aforementioned Brandywine was the 'Baranduin' all along!
3. Uhh but the hobbits don't have the english words brandy and wine because english is from our world. Shit, better invent a chain of Hobbitish Westron puns to get us to something that roughly translates to the english.
It's clever, but clongers are literally inventing the vocab as they go so it's not difficult to come up with this stuff per se.
"Every fantasy nerds desire to catalogue things"
Very true. Very, very true.
shoutout to josh nativlang referencing xidnaf in one of his videos all the linguistics channels are interconnected
Zeri G. It was roasting him tho lol
fair
when did this happennnn
@@hhht7672 I would guess it is about his video titled "The Hardest Language to Spell"
/mi/ oooo
10:55 I like how the Welsh word for "cats" is "cathod".
cat ray tube display
@@melol69 crt (cat ray tube)
Though people may at first disagree, the irish system of adding letters instead of replacing them offers a HUGE advantage to learners: If you read a word, you immediately know where to look it up in the dictionary!
"Infinity War is the most ambitious crossover event in history."
jan Misali: hold my beer
hold my vötgil
jo e mi telo nasa
(my toki pona isn't that good, sorry)
Isaac Bates 'o jo e telo nasa mi' i think
hold my rjienrlwey
@@abyssalboy8811 imagine losing youre 人類 to milk puddign
What😳if😳we😳cellar😳door😳in😳2019?😳
yeremia frans [ˈsɐlˤ.ɻ̩ʷˈɖoːɻʷ]
Hot😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳
2020?
Damn
😳
Two vastly different graphics styles from the two makers, both are effective in conveying meaning and looking nice
imitating edgar's style was really fun
as a tolkien nerd im like bursting with pride even though i havent done anything apart from just rereading all of jirts work as much as i possibly can
I did not know that Fëanor made the writing system, when you said he’s name I almost spat out my drink like ‘*who now?*’
*Premiere in 15 hours*
I will wait every minute.
Facts
It says 15 hours ago lol
11:23
Book, books
I barf
The books
How’s my poem?
Francois Roewer-Despres I barf
Nice haiku.
Mm nice
What is so funny about barf?
As an Icelander, your pronunciation of r̥ really hurt my small linguistic heart :( 1:38
Yeah that killed me 😁
Hákon D yeah, some brazilian portugueae dialects have that phoneme, and this pronunciation is far from voiceless, is just a affricate, but it isnt easy also, so it's ok.
It had to be hr right? or no?
@@PX2000games como assim?
You think that's bad? As a Welshman, his pronunciation of "Meddal" completely killed me!
I really enjoyed this video. I was really excited to see you get to this language! I don't think I agree with you that vocabulary is the least interesting aspect of evaluating a conlang, though. I find it interesting to see if the creator exhibited awareness of how the semantic space of words and usage differ between languages. I can see how that could be dull for a lot of people, but for the kind of people who like reading etymologies of words in natural languages and enjoy seeing how languages differ in this regard, that's a fun aspect of conlanging, too.
4:53
My boi Arftifexian really pronouncin' that Welsh "dd" wrong.
*_smh my head_*
Smerg the Dargon its interesting cause he usually pronounces english TH as T/D so i thought that was the case, but then he pronounces other instances of th right
Shaking my head my head too.
I'm shaking my head my head as well. He really should've known.
@@Ashley24306 Well, at least it's not pronouncing them as f.
He is Irish. The Irish cannot say th.
17:17 i didn't even realize this part literally says "the thing 'here's tree' is from" i only realized that after watching the 2014 christmas specials last night
I really would've paid to see a collab between Artifexian, NativLang and Conlang Critic.
I mean come on it's the three language sages.
Langfocus and Biblaridion: am I a joke to you?
xidnaf:
Slam Wall I’d FLIP if langfocus got included
@@jslice6137 not really a language channel anymore :/
@@jaygryska317 Easily one of my favorite language youtubers! Whenever one of them posts a new video, it makes my day.
"Sindarin is one of the two languages people mean when they say 'Elvish.'"
Like when people say "Chinese."
