introducing the Megalopolian language | retconlang S1E0
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ม.ค. 2021
- finally. let's get this thing started! (more substantial stuff coming soon. I mean, not stuff that's related to this, but it is substantial and it is coming soon. you'll see)
the first episode in my new series retconlang, a show where I make conlangs based on ideas that I think have missed potential.
Futurese: jbr.me.uk/futurese.html
/ hbmmaster
conlangcritic.bandcamp.com
seximal.net
/ hbmmaster
/ janmisali
The ten downvotes are from time travelers, horrified to discover that their native Metropolian tongue was invented by a critic as a lark side project.
It seems you’ve been on reddit too long, that’s called a dislike😂
@@hannahthoms4246 lol
@@hannahthoms4246 Wait, isn't it called an Australian thumbs-up?
@EXTV You're forgetting Meme's first law:
1. The lifetime of a meme extends long beyond the viability of its humorousness.
@EXTV to be fair, that _was_ only a half-assed effort to start a comment chain lol
Coming soon:
"Conlang critic: Megalopolian"
soon™
"This vowel inventory is... Bad."
@@WowUrFcknHxC *depression at it’s finest.*
“The consonant inventory is asymmetric”
"when i say the word salad, some people think it sounds like I'm saying salad"
I know a guy who says what I think is "collar" when talking about "colour"
1:53 When I say the word sahlud, some people think it sounds kyna like I'm saying salad.
@@haeilsey let me guess: somewhere in Appalachia?
@@WarriorWildhead1337 Midwest, like Chicago to Indy area
@@haeilsey wait aren't those words pronumced thr same way
Please don't let this die at episode zero like CGP Grey's Indian Reservation series.
And yes, I hope this comment becomes doubly outdated at some point in the near future.
Hey, guys, *guess what* ?
@@decorativewingdings yaaaaaayyyyy
welp
@@ThinkAboutVic Oh well...
Gonna need a full seperate upload of colour shifted "Here's Tree" thx
th-cam.com/video/vKXu0CzRcrI/w-d-xo.html
@@sabouedcleek611 that's not color-shifted tho
@@taududeblobber221 oh i didn't read it properly
here's tree is easily his best video
plot twist: hes been making megalopolian this whole time
man
“No, not that other ongoing crisis”
Lmao if people find this video in the future they’d probably be wondering wtf happened
I'm assuming that Covid is gonna be a generational shared trauma, like the great depression.
For you future people, Coronavirus was the crisis. Thank me later.
More specifically COVID-19
assuming that the pandemic will just automatically dissappear from everyone's minds when it's gone
@@user-qd7zb4wm9b What about in 1000 years?
S1E0
* No more episodes *
* 1 year ago *
I'd love to see how AAVE effects and is effected by Megalopolian. A ton of areas in the Great Lakes Megalopolis like Chicago and Gary have huge black populations who speak an AAVE accented by the region they live in and its a rich source of ideas to pull from or poke at.
yeah that seems like a pretty important part of the lore-design here.... for instance, if this great lakes area generated the variant of english that spread outwards the most (compared to the other future englishes), then potentially an even larger amount of nonBlack people's language and culture would be influenced by AAVE linguistics than in the current real world
@@AuntBibby It's also good to note that while the dissimination is relatively slow, AAVE lexicon and grammar does flow into GAE. Where I live, we're currently seeing the generalization of the habitual be and the the ask-ax transposition [æsk] -> [æks].
I'M GONNA CRY TEARS OF JOY HE'S BACK
"this will affect the northern cities vowel shift i think" amazing
It will be great work! No doubt S1E1 will be released in 2983.
Haha
ofc he has to wait for it to actually evolve first
You may have rotated the colours around Misali, but you'll never fool me; I know that is Tree.
Imagine a future where Iqglic evolves naturally from Irish English.
based
But which dialect? In Cork and Limerick we speak very differently to Dublin, and the North is very different again. In the midlands of course, people exclusively speak Vötgil.
@@markykid8760 So, Iqglic already exists in Ireland?
I think that jack eisenmann is irish.
“Don’t worry you will get an update on this language”
Two years later:
Over 3 years in the making, but _definitely_ well worth the wait.
After 3 years in development,hopefully it would've been worth the wait!
