A reflection on the first conlang I ever made, why it was so terrible, and how you can avoid the mistakes I made. I can't believe I actually went through with this...
Imagine speaking a language for which you need a special alphabet to describe the sounds phonetically, instead of denoting the sounds with simple and unambigous letters and letter combinations in the writing of the language itself. This post was made by the phonetic writing system languages gang It didn't even cross my mind I would make a non-phonetic writing system. Actually I learned IPA at elementary school just to learn to pronounce English, for fuck's sake. Yes, it was a compulsory part of education, every word had an IPA transcription next to it so we could pronounce it. In Swedish, German and French too. Though it wasn't referred to as IPA and I don't know why, probably because it wasn't scientifically exact. But when I later heard about IPA I went in my head "oh it is this school book pronounciation guide" So for me that is just ridiculous oversight.
“Design a language impossible to translate and use it to tell us where the things you stole are!” - an inaccurate quote from xkcd’s Good Cop, Dadaist Cop
“I’m gonna simplify Latin” *some time later* How ´bout I chuck in some TURKISH and FINNISH… Also COMANCHE and GEORGIAN would be nice… wait what was I doing again
*begins disentangling space and time, referencing all possessive things _at least_ twice, continues to write the theory of everything into every single word and so on
There is a parallel universe somewhere, where he does not delete the file, and Thandian becomes an international auxilliary language in about 500 years.
We once had to analyse a book in class, and this one girl counted every single noun, verb and adjective, because she thought that the amount of each type of word had a deeper meaning within the storyline. I feel a similar energy with this video.
But did she also count the other types of speech, like pronouns, numerals, conjunctions, adpositions, interjections, ...? Or did she just assume everything would fit into those three categories, like some people do? That would be kinda funny.
"Three different terms for good." The naturalistic language part of my brain is screaming whilst the part of my brain that wants to be able to describe specific concepts with scientific or philosophical accuracy is applauding.
@@PanthereaLeonis Ι think he means there cannot be many morphemes (ie standalone words that don't derive from anything) that mean good, which seems reasonable. Because exceptional, awesome and delightful are compound words that once broken down you can see they don't mean good literally, but they acquired that meaning through metaphor/association. Also note that they don't mean exactly the same. Each word has a different "punch"
Have you ever tried to make "old Thandian"? As in a fixed version removing all the stuff added by scholars centuries later who tried to re-create it. That could be a cool story for Franken-Thandian, its the extreme version of what they are doing with re-creating Mayan. Except in your case the scholars had no descendants of the native speakers to learn from
I'm sorry but is mayan dead? I know multiple friends who speak native languages and even one who's first language is quechua, is the language actually dead or just spoken in small communities? also what type of mayan are we referring to cause like 99% of the time there's regional (and status) variations of a language
@@rosefulmadness I was referring to the version of Mayan from inscriptions, there was a project a few years ago that used native tongues to provide a spoken element to the pictograms. At least according to the documentary [a Nova or NatGeo one], while the pictograms were deciphered a while ago, similar to Ancient Egyptian, there was no direct contemporary pronounciation, so they assigned the translations of the symbols to the closest native spoken words.
I actually created a language a while ago to be used in a fictional setting, as a sacred language for a group of people who valued simplicity. The language currently has about 150 words and is modeled after Swahili. I think what made that so successful for me was the fact that the grammar rules weren’t that rigid, and it ultimately didn’t matter if things weren’t exact, only that the meaning got across. I still have the rough draft, and it will probably become super cringey in a few teases, but I’m still prearranged darn proud of it.
Oh but I actually love the idea of natlang using different roots for time and space words. And then build their whole culture about their perception of these two kinds of dimension. Super fascinating! Also! Don't be so hard on yourself! I think you first language is actually cute. I mean.. It's not "good", but you can just feel the innocent enthusiasm of someone who is just learning about languages when looking at it. And I believe that's wonderful! One step closer to perfection
That first point is an issue I have with Biblaridion in general. Biblaridion often acts as if it a feature hasn't already occurred in a natlang, it can't occur in a natlang.
The one who invented Hangul wasn't an expert in phonology, as can be inferred from his calling some vowels yin and other Yang He just did it based on his rough analysis (and it isn't really that featural)
I was reading a story which had an artificial language which was created to be extremely difficult to translate to control information and allow secret communication between leaders by using redundant grammatical and structural features to act as a sort of checksum. Good job doing that without trying.
@@IrvingIV that's some super secret you need to hide there. Still tho - double, triple, whatever-le encryption exists which is significantly easier than learning an impossibly complex language.
English is actually a pretty simple language. Remembering things like "Bit" instead of "Bited" is annoying but it isn't the end of the world. The worst part is that our spelling system is inconsistent, but at least the text itself isn't difficult to understand or use. There are languages FAR worse off as far as spelling systems go.
My internal linguistics brain was like "ffs! use "dh" for [ð]!" and then I realized I said it aloud and no one knew what I was talking about and I looked like a crazy person.
Can't be pronounced as either /k/ or /θ/ (or /s/ in dialects with seseo) ? Still though, us Turkish speakers are laughing along, English orthography really is just ridiculous.
well, try Slovak, but de, te, ne, le, di, ti, ni, li, will be kinda confusing because its soft but not with y, and also maybe spodobovanie? for example sometimes t sounds like d (Who-> Kto? - > "Kdo?") for better pronounciation. Or b to p
tbh turkish isn't that complex. all the grammar makes more sense than english or german (these are the languages i learnt) and you don't need to understand whole grammar to be able to speak it decently
Karthin! (??) Might be cringey to look back on your own handiwork, but for me it was a fun showcase of exactly why some of us return to language building over the years - creatively exploring how linguistic features work together.
NitavLang himself! Yeah, as terrible as Thandian was, it was the initial satisfaction I got out of making it that got me into linguistics in the first place, so I guess that was a positive outcome.
Y'all the first language I ever had any success in learning was Japanese, which I'm working on to this day, but what that means in terms of conlangs is that I consistently forget that not every SOV language uses particles and that no, I don't have to have ridiculous amounts of variations and conjugations. Just because Japanese does it does NOT mean I should.
@@warau242 I can answer more in depth in English, but I have a hard time with details in Japanese. To be honest, what you're doing now, practicing with what you have when you get the chance to online and such is very useful. The more you use the language, the more familiar you get with it. To do lists, shopping lists, talking to yourself, ordering coffee from no one while you fold laundry, whatever gives you a chance to practice.
I think my favorite part is that every individual aspect of the language, or even any given group of aspects, could reasonably arise in some form in a naturalistic language. The issue when creating a naturalistic language is treating these concepts like lego bricks that you can stick together however you want
If you're making a language that's supposed to be naturalistic, the important thing to bear in mind is the culture and identity of the people you're creating it for. Always let that sense of culture dictate what features do and don't go into your language.
@@tasse0599 Probably the most common way in which culture influences language is in formal speech. There may or may not be formal pronouns, but beyond that, you want to take into account how the language can encompass a vocabulary that both matches the speech patterns of the educated and the speech patterns of the less educated. The culture within a language also influences how it appropriates other languages that it comes in contact with. Some loan words can be considered academic, but others vulgar; when words are loaned, what is the strategy for accommodating them to their own language? It spelling kept, but pronunciation nativized? Is pronunciation kept, but spelling nativized?
@@tasse0599 To use a specific example of one of my conlangs, though, there is one language in which there are several gods. Each noun is gendered after a patron God. Culture definitely plays a role in how gender categories are perceived. I'm also trying to develop a language and grammar around the idea that its speakers talk over each other instead of waiting turns. It's kind of hard to figure out, but I hope to find the math behind simultaneous two-way communication.
@@tasse0599 Other things that can affect a language: 1) Cultural fondness of poetry (can lead to vowel harmony) 2) Cultural prevalence of memorized oral tradition. 3) Cultural acceptance of non-verbal expressiveness (can lead to less grammar and more contextual communication) 4) Importance of animals (can lead to animate nouns being treated differently than inanimate nouns, such as in Dothraki). 5) Literacy rates 6) Outlook on time 7) Musical style and convention.
@@tasse0599 Another example of what I think he's getting at is to assign symbolic and cultural meanings to words, even if they don't inherently mean that. A famous IRL example is Aloha in Hawaiian means both "hello" and "goodbye", because of how hard it is to leave for good when you live on a small island.
"So it was one to one with Latin" "That's not so ba-" "Well I guess I'll throw that in, too" "I don't know about this..." "Phonology. It's English." "Now you're pushing it..." "U is oo, eI is ã" "Dear god." "No grammatical gender. But literally has everything else that most people never heard of" "You're killing me." "A ton of cases" "Stop my head hurts"
One thing to note is that even though the final result was not something that you're proud of, it served the purpose of learning. It made you excited to learn a lot about new things, apply them, and open the possibilities to make a mess and discover. If you want to learn something, I think this approach is the best one
I mostly just want to observe the train wreck. I'm fairly certain the video maker was completely over reacting. It could prolly be fixed by just adding a love triangle. I mean... it sounds like a completely natural language for time travellers to learn.
