So the next question: are both storytellers different characters, or is one just asking "what happens next?" and commenting on the story? ...or both are different styles of story, each with a long history and their own tropes?
You can make phonology bad by having all of the phonemes be similar to each other and hard for small children to pronounce, making it so children cannot be meaningfully understood.
Yeah, find the sounds children often make first, Like 'm' or 'p', And just have them absent from the language, And then instead have really rare contrasts, like say having minimal pairs between /x/, /χ/, and /h/, and maybe /ħ/ too for good measure. Something like that wouldn't necessarily make the sound harder to _speak,_ if people grew up around those sounds they'd likely be able to produce them easily, But it would make it harder to _understand,_ as it can be really hard to tell those sounds apart, especially in a loud or crowded environment.
And when you speak, you're doing so in one sentence, thus you could order _all_ of the words alphabetically, as there are no distinct clauses! Anof emfta fe fi fi fi fi fi fi iep iep impus inj jampus kepatak kfitf kfitf kfitf kfitfip kfitfip makata mala mfjo mfjo mju mju mnsuans no no no no no pakat pakat pefi peftk peftk pemol peraki soe soe soememj soememj sunut tama tama tama. I just had a thought. Isn't language much easier to understand when, in order to parse words, you have to retain lots of superfluous information which is only given implicitly? This is distinct from using superfluous information in an agreement system, where the information is both duplicated where it's relevant _and_ given explicitly. We should impose a grammatical constraint that you remove duplicates of words, but only when they have the same meaning! Anof emfta fe fi iep impus inj jampus kepatak kfitf kfitfip makata mala mfjo mfjo mju mnsuans no no no pakat pakat pefi peftk peftk pemol peraki soe soememj sunut tama tama tama. (Note on 3 'no,' while both 'we' and 'us' seem to be different forms of the same pronoun, the translations as given are different. While this would presumably be for clarification in English translation, conservatively I'm leaving them as distinct, and thus duplicate. The other 'no' is 'that,' mala.)
@@gavasiarobinssson5108 I suppose alphabetical order makes alliteration interesting in certain ways, and it would really alter the way rhyming and meter are handled, particular considering the 1-sentence rule. I suppose you could do dialogue poetry, but overall I think the poetry ends up being more cursed than interesting in this language.
But what does "alphabetically" mean? Are we ordering the alphabet by number of fingers, number and placement of lines on the side, or how many sides the polygon has? Or some unholy combination of these? And where do the symbols at the end go?
@@klop4228 Oh! I forgot about the abjad for the language. In that case, we'll absolutely need to do none of those things you just said, because those would be logical. It would probably make sense to optimize the alphabet to be written as ambiguously as possible, looking for all the ambiguous sets of pairs of characters, and forming as many of those pairs as possible in order. I just had a cursed thought. What if we say the abjad goes in an order, but without a first character? Like, you can say for sure that one goes after the next, but if you'd write all of them, once, in order, it's equally valid to start on any character. It'd be like a circle! When doing this, we should impose a rule that you can't literally write the abjad in a circle, and also that you should put a copy of the first character at the end, for clarification.
"Penafi" can be translated from Malay to mean "denier" ("nafi" means to deny or refute; "pe-" is a prefix meaning the doer of attached verb), which is fitting for a language that actively denies communication.
@@anggakaruniawan Eh, ya ka tak ada? Dalam KBBI ada disenarai kata "nafi". Agaknya tak selalu diguna kot dalam percakapan sehari-hari - dalam bahasa Melayu pun jarang dipakai.
@@anggakaruniawaningat lagu "Sahabat Jadi Cinta"? "Tak bisa hatiku menafikan cinta Karena cinta tersirat bukan tersurat Meski bibirku terus berkata tidak Mataku terus pancarkan sinarnya"
@@roseashkiiii4361 why would they care about the thing that is completely opposite of just north-northeast of the thing on the opposite side of your body from where you are gesturing?
I feel the issue with this language is that it will very quickly gain grammar and specificity and whatnot by convention. "po", for example, if used in usage will very quickly gravitate towards always being taken to mean the thing that is being gestured at. I feel for a language to actually be the worst, it has to be at a local optima - where a single change to the can't make the language better. Only then can you make a stable worst language that truly stands the test of time.
yeah same i feel as if you need to find a low valley of efficiency on the highest mountain of linguistic effort and if there is a stream that your language can slide down into boring language territory, at least some plausible explanation as to why the need of hiding or codifying speech can make a lot of crazy changes to a language, or the medium of communication, or a people's system of organisation, etc but saying something could in theory be done but it's rude or it's just mot done doesn't work too well in my book
Or you could have a strong community of zealots dedicated to ensuring that no beneficial change is ever deemed acceptable. The only changes that are ever allowed, must be ones that make it worse. Then force most of the world to speak it this way forever, and teach it in schools, using the same standards all the time. ...wait, I think there is already a language like that...
Someone already did that with French for the first one. So English would be a cursed conlang heavily influenced by another cursed conlang. I couldn't see why this isn't the most cursed language that exists.
Ah yes, where each word can be pronounced differently which that same pronunciation which can have the same character of a different word and meaning in context.
This is epic. Thank you for sharing it! When I was in college, I fell in with an extremely weird and wonderful group of friends who shared an imagined world that we did a kind of mixed role-playing and world-building in. This included several related conlangs. My favorite was Clinical Frelng, a linguistics experiment that escaped from the laboratory and memetically infected the population of an entire planet. The one feature of this language I remember was its orthography. All words were three "letters" long. The first letter indicated all the vowels in the word, the second all the consonants, and the third what order they occurred in. So e.g. "kudi" (meaning "person") would be spelled as the equivalent of "(iu) (dk) (c2 v2 c1 v1)". There were tens of thousands of glyphs for that last character. Ah, bright college days. 🙂
That reminds me of when i made a sign language with my friends in elementary school, but it involved both hands and feet, like stomping and clapping meant “go!”. I gotta admit, having friends was kinda fun sometimes.