Interestingly, there is actually some debate as to whether or not Chinese functions as a language family or as a series of dialects. Many Chinese people see what linguists call the Sinitic Branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Gan, Hui, Jin, Hokkien, Min, and Wu) as dialects of Chinese, similar to the difference between Australian English, Cork English, and Bostonian English. However, the Sinitic languages tend to have little mutual intelligibility. While the aforementioned English speakers may have a hard time understanding each other, they could probably converse somewhat well: this is usually not true of someone from Shanghai who speaks Wu and someone from Jiangsu who speaks Mandarin. This is further complicated by the fact that all of these languages have their own dialects, reducing conversational ability even more. Additionally, Chinese language family speakers typically use a standardized form of written communication, called Standard Chinese, which is similar to how Standard Arabic functions in the Arabic-speaking world, where thousands of local dialects exist. Because of this, Chinese is sometimes referred to as a family of closely related spoken languages, but only a select few written languages (for written Cantonese, written Shanghainese Wu, and written Hokkien are also commonly used). To add in political conflict, several areas of the globe that speak Cantonese are Hong Kong and Macau, who both claim independence from mainland China and whom the Chinese government does not officially recognize as independent. A person from Hong Kong may justly feel sore about their language being referred to as "Chinese". The same is true of Hokkien, primarily spoken in Taiwan. All in all, it's a complicated issue, but one that interests me a lot :)
@@violetinreal8188 Cool, I didn't know that :O
translating the grain as a unit into mg made my day. Thanks Misali.
Why would you tease us like this?
Can you please make an episode on Ämärangnä, also known as Adytite, from the SCP Foundation? It's a natlang that, in universe, broke off from Proto-Uralic as Old Adytite, which was the official language of the Kalmaktama Empire (Lit. "Deathless") and currently serves as a secret religious language for the Sarkic Cults. The SCP wiki has a full article on it so it should be pretty easy to make. Love your channel!
On April fool's day you should do an episode on German as if you don't know it's a real language and criticising it for copying English and Latin and having too complicated word order
Or on English... I mean, this whole language is basically a bunch of words stolen from other, *real* languages and just sort of mashed together haphazardly
I mean - English hailed from a more archaic form of German, so technically English is the one copying German, not the other way around
@@ODKBE Technically German and English descended from a common ancestor so no one copied anyone
I remember playing LOTRO back in the day and I noticed that the monsters had these cool plural names like "craban" became "crebain" in the plural and so on.
So this video is canonical proof that Conlang Critic, NativLang, and Artifexian all exist in the same constructed universe?!?!
If you watch Artifexian, you can add Xidnaf and Biblaridion
@@killianobrien2007 ðe conglang cinematic universe
@@jan_Eten I wonder if ŋə has ever crossed over
@@killianobrien2007Yes, Biblaridion appeared in one of the conlanging iceberg videos
Love the collaboration, but let's not forget our fallen linguistic hero that, in a perfect world, would be Jan Misali's best friend: Xidnaf.
Does jan misali even have friends? I think he is a robot
Thanks Edgar! Delightful episode and I can't wait to see your Quenya breakdown.
Tengwar are beautiful, but I also like what Mark Rosenfelder wrote in The Language Construction Kit:
“[k]eep the letters looking distinct. The best alphabets spread out over the conceptual graphic space, so that letters can’t be confused for one another. Tolkien [Tengwar] is a bad example here: the elves must have been tormented by dyslexia.”
"My next video is the most effort I've ever put into anything in my entire RUclips career. I'd hate for you to miss it."
Time to start making predictions and theories about what it could be!
It was Poliespo wasn't it 😭
It was "😳what if we kissed😳in 2019😳"
It is the 2019 end of year meme video
When you talked about reading the sindarin dictionary and feeling like there are missing words remind me of the old nahuatl dictionary my great grandpa inherited to me, where many a words are spelled wrong and some words feel like they're missing. It's like a foreign person wrote a dictionary about it, and I feel like that makes sindarin at least a bit more interesting
"f"s are pronounced as "v" in welsh 9:40
mhm
12:12 did you just convert an idiom into metric?
Easily one of your best episodes. I still love how you blend your and Edgar's visual styles together like on the number collab video(s)
Episode 30!!! It'll be 6PM in my country, when it airs. Finally! It says "the last episode in 2019''. So no Conlang Critic in December!
This will likely be my favourite episode ute, Iabsolutely LOVE lord of the rings and I especially like how there is so much background that isn’t shown in the books!
>saw this premiere like 12 hours ago
>was hyped
>decided not to click bc it was too soon, thinking others would do the same
>90 likes and 45 comments
>O H
oh my god so many amazing cameos i'm tearing up a little from excitement
he isn't here? you have betrayed me.
/v/ is written F in Welsh, and /f/ is written FF, unless the /f/ is a result of aspirate mutation of P which is then written PH!
I need to study for my exams :( please stop tempting me with these delicious videos (DON'T STOP)
"abjads and abugidas"
me: has vietnam war flashbacks to my first attempt at making a conlang when I was 12....
that was awesome! thank you sm for the premier 🧡
4:47 ...is that Edgar doing a trill? Impossible.
