i like that misali always notes that dead creators are "late" no matter how long ago they lived. a conlanger could have been born in 500 BC and misali would still make sure to let us know he's dead now, just in case we were worried a 2,500 year old vampire conlanger was hanging around
JmmiP 20 shouldn't that just be [fjʉ] or [fçʷʉ] unless you have some weird accent that turns f into ɸ and why the hell is çʷ in there? we don't need a voiceless palatal fricative and a voiced palatal fricative after each other. No person hears the difference between the 2. çʷjʉ is stupid. And why is there a regular u at the end too.
The Major well most people do you use the bilabual as they don’t pronounce it as a word. The last u signals a diphthong so is somewhat required, the rest is up for debate though
That description was admittedly very egregious. It's obvious Brown never learned IPA and had only a weak grasp on phonology. One of the annoyances in his "Loglan 1" is that he uses English eye-spellings throughout the book. These are unnecessary ballast given that the language's spelling and pronunciation are isomorphic and thus shouldn't require explaining throughout the book.
The letter x is used to represent that consonant cluster, yes. However, the IPA character /x/ isn't the same as the latin alphabet's x, and is used in IPA to denote a voiceless velar fricative. (If you're unfamiliar with what that means, try to say the letter k and draw it out - /x/ is the sound you're making).
He mistook the American Phonetic Alphabet for the International Phonetic Alphabet; that's where the fricatives with diacritics come from. I had a semester of undergrad phonology with a textbook that used the APA and it was awful.
The APA has very different goals, mainly related to language discovery (like describing unwritten languages for the first time) it's not meant to be as rigid as IPA because IPA doesn't work in field linguistics.
@@cliffarroyo9554 You’re right. It’s similar with the Slavic transcription, except that is also used a lot in historical linguistics. I must say I find it way more convenient than the IPA in this regard. It is specialized and works well for its purpose. I find longer transcriptions way more readable at a glance. I also think it’s good to know different transcriptions to avoid a mistake that you equate the IPA symbol to the sound. It sounds dumb the way I just wrote it but reading stuff by language hobbyists on the internet sometimes makes me think they honestly think IPA symbols are sounds. Not to mention that some IPA sounds are used or described in an ambiguous way, which confuses a ton of people.
The guy who created this: "I'm gonna make a logical language! Also it's spelled inconsistently, pronounced inconsistently, and scientific words have a special set of spelling rules" good job
@@sunflower_ace: This is a brivla. Moreover, it is a gismu, so it has to be CCVCV or CVCCV. You are proposing a cmevla. Your proposal is perfectly good for that role, although there is a uniform way of generating modern country names.
The use of c, s, and z with háček used to be common in the “Americanist” school of linguistics; it’s not some weird notation that Brown came up with on his own, but was a standard alternative to the usual IPA symbol. The goal was to be usable on a regular typewriter, where you could backspace, rotate the platen up a bit, and type a v over the previous letter. Cumbersome but possible, unlike typing an esh or ezh. There were some other typewriter alternatives, but I guess linguists studying American languages didn’t usually need most of the other untypable IPA symbols.
Even though I think that Loglan would be a terrible international language, I would defend him by saying that the original intent of Loglan was to actually test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
In defense of the use of [š] and [ž], while they might not be standard ipa, they *are* standard for those sounds in the *American* phonetic alphabet so it's really not that weird
I mostly agree with this. Brown developed Loglan mostly before the Internet, which these days provides not only a lot of conlanging info but critical feedback from real people. He also did most of his work before formal semantic approaches back in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered by Montague, began to show the deep connections between the logical languages of mathematics and the natural languages. As far as I can tell very little or none of that work found its way into Loglan/Lojban. The result comes from Brown doing his best with the knowledge and ability that he had, and the Lojbanists trying to patch up the rest.
The Lojban word for walk is *cadzu* You may be thinking of *klama,* not kalma, meaning go/come. Also, the Toki Pona word for come is apparently *kama* so it shouldn't be that foreign to you.
Yes there is more than one error in the vocab segment. "Patfu" is Lojban and "farfu" is Loglan for father. Also, for mother, the Lojban is "mamta" and the Loglan is "matma" (similar but not the same). Another thing, in Loglan but not in Lojban, in cultural words like "ponjo" the final vowel can change to mean different things. So "ponji" means Japanese _person(s)_. You can see the similarities, which are inevitable since the base words are being put together in a similar way, in similar form (CVCCV and CCVCV), from similar aposteriori sources, but only a few base words are exactly alike across both languages. "Blanu" meaning blue is one of the few examples of an identical non-cultural base word.
Another screwup: There is no word "kalma" in Lojban. Mitch probably meant "klama", but this word does not mean walk like he says; it means go (specifically, go by vehicle, a meaning opposite of walking). Except for "lodji"/"logji", virtually all the vocabulary discussion in this video was marred with careless errors.
Not necessarily opposite of walking. "klama be fu lo zu'o cadzu" (or its lexicalised abbreviation "dzukla") is "go by walking". x5 is "vehicle/means", which can be "a bus", or can be "the process of walking"; the selbri is all about changing one's location, and is unspecified on the mode of transportation, until one fills that fifth argument.
Mike S. And actually dzoru sounds a lot like 走路 in Mandarin which spells zou lu, so this word might be more familiar to Mandarin speakers than English speakers.
I think Lojbanists who insist that Lojban doesn't have any verbs bring up the distinction between the syntactical value of a given word from its morphological one. A word with the morphological value of a verb can take the syntactical role of a predicate of a sentence, while the same role can be filled by Lojban's whatever it was called.
If you actually study predicate logic, it makes sense how they aren't technically verbs. Like if I say "tavla," I'm basically identifying my sentence as being about a speaker, and audience, a subject, and a language of communication, in that order. The selbri are roughly comparable to verbs, but overall they're more like sentence identifiers, identifying the basic form of the sentence being uttered. A verb basically only defines a relationship between a subject and a direct object, whereas a selbri predicates a relationship between literally all of the components of the sentence. So if I were to semantically compare it to anything, I'd call it a word that functions as multiple verbs and also all of the prepositions in the sentence.