Make sure that you face away from someone when you are speaking as to not be rude, this means they can't lip read and all the sounds come out quieter and blurrier and facial expressions can't be read which means less context and pointing and gestures are even harder!!
my solution for the gesturing problem would be to make the language mixed between verbal and signed. if you're busy using your hands to sign words, you can't use them to point. make sure the signs involve all your limbs so you don't get smart asses pointing with their legs.
Hm, what if we tried to design a language so as, not to just be bad, but, compromising on that goal a little bit, in order to try to make it *stably bad*, I.e. not just trying to make it as bad as possible at the particular snapshot we describe, but rather, try to make it so that as the language evolved over time with people trying to communicate, designing it so that it would take longer for these changes to make it not-so-bad. Like, the worse some particular feature it, typically, the more quickly, I think, it would tend to change for the better... But suppose we designed it to be good enough that a culture could plausibly speak this language, encounter some irl natural language, and yet still prefer to use (a modified form of) their native language, and want to preserve some form of their language... but, would likely want to make some reforms to their language. How can we design the language so as to stymie these reforms? How can we make it so that trying to fix one thing, will generally end up making another part worse? In order for this, the language needs to have some genuine structure to it, just one that is bad. Here’s an idea: Use the “many words can mean both one thing, and the opposite of that thing” idea, but, in order to discourage the language from evolving to make the sounds for the two versions different, instead, make the language already have a means of distinguishing between them... but put it substantially later in the sentence (perhaps put all such markers at the end?) Now, this seems to invite a change to the language where people simply move the sense-indicator to the word whose sense needs to be disambiguated. That’s a problem. We can’t have that. To pre-empt that, therefore, we should make sure that saying any of these natural ways to try to fix it, are already things that the language assigns different meaning. Importantly, these meanings should be such that they could potentially be used in the same context, but unlikely to be what was meant. I do think the “many/none” ambiguity is a good fit. Could say maybe that “man [noun] [verb] [object] nom” means “no [noun] [verb] [object]” while “man [noun] [verb] [object] yom” means “many [noun] verb object” While “man nom [noun] [verb] [object] ” means “a non-negligible amount of noun verb object” and “man yom [noun] [verb] [object] nom” means that the speaker doesn’t know whether any noun verbs subject. Etc.
Why do I feel like speakers of this language would: A) push for language reform and maybe use a little distinction in their phonemes B) simplify the orthography into something more useful and readable, like maybe shift the lines somewhere else to make it more readable or change the shapes a little to make them more writable C) get around the "one sentence rule" by having a listener interject with "mhm" or "yeah" every sentence until it becomes customary and respectful to do so DAMMIT humans are good at communicating
Problem is, "This language is terrible, we should change it" can also mean "This language is fine, we should leave it how it is", making it difficult for language reform advocates to argue their case.
Imagine lawyers in the world with this language: - the law says it is prohibited to eat horses in car. - NOOOO! the law says it is obligatory to feed not horses which serve as cars!
The worst possible orthography would be one that shared as many words per character as possible, no spaces, line breaks, or punctuation; and relied entirely on context for you to determine which word each character was standing for.
I reckon I could make that worse: writing it in boustrophedon (i.e. alternating directions of written lines, like how an ox plows a field) but only every second piece of material written (so that one side of the paper is written normally, but the other side is boustrophedon)
I love the fact that every word is metaphorical. "He speaks Penafi = He speaks lots of words" could literally just mean that "He wont shut up". Given the language, I'd say that's a rational response.
This reminded me of the short story "The weird language from Kampung Sebula" that talks about a very complex and silly language, for example an empty bed has a different word than when someone is on it. Also, the same word could change depending on if you were speaking to a child, an adult or an old person.
I mean, about the gestures, you addressed the idea of deictic gestures, but what about their iconicity? I suppose one could have to gesture for something completely different than what they are attempting to represent, but how would you deal with it? I love the idea tho, it’s absolutely infuriating 😂
I think with the orthography you could have done something like the programming language Malbolge which all tokens dont just do one thing in isolation but have a side effect elsewhere in the writing. Like let's say ¤ is a letter in my language. It means the syllable *pta'*, but what it also means is 10 letters from the end of the sentence, increment the letter used 3 times down the alphabet (to use English as an example: if its the letter H it becomes K) and then invert its voicing. However, when it modifies that letter, there's a side effect attached to that which must be interpreted. This makes reading and writing a tangled web of modifiers that must be planned to write and untangled when reading
What if emphasis could only be through double negation? No adverbs such as "very", or "so", or "incredibly" exist. So to say "They are very beautiful" you would have to say "They are a person who are not not beautiful" or maybe "... Beautilessless" and to say "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmorizingly beautiful" You would have to say "They are a person who are not not not not not not beautiful"
Not sure if you intended it, but if you make it so that you have to use the same mechanism to emphasize negatives, it would become very risky to emphasize anything (and thus be even worse). Fail to hear a single one of the negations and you'll get the completely wrong meaning. "They are a person who are not not not not not not beautiful" = "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmerizingly beautiful" "They are a person who are not not not not not not not beautiful" = "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmerizingly ugly"
I think this language could easily become the center of a game where people try to have a conversation and afterwards see how close they got to understanding each other
i once had a conlang idea of the entire language being /a/ and the different meaning of words are signified by the tone youre speaking, so as the person i am i set 400Hz as “good” and 401Hz as “death” and 402Hz as “tasty” amazing language am i right
So, like Solresol, except that instead of seven musical notes to distinguish, you have a few thousand frequencies to distinguish. Good luck communicating if you don't have perfect pitch.
