in Tivinkiji it is lisata Qiki la lisata qumununi sin qumununi 3:00 qakati maki pakasa min qiki. I stayed up last night till 3:00 making my own language. Literally: I no sleep past night before 3:00 action create language of me. (I really did)
@@TheRojo387 thorn does make sense for the voiceless dental fricative but eth representing the voiced dental fricative makes absolutely no sense. /δ/ would be much better suited for representing that sound
I'm confused about people disliking being forced to learn cursive. The first thing I learned to write in was cursive. It's the way I write the most when writing personal notes or texts longer than 2 simple sentences, since it is a very fast manner of doing so. Since people often have trouble reading my handwriting I sometimes have to imitate print (at around 2,5 seconds per letter).
@@festerdam4548 I mean I liked it when we were learning it, but I find it takes me longer to write legible notes with cursive, and I don't do it well in the first place. I also find it harder to read if it's not very clear
@@creativewanderer9577 Since it's much less likely to have to raise the writing utensil, it should increase the speed. I'm not speaking about marriage invitation cursive (fancy), but rather cursive that's used day-to-day for note taking or longer texts (practical). My handwriting is pretty bad, though, so for short and important messages, print is very useful ("Have fever. Don't wait for me.") Edit: Didn't read the legible part. Yeah if you are aiming for legibility, print is your friend, but I don't use it for long texts because I take so much longer to write with it.
@@festerdam4548 I imagine some dissatisfaction is from legibility. People can already have terrible handwriting in normal script, and with cursive's almost nonexistent use in formally typed and printed media, most people are naturally not nearly familiar with cursive script as both a writing, but greatly a reading script, as they are with standard Roman letters. From a young age kids are exposed almost completely to standard script, and I imagine most are fine using what they would favor something they see more often and is completely standardized in every other form of media to be exposed to.
As a weaver I’m super taken with the decorative kēlen writing system. Lovely. It’s so easy to work into a pattern-you could weave a name or title (or even endearments for courting/wedding gifts-imagine!) into garments. This absolutely sets my mind alight.
feel like in modern society we dont really have that kind of thing anymore. sure we have calligraphy but barely anyone uses it anymore other than making satisfying youtube videos
There was a writer called Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote a story about a guy that found in a mysterious encyclopedia which told about two different peoples who spoke one a language without verbs, while the other spoke a language without adjectives. He tries in quite some detail to express the intuition of those languages. I remember once I was talking with a friend about making a language without adjectives or verbs. We got excited and started eliminating other things too. In the end we had wiped every structure and left only colors, hahaha.
This is definitely my experience bias talking, but that relational relabeling of verbs reminds me a _lot_ of how some programming languages work. Declaration, assignment, ownership, and change are roughly a set of fundamental "actions" that can happen in higher level languages, everything else is a noun constructed by composing other nouns and relations. I wonder if that's part of why it's so hard for us to learn to work with computers. Most of us are used to languages with lots of verbs, so we emulate that by thinking in imperatives, when in fact it may be better to think in relations...
Same, looking at the relations reminded me a lot of asm with how simple each individual word is but they can be combined to make higher level concepts that end up making practically limitless possibilities
Have you tried Factor, in which everything can be thought of as a verb? Or Joy, or Forth, Cat, Kitten, concatenative languages in general. Even numbers can be seen as a verb that puts itself on the stack.
@@frechjo I actually wrote a forth-like lisp for fun my freshman year of college. Recursion didn't work because it was dynamically scoped (or I just did the scoping wrong?). It's a neat idea, but I think 'all verb' languages are even harder to work with than 'all noun' languages, and that's reflected in popularity.
Perhaps this language would be easier for programmers to learn? It seems very logic-based; if you know about coding, the relational system might seem to make more sense than the average person would find.
Since my name is Kaylan (pronounced like in the video) and I gotta say sentences out of context made me laugh my ass off xD "When I first heard the concept of "Kaylan", I was immediately skeptical" lmao Glad YT recommended your channel to me in general anywho!!