I have not studied predicate logic, but I don't think this is entirely correct. Verbs can have more arguments than subject and object in natural languages; consider the English word "trade" (four argument places, one of which is marked with a preposition).
one of the defining features of loglan is the fact that words can be used as verbs or nouns or adjectives or adverbs, the part of speech depends on word order. so, no, the word "primitive" isn't just a nonstandard term for "verb".
Lojban literally came from Loglan. Loglan was first, but a bunch of speakers wanted to reform it, but the creator of Loglan didn’t want to change it, and said speakers ended up making up their own version of Loglan, which we know as Lojban.
If anyone is serious about linguistics and conlanging, reading Loglan 1 is a must for him/her. One of the books of my life. A couple hundred pages will guide you through the fascinating and arduous process of the language development and will put you in a position to make an informed judgement of Loglan.
While James Cook Brown was indeed terrible at describing those sounds, his notation is in fact mostly legit; it's *not* IPA (which he may or may not have been terrible at, had he tried to actually use it), but it is valid Americanist transcription, which is appropriate for the period, before IPA became as widely popular as it is today.
My review of your review: You made a LOT of careless errors in the vocabulary section (see my responses elsewhere in these comments), but you did at least pronounce the Lojban and Loglan words correctly. What shows in your series is this: You are very passionate about phonological design, especially with respect to interlang sensibilities, and not so concerned with other aspects of conlang design. However once you've cooked up your sound set and decided your phonotactics, the majority of work in conlang creation actually involves decisions re morphology, lexicon, syntax, pragmatics, etc. In the case of the two Loglanic languages (Loglan and Lojban), the design work also involved a lot of choices regarding representing logical form/semantics. The most damning criticism of these two languages is to be found not in their phonology and orthography but in the painful baroqueness of the morphology and the various problems with establishing logical form, but you have glossed over the issues entirely. I understand you can't be expected to have intimate knowledge of decades of design and debate, but it should be stated without even a passing mention of these issues your review comes across as superficial.
you know what zese, lightning never strikes the same place twice! a common if untrue statement. but you know what they don't zese, Lightning can miss the mark repeatedly and no one is the wiser (I had a joke about the Creator of Vötgil and Zese but I forgot it.)
A gismu isn't a verb. It's any word that fits into the standard CCVCV or CVC(C)CU structure. These are the basic root words that have meanings on their own. The "verbs" that you're referring to aren't quite comparable to verbs. They're called "selbri," which is basically their word for "logical predication between ideas that is recognized within the language." The best I can describe it as is that a selbri is a word that defines the meaning of all of the other words in the sentence. For example, if I said "John cu tavla Misali Lojban English," that simple "cu tavla" basically fills in all of these gaps: "(there exists so that there is a speaker named) John, (and also a receiver of speach named) Misali, (in such context that the subject of conversation is) Lojban, (and since speaking logically involves a language of communication, the language being used by John is) English." Which I guess you could basically translate to "John talks to Misali about Lojban in English." Even then, though, "tavla" is clearly more than just a verb, because it also implies the words "about" and "in" when referring to Lojban and English. Also, call me crazy, but I actually found that most of Lojban words made intuitive sense when I saw them. Not literally all of them, but still most of them.
The reason different types of words are denoted in a non-standard way (predicates and the like) is definitely because of how this language was meant to function. On the surface, predicate logic may seem somewhat similar to the natural logic that is somewhat inherent to most people. And in fact, everything that works in natural (or propositional) logic can be rewritten in predicate logic. The difference comes in that predicate logic is much more abstract in how truths are reached. The biggest change is that instead of logical "atoms" (which regardless of their meaning can only have a finite number of truth values), predicates act as a qualitative evaluation of a variable of the domain, which means they have infinitely possible values. It also means that their values depend on what that value is in any given interpretation. While it's still entirely possible to prove/disprove theorems in predicate logic, it requires an entirely new way of thinking. So yes, it probably would have verbs and the like, but I'm pretty sure this guy - being a mathematician - was really trying to outline the overall grammatical structure that would indeed make this language very unique (and also incredibly hard to learn /interpret). I mean, imagine if when stating something you had to outline a general predicate formula in which your situation could apply, then follow that with "where one interpretation may be defined as" and then finally saying what you wanted to say in the first place lol. Really good tool for learning math... not so much a good tool for communicating information lol. Idk if that's how it was meant to work but that would be the most direct translation of predicate logic to written logic in my mind so... yeah.
If anyone is reading through the comment section, notice how The Conlang Critic never replies to comments that claim he's factually mistaken. No thanks; no apologies; no promise to do better research.
@@whatno5090 Well that was just because I researched and enjoyed Lojban enough to notice his mistakes and uncharitable takes. More so than his other videos. I don't think that is an ulterior motive, although I would prefer he (1) researched enough to avoid making mistakes and (2) be accountable when he does. He seems to take more care with his recent videos but considering his Lojban video was his first Conlang Critic video, he could have had enough integrity to admit his mistakes instead of doubling down and changing his intro to "the show that gets facts wrong about your favourite conlangs," to dodge criticism.
I don't understand why it's necessary for an international language to be fully compatible with at least one other language. Isn't it better that everyone has to learn a little something extra?
Jan Misali believes it's better to have a language that strips everything down to as little words, sounds as possible (toki ping) than to just learn a new phonetic sound.
I feel like the reviews have gotten much better the deeper you go into the playlist. Hopefully in the future there will be a vid on any major updates in the conlang scene.
Voksigid was different from its predecessor engelangs in that its content words explicitly had verbs as semantic and morphological roots, and that its lexicon was clearly drawn from a largely homogenous pool of sources (Standard Average European), while it's syntax was based on deliberate inversion of that of Japanese (which ultimately meant that out of all natural languages, typologocally it most closesly resembled those of the South Pacific and Mesoamerica). There was really no other language like it, hence it's a pity it never got past square one.
So you started your conlang review show about how much you hated lojban but claim to have only done one day of research prior to making that video? whaaaaaaaaaatttt
Oops, I put answering your comment on the back-burner and basically forgot about it, but nope. I do not think this statement or disclaimer really excuses anything. I'm not saying that Jan Misali can't give his opinions, because reviews and opinions are subjective. In fact, I'd love to hear opinions and stuff from the conlang critic about stuff in conlangs he likes. It's just that this disclaimer and what I pointed out betrays a certain level of unprofessionalism and ...disrespect? Really, do you think Jan Misali really just wants to make stuff up about the conlangs he reviews? No, but he spends one month (maximum) reading about a conlang and makes a video with this disclaimer so viewers like you can point it out whenever someone raises a little disagreement. Has he even really made a factual error in his videos? Just sticky corrections and be graceful if someone points out a honest mistake, dude. Don't go, "hey welcome to the conlang critic, where the facts are made up and the points don't matter so I made a ranking system that matters even less!"