The Tengwar (elvish script) at 0:06 don't seem to spell but rather something like (?). Can somebody clarify what that means? Is it an alternative name for the language?
@9:40 The /v/ is latinized to /f/ because in Welsh /f/ makes a ⟨v⟩ sound. (And the ⟨f⟩ sound is represented with a double /ff/).
Switch your brackets around, though. The slashes are used for broad transcriptions into the IPA, and the angle brackets are used for orthographical representations. Thus, the sound /f/ is represented by the spelling ⟨ff⟩ in Welsh.
Did any other Welsh speakers die a little inside at 4:50 onwards?
Oh cmon, i wanna see some tengwar
How can you talk about the doors of Durin without mentioning the tengwar mode of Berliand?
6:42 To me it sounds like a *slightly* more open and slightly further back ü, which represents that sound in my native german, so yeah, you're doing a good job with that.
I looked in my RUclips feed to see “Uploaded 1 second ago”
This seriously looks like a real language. Props, Tolkien.
Great! Also using the 1st age name for Sindarin, Eglathrin, from the very beginning.
5:45 Welsh doesn't have the letter "v". It uses a single "f" for the /v/ sound and a double "f" for /f/
This is not actually contradicting the video. It's talking about orthographic strategy, not inventory.
@@AvalonisHere Yeah so am I. Artifexian is talking about how a word with the sound /v/ would be spelt if it were Welsh, in which case it would be spelt with an
Edit: in fact the Welsh word for "woman" with the soft mutation is spelt "fenyw" and pronounced with a /v/
@@Sprecherfuchs You are not understanding the point of the comment. "Note the different orthographic strategies. Irish adds letters, Welsh replaces letters, so if Irish were written like Welsh-"
Irish does actually have a v in loanwords, so this is exactly 100% how Irish would write it if it had the replacement method Welsh has.
Hopefully you get it now. "Written like Welsh" doesn't mean "written with the exact same orthography," it very clearly on context means "written with the same lenition orthography".
8:12 In devnagari the second line is read as 'muh' like in 'murder' not 'ma' as in 'mars'
Maenas Herdir! Masterpiece! Looking forward to your next video, jan Misali!
you should definitely check out Hymmnos, from the Ar Tonelico series. It’s got a lot of flaws, but some REALLY unique concepts, especially in its grammar (it’s primarily meant as a “magic” language, or a purely ritualistic language used to cast magic by “interfacing” with a giant AI that controls the universe*, but it can also be used in speech, albeit probably not very easy to do so)
*okay this is a hyper simplification of the lore, but honestly it would take hours to explain it all, thankfully not a lot of the content of the language itself hinges on knowing the lore beyond what’s available in the wiki.
I use a 13-based number system to my fictional elves. It fits nicely in the other aspects of the language like the number of tones, and an odd-based number system represents very well their chaotic nature. in an even-based number system, the final digit dictates the even-or-odd-ness of the number in a simple ordered way, numbers ending in 2 are always even and numbers ending in 3 are always odd, but in an odd-based number system, the even-or-odd-ness shifts from "trezen" to "trezen", so 2 is even, 12 is odd, 22 is even, 32 is odd, etc.
The romanisation of /f/ as when mutated from /p/ is from welsh. Take yr pysgod ‘the fish’ vs sglodion a physgod ‘fish and chips’
But ffrainc ‘France’
Artifexian saying he's a little jealous that Tolkein was more inspired by Welsh than Irish made my day 'cause it's almost always the other way around xD
Based on ignorance, anyone than knows anything about Welsh. Its a lovely language and culture.
There's one tiny piece of evidence for an elvish language inspired by Old Irish. There's a list of different tribes' words for ‘elves’, and given the cognate nature of things, it really looks (to my eyes) like one is supposed to look like the Gaelic-ish counterpart to Sindarin. Specifically Old Irish, which would make sense given that Tolkien was a philologist.
8:05 imo the difference between abugidas and abjads are the necessity of vowel marking, it's part of abugidas, while in abjads it's optional.. abugidas don't necessarily need to contain an inherent vowel..
Fun fact, Middle Earth does have a conlanger in it. It's none other than Sauron himself, creator of the Black Speech.
Already excited for the video on Quenya
In Welsh, the digraph "dd" (in "meddal") is the voiced dental non-sibilant fricative, ð, the same sound as the "th" in English words like thou, they and this (but not three, thorough and think). The voiced alveolar stop "d" which you used is represented by the letter "d". In the Welsh alphabet "dd" is a letter in its own right, as are ch, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh and th.
I love how the Tolkien community had to basically reconstruct this language from Tolkien's notes and his other languages.
