Let's Examine Constructed Languages

A short documentary film/cartoon which illustrates the creation of constructed languages, highlighting a few notable examples. Featuring Car Slam narration by /u/CrazyCollectorPerson!
Special thanks to my dear friend J. Christensen for providing the narration for this video!
If you're interested in learning more about Esperanto, check out Evildea: / evildela He's hilarious and makes great videos about Esperanto culture, most of which have English subtitles.
Some good Lojban resources can be found here: mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban_Wa...

[@NoiseAndBells]

I understand this was years ago, but I'm still getting comments to the effect of "why did you include Car Slam instead of Ithkuil/Toki Pona/Klingon/etc," so I feel like I should clarify: Although it may seem like an odd choice, please be aware that this was for a school project and I was working within the parameters my film professor assigned, one of which was to include at least one interview with an actual person. The original idea was to talk about well-known conlangs for the first two sections, and then have the third section of the video focus on the online conlanging community, which would give me the opportunity to include an interview with someone from the community. Prior to making the video, I made a Reddit post on /r/conlangs asking for people to volunteer 30-60 second clips of them talking about their conlang. I planned to use these audience-submitted clips to give examples of the kinds of languages people have created. Ultimately, however, the only person who reached out to me with a clip was u/crazycollectorperson, who was working on Car Slam. As a result, Car Slam was the only conlang featured in the "community" section. That said, although I would have liked to be able to feature additional examples, I think Car Slam is a really cool language and I think it works perfectly here as an example of some of the more creative or unusual conlang ideas people have come up with, so I'm very grateful to u/crazycollectorperson for volunteering to share. Hope that helps clear things up a bit.

[@janmusi]

I'm not reading all that

[@HBMmaster]

nice

[@MadSpectro7]

You NEED to do a video on Car Slam now.

[@georgewalker7913]

I agree with Shoes. DO CAR SLAM NOW!

[@HBMmaster]

just updated the Big List

[@phalvorantos]

conlang critic im subbed

[@bookle5829]

Are you still gonna ban people in the discord?

[@fidelcastro56]

That Theta vs Thorn fight _nailed_ it.

[@fidelcastro56]

Badum t ʃ ʃ ʃ

[@fidelcastro56]

Kjades Because they were fighting with thumbtacks, which are like little _nails_

[@NoiseAndBells]

Ohohoho. Very nice!

[@fidelcastro56]

Rakehell Gardener You should give me a shout out in your next video for my great pun :D

[@NoiseAndBells]

This was honestly supposed to be a one time thing (I don't really ever make videos) - but based on the surprisingly positive response I've been getting, I'm considering starting a series based on this style. Maybe I'll have to hide a smiling turtle somewhere in whatever comes next ;)

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

I'd love to hear a recording of two people conversing naturally in Ithkuil. I doubt it will ever happen.

[@theeclipsemaster]

I tried making one word in ithkuil, several months ago. I still have a headache, and I know I got the word wrong

[@fanaticofmetal]

​@@theeclipsemaster Quijada has finished Ithkuil 4, a simplified version of Ithkuil 3.

[@theeclipsemaster]

@@fanaticofmetal ooh thanks.

[@EchoLog]

@@theeclipsemaster any progress on that word or? Lol

[@theeclipsemaster]

@@EchoLog nah i gave up.

[@efenty6235]

the car slam guy is unusually seductive

[@kuro8182]

Lojban actually sounds pretty cool.

[@anoc1847]

5:17 tavla means painting in swedish so its so funny to me how u wrote painting on a painting thingy

[@frank_calvert]

"painting thing" an easel you mean?

[@tibethatguy]

sitelen tawa pona!

[@NappingWanderer]

This is great! This a really great intro for people into the concept of conlangs :)

[@NoiseAndBells]

Thanks so much! :D I love your profile picture by the way, it's adorable.

[@kyazarshadala8114]

7:09 theta will never be anywhere close to how great thorn is

[@ateium2409]

In my handwriting þ looks the same as p

[@oc2thorpe]

Yes. Thorn is superior

[@constantinethecataphract5949]

As a greek i can say Θ is superior to the punny þ . Does þ exist in its main language ? No Does θ exist in its main language ? Yes Θ>Þ

[@petroglyph888mcgregor2]

Thorn is like a b and p that got typed on top of one another. Theta is much older. They are both cool, and useful in their respective alphabets---the Icelandic alphabet and the Greek alphabet.