The Bronze Messiah It sort of does: He stated that the Lojban word for *father* is *farfu* and argued that it does not sound like padre or papa, etc. However, the word for father is actually *patfu,* so his point is moot; He claimed that *.i* was useless as "it should be clear that you're about to speak because you're about to speak," but that argument is also moot, because *.i* is a way to separate sentences *(la MIsalin. cu tavla fi la lojban. .i mi se bangu la lojban* - Misali talks about Lojban. I speak Lojban.); He mentioned *zoi* and made it sound like a bad thing; He mentioned *zo'o* as though it's a bad thing (zo'onai ko sisti - Seriously, stop!) He said the grammar system was bad, but gave no examples of how it worked. I'm not concluding Lojban is flawless, but he did essentially create a straw-man to destroy and not the actual language.
See my top-level reply. Lojban sucks in many ways, but it's also an amazing achievement that has yet to be bettered at what it's meant to do. It likely has the most complete grammar of any constructed language ever (I'm paraphrasing Anita Okrent's "In the Land of Invented Languages."). It can be incredibly expressive - just listen to the album "ZA'O" by Djemynai, a full-length rap album in Lojban you can find on BandCamp, or check out the translations of Alice in Wonderland or Wislawa Szymborska's poetry. Enabled by its unambiguous morphology, it has an awesome dictionary/translator application, La Sutysisku, which breaks down any Lojban sentence into its morphemes and provides definitions for each of them. And Lojban does so much cool stuff linguistically, like allowing you to express complex emotional states and evidentiality with just a few syllables.
I imagine that research involved copying information from a Wikipedia page. Watch the Lojban video and tell me you actually learnt anything about the language or how it works.
I think Lojban has separate names because the English words and definitions aren't very precise or systematic. As to not really fit the precision of what they actually are in Lojban. For learning convenience, they should be introduced as such though.
What I want to know is why you say every midlide over an open fore untrinded clipple instead of a onefold midway clipple, or even only the midlide itself. Also, love the new upbeat mood.
As far as the Japanese word for father is concerned お父さん (otoosan) is far from the only way to say it and is actually supposed to be used about someone else's father whereas one's own is 父 (chichi). But when said in a compound it could sound like the "fu" part of farfu as in 父母 (fubo) = father and mother or parents. Linking mamta to any of the equivalent forms for mother though is another story: neither お母さん (okaasan), nor 母 (haha) nor the "bo" of 父母 sound anything like mamta.
1:35 vox somewhat recently did a video on the topic of how languages use "r" and "l" compared to English, although it basically only focuses on Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. In the comments though there's a few people talking about other languages that don't distinguish r and l. I think it's really cool and you should give it a watch! th-cam.com/video/2yzMUs3badc/w-d-xo.html
The quote about special rules for biological species names seems to ignore the fact that the bacterium Escherichia was named after a guy called Escherich, whose name was definitely not pronounced "es-kehr-reek." Maybe it was more important to the Loglan peeps to have consistent pronunciation, but it's interesting that they picked an example where streamlining the name makes it less helpful because it obscures the original meaning.
There are natural languages with different internal logic, for example the topic-focused syntax of Japanese can be a weird thing for speakers of subject-focused languages such as English to wrap their head around, so a conlanger could hardly be faulted for trying to play around with structures, it isn't necessarily a Sapir-Whorf thing.
What's wrong with having two of the same vowel in a row? It's a neat feature that is rare, but does occur in some languages. For example the Swedish word "fan" (devil) is /ˈfäːˌän/, and that's kind of neat.
5:40 I get that it's hard to pronounce the same vowel twice in a row, but that's a thing in Spanish for example, in words like leer, creer, proveer and so on, so it's at least possible.
Just as a heads up you used "mama" as the Russian example for lojban but "otyets" for loglan, the consistent options would either have been "mama" and "papa" or "mat'" and "otyets", it's about the same difference as "mom and dad" vs "mother and father" in English.
I'm really enjoying your series. if you're taking requests through the TH-cam comments, how about any of the David Peterson languages - how about High Valyrian, or Trigedasleng?
Amir Swrr, have you not seen David Peterson's book Living Language Dothraki? It's basically a learning guide for Dothraki. For legal reasons, he did need approval from the show's producers and such, but it's been on the shelves for a while now. Peterson seems to really enjoy when fans try to learn his languages, so I don't think it would be a problem if our resident Conlang Critic takes a stab at them.
"Yes, Jim, palato-alveolar consonants are written with heckin', tone diacritics over alveolar consonants, good job." is a dense, extremely specialized criticism, but it's delivered as if insulting someone for forgetting how to tie their shoes. I love it.
I feel like you ignore a type of conlang distinct for IAL or artlang: the engilang. Obviously not as much of a problem because there's no more ranking, but just wanted to be that guy
I suppose the similar vocabularies of logban and loglan demonstrate that they derived words with similar methods in a logical non-arbitrary way. Kind of like how different mathematical equations can be used to approximate pi though they will be slightly different from eachother.
6:30 but does it sound like chichi, which is another word used for father? It doesn't, but I'd at least expect you to compare this word and not otousan
German is missing /w/ and . If is also a vowel, it's only . German underlyingly, german has /ç/, but /x/ might also be there, but is limited in distribution to after back vowels.
What's wrong with a "whatever rhotic?" If the pronunciation doesn't change the word, I'm fine with either. Some languages don't use trilled rhotics; others exclusively trill. Of courses, there are also some languages that don't use any rhotics, but if I can learn to use /x/ or /ʀ/, they can learn /r/ or /ɹ/. They're much easier, in comparison.
And it makes sense to use the lojban words, especially since the lojban terms can be (and are) defined precisely, whilst the English terms would have been ambiguous.