When I first decided I wanted to create a language, I literally didn't even know conlanging existed. I literally just took a list of all the words in english and assigned gibberish words to each of them. After, I wanted to make a bunch of symbols, so I tried to get all the phononems and dipthongs and sounds and make symbols for each of them. Then I made the word alpha have the symbol for alpha, and so on, and then on. I didn't know the IPA existed and just tried to figure out the different sounds in english. On the web it said there were 44 phononems and there were also mixtures of these so I tried to make symbols for each of these. I also made each astronomical thing have a symbol, like for example capricorn would have a capricorn symbol. I tried to split up c into two different sounds and change u and do a bunch of other weird things. It was really really dumb. I saw some simple things on the web about how to make a language. It was really basic and barely talked about all the complicated things that go into a language. And then I saw Artefexian's series and watched it, and I realized making a language was much more complicated than I thought. When this video first popped up, I said to myself that I liked Artefexian and shouldn't watch all these "weird" other people. And then Biblaridion popped up in one of Artefexian's videos so I decided to watch this video.
All in all, remember that language has two main goals: • _To make it easy to tell information_ (includes speaking and writing sentences) • _To make it easy to understand information_ (includes reading and hearing sentences, along with differentiating words/phrases from each other) If your language is hard on either end, then it needs revisions. A good language has at least some sort of a balance between the two.
Unless your point/goal is neither. You could, in theory, create a world where the military of a country decided to make a super complex language instead of a code/cipher just to avoid any enemy country from understanding messages should the enemy intercept said message or some other convoluted reason. But if you're going for a language that would be used in a world for everyday speech or was once used for such a purpose, yes, make it easy for someone to encode and decode information via that language.
I find it incredibly entertaining to hear you go on about adding about 6 features every time, me going 'that's not too terrible', and then you showing the 21 other features you added on top of those.
I wonder how Hungarian matches up to Polish. Tolkien (a seasoned linguist) reputedly said that he thought Polish was an extremely hard language to understand.
I feel like you were so caught up in making a cool and complex language you lost sight of the point of language, to easily transmit knowledge. Once you hit a certain point it just becomes confusing as hell
There’s also the point that the way a language is spoken and the way it is written can be extremely different, and sometimes be 2 completely different languages. I don’t know that many languages, but I know French is very different when spoken or when written.
@@unfetteredparacosmian That is not right, there are "Fus-ha" which is the official Arabic language, by which Quran is written, and the is "Aamia" or "Darija", which is the language spoken in different Arabian countries, (each country has its distinct Aamia). This difference between “Fu-sha” and “Aamia” is way larger than the difference between formal and informal English or different accents in English. Some of the versions of Aamia have an entirely different grammatical structure than “Fusha”, and some differences in pronunciation. Other than “Fus-ha” and “Aamia”, Arabic Language has a very consistent system pf pronunciation, in other words, Arabic is spoken almost exactly the way is written. In English for example, you cannot know for sure the actual pronunciation of a word unless you see how it's pronounced in a dictionary, (“have” should be pronounced similar to “save”).also since there are a lot of ways to pronounce the same thing like (write, right, rite) that make it harder to write the word you have heard (of course new words) because it can be written in many ways, nothing like that in Arabic. Also, there are many words in English that contain silent letters. There is a rule dictates when the “Lam” letter is silent and when not. I don’t want to dive into the details, but I want to say that Arabic is very straightforward in this aspect, what makes it hard is its grammar rules.
A good rule of thumb is that would you need to remember all the features you introduce to the language, and be able apply them to any word. If you can't remember it is not worth it. It also needs to sound beautiful at all times, or according to your criteria of sound you want to achieve. Though failing that isn't too bad, English is a very ugly language Don't go much more complicated than Finnish, Estonian or Latin. They are the most complicated real life languages I know. When introducing case system don't introduce classes or exceptions just for the sake of it, make them when the language demands it. But I wouldn't recreate Hungarian in conlang because that would be a huge mistake. Even if it is real. Too complicated.
@@omarradaro8379 Arabic doesn't write vowels and that's painful for learners. Why can't the diacritics be used everywhere? That would be so much convenient, only some ink will be wasted right? To read Arabic, you have to have a great knowledge in the language and a great guessing ability and to read English you need to know it's history.
I've been making conlangs for quite a while now, closing in on a decade, and I only have one that I'm really, really proud of. And just to prove that it can pass for a real language, I've actually been teaching myself to read and write it. All I have to do is look up roots I don't know and I can construct a solid simple or compound sentence. I'm still working on how to make complex statements, and temporal and spatial references are something I'm struggling to get hold of (as I haven't given them nearly enough thought), but all in all I think it's pretty decent so far.
12:24 Italian actually has this exact feature! we have "bravo" for expressing skill (Im good at this) "bene" for saying well (I'm doing good) or good as a noun (the good in the world), and "buono" meaning a morally good person or a good food
I don't understand anything that is being said in this video. This is the first time I've even heard the word "conlang". I'm not sure how this ended up in my recommended...
A Conlang is a CONstructed LANguage - a language invented by someone that could feasibly be spoken e.g. Klingon, Dothraki, Esperanto and anything from Lord of the Rings. There are communities online where people create these for aesthetics or just to experiment with linguistics. There's a common issue where beginners, ignorant of how languages work outside the ones they speak, create something inefficient, inconsistent or impossible to use as a language. This video is about the author's creation when he was that beginner, and how to avoid it.
@@LowestofheDead thank you. I hate it when jargon is used without any explanation, especially when it is the central topic of discussion and, as you have shown here, is not hard to explain.
@@edwardblair4096 if you didn't understand any of the jargon then congrats: you're not part of the intended audience, that's not to say your criticism isn't valuable though.
@Jone Tokaye That's almost exactly what I did with mine... The main difference is that I based it off of Portuguese, which is my main language, and simply removed those things I find annoying such as verb conjugations, genders, verbal concordance and grammatical cases whatsoever (even though Portuguese has none). Then I created new vocabulary and that was it hahaha.
That’s not what he said, no? He said he’d learnt Latin on a technical level. On my first day in Canada I was also surprised at the utter lack of awareness of their own language’s mechanics and grammar. Oh well.
> _"so you didn't do English in school?"_ It's true that most people tend to use English as their base if that's their native language. But if a conlanger does know a second languge well, like he knew Latin. Then using the second language as a base becomes more common ... in my experience.
@@rodriados Did it work? I am also creating a conlang based on the features I like in portuguese but now it does not resemble anything in portuguese grammar at all
I applaud your willingness to share your early attempts at conlanging despite your embarrassment. My earliest attempts at conlangs (many years ago) are much worse in my opinion than you judged your own. My only saving grace was that I was so disorganized that I never retained any of my notes.
Aw, don't delete it. I never look at Yeltax anymore, but it's still around if I want to check in on it. Anyway, I'm surprised you didn't learn Turkish and say "I must have vowel harmony", but it sounds like you're not nearly as phonology focused as I am.
Holy crap, it's George Corley! I certainly didn't care about phonology at the time, at least not beyond a couple of bare-bones phonoesthetic choices. When I first learned about vowel harmony, I just thought it was confusing and annoying, but now that I actually know stuff about phonology I think it's awesome. These days I put way more thought into phonology than I used to. By the way, Conlangery really helped me substantially improve the quality my conlangs, so thanks very much for that.
@@Biblaridion can u pls upload thandian? Some1 in the comments said u can recover it with some aoftware if it isnt overwritten. Pls upload it we want thandian NOW!!!! :((((((((((
I thought of some other features that'd make the languages more hellish: Nasal harmony (Guarani) and consonantal harmony (can be found in other languages).
see to me this would be a language for magic. something needlessly complex that requires years of study, nothing is natural and everything must be precise to work properly
@Andrew Gharibian fair enough but I meant it more seriously. Like why should one assume the words needed to control any one thing would be even remotely like anything else. It could be done comedic but does not have to be.
That's actually a cool idea! Done correctly, it could definitely be interesting. It could even include some grammatical features that'd make no sense outside of the context of magic, though I cant think of any examples right now.
Also extremely complex languages could be used by more intelligent beings. Think gods or possibly super AIs. You want to convey that they speak in a language far more complex and expressive than normal languages humans are capable of.