Thanks, and have fun
"I promise you will not have to wait as long for the next episode for the next one, wich you had to wait for 3 yrs"
sometime before 2024 is still a long time
one year left, misali-human.
womp womp
holy shit i cant believe you made megalovanian
Humans like you are the reason this world is cruel
@@aguywithahand502 what
how
@Echo Undertale stans are getting desperate amirite?
like from that one game, undergame
‘Bout time for this series (remember in Futurese when Jan Misali asked why people would start saying /ji:/)
Yee.
Because … linguistically, that's the phonological change predicted? Y'know, kinda like we lost the “k” in “knight” and “knife” over the past 1000 years?
@@John_Weiss but that doesnt answer how they say /ji:/
@@frank_calvert ji: is the swedish name for the letter j...
@@rubbedibubb5017 that doesnt solve anything about this problem
fun fact, the scientists on Antarctica are starting to develop their own accent from all the isolation
i wonder what doez it sound like?
@@artifactU There isn’t much research, but so far the only change I know is ʊ to ɯ
ive looked into it & it seems the only thing that happened was some vowel slightly lenkthened
In order to keep the promise that the next episode won't take as long as this one did to come out, the release must be no later than April 16, 2024. I have faith that you can pull it off.
You have a brilliant pfp
5 days remaining
well
@@Writer_Productions_Map welp
Don't worry. You've already got a signoff for the series, and you'll never bother to make an actual one.
Unless this comment motivates you to make one. In that case, cool
I am the WarOwl, and I still...
... have no closer.
happy one and a half year anniversary
i love poppish/sodatic as names for language families it's very funny. i'm the only person in my main friend group that calls it pop. i'm glad to see this series come out, i'm excited to see more!
i would love to see what you have in mind for poppish just out of selfish curiosity to see what midlands ends up like in this too
THANK YOU for putting those words next to each other! i didn't get the gag until now
I'm totes sodatic.
Disappointed the Cokean Branch wasn't labelled as such
@@janmelantu7490
Not everything gets the right name. Sad, but true.
An AI takeover doesn't HAVE to be dystopian and depressing - it depends entirely on what the AI's utility function is.
most positive one I've seen is like in Scythe (if ignore the whole random people murdering thing but that's not really related to the ai)
Well I uh…
...
It's been 1.4 years.
"I promise you won't have to wait as long for the next episode as you did for this one"
Coming close to breaking that promise...
I will wait forever for episode 1
I usually consider conlanging as an aspect of worldbuilding for my writing. This is like doing it the opposite direction... worldbuilding as a part of conlanging. Love it.
The entire reason for Lord of the Rings was exactly this.
@@TheYoshi463 was about to say: Tolkien has entered the chat.
I adore the renaming of "modern english" as "imperial english" that's so much more to-the-point and helps clarify why it sounds the way it does
az a bonus it also makes the acronym ME less confuzing
The death of Scots on your timeline saddens me.
nothing in that video is final. tbh i dont think it would die out there will always be a few people speaking it/people will try to revive it abit
edit: i dont think it shows the death of scots i think the tree on the video was just to show the elvoution of english and he didnt anything after the langauges that wasnt english cos it wasnt relevant
@@Yoreni I don't think that revival efforts are an effective way to keep a language going, however I don't think that Scots is going to need one either, it's doing fine.
@@pentelegomenon1175 What do you think is an effective way to keep a language going?
@@donalbreathnach244 Good point, I guess revival efforts work better than anything else.
That's a lot of conceptualization for such a short video! Can't wait.
I hope Misali comes back to this series, I would love to learn more about this project and see how to make a well constructed future adaptation of a modern language. Especially through the expertise of the conlang reviewer Misali.
YEEEEAHHHHHHH BABY!!! THE OUTDOING WITH MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY IS WHERE IT IS AT!
This looks like so much fun! One thing I think would be cool to include would be how quickly meme culture words are infecting the common lexicon, but, as they are often seemingly random words assigned contextual meanings that might be hard.
you know, that's kinda language evolution in general isn't it
Language change and communication in general has always been driven by memes. Memes existed before the Internet, after all. A meme is a self-propagating idea, per its original definition.
Example: Do you use thumbs-up and thumbs-down to signal approval and disapproval, respectively? Then you're using a gestural meme that goes back 2000 years to the Roman Empire.
