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 language that, I mean, it’s not that it’s hard to pronounce the name,
it’s more that it’s hard to say its name out loud in a way that makes it clear what
language you’re talking about. Iqglic. it’s not English, E N G L I S H, it’s
Iqglic, spelled I Q G L I C. we’re just gonna, just gonna have to deal with that.
now, if you’ve seen some other episodes of Conlang Critic, you might have heard of
Iqglic before. (that’s Iqglic, not English.) even if you haven’t, you still might have
heard of Vötgil. Vötgil was one of the first languages I reviewed
in this series. at the time, it was a bit exciting, because it was a first in a few
ways. I dunked on Vötgil pretty hard in that review, and it held the title of my least
favorite conlang until the Poliespo episode from earlier this year. Vötgil is an amature
international auxiliary language created by Jack Eisenmann in 2012. in short, it’s a
language where every word is three letters long and borrowed from English. and actually,
in this case, the distinction between the two languages with names that are pronounced
like /ɪŋɡlɪʃ/ isn’t as important, because Vötgil, in addition to being based on English
(the natural language), was more directly based on Jack Eisenmann’s earlier project,
Iqglic. man, there’s really no good way to disambiguate
these. I asked Jack Eisenmann if there’s a way to differentiate between them, and he
said, quote, “no”. so like, officially, you just don’t. oh, by the way, he wanted
me to make it clear that he doesn’t actually still care about this language. he abandoned
Iqglic almost a full decade ago, and hasn’t spent any time at all on it since. okay, right, Iqglic is an international auxiliary
language created by Jack Eisenmann in 2011. while Iqglic (2011) appears to be a modified
version of English (1550-present), it’s more accurate to describe it as a completely
new language built from the ground up that just happens to be based on English. the distinction
doesn’t matter that much, but the amount it matters isn’t none. Iqglic’s consonants are: /m n ŋ/
/p t tʃ k/ /b d dʒ ɡ/
/f θ s ʃ h/ /v ð z ʒ/
/w ɹ j/ /l/ this is literally just the English consonant
inventory. I guess the marginal phonemes aren’t here, but like, there’s not much I can really
say about this inventory from a design standpoint. like, sure, I could do my normal thing, maybe
even bring back that gameshow segment, and talk about individual phonemes that make this
less suited for an IAL, but it’s not like each of these consonants was selected individually.
this inventory is the way it is because of exactly one bad decision, the decision to
just copy English. and like, that was a bad idea. don’t do that. the point of an IAL
is to be a culturally neutral language that anyone can learn, and deliberately copying
one specific natural language without adjusting it in any way is the opposite of that. oh, I guess I should also talk about how my
analysis here is technically different from the way it’s described in the official documentation.
so like, a lot of these things aren’t supposed to be consonant phonemes? like, the affricates
are presented as stop-fricative consonant clusters, and the semivowels are presented
as non-syllabic allophones of their corresponding full vowels. so like, I could reduce this
chart to just this instead, but I don’t think this is really the best way to analyze
it. anyway, Iqglic’s vowels are: /i ɪ u/
/e ə o/ /æ ɑ/ Iqglic phonology isn’t defined using the
International Phonetic Alphabet, so I made some interpretations. I talked about this
in the Vötgil review too, but the way it’s described, just using examples of English
words the vowels appear in without specifying which pronunciation, would mean that if I
wanted to interpret the Iqglic documentation completely literally, the vowel inventory
could look something like this instead. but that’s not really fair, right. of course
this stuff isn’t supposed to be referring to the way I pronounce these words in particular.
it’s supposed to work for everyone, right? so really, I should analyze them like this,
using a broad diaphonemic analysis of English. so like, however you pronounce the vowel in
“bought”, that’s how that vowel is pronounced. but the thing is, I don’t think that’s
really what was intended either. Jack Eisenmann speaks a dialect of E-N-glish
with the cot-caught merger, and I-Q-glic appears to have been designed without taking into
consideration that there exist dialects without the merger. I guess I should explain what I mean. so like,
here’s eight lexical sets in English. the General American dialect of English groups
them like this, into five different vowel phonemes. other dialects, like Received Pronunciation,
have completely different groupings for these vowels. like, as you can see here, in RP,
BATH, START, and FATHER are all the same vowel phoneme, but in GA, they’re three separate
vowels. anyway, the cot-caught merger takes the FATHER,
LOT, CLOTH, and THOUGHT lexical sets and pronounces all of them as one thing. merging them, if
you will. now, the fact that Iqglic (2011) incorporates the cot-caught merger isn’t
itself a bad thing. I’ve said it many times before: when learning a new language, it’s
a lot easier to adjust to a smaller phonemic inventory than to a larger one. the problem
is that the way it’s implemented is pretty careless. the word used to define the pronunciation
of this vowel is “bought”, which is a THOUGHT lexical set word. so, someone looking
at this word could pronounce it like /stɔːɹ/, using their pronunciation of the THOUGHT vowel,
and then assume that it’s the word for “store”, even though it’s actually supposed to be
“star”. this is really just one piece of a much larger
problem. Iqglic was very clearly designed with one specific dialect of English in mind.