This isn't quite as bad as I expected. The part with conjunctive affixes, for example, doesn't seem completely impossible for a real language to evolve over time. A lot of people's first conlang is just "I went into an English dictionary, crossed out every word, and added my own"
I watched this video twice: one sound a year ago, and once today. The difference in how much I understood and was able to learn is absolutely staggering. I having even say down and actually tried to make my language, but after watching this again, I am pumped to try again. I was able to pick up on so much more this time round. I want to watch this video again a year from now, and see how much further I grow as a person and as a conlang creator.
As a Vietnamese language learner, this is all true. Fortunately the grammar is relatively simple: no verb conjugations; nouns, verbs and adjectives are relatively interchangeable.
@@TSDT Every word is monosyllabic, as well. Which could be both a good and a bad thing. Simple ideas are just single syllables. Mildy more complicated ideas put multiple words together. Fun fact, the word "cactus" translated literally is "the bone dragon plant" Source: I'm Vietnamese. :P
1) I hope you didn't really delete your Thandian file. It's important to see how far you've come & there was a lot of valuable education in it. 2) I am certainly convinced that you can't make ANY naturalistic anything without wider use. As more people use something, they will (naturally) streamline & clarify it. If u asked native Spanish speakers to translate Spanish into Thandian, they would need the gendered nouns but native English speakers wouldn't. Native Turkish would similarly seek a way to all of their native Turkish stuff in Thandian. In a sense, what you might have been inadvertently creating was a "universal print language" while everyone speaks their own core verbal language like Chinese is. 3) Action is always driven by belief. Thus the motivation for language evolution & result is caused by evolution in the people's core beliefs. If the people had no belief in the passage of time, only the universality of NOW, they may very well develop a language which lack future AND past tenses. Every statement is "I act". "I eat breakfast." would include all 3: "I ate breakfast this morning. I will eat breakfast tomorrow. I am eating breakfast now." Similarly, there may not be different words for different meals. Instead of saying breakfast, the sentence may simply be "I eat." 4) I am Groot. 5) On further consideration, Thandian sounds like the perfect written language for a bloated, corrupt empire who is trying to please everyone under them in the final years before they collapse. The penal code reaches to millions of pages. New laws are hundreds or even thousands. There is no way to not break the law, but there is noone who actually understands the law so no one knows if what you did was illegal or not. Similarly, everyone is adding & bloating the language so fast & fat that there are actually dozens of languages which all happen to use the same glyphs. It's NOT that Thandian was "bad", but it didn't suit your intended purpose. This idea gives it purpose, a new lease on life. 6) This is the core problem w hobby worldbuilding or worldbuilding without focus on the story. The people who speak & use the language shape the grammer & usage much more than the rules do. You Grok?
The idea with the bloated empire using a bloated language is really good! Especially when you are making a conlang for a larger worldbuilding project, the language should primarily serve the world as a whole.
Well here’s something that you did right in making your language: now I want to continue learning french and Ukrainian. Language is a fascinating thing but I’ve stopped being fascinated by it recently. I can see how passionate you are about linguistics through this project and it reminded me of why I wanted to learn grammar structures from different languages in the first place. 1. Because I want to be able to speak them eventually And 2. (Especially for uncommon languages like Ukrainian) just because I think the way different cultures communicate is really cool. So thanks for making Thandian even though it was such a dumpster fire
"I didn't even include rules for defining syllable shapes or phonotactics" Me who doesn't know what either of those are: Yeah, that's a crucial step right there
In my D&D game world I had made the bare essentials for a dozen or so conlangs and gave the ones known to my players, for example the Dwarf of the party got Dwarvish/Dweorgumal pages of a dictionary and some common sentences. If they wanted to say something in dwarvish to a stronger effect, for example to threaten another dwarf-speaker, they could actually try and wrangle the words into something and I'd usually give them advantage on the intimidation for the effort. The languages themselves would be developed on my own time though their psuedo-forms would be used by the players -- that way I could focus more on the other aspects of world-building while content with the languages I had.
That's a pretty damn good way of going about it. I think it's actually kind of difficult to incorporate a conlang into a game world beyond just names for places and people and maybe some magical incantations, but that's a very cool way to make a conlang more relevant to the game.
@@Biblaridion Thanks and I thought so too, by doing it this way player characters can also understand the names of in game elements without having to be told explicitly, allowing them to arrive on to deeper meanings organically.
Well Linguistics can be argued as nearly a part of Math, or at least connected to Mathematics, you are just doing logic. Also, I would say, high levels of Mathematics is pretty flipping hard, if you are talking about math up to the high school levels are fine and not hard at all... Well you are right! Normally when people that are into math starts to say it gets hard is when you get into Calculus(That isn't the beginner friendly version of very simple derivations and integrals.) and pretty much everything from there only gets harder. Though I don't even know how I got here, I have only touched Linguistics very lightly, but this doesn't look like the worst thing to take into...
To me, over-complicated or "wrong" conlangs just imply a very long, weird, intricate, complex history of the language's development. Like, why is English the way it is? Because it has roots in a bunch of languages. Why does Thandian have three different ways of meaning the same thing with no discernible correct term? Because it came from proto-Thandian mixed with Old Thandian and High Thandian and its modern speakers use different versions and dialects across the country. It can make things really interesting.
I made a weird "rune language" for my fantasy world... originally it only had runes for ideas and no grammar, because the race using it could read minds and they only used the language for spells and religious rituals... I added the most basic grammar possible into it, explaining that dwarves took on that language but they do not read minds or use magic, so they added simplistic symbols into it, which carried grammar into the language... in the end every sentence ended up as "I be light peace giant" and at that I ended with "giving up" and made a historical event when dwarves gave up on said language and instead started using human languages for diplomacy instead...
I am learning a fourth language right now (and subsequently forgetting my third one) and your video got suggested. I have never in my life thought about creating my own language and I don't know how the algorithm thought this could possibly interest me. Apart from your voice being annoying yet pleasant at the same time I actually learned a lot about languages in general. I didn't even notice that there were two "th" versions. This is a great video, you deserve more views and I hope this gets suggested to a lot more people because once the algorithm ball gets rolling it sure ain't stopping. I wish you the best of luck and a lot of inspiration for future videos. Thank you for taking your time to produce this piece!
@@yasminemixon5458 The "th" in "this", "that" or "the" is voiced, as opposed to the "th" in "with", "think" or "thumb", which is voiceless. The difference is like the difference between "s" and "z", or "t" and "d", or "k" and "g" ("g" as in "go" or "gas"). If you still don't see a difference, then... well... maybe you actually pronounce them the same... Check an IPA chart, it will be interesting either way.
Oh, it would most definitely be fascinating to see a language explore this whole concept further, no doubt. I expect if someone were to create a language with this division as the primary focus, it would have a few extremely interesting quirks as a side effect. And how it ties into everything else would be equally intriguing. The issue then becomes devising a feasible explanation of where the divide comes from, in the event that the language is presented as a naturalistic language. I also wouldn't be surprised to discover a natural language with the same divide, but worse, because of course natural languages do everything worse than anything a conlanger can do, sort of as a side effect of them not being burdened with the weight of having to justify their decisions.
I think *everyone* who dives into this hobby winds up with a 'kitchen sink conlang' aka Frankenlang early on, which we hide away in the closet once we recognize what a monster it is. I salute you for being brave enough to not only share this, but to dissect it in front of us!
My conlang sounds really ugly :( I did the EXACT same thing as you did (added too much stuff) And also, I have no idea why, but I was hellbent on using mostly monosyllabic words, and that's why it sounds like a person is having a seizure and is talking to the devil at the same time. But I'm happy with how my writing system looks tho. Thanks!
There's another habit of beginner conlangers that you also had, but I'm not sure you explicitly said in the video: assuming that grammar is only morphology. Syntax is often ignored, even by experienced conlangers. I'm looking at you, Dr. Zamenhof and your "rules for Esperanto".
Wow, I didn't know there was such a thing as "conlanging". What do conlangers do with their languages once they've invented them? Show them off to each other? I played around with inventing a language when I was a teenager, and because my obsessions were simplicity and minimalism I pretty much avoided the pitfalls you listed here. What I lacked was sticktoitiveness -- I got nowhere near as far on my language as you got on yours, so respect!
I've never made a language, but it does seem interesting (and like a lot of work) I'm a native speaker of Finnish, and having learned English, German, Swedish, Latin, ancient Greek, and Russian at some point in my life, plus taking courses on linguistics and phonology in university, you can just imagine my sheer horror when you started describing your first conlang This video definitely is a useful guide and a grim warning
I do not know how I came across this video since this is the first time I watch something about conlanging, but it was definitely interesting! Besides, I want to add that what you state at the end is true for any project: when you make mistakes and regret them - and that happens every time - do not feel discouraged; instead, learn from them to improve yourself. It's a very positive approach and I think it helps people quit their comfort zone. You've got a new sub :)
Programming languages and conversational languages share similarities in structure ans such though! I find my regular language skills do help me with programming languages. It's just a conversational language to talk to the computer.