My internet is fiddly and at 5:55 my video froze “But what if people just point?” (Still frame, where a spoken pause could be reasonable) It took me a solid 5 seconds to realize the video froze lol
Your breakdown of the morphemes of "Penafi" reminds me of "kuusi palaa" in Finnish, which can mean multiple things, including "six pieces", "your moon returns", and "the spruce is on fire"
You know this has probably been done before, but I just had the best idea. What if you made ur own English accent by taking a bunch of English Phonemes and replacing them with similar ones. Maybe make all ds and ts fricatives or changing where accents are placed (plus you could show off your furigana script idea eh?) Just a thought!
Ah yes, my favorite creator, agneshwise. At least, that's his name according to the subtitles. This feels a lot like Japanese or Chinese with the whole context-based meaning thing.
I once had the idea of a language whose dictionary shifts which each word, so each word's meaning depends on the previous word. That would make it very difficult.
When I was in High School I did an after school event where we were tasked with making a language that could be taught to the teacher but not deciphered by anyone else. Everyone made languages which were either based on code words/latin/signs. But me and my wife decided to invent a language which is local to a specific areas season, relating to shadow distance from the person, and footstep/movements around a person. To establish communication you must first drag your foot in the specific initiation for that person. Then determine the time of day by using your shadow, if you are indoors you need to remember the time of day before entering to align your shadow. Depending on the season someone may align their shadow with yours/may align your shadow with theirs/disconnect shadows/hierarchy their shadow. Then after that you can start movements around that person, depending upon the season they may also have to move with you, to affirm that they are understanding you. Letters have generally very simple movements which unless you had combined letters “th, ss, ha, ll, etc…” you would only move in a approximate degree away from someone. We also had full or more loose movements that related to specific words, which was actually really hard to notice, so we had to make a signifier where we pivot to let the other person know that this is a full word. Our language also allowed for two people to directly communicate at the same time without interrupting the other, allowing for a much better sharing of information then traditional means. We ended up winning the task, even tho we told people about seasons being important to our movements, no one realized that we were lining up our shadows when simulating conversation and different seasons. P.S if you couldn’t infer we were dance partners since like 2 years old, I do not think anyone who has not been practicing dance all their life could do what we did.
This is like the opposite of the bit where I made a gnome kinda language have a set of prepositions that distinctly indicated the direction to reach (from 8 compass points except as if the compass were standing in front of you, plus a way to indicate plus or minus half a point) but also finer distinctions like "inside the hole on the inside of the wall up to your left" but all of that said within one to two syllables the way we use up/down/left/right/inside/outside/forwards etc. Basically the point was that if you're running across the dangerous above-ground where predators could get you and you need to grab something fast, a person can tell you precisely where to grab in a highly memorable way without any confusion.
creating the world's worst language as a synchronic creation seems to be fun, thnx for sharing, but i propose even more fun - let it have a diachrony. mwa ha ha. i bet, quite some of the features you devised for penafi are "cognitively linguistically impossible", simply they could not appear nor survive in a practically used language. just a hypothesis. oh, my, that would be a perfect task for my seminar 😈 experimental linguopoesis, go!
You should have given some examples of alternate alternate phrases the bee movie script could translate to lol. I'd love to see what kinds of confusing gibberish could arise from having a listener who simply doesn't understand the context and so they just think something entirely different is being said XD
The way I would make a language bad is to encode a lot of cultural taboos, have a very limited selection of verbs (less than 20) and very few adverbs or adverbial phrases. Then enforce inconsistency and ambiguity. What you get is a very low data throughput language which creates a structural roadblock to effectively communicating ideas. Perfect.
Interesting when I thought about this I went in the opposite direction, rather than being incredibly vague, being overly precise to a cumbersome degree. all things have a unique but arbitrary symbol.
I once had the idea of making a worst possible language. Some of my ideas were in your video but there were also some ideas that are not in your video: My first idea was to give the language like 14 different levels of formality so that it is almost impossible to say anything without accidentally offending someone. My second idea was: You know how every verb you say indicates a time by its tense and every pronoun indicates a gender because they're mandatory to include, even when they're irrelevant to what you want to communicate? Well, I had the idea of requiring the speaker to include their own gender, the gender of the interlocutor, their own age, the age of the interlocutor, the time, the place, the level of certainty, how all of this makes you feel, any many other things IN EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE. Get any of those things wrong and your sentence will be considered an inappropriate insult. Even insulting someone in this language is super difficult because if you do it wrong then your insult will be considered inappropriate and unjustified. Thirdly, hestitating is considered offensive, stuttering is considered offensive, and not answering to a question is also considered offensive. Fourthly, pejoratives are far more common than neutral words and if you know a neutral alternative to a pejorative, chances are a native speaker won't know them so you gotta describe the concept instead. If you ever try to talk to a native speaker in this language you'll almost certainly end up in an argument. Even their native speakers have problems with it: Children are generally seen as rude and disrespectful because they haven't figured out the complex formality system yet and many children get into arguments or even get disowned for accidentally insulting someone.
Thank you for this video, and honestly thank Agma Schwa and everyone else who participates in Cursed Conglang Circus. I remember that I used to be super into Conlanging when I was a young teen, and now I think that at least for a little bit, I might have a hyperfixation on Conlangs again. I will now be obsessed with this crime against humanity that is a language.
If you’re trying to make a bad language, then the worse your language is, the better it did at accomplishing its goals, so you actually made a good language in the end. If you want a bad language, you need to try to make a good language and fail.
People will just assume the most useful version of the word is the one being used, i.e. the one you're gesturing at. It's like how in the sentence "where'd you get a horse", "a horse" explicitly denotes a non-specific horse, yet connotes a specific relevant horse that the person got.
Okay but why is this legitimately compelling?! It takes a deep understanding of rules and structures in order to break them so wholly and absolutely like this.
This makes me wonder if a conlang can be made that, rather than being made to be really difficult for humans to learn, is made to be very difficult for Large Language Models to learn
I just thought of something. All the ambiguity between the defintion of each words could be resolved if this language evolves to become a tonal language. Now I doubt it will evolve to become a tonal language because no one will actually speak this language for reasons other than "why not?", but it could become an informal rule among people who speaks this. An unofficial official rule.
the issue is that there's unironically lots of languages that do this thing in which one word can mean thing or anti-thing or oranges according to context (ancient Hebrew comes to mind) and people spoke with it fine.