the vocabulary phonemicizes things like intervocalic tapping and <tr> affrication, things that
are definitely not universal among English speakers. Iqglic has another problem that we’ve seen
before many times: its phonotactics are left undefined. there’s no set limit to what
sequences of phonemes can form valid words. now, you’d think that since all words in
Iqglic are from English that this wouldn’t be that much of a problem, and yet it really
is. probably the biggest issue this causes is
when dealing with syllabicity. the letters <y> and <w> are ambiguous as to when they’re
pronounced as non-syllabic semivowels and when they’re pronounced as syllabic full
vowels. if the official documentation is to be trusted, then every letter is pronounced
one way, so they’re always syllabic. meaning that this is a four syllable word, pronounced
[pæ.u.ɹu.ik]. this leads to an interesting question: what
is the true nature of this conlang? is the true version the way it’s described by the
reference grammar, or is it what was intended by its creator? are mistakes in the official
documentation truly part of the language? is the word for bush really pronounced /bush/? there’s five words in Iqglic that contain
that specific consonant cluster, according to the official documentation. this is clearly
a mistake. all of these were intended to have /ʃ/ instead, but how much does authorial
intent actually matter? when dealing with language, it’s the speakers
who decide what a language truly is, but this conlang doesn’t have speakers, so there’s
no definitive answer. if you’ve seen the title of my video about
English spelling reforms, you’ll know that I think most English spelling reforms are
bad, and that’s because most of them are like Iqglic (2011). it really is a textbook
bad spelling reform. it’s super unintuitive, and I really don’t like the way it looks.
it does that thing where <tc> is used for /tʃ/? I hate that! like, I understand the
reasoning behind it, but it does not look good! okay, here’s a fun game we can play. this
is all words in the language that end with the letter <u>. just look through them, and
try to read them to yourself. don’t think about it too hard, just get a sense of how
you instinctively think these words are pronounced. now, my guess is that most of you doing that
will have made the same mistake. that is, the first time you see one of these words,
you assume that the letter <u> at the end is pronounced like /u/. it’s not. the letter
<u> in Iqglic is pronounced like /ə/ in all contexts. this is what I mean by calling this orthography
unintuitive. it directly contradicts most people’s intuition. that actually seems
to include Jack Eisenmann himself, funnily enough: there’s five words in Iqglic that
end with the letter <a>, all of which are from English words that end with schwa. like, Jack already got it! it makes more intuitive
sense for words that end with /ə/ to be spelled with <a> instead. but since that contradicts
the “every letter is pronounced exactly 1 way” thing, it’s gotta be <u> instead. but also, is every letter pronounced exactly
1 way? this is that same point I was making before, is Iqglic the language that Jack Eisnemann
described, or is it the language he meant to describe? Iqglic has another writing system, and there’s
no real description of how it works anywhere. basically, there’s different letter shapes
for all the consonants, and what color it is indicates what vowel comes after it. you
can also put one consonant above another, which makes it so the vowel goes before the
consonant instead. it’s a somewhat interesting idea, but it absolutely does not fit Iqglic
phonology, and it definitely has no place in an international auxiliary language. also,
since there’s eight phonemic vowels, the colors you have to distinguish aren’t nearly
distinct enough, especially if you’re colorblind. grammar is the main thing that separates Iqglic
from English. you know, besides the aesthetics. if you’re familiar with Jack Eisenmann’s
later works, Iqglic is a lot like those. there’s four strictly separate parts of speech: nouns,
verbs, “descriptors”, and prepositions. unlike Jack’s later conlangs, descriptors
are only adjectives and adverbs, and not intransitive verbs. though, it does say that all verbs are transitive,
which is like, obviously wrong, given the verb “egzist”. another fun difference between Iqglic and
Jack’s later conlangs is that Iqglic actually has a fully functional set of third person
pronouns! I mean, sure, they’re directly copied from English, but it’s better than
literally nothing. of course, it’s completely fine for a language
to not use third person pronouns. the problem with Vötgil is that it didn’t clarify
what you’re supposed to use instead of third person pronouns. anyway, Iqglic grammar is pretty simple. what
you’re looking at now is the whole thing. some basic rules about noun phrases, a handful
of suffixes, and something about “situation nouns”. again, it’s a lot like Jack Eisenmann’s
other languages. “situation nouns” are supposed to be relative clauses. you put quote
marks around a verb phrase and now it functions as a noun. how are you supposed to pronounce
them? no idea! situation nouns are a staple of Eisenmann
conlangs, and the way they’re implemented in Iqglic is absolutely the worst version.