During gladiatorial battles, when one combatant was no longer capable of fighting, the other combatant … the winner, if you will … might want to/try to finish off the other guy. The crowd, if they wanted the loser's life to be spared, would signal this with a “thumbs down,” gesture. You heard that right - not thumbs up, but thumbs down, which meant, “Stick your sword in the ground and let him live.”
And of course, “thumbs up,” meant the exact opposite: keep your sword up, i.e. “No, _do_ kill him. Kill Him! Kill Him! Kill Him!”
Then, somewhere along the line, after the gesture became a meme that spread all over Europe, not only did the original meaning change, it got inverted.
Another example: The word, “Okay.” Regardless its origin, it's spread around the world.
@@John_Weiss nah, the meaning didn't get inverted, if you think about it. Thumbs up was approval, thumbs down was disapproval. Good and bad. Positive or negative responcses. That hasn't changed. People just got muddled about what was being approved or disapproved of in the arena. (Action vs target)
Reminds me of how the Finnish word for any type of + sign like shape, risti, comes from a greek word meaning “anouint”
"there is an old english proverb that goes like 'ok boomer', it signifies challenging rule and rising up from the people who control you"
My head canon is that this language is spoken in the Star Trek: Discovery universe, but we don't know that because the universal translators mask it from the perspective of the Discovery crew (and by extension, us).
He's back! /jiːt/
Please continue this series
I've actually been working on a 5-conlang language family with this exact idea (with languages based on NYC English, Southern American, Great Lakes English, Californian English, and AAVE). It's really helped me realize just how little exposure I've had to NYC, Great Lakes and Californian English.
damn it would have been really cool if he ever made a second one...
plz help
Hue rotated "Here's tree" is my new religion.
"Here's tree" was already my religion
@@geeknotgamer1985 crusade
I have been (not so) patiently waiting for the continuation of this series. When It released it inspired me to pick up and revamp an old conlang of mine based on the dialect of English that I speak. I was gonna make the entire continental western United States into a big Dialect Continuum because those seem very fun to me. I haven't gotten very far at all into this version of "Basinish" yet because my brain makes it hard to focus on stuff usually but I thought it was a fun project and it might be cool for a whole bunch of people from different areas to make their own future english variety and work together to create the world of 2983.
I can already feel the blursed energy radiating from this language
I promise you won't have to wait as long for the next episode as you did for this one. That's good. At most 2 more years until the next episode!
one year left, misali-human.
I want ep 2 😭
You mean ep. 01
the "this will affect the northern cities vowel shift i think" meme is killing me oh my god
One year and still only one video
If I may be so bold, I believe calling it ‘Megalopolitan’ would make more sense (or at least sound cooler).
Love your channel btw.
Maybe in their language the word is different.
this is amazing thank you clong critic
clong?
@@mariafe7050 clong
@@pikksen7905 Filters. (obsolete) Past participle of cling. verb.
You talked about what languages they might speak on extraterrestrial settlements: There's this really awesome (and very scientifically accurate) TV show called "The Expanse" that takes place in a fairly distant future where Earth has colonized Mars and the Asteroid Belt. In fact, so much time has passed since the colonization that Martians and Belters have become a distinctly different breed of human from the Earthers. What's super interesting is that the Belters have developed a Belter Creole based off of those who first went to work in the belt, might be worth a look! 👀👀
...soooo how's it goin'?
No joke I was in middle school when the futurese episode came out and now I'm in college
wow
feel old yet?
I must say, I have no interest in languages, nor do I know what conlangs are, but I absolutely love listening to you speak about random stuff like hangman, languages, shapes, weird counting systems that I've never heard of, Mario, and Rhythm Heaven. God bless you man, you are an amazing man with your voice and your topic choices (I get super interested in this stuff whenever I watch your videos lol)
Language evolving speed will probably be quite different in the future than it was in the past.
Word population is still growing exponentially and we probably write way more now.
On the other side internet will probably act as a brake on the diffusion of local linguistic variations... umm
I have to be inclined to disagree. I think that the way language changes will be different because of the internet, but the overall rate of change will remain similar.
As anecdotal evidence, consider that it only took me less than an 80 minute class session to change how the professor pronounced the word 'root' ( [rut] -> [rɞt] ) just by saying it a lot (they reverted back to saying it their way later, but I stand by this point). Plus you have to consider that there exist people like me who pronounce [proʊˈnʌns] words atypically on purpose to get under prescriptivists skin, and some of them'll stick.