It doesn’t really always have to be about communication, you could try creating a la gauge that is particularly suitable for poetry (for example one full of assonances and rhymes, a pleasing rhythm and intonation and a grammar able to express varied nuances while still being flexible)
The "Penafi" controversial meaning didn't send me to a coma just because in Russian we have "A kettle wouldn't take so long to cool down" and "A kettle takes so long to cool down" and those phrases are absolutely equal
I actually think that the addition of characters like the checkered one make the language easier to decipher, as it can give you information about the characters to its left and right.
I had an idea like this back in high school to make a really fucked up conlang that was next to impossible to learn or use, except I just grabbed the idea of conjugations/declensions and turned the dj soundboard dials up to maximum on every category: the language would have like 185 genders, 122 noun cases, unique inflection for every number category up to 1,000 (i.e., singular, dual, trial, quadral, etc.), and verbs would have unique tenses for the last 18 days and the next 45 days in addition to X number of weeks, months, and years in the past/future, plus the 1,000-number inflection, plus 65 verbal moods and 93 verbal aspects. But the worst part would be that there would be no consistent paradigms anywhere, every single noun and verb would have a unique declension/conjugation paradigm, *and*, there would be a ton of unpredictable identities and irregularities between different inflections for the same noun/verb. I think I wrote out like 1/100th of one word's inflections before I got bored of the project.
Click the link try.lingoda.com/KKlein_Sprint and use my code KKLEIN20 for €20 or $25 off your Lingoda Sprint registration!
You did not forget to put this after uploading the video
@@Elisadoesstuff nope, absolutely not. i remembered immediately. as always.
Create the World's best Language now : )
Duolingo: *This means WAR*
@@stefanofeblesverastegui8869Indonesia language is the best nation language (real language not artificial or imitation) in the world
Time to unironically learn and make a community around this.
there is already y
Unfortunately people will intentionally or not evolve the language to make it clearer.
@@emmet3219 where?
As a wise man once said, you could make a religion out of this
@@enarmonika5557 No, don't-
I feel like the one sentence at a time thing could lead to stories being structured as dialogues, requiring at least two storytellers.
That's actually really smart.
no no no you can't make this language good and use its limiting structures as a catalyst for linguistically derived cultural features you cant
@@austinrimel1150 DAMMIT humans are good at communicating
So it's a cant spoken among improv troupes when they're having a rap battle?
So the next question: are both storytellers different characters, or is one just asking "what happens next?" and commenting on the story?
...or both are different styles of story, each with a long history and their own tropes?
You can make phonology bad by having all of the phonemes be similar to each other and hard for small children to pronounce, making it so children cannot be meaningfully understood.
You might not need bad phonology for that, depending on the child.
Yeah, find the sounds children often make first, Like 'm' or 'p', And just have them absent from the language, And then instead have really rare contrasts, like say having minimal pairs between /x/, /χ/, and /h/, and maybe /ħ/ too for good measure. Something like that wouldn't necessarily make the sound harder to _speak,_ if people grew up around those sounds they'd likely be able to produce them easily, But it would make it harder to _understand,_ as it can be really hard to tell those sounds apart, especially in a loud or crowded environment.
Me when /ə/ /ɜ/ distinction
@@rateeightx Tlingit people were fine with it for many centuries, for some reasons.
Every word has a cluster of three or four consonants that makes it near impossible for even adults to pronounce.
If you're feeling unsure about your own conlang; don't worry! It could always be worse
If you want to make it worse, just add in r-colored nasal creaky vowels. Or turn regular consonants into cursed glides.
> poliespo
be but could Hm… it That though. weird, work would
As a Swede, with this video title, not bringing Danish up even once? Your self control astounds me.
As a Dane, I had the very same thougth
Oh, hey, it's another RUclips guy!
Rødgrød med fløde
@@Ra1d_danois Danish=the worst European Germanic language 😂.
@@Anonymoose66G Nonsense, you know it's dutch!
Since word order is arbitrary, you can just order all of the words alphabetically.
And when you speak, you're doing so in one sentence, thus you could order _all_ of the words alphabetically, as there are no distinct clauses!
Anof emfta fe fi fi fi fi fi fi iep iep impus inj jampus kepatak kfitf kfitf kfitf kfitfip kfitfip makata mala mfjo mfjo mju mju mnsuans no no no no no pakat pakat pefi peftk peftk pemol peraki soe soe soememj soememj sunut tama tama tama.
I just had a thought. Isn't language much easier to understand when, in order to parse words, you have to retain lots of superfluous information which is only given implicitly? This is distinct from using superfluous information in an agreement system, where the information is both duplicated where it's relevant _and_ given explicitly.
We should impose a grammatical constraint that you remove duplicates of words, but only when they have the same meaning!
Anof emfta fe fi iep impus inj jampus kepatak kfitf kfitfip makata mala mfjo mfjo mju mnsuans no no no pakat pakat pefi peftk peftk pemol peraki soe soememj sunut tama tama tama.
(Note on 3 'no,' while both 'we' and 'us' seem to be different forms of the same pronoun, the translations as given are different. While this would presumably be for clarification in English translation, conservatively I'm leaving them as distinct, and thus duplicate. The other 'no' is 'that,' mala.)
Poetry?
@@gavasiarobinssson5108 I suppose alphabetical order makes alliteration interesting in certain ways, and it would really alter the way rhyming and meter are handled, particular considering the 1-sentence rule. I suppose you could do dialogue poetry, but overall I think the poetry ends up being more cursed than interesting in this language.
But what does "alphabetically" mean? Are we ordering the alphabet by number of fingers, number and placement of lines on the side, or how many sides the polygon has? Or some unholy combination of these? And where do the symbols at the end go?
