thank you to... actually, nobody wanted this. welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I'm jan Misali, and in this episode, we'll be looking at the useless language worth less than ten dollars, Kay(f)bop(t). actually, Kay(f)bop(t) isn't the full name. it's an official name, but it's really just a shorter version of "Kay(f)dan(f)san(t)ap(t)vlir(t)sang(b)es(p)u(t)vom(b)ngag(t)vlim(p)kay(f)sna(f)kay(f)ga(f) bop(t)veg(p)daf(f)shof(b)*om(p)vlim(p)ga(f)vlim(p)ga(f)", which I am not saying again. the name itself is highly descriptive. the first word means "language", but with added suffixes that cause it to specifically mean "limited, expected, inedible, undying, epic language worth less than ten dollars". the second word is an adjective which can mean several things, but here means "far less useful than average". it could also mean "far more useful than average", but it probably doesn't. I'm getting ahead of myself. Kay(f)bop(t) is an artlang (?) created by Daniel Swanson in 2015, based on badconlangingideas.tumblr.com, a blog full of jokes about hypothetical conlangs with really impractical features. Kay(f)bop(t)'s goal is to incorporate a whole bunch of these impractical features into one language. so, essentially, Kay(f)bop(t) is forty six jokes thrown together into a single language, with a few extra original jokes thrown in there. its consonants are: man, look at all those goofy consonants! most of these are also in English, with the exceptions of the percussive bimanual stop, sinistral lateral click, dextral lateral click, and the faciomanual click, all of which are phonemes so rare that I had to make up my own legitimate sounding names for them for the purposes of this video. and, yes, you do have my permission to use "faciomanual click" in reference to the sound a facepalm makes. personally, I would've included the linguolabial trill, but that's just me. Kay(f)bop(t)'s vowels are: this is just your classic five vowels here, each one able to be pronounced approximately too many ways, as well as a bonus sixth vowel, /ø/, written with 酶. Kay(f)bop(t) also has four phonemic hats because of course it does. if you were to actually attempt to speak Kay(f)bop(t), you would need to quickly swap between these four hats pretty much every syllable. the orthography, compared with everything else, is a little underwhelming. it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect, but with English type variation on the vowels, and some nonstandard use of punctuation for the weird sounds. the only surprises here are the Han characters, which seem really out of out of place, especially since they're only used in one word each. 酶 is only used in the word "酶(p)", which means "null", and the other three are only used in the word "z瑟g(f)蕯蕦(f)z瑟g(t)蕯a(f)", which means "a type of lover who works hard to fit in with your life, because they love you so much and are willing to put in effort to make your relationship work". you might notice that both of these words are jokes. now, speaking as an ameteaur memeticist, both of these jokes woud've probably been funnier if Swanson had spelled them more phonetically, especially since both of them are essentially jokes about pronunciation, to some extent. simple words in Kay(f)bop(t) are usually extremely long, and that's mostly because of the suffix system. it's kinda like Ithkuil except it's mandatory, and it's simultaneously more specific and less precise. nouns are required to be conjugated by case, number, expectation, edibility, grammatical gender, manner of death, awesomeness, and market value, and verbs are required to be conjugated by number, expectation, mental state, day of the week, honesty and subject magnitude relative to that of a breadbox, awesomeness, and certainty. again, these aren't optional. every noun ends with nine suffixes, and every verb ends with seven suffixes. you might think that this means Kay(f)bop(t) goes for maximum precision, but then you might look at the vocabulary. a Kay(f)bop(t) root can have up to and including eighteen (18) distinct, unrelated meanings. for example, the root "bes(b)baf(t)let(p)gob(b)-" can mean hatter, terminology, journalese, grasslike, unrevenged, alphabetization, misty, heal, althea, detain, edict, rehash, guzzler, thalassemia, ergot, humilia, raceabout, or epanchement. this combined with the suffix system means interpreting a Kay(f)bop(t) word is sorta like a game of Twenty Questions, right down to the "animal / vegetable / mineral" type noun classes and the conjugation based on size relative to a breadbox. just like in Twenty Questions, this still might not be enough information in some cases, to the extent that some entire chunks of text can mean multiple, distinct, equally valid things, with no way to know which one it is other than context. very impressively, one particular phrase may be interpreted either as "all of humanity had one language. they moved from the east to a plain in Shinar, and set up things for long term residence." or as "we are not strangers to love. you know the rules. I know the rules. I'm thinking of an entire commitment. you would not get this from a different guy." that is an impressive amount of dedication right there. this isn't even the whole thing! there's a video available where Swanson reads the entirety of this passage and it's almost forty minutes long. there's a link in the description [on some platforms]. Kay(f)bop(t) set out to be a bad conlang, and, honestly, I think it's the best possible type of bad conlang. in fact, I'd go as far as to say that Kay(f)bop(t) is worse than Ithkuil is good, technically making Kay(f)bop(t) the best artlang reviewed so far. thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time, where I'll be reviewing Klingon.