@@PanthereaLeonis Yeah, that's pretty nice. Thinking about how people interpret natural languages has always helped me understand how a computer might proceed about a program.
So you had separate suffixes for -ity, -tude, and -ness, which turn adjectives into nouns. Ah! But what did you have for -ful (beautiful, wasteful, etc.), which turns nouns into adjectives?
I have NEVER thought about the space/times thing you mentioned, but it made me immediately think of Einstein. It almost feels like... we humans were actually subconsciously aware of spacetime as one thing and NOT two separate entities. Which seems weird because spacetime is not an easy concept to grasp, but apparently, in our language, we all already understand it...
Holy crap, i actually thought your video was removed, because i forgot the channel name. Thank you, i will never forget this video ever again. My nostalgia has finally been revisited.
"I didn't even know how the IPA worked at the time."
Me, who doesn't know how the IPA works: "Rookie mistake."
Me looking back at my first language ... only 3 letters are defined, the rest are "assumed". Thanks past me.
I'm still only just figuring that out
What is ipa? Idk. But that was a foreseeable mistake of you.
@@crow7137 International phonetic alphabet
Imagine speaking a language for which you need a special alphabet to describe the sounds phonetically, instead of denoting the sounds with simple and unambigous letters and letter combinations in the writing of the language itself.
This post was made by the phonetic writing system languages gang
It didn't even cross my mind I would make a non-phonetic writing system. Actually I learned IPA at elementary school just to learn to pronounce English, for fuck's sake. Yes, it was a compulsory part of education, every word had an IPA transcription next to it so we could pronounce it. In Swedish, German and French too. Though it wasn't referred to as IPA and I don't know why, probably because it wasn't scientifically exact. But when I later heard about IPA I went in my head "oh it is this school book pronounciation guide" So for me that is just ridiculous oversight.
"I needed AT LEAST as many cases as Finnish." - said no one else, ever. Not even Finns.
Except for Hungarians
Hungarian has a few more than Finnish, believe it or not
*I said, someone who's basing their main conlang's verb conjugation on Finnish's
@@thepsychocyborg9278 RIP you
@@guruchintanan5686 Finnish has 15 cases, while Estonian has 14.
Bibliaridion: Designs a language nobody can translate
*The US military would like to know your location*
Why can't I like twice?
Too bad they won't be able to speak it either
“Design a language impossible to translate and use it to tell us where the things you stole are!” - an inaccurate quote from xkcd’s Good Cop, Dadaist Cop
And the People's Liberation Army of China!
*Navajo intensifies*
Biblaridion: *Doesn't want his language to sound weird*
Biblaridion: Basically puts all other weird stuff he finds
adds /ɹ/ lmao
Oh same
@@dmc-12delorean28 /ɹ/ is great
Also putting two of the rarest sounds on earth
@@asloii_1749 It's a great sound, but a weird sound nevertheless.
Me, who knows nothing about conlangs or how language works:
"Ah yes, a foolish mistake indeed!"
I know nothing about the topic either and yes, even I could spot the bloatyness.
hahahaha, hope you're having fun visiting our little rabbithole
@@markmayonnaise1163 I am, at least.
I was just thinking it sounds like English
why is this so funny lmao
"I'm gonna simplify Latin"
*5 months later
"Alright, I'm gonna add unique features of Comanche in my language"
“I’m gonna simplify Latin”
*some time later*
How ´bout I chuck in some TURKISH and FINNISH… Also COMANCHE and GEORGIAN would be nice… wait what was I doing again
HOW THERES ONYL 1 REPLY AND 1.7K LIKESSS
literally me, three months ago my language was an alphabet and literally greek mixed with with latin.
and now i turned it into an abjad
@@Ballin4Vengeance people trying to make Urdu:
*begins disentangling space and time, referencing all possessive things _at least_ twice, continues to write the theory of everything into every single word and so on
I LOVE horrible conlangs. They're chaotic, unpredictable, unapologetically complex... love it
My brain begs me to try and reconstruct thandian from the examples in the video.
@@elaqgarahulelpon1479 it would be so cool!!
It gives me the same joy as looking at peoples' high school OCs. Pure joy
it’s funny to know people will look at it and get extremely confused
Ithkuil moment
*Me after binge-watching biblaridion, xidnaf and conlang critic*:
“You know, I’m something of linguist myself”
me
@@pollinationtechnician7553 as well
Same.
Me too
Yep
There is a parallel universe somewhere, where he does not delete the file, and Thandian becomes an international auxilliary language in about 500 years.
Oh god no.
oh god
It would drop 90% of its features
@@aramkaizer7903 Lmao
@@aramkaizer7903 I bet it would become like Esperanto with only 10 grammar rules or something
How not to make a conlang:
Dont take English and make the letters look different
Buhtt... waiy nahtt?
Eh, that works if it's just a written lang.
Уе хав сирилик фор твит
So.. basically a weird font?
Whathe dothi ith mather ifith Ee changeth thee spelli Fu mineth spreetch.
We once had to analyse a book in class, and this one girl counted every single noun, verb and adjective, because she thought that the amount of each type of word had a deeper meaning within the storyline.
I feel a similar energy with this video.
LOLL
this just scrambled the shit out of my brain
That poor girl.
sounds like me overthinking things
But did she also count the other types of speech, like pronouns, numerals, conjunctions, adpositions, interjections, ...? Or did she just assume everything would fit into those three categories, like some people do? That would be kinda funny.
What I expected: Some tips about common pitfalls that beginning conlangers fall into and how to avoid them.
What I got: *confused screaming*
Welcome to H E L L
Same
Pfft it really is what not to do
15 cases and 6 numbers?! So every single noun has 90 possible endings. I clap in linguistical pain to you sir.
@William Holloway yes, like linguistic, but ical. Think of the words fantastic and then fantastical.
I think in spanish we have 8? not entirely sure. thats a lot of posibilities
@@moris_tm6670 we don't have cases and only singular and plural for numbers. What we do have is 17 verb tenses: ibb.co/z5QBVM3
@@alfrredd you forget the progressive forms with "estar", like "estoy comiendo". Counting these I think there are around 30 hahahaha
@@iosusito5683 17 formas personales (que se conjugan) y dos : gerundio (comiendo) y participio (comido) que no son personales (no admiten conjugación)
"Three different terms for good."
The naturalistic language part of my brain is screaming whilst the part of my brain that wants to be able to describe specific concepts with scientific or philosophical accuracy is applauding.
That... that is a very small amount of "good" words. Apparently, things can't be exceptional, or awesome, or delightful.
@@PanthereaLeonis True. Even English has an abundance of words for "good", although a general word for "good" would be a good idea.
@Samurott Lol
@@PanthereaLeonis Ι think he means there cannot be many morphemes (ie standalone words that don't derive from anything) that mean good, which seems reasonable. Because exceptional, awesome and delightful are compound words that once broken down you can see they don't mean good literally, but they acquired that meaning through metaphor/association. Also note that they don't mean exactly the same. Each word has a different "punch"
Im *so* stealing that for an alien auxlang bc it makes a ton of sense for those folks
Instructions unclear, created a creepy version of Latin.
Please show me
Emas, siht sdnuos desruc.
@@AlexRobloxBB Hsilgne sdrawkcab tsuj staht "egaugnal" a htiw pu gnimoc rof suineg a ekil leef uoy nehw
English backwards just thats "language" a with up coming for genius a like feel you when
@@LPPB ok I just translated that and it makes no sense
Imagine an alternate universe where he discovered Tsez while making Thandian
OH GOD NO
Dear GOD that would be a nightmare
Or Ithquil
@@lowencraft1404 *Iţkuil
150 cases has to be a minimum.
Ooooohhhhh so that's how English was made.
Lucius Cabeza The bird This but the only consistent thing is the lack of consistency
novanoprod that’s because you already know it, pretty sure it’s hard for people who don’t speak english
Да сука
@@Capade u have an advantage. Ur west germanic like them. Im south slav and for the rest. Sure is hard asf. Not 4 me. Xd
@@Capade yeah it has eazy grammar i was talking about its spelling. Which i see y ppl fail it hard. Its inconsistent and makes no sense
Addict: "I need my fix!"
Bib: "I need my affixes!"
This is too good.
Tolkien didn't made a language for his novels, he made some novels to show his languages
Have you ever tried to make "old Thandian"? As in a fixed version removing all the stuff added by scholars centuries later who tried to re-create it. That could be a cool story for Franken-Thandian, its the extreme version of what they are doing with re-creating Mayan. Except in your case the scholars had no descendants of the native speakers to learn from
That sounds very cool, actually.