StrategicGamesEtc ... the Lojbanists could have simply given singular and precise definitions for parts of speech already in use. Linguists have to do it all the time if something in one language is similar but not the same to that concept in another language. It would be much simpler for anyone trying to learn Lojban.
I still think lojban is better reviewed as an artlang than as an interlang. In my opinion, it's very much an experimental language, and while I think it's silly that the creators said it could be used as an interlang, I also think even they knew it's primary purpose was as an artlang.
Oh yeah, you definitely got facts wrong about both of these conlangs. Like, a ton of facts. Like, Lojban for "father" is actually "patfu." (and if you look it up, you will indeed see how it's derived from all of its source languages) Ponjo also sounds a lot like a combination of the words "nippon" (another translation of nihon) with "Japan." And overall, the vocabulary is very different, so your claims are all wrong. Just speaking as someone who actually bought the book on Lojban. And just so you know, Toki Pona.
John Hooyer It really annoys me. Not that he got facts wrong, but because he refuses to admit it. He thinks, if he says "he gets facts wrong" in the introduction, he doesn't need to mention what mistakes he makes. He could do it so easily: he could just add a comment that lists each error and give an apology.
Of course a language would have their own words. Likewise, they'd have words describing their types of words: a fu'ivla is a borrowed word, a lujvo is a word combining gismu, etc. I don't know why you have a problem with that.
Isn't 9/20 of all languages more common than than some of the other sounds in Lojbans inventory. It doesn't really matter though, because glottal stops are so absurdly easy to pronounce that worrying about whether learners of Lojban would be able to learn to is absolutely ridiculous. Just because a sound (or lack of sound in this case) isn't in your native language doesn't automatically make it hard for you to pronounce.
i like that misali always notes that dead creators are "late" no matter how long ago they lived. a conlanger could have been born in 500 BC and misali would still make sure to let us know he's dead now, just in case we were worried a 2,500 year old vampire conlanger was hanging around
@John Doe Thank you, I now know that you think this is funny!
@@chud-dot-us-dot-gov fish
except for J. R. R. Tolkien
@@themobiusfunction except that tolkien is still alive or that he didn't say "late tolkien"
to be fair, a vampiric conlanger is a cool idea.
[ɸçʷjʉu]
Never considered the fact that "phew" could be written in IPA
JmmiP 20 [ʘɸʉ̥] - blowing a kiss
JmmiP 20 shouldn't that just be [fjʉ] or [fçʷʉ]
unless you have some weird accent that turns f into ɸ and why the hell is çʷ in there? we don't need a voiceless palatal fricative and a voiced palatal fricative after each other. No person hears the difference between the 2. çʷjʉ is stupid. And why is there a regular u at the end too.
The Major well most people do you use the bilabual as they don’t pronounce it as a word. The last u signals a diphthong so is somewhat required, the rest is up for debate though
You mean [ç̍ʷː˦˩]?
@@livedandletdie Many if not most Americans typically pronounce /u/ as a dipthong like [ʉ͡u], [ɨ͡u], [ɯ͡u], or [ɨ͡ʉ]
That /x/ description hurt me inside.
That description was admittedly very egregious. It's obvious Brown never learned IPA and had only a weak grasp on phonology. One of the annoyances in his "Loglan 1" is that he uses English eye-spellings throughout the book. These are unnecessary ballast given that the language's spelling and pronunciation are isomorphic and thus shouldn't require explaining throughout the book.
Isnt "X" like a /ks/ type sound?
At least in English and American English?
The letter x is used to represent that consonant cluster, yes. However, the IPA character /x/ isn't the same as the latin alphabet's x, and is used in IPA to denote a voiceless velar fricative. (If you're unfamiliar with what that means, try to say the letter k and draw it out - /x/ is the sound you're making).
When are you going to start doing reviews?
Just think "xaxaxa"
I'm guessing eight in Loglan is "vo" and most is "re"?
Uhh Maybe
Conlang Critic i checked it does mean eight most XD
What's so bad about vore?
@@thegay keep your innocence and never go to the darker side of the internet
@@thegay Nothing, eating is very normal
He mistook the American Phonetic Alphabet for the International Phonetic Alphabet; that's where the fricatives with diacritics come from. I had a semester of undergrad phonology with a textbook that used the APA and it was awful.
The APA has very different goals, mainly related to language discovery (like describing unwritten languages for the first time) it's not meant to be as rigid as IPA because IPA doesn't work in field linguistics.
@@cliffarroyo9554 You’re right. It’s similar with the Slavic transcription, except that is also used a lot in historical linguistics. I must say I find it way more convenient than the IPA in this regard. It is specialized and works well for its purpose. I find longer transcriptions way more readable at a glance.
I also think it’s good to know different transcriptions to avoid a mistake that you equate the IPA symbol to the sound. It sounds dumb the way I just wrote it but reading stuff by language hobbyists on the internet sometimes makes me think they honestly think IPA symbols are sounds. Not to mention that some IPA sounds are used or described in an ambiguous way, which confuses a ton of people.
The guy who created this: "I'm gonna make a logical language! Also it's spelled inconsistently, pronounced inconsistently, and scientific words have a special set of spelling rules" good job
"Also it's spelled inconsistently, pronounced inconsistently..."
How so?
I think this language says more about its author than its speakers
Just get a Brain transplant! You'll still not get it, but at least do don't remember being confused.
And it uses unfamiliar terms no one will recognize to obscure the fact that it is in fact a language with verbs.
Lojban video: critiques by saying people might mispronounce /ə/ as /ʌ/
Loglan video: mispronounces /ə/ as /ʌ/
*slow clap*
*slow,*
*slow,*
*slow clap*
I literally can't distinguish between those two sounds
same here
I don’t believe that they are different sounds
on a related note
can anyone else not distinguish /e/ and the other e i cant write on an ascii keyboard
@@HBMmaster ə as in about; ʌ as in strut
The vowels for My conlang are: Ooh Eeh Ooh Ah Aah
and the constanants are: Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang
Ooh eeh ooh ah ah?
i feel like if you put enough effort into this idea it can rival kay(f)bop(t)
Ooh ting, ooh ah ah bang.
ooo eee oo aa aaa ting tang wallawalla bing bang
@@otesunki ting tadaaa
That is what Zese my friend
One nitpick: since one of the readings for 日本 is "Nippon", the word "ponjo" doesn't seem very weird at all.