[@constantinethecataphract5949]

@@petroglyph888mcgregor2 þ was in English first. Icelandic has đ

[@mr.parabola5051]

I like to make languages. (English) Lizhuh nihkio inhk zuhshaz. (Miihk) Kaka nini rina'i vashoku. (Luskan) Badahusara sugafi. (Sugafi) Ibi jokak'e ara askanis. (Askanian) zigzag zígzũgzîgzîg zĩgzìgzágzũgzîgzîg zígzĩgzâgzũgzagzag zágzàgzágzũgzãgzîg. (ZigZag)

[@Krixwell]

Ultse dazu kvefe gu taz es eb taz cvir. (Kandva)

[@angelcaru]

mi pali e toki la mi pilin pona (toki pona)

[@RunningHamsterPower]

This popped up in my video recommendations again and it's just as good as I remember it. 👌👍

[@honeycomblord9384]

Very interesting, I learned a little more about these languages, most of all Lojban. This was an overall accurate, unbiased, and interesting video!

[@rabbitpiet7182]

carslam sounds like the facebook ai

[@lampfacedampchase8048]

6:40 hey I'm in it cool

[@lostmemories4398]

PLEASE MAKE MORE VIDEOS!!

[@eac-ox2ly]

Lmao at that carslam. Truly hilarious how it sounds like gibberish

[@agalitev]

never did I think a train would teach me about languages

[@rando8773]

That's a nice train.

[@rockerdax]

I like your style, I hope to see more videos from you about...anything, really.

[@SotraEngine4]

Could you analyze some of the /r/conlangs conlangs?

[@shekharaakula6233]

Amazing stuff!

[@abdulrashidalshams4422]

i'm brazilian and i'm expanding the vocabulary of my language it's called lohati bi olmak bresiliene und bi smak eksik al vaket av ma idiom tar namenk lohati

[@Ykulvaarlck]

it's really funny that every single person you showed writing in lojban in the screenshots has since moved onto another conlang called toaq, which me tries to amend the flaws in lojban. kinda wish you went over it as well

[@NoiseAndBells]

To clarify, nearly all of the individuals who you are referring to are still active to some degree in both the Lojban and Toaq communities as of the present, with the notable exception of Solpahi (creator of Toaq) himself. In any case, I did not feature Toaq in this video because I published it in April 2017, at a time when Toaq as a language and community was in a relatively early state. As a matter of fact, I had not heard of the language at all until around 2019, when I started creating Lojban music and consequently became more involved in logical languages. Of course, having now had the opportunity to examine it in more detail, I quite admire Toaq- and I would love to talk at length about it at another time, perhaps in another video unburdened by the formal constraints of a college film project.

[@volvagianintendo6465]

Lojban sounds endearing to me, unlike Toki Pona; and Car Slam was very funny XD!

[@MrInsdor]

Surprised to read that you never make videos as this was excellent. Oh boy, of all the conlangs it is Car Slam😂 Don't get me wrongit is awesome, but since this is an introduction to conlangs in English I think any other conlang would've had a much better effect to peak interest.

[@NoiseAndBells]

Zinouweel I asked the conlanging subreddit to give me audio of them talking about their conlang and the Car Slam guy was the only person who did. I think it's a perfect choice though, I wanted to show an example of a really weird conlang that would be a good example of creative conlanging. To each their own.

[@livedandletdie]

It's a weird conlang, you could have chosen Sindarin, and just take a clip from Lord of the rings. A lot easier. or Dothraki from GOT, or why not Hardonian by that weird guy that made a few Slavic based languages. Or if you really want a weird conlang, why not Vötgil or tokipona or Solresol.

[@granderondeproductions3286]

rzęgo się na Haknego polski i szczandiveckuławy

[@ManuelBTC21]

I'd be interested to see a language that is not so much constructed as it is derived by a program. Given a corpus of texts from different languages, what phonemes are common and can be spoken by all. What words are common and can be carried over. What concepts and phrase are used most often together, so the vocabulary generated with less ambiguity.

[@NoiLeafGreen]

This is great.

[@Curvyfeets]

Underrated

[@jondoe6608]

cool video!

[@gavintoohey6604]

Thanks mate :)

[@paianis]

The loudness could be more consistent.