I'm sorry but is mayan dead? I know multiple friends who speak native languages and even one who's first language is quechua, is the language actually dead or just spoken in small communities? also what type of mayan are we referring to cause like 99% of the time there's regional (and status) variations of a language
@@rosefulmadness I was referring to the version of Mayan from inscriptions, there was a project a few years ago that used native tongues to provide a spoken element to the pictograms. At least according to the documentary [a Nova or NatGeo one], while the pictograms were deciphered a while ago, similar to Ancient Egyptian, there was no direct contemporary pronounciation, so they assigned the translations of the symbols to the closest native spoken words.
@@rosefulmadness Quechua is so far from Mayan you have no idea
At first, I was all like "why is the music so spooky?" then i realized it's because of the horror we were about to observe
LOL heh haHAHA!
Verbs agree with nouns? = Perectly rational
Adjectives agree with nouns? = Completely irrational!
The young Biblaridion was an interesting person.
Hello? I think I saw your username somewhere before. Didn't know you were into conlangs.
@@kadenvanciel9335 I see this person too, in redlettermedia videos
Damn, my mother language does both
@@Motofanable Deutsch?
I saw his username before too, he was on the other comment replying about how he wanted to turn prepositions into cases or smth
I actually created a language a while ago to be used in a fictional setting, as a sacred language for a group of people who valued simplicity. The language currently has about 150 words and is modeled after Swahili. I think what made that so successful for me was the fact that the grammar rules weren’t that rigid, and it ultimately didn’t matter if things weren’t exact, only that the meaning got across. I still have the rough draft, and it will probably become super cringey in a few teases, but I’m still prearranged darn proud of it.
I like the sound of that
Reminds me of Toki Pona
toki sina li pona!
"About 4 years ago"
*shows 2013*
It was then I realized... this isn't a recent video
Same
Lol
How *NOT* to make a language: Don't take Esperanto and rename it.
New language: Esperanti! O's are switched with I's and vice-verss
If Esperanto is so good then why isn’t there Esperanto 2?
Unpopular opinion: Esperanto sounds and looks really ugly.
Deez Noots there is. It’s called Ido
Deez Noots that does actually exist
*your language*
“hey can i copy your homework?”
*every other language*
“ok just dont make it o...”
*your language*
“OK THANKS!”
ok THanks
ok THānks
Oh but I actually love the idea of natlang using different roots for time and space words. And then build their whole culture about their perception of these two kinds of dimension. Super fascinating!
Also! Don't be so hard on yourself! I think you first language is actually cute. I mean..
It's not "good", but you can just feel the innocent enthusiasm of someone who is just learning about languages when looking at it. And I believe that's wonderful! One step closer to perfection
That first point is an issue I have with Biblaridion in general. Biblaridion often acts as if it a feature hasn't already occurred in a natlang, it can't occur in a natlang.
Honestly I could imagine a culture coming up with a writing system that works like that. Not everyone has a great understanding of phonology
The one who invented Hangul wasn't an expert in phonology, as can be inferred from his calling some vowels yin and other Yang
He just did it based on his rough analysis (and it isn't really that featural)
I was reading a story which had an artificial language which was created to be extremely difficult to translate to control information and allow secret communication between leaders by using redundant grammatical and structural features to act as a sort of checksum.
Good job doing that without trying.
Green Mario What’s the title of this story?
What’s it called
They couldn't have just encrypted it?
@@dandanthedandan7558
Maybe they wrote the messages in the language pre-encryption, as an extra layer of security?
@@IrvingIV that's some super secret you need to hide there. Still tho - double, triple, whatever-le encryption exists which is significantly easier than learning an impossibly complex language.
How NOT to Make a Language: Don't be English.
REEEEE DOUBLE NEGATIVES
Rasta Hat Attack I don’t got no English classes
@@hsuhorn you don't not know nothing about no English.
English is actually a pretty simple language. Remembering things like "Bit" instead of "Bited" is annoying but it isn't the end of the world. The worst part is that our spelling system is inconsistent, but at least the text itself isn't difficult to understand or use. There are languages FAR worse off as far as spelling systems go.
@@catpoke9557 English is so full of exceptions, that grammar rules basically become bad suggestions. Also it has too many sounds.
My internal linguistics brain was like "ffs! use "dh" for [ð]!" and then I realized I said it aloud and no one knew what I was talking about and I looked like a crazy person.
dh = [ð]? Perfectly normal
@@battotaiguy69 Works fine for Albanian.
English speakers: *Have troubles understanding phonetics*
Spanish speakers: *Laughs in always having the same sound for each letter*
Can't be pronounced as either /k/ or /θ/ (or /s/ in dialects with seseo) ?
Still though, us Turkish speakers are laughing along, English orthography really is just ridiculous.
@@pfysche2283 ghoti
well, try Slovak, but de, te, ne, le, di, ti, ni, li, will be kinda confusing because its soft but not with y, and also maybe spodobovanie? for example sometimes t sounds like d (Who-> Kto? - > "Kdo?") for better pronounciation. Or b to p
well not really. off the top of my head, c and g have two separate pronunciations each in spanish
Except for c being hard or soft; b, d and g sometimes being fricatives and sometimes being stops; ll and y both being /j/; and h being silent
The moral of the story is, don't go to turkey
@@parthenogenesis. I think it was a joke.
as a Turk I can say we have the word Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımzdan mısın? Hahahahhahahaha I'm very happy I was born here.
It is a fowl place :)
Im turkish myself. So:
Yes, just dont.
tbh turkish isn't that complex. all the grammar makes more sense than english or german (these are the languages i learnt) and you don't need to understand whole grammar to be able to speak it decently
Karthin! (??) Might be cringey to look back on your own handiwork, but for me it was a fun showcase of exactly why some of us return to language building over the years - creatively exploring how linguistic features work together.
NitavLang himself! Yeah, as terrible as Thandian was, it was the initial satisfaction I got out of making it that got me into linguistics in the first place, so I guess that was a positive outcome.
It's God himself.
Ozh icha gluth izh sol!
@@Biblaridion upload thandian pls. Theres other people who want it dude. Just scroll up/down to see
NativLang, could you do a language showcase on Thandian? Like for April Fools or something
Y'all the first language I ever had any success in learning was Japanese, which I'm working on to this day, but what that means in terms of conlangs is that I consistently forget that not every SOV language uses particles and that no, I don't have to have ridiculous amounts of variations and conjugations. Just because Japanese does it does NOT mean I should.
まだ勉強しているの？日本語の勉強はどうですか😮
@@warau242 はい、まだ勉強しています。このコメントについて忘れました。お久しぶりですね。半年前からクラスに通い始めたの前に、たいてい辞書のアップを使たりRUclipsの動画を見たりしていました。しかし、しばしば練習しなかったから、まだとても上手じゃないだ。
@@warau242 I can answer more in depth in English, but I have a hard time with details in Japanese. To be honest, what you're doing now, practicing with what you have when you get the chance to online and such is very useful. The more you use the language, the more familiar you get with it. To do lists, shopping lists, talking to yourself, ordering coffee from no one while you fold laundry, whatever gives you a chance to practice.
I think my favorite part is that every individual aspect of the language, or even any given group of aspects, could reasonably arise in some form in a naturalistic language. The issue when creating a naturalistic language is treating these concepts like lego bricks that you can stick together however you want
Each of these aspects arise by linguistic evolution out of necessity and convenience, and interact and shape each other during this process.
If you're making a language that's supposed to be naturalistic, the important thing to bear in mind is the culture and identity of the people you're creating it for. Always let that sense of culture dictate what features do and don't go into your language.
e. g. ...?
@@tasse0599 Probably the most common way in which culture influences language is in formal speech. There may or may not be formal pronouns, but beyond that, you want to take into account how the language can encompass a vocabulary that both matches the speech patterns of the educated and the speech patterns of the less educated. The culture within a language also influences how it appropriates other languages that it comes in contact with. Some loan words can be considered academic, but others vulgar; when words are loaned, what is the strategy for accommodating them to their own language? It spelling kept, but pronunciation nativized? Is pronunciation kept, but spelling nativized?
@@tasse0599 To use a specific example of one of my conlangs, though, there is one language in which there are several gods. Each noun is gendered after a patron God. Culture definitely plays a role in how gender categories are perceived. I'm also trying to develop a language and grammar around the idea that its speakers talk over each other instead of waiting turns. It's kind of hard to figure out, but I hope to find the math behind simultaneous two-way communication.
@@tasse0599 Other things that can affect a language:
1) Cultural fondness of poetry (can lead to vowel harmony)
2) Cultural prevalence of memorized oral tradition.