I don't think they ever said it was weird. Just that the Logban and Lojban words are exactly the same.
ponjo is like pig-latinised version of jopon, idk.
1:42 rip, many Japanese speakers have a hard time telling the difference between /l/ and /r/
Still could've beeb CVCVC to be Nipon. Or even Nihon
@@sunflower_ace: This is a brivla. Moreover, it is a gismu, so it has to be CCVCV or CVCCV. You are proposing a cmevla. Your proposal is perfectly good for that role, although there is a uniform way of generating modern country names.
Hold on, isn’t Loglan’s phonology compatable with Scottish English?
yeah but that has less speakers than polish
Based
Scots doesn't have [u], among others.
@@liamannegarner8083 Scottish English and Scots aren't the same thing.
The use of c, s, and z with háček used to be common in the “Americanist” school of linguistics; it’s not some weird notation that Brown came up with on his own, but was a standard alternative to the usual IPA symbol. The goal was to be usable on a regular typewriter, where you could backspace, rotate the platen up a bit, and type a v over the previous letter. Cumbersome but possible, unlike typing an esh or ezh. There were some other typewriter alternatives, but I guess linguists studying American languages didn’t usually need most of the other untypable IPA symbols.
Even though I think that Loglan would be a terrible international language, I would defend him by saying that the original intent of Loglan was to actually test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
In defense of the use of [š] and [ž], while they might not be standard ipa, they *are* standard for those sounds in the *American* phonetic alphabet so it's really not that weird
I would say that his work was good if you account his ignorance. What I wouldn't accept is some conlanger in the twenty first century making loglan.
I mostly agree with this. Brown developed Loglan mostly before the Internet, which these days provides not only a lot of conlanging info but critical feedback from real people. He also did most of his work before formal semantic approaches back in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered by Montague, began to show the deep connections between the logical languages of mathematics and the natural languages. As far as I can tell very little or none of that work found its way into Loglan/Lojban. The result comes from Brown doing his best with the knowledge and ability that he had, and the Lojbanists trying to patch up the rest.
Not every conlanger has to be an expert even in the modern day.
> отец
well, there's папа (/papa/) in russian with the same meaning, but more, ehm, gentle (like mother vs mom or father vs dad)
Honestly Lojban is much better. Has features that make it 10x easier to use.
.iesai
The Lojban word for walk is *cadzu*
You may be thinking of *klama,* not kalma, meaning go/come.
Also, the Toki Pona word for come is apparently *kama* so it shouldn't be that foreign to you.
I'm pretty sure even the Huns would have called this video savage before backing away slowly.
Thomas Faulhaber I got tired of people calling me a weeb based solely on my avatar. Oh, and it's a great conversation starter!
Seiban Ey my guy that’s a fantastic avatar.
@@seiban8455 my avatar has my nane written in Japanese
Isn't "patfu" the Lojban word for "father"?
And nippon is also Japan in Japanese, hence ponjo.
Yes there is more than one error in the vocab segment. "Patfu" is Lojban and "farfu" is Loglan for father. Also, for mother, the Lojban is "mamta" and the Loglan is "matma" (similar but not the same). Another thing, in Loglan but not in Lojban, in cultural words like "ponjo" the final vowel can change to mean different things. So "ponji" means Japanese _person(s)_. You can see the similarities, which are inevitable since the base words are being put together in a similar way, in similar form (CVCCV and CCVCV), from similar aposteriori sources, but only a few base words are exactly alike across both languages. "Blanu" meaning blue is one of the few examples of an identical non-cultural base word.
Another screwup: There is no word "kalma" in Lojban. Mitch probably meant "klama", but this word does not mean walk like he says; it means go (specifically, go by vehicle, a meaning opposite of walking). Except for "lodji"/"logji", virtually all the vocabulary discussion in this video was marred with careless errors.
Not necessarily opposite of walking. "klama be fu lo zu'o cadzu" (or its lexicalised abbreviation "dzukla") is "go by walking". x5 is "vehicle/means", which can be "a bus", or can be "the process of walking"; the selbri is all about changing one's location, and is unspecified on the mode of transportation, until one fills that fifth argument.
Mike S. And actually dzoru sounds a lot like 走路 in Mandarin which spells zou lu, so this word might be more familiar to Mandarin speakers than English speakers.
1:54 It looks like he was using Americanist phonetic notation (which uses š and ž instead of ʃ and ʒ) instead of the IPA.
The Lojban word for “father” is *patfu*
Seriously, I don't know where you are getting your information from.
he just makes up whatever he thinks is "funny"
Ah, can't wait for the next episode and its "situation nouns"!
I think Lojbanists who insist that Lojban doesn't have any verbs bring up the distinction between the syntactical value of a given word from its morphological one. A word with the morphological value of a verb can take the syntactical role of a predicate of a sentence, while the same role can be filled by Lojban's whatever it was called.
If you actually study predicate logic, it makes sense how they aren't technically verbs. Like if I say "tavla," I'm basically identifying my sentence as being about a speaker, and audience, a subject, and a language of communication, in that order. The selbri are roughly comparable to verbs, but overall they're more like sentence identifiers, identifying the basic form of the sentence being uttered. A verb basically only defines a relationship between a subject and a direct object, whereas a selbri predicates a relationship between literally all of the components of the sentence. So if I were to semantically compare it to anything, I'd call it a word that functions as multiple verbs and also all of the prepositions in the sentence.
Didn't really understand what predicate logic was all about till now.
I have not studied predicate logic, but I don't think this is entirely correct. Verbs can have more arguments than subject and object in natural languages; consider the English word "trade" (four argument places, one of which is marked with a preposition).
It's a shame he never clarifies what "predicate logic" is. I doubt he knows, to be honest. If he did, he'd explain it.
one of the defining features of loglan is the fact that words can be used as verbs or nouns or adjectives or adverbs, the part of speech depends on word order. so, no, the word "primitive" isn't just a nonstandard term for "verb".
That paragraph about how /x/ works made my throat sore just hearing it
Lojban literally came from Loglan. Loglan was first, but a bunch of speakers wanted to reform it, but the creator of Loglan didn’t want to change it, and said speakers ended up making up their own version of Loglan, which we know as Lojban.