That was my gripe with the video, the assumption that English in the 11th century is as equally different from 21st century English as 21st century English will be from 30th century English. Language change isn't just a consistent process that produces the same level of change at a certain rate.
In less than a few hundred years, Latin splintered off into barely recognizable daughter languages with the case system and verb conjugation system virtually gone (with the exception of Romanian which still retains a dual case system), while Greek remained extremely similar with most of the case system and common verb conjugations intact after thousands of years.
Or a better example is the development of Balkan Slavic. Bulgarian lost the vast majority of the Proto-Slavic case system and verb conjugation system, while neighbouring Serbian retained almost all of it. They both had similar histories in the same location i.e. Slavic migrants to the Balkans, same religious and administrative language (Church Slavonic), influenced by Christian Greek society, and later Islamic Turkish society but they both developed completely differently in the same length of time.
I understand that it's an easy conceptualization to use for imagining how a language could evolve, using the language's past, but the real world doesn't work like that.
But it's certainly interesting to think about how future technology and societies will affect the rate of language change. Will the breaking down of international borders and unification of linguistically diverse groups create radical change and the birth of languages we cannot even imagine, or will future education allow the current standard to be forced onto many diverse groups without considerable change for a very long time?
Honestly, I'm looking forward to seeing how internet subcultures influence English orthography. Various memes use nonstandard spellings that are more or less legible, for example. It's entirely possible that at least some of these nonstandard spellings might become part of informal speech.
LMAO yt updated while i was watching this vid and now the description and comments look completely different
THE BOY MAKING HIS OWN LANGS LETS GOOOOOOOOO
This is such an awesome idea for a conlang/worldbuilding project! Excited to see what the rest of this season and future seasons will hold!
please continue this
Where is the S1E1 edition of retconlang, when you will start making the conlang??? Please jan Misali......
I was waiting for this and I'm extremely overjoyed
I love this! Please do more retconlangs!
yeahhhh!! as somebody from Toledo, OH, i feel so honored by the acknowledgement of Great Lakes English.
cannot wait to see the grammaticalization of "ope"
fun question: will megolopolian have its own norman invasion?
The great leftist migration, in which leftists from all across the United States migrate to the Great Lakes Region, inspired by the rightwing failed free state project, occurs between 2056 and 2059.
@@ookazi1000 that's sounds a bit too early.
This is amazing timing. Just over a week ago I obsessively tried to find the promised video on this topic that I thought already existed and here it is!
Remember that how fast does a language split apart is determined by how much contact with other speakers of said language there is.
After the fall of rome latin split into Romance langs despite being one language for a 1000yrs
I laughed so loud when I saw that timeline at 4:18 I wasn't expecting you to consider 3 different periods :D
splitting the life of a language into three different time periods is pretty common in linguistics i think. but yeah that timeline is hilarious
Gotta do something with Kansas Citian English. Most people think that the accent around Kansas City is just the lack of an accent when this just isn’t that case. Like how your is pronounced more like yer.
4:56 boy is that a pretty bold assumption to make. Different languages develop at different speeds depending on technological and social factors, as well as how widespread they are.
…as well as how much of a cultural tendency there is for the young to linguistically innovate.
German, for example, as been notorious for the past 70 years for having an “youth-language” that becomes part of the standard language as those youth age into adulthood. Meanwhile, a new “youth-language” develops and the process repeats.
[This is how the German word „geil“, meaning, “horny,” has changed into an expression meaning, “cool” [as in “awesome”] within 30 years. In the 1980s, using „geil“ would get shocked looks from the older generation. Now? Today's parents and even grandparents will talk about, say buying a car that's really „geil“.
It still means “horny” when used to describe animals, however.]
@@John_Weiss I know right! And this is something that is absolutely normal during a period of rapid technological development. In general, territorial/influence expansion to a language tends to simplify its grammar, economic/technological progress changes its vocabulary, subordination tends to make it lend words and phrases and finally seclusion makes it more conservative and archaic. My language, Greek, has interestingly gone through all of those phases at some point in its history, and as far as I know it is the only one (well maybe English or French as well but they weren't quite "subordinated" except if you count Norman rule in Britain and Roman rule in France). This is part of why I was so keen on pointing out this fact. Language isn't a code, it's a way of life, and as is the case with everything living, it evolves in unique ways, every language is different in a variety of ways and word/grammar retention is also one of them.