3) Cultural acceptance of non-verbal expressiveness (can lead to less grammar and more contextual communication)
4) Importance of animals (can lead to animate nouns being treated differently than inanimate nouns, such as in Dothraki).
5) Literacy rates
6) Outlook on time
7) Musical style and convention.
@@tasse0599 Another example of what I think he's getting at is to assign symbolic and cultural meanings to words, even if they don't inherently mean that. A famous IRL example is Aloha in Hawaiian means both "hello" and "goodbye", because of how hard it is to leave for good when you live on a small island.
"So it was one to one with Latin"
"That's not so ba-"
"Well I guess I'll throw that in, too"
"I don't know about this..."
"Phonology. It's English."
"Now you're pushing it..."
"U is oo, eI is ã"
"Dear god."
"No grammatical gender. But literally has everything else that most people never heard of"
"You're killing me."
"A ton of cases"
"Stop my head hurts"
My reaction exactly.
If it was less anglo-centric in the romanization, it would actually be better than my second conlang
Justin Y. 2.0
Sea Shell this, is a bucket.
Dear God...
"No grammatical gender. But literally has everything else that most people never heard of"
That's actually based
One thing to note is that even though the final result was not something that you're proud of, it served the purpose of learning. It made you excited to learn a lot about new things, apply them, and open the possibilities to make a mess and discover. If you want to learn something, I think this approach is the best one
6:39 is nobody gonna talk about how it says
*" cotact us "*
**ends up making a language**
Ya know, as you do
I have no idea how RUclips brought me here... at all...
but I was already interested in making a language, so I guess it works?
Yes...?
Me too (😂
Why did you delete that file? Now how will we ever learn to speak Thandian?
I mostly just want to observe the train wreck. I'm fairly certain the video maker was completely over reacting. It could prolly be fixed by just adding a love triangle.
I mean... it sounds like a completely natural language for time travellers to learn.
@@NimhLabs OH FFS LOL
we need Thandian to be the proto-lang for the next 8-episode long series of videos depicting in detail how to create the whole language tree
It could be in his recently deleted, ask him to restore it.
I wanna learn Thandian too
When I first decided I wanted to create a language, I literally didn't even know conlanging existed. I literally just took a list of all the words in english and assigned gibberish words to each of them. After, I wanted to make a bunch of symbols, so I tried to get all the phononems and dipthongs and sounds and make symbols for each of them. Then I made the word alpha have the symbol for alpha, and so on, and then on. I didn't know the IPA existed and just tried to figure out the different sounds in english. On the web it said there were 44 phononems and there were also mixtures of these so I tried to make symbols for each of these. I also made each astronomical thing have a symbol, like for example capricorn would have a capricorn symbol. I tried to split up c into two different sounds and change u and do a bunch of other weird things. It was really really dumb. I saw some simple things on the web about how to make a language. It was really basic and barely talked about all the complicated things that go into a language. And then I saw Artefexian's series and watched it, and I realized making a language was much more complicated than I thought. When this video first popped up, I said to myself that I liked Artefexian and shouldn't watch all these "weird" other people. And then Biblaridion popped up in one of Artefexian's videos so I decided to watch this video.
This is my first introduction to conlangs and I'm just sitting here like: Oh no! A rookie mistake! One of the classic blunders!
All in all, remember that language has two main goals:
• _To make it easy to tell information_ (includes speaking and writing sentences)
• _To make it easy to understand information_ (includes reading and hearing sentences, along with differentiating words/phrases from each other)
If your language is hard on either end, then it needs revisions. A good language has at least some sort of a balance between the two.
Unless your point/goal is neither. You could, in theory, create a world where the military of a country decided to make a super complex language instead of a code/cipher just to avoid any enemy country from understanding messages should the enemy intercept said message or some other convoluted reason. But if you're going for a language that would be used in a world for everyday speech or was once used for such a purpose, yes, make it easy for someone to encode and decode information via that language.
@@moondust2365 what if thandian was secretly made for the military?
@@zelda_smile Oooh! That'd be nice XD
@@zelda_smile THe Thandian Army
@@masicbemester good one :)
I have no idea what a Conlang is but I'm just over here like "hmm yes indeed that is correct."
Constructed language :)
its where you create a language with (hopefully) original grammar and sounds. its quite a niche subject what with how 'specialistic' it is
hey, that's how i learned about this linguistics stuff. . . literally just trial and error.
I find it incredibly entertaining to hear you go on about adding about 6 features every time, me going 'that's not too terrible', and then you showing the 21 other features you added on top of those.
Should have watched this when I tried to make up a language when I was 5
So, you basically invented Hungarian?
Hungarian has quite a different phonology.
John Smith
Hungarian is pretty hard
LMAO
I'm hungarian and I can't even speak it properly, yet I live in hungary.
I wonder how Hungarian matches up to Polish. Tolkien (a seasoned linguist) reputedly said that he thought Polish was an extremely hard language to understand.
I feel like you were so caught up in making a cool and complex language you lost sight of the point of language, to easily transmit knowledge. Once you hit a certain point it just becomes confusing as hell
There’s also the point that the way a language is spoken and the way it is written can be extremely different, and sometimes be 2 completely different languages.
I don’t know that many languages, but I know French is very different when spoken or when written.
@@matthewhemmings2464 I've heard that's nothing compared to Arabic
@@unfetteredparacosmian That is not right, there are "Fus-ha" which is the official Arabic language, by which Quran is written, and the is "Aamia" or "Darija", which is the language spoken in different Arabian countries, (each country has its distinct Aamia). This difference between “Fu-sha” and “Aamia” is way larger than the difference between formal and informal English or different accents in English. Some of the versions of Aamia have an entirely different grammatical structure than “Fusha”, and some differences in pronunciation. Other than “Fus-ha” and “Aamia”, Arabic Language has a very consistent system pf pronunciation, in other words, Arabic is spoken almost exactly the way is written. In English for example, you cannot know for sure the actual pronunciation of a word unless you see how it's pronounced in a dictionary, (“have” should be pronounced similar to “save”).also since there are a lot of ways to pronounce the same thing like (write, right, rite) that make it harder to write the word you have heard (of course new words) because it can be written in many ways, nothing like that in Arabic. Also, there are many words in English that contain silent letters. There is a rule dictates when the “Lam” letter is silent and when not. I don’t want to dive into the details, but I want to say that Arabic is very straightforward in this aspect, what makes it hard is its grammar rules.
A good rule of thumb is that would you need to remember all the features you introduce to the language, and be able apply them to any word. If you can't remember it is not worth it. It also needs to sound beautiful at all times, or according to your criteria of sound you want to achieve. Though failing that isn't too bad, English is a very ugly language
Don't go much more complicated than Finnish, Estonian or Latin. They are the most complicated real life languages I know. When introducing case system don't introduce classes or exceptions just for the sake of it, make them when the language demands it.
But I wouldn't recreate Hungarian in conlang because that would be a huge mistake. Even if it is real. Too complicated.
@@omarradaro8379
Arabic doesn't write vowels and that's painful for learners.
Why can't the diacritics be used everywhere? That would be so much convenient, only some ink will be wasted right?
To read Arabic, you have to have a great knowledge in the language and a great guessing ability and to read English you need to know it's history.
I've been making conlangs for quite a while now, closing in on a decade, and I only have one that I'm really, really proud of. And just to prove that it can pass for a real language, I've actually been teaching myself to read and write it. All I have to do is look up roots I don't know and I can construct a solid simple or compound sentence. I'm still working on how to make complex statements, and temporal and spatial references are something I'm struggling to get hold of (as I haven't given them nearly enough thought), but all in all I think it's pretty decent so far.
12:24 Italian actually has this exact feature! we have "bravo" for expressing skill (Im good at this) "bene" for saying well (I'm doing good) or good as a noun (the good in the world), and "buono" meaning a morally good person or a good food
I don't understand anything that is being said in this video.
This is the first time I've even heard the word "conlang".
I'm not sure how this ended up in my recommended...
You're not the only one
A Conlang is a CONstructed LANguage - a language invented by someone that could feasibly be spoken e.g. Klingon, Dothraki, Esperanto and anything from Lord of the Rings. There are communities online where people create these for aesthetics or just to experiment with linguistics.
There's a common issue where beginners, ignorant of how languages work outside the ones they speak, create something inefficient, inconsistent or impossible to use as a language. This video is about the author's creation when he was that beginner, and how to avoid it.
@@LowestofheDead but how did I end up here is the question
@@LowestofheDead thank you. I hate it when jargon is used without any explanation, especially when it is the central topic of discussion and, as you have shown here, is not hard to explain.
@@edwardblair4096 if you didn't understand any of the jargon then congrats: you're not part of the intended audience, that's not to say your criticism isn't valuable though.
"my own language"
*expecting English*
"Latin"
so you didn't do English in school?