If anyone is serious about linguistics and conlanging, reading Loglan 1 is a must for him/her. One of the books of my life. A couple hundred pages will guide you through the fascinating and arduous process of the language development and will put you in a position to make an informed judgement of Loglan.
Did he say “hecking?”
OH MY GOD I just realized at the end, the "You know what? Zese" joke. am currently laughing my ass off rn
While James Cook Brown was indeed terrible at describing those sounds, his notation is in fact mostly legit; it's *not* IPA (which he may or may not have been terrible at, had he tried to actually use it), but it is valid Americanist transcription, which is appropriate for the period, before IPA became as widely popular as it is today.
he sure did call it the international phonetic alphabet though
Well! That's all on him, then. Criticize away!
Zese vid huh?
*Jack Eisenmann makes the best conlangs*
My review of your review: You made a LOT of careless errors in the vocabulary section (see my responses elsewhere in these comments), but you did at least pronounce the Lojban and Loglan words correctly. What shows in your series is this: You are very passionate about phonological design, especially with respect to interlang sensibilities, and not so concerned with other aspects of conlang design. However once you've cooked up your sound set and decided your phonotactics, the majority of work in conlang creation actually involves decisions re morphology, lexicon, syntax, pragmatics, etc. In the case of the two Loglanic languages (Loglan and Lojban), the design work also involved a lot of choices regarding representing logical form/semantics. The most damning criticism of these two languages is to be found not in their phonology and orthography but in the painful baroqueness of the morphology and the various problems with establishing logical form, but you have glossed over the issues entirely. I understand you can't be expected to have intimate knowledge of decades of design and debate, but it should be stated without even a passing mention of these issues your review comes across as superficial.
Do you know any conlang that is better than loglan,lojban, or toki pona?
Don't call him "superficial," mind you. He'll throw a fit and call you a hater. He'll probably say you're sexist, too.
kebede zewdie ithkuil
I agree. At the very least, it would have been helpful to read one complete sentence in Loglan to showcase its unconventional grammar.
Is there an effort in the Lojban community to create a Lojban 2.0 or even a wholly new predicate logic language that solves these issues?
you know what zese, lightning never strikes the same place twice!
a common if untrue statement.
but you know what they don't zese,
Lightning can miss the mark repeatedly and no one is the wiser
(I had a joke about the Creator of Vötgil and Zese but I forgot it.)
u mean what ze don't se
A gismu isn't a verb. It's any word that fits into the standard CCVCV or CVC(C)CU structure. These are the basic root words that have meanings on their own. The "verbs" that you're referring to aren't quite comparable to verbs. They're called "selbri," which is basically their word for "logical predication between ideas that is recognized within the language." The best I can describe it as is that a selbri is a word that defines the meaning of all of the other words in the sentence. For example, if I said "John cu tavla Misali Lojban English," that simple "cu tavla" basically fills in all of these gaps: "(there exists so that there is a speaker named) John, (and also a receiver of speach named) Misali, (in such context that the subject of conversation is) Lojban, (and since speaking logically involves a language of communication, the language being used by John is) English." Which I guess you could basically translate to "John talks to Misali about Lojban in English." Even then, though, "tavla" is clearly more than just a verb, because it also implies the words "about" and "in" when referring to Lojban and English.
Also, call me crazy, but I actually found that most of Lojban words made intuitive sense when I saw them. Not literally all of them, but still most of them.
The reason different types of words are denoted in a non-standard way (predicates and the like) is definitely because of how this language was meant to function. On the surface, predicate logic may seem somewhat similar to the natural logic that is somewhat inherent to most people. And in fact, everything that works in natural (or propositional) logic can be rewritten in predicate logic.
The difference comes in that predicate logic is much more abstract in how truths are reached. The biggest change is that instead of logical "atoms" (which regardless of their meaning can only have a finite number of truth values), predicates act as a qualitative evaluation of a variable of the domain, which means they have infinitely possible values. It also means that their values depend on what that value is in any given interpretation. While it's still entirely possible to prove/disprove theorems in predicate logic, it requires an entirely new way of thinking.
So yes, it probably would have verbs and the like, but I'm pretty sure this guy - being a mathematician - was really trying to outline the overall grammatical structure that would indeed make this language very unique (and also incredibly hard to learn /interpret).
I mean, imagine if when stating something you had to outline a general predicate formula in which your situation could apply, then follow that with "where one interpretation may be defined as" and then finally saying what you wanted to say in the first place lol. Really good tool for learning math... not so much a good tool for communicating information lol. Idk if that's how it was meant to work but that would be the most direct translation of predicate logic to written logic in my mind so... yeah.
If anyone is reading through the comment section,
notice how The Conlang Critic never replies to comments that claim he's factually mistaken. No thanks; no apologies; no promise to do better research.
notice how your name is written in one of the logical languages, and you can get an idea of perhaps some alterior motives for writing this comment
@@whatno5090 Well that was just because I researched and enjoyed Lojban enough to notice his mistakes and uncharitable takes. More so than his other videos. I don't think that is an ulterior motive, although I would prefer he (1) researched enough to avoid making mistakes and (2) be accountable when he does.
He seems to take more care with his recent videos but considering his Lojban video was his first Conlang Critic video, he could have had enough integrity to admit his mistakes instead of doubling down and changing his intro to "the show that gets facts wrong about your favourite conlangs," to dodge criticism.
@@66LordLoss66 yeah you right
🎶 Ponjo, Ponjo, Ponjo, sakana no ko 🎵
I don't understand why it's necessary for an international language to be fully compatible with at least one other language. Isn't it better that everyone has to learn a little something extra?
Jan Misali believes it's better to have a language that strips everything down to as little words, sounds as possible (toki ping) than to just learn a new phonetic sound.
Enochian and Lingua Ignota both seem like cool ideas for episodes.
just updated the Big List
JoeyJoJo
Is Enochian developed enough to actually be a usable language?
I feel like the reviews have gotten much better the deeper you go into the playlist. Hopefully in the future there will be a vid on any major updates in the conlang scene.
Well something you may want to take into account was that Lojban came after Loglan and was called "a realization of Loglan".
6:30 As a japanese speaker, i can say confidently you pronounced that so well!