[@ArcG3]

Very cool 👍

[@petroglyph888mcgregor2]

At 7:18, you call "COP-lah" simply "spelling out each syllable", but it is by no means as simple as that. These letters and combinations of letters mean wildly different things to different people. Even among anglophones, the vowels are unpredictable. You think every English-speaker says "COP" the same way? Depending on the dialect---not even close!

[@NoiseAndBells]

Greetings from the future! I am well aware- I was less trying to weigh the pros and cons of different phonetic transcriptions and more trying to provide a silly example of a faux pas that conlang newbies sometimes make. "Spelling out each syllable" is the only way I could think to describe the informal system that people sometimes use, which, as you pointed out, does not accurately represent how phonology works. I certainly did not intend to suggest that using IPA or actual formal phonetic systems is unnecessary or pretentious; on the contrary, I was merely trying to convey that you are likely to draw some criticism if you write something like "mabla (MAH-blah)" in your post on /r/conlangs 😋

[@petroglyph888mcgregor2]

@@NoiseAndBells I understand your point better now. Thanks

[@fantikus6300]

did you make every song in here? i mean remix it not create because i want the music from this

[@NoiseAndBells]

I created all the music in this video including the remix of the Esperanto anthem. The individual tracks can be found on my SoundCloud: Intro: "Come See Eternity" soundcloud.com/noise-and-bells/come-see-eternity Esperanto: "La Espero (8-bit remix)" (not uploaded) Lojban: "Break-Bulk Blues" soundcloud.com/noise-and-bells/break-bulk-blues Conlangs/Car Slam: "2-O'Clock Shuffle" soundcloud.com/noise-and-bells/03-2-oclock-shuffle Outro: "No More Great Mysteries" soundcloud.com/noise-and-bells/no-more-great-mysteries

[@AshtonSnapp]

Yatsiwele aho guekemalo. Yatsiniwele yua?

[@Kyropinesis]

i'm a big fan of toki pona

[@rhondabowling]

helihuh, iauo uyayu oghoe? eioi iauo oghoe. bayago! ŝeses, eioi iauo oghoe. nunenan, iauo uyayu oghoe?

[@NoiseAndBells]

is this from a conlang you are making?

[@Curvyfeets]

I love Epseranto

[@amadeosendiulo2137]

Same mi.

[@nevertoocoldforicecream3381]

mi pi toki pona

[@someordinaryyoutuber5886]

Gret! Me Namo Es Jonah! Hou Bie Ju? Me Konstruktaj Langua Es Kalaj "Salemon"

[@MisterSketch4]

Toki pona li pona tawa mi!

[@larho9031]

jan mute li toki e toki pona la, mi toki e pona.

[@brotherpingu]

Great video, but how does the train turn the page?

[@NoiseAndBells]

Same way Larry the Cucumber holds a rubber duck

[@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana]

If hard constructed languages are so hard to get any fluent speakers how did the first Indo-European language get so insanely complex?

[@falkland_pinguin]

Protoindoeuropean had lots of native speakers growing up in a PIE-only environment. This means that a) people had no other choice if they wanted to communicate at all and b) they got to learn it as their mothertongue (which makes stuff a lot easier - for example, as a native german speaker, I have an intuition for an adjective declension table that is often considered outrageously confusing by second language learners). Compare that to a conlang that a) might, if anything, reduce your ability to talk to others, since barely anyone speaks it, and you could learn something like Mandarin Chinese with its 1 billion+ speakers instead, and b) you have to put in all the second-language-learner's effort because toddlers are just better at language acquisition than adults. See the difference?

[@philippinesbaybayin7044]

Vanent'aç kreeidü ounlaşveiwfrei zinne. I want to create my language also.

[@claudiaramirezsobrado9465]

make more videos

[@eac-ox2ly]

Btw, you should increase the volume of your video like +12dB or +15dB

[@-.7]

good video but music is too loud-

[@sanuwapilapiti6949]

I also like make to make a language. how can I crate my writing system for google keyboad?

[@oc2thorpe]

Idk. Linguists do something called romanization, where each sound is represented with English letters.

[@sanuwapilapiti6949]

@@oc2thorpe I have my own abugida script. Romanization is so westernized. I want to make some uniqueness in my language. So do you know how can I make computer typing system with my own alphabet.