People who don't know Lojban: "whoa, lojban says it doesnt have verbs!" People who know Lojban: "wtf are you smoking, the entire language is built around verbs"
@Joe Esperanto has some constructed dialects or derived languages. Ido is definitively in Esperanto's family, as well as that simplified/teaching version for Asians which I can't recall it's name. There are also some fictional dialects used in literature. So yes, Esperanto is already a family of languages. About dialects arising naturally among native speakers, I don't think there's much of it (unless you count as a dialect the variations that could exist inside a family or a very reduced group). There's not much of a geographical isolation, most Esperantists try to follow the grammar and vocabulary standards, and there's some aversion to the formation of dialects among the community. There are a few aspects you could consider "dialectal", like common mistakes by influence of the speakers native language, or adherence to reform proposals (like iĉismo, ĝiismo or riismo), but they're minor imo.
"To cause to become" as a replacement for lots of verbs is something I wish English had. Imagine how sophisticated this would sound! Instead of "the fan cools the room," or "the dog eats his food," equivalents would be "the fan causes the temperature to go down," or "the food causes the dog to be sustained" Edit: "TO GIVE WORDS???" OH MY GOD THIS CONLANG IS AMAZING
I think it could be possible to have a lang COMPLETELY without verbs, by for example specifying the state of something before and after a verb happens. Instead, of "they give me the thing" its something like "their thing -> my thing". If you are thinking that the "->" is a verb, what if all sentences are assumed to be linked in this way through just punctuation (so it becomes "their thing. my thing", and if they aren't, then a prefix is added to the first word of the next sentence? Can a period really be a verb? I don't think so. Also, I disagree that you said hangman is completely unrelated to anything else on the channel. Hangman is the most commonly played language related game!
Yeah, you're right, I think you could create completely verbless language just by stating the object's state before and after and having everything else be implied. It's technically verbless. I wonder, though, if there are verbs that can't be worked around like this. Let's see . . . I think it's possible with most common verbs. 'Say' works ("words in my mouth-->words in their ears" or something like that), 'walk' could be '"I here" (the 'am' can be implied like in Russian)-->"I there"'. But what about verbs like 'think'? "No thoughts in head"-->"thoughts in head"? (And again, you can say that something exists without using a verb. Instead of doing it the English way and saying 'There IS a whatever', You just say, 'There whatever'.) There are probably verbs that can only be communicated using verbs, instead of this before-after-state system, although I guess languages evolve and are devious enough that you could probably find a clever way to communicate even those verbs without verbs.
zero copula: Она дома "She at home", does not have a verb. Your language can be an SO language, there's simply no V. "A time ago, their thing, my thing" = they gave me their thing to me a while ago. "I book" could imply reading because that's what you do with books, but then the tricky part is how you would specify that you made that book. "I book-creation" would just make the noun "creation" into a verb, like how English use "book" as a noun and a verb. Technically then "I book" does mean "I'm reading" since "book" here is a verb. I'm really curious if you can make it without verbs.
More to verbs than only action. Also tense, mood, all that. Adverbs useful: yesterday no knowledge of this conlag by me . Today knowledge of this conlang by me. Too much redundancy though. At least success in verbless communication of my ideas.
This actually raised a really interesting thought for me, which I have 0 time to follow up. Would it be possible to have a truly "verbless" language by implying the verb by sentence structure alone, and thus violate this linguistic constant? If you consider what the verbs/relationals in Kelen do, you could combine them into a single relational, and then ellipt it entirely and use suffixes to imply it. For example, let's say you had three suffixes, "oo" referring to the initial object, "oa" to the new object, and "as" referring to the subject/causer. To say "a painter painted the house red", you'd say "houseoo red-houseoa painteras". To say I am tall, you could say "tall-Ioa" and to say I've become tall (grown), you'd say "Ioo tall-Ioa". Then to give (se) would translate similarly. "Ali gave Bob a present" would become "Ali's-presentoo Bob'spresentoa Alias" (though I imagine the Alias would be ellipted due to being implied, much as Korean often ellipts it's subjects) . To say "Bob took Ali's present", you could use "Ali's-presentoo Bob's-presentoa Bobas". Finally, other information could be imparted by adverbs at the end of the sentence. While the other parts of the sentence could be in any order, so long as adjective came before noun, this would always have to be at the end. For example, to say "Bob angrily *stole* Ali's present", you'd use "Ali's-presentoo Bob's-presentoa Bobas illegally angrily" I'd imagine that time wouldn't be implied by tense, but by explicit reference (e.g. yesterday, last-hour, etc.), much like Kiribati. Place could probably be similar (e.g. at-home, at-school), though the "at" particle would likely be ellipted in informal speech. Finally, I'd imagine that the formality of speech would imply whether you kept the suffixes on nouns ("oo", "oa", "as"), and even if you required the nouns at all if it's implied by previous speech. For example "I eat an apple. I eat a banana." would be "appleoo eaten-appleoa Ias. Bananaoo eaten-bananaoa Ias" in formal speech, and "eaten-apple Ias. Eaten-banana." In informal speech. What do you think? Feel free to steal the idea and run with it, just lmk what you come up with!