this is definitely something that should’ve been handled with grammatical particles, not
punctuation. what else? oh, I should talk about the correlatives. Jack uses “correlative” the way Esperantists
use the term, as a catch-all for interrogative, demonstrative, and quantifier pronouns. these
so-called “correlatives” are supposed to be a regularized version of their English
counterparts. so like, if you look at all these in English
you’ll probably notice a few clear patterns. there’s pairs like what/that, when/then,
and where/there, and there’s the whole set of words “everybody, anybody, somebody,
nobody, everything, anything, something, nothing” and so on. so like, you could just try to
take those patterns, and force them to work for absolutely everything. it’s incredibly silly, and I think it’s
my favorite thing Iqglic does. it’s just as unapologetically artificial as the rest
of the language, but at the same time it has this weird charm to it? it’s like Jack was
trying to be as objective and logical as possible when designing it, and he happened to logically
conclude that something this ridiculous was the correct way to do this. unsurprisingly, Iqglic vocabulary is completely
derived from English. it’s small, but not minimal, at around two thousand words. it’s
not enough words for you to be able to assume that any given English word definitely has
an Iqglic equivalent, but it’s too many words for it to feel right rephrasing things
to get around the holes in the vocabulary. like, if you want to say “moose” or “beaver”
you’re fine, but there’s no words for “deer” or “raccoon”. I think most emblematic of the fundamental
conceptual problem with Iqglic as an international auxiliary language is the fact that there’s
words for American imperial units, but not for international metric units. this is an international auxiliary language
that makes absolutely no effort to be culturally neutral in any capacity. it’s careless at
best. you might have noticed that those words for
“inch” and “foot” are both prefixed with leqx-. this is a part of another of the
baffling decisions Iqglic makes. see, Iqglic avoids having words with multiple meanings,
whether they’re from homophones or different senses of the same original English word.
and the way Iqglic avoids this is by just, picking one meaning as the default, and sticking
another word before the other one to disambiguate it. so that’s why there’s stuff like pyryid
and dotpyryid, tw and kawnttw, or sensr and badsensr. it’s another clear example of
the problem with the design philosophy behind Iqglic. Jack came up with some general principles
that maybe sounded good on paper, then fully committed to them without considering if the
results of those principles actually are good. the following is a part of a translation of
the Tower of Babel, from Genesis, translated into Iqglic by Jack Eisenmann specifically
for this video. Ðu entuyr rx wuz hav wun leqgwidj and kömn
werdz. Ðu prsnz wuz fuynd u fyld in ðu land uv
Cynar djeriq "ðey wuz tcravl frum ðu yst land". Ðey wuz sey "Plyz kum. Wy plyz meyk brikz
and "entuyr brn ðey"." tw self. Ðey wuz hav brik for rök and tör for sement. Ðey ðen sey "Plyz kum. Wy plyz bild u sidy
for self and wi "u tawr hav töp in ðu skuy". Wy plyz meyk neym for self for "nöt iz spredid
ovr ðu feys uv ðu entuyr rx"". all in all, Iqglic is a comprehensive failure.
I would call it poorly designed, but calling it “designed” is an exaggeration. Iqglic
was abandoned in favor of what would later become Vötgil, and looking at Iqglic it’s
clear that most of the stuff that’s bad about Vötgil started here. this is the third of Jack Eisenmann’s languages
I’ve reviewed, and they’re really all the same thing. Vötgil, Zese, they’re
just incremental changes to a fundamentally flawed starting point. but really, the problem isn’t in the core
of the language, it’s with its presentation. the Jack Eisenmann conlang does not work at
all as an international auxiliary language, but it doesn’t have to be one! a language
with a small-ish core vocabulary and minimal programming-language-like grammar is a pretty
decent foundation for an engineered language, as long as there’s no pretense of it being
designed for international communication. Iqglic wasn’t the most requested Jack Eisenmann
language for me to review. I mean, you saw how many requests it has, that’s way less
than everything else this season. the most requested one was Pegakibo, Jack’s first
conlang. Pegakibo isn’t an auxlang, it’s a personal language, and it has all the hallmarks
of his other languages. and like, I could have made a video about
Pegakibo, and it would literally just be the Zese episode again but less funny. and that’s
the thing, right, because the Zese episode was just a less funny version of the Vötgil
episode. that’s why I decided to review Iqglic, because at least it’s different
in interesting ways. I don’t wanna keep reviewing Jack Eisenmann’s
languages. one half of it is because they’re all the same so I have fewer interesting things
to say every time, and the other half is because I don’t wanna be mean to the guy. it was
one thing when this was a smaller channel and I didn’t care about things like quality,
but it’s another thing entirely now that I have an actual platform and like, standards. that in mind, Iqglic is complete garbage. thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in
the Conlang Critic Season Three finale, where I’ll be reviewing Quenya. o tawa waso
lon sewi laso! o pilin e suno!
tenpo kama la mi lon wile pi
kulupu jan tenpo hey, so you’re watching past the outro,
so I think I can be real with you for a second. pretty much since I uploaded the Viossa episode,
a small but vocal group of people have been complaining about how I’m not making Conlang
Critic as often as I used to. I wouldn’t really mind it if it was like, accurate? like,
hey, I’ve been making Conlang Critic at a steady pace of once every other month for
a whole year now. like, literally what are you talking about? I make this show every other month, and I
make other stuff between. nothing has changed. anyway, I’ve got an announcement video coming
up about what stuff I’ll be doing after Season Three is over, so look forward to that.