Woah conlang critic releases an actual episode of conlang critic
Your front rounded vowel is fine, it's just a little dark, like you're pushing your tongue against the roof of your mouth or straining the back of your throat :)
Great vid! Always fun!
6:50 The witch's curse seems to have worn off.
Your [y:] is a bit too tense, but definitely right place in the mouth and right lip rounding.
I can pronounce every IPA sound except the labiodental nasal, ejective fricatives and implosives
Mandarin is one of my two native languages and I think your [y] is pretty good
He’s definitely improved his [y] since Folkspraak. Still kind of sounds...Swedish?
You mean since aui. Aui was the first language with /y/
i love this series! was wondering if you'd ever take a look at the ancient language from eragon/the inheritance cycle? apparently it's also based on celtic languages and i thought it was really cool when i read the series 👀
Old Norse in part, plus whatever words Christopher Paolini thought sounded cool. It's not a great language, but it is important to me personally on account of being the language that made me decide to research and begin constructing my own languages.
Not much in the way of Celtic influence actually. The chief influence is Germanic, probably from Old English.
i've heard from one of my friends that the ancient language is just a relex (new words on english grammar) but that could be wrong
@@that_orange_hat Yeah, it mostly is from what I remember. I think the Dwarvish was more original. At the very least, it sounded less English-y to me.
Holding down on this video's thumbnail to see the preview o'r Ddraig Goch was a pleasant surprise.
9:39, f represents a v sound in welsh
14:30 Dude, arrow in Sindarin is "pilinn", like in the LotR opening scene, Elrond says "Leithio i philinn". Novaer!
word final spelling variation i assume is because tolken decided to remove word final vowels and kept the spelling minus the vowel.
despite u guys having such different styles, i'd say u merged them very pleasantly
Congrats to Edgar on pronouncing the voiceless dental fricative so well when demonstrating Welsh
Just a couple things I want to point out:
First, a good descriptive approach to Sindarin and a decent compilation of words and roots can be found in David Salo's 'A Gateway to Sindarin' (books.google.com/books/about/A_Gateway_to_Sindarin.html?id=4dsSn0QAmi0C&source=kp_book_description).
Second, most spoken Sindarin lines in the LotR movies were necessarily in a fan-made version of Sindarin, called Neo-Sindarin, that filled in many of the conversational gaps and missing words (more can be read about that here: tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Neo-Elvish and even published in a book here: books.google.com/books?id=FXInDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_similarbooks).
Thanks for the great video, looking forward to future conlang reviews!
The distinguishing factor of an abjad isn't that they don't have an inherent vowel but that marking the vowels is entirely optional, if a way to mark them exists at all. Tengwar isn't an abjad but an alphasyllabary, which under some definitions is just a type of abugida.
Have you ever reviewed a logography/pictographic languages? Would really be interested in a logographic language review.
FUCKING HELL I FELL FOR THAT NATIVLANG COLLAB YOU DANG TRICKSTER
In terms of the languages that most often get given these labels, the difference between abjads and abugidas is that abugidas like Devanagari, Ge'ez, and Cree (if you count that) are always specific about the vowel (barring historical spelling issues), whereas abjads frequently just don't bother to mark vowels at all. (Althogh Arabic and Hebrew do write long vowels with full letters, unlike early phoenician, the diacritics for writing all vowels are generally only used learners materials and religeous texts.)
As for the semi-duodecimal system, the way I see it is that it's very (VERY) much like Germanic languages… and like… English has kinda lost its word for a "gross" (even though "gross" still exists, it's not really used anymore) but older Germanic tongues did have it. I personally mostly know it from deriving a conlang of mine off Proto-Germanic but I wouldn't be surprised if Tolkien took from Old English's "hundred" versus "hund" and "ān" to "twelf" (knowing that eleven and twelve are actually *ainaz+*lif and *twa+*lif aka one+left and two+left (note that lif and left don't actually share the same root, funnily enough), so… they're not full on new numbers proper, but it's the same in a bunch of other languages; see: all derivations of latin ūndecim and duodecim that most often don't show their roots anymore (onze/once/jonco/indesch - doce/dotze/douze/dudesch/dóghi and of course English "dozen").
But yeah, imo this whole thing was just Tolkien fanboying a bit more about Old English. idk
The interesting bit is that, while perhaps it is somewhat coincidence, English may come close to a true "dual-base" language with no new coinages: if you use "dozen", "gross", and "great gross" (1728 or 1000[12]) you can name, in English, numbers in base-12 about as naturally as in base-10, at least up to BBBB[12] or 20,735: "eleven great gross, eleven gross, eleven dozen and eleven".