Episode two comes out one day I'm sure of it
So um hello from the middle of the next year, is this project over then? Really cool idea so I'm sad there wasn't anything done on it after this, but maybe I'll just have to make one for the west coast myself...
im not one to tell you what to do, but this show would be the light of my life
Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is written in an imagined dialect spoken by people who live on the Moon. It's still intelligible with the English spoken today, but with some unusual vocabulary. Also, there seem to be no grammatical articles, which I think is supposed to be the result of Russian influence on the dialect.
I literally heard “when I say salad, some people think I’m saying salad” 😂
I remember waiting for this when the original Futurese video came out... which I just realised was 3 years ago. This is oddly terrifying in a way that I can't really explain
This is such a long series, I don't know if ill ever be able to catch up to the latest episode.
I don't know why, but at first I read "Megalovanian language" and thought: "God, undertale fans can't stop, can they?"
I’m so excited for this series! it looks awesome so far!!
Welcome back jan! Amazing idea for a series
aaa this project seems so cool! i’m really excited about all the historical/geopolitical events you’re taking into account and what insight this could provide on the way language develops over time
Man this is exactly something I've been hoping for ever since I discovered Futurese several years ago!! I can't wait to see what you come up with.
Never clicked faster xD
I cant wait to see what progress you make with this! The idea of a future english is fascinating to me, especially because it’s certainly an underused idea.
Catching a Jan Misali upload on the day? Hype!
I've been thinking of doing this for a while, but I am so glad someone else already is. It's way easier to critique someone else's hard work than to make something yourself. Looking forward to the next one! :)
I hope you do more of this series this is very fun
Exciting! I look forward to seeing more.
Specific to the question of how culture will influence the evolution of the language, I'll be interested in specifically when and how there are sociopolitical forces for a uniform standard language, versus when fragmentation happens.
Also, how could omnipresent translation software affect the relationship between English and its descendants, or its descendants with each other? If people can look at a text in Imperial English and see it in their language with little cost or effort, that might cement it as a standard -- or lessen the need for any standard.
I've been waiting this ever since the Futurese video! So excited!
I'm looking forward to this, but feel free to make episodes as often or as rarely as you want. Also, if you ever get stuck I'm sure the community would be happy to shout random things into the void until one of them somehow causes you to think of something completely unrelated that solves your problem (or at least, that's how it works in movies right?). Besides, I hear Community Polls are good for the TH-cam Algorithm!
I really would like you to make this a regular series because I love the idea!
I’d imagine that all English dialects are only going to become more and more similar to eachother as the world becomes more and more connected.
You could incorporate this into Megalopolian by adopting features of other American/Canadian dialects.
In some ways dialects become more similar, due to the cultural hegemony of American media.
I can imagine certain dialects becoming more distinct, in an attempt to push back against that, and retain it's own identity.
And then some of the words from those dialects probably make their way back into the hegemonic dialect.
Canadian and American accents are like oil and water. Tell someone that they sound like the other country, and their accent will start moving away from the border. lol
Yeah, I Feel Like Largely Due To The Internet It Will Be Harder For New Languages To Naturally Evolve Now, Atleast From Widely Spoken Ones Like English, As You'd Often Be Interacting With Many People From All Over The World Who Speak It, Likely With Different Accents/Dialects, But As You Interact With Them More Your Dialect And Theirs Will Become More Similar, Maybe They Use Some Word Or Expression A Lot And You Start To Pick It Up Too, Or They Pronounce One Word Oddly, But Due To Interaction With You (And Other Speakers) They Move More Towards The Standard Pronounciation.
Ofcourse There Will Also Be Cases Like Me, Where People Have A Dialect Combining Features Of Several Different Ones, Simply Due To Moving Around A Lot.
Thiiiis is something i have been thinking about for yeaaars already! Wonderful vid, pal!
YES!!!!! i have been excited since you first mentioned this and it paid off entirely!
so uh are we ever getting more of this??
just wait patiently for 2983
Excited for this series!
Still will wait forever for episode 1
i'm legit hyped to see the next episodes. English is far from being my fav language but it's my first time hearing about predictive conlangs so that oughta be interesting
im so excited for ep 1!
2:50 here's tree
I've been waiting for this video for years