The pronunciation of お父さん gave me life
Voksigid was different from its predecessor engelangs in that its content words explicitly had verbs as semantic and morphological roots, and that its lexicon was clearly drawn from a largely homogenous pool of sources (Standard Average European), while it's syntax was based on deliberate inversion of that of Japanese (which ultimately meant that out of all natural languages, typologocally it most closesly resembled those of the South Pacific and Mesoamerica). There was really no other language like it, hence it's a pity it never got past square one.
So you started your conlang review show about how much you hated lojban but claim to have only done one day of research prior to making that video? whaaaaaaaaaatttt
CD Shop That's why he always says " welcome to conlang critique, the show that takes wrong facts about your favorite conlang".
Oops, I put answering your comment on the back-burner and basically forgot about it, but nope. I do not think this statement or disclaimer really excuses anything. I'm not saying that Jan Misali can't give his opinions, because reviews and opinions are subjective. In fact, I'd love to hear opinions and stuff from the conlang critic about stuff in conlangs he likes.
It's just that this disclaimer and what I pointed out betrays a certain level of unprofessionalism and ...disrespect? Really, do you think Jan Misali really just wants to make stuff up about the conlangs he reviews? No, but he spends one month (maximum) reading about a conlang and makes a video with this disclaimer so viewers like you can point it out whenever someone raises a little disagreement. Has he even really made a factual error in his videos? Just sticky corrections and be graceful if someone points out a honest mistake, dude. Don't go, "hey welcome to the conlang critic, where the facts are made up and the points don't matter so I made a ranking system that matters even less!"
The Bronze Messiah
It sort of does:
He stated that the Lojban word for *father* is *farfu* and argued that it does not sound like padre or papa, etc. However, the word for father is actually *patfu,* so his point is moot;
He claimed that *.i* was useless as "it should be clear that you're about to speak because you're about to speak," but that argument is also moot, because *.i* is a way to separate sentences *(la MIsalin. cu tavla fi la lojban. .i mi se bangu la lojban* - Misali talks about Lojban. I speak Lojban.);
He mentioned *zoi* and made it sound like a bad thing;
He mentioned *zo'o* as though it's a bad thing (zo'onai ko sisti - Seriously, stop!)
He said the grammar system was bad, but gave no examples of how it worked.
I'm not concluding Lojban is flawless, but he did essentially create a straw-man to destroy and not the actual language.
See my top-level reply.
Lojban sucks in many ways, but it's also an amazing achievement that has yet to be bettered at what it's meant to do. It likely has the most complete grammar of any constructed language ever (I'm paraphrasing Anita Okrent's "In the Land of Invented Languages."). It can be incredibly expressive - just listen to the album "ZA'O" by Djemynai, a full-length rap album in Lojban you can find on BandCamp, or check out the translations of Alice in Wonderland or Wislawa Szymborska's poetry. Enabled by its unambiguous morphology, it has an awesome dictionary/translator application, La Sutysisku, which breaks down any Lojban sentence into its morphemes and provides definitions for each of them. And Lojban does so much cool stuff linguistically, like allowing you to express complex emotional states and evidentiality with just a few syllables.
I imagine that research involved copying information from a Wikipedia page.
Watch the Lojban video and tell me you actually learnt anything about the language or how it works.
I think Lojban has separate names because the English words and definitions aren't very precise or systematic. As to not really fit the precision of what they actually are in Lojban. For learning convenience, they should be introduced as such though.
The lojban word for father is "patfu" not "farfu"
What I want to know is why you say every midlide over an open fore untrinded clipple instead of a onefold midway clipple, or even only the midlide itself. Also, love the new upbeat mood.
"Verbs are like the basis of the entire vocabulary"
You really need to review Kelen, the language with no verbs!
fede
I can't seem to find any information about it anywhere. How does it work, though?
How in the ass does that work?
I don't know what most of these words mean but I love the sarcastic attitude
As far as the Japanese word for father is concerned お父さん (otoosan) is far from the only way to say it and is actually supposed to be used about someone else's father whereas one's own is 父 (chichi). But when said in a compound it could sound like the "fu" part of farfu as in 父母 (fubo) = father and mother or parents.
Linking mamta to any of the equivalent forms for mother though is another story: neither お母さん (okaasan), nor 母 (haha) nor the "bo" of 父母 sound anything like mamta.
"Haha" sounds quite a bit like it. It's got the exact same vowels and the same amount of syllables.
ママ is a valid (ðough informal) word for moðer
dzoru is actually very similar to the mandarin word for walk, 走路
ehhh kinda
1:35 vox somewhat recently did a video on the topic of how languages use "r" and "l" compared to English, although it basically only focuses on Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. In the comments though there's a few people talking about other languages that don't distinguish r and l. I think it's really cool and you should give it a watch!
th-cam.com/video/2yzMUs3badc/w-d-xo.html
uhm, it was said sarcastically
The quote about special rules for biological species names seems to ignore the fact that the bacterium Escherichia was named after a guy called Escherich, whose name was definitely not pronounced "es-kehr-reek."
Maybe it was more important to the Loglan peeps to have consistent pronunciation, but it's interesting that they picked an example where streamlining the name makes it less helpful because it obscures the original meaning.
Okay, now I want to make a conlang with only verbs.
There are natural languages with different internal logic, for example the topic-focused syntax of Japanese can be a weird thing for speakers of subject-focused languages such as English to wrap their head around, so a conlanger could hardly be faulted for trying to play around with structures, it isn't necessarily a Sapir-Whorf thing.
I would love to listen to you tear Vyrmag a new one.
HOW DID YOU PRONOUNCE VATER????????????
What's wrong with having two of the same vowel in a row? It's a neat feature that is rare, but does occur in some languages. For example the Swedish word "fan" (devil) is /ˈfäːˌän/, and that's kind of neat.
2:06 The IPA has changed considerably over time. This would've been correct only 40 years ago.
the voiced uvular trill is definitely my favorite consonant
E I G H T M O S T
Russian for "father" - "отец" ("ot'iets"), and you pronounced it as "оутэц", lol.
But the predicate is sealed
should've swapped w and u imo. If you want to use as a vowel, use it for /u/, that's what welsh does. makes /y/ in dutch and french too.
