The Weird History of Invented Languages | Otherwords 

I wonder if it actually helped him get better at his actual job as a linguist. If nothing else it's a form of practice, right?

And I imagine he'd be impressed by how far-reaching his conlangs have become! - Dr. B

*Tolkien sees Ithkuil and spontaneously combusts on the spot

@@pbsstoried Impressed or frightened and disappointed. He never expected to complete Elvish or any conlangs during his life, let one have someone else learn them.

Tolkien is a mystifying person linguistically - it was determined within his lifetime that his paternal origin was Baltic-Prussian. He never invested time into Baltic languages it seems let alone prūsiskan which would have been his mother tongue in a decolonised context. But he had no shortage in imagination to come up with artificial languages - almost as though he tried to plug a hole in his own identity (he also referred himself to being "kind of like a hobbit" etc) We know from Tolkien's letters that he had a very flawed perception of his family's past though he certainly tried to learn as much as possible. To me it seems his own bias was severely distorting his own ancestral research at the time. Many of the things he thought he knew were later partially or fully debunked by historians (though obviously Tolkien's ancestral assumptions were usually in good faith). He was correct in that his family was originally from "Eastern Prussia" where his family was comprised of intermarriage between natives and colonists. Many in the Baltic languages community think that Tolkien's perhaps "disregard" for Baltic languages destroyed a unique opportunity to market these languages to a wider international audience - specifically revival efforts of prūsiskan which we know to be the ancestral language of Tolkien's paternal family. As for his descendants they have done a much better job imo. While not as language savvy they have been much more honest with their past and built up a semi extensive network of Tolkiens and variations of the name globally. Nowadays I don't think there is a single Tolkien of mature age the doesn't know their Baltic-Prussian paternal ancestry. Finally - Tolkien did sort of "relinquish his past" in that he thought because of his diverse background he would rather be the person he becomes rather than be dictated by who he is supposed to be ancestry wise. Though that was also based in the context of him assuming he had majority German ancestry (he definitely had some but perhaps not majority) - which understandably became inconvenient as WWI broke out.

Much obliged! And glad to shed some light onto your hobby for those new to conlangs. - Dr. B

Are you the Harvard quizbowl guy?

Hopefully not exclusively cuz I wanna use it too & it'd be weird if you said nothing else. 😁

*"might be", is the quote. The uncertainty is important. But the metaphor is good.

@@paulholleger8538 true, you're right

Comparing anything to Plato's cave allegory is cliche

@@dirkdiggler. i mean, it's probably the most Influencial philosopher of history, so it's not hard to find stuff that talks with him

They were made naturally, like it evolved & not like a person had such idea Similar to saying a "NATURAL" life & an "ARTIFICIAL"life

lon mute a!

Yeah, I was about to say, no mention of my boi toki pona?

Another cool "conlang" is Viossa! It's not really a conlang, but like a "forced" pidgin, using words and concepts across several real languages (but avoiding english) and started as a lingustics experiment with people just pointing and saying what they think that the word should be.

@@alicecold Yeah I've heard of this! I've seen an interview on youtube and thought it was really cool, it was quite a spontaneous project and there are dialects of the language because people have personal preferences but it seems they still understand each other

One of the biggest notes on Toki Pona is that its linguistic library contained just around 100 words at its creation. Another 100-ish has been added since, but naturally, one only really needs to learn those first 100 to be really fluent in it.

😂😂😂

It’s fascinating to me because I am definitely a person who learns best by taking things apart, putting them back together, and doing it myself. When conlang people talk about language, it makes sense to me because that’s what they’re doing - dismantling, reassembling, creating, and explaining the processes while they do it. LOVE conlangs so much.

Glad I’m not the only one excited for new episodes!!

Hard same. really enjoy this show.

Same! It’s one of the most informative and entertaining RU-vid channels.

Right! It's so fascinating to learn about language and all it's beautiful differences and variations.

me toooo!!! this might be the only show i’d be watching in this channel 😭😭

For artlangs (particularly naturalistic artlangs) David Peterson's showcases in his talks and Biblaridion's videos here on youtube are so great and informative. A TON of really good youtubers have dedicated their channel to conlanging and honestly there are so many that have high-quality content that I'm impressed. As an Italian, I must say the community is quite monolingual (in the sense that the content itself is in English, be sure these nerds speak more than one language!), but if you know English, the conlanging world is at your mercy.

i unironically want to learn kay(f)bop(t) if only for the tower-of-babel-story-slash-rickroll

But can you say, "My hovercraft is full of eels"?

toki pona is not never attempted to be an auxlang. it's a philosophical artlang, meaning it was designed to be an artistic form of expression based on the philosophical ideas of minimalism.