Songs in Kelen must be really interesting to write and perform considering how important length is to the meaning of words. I've never in my life been interested in language but for some reason your videos are hooking me.
There is a way to make Kēlen [or any language] more "verbless": 1) Dispense with the copula altogether. Several real-world languages already do that. 2) For the other meaning of the verb, "to be", you can use an adjective like, "identical" or "similar." 3) To replace the construction, "There is …," one could use an adverb, such as, "here." Or an adjective like, "real," or, "present." Or the noun for "the present" or for "today." Or for that matter, it could use all of these, each in a different context that doesn't seem consistent to non-native speakers, but totally makes sense in the world-view of the culture of the language's speakers. 4) The verb, "to have": Easy. Use the genetive case. Again, maybe add in adjectives/adverbs as required by context. 5) Tenses: Again, easy. Just use the appropriate time-word. Or encode tense in direction and use the appropriate direction [e.g. "forward" for the past-tense; or "east" for the past-tense]. 6) A few particles indicating how nouns are connected together, instead of using verbs to make that connection. For example: 6a) A particle that means, "the next two nouns are conceptually connected." What that connection is depends on context. 6b) A particle used on 2 or more phrases, preceding each phrase, which has the meaning, "these phrases have a relationship." We have a similar construction to this in English: "either … or …" and “neither … nor … " 6c) A particle that is put in between items that are part of a sequence. Think of it as the spoken-equivalent of a comma. Again: These particles must not be a mere replacement for a bunch of verbs. A specific combination of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are the replacement for each verb. The particles would just increase the way you can make combinations.
@@jenovahhelson5941 I … don't think so. That would still be a kind of verb. What I was postulating was using a combination of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and grammar to replace verbs entirely. It would result in a rather alien way of thinking. The converse - using verbs as nouns, adjectives, and/or adverbs - actually happens regularly in human language.
wow that Ceremonial alphabet is awesome, i have not seen nothing simmilar, and recently i started with the desing of a conscript that looks like that interlace and it will be for a language with a huge amount of verbs
I’m doing an important school project on conlangs, have had an interest in them for a long time, and have even tried my hand at constructing my own. And yet, there are still so many things you can do with them that I find new and quite surprising! Kēlen’s ceremonial writing system and the relationals to substitute verbs were both really creative and unlike most conlangs I have any knowledge of. I think it’s part of the reason I like conlangs so much-it never ceases to amaze me how creative one can get with them, and language really is an expression of culture and identity, which means there are near-infinite options of what you can come up with. Really, the sky is the limit! I’m glad to have found this video; thanks for making such interesting content :))
Kelen reminds me of Basque. It's just taken the lexical information out of the verbs, and then stripped them down to a closed set. The small closed set of verbs take person, tense, mood etc., while the lexical information is handled by nouns and word order. The "relationals" are just relabelled verbs.
anlāsi everyone, I love this episode, this conlang and specifically the artistic possibilities the braiding patterns have. Thank you for making this video. Also, greetings from the Netherlands
I actually really liked how the passage at the end sounded, which is great because that can't be said about the vast majority of conlangs reviewed on this channel lol
its weird, i thought i found your channel for the first time just now, but scrolling through your videos, i realize ive watched quite a few of them already
I think it's closer to being verbless than one might think; the relationals do the same *job* as verbs, and are translated as verbs when you translate the words into a Human language, but they don't really act like a verb. It conveys all actions by way of things in relation to other things, with no unique words for doing anything!