@Jone Tokaye That's almost exactly what I did with mine... The main difference is that I based it off of Portuguese, which is my main language, and simply removed those things I find annoying such as verb conjugations, genders, verbal concordance and grammatical cases whatsoever (even though Portuguese has none). Then I created new vocabulary and that was it hahaha.
That’s not what he said, no? He said he’d learnt Latin on a technical level. On my first day in Canada I was also surprised at the utter lack of awareness of their own language’s mechanics and grammar.
Oh well.
@@barney1942 Well, you'll probably have the same experience everywhere you go
> _"so you didn't do English in school?"_
It's true that most people tend to use English as their base if that's their native language. But if a conlanger does know a second languge well, like he knew Latin. Then using the second language as a base becomes more common ... in my experience.
@@rodriados Did it work? I am also creating a conlang based on the features I like in portuguese but now it does not resemble anything in portuguese grammar at all
Ah yes, The Silmarillion. The book that has sent far too many conlangers down this hellish rabbit hole.
I applaud your willingness to share your early attempts at conlanging despite your embarrassment. My earliest attempts at conlangs (many years ago) are much worse in my opinion than you judged your own. My only saving grace was that I was so disorganized that I never retained any of my notes.
Aw, don't delete it. I never look at Yeltax anymore, but it's still around if I want to check in on it.
Anyway, I'm surprised you didn't learn Turkish and say "I must have vowel harmony", but it sounds like you're not nearly as phonology focused as I am.
Holy crap, it's George Corley!
I certainly didn't care about phonology at the time, at least not beyond a couple of bare-bones phonoesthetic choices. When I first learned about vowel harmony, I just thought it was confusing and annoying, but now that I actually know stuff about phonology I think it's awesome. These days I put way more thought into phonology than I used to.
By the way, Conlangery really helped me substantially improve the quality my conlangs, so thanks very much for that.
@@Biblaridion can u pls upload thandian? Some1 in the comments said u can recover it with some aoftware if it isnt overwritten. Pls upload it we want thandian NOW!!!! :((((((((((
I thought of some other features that'd make the languages more hellish: Nasal harmony (Guarani) and consonantal harmony (can be found in other languages).
see to me this would be a language for magic. something needlessly complex that requires years of study, nothing is natural and everything must be precise to work properly
@Andrew Gharibian fair enough but I meant it more seriously. Like why should one assume the words needed to control any one thing would be even remotely like anything else. It could be done comedic but does not have to be.
That's actually a cool idea! Done correctly, it could definitely be interesting.
It could even include some grammatical features that'd make no sense outside of the context of magic, though I cant think of any examples right now.
@@pfysche2283 maybe for signifying the type of magic being used? Ie like "firedu" and "firezu" for a fireball and beam of fire repectively
Also extremely complex languages could be used by more intelligent beings. Think gods or possibly super AIs.
You want to convey that they speak in a language far more complex and expressive than normal languages humans are capable of.
@@zs9652 Yeah. Such a language might also have no redundancies and no ambiguities. They'd be saying exactly what they meant, no more, no less.
This isn't quite as bad as I expected. The part with conjunctive affixes, for example, doesn't seem completely impossible for a real language to evolve over time. A lot of people's first conlang is just "I went into an English dictionary, crossed out every word, and added my own"
I watched this video twice: one sound a year ago, and once today. The difference in how much I understood and was able to learn is absolutely staggering. I having even say down and actually tried to make my language, but after watching this again, I am pumped to try again. I was able to pick up on so much more this time round. I want to watch this video again a year from now, and see how much further I grow as a person and as a conlang creator.
Hey, at least you didn’t include every single consonant and 6 different ways to pronounce 20 vowels, just because Vietnamese has a lot of vowels.
Doesn't Vietnamese only have 12 vowels?
@@boaoftheboaians Yes, but then there are the five tones (plus neutral tone, so 6) that turn 12 into 72 different ways to pronounce vowels
Boa of the Boaians I think so, but iirc they distinguish between breathy, creaky, and regular vowels, and also have 6 tones.
As a Vietnamese language learner, this is all true. Fortunately the grammar is relatively simple: no verb conjugations; nouns, verbs and adjectives are relatively interchangeable.
@@TSDT Every word is monosyllabic, as well. Which could be both a good and a bad thing. Simple ideas are just single syllables. Mildy more complicated ideas put multiple words together. Fun fact, the word "cactus" translated literally is "the bone dragon plant"
Source: I'm Vietnamese. :P
Welsh: * Has 2 dental fricatives *
Welsh: Newn ni alw'r un lleisiol yn 'dd' a'r un arall yn 'th'.
Thandian: TH
But 'dd' and 'th' is weird. The two dental fricatives relates to each other like T and D does, so it should be th/dh or tt/dd.
@@Liggliluff dh gang
Albanian uses 'dh' and 'th'
Does someone remember to ð and þ to represent that sounds?
I went with v and d for some reason. It was 3 am, I'm regretting my life choices.
I've once created a language called „saberovian“, with some 20 words, no defined alphabet, phonology or anything else...
mine was the same, lmao. that's the real first conlang- properly define nothing, just make a couple words so you can go "look i made a language!"
“Wierd sounds”
Me a european who uses those “HEY”
"Well, I've gotta put this in there too..."
- Biblaridion, 2014
1) I hope you didn't really delete your Thandian file. It's important to see how far you've come & there was a lot of valuable education in it.
2) I am certainly convinced that you can't make ANY naturalistic anything without wider use. As more people use something, they will (naturally) streamline & clarify it. If u asked native Spanish speakers to translate Spanish into Thandian, they would need the gendered nouns but native English speakers wouldn't. Native Turkish would similarly seek a way to all of their native Turkish stuff in Thandian. In a sense, what you might have been inadvertently creating was a "universal print language" while everyone speaks their own core verbal language like Chinese is.
3) Action is always driven by belief. Thus the motivation for language evolution & result is caused by evolution in the people's core beliefs. If the people had no belief in the passage of time, only the universality of NOW, they may very well develop a language which lack future AND past tenses. Every statement is "I act". "I eat breakfast." would include all 3:
"I ate breakfast this morning.
I will eat breakfast tomorrow.
I am eating breakfast now." Similarly, there may not be different words for different meals. Instead of saying breakfast, the sentence may simply be "I eat."
4) I am Groot.
5) On further consideration, Thandian sounds like the perfect written language for a bloated, corrupt empire who is trying to please everyone under them in the final years before they collapse. The penal code reaches to millions of pages. New laws are hundreds or even thousands. There is no way to not break the law, but there is noone who actually understands the law so no one knows if what you did was illegal or not. Similarly, everyone is adding & bloating the language so fast & fat that there are actually dozens of languages which all happen to use the same glyphs. It's NOT that Thandian was "bad", but it didn't suit your intended purpose. This idea gives it purpose, a new lease on life.
6) This is the core problem w hobby worldbuilding or worldbuilding without focus on the story. The people who speak & use the language shape the grammer & usage much more than the rules do. You Grok?
Bills in the US are frequently 1000+ pages already. That's not uncommon in countroes with traditions of code law.
The idea with the bloated empire using a bloated language is really good! Especially when you are making a conlang for a larger worldbuilding project, the language should primarily serve the world as a whole.
@@somespeciesofpenguin the obvious conclusion is that the US is that bloated corrupt empire
i think the whole point of this video is to document it in a less embarrassing way
Well here’s something that you did right in making your language: now I want to continue learning french and Ukrainian. Language is a fascinating thing but I’ve stopped being fascinated by it recently. I can see how passionate you are about linguistics through this project and it reminded me of why I wanted to learn grammar structures from different languages in the first place. 1. Because I want to be able to speak them eventually And 2. (Especially for uncommon languages like Ukrainian) just because I think the way different cultures communicate is really cool. So thanks for making Thandian even though it was such a dumpster fire
"I didn't even include rules for defining syllable shapes or phonotactics"
Me who doesn't know what either of those are: Yeah, that's a crucial step right there
In my D&D game world I had made the bare essentials for a dozen or so conlangs and gave the ones known to my players, for example the Dwarf of the party got Dwarvish/Dweorgumal pages of a dictionary and some common sentences. If they wanted to say something in dwarvish to a stronger effect, for example to threaten another dwarf-speaker, they could actually try and wrangle the words into something and I'd usually give them advantage on the intimidation for the effort.
The languages themselves would be developed on my own time though their psuedo-forms would be used by the players -- that way I could focus more on the other aspects of world-building while content with the languages I had.
That's a pretty damn good way of going about it. I think it's actually kind of difficult to incorporate a conlang into a game world beyond just names for places and people and maybe some magical incantations, but that's a very cool way to make a conlang more relevant to the game.