@@klop4228 Oh! I forgot about the abjad for the language. In that case, we'll absolutely need to do none of those things you just said, because those would be logical.
It would probably make sense to optimize the alphabet to be written as ambiguously as possible, looking for all the ambiguous sets of pairs of characters, and forming as many of those pairs as possible in order.
I just had a cursed thought. What if we say the abjad goes in an order, but without a first character? Like, you can say for sure that one goes after the next, but if you'd write all of them, once, in order, it's equally valid to start on any character. It'd be like a circle! When doing this, we should impose a rule that you can't literally write the abjad in a circle, and also that you should put a copy of the first character at the end, for clarification.
1:52
Ah yes, a term in the regional dialect of 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖈𝖗𝖆𝖋𝖙𝖊𝖘𝖊 for "My, what a delicious porkchop."
That literally made me laugh out loud!
@@jedimasterhighground334 No joke same
That joke was so stupid I cackled like a hyenna
w w w w w
"Penafi" can be translated from Malay to mean "denier" ("nafi" means to deny or refute; "pe-" is a prefix meaning the doer of attached verb), which is fitting for a language that actively denies communication.
That's honestly really interesting how well that coincidence(if it is) lines up. Thank you for sharing!
Eh, di bahasa Melayu ada kata "nafi"? Di bahasa Indonesia tidak ada😂
@@anggakaruniawan Eh, ya ka tak ada? Dalam KBBI ada disenarai kata "nafi". Agaknya tak selalu diguna kot dalam percakapan sehari-hari - dalam bahasa Melayu pun jarang dipakai.
@@anggakaruniawaningat lagu "Sahabat Jadi Cinta"?
"Tak bisa hatiku menafikan cinta
Karena cinta tersirat bukan tersurat
Meski bibirku terus berkata tidak
Mataku terus pancarkan sinarnya"
What I'm getting from this is that a language is bad at being a language when it has boatloads of ambiguity at every possible level.
Correct!
I mean, the main purpose of language is to convey information. If a language cannot effectively do so, it's fair to call it a bad language.
Eli: Works for awful programming languages as well 😅
Cantonese
English
Everytime K Klein uploads I immediately drop everything and watch it. Unfortunately I was holding a bowl of spaghetti when I saw the notification.
crying
@@iceylore7767 your nafi noooo
Oopsies! XDXDXD
@@roseashkiiii4361 why would they care about the thing that is completely opposite of just north-northeast of the thing on the opposite side of your body from where you are gesturing?
RIP Spaghetti
I feel the issue with this language is that it will very quickly gain grammar and specificity and whatnot by convention. "po", for example, if used in usage will very quickly gravitate towards always being taken to mean the thing that is being gestured at. I feel for a language to actually be the worst, it has to be at a local optima - where a single change to the can't make the language better. Only then can you make a stable worst language that truly stands the test of time.
yeah same i feel as if you need to find a low valley of efficiency on the highest mountain of linguistic effort
and if there is a stream that your language can slide down into boring language territory, at least some plausible explanation as to why
the need of hiding or codifying speech can make a lot of crazy changes to a language, or the medium of communication, or a people's system of organisation, etc
but saying something could in theory be done but it's rude or it's just mot done doesn't work too well in my book
Damn it humans are good at communicating!
Or you could have a strong community of zealots dedicated to ensuring that no beneficial change is ever deemed acceptable. The only changes that are ever allowed, must be ones that make it worse. Then force most of the world to speak it this way forever, and teach it in schools, using the same standards all the time.
...wait, I think there is already a language like that...
So, basically, like an involuntary version of how people refused to adapt to the changes Mr. Esperanto made to Esperanto?
@@LordSandwichIIomg it's every language with an institution that sets rules on how to speak it
My initial thought was when I saw the CCC was just to submit the English language
English:
Strengths
CCCVCCC
Someone already did that with French for the first one. So English would be a cursed conlang heavily influenced by another cursed conlang. I couldn't see why this isn't the most cursed language that exists.
@@modmaker7617 Isn't "strengths" CCCVCCC?
@@usernamenotfound80 There is a hidden 'k' sound when you say the word. "Strengkths"
@@usernamenotfound80
Right the G is silent.
the language spoken out loud sounds like someone talking backwards. it's honestly fascinating
i will never comprehend how linguist youtubers know or at least know about eachother
like it makes sense but like also ?!?!
There are few creators and anyone interested in linguistics or conlanging will basically find all of them
We are very lonely.
We're all in a group chat together, haha
I mean, they’re experts in communication!
@@mildlymarvelousoh my god you're a comedic genius
you've literally just created Japanese and then got rid of all the things holding the language together.
japanese but ONLY CHINESE CHARACTERS while weighting
NO PRONOUNS
@@Somebodyherefornow And the Kunyomi and Onyomi were randomized across all characters
japanese 2: electric boogaloo
Ah yes, where each word can be pronounced differently which that same pronunciation which can have the same character of a different word and meaning in context.
the only thing missing is having 5 different politeness levels for mala
Can't believe K Klein would copy Moldovanto and change it to be totally different. Unbelievable!
Frotz
@@pettylein we meet again
Hi Elisa
I do wonder how languages like this would evolve if they where somehow spoken IRL
Someone needs to make a bunch of AI simulate this over thousands of years in a week.
@@tahunuva4254 I wonder what it will do to Ithkuil
I wonder how would evolve the humanity speaking ithkuil
you are speaking english i think that's enough of an explanation
All words being deictic is a terrible idea that I absolutely love!
Well, now I wanna see someone dub the whole Bee Movie in this language one scene at a time.
I don't know why he chose to write the consonants. I would have only had the vowels. 5 symbols Well, 89 because who cares.
based idea
Has anyone noticed in the translation, the first four word could also mean 'girl just want to have fun'? is this a coincidence?
A happy one
I think this language would produce the most profound poetry, if only anyone could understand it.