​@@yuvalne In my opinion it's in the same category as lojban, a language based on philosopical principles (in lojban's being perfectly logical an unambigous, in toki pona's minimalism)

Yes, I love the Hawaiian shirt!

Well... You haven't experienced real neighbourly friendliness until you've witnessed it in its original Klingon form.

specially in an episode missing the giddy shakespeare

That and this episode's cursed (or blessed?) thumbnail. xD

Loved it 😂

There was also a push in the 90s to 00s to simplify an existing language with few native speakers and have that real language be the new global default. The idea was that this would sidestep the practice of the politically dominate country's language being the linga franca.

Icelandic is highly restricted to preserve it, as it is the closest to Old Norse you can find. If that will actually work remains to be seen.

I was going to say "haha, like French making up Official New French Words because they hated having English loanwords" but this is my first time hearing how strictly regulated Icelandic is, wow

@@pluspiping I recommend looking it up if you find it interesting. As a Swede, I've found some Icelandic people annoyingly claiming they have more Viking heritage, and are more authentic, than the whole of Scandinavia. Despite the fact that the city Uppsala existed before people even lived on Iceland.

@@Ikajo They're not claiming to be more authentic than those who lived in Uppsala before Iceland was colonized, are they? They're only claiming to be "more authentic" than Scandinavia _today._

Well, yeah! They invented a whole language! That’s actually a pretty big deal.

Which _Land of the Lost_ was it?

@@r0bw00d The original TV series, from the '70s. I used to watch it as a kid.

@@JeffRobbins27 That was a great show! Which theme song gets stuck in your head: the original or Uncle Jack?

"English and Latin" So, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Latin and Latin seasoned with a sprinkle of Norse?

It is spelled as "Samen" though, but the Germans have "Zusammen" so maybe that is how the Z fits in

@@MissMoontree en in tezamen is het wel met een z

@@CouldBeMathijs Which is easier in your opinion, German or Dutch? Does Dutch have genders for inanimate objects like German?

@@Anonymoose66G I thing German might be a little more difficult in some aspects, Dutch has a gender system, but the masculine and feminine have merged in almost al situations, so it's actually two genders, neuter and a common gender. Dutch also doesn't really have cases anymore in Standard Dutch and most dialects, even the genitive (English' 's and ', is barely used in daily conversation anymore). But I find Dutch spelling more confusing. Also keep in mind that this post is written from the perspective of a Flemish Dutch native speaker, who has had 1 hour of German class for the past 3 school years, I just have a grasp of the language and do not know it to anything more then A1.

Agreed.

That our language in itself influencing our worldview is a very real thing. This is evident with many new-world slaves being restricted to illiteracy. It's also evident in invasion/colonization of a country. The dominant side impresses their language, as well as ideals, upon the natives.

Cool, what's the story about?

@@bardw8792 at first I'm thinking of making some kind of low fantasy/alternative history mix of a story, based on my home country. Still blurry how to make it work but I'm very excited w/ what will come out of it!

A J. R. R. Tolkien in the making! - Dr. B

@@pbsstoried thx Dr. B! 🥰

Well "Euro-centric"... most romance language speakers today live outside Europe xD

It's not a conlang. Huttese doesn't have a grammar- for the most part it's an English relex- and in Return of the Jedi it's mostly gibberish made to sound vaguely Quechua.

Yeah.... Huttese is somewhat famously an example of where people were lazy and just used gibberish instead of actually making a real conlang. The same utterance is used within a single scene to mean two entirely different sentences

@@leenaf8322 What you're talking about isn't actually Huttese, it's the language Boushh speaks

I thought it was good too. I think its only weakness was that there wasn't enough story to fill its time.

I love that book. The discovery by Brother Francis was especially hilarious, but also evocative. Another conlang I found believable is Belter creole from The Expanse series, which necessitates hand gestures, since it is mostly spoken by people in space suits who can not see expressions.

That’s awesome!

Ooh, when I clicked on translate, it showed me the rest of your comment in English. Good job (this time), Auto-translate. EDIT: Can you tell if it did it correctly?

Ido kaj du aliaj estas eĉ menciitaj en la filmeto 😉

@@resourceress7 I've simply read it en la lingvo internacia Esperanto.

In Chinese, we have three separate words for _fry_ : pan fry (煎), stir fry (炒), and deep fry (炸).