Yey an episode about a language that actually doesn’t have verbs (kinda), unlike lojban which just calls it brivla and thinks that’s enough to trick people into thinking that it doesn’t have verbs.
I think the lojban designers would be the first to tell you that brivla are verbs. No one who is familiar with its grammar would ever claim otherwise. (However, many folks find that, when discussing lojban grammar, it is convenient and maximally communicative to use lojban words to describe lojban grammatical categories. Such usage should never be interpreted to mean that English academic words don't apply. Anyone who knows lojban knows that brivla are verbs. [Even though they also serve as nouns, which is unusual but certainly not groundbreaking.])
I mean, give, cause, be, and have, are commonly available meanings of syllables that compose into verbs in some real languages, so kelen really just defines those built verbs to not be verbs.
The orthography is indeed aesthetically pleasing. I do wonder now if it's possible to go completely without verbs. It's incredible how far you can get with 4 words indicating the actions. Excellent presentation of an excellent conlang.
While i'm not sure if their "to be" can count as not-a-verb-in-disguise, "to have" definitely doesn't need to count as a verb, like in Irish. Instead it's a preposition, i.e. "[thing] is *at me*" vs "*I have* [thing]". You still need to be as a verb for tha particular example, but there's probably some way around that too.
I mean, they're link-verbs, which is a little different, and as mentioned below, some of them don't have to be verbs at all, so it's much closer to being verbless than you'd think.
It may be simpler to write, but I’m my experience sitelen sitelen is very simple to read. I like to think about it as a similar writing idea to Japanese. I know that in some ways it is very different from Japanese, but just like Japanese it has a character system that represents words; glyphs in sitelen sitelen and kanji in Japanese. Also just like Japanese, it also has a syllabary, which I like to think is similar to Hiragana/Katakana. In sitelen sitelen, the syllabary is used for names. This comparison can only go so far through. sitelen sitelen has around 120 complex glyphs, and Japanese has thousands of characters. Japanese also has two syllabaries to use in different circumstances while sitelen sitelen only has one for names. Honestly though I need to learn some of the laced script, as I’m biased towards sitelen sitelen as that is what I know. And it might be fun.
I like the script but it bothers me that it breaks the fundamental rule of interlace (in Celtic and La Tène art anyway) in that the strands aren't all continuous.
@@jakenadalachgile1836 I think that's actually a clever way to help differentiate background from writing - The stuff that isn't continuous is easier to set aside on your mind, to a degree, to help you focus on the important stuff. It would be nicer if the system was designed to have everything interlace, still, I do agree - But there are advantages.
I'm so glad that another conlang uses knotting as a form of communication, even if it's just ceremonial. While I never got far enough to make an actual language with it, I had the idea for my gnomes writing via knotted rope, which could thus be read underground in the dark. This is the same conlang concept where I envisioned an extensive set of positional words, so that, for example, using words as simple as "front" or "beside," you could indicate "reach into the hole and feel the wall closest to you, to the left and a little up" -- thus allowing the gnomes to quickly locate objects and scurry back to the safety of their burrows ^_^
i love that creating a language is somehow both so easy that a highschooler or middleschooler can do it but at the same time so hard that it can take decades for an adult to do it
Years ago, I was in a conlang translation relay, and Sylvia went right before me. I got the text in Kēlen along with her notes on the language. Which made for an interesting challenge since my language puts a lot of grammatical weight on verbs. But, yeah, I like what she's done, and need to go back and see how its been updated since then.
Actually me during the announcement * new video * Oh sounds cool * a video nobody asked for * OH MY GOD * on a topic nobody cares about * YES YES YES * my weirdest idea for a video essay since w * THIS WILL BE GREAT * jan Misali presents: hangman is a weird game * OH MY GOD THIS IS SO AMAZING I CAN'T WAIT (melts with joy)
This video showed up in my recommendations and the thumbnail was interesting so I decided to watch! I have no idea what any of this means but the dude sounds excited about it so that's cool.