This is epic. Thank you for sharing it!
When I was in college, I fell in with an extremely weird and wonderful group of friends who shared an imagined world that we did a kind of mixed role-playing and world-building in. This included several related conlangs. My favorite was Clinical Frelng, a linguistics experiment that escaped from the laboratory and memetically infected the population of an entire planet. The one feature of this language I remember was its orthography. All words were three "letters" long. The first letter indicated all the vowels in the word, the second all the consonants, and the third what order they occurred in. So e.g. "kudi" (meaning "person") would be spelled as the equivalent of "(iu) (dk) (c2 v2 c1 v1)". There were tens of thousands of glyphs for that last character.
Ah, bright college days. 🙂
that orthography is exquisitely awful
That reminds me of when i made a sign language with my friends in elementary school, but it involved both hands and feet, like stomping and clapping meant “go!”. I gotta admit, having friends was kinda fun sometimes.
Make sure that you face away from someone when you are speaking as to not be rude, this means they can't lip read and all the sounds come out quieter and blurrier and facial expressions can't be read which means less context and pointing and gestures are even harder!!
I love that the intro to the be movie is "girls just wanna have fun"
Thats not a good language
mean :(
well it could be worse
@@respys_meh no it couldnt, didnt you read the title?
@@zasharan20:40
@@zasharan2 its a joke...
my solution for the gesturing problem would be to make the language mixed between verbal and signed. if you're busy using your hands to sign words, you can't use them to point. make sure the signs involve all your limbs so you don't get smart asses pointing with their legs.
9:13 as someone who took a year of linguistics in college, this bit KILLED me, I was literally laughing out loud
0:12 you just described french
Sometimes, the absolute worst can be seen as an art form.
Like the movie Independence Day
Hm, what if we tried to design a language so as, not to just be bad, but, compromising on that goal a little bit, in order to try to make it *stably bad*, I.e. not just trying to make it as bad as possible at the particular snapshot we describe, but rather, try to make it so that as the language evolved over time with people trying to communicate, designing it so that it would take longer for these changes to make it not-so-bad.
Like, the worse some particular feature it, typically, the more quickly, I think, it would tend to change for the better...
But suppose we designed it to be good enough that a culture could plausibly speak this language, encounter some irl natural language, and yet still prefer to use (a modified form of) their native language, and want to preserve some form of their language...
but, would likely want to make some reforms to their language.
How can we design the language so as to stymie these reforms?
How can we make it so that trying to fix one thing, will generally end up making another part worse?
In order for this, the language needs to have some genuine structure to it, just one that is bad.
Here’s an idea:
Use the “many words can mean both one thing, and the opposite of that thing” idea, but, in order to discourage the language from evolving to make the sounds for the two versions different, instead, make the language already have a means of distinguishing between them... but put it substantially later in the sentence (perhaps put all such markers at the end?)
Now, this seems to invite a change to the language where people simply move the sense-indicator to the word whose sense needs to be disambiguated. That’s a problem. We can’t have that.
To pre-empt that, therefore, we should make sure that saying any of these natural ways to try to fix it, are already things that the language assigns different meaning. Importantly, these meanings should be such that they could potentially be used in the same context, but unlikely to be what was meant.
I do think the “many/none” ambiguity is a good fit.
Could say maybe that “man [noun] [verb] [object] nom” means “no [noun] [verb] [object]” while “man [noun] [verb] [object] yom” means “many [noun] verb object”
While “man nom [noun] [verb] [object] ” means “a non-negligible amount of noun verb object” and “man yom [noun] [verb] [object] nom” means that the speaker doesn’t know whether any noun verbs subject.
Etc.
This sounds next level cursed and I love it
Why do I feel like speakers of this language would:
A) push for language reform and maybe use a little distinction in their phonemes
B) simplify the orthography into something more useful and readable, like maybe shift the lines somewhere else to make it more readable or change the shapes a little to make them more writable
C) get around the "one sentence rule" by having a listener interject with "mhm" or "yeah" every sentence until it becomes customary and respectful to do so
DAMMIT humans are good at communicating
Problem is, "This language is terrible, we should change it" can also mean "This language is fine, we should leave it how it is", making it difficult for language reform advocates to argue their case.
@@gcewing the biggest problem is that yes means no, no means yes, and left is right is up is north-west-south.
Imagine lawyers in the world with this language:
- the law says it is prohibited to eat horses in car.
- NOOOO! the law says it is obligatory to feed not horses which serve as cars!
The worst possible orthography would be one that shared as many words per character as possible, no spaces, line breaks, or punctuation; and relied entirely on context for you to determine which word each character was standing for.
I reckon I could make that worse: writing it in boustrophedon (i.e. alternating directions of written lines, like how an ox plows a field) but only every second piece of material written (so that one side of the paper is written normally, but the other side is boustrophedon)
Truly cursed, welcome to the Circus
I love the fact that every word is metaphorical. "He speaks Penafi = He speaks lots of words" could literally just mean that "He wont shut up". Given the language, I'd say that's a rational response.
It can also mean "He's very quiet"
@@NewLightning1or “he eats a lot of fish soup” which could mean that he constantly fails at things
Constantly failing is another very good description of Penafi
When you go on the news to talk about this, they should put “Bad Language Maker” under your name on that textbar thing
I like how starts to become increasingly newspeakful
This reminded me of the short story "The weird language from Kampung Sebula" that talks about a very complex and silly language, for example an empty bed has a different word than when someone is on it. Also, the same word could change depending on if you were speaking to a child, an adult or an old person.