Belter Creole. The in-universe origins were that the people who came to live in the Astroid Belt, mining and trawling resources for Earth and Mars, were from many different nations on Earth and over time, forced to live in Space on extended contracts, had descendants that never really learned their ancestors' languages, instead developing a patóis language that incorporated them all. You could actually hear hints of Swahili, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Japanese and more in some of the words, and Belter culture incorporates a lot from the Earth cultures that birthed their ancestors including tattoos similar to what you see in Polynesian cultures

Check out the interview Ars Technica did Nick Farmer. He's the person who developed Belter for The Expanse.

Having recently watched The Expanse for the first time, I am fascinated by the Lang Belta. It is actually believable, that such a language could evolve from a hodge-podge of different earth languages. You can even understand the odd word or part of sentence just from inferring from other real world languages. The most interesting aspect is, that most words have their origin in more than one language, making it a true amalgamation. For example the word "kopeng" for friend is an mix of the french word "copain" for friend and the mandarin word "péngyu" for friend. I would really like to play a campaign in the Expanse RPG, just to have a reason to learn and use that language (and maybe even expand on it).

​@@rd3299 I'm only sad it didn't make an appearance in this great video!

That is pretty much what it means, since that's likely the oly place you will find another speaker.

@@kyleellis1825 hmmmm, you may have a point there!

I second your suggestion. In the meantime, the NativLang channel has a good video about Hangul. It's part of a series on writing systems.

Another word I think about is that in most languages “beer” is very similar, but in Spain and Portugal it is cerveza/cerveja.

that has been done so many times already. check out Esperanto and Lojban

you might think it's just like that, but the problem is that it creates biases. for example, english, being the most commonly spoken language, would be favoured over other languages. english is an indo-european language, like german, french, spanish, hindi/urdu, russian, polish, latvian, armenian, and dutch, but languages like hungarian and chinese and japanese and georgian and indonesian are not. since indo european languages make up the most commonly spoken languages, this results in a eurocentric vocabulary that many people cannot understand. it's not an easy problem to solve. there are some words which are easy though, like cha/te (tea) and ma[ma] (mother)

yes! The pronunciation is kinda wack sometimes but its a great song and what got me into learning na'vi

Sneed, feeder of seed

It says {pIqaD} ("Klingon writing system"). A friend of mine once spelled out {chaq qaS} "It could happen" in pIqaD characters. Another person looking at it said it looked like "yes sex".

Koo-joo, gwan-kee. Cha ha ha ha ha...

I just watched part of that the other day!

Nice! Sort of the linguistic version of the musical trick a friend of mine did in high school. He could play the Mickey Mouse theme song in all sorts of styles, like Bach, or Beethoven, or Jazz, or … similar idea of applying a different set of rules. :)

Shouldn't it be appleum redum, I mean, accusative case?

This languageus interestat meum!

Tried it on Duolingo - it felt natural, but got more confusing the more lessons I did, since it borrowed from so many languages. I felt like I was code-switching every other word.

@@eddierayvanlynch6133 Honestly my brain just goes full Italian when I speak it, hand gestures and all. The problem I have is my Esperanto and Spanish from highschool sometimes trip over each other due to being similar.

mi olin e ona a!

The count very much depends on what standard you use to say it's one. If I make up a word, does that count as a new language? What if I make up enough words to form a sentence, but I don't specify a sound inventory? What if I specify a sound inventory and give phonotactic rules, but don't bother actually spelling out any words? What if I explain how to speak a language, but provide no writing system? Languages are incredibly complex beasts and there are an extremely large number of constructed ones if you relax the rules for what counts as one. I'd bet the count of 500 depends, for example, on the language being *published* and *accepted* by some community of speakers.

and "zig-a-zig 'ah" is what you call your significant other.

There definitely exists a mapping between vocabulary and conceptual space. That's what makes jargon interesting, linguistically. But language isn't *just* that mapping: it is entirely possible to express things that we do not know with language. This is probably transitive: i.e., we express what we don't know in terms of what we do, and thereby expand what we do know. Similarly, knowledge isn't entirely bounded by language. There's plenty that we know but cannot express. Some things, like the limits of logic, like the Liar's Paradox or axiomatic statements, break language and make it nonsensical, but we can nevertheless understand it. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem doesn't entirely apply to language as a whole, but it certainly indicates that language will never be complete.

Neat!

Esperanto in that film is terrible. It seems that only „Angoroj” (1964) and „Gerda Malaperis” (2006) are actual Esperanto films. Although there is no point in watching them for plot.