[@sanuwapilapiti6949]

@@oc2thorpe and thank you for the idea

[@oc2thorpe]

@@sanuwapilapiti6949 I don’t think you can. Sorry tho

[@oc2thorpe]

I found a way. You can use this website called caligraphr to create fonts, and you can write your conlang scripts

[@saibozardyt8945]

In Latin it is Floris , Florem is the accusative case form

[@NoiseAndBells]

Correct, though English gets "flower" from Anglo-Norman, which like most Romance languages inherited it from the Latin accusative form, rather than the nominative. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flower

[@falkland_pinguin]

Why would you use the genitive instead of the accusative though? The nominative and primary dictionary form of the classical Latin word was flos...

[@michaelnovak9412]

Lojban - the best language ever.

[@grimhavenz]

Michael Novak you mean the worst language right?

[@elemenopi9239]

*whistles in toki pona*

[@PaddiBusch88]

Why no proper definition?

[@ronaldonmg]

Definition of what? of conlang? Several national languages (Dutch, German, Romansch) were cobled together from different dialects. Some conlangs were created by a group of people over the course of years. There is no clear demarcation-line

[@iloivar]

*daggers appear*

[@1leon000]

I love theta and thorn equally!

[@OdinAesir-wf2oy]

mi pilin pona e toki pona

[@htfcm]

Jesus Christ! Talk about vocal fry.

[@MrRyanroberson1]

what's your plan for this channel? the two videos seem entirely unrelated in any normal sense

[@NoiseAndBells]

Don't really have a plan? This was originally just a class project but based on the good reception I figure I'll make more in the same style if I ever have time. I have the script for a new one fully written but I've been too busy with life stuff to make progress on it. Hopefully soon haha.

[@MrRyanroberson1]

class project?? what class?

[@NoiseAndBells]

Film production 101

[@davidmacdonald9159]

esperanto is not a natural lang

[@falkland_pinguin]

No, it isn't, and it's not a naturalistic language either (which is what was stated in the video, no one said "natural")

[@lescitrons]

mmmmmmmmmMMmmmMmmmmMmmmmm tooo superficial ya fukin didn't mention some of the biggest conlangs but ya mention caR slam

[@edwarddavis7858]

eww lojban...

[@christopherellis2663]

Esperanto is rubbish 🗑 Lojban, might do better to replace c and ' with x and c.

[@NoiseAndBells]

I like Esperanto, I think it's a neat language. That being said, I don't think Esperanto or Interlingua or Novial or any of the other heavily eurocentric auxlangs are at all suitable for a world language, for obvious reasons. To be honest, I find the entire premise of proselytizing in favor of a universal second language a bit silly. To your point on Lojban: you could certainly map /ʃ/ to "x" as long as you find another letter to represent /x/, which is what "x" is normally used for. I actually use "x" for /ʃ/ in my own Lojban-inspired conlang, Xextan (/'ʃeʃ.tan/). Nonetheless, I do think "c" for /ʃ/ works well enough, though it is admittedly rare in natural languages. As for /h/, on the other hand, the apostrophe is actually a very clever choice if you know its history and purpose. To the parser, the apostrophe acts as neither a consonant nor a vowel, but rather an intervocalic separator: it cannot start or end a word, cannot form a consonant cluster, and is not counted as an extra letter for morphosyntactic purposes. Rather, its sole purpose is to distinguish sequences of vowels from diphthongs, such as dai (/dai/) vs da'i (/'da.hi/). The reason for this is that in Lojban's predecessor Loglan, vowel pairs can appear either as diphthongs or in sequences with no boundaries, resulting in pairs like "tao" and "tau", pronounced /taʊ/ (one syllable) and /'ta.u/ (two syllables) respectively. As you might imagine, the distinction is subtle and often difficult to pick out in spoken conversation. The creators of Lojban found this ambiguity unacceptable, and to remedy the situation they introduced a special phoneme which acts as a vowel separator, pronounced /h/. The apostrophe was chosen specifically in order to visually distinguish the vowel separator from "true" consonants, and to avoid substantially changing the general shape of affected words (i.e. "coa" looks more like "co'a" than "coqa" or something similar). I hope this helps :)

[@falkland_pinguin]

@@NoiseAndBells mi la, this helps :)

[@OVXX666]

Þorn still looks too much like a b or p... it makes its own name lʊk like porn. ϑat's why i use the squiggle ϑeta