:3 cat is my favorite Penafi glyph
Isn't it of all? (This makes perfect sense, although it might take a while)
I mean, about the gestures, you addressed the idea of deictic gestures, but what about their iconicity? I suppose one could have to gesture for something completely different than what they are attempting to represent, but how would you deal with it? I love the idea tho, it’s absolutely infuriating 😂
I think with the orthography you could have done something like the programming language Malbolge which all tokens dont just do one thing in isolation but have a side effect elsewhere in the writing. Like let's say ¤ is a letter in my language. It means the syllable *pta'*, but what it also means is 10 letters from the end of the sentence, increment the letter used 3 times down the alphabet (to use English as an example: if its the letter H it becomes K) and then invert its voicing. However, when it modifies that letter, there's a side effect attached to that which must be interpreted. This makes reading and writing a tangled web of modifiers that must be planned to write and untangled when reading
What if emphasis could only be through double negation? No adverbs such as "very", or "so", or "incredibly" exist. So to say "They are very beautiful" you would have to say "They are a person who are not not beautiful" or maybe "... Beautilessless" and to say "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmorizingly beautiful" You would have to say "They are a person who are not not not not not not beautiful"
Like litotes?
Not sure if you intended it, but if you make it so that you have to use the same mechanism to emphasize negatives, it would become very risky to emphasize anything (and thus be even worse). Fail to hear a single one of the negations and you'll get the completely wrong meaning.
"They are a person who are not not not not not not beautiful" = "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmerizingly beautiful"
"They are a person who are not not not not not not not beautiful" = "They are stunningly, incredibly, mesmerizingly ugly"
@@justforplaylists A bit, but with the opposite effect. Where litotes make the sentence weaker, my bad rule is all about emphasis
@@Primalmoon I did not think about the implications for the listener, and you're right: it is even more dysfunctional than I thought
I think this language could easily become the center of a game where people try to have a conversation and afterwards see how close they got to understanding each other
😂
i once had a conlang idea of the entire language being /a/ and the different meaning of words are signified by the tone youre speaking, so as the person i am i set 400Hz as “good” and 401Hz as “death” and 402Hz as “tasty” amazing language am i right
400.1 means “I am a wanted criminal”
So, like Solresol, except that instead of seven musical notes to distinguish, you have a few thousand frequencies to distinguish. Good luck communicating if you don't have perfect pitch.
A language that requires you to have other people to talk to; this IS the hardest language to learn
I can hear a Swedish accent when you pronounce this conlang, it's quite amusing.
i was looking for this comment
My internet is fiddly and at 5:55 my video froze
“But what if people just point?” (Still frame, where a spoken pause could be reasonable)
It took me a solid 5 seconds to realize the video froze lol
Your breakdown of the morphemes of "Penafi" reminds me of "kuusi palaa" in Finnish, which can mean multiple things, including "six pieces", "your moon returns", and "the spruce is on fire"
You know this has probably been done before, but I just had the best idea.
What if you made ur own English accent by taking a bunch of English Phonemes and replacing them with similar ones.
Maybe make all ds and ts fricatives or changing where accents are placed (plus you could show off your furigana script idea eh?)
Just a thought!
the puns would be fantastic
Person: Why can't anyone understand me?
Meanwhile, their speech:
Literally danish
Having had to take four years of high school French, I can say that in terms of worst language, yours is a close second.
blame the teaching not the langing
Mais pourquoi je n’ai pas trouvé cette chaîne plus tôt?! I love this so much!
Ah yes, my favorite creator, agneshwise. At least, that's his name according to the subtitles.
This feels a lot like Japanese or Chinese with the whole context-based meaning thing.
This is how it feels to learn any new language
You should’ve had one logogram that was just the bee movie script
Wow when you read out the story it sounded like the verbal equivalent of an audio glitch.
bro fi crafted mfjo new “sinitic-papanuguenya" languag”
me gusta
I once had the idea of a language whose dictionary shifts which each word, so each word's meaning depends on the previous word. That would make it very difficult.
When I was in High School I did an after school event where we were tasked with making a language that could be taught to the teacher but not deciphered by anyone else. Everyone made languages which were either based on code words/latin/signs. But me and my wife decided to invent a language which is local to a specific areas season, relating to shadow distance from the person, and footstep/movements around a person. To establish communication you must first drag your foot in the specific initiation for that person. Then determine the time of day by using your shadow, if you are indoors you need to remember the time of day before entering to align your shadow. Depending on the season someone may align their shadow with yours/may align your shadow with theirs/disconnect shadows/hierarchy their shadow. Then after that you can start movements around that person, depending upon the season they may also have to move with you, to affirm that they are understanding you. Letters have generally very simple movements which unless you had combined letters “th, ss, ha, ll, etc…” you would only move in a approximate degree away from someone. We also had full or more loose movements that related to specific words, which was actually really hard to notice, so we had to make a signifier where we pivot to let the other person know that this is a full word. Our language also allowed for two people to directly communicate at the same time without interrupting the other, allowing for a much better sharing of information then traditional means.
We ended up winning the task, even tho we told people about seasons being important to our movements, no one realized that we were lining up our shadows when simulating conversation and different seasons.
P.S if you couldn’t infer we were dance partners since like 2 years old, I do not think anyone who has not been practicing dance all their life could do what we did.
This is like the opposite of the bit where I made a gnome kinda language have a set of prepositions that distinctly indicated the direction to reach (from 8 compass points except as if the compass were standing in front of you, plus a way to indicate plus or minus half a point) but also finer distinctions like "inside the hole on the inside of the wall up to your left" but all of that said within one to two syllables the way we use up/down/left/right/inside/outside/forwards etc. Basically the point was that if you're running across the dangerous above-ground where predators could get you and you need to grab something fast, a person can tell you precisely where to grab in a highly memorable way without any confusion.
creating the world's worst language as a synchronic creation seems to be fun, thnx for sharing, but i propose even more fun - let it have a diachrony. mwa ha ha. i bet, quite some of the features you devised for penafi are "cognitively linguistically impossible", simply they could not appear nor survive in a practically used language. just a hypothesis. oh, my, that would be a perfect task for my seminar 😈 experimental linguopoesis, go!
I am a native spanish speaker who follows a spanish language youtuber and she is also being sponsored by lingoda. I found that funny
This whole language is horrifying!! I love it! You earned a subscription!!!