I don't think I've ever seen an episode of conlang critic the day it was uploaded and I was here after 5 minutes. maybe I should put notifications on instead of checking back every couple months. Now, everyone have a good night's sleep after this new episode, stay safe and in your house and all that, binge the whole series again to entertain yourselves or something
I did it, I've now watched all your conlanging videos! I actually really really like this language. I feel like i want to learn it, but i need to learn a lot more about linguistics first i suspect. I'd love to play with the lace alphabet also, but i need to do a lot of staring at it (and probably learn the language) before i start with that. Most of all, i really like the way the language *feels* to listen to. Something about the phonology is comforting to me. The familiar consonants that i can recognize remind me of the gibberish spoken by Ori's narrator. The elongated vowels also help that feeling. Meanwhile the unfamiliar palatals, velars, and especially the trill re-ground the language when spoken. It sounds soothing to listen to! I want to drift asleep near a campfire, listening to a Kēleñi person recount their folktales. I really hope Sylvia does decide to write a piece of literature with this language in it, I'd be extremely interested. Even more so in a reading of said literature! As for you, I can't wait to hear what you have to say about an IAL that *_I_* can recognize is calling itself "language of earth."
it's cool how you compose unique themesongs for some of your video essays because then months later i can come back to watch some previous video, get a teaser for a previously-upcoming-now-long-released video, and immediately know what video it's going to have been! it's like retroactive subtle foreshadowing that comes ~20 seconds before the straightforwardly spelled out foreshadowing!
Hey man great video it's always nice watching a video on a conlang you're passionate about. I have a question tho, why did you stop including the number of the episode on the title? I miss that tbh
"so right now im just padding out the script so they're not going by too fast for you to see them" much appreciated, thank you. Gave me the chance to pause and read the ones that looked interesting
Kelen sounds like a last name, and every time you say "kelen's this" or "kelen's that" my brain interprets it as someone named kelen doing these things
Can you cover D'ni? As an added bonus, they have their own numeral system. It's a base 25, where the numbers up to 25 are base 5. Thought you might like that. I haven't conlanged in a very very long time. Love the series!
I'd like to find out exactly how the ceremonial alphabet works. Also, one of my conlangs, called Qanda (after your "Q and A" video, which had the spaces removed to become "Qanda", and fooled me into thinking there was a language called "Qanda" going to be reviewed, and inspired me to make one myself) is written vertically in hexagons, where each hexagon contains up to one consonant, up to one vowel, and also encodes capitalization. There are 6 radii from each corner of the hexagon to the centre, 5 of these are used to encode consonant sounds in different combinations, and the 6th is used for capitalization (capital if it's there, small if it's not). If all 6 are absent, there is no consonant (either a vowel-initial syllable, a glottal stop, or a pause). For vowels, there are 3 markers that can be combined to make any of the 7 vowels (or if all are absent, that indicates no vowel): a vertical line from top-left corner to bottom-left corner, a circle in the middle, and a vertical line from top-right to bottom-right If the hexagon is completely empty, that indicates a space (and completely empty apart from radius 6 is a glottal stop, as there's no such thing as a capital space). There are 7 vowel phonemes (8 possible combos, but 1 is a blank, leaving 7) and 33 consonant phonemes (31 from the radii, as there are 2^5 = 32 possible combos, one of these is a blank, leaving 31, add in the glottal stop for 32, and there is also one rare phoneme written with two hexes, the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate, romanized as "tx" (the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, which is already fairly rare in Qanda is "x") When I have some more development done on it (and my other conlangs), how do I submit it to you?
So…. the reason the orthography looks like Devanagari is because it basically is. Nearly all the letters showed on screen seem to be mirrored, rotated, and occasionally slightly modified Devanagari letters 🤷♂️. Looks good, though!
1:29 the behavior of ‘s’ here is oddly similar to the Korean ㅅ, which was originally pronunced as ‘s’ in all occasions but was later reduced to ‘t’ in end of words.
13:50 Oh that's why I'm here. It's so strange and surreal looking at u announcing the thing that boomed as a video (and probably did a lot for your channel too)
