thank you to Michael R. for requesting this episode. 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 Linux of conlangs, Ygyde. that's not a joke. that's not me looking at Ygyde and saying "ha ha it sure would be funny if I compared the type of person who would learn Ygyde to the type of person who'd install Linux!" the reference grammar real life actually unironically refers to Ygyde as "the Linux of conlangs". the reasoning behind it is that it has no copyright protection, as does, according to US court case Oracle v. Google (2014), literally every other conlang. Ygyde is an auxlang created by Patrick Hassel-Zein in 2002, and has been updated slowly ever since by Andrew Nowicki, who really deserves most of the credit. from what I can tell, Hassel-Zein came up with the idea and wrote down the original draft, but Nowicki fleshed that draft right out into a full language. Ygyde's consonants are: as you might've noticed, there's something a bit off about this inventory. I mean, just two (2) episodes after I make fun of Jack Eisenmann for accidentally calling the sound /h/ a "glotal approximant", here I am, very intentionally calling it a "gutteral nonstop obstruent" just so I can avoid having the chart look like this. ugh, just look at how out of place those postalveolar affricates look. no wonder Ygyde's phonology isn't defined using the IPA. yeah, let's go back to the other one. much better. anyway, this is about the third time we've seen some varient of the Esperantist consonant inventory. I'll talk about this trend in depth in That episode (which is a ways off), but basically, the Esperantist inventory is kinda like the gold standard for internationali[z|s]ed phonology, so international languages usually have inventories defined as "Esperanto, but..." Ygyde's consonants are "Esperanto, but" without a rhotic sound, alveolar affricates, postalveolar fricatives, the velar fricative, or nonlateral approximants. and /h/ is allowed to be voiced, because, and this is the real reason, /h/ sounds too similar to /f/. right. as for its vowels, well, since Ygyde's phology isn't defined with the IPA, as I said before, I kinda have to guess what their exact values are. most of them are pretty obvious: but the other two are a little [phonetically] ambiguous. the letter e makes the vowel in "bed" or "get", which is definately around here no matter what your dialect is. and the letter o represents the vowel in "all" or "know", which is a pair of words I happen to pronounce with completely different vowels. in General American, they are also pronounced with completely different vowels. in Received Pronunciation, they are also also pronounced with completely different vowels. so all I can say for sure is that the letter o represents a sound made somewhere around here? see, this is why you need to use the IPA when you're defining your phonology. if all you do is give examples of words the sounds appear in without specifying how you pronounce those words, people are going to get confused. okay, I'm being a little harsh. this isn't a bad phonology. it's just poorly defined. and, hey, Ygyde does specifically ban consonant clusters, so that's cool. it also uses the glottal fricative exclusively to distinguish between pairs of words that otherwise would be to similar, like abo and hapo. okay, now for the orthography. the only thing worth pointing out about the way Ygyde uses the Latin alphabet is that it uses the letter w for the sound /v/, you know, like it does in a lot of Germanic languages also Polish. it doesn't matter all that much because Ygyde doesn't distinguish between /v/ and /w/, but it still is a little confusing. only a little though. Ygyde also has its own alphabet, which looks like this. I think the main advantage it has over just using the Latin alphabet is that for most letters, if you flip them vertically, you get related letters. also, the total number of symbols, including numbers and punctuation, is a nice even power of two, which is good for computers. yeah, imagine that. a conscript that's good for computers! however, the desire to hit that sweet, sweet 2⁵ symbols exactly led to some weird stuff. like, loanwords. when you're using the Latin alphabet, you're allowed to spell loanwords either phonetically or the way they're spelled in their source languages, which makes a lot of sense, but this still applies when you're using the Ygyde alphabet. however, the Ygyde alphabet doesn't have the letters q, r, v, or x, so these are transliterated with digraphs consisting of a similar letter followed by the number zero, so v becomes w0, r becomes l0, x becomes k0, q becomes t0, (because we already used k0 for x) and h becomes f0. you might've noticed that the Ygyde alphabet already has a letter that corresponds to the letter h, called "ho". however, ho isn't used in loanwords for somerising. now for the vocabulary. hoo boy. you know that thing aUI was trying to do, where similar sounding words have similar meaning? see, Ygyde tries to do that too, but more mathematically. what do I mean by "mathematically?" well, the Ygyde word for "pink" is "hupa", or "color #FFABAB". and the Ygyde word for "US dollar" is "cajoga", or "the currency used in the nation located at 37 degrees north, 264 degrees east". you know, in case the person you're talking to doesn't know what the United States's currency is called but happens to know exactly where the center of the United States is. these aspects of Ygyde's vocabulary are best described as interesting, but impractical. even though the degree of precision is impressive, Ygyde is trying to be an auxlang. it really doesn't need to be that precise. however, most of Ygyde's vocabulary is actually quite reasonable. like, an "escape" is a "safe path". a "translator" is a "language changing expert". "bread" is "foam food". "pie" is "good foam food". and the number pi is the "half circle constant". okay, that last one was mathy, but the fact that Ygyde uses tau as its circle constant is fantastic. now, before we get into the ranking bit, I should probably explain a thing. a couple of you have pointed out that the way I've been doing the ranking system doesn't make all that much sense, and I completely agree. so I've decided to streamline the ranking system by only comparing languages is the same general category and by spreading out my reasoning for the ranking through the entire episode, rather than putting it all at the end. so in future episodes, I'll conclude by saying something like this: all in all, I'd say that I like Ygyde more than I like aUI, but not as much as Lojban, making it the second best interlang reviewed so far. I know it's not as in depth as it was for the first few episodes, but doing it this way makes it way easier for me to write these things. thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time, when I'll be reviewing Ithkuil.