Actually, once definitely shows its root as the -ce is in the other numbers as well: once, doce, trece, catorce, quince.
I speak Turkish, which has that rounded front high/close vowel and you're pronouncing it right.
Wait a second… I always considered tengwar and abugida… what makes you call it an abjad? It literally always features vowels, doesn't it?
yes, but in an abugida a specific vowel is indicated by not writing a diacritic, and in an abjad not writing a vowel diacritic means that there isn't a vowel (or it's just ambiguous what the vowel is)
Tengwar *can* function as an abugida, but it's more commonly used as an abjad. There is also a fully alphabetic form, the Mode of Beleriand.
Furthermore, the vowel tehtar were not always written. A word like "calma" was routinely written with just in the tengwar, as there were no other words which could cause confusion with that word. And my understanding is that other words also got that treatment. As such, I think that describing it as a mostly-but-not-entirely-vocalized abjad is fine.
@@Sovairu only the a-tehta was sometimes not written. As "a" is by far the most common vowel, it's absence is more noteworthy than it's presence. Quenya with no vowels at all would however be unreadable. Also, leaving out vowels only works because you're still indicating the presence of a final vowel by writing the carrier. Quenya quite frequently uses vowel alone to distinguish words. For example: ringa (damp, chilly) and ranga (pace). It isn't actually that no word could be confused for calma, there is also a word "celma" meaning "channel".
Tengwar though, can be used for multiple languages. If you had a language that didn't use vowels alone to distinguish words as frequently as Quenya does: then it could certainly function as a true abjad, or as a true abugida.
@@sophiejones7727 I never once said that it was a never-vocalized abjad, did I? However, Arabic uses only vowels to distinguish large sets of words, and yet, its vowel diacritics are almost never used, except for foreign words and names, and for learning material. I am confident that knowledge of Quenya and context within a sentence would usually be enough to figure out what word is written, even with few tehtar being represented. Are you using adjectivally? Then it must be "ringa." Are you using nominally? Then it must be "ranga." So, no, it would not make Quenya "unreadable." Also, there is no real reason to use a vowel carrier in Quenya unless the word starts with a vowel, or there are multiple vowels next to each other, so vowel carriers really shouldn't be coming at the end of a Quenya word. And as for being used for "calma," Tolkien himself said that that was the natural reading for such a rendering: "In Quenya in which a was very frequent, its vowel sign was often omitted altogether. Thus for calma ‘lamp’ clm could be written. This would naturally be read as calma, since cl was not in Quenya a possible initial combination, and m never occurred finally. A possible reading was calama, but no such word existed." This quotation is from his Appendix E in the Lord of the Rings. The main point, though, is that the tengwar, even in universe, are not so vocalized as they might seem.
Here to discuss is Josh from Native lang. Hello! Thanks for being on the show!... He's not actually here. I mean, could you imagine?
Not sure if I'm more sad that Josh wasn't here or proud that Jan low-key implied that Josh is a legend by joking about him coming to his show. 'Cause Josh is a legend. "Could you imagine?"
Question for jan: what's the smallest number of phonemes you've ever seen in a conlang? (Or natural language but im guessing they don't tend to be phonologically small)
two
@@HBMmaster O.o how does that work then?
doesn't
Polynesian langauges tend to have a small amount of phonemes, I think Rotokas has the smallest number in the world- 11.
@@sparrowruth that would essentially just be spoken binary. 1 is a consonant and 0 is a vowel.
"treiglo" is the verb "to mutate". "Treigladau" is the word for "Mutations" 4:49
It’s hard to say that the celtic inspiration is bad, since canonically it is supposed to be an ancient ancestor of modern, real-world languages like welsh.
Ah Ardalambion, the website that got me interested in conlangs and languages in general.
How does adjectives work in sindarin because i cant find any information about adjectives
I think a more canonical form of the word "bow" is cu (or is it cû?)
Based off the Laer Cu Beleg (Song of the great bow)
I thought you would talk about the mandarin criole from Singapore, Sindarin
echant, eregion, teithant, and thiw all look and sound like Welsh! Celebrimbor looks like Middle Welsh. The -ant is a 3rd person plural past ending in literary Welsh* and it appears to be the same in the example! (* dros ryddid collasaaaaaaant eu gwaaaaaaaaed)
0:28 WTF do you even mean by “season”?
Now we just need Quenya.
Also been falling in love with Mando'a lately, so what if you reviewed that? If you do, Wookieepedia and Mandoa.org are invaluable resources.
Bro, I have some great news for you
i love it when he has so many good things to say about a conlang
0:20 Is there any app that i can Translate Sindarin to English?
What I was waiting for