A funny irony for an ideal, logical language
5:40
I get that it's hard to pronounce the same vowel twice in a row, but that's a thing in Spanish for example, in words like leer, creer, proveer and so on, so it's at least possible.
Just as a heads up you used "mama" as the Russian example for lojban but "otyets" for loglan, the consistent options would either have been "mama" and "papa" or "mat'" and "otyets", it's about the same difference as "mom and dad" vs "mother and father" in English.
I lovw this show 😭😭😭
I'm really enjoying your series. if you're taking requests through the TH-cam comments, how about any of the David Peterson languages - how about High Valyrian, or Trigedasleng?
just udpated the Big List
Stephen DeGrace
I can't imagine how you're enjoying these.
dothraki or high valyrian?
These aren’t even supposed to be learned. :D
just updated the Big List
Neither is Dovahzul, but here we are.
Amir Swrr, have you not seen David Peterson's book Living Language Dothraki? It's basically a learning guide for Dothraki. For legal reasons, he did need approval from the show's producers and such, but it's been on the shelves for a while now. Peterson seems to really enjoy when fans try to learn his languages, so I don't think it would be a problem if our resident Conlang Critic takes a stab at them.
"Yes, Jim, palato-alveolar consonants are written with heckin', tone diacritics over alveolar consonants, good job." is a dense, extremely specialized criticism, but it's delivered as if insulting someone for forgetting how to tie their shoes. I love it.
You should have used the unvoiced diacritic under the vowels when you did that phhheewww thing ;)
I, a Filipino, always pronounce English diphthongs as “ai”, “ei”, “oi”.
I feel like you ignore a type of conlang distinct for IAL or artlang: the engilang. Obviously not as much of a problem because there's no more ranking, but just wanted to be that guy
I suppose the similar vocabularies of logban and loglan demonstrate that they derived words with similar methods in a logical non-arbitrary way. Kind of like how different mathematical equations can be used to approximate pi though they will be slightly different from eachother.
6:30 but does it sound like chichi, which is another word used for father?
It doesn't, but I'd at least expect you to compare this word and not otousan
German is missing /w/ and . If is also a vowel, it's only . German underlyingly, german has /ç/, but /x/ might also be there, but is limited in distribution to after back vowels.
MAAA. NAAA. BAAA. DAAA. GAAA. PAAA. TAAA. KAAA...
What's wrong with a "whatever rhotic?" If the pronunciation doesn't change the word, I'm fine with either. Some languages don't use trilled rhotics; others exclusively trill. Of courses, there are also some languages that don't use any rhotics, but if I can learn to use /x/ or /ʀ/, they can learn /r/ or /ɹ/. They're much easier, in comparison.
Could you do Uropi? (the only French auxlang I know with a grammar in English)
just updated the Big List
oof the r~l distinction sarcasm is deadass gonna trigger east asians LMAOO
conlang critic... you do study it so we don't have to?
it's a reference to the nostalgia critic.
ah. heh. Didn't notice that.
Ramanuj Sarkar
You should be angry. Until he stops dodging responsibility and admits his mistakes, I have to respect for him or his opinions.
Couldn't you just say the Lojban/Loglan words for types of words are just the words for linguistic terms?
And it makes sense to use the lojban words, especially since the lojban terms can be (and are) defined precisely, whilst the English terms would have been ambiguous.
oh shit we got a lojban stan......
StrategicGamesEtc ... the Lojbanists could have simply given singular and precise definitions for parts of speech already in use. Linguists have to do it all the time if something in one language is similar but not the same to that concept in another language. It would be much simpler for anyone trying to learn Lojban.
I still think lojban is better reviewed as an artlang than as an interlang. In my opinion, it's very much an experimental language, and while I think it's silly that the creators said it could be used as an interlang, I also think even they knew it's primary purpose was as an artlang.
Zetapology If you sign a chihuahua up in the large dogs category, you're fucked. It's their fault for saying it's an interlang.
@@centoe5537 They didn't sign up for being critiqued by conlang critic
@@centoe5537 My point was just that it could've been a more meaningful critique if it was as an experimental language
Just pointing out but you totally butchered the pronunciation of "Vater"
Were the languages used by traders during the discovery of the Americas, which was a mix between a bunch of languages, conlangs?
o lukin e toki Pandunia!
just updated the Big List
It doesn't have to be an international language for you to call it an international language... wut?
Oh yeah, you definitely got facts wrong about both of these conlangs. Like, a ton of facts. Like, Lojban for "father" is actually "patfu." (and if you look it up, you will indeed see how it's derived from all of its source languages) Ponjo also sounds a lot like a combination of the words "nippon" (another translation of nihon) with "Japan." And overall, the vocabulary is very different, so your claims are all wrong. Just speaking as someone who actually bought the book on Lojban. And just so you know, Toki Pona.
John Hooyer
It really annoys me. Not that he got facts wrong, but because he refuses to admit it. He thinks, if he says "he gets facts wrong" in the introduction, he doesn't need to mention what mistakes he makes. He could do it so easily: he could just add a comment that lists each error and give an apology.
Musical conlang with 24 letters
Bass letters(lower octave)
C3-B3
Treble letters(higher octave)
C4-B4
Bonus letter(drums)
Letters represent vocals
This language is for baritones only
Sample text:BNALDFEHBDJCU(high note!)RNB
So excited!!!
2:09 Yea because the IPA TOTALLY uses the Slovene and Serbo-Croatian letters ž and š to represent the English zh and sh sounds
I would like to see you review Sajem Tan.
just updated the Big List
That USED to be the way those post alveolar fricatives were represented in the IPA, though, right?
there was a time when /ʃ/ was but that didn't last long
Of course a language would have their own words. Likewise, they'd have words describing their types of words: a fu'ivla is a borrowed word, a lujvo is a word combining gismu, etc. I don't know why you have a problem with that.
Artlang?
ill have you know, kalma does sound significantly like kama, and dzoru sounds kinda like towards...
Isn't 9/20 of all languages more common than than some of the other sounds in Lojbans inventory. It doesn't really matter though, because glottal stops are so absurdly easy to pronounce that worrying about whether learners of Lojban would be able to learn to is absolutely ridiculous. Just because a sound (or lack of sound in this case) isn't in your native language doesn't automatically make it hard for you to pronounce.