@@Biblaridion Thanks and I thought so too, by doing it this way player characters can also understand the names of in game elements without having to be told explicitly, allowing them to arrive on to deeper meanings organically.
Thats neat. No sarcasm
Always promote players incentive!
@@reinhartarts1957 That's not neat. Sarcasm. Dwarvish dwarvish haha.
*And people said math was hard...*
Well Linguistics can be argued as nearly a part of Math, or at least connected to Mathematics, you are just doing logic.
Also, I would say, high levels of Mathematics is pretty flipping hard, if you are talking about math up to the high school levels are fine and not hard at all... Well you are right!
Normally when people that are into math starts to say it gets hard is when you get into Calculus(That isn't the beginner friendly version of very simple derivations and integrals.) and pretty much everything from there only gets harder.
Though I don't even know how I got here, I have only touched Linguistics very lightly, but this doesn't look like the worst thing to take into...
Maybe teachers can make learning Thandian, Ithkuil and the like, a punishment for not doing their math homework!
To me, over-complicated or "wrong" conlangs just imply a very long, weird, intricate, complex history of the language's development.
Like, why is English the way it is? Because it has roots in a bunch of languages. Why does Thandian have three different ways of meaning the same thing with no discernible correct term? Because it came from proto-Thandian mixed with Old Thandian and High Thandian and its modern speakers use different versions and dialects across the country.
It can make things really interesting.
I made a weird "rune language" for my fantasy world... originally it only had runes for ideas and no grammar, because the race using it could read minds and they only used the language for spells and religious rituals...
I added the most basic grammar possible into it, explaining that dwarves took on that language but they do not read minds or use magic, so they added simplistic symbols into it, which carried grammar into the language... in the end every sentence ended up as "I be light peace giant" and at that I ended with "giving up" and made a historical event when dwarves gave up on said language and instead started using human languages for diplomacy instead...
I am learning a fourth language right now (and subsequently forgetting my third one) and your video got suggested. I have never in my life thought about creating my own language and I don't know how the algorithm thought this could possibly interest me. Apart from your voice being annoying yet pleasant at the same time I actually learned a lot about languages in general. I didn't even notice that there were two "th" versions. This is a great video, you deserve more views and I hope this gets suggested to a lot more people because once the algorithm ball gets rolling it sure ain't stopping. I wish you the best of luck and a lot of inspiration for future videos. Thank you for taking your time to produce this piece!
You didn't realize there are two "th" sounds? Oh, the thought! (I'm sure you see what I did there.)
@@leathernluv but i pronounce it the same way. I don't see the difference
“Annoying yet pleasant”
@@yasminemixon5458 that is actually a common thing i think. Although swapping them is alot harder (thing -> THing, THis -> this).
@@yasminemixon5458
The "th" in "this", "that" or "the" is voiced, as opposed to the "th" in "with", "think" or "thumb", which is voiceless.
The difference is like the difference between "s" and "z", or "t" and "d", or "k" and "g" ("g" as in "go" or "gas").
If you still don't see a difference, then... well... maybe you actually pronounce them the same... Check an IPA chart, it will be interesting either way.
Video: How NOT to Make a Language
Ad: Grammarly
That space/time thing actually seems pretty cool lol
Oh, it would most definitely be fascinating to see a language explore this whole concept further, no doubt. I expect if someone were to create a language with this division as the primary focus, it would have a few extremely interesting quirks as a side effect. And how it ties into everything else would be equally intriguing.
The issue then becomes devising a feasible explanation of where the divide comes from, in the event that the language is presented as a naturalistic language. I also wouldn't be surprised to discover a natural language with the same divide, but worse, because of course natural languages do everything worse than anything a conlanger can do, sort of as a side effect of them not being burdened with the weight of having to justify their decisions.
*spacetime enters the chat*
I think *everyone* who dives into this hobby winds up with a 'kitchen sink conlang' aka Frankenlang early on, which we hide away in the closet once we recognize what a monster it is.
I salute you for being brave enough to not only share this, but to dissect it in front of us!
the 'moral of the story' is actually great advice for literally any long-term endeavor, not just conlang.
My conlang sounds really ugly :(
I did the EXACT same thing as you did (added too much stuff)
And also, I have no idea why, but I was hellbent on using mostly monosyllabic words, and that's why it sounds like a person is having a seizure and is talking to the devil at the same time.
But I'm happy with how my writing system looks tho.
Thanks!
I tried making a language for cats to communicate. It didn't go well.
Aryaman Manish Joshi can i see how you write your conlang please?
Chinese has a lot of monosyllabic words, of course I haven't learned much of the language, so I might be wrong.
@@larho9031 We have the means, the understanding, the technology... TO ALLOW SPIDERS TO TALK WITH CATS!
@@AveragePicker fear
"A" in thandian script is something I've seen in churches 😂
There's another habit of beginner conlangers that you also had, but I'm not sure you explicitly said in the video: assuming that grammar is only morphology. Syntax is often ignored, even by experienced conlangers.
I'm looking at you, Dr. Zamenhof and your "rules for Esperanto".
Wow, I didn't know there was such a thing as "conlanging". What do conlangers do with their languages once they've invented them? Show them off to each other?
I played around with inventing a language when I was a teenager, and because my obsessions were simplicity and minimalism I pretty much avoided the pitfalls you listed here. What I lacked was sticktoitiveness -- I got nowhere near as far on my language as you got on yours, so respect!
Same bestie
Your background music is A+
subtly back there enhancing the mood
I like it
Kevin Macloed does what Kevin Macloed does best!
@@KingBobXVI Agree! I am a HUGE Kevin Macleod fan!
Didn't even hear!
Bib was so preocupied with wether or not he could that he didn't stop to think if he should
*I HAVE A FEVER, AND THE ONLY CURE IS MORE AFFIXES.*
Agglutination intensifies
"You speak craziness, Earth boy! More organs means more human!"
I don’t get the reference...
@@kertchu I believe its from an Invader Zim episode where he steals kids organs to appear human for the school nurse, although I may be wrong.
I've never made a language, but it does seem interesting (and like a lot of work)
I'm a native speaker of Finnish, and having learned English, German, Swedish, Latin, ancient Greek, and Russian at some point in my life, plus taking courses on linguistics and phonology in university, you can just imagine my sheer horror when you started describing your first conlang
This video definitely is a useful guide and a grim warning
I do not know how I came across this video since this is the first time I watch something about conlanging, but it was definitely interesting!
Besides, I want to add that what you state at the end is true for any project: when you make mistakes and regret them - and that happens every time - do not feel discouraged; instead, learn from them to improve yourself. It's a very positive approach and I think it helps people quit their comfort zone.
You've got a new sub :)
Thandian: 8:13
Klingon: Allow me to introduce myself.
The way he said “rpg group I was involved with” sounded like a cult
Well, I mean, how different are they, really?
I clicked this thinking it was about programming languages. Sometimes I forget words like "syntax" and "grammar" have meaning outside CompSci.
Programming languages and conversational languages share similarities in structure ans such though! I find my regular language skills do help me with programming languages. It's just a conversational language to talk to the computer.
@@PanthereaLeonis confusing programming languages and spoken languages is a good way to make a bad conlang
@@PanthereaLeonis
Yeah, that's pretty nice. Thinking about how people interpret natural languages has always helped me understand how a computer might proceed about a program.
@@yeetyeet-jb6nc yeah that's how they made lojban
It does seem to describe the same process by which C++ was made.
I come back to this video every few years. Priceless advice thats important to remind yourself of
Exactly explaining what I did for both my first and second conlangs.
i'm interested in creating a language and this made me realize it's gonna be like a billion times harder than i thought lmao
67 Thandian speakers disliked.
214
@@EHMM another thandian speaker just found this video and disliked
So you had separate suffixes for -ity, -tude, and -ness, which turn adjectives into nouns.
Ah! But what did you have for -ful (beautiful, wasteful, etc.), which turns nouns into adjectives?
There’s a feedback loop in there somewhere
or -less?
@Bryson Sanger beautifulnessitude
A good way to end the day after spending it basically tearing down my main language and beginning to reconstruct it into a better form.
I have NEVER thought about the space/times thing you mentioned, but it made me immediately think of Einstein. It almost feels like... we humans were actually subconsciously aware of spacetime as one thing and NOT two separate entities. Which seems weird because spacetime is not an easy concept to grasp, but apparently, in our language, we all already understand it...
*music starts*
"Am I listening to an SCP video?"
*STORE HAS BEEN CLOSED INTENSIFIES*
Close enough
Yes. Yes you are.
At least it isn’t Poliespo.
Imagine a mix of both
Holy crap, i actually thought your video was removed, because i forgot the channel name. Thank you, i will never forget this video ever again. My nostalgia has finally been revisited.