Creating the World's Worst Language 

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Time to unironically learn and make a community around this.

you've literally just created Japanese and then got rid of all the things holding the language together.

As a Swede, with this video title, not bringing Danish up even once? Your self control astounds me.

Since word order is arbitrary, you can just order all of the words alphabetically.

I feel like the one sentence at a time thing could lead to stories being structured as dialogues, requiring at least two storytellers.

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.

If you're feeling unsure about your own conlang; don't worry! It could always be worse

"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.

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.

Thats not a good language

My initial thought was when I saw the CCC was just to submit the English language

1:52 Ah yes, a term in the regional dialect of 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖈𝖗𝖆𝖋𝖙𝖊𝖘𝖊 for "My, what a delicious porkchop."

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.

Everytime K Klein uploads I immediately drop everything and watch it. Unfortunately I was holding a bowl of spaghetti when I saw the notification.

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.

I love how you accidentally created japanese in the first part, especially with the 'context' thing

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 ?!?!

All words being deictic is a terrible idea that I absolutely love!

I think this language would produce the most profound poetry, if only anyone could understand it.

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!!

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

I do wonder how languages like this would evolve if they where somehow spoken IRL

Can't believe K Klein would copy Moldovanto and change it to be totally different. Unbelievable!

Well, now I wanna see someone dub the whole Bee Movie in this language one scene at a time.

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.

Has anyone noticed in the translation, the first four word could also mean 'girl just want to have fun'? is this a coincidence?

Sometimes, the absolute worst can be seen as an art form.

I love that the intro to the be movie is "girls just wanna have fun"

Now time to raise a kid speaking only this around them and see what happens

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. 🙂

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.

Truly cursed, welcome to the Circus

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.

:3 cat is my favorite Penafi glyph

9:13 as someone who took a year of linguistics in college, this bit KILLED me, I was literally laughing out loud

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.

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!

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

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

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"

This is how it feels to learn any new language

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

A language that requires you to have other people to talk to; this IS the hardest language to learn

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

My guy is trying to create the worst language while totally ignoring that french already exists

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.

Person: Why can't anyone understand me? Meanwhile, their speech:

I can hear a Swedish accent when you pronounce this conlang, it's quite amusing.

bro fi crafted mfjo new “sinitic-papanuguenya" languag” me gusta

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.

Having had to take four years of high school French, I can say that in terms of worst language, yours is a close second.

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.

bro is silly

Somehow I don’t understand a single thing he says and still watch all 11 minutes and 49 seconds

This Language is perfect for the famous 'Bees can't fly, but do it anyway' statement, because it's so wrong that it can be improved by simply making it unintelligible.

Wow when you read out the story it sounded like the verbal equivalent of an audio glitch.

10:09 "All laws of aviation which we know give us information that no way exists which bee should can fly which has reason that wing of bee too small for purpose which make bee's fat small body off-ground despite which bee of course fly which has reason that bee not care about thing which human think." Yeah, that's basically how my inner-thoughts tend to play out in a nutshell

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!

So the first sentence is «Girls just want to have fun»

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!

This would be either the best or the worst language for puns.

This kinda reminds me of kay(f)bop(t)

Somehow this sounds like an actual language and not someone having a stroke

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.

"The cursedest" Me who speaks English as my first language:

> Tries to create a language that hinders communication > Invents 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.

I am a native spanish speaker who follows a spanish language youtuber and she is also being sponsored by lingoda. I found that funny

The worst language would be a mixture of math, hieroglyphics and rng

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.

*kay(f)bop(t) has entered the chat*

This is evil...

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.

The actual language sounds like when you have a hair on your tongue and you're trying to spit it out

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 made a conlang that has loads of vowel sounds but only 5 symbols,also it has rules which it often breaks it has bits of german french greek and latin words

ah yes, "penafi". no references here

if you wanted to go all out, you could have solved the gesturing problem by incorporating a body language aspect to the language thus requiring the hands not be available to gesture at the object

This is a language; this is masochism incarnate.

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.

fun game idea! one person constructs a sentence in this language. the other attempts to decode what they wanted to say

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.

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 whole language is horrifying!! I love it! You earned a subscription!!!

Thandian: Finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle will be legendary!

Great stuff!

English has some competition

You should submit this to Agma Schwa’s cursed conlang circus

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.

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)

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.

Love this idea, funny concept.

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 have two solutions to this” Me: chop off their arms “The first is to chop everyone’s arms off” Lmao xD great (terrible?) minds think alike

you just created toki pona, great job.