The Weird History of Invented Languages | Otherwords

200+ There grouping up

I spent the whole video waiting for Toki Pona to be mentioned

not sure if this really counts but i think the closest to a universal language is arabic numbers. and of course in the more modern age: emojis/emoticons

Balaibalano was an auxlang created 400 years ago. Just makes you wonder how many there are

I learned about Esperanto through Romanico

"Charmita!" Arnold Rimmer of Red Dwarf, expressing his full knowledge of Esperanto.

Damn, Erica as a Klingon was kinda hot 😅

I live in Europe, more specifically inside the EU, and my dream is to, one day, have our Union become a real Federation, and I always though a unified language like Esperando or Interlingua would help so much.

Most made up languages try to expand their vocab to descrive everything & be as expressive as possible. Only one (that I know of) tries to do the complete opposite - toki pona.

Many languages have words for complicated feelings that cannot adequately be described by words used in everyday life - such as hugge (the contented feeling of being at home, just chilling & doing something lazy'ish like reading a book or paging through a magazine). I wonder if a kittie or doggo have a "regular word" for hugge?!

Un lingue international auxiliari non es un utopie. True story: I was six pages into reading Le axiome de paralleles before I realised that it was written in a language I don't know.

Wonderfully, there are Interlingue articles on Wikipedia: “Interlingue o Occidental es un lingue international creat de Edgar de Wahl in 1922. It es immediatmen comprensibil a mult homes occidental, pro to usabil por mult relationes anc con poc studie anterior.”

Not very helpful if you speak Mandarin or Navajo, though.

I definitely feel very skeptical of the Whorf hypothesis and its implications, of which I think something like "words are the shadows in Plato's cave" would be one. It seems sort of obvious that you might be influenced to think certain things by your vocabulary, but simply considering the fact that you can understand that you can't find the words to express something you're trying to say seems like evidence that it's not so much limiting our ability to think things as it is limiting our ability to express the things we think, and to add to that, the only thing that stands between not having the words for something and having those words is coming up with them as we have with every other word.

Sad, toki pona didn’t get an honorable mention 😢

With mass spreadability of learning resources available online, I would think many of the most popular conlangs have way more speakers than a bus load.

tan seme sina toki ala e toki pona? jan mute li olin e ona

Wait, nothing about volapük?

You can consider modern Chinese characters in mainland China to be an example of a modern written language, as the characters were simplified one by one.

"Brih-inn"..? Never heard of it...

In the comedy sci fi series, 'Red Dwarf', it's imagined that in the future Esperanto has taken off. All across the space ship, signage is shown in English and Esperanto!

Would ebonics be considered a conlang?

I taught myself Esperanto in the 70s and my world and life changed! Not only did I meet and communicate with people from all over the globe, but it gave me the confidence and focus to learn several langs and become a language instructor.

There is a universal language... BINARY

I wasn't expecting to find our tiny unknown Basque language in this video.
🥹💕🥰

You missed Flora Colossi which relies entirely on inflection and context. (e.g. Groot)

As opposed to languages that..weren't invented? What languages came naturally without invention?

There's always Globish... 😉

What’s really interesting is the way a man made language has sort of sprung up out of internet meme culture between purposeful misspelling of words, through intentional humor or autocorrect, and the recent brain rot slang of the 2020s.

I'll bet you're a blast a parties. I will never be accused of being a linguist but I do enjoy your videos. Some of them give me a good chuckle.

Would be really nice if we at least reformed English spelling to be more phonetic.
That seems to be where most are hearing nowadays with its use.

Lingvo or linguo? The second seems to me correct.

For the love of god, get rid of the music!

Dr. Brosovsky, I’d love to see you do a deep dive on the Belter language and accent from the TV series “The Expanse”. It’s a constructed language based in the idea that a bunch of people living and working together in space colonies who spoke different languages inadvertently developed their own creole.

Surprised at no mention of Hildegard of Bingen. She was a fascinating Medieval woman in many ways, just one of which is creating what’s often called the first constructed language. Really it’s mostly just an alphabet and list of nouns at least in terms of what has survived, but she still deserves credit.

This was very interesting.

... did someone ever try to correlate real languages to their peoples' attitudes? like, and please forgive me if it sounds massively racist, is it a case that German and Arabic "sound angry"? How many words for friends or foes, love and war, etc do they have?

There's Newspeak from "1984".
And Nadsat from the novel of "A Clockwork Orange"

The fact that Esperanto didn't become our lengua franca has been to the detriment of the English language. Now, English is dumbed down so much that it dumbs down most people who speak it--native and adventitious alike.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be interpreted as "language shape our perception of the world". Learning other languages definitely shows you more variety in ways things can be categorized and interpreted, but I don't think language alone will expand your perception and understanding of things through vocabulary and syntax. I remember Eckard Tolle saying that words are signposts, meaning that they point to a concept, but neither are the concept nor will they take you to it. If you know the word but don't experience the concept somehow, it's kind of like medieval painters trying to depict lions, whales, elephants etc.

I remember the early tabletop RPG Traveller had a randomized system for generating alien languages. The idea was that if you could generate a language that sounded consistent it would add to the flavor of your alien race - so, for instance, a given word might have a 90% chance a word starts with a vowel, 80% the middle has 2 consonants, 50% it ends with a vowel, and then you randomly pick from a list of vowels and consonants common to that language, and the last random element, word length. The result was a consistent sounding language that was not derived from any human language.

Don't forget Lapine (Richard Adams)

love it

Any linguists out there: the Star Trek Next Generation episode “Darmok” introduced a interesting conlang: Tamarian

The federation translation software could translate word but not meaning as they only talked in references to parables. Similar to Chengyu in mandarin but ALL parable references.

Questions: could that form of language actually exist? Seems the atomic unit is the reference parable not each word. How would one ever learn it?

There’s also interlingua which is mostly understood by many Romance languages speakers

no mention of Toki Pona? :(

Loglan reminds me of the Dad joke when somebody asks me if I got my hair cut and I say “No, all of them” or “which one?”

Also Kalakeri from Bahubali

This just barely scratched the surface on conlanging. I expected it to go deeper than that.

Falling in love 😻 comes from the blood flow to genitalia.. cool beans

Nice lil summary!

I'm not surprised that the star wars conlangs aren't really mentioned mostly because most of them are limited and the most popular (Hutesse) isn't fleshed out. i wish more people would look into Mando'a, the language of the Mandalorians. Its quite easy and its a super fun community. Especially since the language is heavily based on war culture, so its fun to see what everyday objects are refer to in the eyes of a solider. There are multiple fan made dialects to expand the dictionary. Mostly because Disney barely touches the language but there are plenty of resources from the community. Please check out our little corner of the Galaxy! Olaror to cuun aliit! Ret'!