You should have given some examples of alternate alternate phrases the bee movie script could translate to lol. I'd love to see what kinds of confusing gibberish could arise from having a listener who simply doesn't understand the context and so they just think something entirely different is being said XD
> Tries to create a language that hinders communication
> Invents puns
You should submit this to Agma Schwa’s cursed conlang circus
This would be either the best or the worst language for puns.
The way I would make a language bad is to encode a lot of cultural taboos, have a very limited selection of verbs (less than 20) and very few adverbs or adverbial phrases. Then enforce inconsistency and ambiguity. What you get is a very low data throughput language which creates a structural roadblock to effectively communicating ideas. Perfect.
Interesting when I thought about this I went in the opposite direction, rather than being incredibly vague, being overly precise to a cumbersome degree. all things have a unique but arbitrary symbol.
This is fantastic, I especially love that any sound has a chance of being silent. I imagine it's like video game rng lol
this is like if you blasted toki pona with an evil ray
My guy is trying to create the worst language while totally ignoring that french already exists
The actual language sounds like when you have a hair on your tongue and you're trying to spit it out
I once had the idea of making a worst possible language. Some of my ideas were in your video but there were also some ideas that are not in your video: My first idea was to give the language like 14 different levels of formality so that it is almost impossible to say anything without accidentally offending someone. My second idea was: You know how every verb you say indicates a time by its tense and every pronoun indicates a gender because they're mandatory to include, even when they're irrelevant to what you want to communicate? Well, I had the idea of requiring the speaker to include their own gender, the gender of the interlocutor, their own age, the age of the interlocutor, the time, the place, the level of certainty, how all of this makes you feel, any many other things IN EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE. Get any of those things wrong and your sentence will be considered an inappropriate insult. Even insulting someone in this language is super difficult because if you do it wrong then your insult will be considered inappropriate and unjustified. Thirdly, hestitating is considered offensive, stuttering is considered offensive, and not answering to a question is also considered offensive. Fourthly, pejoratives are far more common than neutral words and if you know a neutral alternative to a pejorative, chances are a native speaker won't know them so you gotta describe the concept instead. If you ever try to talk to a native speaker in this language you'll almost certainly end up in an argument. Even their native speakers have problems with it: Children are generally seen as rude and disrespectful because they haven't figured out the complex formality system yet and many children get into arguments or even get disowned for accidentally insulting someone.
Thank you for this video, and honestly thank Agma Schwa and everyone else who participates in Cursed Conglang Circus. I remember that I used to be super into Conlanging when I was a young teen, and now I think that at least for a little bit, I might have a hyperfixation on Conlangs again. I will now be obsessed with this crime against humanity that is a language.
If you’re trying to make a bad language, then the worse your language is, the better it did at accomplishing its goals, so you actually made a good language in the end. If you want a bad language, you need to try to make a good language and fail.
People will just assume the most useful version of the word is the one being used, i.e. the one you're gesturing at. It's like how in the sentence "where'd you get a horse", "a horse" explicitly denotes a non-specific horse, yet connotes a specific relevant horse that the person got.
Okay but why is this legitimately compelling?!
It takes a deep understanding of rules and structures in order to break them so wholly and absolutely like this.
This kinda reminds me of kay(f)bop(t)
Somehow I don’t understand a single thing he says and still watch all 11 minutes and 49 seconds
bro is silly
This makes me wonder if a conlang can be made that, rather than being made to be really difficult for humans to learn, is made to be very difficult for Large Language Models to learn
Thandian: Finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle will be legendary!
I just thought of something.
All the ambiguity between the defintion of each words could be resolved if this language evolves to become a tonal language.
Now I doubt it will evolve to become a tonal language because no one will actually speak this language for reasons other than "why not?", but it could become an informal rule among people who speaks this.
An unofficial official rule.
Unbelievably freaking cursed
the issue is that there's unironically lots of languages that do this thing in which one word can mean thing or anti-thing or oranges according to context (ancient Hebrew comes to mind) and people spoke with it fine.
sure, but every word doesn't work like that, which allows for an actual context to exist
@@kklein that's true
This video made everyone nostalgic for kindergarten memories they don't have
It doesn’t really always have to be about communication, you could try creating a la gauge that is particularly suitable for poetry (for example one full of assonances and rhymes, a pleasing rhythm and intonation and a grammar able to express varied nuances while still being flexible)
The "Penafi" controversial meaning didn't send me to a coma just because in Russian we have "A kettle wouldn't take so long to cool down" and "A kettle takes so long to cool down" and those phrases are absolutely equal
The cat character corresponding to "m j w" really made my day.
Love this idea, funny concept.
I saw everything that could be one thing or the exact opposite or any combination and the only word I could think was "AARGH Whyyyyy"
So the first sentence is «Girls just want to have fun»
I actually think that the addition of characters like the checkered one make the language easier to decipher, as it can give you information about the characters to its left and right.
Obsessed with this, net 0 knowledge sort of language (but also this helped a lot as someone making a fantasy language). 10/10 video. subbed
"The cursedest"
Me who speaks English as my first language:
I had an idea like this back in high school to make a really fucked up conlang that was next to impossible to learn or use, except I just grabbed the idea of conjugations/declensions and turned the dj soundboard dials up to maximum on every category: the language would have like 185 genders, 122 noun cases, unique inflection for every number category up to 1,000 (i.e., singular, dual, trial, quadral, etc.), and verbs would have unique tenses for the last 18 days and the next 45 days in addition to X number of weeks, months, and years in the past/future, plus the 1,000-number inflection, plus 65 verbal moods and 93 verbal aspects. But the worst part would be that there would be no consistent paradigms anywhere, every single noun and verb would have a unique declension/conjugation paradigm, *and*, there would be a ton of unpredictable identities and irregularities between different inflections for the same noun/verb. I think I wrote out like 1/100th of one word's inflections before I got bored of the project.